There is a certain irony in the fact that, while there is hardly anything so important in politics than budgets, there is hardly anything more boring. Politicians rely on this fact to ensure that constituents succumb to the soporific effect of endless columns of numbers and jargon before figuring out exactly where their money is … Read more

The master of strategy Sun Tzu wrote, "know thy enemy." In order to overcome an adversary, you must first understand him. This is a lesson that the Republicans have forgotten in their effort to conduct a "war on terrorism," but one which Democrats should heed in seeking to overthrow the current dominance of the GOP … Read more

Republicans are strongly implying that Secretary of State Jan Brewer is responsible for the large increase in voter registration in 2004, despite her support of Prop 200 and generally acting like Arizona’s own Katherine Harris. What is responsible for the surge in voter registration is not Brewer’s non-existent leadership, but the contentious and close-run 2004 … Read more

I wasn’t going to give the cowards behind two recent anonymous hit mailers the satisfaction of spreading their disease for them, but since other local bloggers have already broached the subject, I decided to put in my two cents. I’m not going to itemize or debunk the charges, Ted has done that quite sufficiently at … Read more

I hosted a MoveOn agenda party yesterday, and one of the very popular ideas was to have a national system of public campaign finance similar to Arizona’s own Clean Elections (which just got a new directer in Eric Ehst, a long-time grassroots political organizer and consultant who is definitely on the people’s side). What most … Read more

I don’t mean to denegrate Gore, or to imply any unethical behavior on his part by a comparison with Richard Nixon. Instead, I intend to illustrate through Nixon’s career an eminently reasonable trajectory in Gore’s political career. There are several parallels between the careers of Nixon and Gore. Both were elected to Congress at a … Read more

Please attend a MoveOn.org sponsored Positive Agenda party this Thursday, May 25th @ 6pm. The time is coming to kick GOP butt in ’06 and ’08, and it certainly appears to be up to the grassroots to set a positive agenda to move the Democratic Party forward. Come on down to the Shanty in downtown … Read more