To my friends back home who suffered through last winter: come see what AZ is all about and be patriotic too!

** See update at bottom. **

Video blog on doing the webcast for the Stand With Arizona rally.

Ok, let’s just get it said: this is the coolest opportunity you will ever have to 1) be patriotic, 2) see the Grand Canyon and 3) have an absolute ball in one of the best undiscovered playgrounds on the planet. Details at Stand With Arizona.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the stuff there is all good info.  But here’s the key takeaway: At the cost of a cheap Southwest Airlines airfare and a few nights in a modern hotel (90% of Arizona is new!) you can both show your support for enforcing immigration law and learn why people are moving to Arizona in droves and have been for 15 years.

Full disclosure: I’m from Delaware, Mary’s from Baltimore. We grew up with the I-95 corridor uber-cynical populus who never saw a beautiful sunset because the trees and buildings always got in the way. We expected the obvious things: to pay half the mortgage for a better house and never again, ever, to endure the first 15 minutes in a car that’s been sitting all night in 5 degree weather.  What we didn’t expect was:

The people are real. You’ll meet Aunt Bea here. Women aren’t afraid to get old. Men aren’t afraid to go bald.

The governments are honest. Seriously. Google “best managed cities” and Arizona is all over the search results.

The views are amazing. Amazingly ugly mostly, because yes you’ll see cactus and plenty of salmon colored earth. But majestic mountains surround the valley and are only minutes away for hiking. Flagstaff to the north and the Mogollon Rim to the northeast are amazing.

The schools are something out of Leave it to Beaver. If you live in Walnut Creek, California your daughter’s math teacher is a pony-tailed 25 year old from Berkeley who could never afford to live in the same neighborhood as the school. If you live in Chandler, Arizona, your daughter’s math teacher is Mr. Rogers, who’s got a beautiful house 2 blocks from the school and has been teaching for 30 years.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether you’d like to try a go out west, come for this. It WILL be hard to leave. And you’ll be helping put an end to  what those idiots in Washington have been doing for the last 30 years about the border.

** Update **

Brief event report.

The press were there in number.  Griff Jenkins from Fox News is pictured below. I sat next to the AP reporter, all night, and he did NOT breeze in, take pictures, then breeze out. He stayed for the whole thing.  (Didn’t expect that, especially when the rest of the press cleared out after 40 minutes.)

Some of the speakers were very effective. One of the most revealing things is that although many of the speakers were people of color, the ones who weren’t almost to a man were married to or adoptive parents of people of color.  The idiocy of progressives continuing to characterize opposition to AZ 1070 as racist overreaction by the ebbing white tide is as plain as the nose on their faces, but they still manage to hide it.

Photos from the event.  Click here for high resolution 3642 x 2432 versions (loads slowly).