Occupy Wall Street Meets Nazizona - Happy Halloween From Joe Arpaio's Favorite Fascist - Threatens on Video to Kill Illegals - Then Detains Immigrants at Gunpoint While Dressed in Military Combat Uniform - No Intervention From the Obama Justice Department? Not Fast But I'm Furious!

Updated on November 1st, 2011  

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

 - Hunter S. Thompson 

Leave it to Arizona's Occupy Phoenix to morph into some creepy psychotic freak show just in time for Halloween.

The camouflaged border blimp in this video is J.T. Ready, who is well known as a neo-fascist ally of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In 2007, Ready was honored by the Phoenix New Times' Best of Phoenix issue with the dubious distinction of being the Best Big Fat White Supremacist.  He has since "left" the national socialist movement and has remade himself as an anti-immigration activist who was once a duly elected Republican precinct committeeman in the Arizona Republican Party. You will notice that the person recording the video initially mistakes Ready for a border patrol officer.

One prominent anti-OWS website cited Ready's appearance as evidence of the protest movement venality, while another website documents the bewildering response of the more progressive Occupy Phoenix protestors to the presence of avowed racists, dressed like soldiers, with loaded military rifles.  In reality, Ready is not at the Occupy Phoenix rally to protect or support the protestors.  He is there for two reasons.  First, he is there because there are television cameras there and, like Arpaio, he is a shameless media whore.  Second, he is there to intimidate Hispanics from participating in the Occupy Phoenix protest.

I would love to show you a video documenting the association between Ready and Arpaio but it was removed from YouTube by a bogus copyright complaint from Harry L. Hughes III, one of Ready's national socialist playmates.

Here's a video of someone - perhaps the same person that posted the original video - confronting Hughes for having his video pulled from YouTube because it contained a copy of a photo Hughes took of Ready with Joe Arpaio.  In this video Hughes embraces the accusation that he is a racist:

In 2002, Joe Arpaio arrested actor Nick Tarr on Halloween for impersonating a law enforcement officer.  Tarr was dressed in an outdated Arizona Department of Public Safety shirt and a pair of Arpaio's pink boxer shorts. Yet Arpaio has no problem allowing these anti-immigration activists to run around in camouflaged desert fatigues with a State flag patch on their shoulders while carrying loaded AR-15s.  

These are some realistic and very scary "Halloween" costumes.  Particularly for the undocumented immigrants J.T. Ready's group is detaining, although I'm sure they appreciated having water poured into their mouths for them.

These photos were taken by Harry L. Hughes III in July of last year and are still posted on his blogfrom which they are linked under the "fair use" protection of U.S. copyright law. The photos are not hosted on my blog but are visible because they are linked to from their original location on Mr. Hughes' blog.  If the photos were deleted by Mr. Hughes, or the link changed, they would cease to be visible on this blog.

Mr. Hughes is on notice that if he makes the same kind of bogus copyright infringement claim that he used to censor the video on YouTube, he can expect me to file a DMCA Counter notification of "fair use." Theoretically, Mr. Hughes will then have two weeks to file a copyright infringement lawsuit or watch as the images are restored and I file a lawsuit against him.

J.T. Ready and his buddies rely on these uniforms to confuse and intimidate the Hispanics they
round up on their immigration patrols who Ready has said on video they are prepared to kill:

Here's J.T. Ready in another scary "Halloween" costume:

In this 2009 video J.T. Ready is doing his best Eric Cartman imitation as he rails against Jews while protesting a Hispanic day labor center in California:

I find it amazing that for the last three years  self-identified Nazi's  have been running around the Arizona desert impersonating the U.S. Military and detaining undocumented immigrants without any Federal intervention whatsoever.  In fact, the photographs on Hughes' website reflect that the U.S. Border Patrol cooperates with Ready's group by taking  it's prisoners into custody without arresting Ready or his followers.

This is exactly the kind of activity that the U.S. Code's criminal civil rights laws were designed to punish and yet Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder and President Obama have failed to even open an investigation into Ready's group for Federal civil rights violations.  This is in spite of the fact that video of Ready's threat to kill illegal aliens has been on YouYube for well over a year, and has been cited in a number of mainstream news outlets including a Gawker article last summer and a Tucson Citizen article in November.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government's erstwhile investigation of Joe Arpaio for racial profiling has languished for over 1,000 days, and there is no sign that there will be any result in the near future, if ever.  The failure to investigate Ready, and the failure to finalize the investigation of Arpaio, can only be explained as reflecting a cynical desire to avoid disturbing the illegal immigration hornet's nest during an election year.

Back to the Arizona OWS video. It is legal in Arizona to carry firearms openly. This includes both handguns and military-style rifles. However, it is not legal to threaten people with firearms. Under Arizona's justification statute, a reasonable person who feels that he/she or another person is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury is allowed to use deadly force in self defense. Arguably, the statute is a nullity since it has yet to be established that there are any reasonable people left in Arizona.  

Typically, a shooter who is not about to fire a sling carried rifle would have the rifle on his shoulder hanging upside down from the sling. You will notice in the video that J.T. Ready is carrying his AR-15 in the low-ready position. It appears that he is using a tactical sling  which is used by police SWAT teams and combat troops.  This is a shortened sling that clips to a tactical vest and keeps the weapon at a low ready position when the gun is not in immediate use.  Typically, a shooter that is using a tactical sling anticipates the imminent use of his weapon in close quarters combat.  I would view Ready's use of a tactical sling to carry his AR-15 in the low-ready position  as a threat that he is about to use his weapon and am amazed that the Phoenix PD allowed him to carry the rifle in this manner. If his muzzle were tipped up just a few inches a reasonable person might be justified in shooting him with impunity under Arziona law.

If J.T. Ready really wants to assert his First and Second Amendment Rights he should come to New York City and show up at Zuccotti Park dressed like this while carrying his AR-15 and see how NYPD responds.

Prop 203. What to Expect From the Passage of Arizona's Proposition 203 Initiative Legalizing Medical Marijuana

As I've previously posted, the most significant outcome of the 2010 elections here is the gains made by ultra-conservatives in both houses of the Arizona State Legislature. The SB1070 worshiping cabal of the Arizona Republican Party now has a veto-proof majority in both the Arizona House and the Arizona Senate.

They immediately flexed their muscles by electing Russell Pearce - the Godfather of the HB1070 anti-immigration movement - to be the new President of the Arizona State Senate. Russell Pearce's brother, Lester Pearce, is the presiding judge over all of the Justice of the Peace Courts in Maricopa County. "Judge" Pearce - who is not a lawyer - was quoted by Garrett Epps in a recent issue of The Atlantic as telling an audience that the Constitution was written by Moses, among other choice bits of Constitutional analysis that you can read about here.

Senate President, Russell Pearce has created a new committee called the Border Security, Federalism and States' Sovereignty Committee. The chair is going to be Sylvia Allen (she’s the one that gained national notoriety for stating, during another committee hearing earlier this year, that the earth was 6,000 years old). You can watch the video below:

Expect the possibility of a lot of resistance to the implementation of the Prop 203 initiative and the potential for a lot of litigation before dispensary doors open in Arizona.

DESERT ZEITGEIST: 2010 ELECTION ANALYSIS

The most important development coming out of Tuesday's mid-term election results is that the conservative, HB1070 worshipping cabal of the Arizona Republican Party now has a veto-proof majority in both the Arizona House and the Arizona Senate.  They immediately flexed their muscles by electing Russell Pearce - the Godfather of the HB1070 anti-immigration movement - to be the  new President of the Arizona State Senate.  Everyone needs to brace themselves  for  two years of increasingly draconian budget cuts and more tax money being wasted on frivolous litigation defending indefensibly unconstitutional legislation relating to immigration.

All I can say is thank God for term limits, which appear to be the last best hope for idiot proofing Arizona government.  However, it increasingly looks as if term limits in Arizona politics is as fruitless an exercise as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.    

In the coming days I will be reporting on the devastating impact that the last round of budget cuts has had on the poorest and most vulnerable of Arizona's citizens, and the irresponsible budget slashing we can expect from the legislature over the next two years.  Watch for an increase in the level of suffering among Arizona's poor, particularly poor children. Also watch for the 14th Amendment anchor-baby cloud to grow larger each month (more  later on the unintended consequences and dangerous implications of the  efforts to modify the 14th Amendment on Arizonans' Second Amendment rights). 

It is mind numbing how badly the Democratic Party misread the mood of the country leading up to this election, and how badly many pundits have misjudged the election results.  I was dumbfounded when I read John Fund's column in the Wall Street Journal last week which contained an interview with a retiring six-term democratic congressman who revealed that as late as September the Democratic leadership's pollsters were telling members of the democratic caucus that their constituents didn't care about the deficit.  Post election analysis by pollsters and pundits are equally tone deaf.  

My congressional district in Phoenix is the most heavily democratic district in the State and home  to Congressman for Life Ed Pastor, the only Democratic Congressman in Arizona that did not have a credible challenge in the general election this year.   My polling station in downtown Phoenix was like a ghost town.  I had to side step the tumbleweeds rolling past the empty voting booths.

ASU Pollster Bruce Merrill appeared tonight on PBS' local Horizon program and opined that the poor turnout by the democratic base was the result of the absence of President Obama on the ballot this election cycle.  He didn't describe the statistical basis for his opinion, but my reading of the political zeitgeist has me convinced that he has underestimated the anger and frustration consuming the democratic party's liberal base.  47% of Democrats believe President Obama should face a primary challenge in the 2012 elections.





I believe that if Obama had been on the ticket this year the democratic turnout would have been much worse.  The young people who worked so hard for Obama's election in 2008, the old left and the aging hippies who thought that they had finally reached the promised land, all stayed away from the polls in droves because they were simply sick and tired of being repeatedly lied to by the Obama Administration.  

Over the past two years the Obama Administration has

• continued the most draconian Bush Administration privacy and soul destroying "war on terror" policies including the renewal of the Patriot Act and the shifting of the unholy rendition program from outsourced torture by foreign countries to the Iraqi and Afghani governments' torture chambers; 

• increased the use of unmanned predator drone to commit extra-judicial assassinations, causing unprecedented collateral civilian casualties;

• continued to fight tooth and nail in the Federal courts to preserve the military's discriminatory "don't ask don't tell policy" barring gays from service in the armed forces; 

• shelved any meaningful effort at comprehensive immigration reform and abdicated the immigration reform debate to kooks and racists; 

• continued prosecuting State law sanctioned dispensaries and individual users of medical marijuana under Federal drug laws; 

• failed to even initiate the promised closing of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp; 

• allowed the greedy one-percenter bastards from the major financial services companies - who were allowed to run amok during the Bush Administration - to gang rape small business and the American middle class and repeatedly pillage the public treasury; 

• delegated the writing of his "signature" health care legilsation to Congressional Democrats and then abandoned the "public option" at the drop of a hat, thereby abandoning Americans to the whims of the insurance companies; 

• engaged on a regular basis in the same unethical cronyism that has corrupted American politics for generations (including the targeting of Republican-owned auto dealerships for closure during the bailout of the auto industry, and the granting of numerous exceptions to the strict new anti-lobbyist policy on Executive Branch appointments);

• granted exemptions to four countries from a Federal law that  bars U.S. Military assistance to nations that use child soldiers.

• delayed the deadline for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanaistan by four years, breaking perhaps his most important campaign promise.

And on and on and on with example after example after example of the inconvenient truth that President Obama has broken nearly every major campaign promise that was supposed to set his Administration apart from the mistakes of the Bush Administration. There has been a lot of hope and very little change.