Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

The US Chamber of Commerce is going full bore against HB 800, the Employer Free Choice Act. They are running radio ads against Harry Mitchell, which can be found on the Chamber’s press page.
The ads are over the top, accusing Mitchell of being against the right to vote and the right to privacy. Pretty ridiculous, really. […]

I caught a bit on KJZZ yesterday about John McCain’s problems with Republican activsts. More accurately, I should say, John McCain’s problems with a vocal minority of Republican activists.
They interviewed Republican District Chair Rob Haney and Republican consultant Stan Barnes. Haney once again reiterated his litany of supposed liberalisms that McCain has engaged in.
Barnes was […]

Gen. Wesley Clark and Iraq veteran Jon Soltz of VoteVets have unveiled a new website called StopIranWar.com in the hopes of organizing grassroots opposition to a possible (planned?) military action against Iran.
Clark and Soltz have distributed a video describing their effort.

I was poking around on an otherwise liberal blog and saw a blog ad stating that “unions want to take privacy from American workers!” This smacked of the silly campaign that the Arizona Chamber of Commerce ran against the increase in the minimum wage that argued that somehow it would violate people’s privacy.
Lo and behold! […]

Despite a rumor that was communicated to me by an over enthusiastic source, Clarence Boykins has not yet filed his Statement of Organization at the Clerk’s office.
Everything else I wrote about him is true, I promise.

Today is the last day for unions who wish to represent Pima County employees to file to participate in a yet to be scheduled election. County employees will be asked what union they want representing them, or if they want to be represented by any union at all. Unions that wish to have their names […]

Word is that Clarence Boykins filed his statement of organization to run in the Democratic primary for Ward 2 yesterday.  This allows him to start collecting money and signatures and otherwise cause the sorts of mischief that we expect out of our candidates. The city clerk’s candidate listing still doesn’t reflect this, but it should […]

Nobody but me remembers this, but I was a candidate for Ward 6 city council for a few days in late 2004. I saw that no one had pulled papers to run against Fred Ronstadt, so I went downtown and pulled them myself.  As it turned out, Steve Farley had pulled papers already but for […]

Way back in nineteen-hundred and eighty-six, I was a volunteer for Richard Kimball, who was running a kamikaze campaign for US Senate against a two term congressman from Phoenix named, um…it’s on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah, John McCain.
Kimball was a umpteenth generation Arizonan (his ancestors included Mormon pioneer Heber Kimball), and saw […]

The invitation for a party being thrown by lobbyists for Rep. Jonathan Paton has been making the rounds among politicos.
Lt. Paton served our country ably and honorably and deserves a party. Yep. In fact, all of his fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines deserve one too. Lets bring ‘em all back home so we can throw […]

DreamHost, the folks that put up with this blog enough to have in on their server, had a planned power outage yesterday that wasn’t supposed to last long. Unfortunately, the outage revealed a whole raft of other problems so this blog was down most of the night.
I just know that some of you are going […]

An article in the Tucson Citizen this week talked about the retreat of the bolo tie from our legislature. There was a time that our legislature was full of them, but the reporter was only able to find one, some goofball from Barrio Viejo.
The reporter missed out on a big part of the bolo tie story: […]

At around 11:00, the State Democratic Party forwarded this release:
Reno, Nev. - In an effort to ensure that Democratic presidential candidates focus on issues important to Westerners, four key Western state Democratic parties will co-sponsor the August presidential debate in Reno with the Nevada State Democratic Party, the Western Majority Project and FOX News Channel.
The […]

Word is out that Lt. Jonathan Paton will be Rep. Jonathan Paton again and be back in the legislature on Tuesday.
Everyone on both sides of the aisle are glad to see him back and safe. Now that he is home and political considerations are okay, some vote counters on the Republican side are no doubt […]

All of Mo Udall’s talk about the circular firing squads seems to have fallen away and the Democratic caucus has gotten past whatever differences led to the split that was talked about way back in the first week of the session.
This week, the House Democratic caucus has largely held together in opposition to Republican bills. […]

The American Prospect is carrying an article called “Fitting the Bill: Why isn’t Bill Richardson’s presidential candidacy taken seriously?” In it, Matthew Yglesias goes through some of the reasons why Bill Richardson’s candidacy hasn’t garnered very much interest from the national media.
I’ve wondered about this myself. As Yglesias points out, Richardson is a two-term governor, exactly […]

Speech delivered by Representative Bill Konopnicki, Republican of Safford, on the floor of the State House yesterday.
Mr. Speaker and Members of the House
I rise to share a troubling experience of this past weekend - one that, I am sad to say, is becoming more commonplace. My comments are not aimed at any individual, or at […]

Today is the day that Catholics begin the lenten season of pennance.  The lenten mass includes a reading from Matthew Chapter 6:
Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
A healthy way to carry yourself, no doubt. We can all […]

In an emotional speech on the house floor today, Safford Republican Bill Konopnicki spoke of the continuing debasement of public debate in our legislature.
Konopnicki stated that not only has he gotten threatening phone calls and e-mails, but members of his family have as well. Konopnicki was careful not to name names, but his story was […]

My brother had an appearance on Laurie Starr’s Starr Tracks last night on KXCI. He spun for about two hours and only played one song purloined from my music collection.
In the spirit of my previous post about presidential candidates and their song selections (and this one too), here were the songs that Tom played on […]