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Bill Moyers takes on ALEC
September 29, 2012
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by David Safier
The first half hour of this week's Moyers & Company is titled, "United States of ALEC." Moyers gives this topic his usual careful, thoughtful coverage. For those who have been following ALEC for awhile, there's nothing new here, but it's a helpful primer on the way ALEC wines and dines conservative legislators and gets similar-to-identical, corporate-friendly legislation passed in states across the country.
Our own Rep. Steve Farley (currently running for Senate in LD-9) makes the statement that begins the episode, then he's featured in the 3 minute Arizona segment that starts about 27 minutes in.
You can watch the episode below the fold. If you go to the Moyers & Company website, you can read and print out the full transcript.
Arpaio’s deputy shoots and kills unarmed 19-year-old (video)
September 29, 2012
by Pamela Powers Hannley
Unarmed teenager Trevon Martin is shot and killed in Florida, and the story goes around the world.
On September 14, 2012, unarmed, 19-year-old Joel Smith is shot and killed in Guadalupe, Arizona by a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy, and the news doesn't even reach Tucson. WTF?
The Maricopa County Sheriff's Department is beyond corrupt. It will be a national disgrace that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is re-elected. How long will Maricopa County voters support a racist octogenarian who sweeps through neighborhoods and arrests brown people; who forces prisoners to live in the blasting heat in the Tent City Jail; who wastes taxpayer money pretending to be the border patrol while ignoring criminal cases; who allows his guards to torture and even kill prisoners? The sheriff's department should uphold the law, not break it with impunity.
Wake up and do the right thing, Maricopa County.
Watch a video about the Joel Smith shooting by Dennis Gilman after the jump.
Abortion: What happens when a ‘pro-choice’ blogger debates a ‘pro-life’ protester? (video)
September 29, 2012
by Pamela Powers Hannley
With the Republican Congress and the state legislatures (including Arizona's) passing anti-woman laws that ranged from the absurd to the vindictive, I can't understand why any woman in the US would vote Republican in this election.
The impressive War on Women backlash may be one reason why most campaigning Republicans–except Todd "legitimate rape" Akin–are trying to forget anti-woman maddess that swept through their party in the spring. (After all, they don't want to lose all of the women's vote.)
None the less, the War on Women and the assault on women's reproductive rights continue– at least in the religious right wing of the Republican Party.
The Democratic Party's platform includes strong pro-choice language. Consequently, at the recent Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, a small band of anti-abortion protesters demonstrated in front of the convention center daily. Mostly, the demonstrators were old white men (surprise, surprise), but on one particular day a handful of young women joined them (to lend some credibility?).
You might say that "the devil made me do it," but with video rolling, I engaged one of the protesters in a heated, street-level debate about abortion, choice, access to contraception, sex education, "legitimate rape", fetus personhood, the morning after pill, and forcing underage girls to have a rapist's baby.
Surprisingly, we found some consensus. We both believe…
– Abortion is a very difficult choice.
– Abortion should be a last resort, not a routine birth control method.
– Rape is rape, and there's no such thing as protection from pregnancy when a woman is raped.
– Abstinence only education is "unrealistic." Contraception and sex education should be provided to young girls in order to prevent unwanted pregnancy. She didn't want the contraception to be free, but she was somewhat more enlightened and reasonable than most Congressmen.
– Vaginal ultrasound should be an option, if the woman wants one. (On the tape, she seems incredulous when I tell her about some of the legislation that has passed.)
Of course, the big differences between us were that:
– I believe every woman should have the right to choose, and she wants the government to dictate what citizens do;
– She believes that a fetus is a person from the moment of contraception, and I don't. She also believes that "right to life" doesn't apply to "criminals". (So, the death penalty is OK, but not abortion.)
What I came away with is that much of the anti-woman legislation passed by Arizona and other states is too extreme even for a deeply religious woman who is vehemently opposed to abortion.
Watch the video after the jump.
Nancy Young Wright joins Republicans, files Campaign Finance complaint about Ally Miller
September 28, 2012
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by David Safier
Ally Miller's Republican primary opponents Mike Hellon and Stuart McDaniel filed separate, formal complaints against Ally Miller about a too-close-for-comfort relationship between her political consulting firm, Tagline Media, and a few Independent Expenditure groups working on Miller's behalf. The interesting thing is, their complaints were too late to affect the primaries and make it abundantly clear that neither Hellon nor McDaniel have any love for Miller or care to increase her chances of beating Nancy Young Wright in the election for Pima County Supervisor, District One. To the contrary, it looks like they want to put some electoral hurt on her.
Young Wright recently filed a complaint of her own over the same issue. Hers is far more detailed than the earlier complaints. She gives evidence that there was an insufficient wall of separation between Ally Miller's campaign and the Independent Expenditure groups, and also maintains some of the IEs made thousands of dollars worth of ad buys before they had filed their statements of organization.
You can read the copy of Nancy Young Wright's complaint sent to Brad Nelson at Pima County Elections below the fold. It also went to the State Election Director at the Secretary of State's office.
[Full disclosure: I volunteer with Nancy Young Wright's campaign. I am also a member of the fact-based community and am relaying information from a Media Release sent out by Nancy Young Wright's campaign.]
Nathan Sproul, Arizona’s own Republican voter trickster/fraudster, goes national
September 28, 2012
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by David Safier
It made the Star and lots of news outlets. Arizona's Nathan Sproul, who has been paid to mess with voter registration here and elsewhere for years, finally got caught, good, in Florida. His group, Strategic Allied Consulting, has been dealing in fraudulent voter registrations — including signing up dead people as new voters and even, according to Brad Friedman of Brad Blog, changing the addresses of registered Democratic voters so that when they go to vote, their addresses don't match and the best they can do is fill out provisional ballots. You can watch a video of Friedman talking about this on Thom Hartmann's show below the fold.
Florida is only the start. Sproul has contracts in lots of other states. This story is still unfolding and deserves major press coverage. (Here's the coverage in The Nation.) It's yet another example of the Republican voter suppression and voter fraud efforts, exposing them for the anti-democratic scoundrels they are.
I'll leave it for others who know Sproul's history better than I to talk about his prior misdeeds which have made him a Republican hero and an enemy of America's voting process. Suffice it to say, if ACORN had done a quarter of what Sproul has been guilty of, it would have deserved the accusations that were falsely heaped upon it.
UPDATE: I just scrolled through recent BfA posts and found AZ Blue Meanie has a detailed post about this story, including material about Sproul's 2008 work in voter registration fraud.
Jeff Biggers’ big book night tonight at 8pm (doors open at 7)
September 28, 2012
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by David Safier Jeff Biggers got some local love for his new book, "State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream." The Weekly published a long excerpt, One of Those Little Barefooted Mexican Kids, about Raúl Castro. Add that to another excerpt published in Salon last week. Tonight's the … Read more
Fact checking the mendacity of ‘Mittens’
September 28, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Time once again for Steve Benen's weekly fact check of the shameless shapeshifter and pathological liar, Willard "Mittens" Romney. Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXVI:
When Mitt Romney talked to "60 Minutes" last week, he said President Obama has "repeatedly shown a reckless disregard for the truth." If there's ever been a more blatant example of political "projection," I don't can't think of it.
And yet, Romney is increasingly invested in this. This week, several reports noted that Romney intends to use next week's debate to do some "fact check" the president. The Obama campaign, unimpressed, released a video this morning on the subject. (Video below the fold).
Of course, if the 2012 presidential race comes down to which candidate is more dishonest, Romney's in trouble. Consider, for example, the 36th installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity.
1. Romney argued just yesterday that the crisis of military suicides would be made worse by looming cuts to the defense budget.
2. In same speech, Romney said, "You realize we have fewer ships in the Navy than any time since 1917."
This one again? Romney dropped this lie a while ago, but it's apparently back.
3. Romney went on to say, in reference to the president, "[H]is plan also calls for trillion dollar deficits."
Obama's plan calls for trillions in deficit reduction.
4. Romney added, "It is the same series of policies he's put in place over the last four years and they have not worked. And if you don't, why, look at the price of gasoline."
To blame gas prices on the president's policies is ridiculously untrue.
5. Romney also said in reference to Obama, "He's put us on a road to Europe."
The irony is, Europe is trying to grow through austerity, just as Romney intends to do here. He's lying in a self-refuting sort of way.
6. In a speech at Westerville, Ohio, Romney boasted, "We got unemployment down [in Massachusetts] to 4.7 percent."
Well, in reality, the unemployment rate in Massachusetts dropped because so many people dropped out of the state's workforce. The fact of the matter is Massachusetts' job creation record during Romney's term was "one of the worst in the country," ranking 47th out of 50 states.
Continue reading Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXVI.
Vulture capitalist ‘Mittens’ Romney liked to ‘harvest’ companies for profit
September 28, 2012
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Willard "Mittens" Romney really doesn't want you to believe that he is the heartless vulture capitalist that his GOP primary opponents and the Obama campaign have portrayed him as. The problem is, Mittens never cleaned up all the evidence he left behind that proves otherwise.
David Corn at Mother Jones has another video, this one from a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company. NEW ROMNEY VIDEO: In 1985, He Said Bain Would "Harvest" Companies for Profits | Mother Jones:
Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.
The video was included in a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that gave birth to Bain Capital. Here is the full clip, as it appeared on that CD-ROM (the editing occurred within the original) (video below the fold):
