The Department of Justice announced today that it is taking Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to court for obstruction of justice. According to the DOJ complaint, Arpaio’s office has refused to cooperate with a federal investigation into his office over allegations that Arpaio abused prisoners and relied on racial profiling to fill his jails.

The DOJ and Arpaio have been tussling in public for months, but it came to a head in August, when the DOJ sent a letter to Arpaio threatening legal action unless the sheriff complied. After Arpaio failed to turn over files to the Justice Department by their August 17 deadline the two parties had a joint meeting that sounded hopeful.

On August 25, the Arizona Republic reported that the DOJ has set two new deadlines in September and October for Arpaio; the Justice Department is trying to gain access to six of Arpaio’s jails to tour the facilities and interview staff. Investigators also demanded that Arpaio turn over arrest records. On August 27 Arpaio’s office responded by saying it would not cooperate.

The DOJ has been investigating the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for alleged civil rights abuses since 2009. Arpaio, who’s already responsible for one quarter of all the deportations in the country, has had his arrest powers restricted by the federal government. But that hasn’t stopped the cowboy sheriff from his very liberal interpretation of his powers.

Arpaio’s well known for his immigration sweeps through his juristiction–he ran his seventeenth on the day that SB 1070 went into effect. Arpaio’s been known to parade detainees down Phoenix streets, hold immigrants in tent cities and force people to wear pink underwear for the fun of it. But his jails also have a well-documented history of abuse. Settling all the various lawsuits against the MCSO have cost the county $42 million in the 16 years that Arpaio’s been in power.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. This is the first time the DOJ has sued to gain access to public facilities and documents.

Read the DOJ’s complaint here.

This is one dope mashup. Courtesy of Latoya Peterson over on Racialicious, here’s a clever splice of the classic Disney flick Pocahontas and Adriel Luis’ spoken word poem Slip of the Tongue.

We first spotted the mash-up on Sociological Images, where a student, Samantha Figueroa, did the editing for a class project. The task was to combine two loosely related art forms in order to produce an inspirational and critical piece.

Humorous, informative and fast-paced, the manipulated visuals compliment Luis’ poem so well that you sort of wished the actual Disney film was just as good.

It’s a terrible day to be a Malthusian in America. On Monday afternoon James J. Lee decided to take several hostages in the Maryland headquarters of the Discovery Channel, and brought with him a list of wild demands for the television station to focus population control. Lee said his views were informed by his Malthusian ideals–Thomas Malthus was an 18th century British thinker who argued that unchecked population growth would be the downfall of human society.

Yesterday it was an obscure, though on its surface a not entirely unreasonable theory. Today Malthus is again in the news. Except Lee was more than a Malthusian. His passionate, valid cries about the desperate state of the environment–”Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels,” Lee wrote–and humans’ direct role in environmental degradation, were tinged with echoes of xenophobia. Lee’s screed called on the station to shift its programming to focus on strict population control via forced sterilization. He also advocated for closed borders and an end to immigration into the country.

Lee is dead now. After a tense standoff yesterday afternoon he was shot on the scene by a SWAT officer after pointing his weapon at one of his hostages. There were no other injuries, and the building’s 1,900 occupants all made it out safely. Lee’s legitimate fears about the environment had been clouded in part by xenophobia. 

And not on accident, either. 

The gunman’s deranged demands brought to the fore tenets of a growing sector of the environmental movement that’s been co-opted by white nationalists and immigration restrictionists with extensive ties to anti-immigrant networks like the American Immigration Control Foundation, Californians for Population Stabilization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (also known as FAIR) and its various offshoots like NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies.

And if FAIR sounds familiar to immigration rights watchers, they should. FAIR is the group, founded by anti-immigrant zealot John Tanton, that helped write Arizona’s SB 1070 and has been orchestrating the growing copycat bill movement around the country.

In a political climate where immigrants make easy scapegoats for a host of social and economic ills in the country, it’s easy for these anti-immigrant groups to blame immigrants, too, for increased fossil fuel use, urban sprawl, the melting of the polar ice caps. Immigrants track their dirt and babies and poverty into the country, and threaten “America’s environmental stability,” so the anti-immigrant environmentalists say.

The “greenwashing” of the movement has been well-documented. This summer the Center for New Community released a report documenting the nefarious connections between the anti-immigrant movement’s faux-environmentalism that stretch back to the 1960’s. They made an unsuccessful attempt to derail the Sierra Club’s agenda; they’ve started websites called Progressives for Immigration Reform; they’ve run convincing ads in lefty magazines masking their anti-immigrant views behind concerns about the planet. But it’s not that immigration restrictionists care so much about the environment; they just care much more about ending people’s right to enter the country.

Lee seemed to have bought the lies. He wrote:

Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH!

Lee also condemned war as a contributor to climate change, and wanted the country to find solutions for the unemployment and housing crises. He wanted the best for the ailing planet. So should we all. But he missed a crucial point: migration is not the cause of climate change. Very often, the ravages of climate change and environmental degradation are the impetus behind people’s leaving their home countries in search of work and life elsewhere. Saving the planet and protecting immigrants’ rights to enter and be in the country are parallel pursuits. They are even very often unified goals among those who know that communities of color and immigrants often feel the brunt of the environmental crisis first, and worst, and know that the welfare of the planet is also dependent on the welfare of the world’s most marginalized people.

A new watchdog campaign is emerging to stamp out sexist attitudes and stereotypes in electoral politics. Perhaps inspired by the sub rosa misogyny that surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaigns, the Women’s Media Center and other feminist groups want to mobilize in direct response to sexist attacks that undermine women’s political presence, the Washington Post reports.

The Women’s Campaign Forum, Women’s Media Center and Political Parity plan to spend $250,000 on research and outreach for the initiative, which they have dubbed “Name It, Change It.” The idea is to call out a range of issues – everything from what the groups considers an unfair focus on women’s clothing and family responsibilities to profane name-calling.

The money will pay for an online advertising campaign, spoof videos and a smartphone application that will allow users to report sexist comments in the media.

But the clincher is the Post’s quote from Women’s Media Center President Jehmu Greene, evoking a tension that threaded through the Clinton-Obama primary race:

Sexism against women in the media has become normalized and accepted in a way that they would not be if the comments were racist…It dramatically affects women candidates.

Few would doubt that racism and sexism are handled differently in the media, but how, exactly? Subtle racial slights and sexist overtones are both prevalent in mainstream reporting, and as social issues, racism and sexism are both frequently glossed over or oversimplified in clumsy coverage. But does this campaign, dubbed “Name It, Change It,” suggest that racism in mainstream politics receives greater scrutiny than sexism in the same context?

As candidates Obama and Clinton went head-to-head in the presidential race, there was a palpable sense of injustice, or at least discomfort, about how the “race card” was playing out against the “gender card.” Recalling the legacy of a pioneering woman of color in politics, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem wrote in a 2008 New York Times op-ed:

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

So wither the “coalition of outsiders” in the age of Obama? Do women’s groups feel that it’s high time for their struggle to be vindicated now that the man in the White House has, at least on the surface, crossed a historic colorline? Is racism really easier to call out than sexism in political races? And aren’t we doing both struggles a disservice, as Steinem suggests, by framing them on an either-or divide?

The success of the “Name it, Change it” campaign might depend on whether activists recognize that, on an increasingly diverse political landscape, the more narrowly a problem is named, the smaller the potential for real change.