Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

I have only one question about last week’s hearings on Dolores Huerta’s speech: what did this accomplish?

I spoke to Rep. Jonathan Paton last week, and he went over many of the points he later made on Arizona Illustrated. Paton believes that speeches such as Huerta’s should be followed up by someone of an opposing viewpoint. He also thinks that the transcripts of such speeches should be available to the public. Okay, sounds reasonable.

The trouble that I had with this was that I didn’t think that this was the business of a full blown legislative committee hearing, especially since many of his questions to TUSD were already answered, and he was already able to get a copy of the speech online.

If you are interested in reasonable discussion of issues, the last thing you want to do is bring them up in front of a legislative committee.

After reading press reports on the questioning of TUSD officials, it is difficult to see what Republican committee members think could have been done about the statement. Did they think that a district official should have been in the back of the room with a mute button?

Oh wait, I forget, this is the Arizona Legislature. They weren’t interested in doing anything, they wanted to score ideological points.

For example: the Republicans are particularly burned up about Huerta’s statement that “Republicans hate latinos.” Okay, I’ll stipulate that that was not the most tolerant statement. So, who did they invite to the committee hearing? David Horowitz.

David Horowitz wrote a book called Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. So, “Republicans hate latinos” is intollerant, but saying that progressives hate whites is perfectly reasonable.

Horowitz also has a website which claims that figures like Sen. Tom Harkin, Ruby Dee and Roger Ebert are pawns in a terrorist conspiracy. Yes, this is exactly the sort of person you should invite to speak on behalf of calm, reasonable, tolerant political speech in schools.

You don’t invite Horowitz to learn any actual information or to hear reason, you invite him so he can trash talk everyone to his left. Which, by the way, includes a lot of people.

Wait, I thought this was about a speech and how much money was being spent on busses. What the heck would Horowitz know about that?

Another amusing moment came when Rep. Rick Murphy pretended not to know what MEChA was. Funny thing, descriptions of MEChA always seem to show up in Republican talking points whenever they are running against a latino Democrat.

Rep. John Allen claimed that Tucson High School was a “sweat shop for liberalism.” Such a statement seems to point out that he was more offended by the particular brand of politics being expressed, rather than the inflamatory nature of the remarks. He also admitted in one article that the legislature couldn’t do much about it. Great, than why have a hearing?

So, any legislation coming out of this? I didn’t think so. Good waste of time, fellas.

NB - I also ran across this tax-payer financed press release from Tom Horne’s office. Horne is saying that his deputy, who is hispanic (some of Tom’s best friends are, you know), should be sent out to schools to tell students why she is proud to be Republican. Um, so to counter Dolores Huerta’s alleged misuse of a single public school assembly to make a partisan statement, Tom Horne sends an official press release on state letterhead to make a partisan Republican statement, and says that his deputy should be allowed to tour all the schools to make partisan statements.

Also, Horne talks about how wonderful and tolerant he is toward hispanics. At least that is true when he isn’t running against them.