A few words on Russell Pearce

[tahnan]

For those who don't keep track of local Arizona politics, Russell Pearce is the state senator who wrote the anti-immigration bill (and who, probably not incidentally, pals around with a notorious neo-Nazi). His latest crusade involves reviving an old plan of his to deny citizenship to children born in the US to non-citizen parents, apparently not having noticed that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution has this point pretty well covered.

So I wandered by his website, http://www.russellpearce.com/. The front page is an image, so I can't copy the text; instead, I'll let you visit it, and restrict myself to several observations here:

1. There's no comma after the first word of the Declaration of Independence (at least, not according to the transcript at archives.gov, and I trust them to know).

2. Those words were not "penned July 4th 1776". They were written some time in June and then debated and edited for several weeks.

3. You can't really threaten words; the words are there, period. You could threaten the sentiment they express, but the first thing quoted there doesn't express a sentiment at all. It's a dependent clause. You can't threaten the idea that "when a certain thing happens". (Also: "so long ago written"? English has a standard word order, you know.)

4. "I have pledge..." should be "I have pledged...." (Unless you have Lemon Pledge. In which case, capitalize it; it's a brand name.)

5. The plural of "Arizonan" is "Arizonans", not "Arizonan's".

6. "I receive a lot of the questions from concerned citizen on various issues" has at least two grammatical errors: you can't use a definite article and refer to "the questions" without having already introduced those questions into the discourse, and "citizen" should be plural. (Additionally, "on various issues" is somewhat misplaced, unless you've got a constituent who's a citizen on various issues.)

7. You're an idiot.

Or...wait. Wait! Someone whose command of English is that bad can't possibly have been raised and educated in an English-speaking country! I hereby ask the Arizona police to detain Russell Pearce, based on reasonable suspicion that he's an illegal immigrant masquerading as a citizen.

(For more evidence, try reading his bio. Among other things, we learn that his son was shot by an illegal alien, which might explain some of his irrational hatred. And imagine being an English teacher who has to correct the following bullet point: "Established no smoking jails, removal of explicit magazines, and removal of PG-13 and R rated movies from the county jail".)

Comments

[stigant.livejournal.com]

Also, when you take an Oath of Office for a elected position, don't you pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the Declaration of Independence? Seems like we'd have a lot more secessions if people were upholding the DoI.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I assume he meant a personal pledge, not an oath of office. (I'm not sure what you pledge to uphold when you're sworn into a state office; it might just be the state constitution.)

[jadelennox]

also, he clearly doesn't want the votes of people with visual impairments or people who browse with non-visual browsers, because there's no other reason to make the text be an image. And you can't actually navigate the site with JavaScript turned off, so he doesn't want the votes of people who are concerned about privacy, who are using old computers, or, again, the votes of people with disabilities.

no, wait, I'm being silly. Actually, he's just got a web developer who has as much understanding of computers as he himself has understanding of the English language.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The utter lack of accessibility was not lost on me, no.

[ztbb.livejournal.com]

We routinely have lots of ballot measures here in AZ, and occasionally one or two of them are a bit inscrutable. Here's where Russell Pearce comes to the rescue. In the voters' guide that gets sent out with arguments for/against all the measures, RP writes an argument for pretty much every one of them, so I can double-check that I've understood the measures correctly by making sure that my position is the opposite of his.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Well, hey, as long as he's making himself useful.