Arizona Democrats are asking the state Supreme Court to disqualify two GOP candidates:

Democrats on Monday asked the state Supreme Court to overturn a judge’s decision that kept two Republicans on the Aug. 24 ballot, even though the judge found they had broken the law in getting there.

The appeal comes in the wake of a ruling that state Sen. John Huppenthal, a Republican candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, and Bob Thomas, who is seeking the GOP nomination for state Senate in central Phoenix, violated the law when they collected signatures on their nominating petitions.

The two collected signatures before they had formed their campaign committees, Judge Robert Oberbillig found, which is against state election law.

But the punishment for that violation is a fine, he ruled, not removal from the ballot, which is the remedy the state Democratic Party had sought.

Party officials then turned to the state’s highest court for an appeal. Spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson said it would be hard to assign a dollar value to signatures that were collected outside of the official period. A more fitting punishment would be removal from the ballot, she said


Arizona’s Border Security is getting a $50 million boost:

A new $50 million pot is available to local law enforcement in Arizona and along the U.S.-Mexico border for border-security projects.

The money comes from a $94 million settlement that Attorney General Terry Goddard’s office reached with Western Union earlier this year to end a seven-year investigation into drug smugglers' use of wire companies to move money across the border.

Goddard’s office sent out grant applications Monday to city, county and state law-enforcement agencies in Arizona, Texas, California and New Mexico. Each state is guaranteed at least $7 million, Goddard said.

The money can be used to attack the issue of cross-border smuggling of drugs, people, weapons or money, he said. The drugs and people come north into the U.S., and the weapons and money go south to fuel the cartels' operatio

Read more at the AZ Daily Star.


Heat City is reporting that the Mexican government has joined the fight to stop Arizona’s immigration law:

brief_on_behalf_of_mexicoThe Mexican government formally joined the fight to stop Arizona’s new immigration law on Monday, telling a U.S. court the law “threatens to poison the well” of diplomacy between the two nations and exposes Mexican citizens to racial profiling by police.

In a 28-page brief (pdf) filed in the U.S. District Court of Arizona, lawyers for Mexico said the creation of the law, widely known as S.B. 1070, “has been closely followed at the highest levels of the Mexican government and throughout Mexican society.”

The government said it believes the Arizona law, which among other things makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, violates the U.S. Constitution. It asked the court to throw the law out entirely.

More here.

Border agents captured some elusive prey on the border: More than 100 piñatas of Disney characters, according to an AP story on the KTAR site:

DOUGLAS, Ariz. – It was no fiesta on the Arizona-Mexico border for the driver of a shipment of pinatas that looked like Disney characters.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rob Daniels says officers at the Douglas port of entry stopped a tractor-trailer coming from Mexico for further inspection on Friday.

Officers found the tractor-trailer was loaded with papier-mache items, including 108 pinatas in the likeness of Disney characters on their way to Thornton, Colo.

The story quotes a border official saying, stopping counterfeit goods is “a vital element in national security.”

NYT story on the piñata underground here.