Notorious Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing increasing fire over his office’s failure to adequately investigate hundreds of sex crimes, including dozens of alleged child molestations. Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has previously gone easy on the sheriff, joined the critics. While he stopped short of calling for Apraio’s resignation, in an interview with 3TV news in Phoenix, McCain said he was “outraged” and “astonished that there hasn’t been more outcry about the failure of these investigations.” Watch it:

This week, in separate moves, local Latino and black leaders called on Arpaio to resign. A Change.org petition for his resignation had received more than 19,000 signatures as of this publishing (sign it here), just two weeks after it was created.

McCain put out a statement earlier this month taking a much more circumspect stance, saying he was merely “concerned” with the report on the sex crimes, so today’s comments suggest the political winds may be turning against Arpaio.

The sheriff, who has made a dubious name for himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” for his hardline stance on undocumented immigrants, is also facing significant heat over a Department of Justice investigation, the results of which were released earlier this month, alleging that his department has systematically violated civil rights laws.

Nonetheless, presidential hopeful Rick Perry held a campaign event with Arpaio this week in Iowa. Perry has dodged most questions on the Department of Justice investigation or the sex crimes allegations, but a spokesperson told TPM, “Governor Perry knows Sheriff Arpaio as a dedicated law enforcement professional fighting to keep his neighbors safe in the wake of federal failures to secure the border and deal with border crime,” he added.

At a radio forum sponsored by the anti-abortion and anti-birth control group Personhood USA, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that he would refuse to obey a Supreme Court decision striking down the group’s signature anti-choice proposal:

QUESTION: You have agreed to “endorse legislation making clear that Fourteenth Amendment protections apply to unborn children” . . . . What happens if the U.S. Supreme Court attempts to strike down this legislation, and replace it with one of its own edict denying the inalienable right to life for all persons born or unborn? Would you enforce the inalienable right to life or the Court’s opinion as the law?

PERRY: Well, obviously you enforce the right to life opinion.

Listen:

Perry’s promise to openly defy the Supreme Court is disturbing, but it is also far from original. Fellow candidates Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have also pledged to treat binding Supreme Court opinions as if they were merely optional, and Gingrich even supports legitimizing his radical view of the Constitution through a campaign of intimidation against judges who disagree with him.

Nevertheless, the GOP’s burgeoning love affair with Jim Crowesque defiance of the judiciary is very strange, considering that activist judging is the backbone of their policy agenda. Republicans almost universally support the ridiculous idea that the Affordable Care Act should be tossed out by the Supreme Court, and their presidential candidates have almost unanimously promised to appoint more justices modeled after the ones that authorized unlimited corporate money in American elections. If President Perry has the power to flout Supreme Court decisions that he disagrees with, there’s nothing preventing President Obama from ignoring the Supreme Court’s clearly erroneous opinion in Citizens United.

But, of course, such an attack on the Roberts Court’s misguided opinion would run headlong into the GOP’s first rule about interpreting the Constitution — the Constitution says whatever you want it to say, so long as it’s conservative.

North Carolina is one of the few states in the country with public records of who has a permit to carry a concealed firearm, so it provides a rare window into how such permits are handled once their holder’s criminal record proves them unfit to carry a hidden gun. The results are not pretty:

More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun. [...]

The review also raises concerns about how well government officials police the permit process. In about half of the felony convictions, the authorities failed to revoke or suspend the holder’s permit, including for cases of murder, rape and kidnapping. The apparent oversights are especially worrisome in North Carolina, one of about 20 states where anyone with a valid concealed handgun permit can buy firearms without the federally mandated criminal background check. (Under federal law, felons lose the right to own guns.)

Violent criminals who were allowed to keep their concealed carry permits include Ricky Wills, who “terroriz[ed] his estranged wife and their daughter with a pair of guns and then sho[t] at their house while they, along with a sheriff’s deputy who had responded to a 911 call, were inside,” and Charles Dowdle, who “was convicted of multiple felonies in 2006 for threatening to kill his girlfriend and chasing her to her sister’s house, where he fired a shotgun round through a closed door.” Indeed, violent individuals convicted of domestic violence-related crimes are the most likely to be allowed to keep their concealed carry permits. Nearly two-thirds of individuals convicted of “assault on a female” in the state of North Carolina did not have their concealed carry permits suspended.

The state’s failures to suspend these licenses appears to be a series of oversights, not a deliberate effort to place concealed firearms in the hands of violent criminals — indeed, Mr. Willis’ permit was revoked after New York Times reporters informed the state that he still had it. Nevertheless, these oversights could soon have consequences for the safety of Americans in all fifty states. The National Right To Carry Reciprocity Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives, would give holders of concealed carry permits from any one state the ability to carry a concealed weapon while than were visiting any other state — even if the state they were visiting banned concealed carry or would not allow them to obtain a carry permit.

In other words, should this bill become law, it would mean that a violent felon from North Carolina could keep his permit solely because of an oversight, and then travel to any state he chooses with a concealed gun tucked under his jacket.

Shortly before leaving her chambers for the holidays, California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, a former prosecutor who was appointed to her state’s highest court by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), became the latest high-ranking official to question whether her state should continue to impose a death penalty:

“I don’t think it is working,” said Cantil-Sakauye, elevated from the Court of Appeal in Sacramento to the California Supreme Court by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s not effective. We know that.”

California’s death penalty requires “structural change, and we don’t have the money to create the kind of change that is needed,” she said. “Everyone is laboring under a staggering load.” . . .

“I don’t know if the question is whether you believe in it anymore. I think the greater question is its effectiveness and given the choices we face in California, should we have a merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs?”

Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s comments are just the latest sign that our national consensus is moving away from state-sponsored executions. Although most Americans continue to support the practice, a recent poll found support for the death penalty at a 39 year low and the number of death sentences declined below 100 this year for the first time in over three decades. Illinois recently abolished its death penalty and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) declared a moratorium on executions while he is in office.

Californians will soon have the opportunity to follow Illinois’ lead. Petition signatures are currently being collected for a ballot initiative which will abolish the death penalty in that state as well.

A 93-year-old Tennessee woman who cleaned the state Capitol for 30 years, including the governor’s office, says she won’t be able to vote for the first time in decades after being told this week that her old state ID failed to meet new voter ID regulations.

Thelma Mitchell was even accused of being an undocumented immigrant because she couldn’t produce a birth certificate:

Mitchell, who was delivered by a midwife in Alabama in 1918, has never had a birth certificate. But when she told that to a drivers’ license clerk, he suggested she might be an illegal immigrant.

Thelma Mitchell told WSMV-TV that she went to a state drivers’ license center last week after being told that her old state ID from her cleaning job would not meet new regulations for voter identification.

A spokesman for the House Republican Caucus insisted that Mitchell was given bad information and should’ve been allowed to vote, even with an expired state ID. But even if that’s the case, her ordeal illustrates the inevitable disenfranchisements that result when confusing voting laws enable state officials to apply the law inconsistently.

The incident is the just latest in a series of reports of senior citizens being denied their constitutional right to vote under restrictive new voter ID laws pushed by Republican governors and legislatures. These laws are a transparent attempt to target Democrat constituencies who are less likely to have photo ID’s, and disproportionately affect seniors, college students, the poor and minorities.

As ThinkProgress reported, one 96-year-old Tennessee woman was denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage license. Another senior citizen in Tennessee, 91-year-old Virginia Lasater, couldn’t get the ID she needed to vote because she wasn’t able to stand in a long line at the DMV. A Tennessee agency even told a 86-year-old World War II veteran that he had to pay an unconstitutional poll tax if he wanted to obtain an ID.

United States District Judge Richard Mark Gergel just handed down a preliminary injunction blocking several key parts of South Carolina’s anti-immigrant law. The provisions blocked by Judge Gergel’s opinion include:

• Papers Please: The SC law makes it unlawful for immigrants to fail to carry immigration papers. This provision is now blocked under Judge Gergel’s order. Additionally, Judge Gergel’s order suspends a provision prohibiting immigrants from presenting fake immigration papers to law enforcement.
• No Rides For Undocumented Immigrants: The SC law makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to “transport, move or attempt to transport” an undocumented immigrant “with intent to further that person’s unlawful entry into the United States” or to help that person avoid detection by authorities. This provision is now blocked.
• No Shelter For Undocumented Immigrants: Finally, the provision of the SC law making it a felony to “conceal, harbor or shelter” an immigrant for the same purposes forbidden under the provision prohibiting transportation is also blocked.

Judge Gergel’s opinion hews closely to longstanding precedents establishing that the federal government — and not the states — must be in charge of our nation’s immigration policy. For this reason, it is an important reaffirmation of the fact that America has one policy towards foreign nationals, just like it has one policy toward trade with China or one policy towards war with Iraq, not fifty different foreign policies for fifty different states.

Moreover, while Gergel leaves some parts of the law in effect, it is possible that more provisions of the law could be struck down at a future date. Although a challenge brought by several immigrant rights groups challenged the entire law, Gergel found that they did not have legal standing to bring such a broad challenge. Accordingly, he did not reach the merits of the question of whether the entire law is unconstitutional, and a future lawsuit could do so.

Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) emergence as the front-runner in the Iowa GOP primary is bringing new scrutiny on Paul’s newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s. The newsletters, published under his name, included content claiming that African-Americans are trying to give white people HIV, suggested that Washington, DC is “anti-white and proud of it,” provided instructions on how to murder African-Americans, and warned of “malicious gay(s)” who spread HIV.

Yesterday, Paul walked out of an interview after CNN’s Gloria Borger pressed him on his role in publishing the racist content:

PAUL: I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written. And it’s been going on twenty years that people have pestered me about this. And CNN does it every single time.

BORGER: Is it legitimate? Is it a legitimate question to ask that something that went out under your name? [crosstalk]

PAUL: And when you get the answer it’s legitimate that you take the answers I give. You know what the answer is? I didn’t write them. I didn’t read them at the time. And I disavow them. That is the answer.

BORGER: It’s legitimate, it’s legitimate. These things are pretty incendiary.

PAUL: Because of people like you.

BORGER: No, come one. Some of the stuff was very incendiary, you know, saying that in 1993 the Israelis were responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center. That kind of stuff.

PAUL: Goodbye.

Watch it:

As reported yesterday on ThinkProgress, the likely author of the racist rants published under Paul’s name is Lew Rockwell, a notorious libertarian activist who led a campaign to align libertarians and bigots in the 1980s and 1990s. But the fact that his newsletter published racist statements over a series of years raises real questions about Paul’s claim that he “never read that stuff.” Thus far, Paul has refused to name the author(s) of the offensive articles.

In a seperate CNN interview yesterday, Paul said:

PAUL: I really don’t know [who the authors were]. Twenty years ago, I had six or eight people helping me with this letter, and I was practicing medicine, to tell you the truth.

VELSHI: Right.

PAUL: And, so, I do not know.

VELSHI: Well, we could find out because you have six or eight people, I guess, one of those six or eight people.

PAUL: Well, possibly, I could.

Paul’s assertion that CNN is to blame for asking him about the racist content of his newsletters is contradicted by his answer to a similar question in 2008, in which he told [VIDEO] CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I know there’s reason [to ask these questions]. I don’t say you’re unjustified in asking the question.”

MInority and immigrant rights groups have been pushing for John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, hosts of The John and Ken Show on the Clear Channel radio station KFI in California, to be taken off the air ever since the hosts targeted an immigrant advocate in a Sept. 1 show. On air, the hosts gave out the personal cell phone number of Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

Cabrera received hundreds of hateful and threatening phone calls afterward. “These calls were intent to diminish me as a person,” Cabrera told the Los Angeles Times. The show’s hosts have a history of discriminatory and vitriolic rhetoric, but this incident went too far:

The incident struck a chord among leaders of civil and immigrant rights groups across the state, many of whom saw it as the latest example in a long history of the popular radio show inciting anger and vitriol.

“It was the last straw,” said Alex Nogales, president and chief executive of the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC). “These guys have been at it day in and day out. It’s the same ugly rhetoric.” [...]

Now the coalition has joined with several major Latino and immigrant rights groups, including the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the National Immigration Law Center, in calling on the radio station to remove the show’s hosts or face a boycott of its sponsors.

To pressure the sponsors, the NHMC has been asking people to contact the show’s major sponsors, such as Chevron, Hyundai, and Target, to ask them to stop sponsoring The John and Ken Show, and they are asking people to stop shopping at the advertisers if they don’t pull their ads. “As a consumer, let the advertisers know you are not willing to spend your hard earned money with businesses that support hate speech,” according to the NHMC’s campaign.

For more information about the campaign, click here.

With übertenther Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) emerging as the latest frontrunner in the Iowa GOP primary, Ta-Nehisi Coates chronicles many of the most offensive highlights from a series of racist newsletters Paul published in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

• Needlin’: Paul’s December 1989 newsletter claims that roving bands of African-Americans are trying to give white people HIV. According to the newsletter, “at least 39 white women have been stuck with used hypodermic needles-perhaps infected with AIDS-by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14. . . . Who can doubt that if the situation had been reversed, if white girls had done this to black women, we would have been subjected to months-long nation-wide propaganda campaign on the evils of white America? The double standard strikes again.”
• Fantasies of Anti-White Bias: The same newsletter imagined a fantasy world where anti-white racist dominates DC’s culture. “To be white in Washington, however, is to experience a culture that is anti-white and proud of it. Radio stations urge listeners not to shop in white (or Asian) owned stores. Ministers lead anti-white and anti-Asian boycotts. Professors teach that whites are committing genocide against blacks and invented crack and AIDS as part of The Plan.”
• Instructions on Murdering Black Youth: A 1992 newsletter provided fairly detailed instructions on the best way to shoot and kill an African-American and get away with it. “If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. . . . An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.”
• Beware the “Malicious Gay”: African-Americans are not the only target of the newsletters’ ire. Ron Paul’s publications also feature unusually bad medical advice punctuated with anti-gay fantasies. “Those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get a blood transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay, as was Kimberly Bergalis.”

In a partial defense of Paul, David Weigel offers a perfectly plausible explanation of how these bigoted rants against science and reality came to appear under the name of a medical doctor who now argues that the War on Drugs should end because it is inherently racist. As Weigel explains in a piece he co-authored with Julian Sanchez, the likely author of Paul’s racist rants wasn’t Ron Paul, it was a repulsive libertarian activist named Lew Rockwell.

Rockwell, who now runs a far right think tank that publishes articles with titles like “How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare,” believed in the 1980s and 1990s that libertarians had become a “party of the stoned” that needed to be “de-loused.” His solution, according to Weigel and Sanchez, was to try to expand the libertarian tent to include overt racists who could be attracted to libertarians’ opposition to “State-enforced integration.” It was likely Rockwell, and not the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, who drafted the racist rants published in Paul’s name.

This explanation for Paul’s behavior hardly excuses it, however. The simplest conclusion that can be drawn when someone publishes a racist rant in their own name is that they truly believe that one race is superior to another. Weigel and Sanchez’ reporting, however, leads to only two possible explanations. Either Paul is so oblivious to what was being done in his name that this obliviousness alone disqualifies him for a job like the presidency — or he knew very well that horrific arguments were being published his name and he lent his name to a cynical racist strategy anyway.

Studies continue to show the important economic impact immigrants have on the national economy as well as states, be it the millions in losses Alabama faces after passing a draconian immigration law to the number of jobs immigrants help create.

Now venture capitalists are arguing for immigration reform for the sake of the economy after a study showed that immigrants founded almost half of the U.S.’s top 50 start-up companies and are vital management or development employees at roughly 75 percent of the nation’s leading cutting-edge companies.

Companies with immigrant founders include the textbook rental company Chegg and the online craft site Etsy. The most common countries of origin for these entrepreneurs were India, Israel, Canada, Iran, and New Zealand, and for many, their experiences creating a start-up were “uniquely American,” according to the report by the National Federation for American Policy:

The stories of how the companies were founded carry a uniquely American feel. In true “only in America” fashion, two former students at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran ended up in San Francisco and established an online romantic social network that is considered a top destination for singles. The men had to abandon another company they started years earlier after an immigration attorney informed the pair it was virtually impossible for a foreign national to gain a visa as the founder of a startup company. [...]

While it is often large companies that are cited in media accounts supporting liberalized immigration rules for highly-skilled foreign nationals, Eric Lekacz, a native-born co-founder of ExteNet Systems, which provides network infrastructure for wireless providers, points out that hiring the right person can be even more critical for newer companies. “When in the emerging growth phase you have to get the best person without regard to race or ethnicity,” he said.

The NFAP’s report concludes that the U.S. needs policies to retain talented entrepreneurs in the U.S., but the hoops can be high for those who want to immigrate to the U.S. And the cap for H-1B visas, highly sought after for IT workers, has already been reached for the 2012 fiscal year, so anyone who wants to apply for the visa will have to wait another year before trying. “It’s a gamble whether an entrepreneur should stay or leave right now, and that’s not how the immigration system should work,” said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, according to the Chicago Tribune. “What we need is legislation that helps these entrepreneurs from outside the United States.”

Our guest blogger is Ann Garcia, Research Assistant for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund

While Newt Gingrich has tried hard to brand himself as moderate on immigration issues, the more details that emerge about his plan, the more his mask of compassion for undocumented immigrants living in our country peels off at the edges.

In late November, Gingrich famously broke ranks by saying that not all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our nation should face deportation. Gingrich’s exceptionally modest proposal would grant residency permits without a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants who have been here for 25 years, have a U.S. citizen family member to sponsor them, can get approval from a McCarthyite “Citizen Review Board,” and can demonstrate income sufficient to pay private health insurance and a $5,000 fine.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Gingrich disclosed that only 2 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants would be eligible to attempt to jump through this grueling set of hoops:

SCHIEFFER: That’s the question I’m coming to. There are 11 million of these people. I mean, what are you going to do with them? You can’t build that many prisons to put them in. You can’t get that many buses to haul them back.

GINGRICH: Seven or eight or nine million would go home and get a guest worker permit and come back under the law. The last two million are people who have been here a very long time. They are really part of the community. They’re not citizens but they’re part of the community. The folks, you and I may well know some of these folks. And 25 years ago, they did something wrong but they’ve been very good neighbors. They belong to the local church. As I said one of the requirements would be they have to have an American family sponsor them to be eligible for review by the Citizen Review Board. I think it’s a responsible position that recognizes the humanity of the problem but firmly establishes the rule of law.

Watch it:

The truth of the matter is that very little daylight exists between the proposals of Newt Gingrich and his GOP primary opponents who propose the deportation of all 11 million. The leading GOP presidential candidates, including Gingrich, continue to kowtow to a small minority of Republican voters who believe American taxpayers should foot the $200 billion it would cost to deport 8.64 million undocumented immigrants.

If campaign donations are any sign, Mitt Romney is the runaway favorite candidate of billionaires and Wall Street bankers. Indeed, Wall Street has flooded his campaign with donations and a massive 10 percent of all American billionaires donated to his campaign. So it should probably come as no surprise that, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Romney called for the super wealthy to be able to give unlimited sums of money directly to candidates:

TODD: Do you think Citizens United was a bad decision? [...]

ROMNEY:Well,I think the Supreme Court decision was following their interpretation of the campaign finance laws that were written by Congress. My own view is now we tried a lot of efforts to try and restrict what can be given to campaigns, we’d be a lot wiser to say you can give what you’d like to a campaign. They must report it immediately and the creation of these independent expenditure committees that have to be separate from the candidate, that’s just a bad idea.

Watch it:

It’s not entirely clear from this interview that Romney understands what happened in Citizens United. That decision emphatically did not follow any “interpretation of campaign finance laws that were written by Congress.” Rather, Citizens United threw out a 63 year-old federal ban on corporate money in politics. Citizens United was a case of five conservative justices deciding they knew better than America’s democratically elected representatives, and it was not a case of judges following the law.

More importantly, however, Romney’s proposal to allow wealthy donors to give candidates whatever they’d “like to a campaign” is simply an invitation to corruption. Under Romney’s proposed rule, there is nothing preventing a single billionaire from bankrolling a candidate’s entire campaign — and then expecting that candidate to do whatever the wealthy donor wants once the candidate is elected to office. Romney’s unlimited donations proposal would be a bonanza for Romney himself and the army of Wall Street bankers and billionaire donors who support him, but it is very difficult to distinguish it from legalized bribery.

As Romney himself said in 1994, when you allow special interest groups to buy and sell candidates, “that kind of relationship has an influence on the way that [those candidates are] going to vote.” Now that Romney’s running for president on the Wall Street ticket, however, he’s suddenly unconcerned with whether or not his big money donors exert a corrupting influence.

After conducting a two-year investigation, the Department of Justice released a report slamming the East Haven Police Department (EHPD) in Connecticut for pervasive discrimination against Latinos in violation of the Constitution and federal law. In a letter to East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. (R), DOJ Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez noted that not only did the EHPD consistently engage in discriminatory traffic enforcement, “treating Latino drivers more harshly than non-Latino drivers after a traffic stop,” but that it conducted “unauthorized immigration investigations” of Latinos, reflecting a discrimination that is “deeply rooted in the Department’s culture”:

The letter described the discrimination as “deeply rooted in the Department’s culture,” and cited a statistical analysis showing how Latinos were “intentionally targeted” for traffic stops. It provided the example of a particular officer’s stops — 40.5% of which were of Latino drivers.

Overall, the investigation found that 19.9% of traffic stops made by the EHPD were of Latino drivers, concluding it “shows pervasive discrimination against Latinos on every level of EHPD traffic enforcement activity.” The report also said officers were able to target Latinos by focusing on customers leaving Latino businesses.

In addition to the high rate of traffic stops, the report accused some EHPD officers of conducting unauthorized immigration investigations. The report mentioned “numerous incident reports” where EHPD officers contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the status or seek an immigration detention of a Latino person. Investigators said the tactic was “used to harass and intimidate Latinos rather than pursue legitimate law enforcement objectives.”

East Haven is 88.5 percent white, and only 10.3 percent Hispanic or Latino, so Latino drivers are twice as likely to be pulled over than their share of the population would suggest.

The report also accused the EHPD leadership of obstructing the investigation by “creating a hostile and intimidating environment” for those willing to cooperate. The EHPD did not comment on the report. The DOJ intends to meet with community leaders but said it “may suspend or terminate federal funding if the town fails to address the civil rights violations.”