President Obama had millions of people to select from in choosing a head of Homeland Security.
He chose Janet Napolitano, pulling her from her position as governor of Arizona. That put Republican Janice Brewer in Napolitan's place, as AZ Governor.
Brewer signed the hateful new immigration legislation into law.
NPR's John B. Judis writes, "The bill might not have become law if Democrat Janet Napolitano had
still been governor. Napolitano vetoed similar measures. And Arizona's
Latino community hoped that Brewer, who replaced Napolitano, would veto
it."
Obama not only set up the circumstances so a bill like this could pass, he set up Brewer to be an incumbent with an edge in the next election. Of course, Obama didn't do it alone. John Podesta, his transition director probably had a hand, as did his closest advisors.
Every decision has consequences. Obama took a gamble appointing Napolitano. Maybe he owed her a favor. It doesn't matter. The decision he made contributed to the passage of this bill. Who knows whether this bill be inspire copycats in other states? Sometimes a small step, what seems like a discrete, isolated decision has extended consequences. This is one of those cases.
update: I added this note in today's daily newsletter.
I am an eternal optimist, and I'm into positive psychology and positivity. It drives some of the people in my life crazy, the way I always try to see positives in things, the way I frame things positively. That applies to Obama too. Though I am profoundly disappointed with him so far, I still hold on to some hope that he will wake up and take the power we gave him and start doing real good, instead of selling out to corpos and banksters as he's done. And I'll call it for what it is when it comes to his role in enabling the racial profiling hate law that would not have passed if he hadn't appointed Janet Napolitano, vacating her seat and giving it to a republican.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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