This is the only Arizona Centennial story I will write.
Sorry, but I can’t be rosy as Arizona inches towards its 100th b-day on Valentines day.
As we all know, not all birthdays are great.
Arizona, on its hundredth birthday, finds itself under the leadership of an increasingly extreme and expensive Arizona Legislature that seems distanced from Arizona universities (as evidenced by the guns on campus measure it will surely pass) and Hispanics (as evidenced by a new slew of immigration laws about to be pitched.)
We need to ask ourselves: How did the people in the Arizona Senate and House get  their power?
Political scientists have a plausible explanation.
1. Extreme candidates tend to get voted into office in closed primaries, which most of us don’t vote in. Closed primaries are those primaries offered by the parties – ie, the Republican primary and Democratic primary. We don’t vote in these because we are lazy or busy or Independents or the wrong party or we don’t know about it.
2. Once the fringe candidates win the primaries, they advance to general elections.
3. That’s when most voters vote.
4. But by then, it’s too late.
5. The elections have already been decided, to a large degree, in the closed primaries, by the fringe voters who choose fringe candidates.
6. There’s a way to weed out wing nuts, though, the political scientists say — “open primaries.”
7. In open primaries, all voters – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – vote on the same day on one ballot. If you’re a Dem, you can vote Republican. And vice-versa. And Independents, also can vote for whomever from whatever party.

There’s a current petition drive, called Open Elections, Open Government http://azopengov.org/petition-locations2.aspx, that seeks open primaries in Arizona.

To celebrate Arizona’s birthday, decide whether you want to sign it.

The Mexican drug war is fueled by American consumption of Mexican drugs — Americans are stoners, one in five of us use pot, says New Yorker writer Steve Coll. Where does our pot come from? Mexico, mostly. Read Coll’s smart commentary here. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/mexico-drug-war.html

Dominque Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who was widely viewed as a likely contender for the French presidency, faced sexual assault allegations by a chambermaid who says he attacked her in May. The maid, an immigrant from  Guinea, speaks a West African dialect called Fulani. The maid spoke Fulani to a mysterious West African friend who was incarcerated someplace in Arizona for drug charges, and the call was recorded, and this helped shatter  her credibility. (She also lied on her income tax form and her political asylum application, according to press reports.)  The reason the taped phone conversation shattered the maid’s cred,  at least in the eyes of newspaper reporters who talked to prosecutors,  is  that the maid said something to the effect of “Don’t worry I know what I am doing” and the inference was that she was going to scam DSK, who is enormously rich.

After word of the taped conversation got out, DSK, who on home arrest in cushy quarters in New York, was released. (He can’t leave the USA, though.) Prosecutors still haven’t decided whether they will pursue the case.

In other words, that phone call with the guy in Arizona was important.

I’m telling you all this so you’ll know why media outlets all over the USA were scrambling to get in touch with the mysterious West African friend, to get his side of the story. The problem, though, was that no one knew his name, or where he was incarcerated.

That is, until The Daily Beast found him. His name is Amara Tarawally, and he is an unauthorized immigrant from Sierra Leone, and in an exclusive interview with me, he claims  he’s the maid’s fiance. He was arrested in a pot bust in Chandler, Arizona, about a year ago. After serving time in jail, he was transferred to a detention center in Eloy, Arizona, pending a hearing on his immigration status.  But since his immigration case is based in New York, the case hasn’t been transferred out to Arizona yet and he’s in limbo. He told me even Sierra Leone would be better than detention because he’s been in the dark for so long, and feels cut off from the world. He also told me the phone call was taken completely out of context, that the maid is a beautiful woman who would never lie, and that he learned English from watching CNN, The Price is Right, and Deal or No Deal.

You can read the story here.

And here is an NBC interview I gave earlier today.

What do you think?

Did DSK assault the maid?

And how come just about every good news story has an Arizona connection?

For years, this journalist has  tried to avoid what we in the j-world call “flaks” — they have a lot of other names, too. Communications specialists. Public information officers. Publicists.

We journos sneak around publicists if we think they’re trying to keep us from the truth. But there are very good publicists, too, who help us get the interviews we need.

I never thought I’d need a publicist.

But I do.

Because I can’t multitask.  I’m an author and a public speaker, but I’m above all else a journalist, and I still have to cover  intense stories that take up a lot of time.

After all, this is Arizona.

But in the meantime, journalists wanted to interview me.

I don’t want you to think I’m a raving egomaniac. I’m  not. Or at least I try not to be.

But ever since my book came out, I’ve gotten requests for interviews from journalists who want me to talk about the book, the immigrants who reside in its pages, or other newsbreaking stories in Arizona — crazy laws,  Joe Arpaio, guns, politics, murder, Shawna Forde, you name it.

And I’ve also been asked to speak on panels, at book clubs, at university gatherings.

All of this deeply honors me, and humbles me. For months I’ve been trying to schedule it on my own AND write stories.

But as I said, I can’t multitask.

So, a  terrific publicist has agreed to take on the scheduling, public speaking, media organizing for the author-public-speaking-media  side of my professional life.

Her name is Carmen Cornejo, and she owns Critical Mass Communications. This is her picture.

CARMEN CORNEJO

She’s stunningly qualified, kind, and very smart.

Here is how you reach Carmen:
(480) 324-6378
carmen@criticalmassc.com
www.criticalmassc.com

If you can’t reach Carmen, try Bob Sembiante, the senior publicist at Globe Pequot Press, which published my book. robert.sembiante@globepequot.com — 203-458-4555.

In closing, here’s a photo taken at Changing Hands bookstore after a reading. They sold out of books. They had to borrow some of mine so they would have enough to sell. YAY AND WOOT!

We were celebrating. I’m on the left. Carmen is on the right. In the middle is Bobby Boos, who designed this website and keeps it alive even when I go into its guts and screw up the code.

TERRY, BOBBY AND CARMEN AT A CHANGING HANDS READING

As I said, we have a lot of fun.

Thank God I’m in good hands.

TERRY GREENE STERLING ON GRATITUDE AND TALENTED FRIENDS IN ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION WAR ZONE

I’m grateful for my family, my health, my work and my friends. Sometimes, I get to work with my friends. That is a great joy. Two dear friends have come out with remarkable projects this year, and it has been a pleasure  and honor to see their excellent work take form.

Kathy McCraine, my dear  rancher friend, has spent her life documenting the vanishing cowboy culture in the American West.  She recently published a truly remarkable book that fuses culture, oral history, food, and art — honestly, you’ve never seen anything like it.  Mark Kohler illustrated the book with stunning watercolors, and Kathy added her fine reporting and photography. The book is called  Cow Country Cooking. But it’s about a lot more than food.

(Full disclosure: I spent my childhood on the O RO ranch featured in the book.)

(More full disclosure: Kathy took a lot of pics for my book, Illegal, Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone and I edited her copy for Cow Country Cooking.)

For several years, my friend Valeria Fernandez, an outstanding broadcast and print reporter based in Phoenix, has been working with Dan DeVivo on a remarkable documentary  called Two Americans. The main characters are  Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kathy Figueroa,  a little girl whose parents were arrested by Sheriff Joe’s deputies in a car-wash raid.

I’ll leave you with a link to the Two Americans website and a taste of the documentary, below.

Watch this:

Friends, I’ve spent about a month and a half working on an immigration story for Phoenix New Times, the mother ship of Village Voice Media.

Normally, these pages are reserved for some of my observations on Arizona politicking and immigration, but I’m imposing a gag rule on myself because I don’t want to spill the beans for the New Times Story.

It’s running in early December, and then I will wax eloquent once again. In the meantime, here’s a story I wrote on Sheriff Arpaio for The Daily Beast.

The two key Arizona  lawmakers who pushed SB 1070 through the Arizona Legislature expressed outrage after President Barack Obama voiced  support for comprehensive reform of federal immigration policy earlier today.

You can read a really good analysis of  just why, exactly, Obama chose this time and place to speak about immigration in a big way. Just link here. Obama delivered his talk at American University, in Washington. He  said this, in a nutshell: It’s time to reform federal immigration policy using a four-pronged approach of border enforcement, workplace enforcement, visa policy modernization and a stand-in-line-and-pay-your-fees pathway to a green card. (Citizenship, and voting privileges, would come years later.) (Oh, and the comprehensive immigration reform Obama touted is not new;   Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, with President Bush’s blessing, tried to get it passed  back in 2006. )

Obama also took a couple of jabs at Arizona and SB 1070, saying the law pummels law enforcement authorities with burdendome expenses and responsibilities, and, of course, opens the door to racial profiling.

Almost immediately after Obama stepped down from the podium,  John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills legislator who has become a key spokesman for SB 1070 after sponsoring a similar law in the Arizona House, appeared on TV in Phoenix. He told  FOX News he was offended that Obama lumped immigrants who came here illegally with immigrants who came legally, like his grandparents. He said the Obama plan meant “amnesty” and SB 1070 protected against racial profiling.

Kavanagh had recently done a little offending of his own, when  he “joked” to a roomful of Latino journalists that Canadian “illegals” could stay in Arizona because they had money. You can read about that here.

Sen. Russell Pearce, the main sponsor of SB 1070, told Phoenix FOX news that Obama was fear mongering and just wanted “amnesty.” Pearce has been accused of fearmongering, too. The Arizona Republic noted that Pearce erred when he attributed 9,000 deaths to “illegal immigration.” In a fascinating and informative profile, reporter Gary Nelson notes:

Pearce has frequently cited a soaring crime rate caused by illegal immigration as one of the reasons for his stance.

However, statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that violent and property crimes in Phoenix have decreased in the last three years at a rate that is even faster than the nation’s as a whole.

As recently as two months ago, Pearce wrote a constituent that illegal immigrants are responsible for “over 9,000 American deaths every year.” The number has been attributed to U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who said he “extrapolated” from a Government Accountability Office study. The study, however, was on illegal-immigrant prison populations and does not mention that figure.

Read more: azcentral.com

Just days before Pearce accused the President of fear mongering, Gov. Jan Brewer talked about “beheadings” that couldn’t be substantiated, and said all those “illegals” crossing the border were drug mules.

Here’s Brewer’s beheadings video: Brewer talks about beheadings.

The beheadings couldn’t be substantiated, according to Politico.

SB 1070 has long been promoted by proponents as kicking in only after a  cop  lawfully stops detains or arrests someone they suspect of committing a  ”crime”  ( the ” crime” category includes   city ordinances and  traffic violations) and then only after “reasonable suspicion” exists that the  person is in the country illegally.

Today, thanks to  Evan Wyloge, a rising star  journalist who has been covering this angle relentlessly we learn:

Lyle Mann, director of the Arizona Peace Officers Standards and Training board, said what constitutes a “stop, detainment or arrest” is really much broader than the law’s supporter’s have been conveying since the law was signed April 23.

“The truth of the matter is an officer can stop anyone for any reason and ask them anything,” Mann said. “Is that kind? Is that brutish? That’s another question.”

Does this broad interpretation also apply to US citizens who are lawfully stopped detained or arrested while driving their undocumented relatives?

We’ll know for sure on July 29, when the law kicks in, barring court injunctions.

TERRY GREENE STERLING: PHOTOS FROM A HOTBED OF (IMMIGRATION LAW) PROTEST – PHOENIX, ARIZONA

Soon, this site will be redesigned. We’ll have lots of new features, and my web designer, who is very smart about these things, says I won’t be able to use such HUGE pictures. What can I say? I’ll have to defer, after all, he knows what he’s doing. But until we get the new site launched, it is Bigpicturepalooza.

Here are two photos I shot at the May 29 pro-and-con immigration-law rallies.  You can read the law in earlier posts on these pages.

This is a picture of a boy marcher whose mother is an undocumented immigrant. She is a professional clown. She entertains kids at birthday parties. This explains why she painted her son’s face with the words: For America. Naturally, the boy and his mother are opposed to the law. Estimates for the march this child attended ranged from 10,000 to 100,000. I figure there were about 30,000 marchers, but I couldn’t be sure since I was reporting from the middle  of the march.

Below, a portrait of a man who doesn’t have work and came to pro-SB 1070  Tea Party rally in search of work. He told me he didn’t  really blame immigrants for taking his job, but  he said he figured he’d get work if he showed up at the rally. He didn’t get a job, but he got one lead by the time I left the rally around 9 p.m. Estimates for this sedentary rally, in a stadium, where people sat and listened to speakers, ranged from about 5,000 to 10,000. I think about 3,000 people were there when I visited.

PHOENIX NEW TIMES FILES ITS SECOND REPORT QUESTIONING  A MYSTERIOUS SHOOTING OF PINAL COUNTY DEPUTY, WHO SAID HE WAS SHOT BY MEXICAN DRUG TRAFFICKERS WITH AK-47-TYPE WEAPONS IN THE DESERT NEAR PHOENIX.  THE ALLEGED SHOOTERS, WHO WERE MOVING POT, ACCORDING TO THE DEPUTY, WERE NEVER FOUND, DESPITE A MASSIVE SEARCH. THE DEPUTY WAS TREATED AND RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL THAT SAME NIGHT.

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Our thoughts & prayers go out to the Pinal County Deputy shot during a stop.Contrary to what some leaders say,our borders are not secure.6:13 PM Apr 30th via Tweetie –

A tweet by Governor Jan Brewer in the wake of the deputy shooting, one week after she signed controversial SB 1070.

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For those of you who don’t know me, I was a staff writer at Phoenix New Times for fourteen years.  One of my colleagues, Paul Rubin, was and is the best crime reporter in Arizona. He is really well sourced. Cops trust him and tell him things they won’t tell anyone else.

So when Rubin filed a report  that questioned the shooting of a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy just days after Gov. Jan Brewer signed the controversial SB 1070  immigration law, I took notice. He’s not the kind of reporter who shoots from the hip. He knows his business.

Here is his latest report.

“ILLEGAL, LIFE AND DEATH IN ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION WAR ZONE”

By Terry Greene Sterling

I have been covering the immigration battles in Arizona for the last year and a half. This book was written after many, many hours in the trenches. This is the cover.

The book comes out in June, but you can buy it now here.

Please join me on this intimate journey. The people in the shadows want you to know their stories.