Productive anger Re: Arizona-- MASSIVE LATINO VOTER REGISTRATION AND GOTV!

[Muddy Waters Guitars]

I just spoke to an old precinct captain friend from Scottsdale in Arizona, and he's told me that the registration numbers for Latinos there are up 300% from just a year ago, due to outrage and fury over the outrageous, unconstitutional law passed by the Arizona legislature. Not only Latinos, but Navajos and Pueblo, Filipinos, Turks, Arabs, Laotians, Armenians and other groups disproportionately targeted by this foolish law, are registering massively, beginning their revenge against the GOP fools. Arizona will very soon be a Blue State. Moreover, this is having a spillover effect-- Latinos in neighboring California (helping to thwart Meg Whitman and her pathetic and embarrassing multimillion dollar ego-trip in that campaign), New Mexico and especially Texas, also bordering (and historically and culturally) Latin America, have been registering in much higher numbers than before. We need to do everything we can to boost this process especially in those states, and encourage massive turnout by not only minority voters but also college students, professionals, the unions and working class, and other Democratic constituencies. The Republicans have shot themselves in the foot with this law, and it's time to make them pay!

It's sweet historical justice-- Arizona, after all, was one of the states seized in the Mexican-American War in 1848 (a war fought to extend slavery into the Southwest, since Mexico had banned it well before the United States had). And despite numerous treaties, laws and guarantees that would supposedly safeguard the rights of the indigenous Latinos and native Americans who long preceded settlement by the pro-slavery Anglos who eventually took over the state, those promises were broken one after another. That's one of the reasons that Arizona is in the hands of wingnuts today-- the wingnuts' predecessors have been especially aggressive in their imperialistic BS in Arizona since 1848.

It's time now to turn the tide. Let's get aggressive and do everything we can to boost up the registration numbers and turnout of Democratic voters in the Southwest. Also, make sure to request ballots available in Spanish, Tagalog and other relevant languages-- by well-established federal law, jurisdictions must provide the multilingual ballots when any language community is above 5%, one of the corollaries of the Voting Rights Act. Mid-term elections are almost always a problem for the party in charge of the Presidency, largely because of turnout-- its own supporters grow apathetic and complacent, and don't turn out to vote. We don't have that luxury this time in 2010-- the Republicans have been taken over by their wingnut wing, and they're too dangerous to our country to be allowed anywhere near the halls of power. We have to hit them hard by boosting out turnout levels even higher, and the place to start is in the Southwestern states.