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.

Gosar, Franks, Salmon and Schweikert Gang up to Kick the Poor in the Teeth

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By Michael Bryan The Republicans of Arizona's Congressional delegation ganged up with their Tea Party hooligan buddies to kick the poorest and most defenseless among us while we are down last week. The bill slashing SNAP (food stamps) passed on a purely partisan vote, including those of all four of Arizona's Republican Congressional Representatives, cutting … Read more

The Empty Suit

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By Tom Prezelski

Re-posted from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

To use a well-worn paraphrase of Mark Twain, there are lies, damned
lies, and campaign rhetoric. The last category includes those easily
refutable throwaway little fibs that inevitably arise during a
problematic candidacy.

Brave_Little_TailorOne
example of this comes involves the financials of the increasingly
quixotic campaign of Ward III Republican Council candidate Ben Buehler-Garcia. As most readers know the City of Tucson has a public campaign finance
system which became the inspiration for Arizona’s Clean Elections Law,
which, in turn, has become a model nationally. Under this system, a
candidate receives matching funds by getting at least 200 individual
contributions of $10 or more from city residents. The system has been a
good way of making sure that narcissistic auto dealers who live outside
the city limits or sleazy political operatives from Phoenix are largely
excluded from our elections.

Buehler-Garcia has not yet filed for matching funds, though he
assures everybody that he has the 200 contributions he needs. He has
been making this claim for weeks, though his campaign finance reports say differently.
Though, at first glance, his reports seem to list sufficient
contributions, the most cursory inspection shows that some contributors
are listed multiple times and some live outside the city. In one case, a contribution from a Maricopa-County based PAC is listed as being from an individual.

This is all a matter of public record.

In Defeat, Antenori Gives Up And Becomes A Hippie

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By Tom Prezelski Reblogged from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion As reported earlier this week in Blog for Arizona, an effort co-chaired by Frank Antenori to force Arizona’s Medicare expansion on the ballot seems to be short of signatures and will not be moving forward. This is the latest in a series of defeats for the … Read more

La Ironía Es Un Plato Que Se Sirve Frío

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By Tom Prezelski
Re-posted from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

For a blogger, discussing foreign affairs is strictly an academic
exercise, sort of like complaining about our summer heat in Tucson.
Nonetheless, sometimes, the irony of a situation is so rich that one
must indulge his inner nerd and comment.

Last week, the news came
that Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo y Marfil,
using terms like "decolonization," has stated his government's support for Argentina in its never ending dispute with the United Kingdom over Las Islas Malvinas the Falkland Islands. Margallo's comments may have been an expression of Panhispanismo,
a political movement which seeks to promote ties between Spain and its
former colonies. More likely, they were part of an effort to secure
international support in the ongoing dispute over Gibraltar, which has heated up recently.

British
sovereignty over Gibraltar, as some may recall, has been contested by
Spain for over three centuries, resulting in about a dozen battles and
sieges, the most recent of which was the largest battle in the War of American Independence.

Trolls on Auto-Pilot

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By Tom Prezelski

Re-blogged from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

Online comment sections are generally regarded as a miasma of ignorance, malice, and outright lies
which makes one wonder why so many publications think it necessary to
have them. They may have started as a noble experiment, but the forums
quickly degenerated into a platform for socially inept malcontents whose
rantings are too poorly sourced or too badly articulated to meet
editorial standards. In some cases, publications like the Arizona Daily Star have made too-little-too-late
moves to rein in the excesses, but editors generally seem reluctant to
take responsibility for providing a respectable platform for hate speech
and personal attacks.

The Tucson Weekly actually does a pretty respectable job of
policing its online comment section (In the interests of full
disclosure, it should be mentioned that I am a paid occasional contributor to the Weekly).
In some cases the editorial staff takes the time to respond to the
posts, particularly when the comments become personal. The exchanges
between editor Dan Gibson and a local cosplayer who calls himself “Colt Cassidy,” for example, are sometimes interesting.

A recent article by Linda Ray generated an interesting post from the cryptically named “Ronsonit” which illustrates another problem with online comments: