The American Civil Liberties Union was in federal court Wednesday to challenge an Arizona law that bans so-called "race and sex selection" abortions. The civil rights organization says the statute intentionally targets and "stigmatizes" women of color, because there is the assumption that they want an abortion based on these reasons. 

The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum and the NAACP of Maricopa County. The group argues the law, which came into effect in 2011, "exploits racial stereotypes to discriminate against black and Asian American women seeking abortion by requiring doctors—under the threat of criminal penalty (the law makes it a felony to perform an abortion if the doctor knows it is based on the fetus' race or sex, according to the Arizona Republic)—to racially profile their patients."

From an ACLU press release:

During debate over the law, Arizona lawmakers claimed that there was a racist plot to prevent the birth of Black children. These lawmakers also claimed the law was needed to prevent Asian-American and Pacific Islander women in Arizona from having sex-selection abortions, even though Arizona’s own data showed no sex disparities among children born to AAPI women in Arizona as compared to women of other races.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals now has to decide whether this suit has legal standing to challenge this law, based on alleged violations of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.  But, back in October 2013, a federal district court threw out this lawsuit, "despite overwhelming evidence of discriminatory intent, stating that the groups did not have legal standing to challenge the law," the ACLU says in a press release. 

From the Republic:

A federal judge in Arizona dismissed the lawsuit in 2013, saying the groups failed to prove minorities had been unequally denied abortions under the law. Being stigmatized, the judge wrote, is not enough to grant a group or individual legal standing in such a lawsuit. The ruling did not address the constitutionality of the underlying law.

The plaintiffs appealed to the 9th U.S. circuit, and were granted a hearing.

...

The Scottsdale-based Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom is defending the law on behalf of the state and bill sponsor Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park. Alliance Defending Freedom did not return calls seeking comment.

Montenegro in the past has said the intent of the law was to protect minority fetuses. “No one should be discriminated against by being subjected to an abortion because they are going to be born the ‘wrong’ gender or the ‘wrong’ race,” he said.

During legislative hearings on the law, Republicans said that statistics show a high percentage of abortions are being sought by minority women and that abortion clinics intentionally locate in minority areas. They said statistics indicate that some populations are increasingly seeking abortions based on the fetus’ sex.

Time Magazine has a special treat for us today. Last year, in a photoshoot for the magazine Donald Trump posed with a bald eagle. It went very well.

The eagle's name is Uncle Sam, and I love him.

Attention everyone with desk jobs, mindlessly staring into their computers and helplessly waiting for 5 p.m.: Season 2 of Serial started today, and Episode 1 is online now. 

After much speculation it turns out, yes, Season 2 is going to focus on Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. solider who was held prisoner by the Taliban for five years after leaving his Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan.

Here's Serial's description of Season 2: 

Bipartisanship in Washington. That alone is something to marvel at, regardless of what the Republicans and Democrats are agreeing on. The House and Senate passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which will replace Bush's No Child Left Behind, by huge margins. Congresspeople of both political stripes like it. Teachers unions like it. Lots of people on the left and right like it, or kinda like it. Rarely is heard a discouraging word about the ESSA as it makes its way to Obama's desk.

So, what will ESSA do? The answer is, it won't really do much all by itself, but it will give states more latitude to carve out their own education agendas. Given how much wrong-headed educational dictates have come out of the Bush and Obama administrations, that might be a good thing. But states' rights? In Arizona? In education? With Ducey and anti-public school legislators leading the charge for more privatization and the shifting of funding toward the "haves," charter schools and private school vouchers and away from everyone else? What could possibly go wrong? (Answer: pretty much anything.)

Here are some of the changes.

Common Core standards will no longer be pushed so hard from the top. Thanks to pressure from an odd coalition of the right and left that agreed they all disliked Common Core, though for different reasons, the standards will be optional. That won't make much of a difference here. Arizona already dropped its strict compliance with Common Core and is in the process of carving out its own version. Round and round our standards go, where they'll stop, nobody knows.

States will still have to give standardized tests to 3rd through 8th graders, then once in high school, as they do now. But states have the right to lower the high stakes a bit. Those test scores will no longer have to be the predominant measure of teacher or school success. Other factors can have substantial weight in the evaluations. And the law says it's OK for students to opt out of the standardized tests if the state allows it without any threats of withholding federal dollars for education.

The new album from Miss Lana Rebel and her trusty side-kick multi-instrumentalist Kevin Michael Mayfield is a journey through the past from start to finish. You can hear the ghosts of those nights of excess and the realities of cruel hungover mornings. You can feel the sorrows of your missed chances, sleepless nights and restless hearts forever wandering the countryside still searching for one more sip.

Before Rebel and Mayfield became a duo, Rebel had extensively toured with different backing bands and released three albums. Her songs have been featured on NPR, as well as country and Americana radio programs around the world—reaching top ten charts on college radio stations. Mayfield has a background in media arts with professional film scoring and music and film editing experience.

The album, titled The Midtown Island Sessions, begins with the upbeat full-band number called "Better Way to Live." The song is about letting go of something that is probably not too good for the soul to begin with, so Rebel forsakes all their fancy clothes, money and big ol’ Cadillac and head for the hills even, despite her mailbox full of bills and pocket full of sand.

Recorded in the spring of 2015 with Matt Rendon at Midtown Island Studios, Rendon both engineered the album and provided background vocals on the hauntingly sullen ”I Hope It Don’t Rain,” which is a standout track with Rebel singing lead and harmony vocals, accompanied by the full band. This song succinctly describes what it feels like to be traveling and looking for shelter before rain catches up with you, feeling tired from the road and just wanting to be with your lover.

“Can you bear with me for 30 seconds?” Oisín Mac Diarmada, Irish fiddler and storyteller par excellence, says by phone from freezing Columbus, Ohio. “I’m after ordering a cup of tea.”

Mac Diarmada and his team of Irish musicians—and one California step dancer—are on the “Irish Christmas in America” tour this month, bringing their seasonal music, song and dance to venues across the nation. They alight in the Old Pueblo on Tuesday, Dec. 15, for a single show at Berger Center for the Performing Arts. The tour started out in northern climes and will end in the sunnier south.

“We can’t wait to get to Tucson,” Mac Diarmada says.

Now 11 years in the making, the loveable Irish Christmas show first stopped in Tucson way back in 2005. The concert is an evening of stories, songs in Irish and English and photo slides conjuring up the joys of an Irish Christmas.

“We don’t feature standard Christmas carols,” Mac Diarmada says. “One of our lovely Irish Christmas songs is `The Candles of Baby Jesus’–sung in Irish. And we do ‘Silent Night’ [Oiche Chiuin] in Irish.”

The performers will recount at least one old Irish Christmas custom that survives: So-called Wren Boys venture out in costumes on Dec. 26, “going round from house to house, singing, maybe playing instruments,” Mac Diarmada says. “It’s a big social day of getting out of the house, after the family day of Christmas.”

Mac Diarmada, himself a prizewinning fiddler from Sligo, has enlisted an all-star pickup band. This year’s five musicians play the full array of traditional instruments, including fiddle, flute, harp, whistles, concertina and uilleann pipes.

Singer Séamus Begley, who has been on the Christmas tour for the last five years, is a native Irish speaker from Kerry in the West of Ireland. Awarded a TG4 Traditional Singer of the Year award in 2013, Begley specializes in songs in the island’s native tongue and also plays accordion. At 66, “he represents an era of Irish music,” Mac Diarmada says. “He’s a real character, a charming, funny person and a natural performer.”

Singer Teresa Horgan, a soprano raised in Cork, has performed in Tucson a number of times, with the band FullSet and last February with Outside Track.

Samantha Harvey, a champion Irish step dancer from Ventura, California, will dance with the band, accompanied on some numbers by local kids from Tucson’s Maguire Academy of Irish Dance. Descended from Italians, she grew up studying at the Claddagh School of Irish Dance. Now on her third year on the tour, Harvey and Mac Diarmada were married at the start of the year after touring in Asia together. When the band returns to Ireland on Dec. 22, joining the thousands of Irish emigrants who return each year, Harvey will go with them, Mac Diarmada says. “We’ll be going back home to Sligo for Christmas.”

Irish Christmas in America is at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 15, at Berger Performing Arts Center (1200 W. Speedway Blvd.). Advance tickets are for $27 general admission with senior, student and member discounts available. You can buy yours at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.), The Folk Shop (525 N. Campbell Ave.) or online with a $3 fee. 

Sen. John McCain tells the Washington Post he'd support Trump if he were to become the GOP's nominee for president, while Sen. Jeff Flake says there's no way Trump will win the nomination:

The response from the GOP leaders illustrates the tricky position in which Republican leaders find themselves when it comes to the unpredictable Trump. Prominent Republicans, including party chairman Reince Priebus, have treated the businessman with kid gloves even as his rhetoric has inched further toward the fringes. Trump has previously discussed mounting a run as an independent if he is not treated “fairly” by party bosses, stoking GOP fears that he might eventually peel off voters from the party’s eventual nominee.

“I will support the nominee of the party,” said Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee. “I doubt if there’s any nominee I totally agree with in my lifetime.”

Pressed on how he could disagree vehemently with Trump on this issue, yet theoretically vote for him, McCain deferred to the limits of the two-party system. “I am a loyal Republican, and I rely on the good judgment of Republican voters.”

Some Republicans stated that the question was moot because the businessman would not win the GOP nod.

“He won’t be the nominee,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.). “I don’t think he’ll win Iowa, and I don’t think he’ll play second fiddle to anyone. As soon as someone eclipses him, and he figures ‘I can’t say anything crazier than I’ve said to change the equation,’ then he’ll find a way to back out.”

Flake called Trump’s proposal “lunacy” and “just awful, frankly.”

“Just when you think he can’t stoop any lower, he manages to do so,” Flake said, wondering how Trump’s plan would affect diplomats and foreign officials who are Muslim from taking official visits to the U.S. He pointed specifically to a visit scheduled next month from Jordanian King Abdullah.

“I’m not sure he’d be able to come under a Trump presidency,” Flake said.

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore looks at why Republicans are afraid to say they would not support Trump: They're afraid he'll launch an independent run in the general election that would drain off the voters they need to win the White House:

The concept is very solid: a disgraced cop faces his toughest and most important case, finding his missing teenage daughter. As he begins to learn that she was no angel, his mission becomes even more heartbreaking.

The World of Kanako starts with that premise … and then goes completely nuts. As manic as it is violent, the Japanese film dives headlong into a drug underworld filled with dirty cops, gang warfare and underage prostitution. The way director Akikazu Fujishima ties all of this together, while also weaving in a few related subplots, is phenomenal. And the work by Koji Yakusho as the father driven to rage and madness (not that he ever had far to go) is sensational.

The tone and the bloodshed may be too much for some, but there’s no question that Fujishima goes for broke here and meets the challenge head-on.

Under a new set of rules approved by the Tucson City Council Tuesday night, the city's homeless residents are not allowed to have items bigger than 4-cubic feet on the sidewalk, faith groups and others cannot distribute pre-packaged food or beverages at parks without a permit from the city and sidewalks are off limits between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. 

A homeless protester asked the council: Can you fit all of your belongings within 4-cubic feet?

"I ask you to consider that right now," Roy Trout told the council before its vote. "Number 2, how many of you hold picnics in the park every day or on special occasions? Why can't the homeless have picnics at the park with the church? We are coming up with all of these laws and sanctions...to make life harder on each and every member that is out there, life is already hard enough." He said that while teenagers beat up homeless people, such as himself, on the streets, the City Council "is worried about 4-cubic feet for a homeless man's belongings. It doesn't make sense to me. The City Council is worried about a church going into a park and giving a homeless man a meal and having a picnic with them."

The ordinance—which passed with a 5-2 vote, and is pretty much a set of clarifications and amendments to provisions that were already in place—concerned critics, and even some members of the council. 

City Councilwoman Karin Uhlich (Ward 3) was very worried about ending up in court, and the possibility of losing federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—the agency that keeps many homeless shelters afloat. Recently, she pointed out, the Department of Justice said certain actions, such as not allowing people to sleep on sidewalks, is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's  protections against cruel and unusual punishment, and thus unconstitutional. Simply put, it criminalizes homelessness, DOJ argued. Uhlich unsuccessfully pleaded to have DOJ review the city's suggested new rules before voting on them. She and Councilman Steve Kozachik (Ward 6) voted against the new ordinance. 

"Everybody seems to want to downplay those issues but I am not willing because there is a lot at stake," Uhlich said at the meeting. "My preference would be not to [move on] at this point. It is arbitrary...that 4-cubic feet...we are going to end up in court. I think it will put our HUD resources at risk." Newly re-elected Councilwoman Shirley Scott (Ward 4) wasn't sure the DOJ would pay that much attention to an ordinance in the City of Tucson. But, they have been striking down similar ones in other cities, such as Boise, Idaho. "They must have a mechanism to what constitutes as criminalizing homelessness and what does not," Uhlich responded. 

We've got two pairs of tickets to Wednesday night's Wildcat basketball game. The game starts at 7 p.m. We'll draw the winner Wednesday ("tomorrow" from when this was published, "today" if you're seeing this in your newsletter) at Noon. You have to be able to pick the tickets up at our office (located near the Foothills Mall) before we close at 5 p.m.

If five hours notice is enough to get you to our office, enter now.