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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was terribly upset with the news that this sequester battle is going to end up cutting into the profits of her buddies in the private prison industry: Jan Brewer: Freeing Immigrant Detainees Is ‘Height Of Absurdity’:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) is not at all happy with immigration officials for releasing hundreds of detainees in anticipation of coming sequester cuts.

“I’m appalled to learn the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun to release hundreds of illegal aliens from custody, the first of potentially thousands to soon be freed under the guise of federal budget cuts,” Brewer told the Arizona Republic in a statement. “This is pure political posturing and the height of absurdity given that the releases are being granted before the federal sequestration cuts have even gone into effect.”

In an interview with FOX News' Neil Cavuto on Wednesday, Brewer also attacked the White House over their claim that they had no involvement with the decision, saying they were in "duck and cover mode."

Maggie's Farm at Kos has more on what really has Brewer upset: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer 'appalled' DHS is releasing immigrants. Blow to prison industry profits:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's quest to imprison as many aliens as possible was steered in part by the state's powerful private prison lobby, since the "papers please" law and other tough anti-immigrant policies bring more customers to their jails. Most stories about the Department of Homeland Security releasing inmates this week have overlooked the blow to the prison industry's bottom line. It costs, for instance, about $164 a day to incarcerate one immigrant. Multiply that by tens of thousands. Day after day. [...]

Jan Brewer's been an esteemed member of the Crazy Republican Governors Club—joining lugheads like Scott Walker, Sam Brownback and Rick Scott who've embraced the tea party's "cut the deficit" gibberish, seemingly unaware of the effects in their state. Now Brewer and her looney tunes ideologues are getting a taste of Norquist's bathtub politics. She's finding out what GOP obstructionism is going to cost Arizona, and it began this week with her state's former governor, Janet Napolitano, releasing immigrants.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer says she's appalled to hear that the Department of Homeland Security has begun releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants from custody. It's the first of potentially thousands of immigrants to soon be freed before mandatory federal budget cuts go into effect.

The reality chicken has come home to roost in the guise of nearly 31,000 immigrants held in jails nationwide. That's an expensive undertaking, and the sequester will wallop DHS upside the head, necessitating huge cuts. Rather than $164 a day to incarcerate one inmate, the "supervised release" planned for prisoners who pose no serious threat costs less than $14 per day—a blow to prison profits, even if only some inmates are held in private facilities.

Gillian Christensen, an [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] spokeswoman, said ICE has reviewed "several hundred cases" of immigrants being held in jails around the country and released them in the last week. They have been "placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release," she said.

Of course if you watch the clip above with Brewer on Cavuto's show, you'd get the impression the opposite was true and that it was more expensive to monitor the prisoners than jail them.

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Officials in Texas announced on Thursday that state troopers would no longer be allowed to open fire on suspects from helicopters after the recent killing of two immigrants.

While announcing the new policy, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw insisted that the ban on aerial shootings had nothing to do with the October 2012 death of two Guatemalan immigrants, who were gunned down by troopers in helicopter while they were hiding in the back of a speeding pickup truck near La Joya.

"I’m convinced that now, from a helicopter platform, that we shouldn’t shoot unless being shot at, or unless someone is being shot at," McCraw told the state House Committee on Appropriations. "Last Friday, after a review of the policy and looking at all of the different things, and this is not a reflection of what happened there, I’m a firm believer they did exactly what they thought they needed to do."

ACLU of Texas Executive Director Terri Burke welcomed the change, but faulted the Texas Legislature for not moving to force the policy earlier.

"We were shocked. We’re thrilled, but we were surprised," Burke said in a statement "We hope that this decision is a step, if only a small one, toward ending the culture of violence that pervades enforcement of border security in Texas.

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Sunday challenged Republican lawmakers who oppose a bipartisan agreement to give legal status to undocumented immigrants as a part of comprehensive immigration reform.

"The are 11 million people living in the shadows, I believe that they deserve to come out of the shadows," the Arizona senator told Fox News host Chris Wallace.

"Under your plan -- although they wouldn't get the path to citizenship until you got this border enforcement certification -- they would almost immediately get probationary legal status, which basically means that they could continue to live in this country legally," Wallace noted. "Some of your critics on the right are saying that's amnesty."

"Well, I don’t think it is amnesty to start with," McCain insisted. "Second of all, what do you want to do with them?"

"Third of all, it's a tough path to citizenship, you have to pay back tax and learn English and have to have a clear record and get to the back of the line behind to the people who have come here legally or waiting legally. So, I just reject that."

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other conservatives have blasted the bipartisan immigration reform proposal, arguing that the focus should be on securing the border without providing a path to citizenship.

"I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship," Cruz recently said. "To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally."

(h/t: Think Progress)

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I guess Mitt Romney isn't too worried about potentially making these results from the Pew Hispanic Center any worse than they are already with his comments to a crowd in Le Mars, Iowa, where he said he'd veto the DREAM Act if elected president.

Mitt Romney Making His Final Stops in Siouxland Before Jan. 3rd:

Romney, a self-proclaimed conservative business man, shared his plans on how to balance the budget, without raising taxes, using energy resources that are already here in this country, and he was up front when asked if elected president if he would veto the DREAM Act regarding immigration.

"For those that come here illegally, the idea of giving them in state tuition credits or other special benefits, I find is to be contrary to the idea of a nation's laws. If I'm President of the United States, I want to end illegal immigration, so we can protect legal immigration. I like people coming to this country," said Romney.

The governor was also up front telling folks in Le Mars that if elected president he planned to cut a number of government programs, some many people may like; in order to help balance the budget. And while many people seemed to like what they we're hearing, some have yet to make up their minds.

"No, not yet. We still got ten months to go.... A lot can happen," said Le Mars native Larry Petersen.

Romney says his priority if elected president is to reclaim the American dream and make this country the land of opportunity once again.

I guess it's that "land of opportunity" unless you're unfortunate enough to be a child who was brought here by your parents through no fault of your own and this is the only country you've ever known since you were a baby or small child and you don't want to shipped off to another country that would be as foreign to you as it would be to most native born Americans.

Everyone keeps touting Romney as the best hope to beat President Obama in the upcoming election because he's the supposed "centrist" or "moderate" Republican candidate in the race, but he's been moving so far to the right on so many issues during this primary, it's hard to see how he attempts to walk back so much of his rhetoric like this after moving so far to the right in the primaries. If Romney is supposed to be a "moderate" in the GOP, moments like this along with the fact that he's got a bunch of former Bush neocons advising him on foreign policy aren't going to help him much once we get out of these primary races. That would apply doubly for how he's been forced to campaign in Iowa.

Sadly for Romney, we have these video recording devices available to us these days that are going to remind voters about moments like this one and a whole lot more in the year to come. I guess we'll find out whether his attempt at a hard shift to the right along with his past flip-flops will cost him in the general election.

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Well, no big surprise that Mike Huckabee decided he was enjoying his well-paying gig over at Fox News so much that he's not going to run for president in 2012. If we weren't sure before he made it official tonight, this appearance by Ted Nugent on his show just prior to his "big announcement" should have tipped everyone off.

Nugent was asked what he thought about the killing of Osama bin Laden and although Nugent praised the decision to go in and get him, he downplayed the importance of them finally killing him by saying it didn't really matter that much in the overall "war on terror." Anyone think he wouldn't have been dancing around praising Bush as the best president ever if this had happened under Bush's watch?

And for all the talk from Huckabee about being a Christian and a man of god, why is he allowing someone who spouts off the kind of inflammatory, violent rhetoric we heard out of Nugent here on his show? I think we all know the answer to that, but I find it pretty ironic after all of the yelping over the rapper Common coming to the White House, on the night that one of the Republican Party's supposed "front runners" was potentially going to announce whether he was running for president or not, he chooses to bring someone like Nugent on to spout this nonsense:

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Hardball's Chris Matthews decided to have a conversation about President Obama's recent meeting with on immigration reform. And true to form, MSNBC just had to bring on Pat Buchanan for commentary, because heaven knows they can't seem to have a discussion on race or immigration on that network without their resident flame thrower and racist in chief.

Buchanan blames the failure of the DREAM Act last January on Harry Reid, and says he should have mustered up the votes when Democrats still had control of the Congress. Never mind the fact that Reid's never had any kind of progressive majority there between "Independent" Joe Lieberman and the Blue Dogs he's had to contend with, along with the Republicans' willingness to obstruct and filibuster literally everything he tried to pass with fanatical uniformity.

Buchanan also blithely talks about sending those kids back to where they supposedly came from, when the ones the DREAM ACT would have affected don't know any other home, they've been here so long. No, in Pat's mind, "they broke into the country." That's some way to talk about little children, many of whom were too young to even understand what was going on when their parents brought them here. (Indeed, many of them are the children of parents who are now legal citizens.)

I don't disagree with Buchanan that they ought to go after the businesses taking advantage of people for cheap labor. But the demonization of the people coming here looking for work is nothing but divide-and-conquer fearmongering, where you pit one working person against another -- a strategy Pat Buchanan has been practicing for decades now, and, sadly, one MSNBC allows him to continue every time they have him on the air to discuss race relations or immigration.

Several House Democrats spoke at a rally this week in front of the Alabama legislature in opposition to HB 56, an immigration-enforcement bill patterned after Arizona's "papers please" law. They linked their own historical struggle for civil rights in Alabama to the battle being waged over immigration. As I watched, it occurred to me that Alabama might be the first state where local history provides a focus for opposition to the tea-fueled wave of pandering state immigration bills. This took place just blocks from the Civil Rights Museum and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church:

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Lou Dobbs and Isabel MacDonald squared off on Lawrence O'Donnell's new show on MSNBC, The Last Word to debate MacDonald's recent article at The Nation which has sparked controversy over whether Dobbs hired illegal immigrants. Dobbs of course characterized the article as a "hit piece" by a "leftist organization" that's just wanting to raise money from the story. Dobbs said he never “directly, knowingly employed any undocumented worker”. As MacDonald and O'Donnell pointed out, Dobbs' problem is not a legal one but a problem with the hypocrisy of him going on the air night after night on CNN and railing about illegal immigration when people like him are a source for their employment, directly or indirectly.

Dobbs defended himself saying he's softened his stance and is trying to help look for solutions to the problem. As MacDonald reminded him, when there was legislation being drafted to try to find a compromise to the problem of illegal immigration, it was shows like Dobbs' that helped to derail it. So nice of him to change his stance after he got knocked off the air on CNN.

This was an extremely long interview. You can watch part 2 below the fold.

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John McCain is still insisting that President Obama come visit the Arizona border and that he's ignoring the violence there being caused by the drug cartels. Chris Wallace points out to McCain that despite his criticism of the Obama administration, the annual flow of illegals into the U.S. is 2/3 smaller than it was in 2005 and the total number of illegals into the U.S. is down 8% from 2007 and asks if they deserve any credit for having done something right? McCain goes on and all but ignores the statistics cited to him by Wallace other than to acknowledge that finally that there has been some improvement.

Wallace should have also pointed out to him that not only are the immigration numbers down, but he's lying about the violence increasing as well. While crime has increased on the Mexican side of the border it is not "spilling onto our side" as McCain claims here.

McCain: Obama is Ignoring Border Violence Threat to U.S.:

Some measures on illegal immigration to the United States have improved, but the Obama administration is ignoring violence spilling into the U.S. from Mexico, Arizona Sen. John McCain said Sunday.

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate noted that 28,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered in the drug war in Mexico, with 72 individuals, including 14 women, killed in one attack just last week. That violence is a threat to U.S. security, McCain said.

"The people who live in the southern part of my state do not have a secure environment. To wit, there are signs that the government put up that say, 'Warning. You are in a drug smuggling area and a human smuggling area,'" McCain "Fox News Sunday." [...]

Anybody who "hasn't seen what's going on south of our border, they have been oblivious to the terrible, terrible struggle that's going on down there," McCain said. "The incredible violence down there is spilling over onto our side of the border if we don't get our border secured."

McCain said President Obama needs to walk the Arizona-Mexico border and see for himself the destruction caused by an explosion in drug and human trafficking.

"Unfortunately, he hasn't had time to do so," he said.

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Glenn Beck is a busy man.

Just in the past week, Beck has held his "Restoring Honor" rally and launched a new website. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that Fox News host has just gotten around to being outraged at a story first reported almost a year ago.

Last December, AOL News first reported that a professor at the University of California, San Diego developed a GPS cell phone application to help immigrants illegally cross the border into the United States.

Ricardo Dominguez describes himself an "artivist" -- a cross between an artist and activist -- and he calls his newest act of civil disobedience a "Transborder Immigrant Tool."

It's a cheap Motorola cell phone retrofitted with GPS technology. Dominguez, an associate professor of new media arts at the University of California, San Diego, hopes to get the tool into the hands of people making the treacherous crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border on the so-called Devil's Highway.

[..]

The Transborder Immigrant Tool was inspired by a university colleague of Dominguez's who developed a Virtual Hiker Tool to help him keep his bearings during desert hikes. The Transborder Immigrant Tool will give the user basic orientation, distance from destination, and the location of water. (It will also be loaded with short, haiku-like poems written by poet Amy Carroll. "We wanted to have a hospitality tool," Dominguez says of the poems. "At the core of the poems is a rethinking of the idea that good fences make good neighbors. Borders do not make good neighbors. We should be welcoming.")

The tool, which will cost less than $30 per unit, is undergoing field testing and tweaking. Dominguez has so far collected $15,000 in grants to fund its development and rollout, and by next summer, his plan is to have churches and groups like Border Angels and No Mas Muertes distribute the phones and train users on their features.

For the August 31 rollout of his new website, The Blaze, Beck's team produced a video highlighting Professor Dominguez's 2009 comments about the GPS phones.

Beck took to the air on his Fox News show Wednesday to express his outrage over the year-old story.

The segment began with a quote from Dominguez. "It is a tool that not only allows the safety, but also creates kind of this deeply poetic centering of hospitality," said the professor. "In a certain sense, we think of it as the Statue of Liberty that one carries along as one walks."

"So they have the GPS cell phone paid for with your tax dollars coming in across the border at night illegally," noted Beck.

"You can teach whatever you want, but not with tax dollars. I would also tell you I think these people should be fired," said Beck.

"Let me ask you, there was a time not long ago in this country we walked you through walls of fire to make sure we weren't funding Hamas or Hezbollah. I have news for you. There are a lot of universities that are as dangerous with the indoctrination of the children as terrorists are in Iran or North Korea," said Beck.

It's clear that Beck probably wasn't talking about his own university.