Michael Bryan

Michael founded BlogForArizona.net as the Howard Dean presidential campaign blog for Arizona in 2003, and has been blogging ever since. The Blog is now coming up on 20 years of continuous publication, a major achievement for any political blog, which usually have the life-spans of mayflies. Michael is an attorney living in Tucson with his wife Lauren. In 2008, Michael remade BlogForArizona into a collaborative project. Michael is now but one of the contributors to the blog and provides editorial and publishing direction in consultation with the Board of Directors and the other authors. If you want to keep up with the latest Arizona and National political news in an entertaining quick hit of news and opinion, check out the BlogForArizona twitter feed, which Mike largely curates and writes. Michael is also an AAPC member who occassionally consults on political campaigns, strategy and communications.

Midterms Kickstart Democratic Efforts to End Gerrymandering in 2020

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By Michael Bryan

The 2018 midterms have set the table pretty well for the Democratic Party to roll back the GOP’s 2010 gerrymandering spree, and a path to ending the practice is now apparent. Most of the West, New England, much of the Piedmont, and the upper Mid-West are now largely immune to further gerrymandering after 2020 due to Democratic control, divided government, or independent commission control.

However the GOP continues to control a the organs of government needed to continue or deepen the gerrymandering of a plurality of Congressional districts, including the vital and highly populous states of Texas, Florida and Ohio.

Gerrymandering remains a serious problem, even in states where Democrats have made significant gains, the results still bear the hallmarks of the 2010 gerrymander.

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After the Midterms: The Brave Path

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We won the midterms. I’m sure many readers shared the sense of visceral relief when it became clear that we at least had the House, that the slide to authoritarianism could be stopped. And then the joy that Krysten Sinema and Katie Hobbs won key statewide victories, the validation of knocking on one more door, writing one more postcard. A crisis situation has the benefit of clarity, that strength of fighting for the very survival of our democracy. Similarly, a clear enemy, someone so horrible or just plain mean that fighting them is a no-brainer, is oddly relaxing. But fighting, even winning, doesn’t always solve the problems — or even address the weaknesses that enemy was exploiting.

Fighting the wave of outright racism, voter suppression, possible cheating and fearmongering in the midterm elections definitely felt like a crisis to me, and walking precincts and talking to voters was a satisfying way to deal with it. Some things those voters said, though, reminded me that there’s more to the story.

A Mexican man in south Tucson told me that though he voted for Democrats, he was for a wall. One of my writing volunteers in El Paso told me that although everyone hated the child separations and despised the tent cities, they also felt strongly about waiting your turn and resented some of the asylum seekers. Another Democrat refused to support our candidate for Governor, not because he was opposed to the wall but because the voter thought he didn’t communicate a clear alternative solution. There was a sense among some voters of yes, they are awful, but what exactly are we going to do? What is the plan?

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Breathtaking Hipocrisy

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Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com.

There are many things to be upset about in today’s world, especially in the political arena. What probably gets my blood boiling quickest though, is the unadulterated hypocrisy I see coming from the Right.

According to the Arizona Capitol Times, AZ House Speaker Mesnard recently criticized Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes for his opening of certain Emergency Early Voting Centers during the General Election. He accused Fontes of selectively choosing where to open these centers and said, “those type of ‘shenanigans’ foster doubt in the public about the integrity of our election system.” Mesnard added that “And I cannot think of a more dangerous reality than people questioning the integrity of an election system.”

Okay, maybe he really does believe this. It is of course, something that any patriotic American should be worried about. Even if he does believe it though, his party and foremost, its leader (President Trump), has been stoking this “dangerous reality” ad-nauseam. And, the Arizona Republican Party recently jumped on his bandwagon with unfounded claims of deliberate election fraud by the Democrats.

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Balance is the key

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Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com.

I just listened to “The Coming Storm”, by Michael Lewis. I didn’t carefully read the description before diving in, and thought it would inform me about the increasing violence of weather. Rather, I learned about the privatization of weather, or at least the reporting of it, and the Department of Commerce.

Turns out, the Department of Commerce has little to do with commerce and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. Rather, it runs the U.S. Census, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over half of its $9B budget though, is spent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to figure out the weather. And figuring out the weather, is largely about collecting data. “Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.” One senior policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration, said the Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Science and Technology. When he mentioned this to Wilbur Ross, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department, Ross said, “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that.” Unfortunately for all of us, Ross also wasn’t interested in finding someone who would do it for him.

In October 2017, Barry Myers, a lawyer who founded and ran AccuWeather, was nominated to serve as the head of the NOAA. This is a guy who in the 1990s, argued the NWS should be forbidden (except in cases where human life and property was at stake) from delivering any weather-related knowledge to Americans who might be a consumer of AccuWeather products. “The National Weather Service” Myers said, “does not need to have the final say on warnings…the government should get out of the forecasting business.”

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Oh No She Didn’t!

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Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com. AZ Capitol Times reported today that in response to a Save Our Schools suggestion that voucher expansion should be “sidelined” while the battle for public education funding continues, Kim Martinez, a spokeswoman for the American Federation For Children, said she was “unimpressed”. Martinez also said that, “It is unfortunate that Save Our … Read more