This site aggregates Arizona's political blogs. If you would like to have your blog added to the list, contact site administrator Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.
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For a list of all the blogs aggregated, see below.
Among this group, Obama now leads Romney 65 percent to 30 percent, and there has been a net 18-point swing toward the president since November.
After unmarried women dropped off for Democrats in 2010 and were slow to return to the party in 2011, Obama is now approaching the level he won in 2008, 70...
At Sheriff Paul Babeu’s press conference yesterday where he came out as a gay man (and denied threatening his ex with deportation as the man alleges), Babeu was asked about his position on gay marriage. He recited the standard libertarian line about civil unions and “states rights”. I got increasingly irritated with Babeu as he repeated ambiguous babble about “respecting privacy”, as if the whole scandal were about nothing more than his private life and as if he wer...
Here’s what Arizona Congressman Trent Franks said in an interview with Concerned Women of America (motto: “We’re concerned!”):
The greatest challenge we have, and I’m going to be partisan for a moment but its reality, we must change presidents. At all costs, we must change presidents. This is the most pro-abortion president in the history of the country and not only will the unborn suffer terribly, the Constitution itself will essentially be abrogated by his Supreme Cou...
The Arizona Corporation Commission is an independent branch of the state government, enshrined into existence by Article 15 of the state constitution. The Commission is responsible for regulating utilities, securities, and corporate entities registered in Arizona.
State Senator Lori Klein, who likes to brandish her pink pistol at the Capitol at unsuspecting reporters, is deeply concerned about today’s public school teachers. Many of whom are apparently frustrated standup comics busting out “The Aristocrats” on the tender ears of grade schoolers on such a regular basis nowadays that it has become necessary to rein them in via SB1467, which would treat teachers as if they were TV and radio stations operating on the public airwaves, except ...
I was trying to find a religion or common interest group with a position that was as diametrically opposed as possible to that of religions that forbid contraception to make a point. I thought about using the Shakers for my analogy but there are only three elderly members left. Belief systems that don’t allow their members to procreate don’t tend to grow their membership easily or stick around long. Go figure. But there is a more modern group with a website called the Voluntary Human...
So there was all this brouhaha going on about birth control coverage last week, with conservatives pretending their opposition to it was based on “religious freedom” or some such hooha. And the problem, supposedly, was that religious institutions were going to have to pay for harlots getting their sex pills uh I mean medical services that contradict their deeply held moral principles. So then Pres. Obama accommodated religious institutions by allowing women employed by them to get th...
This past Monday the AZ Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on SB1474, the “guns on campus” bill, which would allow concealed weapons to be carried on Arizona college campuses. My dear friend Jennifer Longdon testified against it. She had expected to get 5 minutes to speak but it was shortened to 3 minutes due to the time constraints of so many people showing up to speak on it (mostly against). I watched her abbreviated testimony online and she did great. But she wanted people...
Those of us who have paid attention to anti-choice politics for years have been warning everyone that they are after birth control in addition to legalized abortion but some alleged “liberals” (looking at you, EJ Dionne and Chris Matthews) still refuse to accept it. The right wing freak out about mandated birth control coverage in employer health plans isn’t about “religious freedom” or a “war on the Catholic Church”. It’s the same old, same old &#...
Yesterday the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee moved SCR 1021 forward, which would put a referendum to overturn Clean Elections on the ballot. It would be called, misleadingly, the “No Taxpayer Subsidies for Political Campaigns Act”. Polling shows that public support for Clean Elections is high but the impetus for getting rid of it comes from business groups and consultants who don’t like anything that threatens their grip on politicians and campaigns, hence the necessity of ...
Rep. Kimberly Yee (R-West Phoenix) introduced a anti-abortion bill yesterday. Unlike Sen. Steve Smith’s “personhood” bill, this one doesn’t declare a fertilized egg a legal human being. Yee’s bill requires similar intrusive “informed consent” hurdles before a woman can get an abortion procedure but also bans abortion after 20 weeks. The bill should pass easily, given the makeup of the lege and how Governor Brewer will sign anything anti-choice that comes...
Union stripping, Clean Elections gutting, and allowing guns on college campuses are on the Capitol agenda for the week of February 6th. Lots of folks are planning press events and protests of the heinous bills but I wanted to make sure y’all know about, and try to go if you can make it, to a press conference at noon on Monday to call out the GOP on their appalling disregard for public safety as they kowtow to the gun lobby. Here are the details, courtesy of the Senate Dems:
Next week is going to be a humdinger for Arizona progressives in terms of the bad legislation on the agenda but this past week ended on a couple of positive notes and I think we should take a moment to appreciate them.
1. Komen/Planned Parenthood smackdown. Supporters of comprehensive (and that includes reproductive) women’s health care pushed back hard on the Komen Foundation’s ideologically driven decision to pull breast cancer screening grants to low income women from Planned Pare...
Conservatives often tell me they are more altruistic than liberals, touting surveys showing that conservatives donate more to charity and volunteer more often. I’ve always been skeptical of those claims because a lot of it is tithing and participating in church activities, which I don’t consider charity except to the extent that they are actually helping people in need in the community and not just enhancing your own church experience. IOW, running a food bank is charity but refloori...
Okay, people, did I not tell you the other day that being vigilant about reproductive justice is important? Personhood has reared its head in Arizona.
2010 was the year Arizona voters lost their damn minds and sent a bunch of reactionary whackaloons to the Arizona Legislature, essentially to show that Kenyan Usurper in the White House what was what. So we lost people like Rebecca Rios, a veteran Dem legislator and a strong advocate for children and the working poor, who had served her constitu...
My good bud Diane D’Angelo chairs the City of Phoenix Human Rights Commission. Unlike many boards and commissions, HRC actually does stuff. Last night they voted unanimously to demand Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s resignation for numerous and egregious civil and human rights violations. Needless to say this has caused consternation among Arpaio’s nativist fan club and I’m told they are pestering the City Manager’s office with calls demanding Diane’s rem...
Last week, someone prefaced a comment to me thusly. I’ve heard variants of that line for years, mostly from fellow liberals and centrists who think some of us ladies spend too much time dwelling on reproductive justice when there are so many more Important ThingsTM we ought to be caring about. Such as the economy. Or the Fiesta Bowl scandal.
I care about reproductive justice for women, a lot. So much so that I devote a lot of time to...
“He didn’t feel that I had treated him cordially” in the book, Brewer explained to reporters Wednesday. “I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt.”
A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation, said that Obama told Brewer he would be happy to meet with her after receiving her invitat...
Rep. Terri Proud, a Tea Party freshman in the Arizona Legislature, is sponsoring a bill allowing an elective course on “Biblical influence”. Here’s the language and your Diva has indicated the salient portion:
So teachers, you are not required to use a specific version of the Bible. I recommend this one: The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.
That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
