FOK News Channel for Thursday, April 28th, 2011

First Guess: A Modest Proposal About Arizona - Discontinue It
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A modest proposal about Arizona.

I'm Keith Olbermann in New York with the First Guess.

A week ago it was when a bolt of lightning struck Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, causing her to experience a moment of temporary sanity and in turn leading her to veto the lunatic fringe birther bill passed by the state House and Senate which would have required each Presidential candidate to provide 'a valid long-form birth certificate' before they could appear on Arizona's Presidential ballot.

Ms. Brewer, last heard from claiming that there were decapitated Americans littering the Arizona desert, when she may have been misremembering what she saw in a TV crime drama, either came briefly to her senses or she herself felt threatened by the bill because of some ominous secret origin of her own. Like that maybe her birth certificate reads 'Land of Atlantis.' Or perhaps 'Lost Greek City of Troy.'

The governor's intervention will not stop Arizona, not for long anyway. The state is still hellbent on self-destruction and at the current rate it's going to meet its goal. The veto'd bill included one of the most bizarre sidebars in the history of the American legislative experience.

One of the more practical of Arizona's Republican totalitarian psychopaths realized that not every state generates a long-form birth certificate any more, so he helpfully included other documents that could be presented as proof that you aren't from Kenya, or Mars, or Yemen, or Panama. In lieu of a certificate, an early census record would be acceptable, or a certificate of live birth, or a signed postpartum medical record, or a baptismal certificate, or a certificate of circumcision.

Yes, a certificate of circumcision. A bris certificate!

In a moment, we'll get to the insanity implied by this request to 'show us the record of your little candidate.' And yes, obviously this was a bit of a non-starter for women who wanted to be President. But first: it was explained to me by one Arizona politician that the suggestion of this documentation of the mohel's toil, as it were, was made specifically to cover would-be Presidents born at home. That there has not been a future President born at home since August 27th, 1908, didn't seem to matter to the House and Senate of Arizona, or as they are known to the members of the legislature in Taiwan who you always see fighting each other, and hitting each other over the head with shoes, 'our comic relief.'

Unfortunately here, nobody's laughing at Arizona. In the last three years that state has given us the Papers Please law, the ascent of white power groups inside state government, Senator Jon Kyl's 'Not Meant As A Factual Statement' statement, the Republican candidate who invited supporters to fire a machine gun at a rally, the Tucson shootings, the recall effort against the sheriff who correctly blamed the Right for violent rhetoric, and John McCain's decision to curse us all by elevating Sarah Palin from rinky-dink governor to national laughing stock.

So back to the point. I have a modest proposal. Arizona is, after all, our newest continental state. Alaska 49, Hawaii 50, yes, but Arizona's 48th. Our ancestors were more sure about New Mexico than they were about Arizona, and I'd say that means Arizona's statehood is still unofficially an experiment. Well, they failed! Any state asking Presidential candidates to metaphorically wave their willies to get on the ballot is a failure.

Now, to me, it would be wrong to simply say 'Hey, you're a territory again. No senators, maybe one congressman with or without a vote.' Similarly, saying 'Okay Arizona, great idea, didn't work. California, you take some of it, and New Mexico you get this part, and Nevada, Utah, maybe even Colorado, you get a little each.' I don't think that's fair either. It's not like Nevada and Utah are any great shakes.

No, here's my idea: fair, not to the advantage of other states, just a clean break.

Sell it.

Sell Arizona. I don't see anything in the Constitution that says we can't! We bought Louisiana, we bought Alaska - all right, bad example. But where does it say we can't sell? I mean, we'd have to take some humanitarian steps first, like moving the pro sports franchises out of there, that metropolitan area forming in the Strip including San Antonio and Austin and Frisco, that's huge. You give Texas another football team, another baseball team, Governor Rick Perry will sign on to our 'Sell Arizona' plan inside of an hour.

And I say not only is it time to sell Arizona, it's time to give its union-busting, Social-Security-cutting politicos a chance to truly address the deficit and the trade imbalance in a direct and meaningful way.

We should sell Arizona to the Chinese.

Now, I'm not saying they'll give back the whole trillion-two in US debt just for Arizona. But to get an actual outpost here, the Chinese would pay through the nose. They want to unload that debt anyway, and most of the members of the Arizona House and Senate would probably be able to keep their jobs under Chinese rule. They don't care a thing about human rights - and neither do the Chinese.

I think this is a masterstroke. Sell it to China! Arizona is beyond redemption. It's a blight on our politics, on our culture, on our ethics, on our history. And that was all true before Arizona flirted with asking would-be Presidents to provide records of their circumcision! Which, as you will necessarily agree, was the height of hu-bris!

See you late spring.