Month: August 2014

You have been reading about the DNC’s “Bannock Street Project” focused on this year’s senate races, where the Democrats hope to replicate the voter turnout prowess of the Obama campaign in midterm elections to offset the midterm fall-off problem Democrats usually suffer with their base voters.

Molly Ball at The Atlantic has the latest, Inside the Democrats’ Plan to Save Arkansas—and the Senate:

This year, Arkansas is home to one of the nation’s most intense Senate races, as incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor faces a challenge from a first-term congressman, Representative Tom Cotton. Like many of this year’s competitive Senate contests, it features a Democratic incumbent desperately trying to survive in deeply hostile territory—in this case, a state Mitt Romney won by 23 points, or more than 250,000 votes. Other seats Democrats are trying to hold onto are in similarly tough states such as Alaska, North Carolina, and Louisiana.

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Fred DuVal, Democratic candidate for governor of Arizona, thinks Arizona ought to do more of what some other states are doing, promote economic growth by fostering trade with Mexico. He wants Arizona to take advantage of the U.S. relationship with Canada and Mexico by making Arizona a logistics hub for the transportation of goods. DuVal believes Arizona urgently needs to modify its view of Mexico, expand it beyond the current emphasis on border security.

He makes a good point. While border security and immigration matters can’t be ignored, the state’s leadership has mostly dwelled on the negative aspects of the border relationship. While busy pushing legislation such as SB 1070, they may have overlooked potential opportunities offered by Arizona’s location on an international border. For the first half of 2014, exports from Texas to Mexico amounted to $51.6 billion while shipments from Arizona came to $4.0 billion. The July unemployment rate in Texas was 5.1%, Arizona’s stood at 7.0%.

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House Speaker Andy Tobin, running for Congress in CD 1, has frequently asserted in press releases that he alone among his GOP primary opponents has not made any embarrassing gaffes during this campaign.

Well, that was until this past week. Tobin expounded on the latest wingnut conspiracy theory making the rounds to The Tucson Weekly. Charles Pierce at Esquire lets him have it. Please Stop Electing Morons, A Continuing Series:

The Ebola fever outbreak in west Africa is bad enough . . . One thing that the victims of that catastrophe don’t need right now is to get hauled into the American political process, even by proxy, because nothing ever ends well for anything that gets hauled into the American political process, even by proxy.

Aw, dammit. Too late [h/t The Tucson Weekly]

In the meantime, though, Tobin says he’s hearing about worries from constituents that the recent wave of undocumented youth from Central America could cause an Ebola outbreak in the United States. “Anything’s now possible,” Tobin said last week. “So if you were to say the Ebola virus has now entered (the country), I don’t think anyone would be surprised.” Tobin acknowledged that Ebola has been limited to outbreaks in Africa, “to the extent that they’re really aware of that. I think there is a reason we should be concerned about it and say, ‘Hey, can you assure us the people crossing the border are not from the Middle East?’ … So I use that as an example, that the public would not be surprised to hear about the next calamity at the border.”

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Who says you can’t nail Jell-O to a wall? I know, you can’t literally nail Jell-O to a wall, but once in a great while you can do so figuratively by forcing a conservative to confront the glaring contradictions in his logic. It doesn’t happen often. If you’re trying to get there, always try to debate via email, because it’s infinitely more difficult to force the confrontation in a live conversation, for the obvious reason that there’s no written record of what was previously said.

Truth is, engaging in this sort of debate is an utter waste of time, but for those of you who share my glee when a conservative gets called on his bullshit, enjoy the ride. It takes a long while to get there, so bear with me. I have tried to excise the passages that are beside the point, but there remains a lot of back and forth. That was actually helpful, because you need the conservative to lose sight of his original premise in order to reach the desired result.

The starting point is an article I wrote a few months back in which I suggested that corporations were becoming too big (and too powerful) to tax. A conservative I know emails me to call into question the practice of taxing corporations at all.

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