U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (far left) was part of a White House meeting in February with President Barack Obama in this photo posted at whitehouse.gov by the Obama administration.

With the state budget crisis on hold until Monday, I can take a moment to mention other tidbits that have happened in the past week or so. Here’s a few items that caught my eye:

• Janet Napolitano, one-time governor and now U.S. Homeland Security secretary, was named by President Barack Obama to be his lead negotiator with Congress on immigration reform policies. Obama revealed this after a high-level June 25 meeting at the White House intended to jump-start an effort to finally resolve the nation’s broken immigration system. Napolitano received a huge amount of media attention when the swine flu pandemic was first identified. She seemed to be on my television news every day for weeks. Now, she it’s likely she’ll be back in the spotlight this fall on an issue that, until the economy collapsed, had been one of hottest domestic topics especially among talk radio and television and certainly here in Arizona.
• Have you taken the Tribune’s Fourth of July quiz yet? And you passed, right? Of course you did, that’s why you read this blog! But if you are, say, under 30, you are likely to be in a shrinking minority who actually understand basic American civics. Tribune writer Mandy Zajac used questions from the official test given to all immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens. The Goldwater Institute used the same test when it recently surveyed 1,350 Arizona public high school students and found nearly 97 percent couldn’t pass the exam! The institute’s Matthew Ladner suggests high schools should require the citizenship test for graduation, or colleges should require it for admission. I’ve got to say, if we expect foreigners in this country to have this knowledge, how we can fail to demand it from everyone else?
• The Associated Press reported on a Republican candidate for Maine’s governor who appears to have “borrowed” the Obama campaign logo from last year. I’m detecting a pattern here, as we noticed a similar concern in April with John Paul Mitchell, a Republican candidate for Arizona governor.

Posted in: Election issues • Immigration • Journalism • Presidential campaign • Barack Obama • Goldwater Institute • Independence Day • Janet Napolitano • John Paul Mitchell |

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