AZ Rep. Ken Clark (D) and Sen. Debbie Lesko (R) were on Channel 3’s Politics Unplugged to discuss the recently ended legislative session (one of the quickest in history).
(Link to video since, of course, it autoplays when embedded.)
I’m not singling out host Dennis Welch because he’s far from the only news person in Arizona who does this, but this interview is the latest example of the infuriating habit they have of pretending to be utterly ignorant of our state’s political realities so as to appear “balanced”. On the topic of the budget Sen. Lesko stuck to the GOP/Governor Ducey script of how a parsimonious spending plan was what they were elected to do and how education funding wasn’t cut at all (if you squint really hard). Clark criticized Lesko’s dubious math on spending-per-pupil and decried the GOP majority’s abandonment of investment in education and infrastructure in favor of 23 years of tax cut magic. It was what you’d expect from a bipartisan panel. The part that irritated me the most was Welch demanding to know what the Democratic plan was.