Arizona State Senator Al Melvin posted that this afternoon. (Cynthia, who tweeted “Amen!” in approval to Melvin basically declaring America a conservative Christian-only zone, describes herself as “Christian,Mother,Native Texan,Student,Abstinence Advocate(4 all ages) Pro-Israel-No Profanity Zone” on her profile.)

Someone on Facebook joked wryly that today was a “Chamber of Commerce day” for Arizona, in light of Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s recent e...

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Per his Wednesday Republic column where he takes issue with scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have a new book out blaming (duh) the Republicans for all the problems in the country now:

According to them, the Republican Party has become “an insurgent outlier in American politics.” It is “ideologically extreme” and “far from the mainstream.”

Mann and Ornstein’s own delusion about the center point of American politics is revealed by their description of the Democrats under...

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Yep, Governor Jan Brewer is a lying liar. From her office’s press release on signing HB2625, aka the “Tell Your Boss Why You’re Taking The Slut Pills” bill into law Friday:

“Let’s not forget why we’re having this discussion: It’s ObamaCare that created this issue by forcing
church-affiliated employers and non-profits to offer services in violation of their religious faith,” said Governor Brewer

Bullpucky. The Arizona Legislature passed a law in 2002 requiring al...

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Our Lady of Sorrows is a Phoenix school that has gotten into the news recently for refusing to play baseball against a team with a female player. The story has gone viral and Twitter is clucking over us zany Arizonans yet again. A few tweets that caught my attention were about the schismatic Catholic organization that runs Our Lady. Turns out they are some very strange and bitter people who long for that good old Vichy government and think everyone should stop picking on the Nazis.

The powerhous...

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Two weeks ago a 13 year old Minnesota girl committed suicide by hanging herself. Rachel Ehmke’s parents say she had suffered months of abuse at school:

The constant name-calling started sometime in the fall, Ehmke said.

“She’d say you’d walk by girls in school and they’d holler out things like “slut.” Stuff like this. It was just relentless,” Ehmke said.

At one point the bullies put gum in his daughter’s books and all over her locker, he said...

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Per EJ Montini today:

According to Brewer, “This is a common-sense law that tightens existing state regulations and closes loopholes in order to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund abortions, whether directly or indirectly.”

Indirectly?

It’s like when townsfolk get out the pitchforks and torches and try to shut down the local art museum because they object to a single work of art. Or when a mob wants to burn books because of a single novel it finds offensive.

It’s class...

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Paul Krugman has been even more excellent than usual lately at debunking the Beltway conventional economic wisdom. Here he is breaking it down in the New York Review of Books:

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn�...

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Russell Pearce, the former BFF and Mormon mentor of neo-Nazi JT Ready, is correct when he points out that he had nothing to do with Ready’s horrific killing spree in Gilbert yesterday. But it was inevitable that multiple reporters were going to ask him for a statement on it because, duh, they had a long association with each other. If Bill Ayers or Reverend Wright went on murderous rampage does anyone honestly believe President Obama wouldn’t be asked about it, even though his associ...

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Per last Friday’s “5 Minutes for Families”:

Despite being Arizona’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood claims this bill will deny women access to other medical procedures including cancer screenings and women’s health services. Once again, this is not true. The bill does not reduce the funding by one penny – it simply prioritizes the funding to healthcare providers who can provide more comprehensive services. There are plenty of options for women t...

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Per yesterdays AZ Republic editorial:

Which brings us to former Democratic Sen. Dennis DeConcini’s testimony. Who, exactly, authorized DeConcini to “apologize” before Congress for his state’s behavior?

A member of the Senate for 18 years, the Tucson native had a great opportunity, a national stage, to instruct Schumer and Congress on the consequences of their failure to act on immigration reform.

You don’t have to be a supporter of SB 1070 — we most emphatical...

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Center of Arizona Policy director Cathi Herrod’s Sunday op-ed is a pitch to libertarians to support discrimination against gays because, freedom! “Support of tried-and-true tradition of man-woman nuptials will grow.”

Maintaining one-man, one-woman marriage fits perfectly into libertarian philosophy:

1. Marriage benefits the entire community and lowers dependence on government programs.

2. Only the government is in the position to enforce marriage contracts.

3. Changing the def...

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HB2625, the anti-contraception bill, passed the AZ House yesterday on a mostly party line vote with the recommendation to adopt Senate amendments that would limit the scope of employer exemptions to the mandate to cover birth control in health plans. If those amendments are adopted (we’ll see) then only employers with a religious mission or affiliation will be able to exclude birth control from health plans. I and others have already explained at length why this is an unconstitutional esta...

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“For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake.” Philippians 1:29

Many conservatives have a remarkable knack for managing to be insufferably whiny even when they’re gloating over victories. Cathi Herrod of Center for Arizona Policy is a perfect example of this. Per her latest “5 Minutes for Families” post:

Through the hard work of the CAP team, our friends at the Legislature, and YOUR support, we exp...

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***I was working on this post before I saw the news that Andy Thomas and Lisa Aubuchon got disbarred. Huzzah! As you were…***

So, Greg Patterson, AKA well-known blogger Espresso Pundit, has been nominated for a spot on the Arizona Board of Regents. This has, understandably, caused garment rending and teeth gnashing in many quarters in Arizona. The AZ Dem Party’s statement on his nomination captures why the center-left and left are (rightly) alarmed.

“I am deeply troubled by the...

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Today’s AZ Republic editorial, clearly written by a very butthurt Doug MacEachern, was a whinefest over how The Daily Show interviewed a dumb wingnut and he came off like, well, a dumb wingnut:

A less articulate critic of the program would be impossible to find. The segment was a cringe-inducing humiliation of the tongue-tied man.

Which, of course, is why the producers sought out the hapless Mr. Hicks. Most real reporters look to board President Mark Stegeman, a University of Arizona econo...

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Okay, so, Rep. Daniel Patterson has been accused of domestic violence by two women, ex-wife Jeneiene Schaffer and ex-girlfriend and campaign manager Georgette Escobar. But a House Ethics investigation revealed that Patterson has been known to exhibit a pattern of menacing behavior toward persons who are not women with whom he has been intimate. You would think that information would spare Schaffer and Escobar from the heavy dose of skepticism routinely heaped on women who accuse prominent men of...

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Hold the damn phone.

I finally got a chance to peruse the preliminary report (h/t to Tedski for the download) of the ethics investigation against Tucson Rep. Daniel Patterson. The team did a thorough job vetting all the complaints and they go far beyond the domestic violence allegations most of us are aware of. Patterson is also accused of all sorts of other vile and menacing behavior toward legislative colleagues, staffers, and lobbyists. The evidence of Patterson’s “dishonest, inap...

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Oh my, they are worried.

It’s from March 25th but Robert Robb’s column in the Republic that day perfectly illustrates the Republican angst over their nosedive with women voters. Robb put on his brave game face and boldly claimed that Democrats are exaggerating and deliberately stirring up this “alleged GOP war on women”. He warned them against pursuing it by citing an outlier NYT/CBS poll bandied about by right wingers for the past month to prove that most ladies in Ameri...

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Michael Bryan of Blog for Arizona shares Republican CD8 Congressional candidate Frank Antenori’s statement about how we leftists are ripping people from the bosoms of their families:

“The family is the core unit that makes this country great. And if you dismantle it, like the left loves to do—they love to divide and conquer. They love to pit us against each other. They love to tear apart families. They don’t want families. They want individuals that they can control. So the k...

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Per AP’s Paul Davenport on the (temporary) defeat of AZ’s birth control bill today:

“She can go to Walmart and buy it,” said bill supporter Cathi Herrod of the Center for Arizona Policy, adding later: “We’re not restricting birth control here. It’s a question of who is paying for it.”

Oh really? Well guess who has been working diligently to make it so pharmacists can deny birth control prescriptions to women? That would be Herrod’s Center for...

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