Ariz. Legislature OKs Presidential 'Birther' Bill : NPR

Image via WikipediaAriz. Legislature OKs Presidential 'Birther' Bill : NPR

The Arizona Legislature gave final approval late Thursday night to a proposal that would require President Barack Obama and other presidential candidates to prove they are U.S. citizens before their names can appear on the state's ballot.

Arizona would become the first state to require such proof if Gov. Jan Brewer signs the measure into law.

Republican Rep. Carl Seel of Phoenix, the author of the bill, said the bill wasn't about opposition to Obama. "This bill is about the integrity of our elections," Seel said.

Thirteen other states have considered similar proposals this year. The proposals were defeated in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maine and Montana.

The bill won final approval from the state House in a 40-16 vote.

So-called "birthers" contend since the last presidential election that Obama is ineligible to hold the nation's highest elected office because, they argue, he was actually born in Kenya, his father's homeland. The Constitution said a person must be a "natural-born citizen" to be eligible for the presidency.

Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama's citizenship, and his Hawaiian birth certificates have been made public. Even though the courts have rebuffed lawsuits challenging Obama's eligibility, the issue hasn't gone away.

"It's a fringe issue in my view, and it's going to cause people to look again at Arizona and say what's all this craziness going on there," said Democratic Rep. Daniel Patterson of Tucson, an opponent of the bill.

The Arizona proposal would require political parties and presidential candidates to hand in affidavits stating a candidate's citizenship and age and to provide the candidate's birth certificate and a sworn statement saying where the candidate has lived for 14 years.

If candidates don't have a copy of their birth certificates, they could meet the requirement by providing baptismal or circumcision certificates, hospital birth records and other documents.

If it can't be determined whether candidates who provided documents in place of their birth certificates are eligible to appear on the ballot, the secretary of state would be able to set up a committee to help determine whether the requirements have been met.

The names of candidates can be kept off the ballot if the secretary of state doesn't believe the candidates met the citizenship requirement.

Shooting moves line on appropriate discourse - Jan. 13: Rachel Maddow talks with Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, about the backfiring responses by Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle to the mass shooting in Tucson.

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The Maddow Blog - How many lives?

The Maddow Blog - How many lives?

The folks at Mother Jones have crunched the numbers on a question many have been asking in the wake of Saturday's shooting in Tucson. What if 31 shots had been only 10?

The high-capacity ammunition clip used by the alleged Tucson shooter would have been illegal under 1994's Federal Assault Weapons Ban, legislation that was allowed to expire in 2004. Had he been restricted to "only" 10 bullets, and assuming the same hit ratio, he would have shot six people and perhaps killed one or two, Mother Jones calculates. Instead, 20 people were shot; six of them lost their 

Opinion: Tucson and Palin's red herring - Jonathan Riehl - POLITICO.com

Opinion: Tucson and Palin's red herring - Jonathan Riehl - POLITICO.com

n the horrific aftermath of the Tucson killings, much of the national debate has been focused on political rhetoric, and whether the pronouncements of certain former governors of Alaska — and graphics on her website — somehow caused this tragedy.

The Palin apologists have seized on this as a red herring. This deceptive argument is being executed brilliantly across the airwaves and Internet by the right.

Now, the classic red herring is not a lie. It is, in fact, true. But not relevant. A way to re-frame the argument. And hope no one notices. The right is exceedingly good at doing this.

Thus we now have a national conversation, and a media feeding frenzy, about whether man charged with the murders was “motivated” by the language of “relock and reload,” by crosshairs over congressional districts.

But this does not matter. What matters is the fact we are having this conversation.

Because what really matters is that the goal posts have moved. Sarah Palin’s disgraceful language and symbols and website graphics are being waved off as irrelevant to the political discourse. When, in fact, they are the political discourse.

Not all rhetoric is verbal. Those cross-hairs sent a message as clearly as any State of the Union Address. So too, the deafening silence from Twitter and Facebook and the other social media outlets, where the former governor allows herself to be heard by the nation. As my former boss, Frank Luntz, taught me: If you want to keep the topic off the table, just keep it out of the conversation.

Mission accomplished.

I am hopeful that my many conservative friends, who are in the profession of rhetoric and in politics, understand I am not just adding one more voice to the Keith Olbermann editorial rant about this horrible situation.

What we are witnessing is not just the partisan, political man-handling of a tragedy — but an outright propagandistic tactic to avoid answering questions, which are of direct relevance to the national political discourse and our broader culture.

What the right is now doing is clearly manipulative. Its continuing rhetorical strategy is the essence of the telltale red herring.

We should not be discussing the motivations of a deranged murderer in Tucson. We should be discussing why we are now having the discussion that we are.

Why we are in the place we are, rhetorically, as a nation.

After all, how do we know when things have gone too far? When there is real political danger manifested in what people say — not just what they do?

Or, more important, have our goalposts have moved so far that we all feel it is wrong to “connect the dots” in a culture that allows tea party talk of gun-toting insurrection, as though it is just part of the multicultural melee, without impact.

It does have an impact. As that lefty President George W. Bush was fond of saying, it “sets the tone.”

Conservatives should be first in line to say this. Leading figures on the right, including Bill Bennett and Robert Bork gained mass followings by proclaiming that the liberal left was “coarsening our culture” and “degrading the discourse” in our society.

No, Palin did not pull the trigger in Tucson. But has the conversation been coarsened? You betcha.

She has won — in a perverse rhetorical way. The red herring worked.

Jonathan Riehl is a communications consultant, who has worked for congressional campaigns and nonprofit advocacy organizations.

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Daniel Hernandez, reflexive hero - Hernandez, Congresswoman Giffords' intern, talks with Rachel Maddow about how he was able to help save the life of the congresswoman after she'd been shot in the head by an assassin.

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Clarence Dupnik is the Anti-Joe Arpaio Sheriff in Arizona

Clarence Dupnik is the Anti-Joe Arpaio Sheriff in Arizona

Until Saturday's rampage against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords left her battling for her life and ended the lives of six others, Clarence Dupnik was not the most famous sheriff in Arizona.

But after a pull-no-punches news conference in which he linked the shooting in Tucson to a poisonous underlying political atmosphere, the Pima County sheriff may soon become known nationally as the anti-Joe Arpaio.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," said Dupnik, referring to the troubled suspect, 22-year-old Jared Loughner.

Dupnik said Arizona, embroiled over the last year by bitter divisions over illegal immigration and health care reform, has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Many officials have been threatened, including Giffords, the federal judge killed by her side and Dupnik himself. The sheriff called that a "sad thing," and said, "Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."

Dupnik, who turns 75 Tuesday, became an instant hero among liberals, who drew a sharp contrast to that other septuagenarian sheriff over in neighboring Maricopa County.

Arpaio, 78, has branded himself "America's toughest sheriff." His harsh and unapologetic tactics to catch illegal immigrants have made him a magnet for controversy who has been accused of trampling civil rights and inciting hate. But they also have made him a tea party star and a long-shot candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

While the Maricopa County sheriff couldn't have been happier when Arizona passed the nation's toughest crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Dupnik was appalled.

A Democrat, Dupnik called the law "a national embarrassment" and wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it was "unnecessary ... a travesty, and most significantly ... unconstitutional."

At a news conference on SB 1070, he said, "If I were a Hispanic person in the state, I would be humiliated and angered." He called the law "morally wrong."

Still, Dupnik said he would grudgingly enforce the law because it was his duty as sheriff to do so.

Not that the sheriff of a county that stretches 123 miles along the Mexican border is a softy on immigration. His 1,500-member department refers more illegal immigrants to the U.S. Border Patrol than any other law enforcement agency in Arizona.

And in 2009, he said it was wrong "to spend the millions and millions and millions of dollars that we do catering to illegals." He said schools should ask about the immigration status of students.

He just wasn't keen on having his deputies spend all their time asking people for their papers.

Dupnik is an institution in Pima County. He has been sheriff for 30 years and has spent more than 50 years in Arizona law enforcement.

He was born in Texas and raised in the historic Arizona mining town of Bisbee near the Mexican border. Dupnik attended the University of Arizona in Tucson before graduating from Chicago's Keeler Institute, the nation's first polygraph, or "lie detector," school.

He joined the Tucson police department in 1958. In 1980, he was appointed sheriff and has been elected seven times since then.

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