Year: 2018

Listen: Grassroots Groups Take Over Pima County Democratic Party

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Broadcaster John C. Scott of KVOI radio 1030 AM talks with Blog for Arizona blogger Larry Bodine.  Listen to hear about: Grassroots organizations have taken over the Pima County Democratic Party. Alison Jones’ 5-vote victory is not a mandate, but it is a call for a new direction. Finding a new executive director to replace incumbent … Read more

Mystery grand jury witness partially revealed in Mueller probe

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We now have a few more clues, but the Sealed grand jury appeal hearing in Mueller probe remains a mystery.

POLITICO reports Mueller appears victorious in mystery subpoena dispute:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a mystery corporation owned by a foreign country to comply with a subpoena that appears to be from special counsel Robert Mueller.

The three-page opinion released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is the latest twist in an opaque dispute that POLITICO and other media outlets have tied to Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The ruling offers the intriguing detail that the entity fighting the Mueller subpoena is a foreign government-owned company, not a specific individual, as many experts had speculated.

But the ruling also still leaves many important aspects of the fight shielded from public view, including the kind of work done by the company, the name of the country that owns the firm and just what information is being sought. The order also offers no direct confirmation that the matter involves Mueller’s team.

In the opinion, Judges David Tatel, Thomas Griffith and Stephen Williams unanimously sided with a lower federal district court in Washington, which had rejected the company’s attempts to quash the subpoena.

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Innovation Used to Benefit Workers. Can it Again?

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Machines can make jobs better, but a tiny class of bosses uses them to make jobs disappear. It doesn’t have to be this way.

[Distributed via OtherWords.org]

A few weeks ago, I cringed when I saw this headline at a popular progressive website: “See How Well the GOP Tax Scam Is Creating Jobs? Walmart Announces Plans for 360 Robot Janitors.”

It’s the same way I’ve cringed when conservative scolds taunt fast food workers that they’ll regret demanding a living wage, because it will cause their jobs to be mechanized out of existence.

On both the left and the right, Americans see innovation mainly as a threat to workers. The unfortunate thing is: They may not be wrong.

It didn’t used to be this way.

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Judge lambasts Michael Flynn and his lawyers, delays sentencing

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On Monday, a day before the sentencing hearing for Michale Flynn, his business associates were charged with illegally lobbying for Turkey:

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday charging two business associates of Michael T. Flynn with acting as agents of the Turkish government, describing in remarkable detail how the three attempted to persuade the United States to expel a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Throughout the fall of 2016, while Flynn served publicly as a key surrogate and foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, prosecutors say he and business partner Bijan Kian took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Turkish government to push for the extradition from the United States of dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen. Their efforts, prosecutors said, were directed by Kamil Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with close ties to the country’s leadership.

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By prosecutors’ account, the foreign government found a powerful and enthusiastic ally in Flynn — who was willing on the eve of the presidential election to pen an op-ed pushing for Gulen’s expulsion.

Flynn, who went on to serve as President Trump’s national security adviser, admitted last year to lying about his consulting firm’s business with the Turkish government and agreed to cooperate with law enforcement in a deal with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team. That almost certainly helped produce charges against Kian and Alptekin. But the indictment Monday spells out for the first time how intimately Flynn was involved in the effort, which involved weekly conference calls to coordinate with Turkish officials.

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The Fight Ahead on Voting Rights

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Arizona Democrats won a lot of important victories in November, but perhaps none will prove to be more consequential than Katie Hobbs’ victory for Arizona Secretary of State. Hobbs not only joined new Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman in breaking Republicans’ decade-long hold on statewide executive offices, but she is now in charge of the most important political battleground in Arizona: the voting booths.

Across the country, the 2018 midterms and their aftermath have demonstrated how voter suppression has become central to the strategy of the Republican Party. As Jamelle Bouie writes in Slate, “Broad, equitable access to the ballot threatens a GOP whose electoral success depends on a narrow (if large) segment of the voting public. Without draconian voting systems in Florida, Mississippi, and Texas, the GOP may not have survived the midterms with its Senate majority; without racial gerrymandering, Republican legislative majorities in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin may not have withstood the “blue wave” of energy and activity.”

And now, in Arizona, a Republican stronghold has turned into a purple state that many consider to be in play for the 2020 presidential election. We have our first Democratic senator in a generation. Five of the nine US House seats are held by Democrats. Republicans have their slimmest majority (31-29) in the state House of Representatives in 50 years. And the voting system is about to be turned over to a Democrat who ran on ending the combination of malice and incompetence that Michelle Reagan used to suppress minority voters as Secretary of State. And oh yeah, the voting system of the state’s largest county is still overseen by Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who already has a target on his back from Republicans. Things are going to get real ugly, real fast.

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