Nancy Barto was selected by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to replace LD 7 State Representative David Burnell Smith, who was forced out of office for campaign finance violations. Although Burnell Smith was one of the six nominated by the LD 7 PCs to replace himself, the PCs were wise enough not to select him as one of the three names to forward to the Board.

The Board selected Mrs. Barto, who was the LD 7 Chairperson of the Republican Party, over Howard Levine and Howard Sprague. Her selection is about as close to re-selecting Burnell Smith as they could get without actually trying that stunt, however. Mrs. Barto is a staunch supporter of Burnell Smith in his fight with the Clean Elections Commission and the courts to keep his job. Mrs. Barto claims that there is still strong support for Burnell Smith in the district, as well as strong animosity toward the Commission.

Barto said, “I’m disappointed that they [the Commission] would go this route. I don’t think they have the authority to overrule the voters of this district.” The Arizona Supreme Court and the voters of Arizona, in adopting and continuing to support Clean Elections, disagreed.

I have been reading a lot about Christianity lately. I recently finished reading “The Five Gospels: What did Jesus really say?” by the Jesus Seminar. As a complement, or in some cases an anodyne, to this fare I also watched the documentary film The God Who Wasn’t There and skimmed “Holy Writ as Oral Lit : The Bible as Folklore” by Alan Dundes, both of which postulate the idea that Jesus was not a historical figure at all, but rather a construct of folklore. In addition, I am currently halfway through listening to the audio edition of “The Gospel of Judas” by Simon Mawer about the discovery of a previously unknown account of Jesus’ life from the viewpoint of Judas Iscariot. In sum, I have of late been steeped in blasphemy.

I didn’t have any particular program or goal in mind in digesting this material, I just felt that I hadn’t taken a good look at biblical scholarship of late, and there might be something of interest in either fiction or non-fiction. With the runaway success of essentially heretical biblical scholarship in “The DaVinci Code” I thought I would get ahead of the curve and see what might be next to hit the Christian cultural zeitgeist.

Not surprisingly, I was quite unimpressed by Bush’s State of the Union. He started with the lie that our Union is strong, and didn’t stop with the lies and half-truths and terrible ironies throughout. The high point was when Bush alluded to his defeat on Social Security ‘reform’ and the Democrats gave him a standing ovation. The rest was Bush’s characteristic jive of taking our highest ideals and traditions and shitting all over them for the low and corrupt ends of his ‘base’.

But I don’t really want to talk about the SOTU. It is never politically significant, anyhow. Most years, Bush’s ratings have fallen following his SOTUs. And while he didn’t drop any real clinkers this year, such as addressing the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports, neither did he say anything that will have any resonance or ring true outside his base. What I thought was really interesting was the Democratic Response.