Fact Check: McSally ‘Equality’ Ad & Website Reveal Flip-flopping

Congressional candidate Martha McSally stands with white women.
Congressional candidate Martha McSally stands with young, white women.

When Congressional candidate Martha McSally ran for Congress in 2012, she was full Tea Party:

  • militarize the border
  • protect the military industrial complex
  • fight for big business and small government
  • balance the budget on the backs of the middle class and the poor
  • repeal and replace Obamacare;
  • fight for the “sanctity of life” (because of her deep faith in God)
  • ignore the civil rights struggles of workers, women, immigrants, people of color, the poor, and LGBTQ.

Fast forward to 2014, and we find that Tea Party Martha with her flight pants, t-shirts, and natural hairdo has morphed into Corporate Republican Martha, with a complete makeover of her ideas and her image. God, the sanctity of life, repeal and replace, and War on Women denials have quietly slipped off of McSally’s campaign website.

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GOP chickens

Ducey, Brnovich, Douglas & Forese: Why Are You Afraid of Tucson?

GOP chickens
If Tea Party Republicans can’t bother to come to Tucson to meet us, they don’t deserve our votes!

It was bad enough when Republican gubernatorial candidate Dicey Doug Ducey decided to duck debates in Tucson, but now the League of Women Voters of Greater Tucson (LWVGT) has reported that only ONE of the invited Republicans– Corporation Commission candidate Doug  “I Heart APS” Little– will participate in a televised LWVGT debate in Tucson. All of the Democratic candidates agreed to the LWVGT debate invitation, along with Libertarian Barry Hess and “Independent Constitutionalist” J.L. Mealer.

“Dark Money” Ducey, Attorney General candidate Mark “Nullify the Constitution” Brnovich, Diane “Tea Party Tool” Douglas, and Tom “I Heart APS” Forese have all decided that debating in Arizona’s second largest city is not worth their time. These cowardly Republicans are taking a page from the playbooks of Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain: don’t go south of Oro Valley, unless you have to rush to the border for a photo opp.

Was it something we said? Or something they’re afraid we’ll say? Did someone tell them that every old hippie artist in Tucson has protest signs tucked behind the couch? Let’s face it. These bought-and-paid-for Koch Brothers candidates can’t hold a candle to the Democratic Party’s slate, and they know it. They don’t want to look stupid on camera. They prefer to hide and hope no one will notice. (Remember Jan Brewer’s on-camera brain fart in 2010?)

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Doug Ducey too extreme

DuVal-Ducey Debate Available Online

On September 18, 2014, Democratic candidate for governor Fred DuVal, Republican candidate Doug Ducey, and Libertarian candidate Barry Hess debated in Tucson. Although it is the only Tucson debate that Ducey has agereed to, it was not aired live on TV or streamed on the Internet. (Ducey didn’t attend the September 21 debate on the … Read more

Bunker Chicken

Doug Ducey Disses Tucson with 3 Debate Cancellations

DD-chicken-NL ICYMI, there was a gubernatorial debate between Democrat Fred DuVal, Tea Party Republican Doug Ducey, and Libertatian Barry Hess last night in Tucson.

What? You tried to find the debate on TV, radio, and the Internet, and it wasn’t there? That’s because 99% of Tucson– and the state– was cut out of the process last night. The first DuVal-Ducey debate, held in Phoenix, was broadcast on Phoenix television and streamed live over the Internet, but the Tucson debate was pushed back to an prime time 8 p.m. start by the Ducey campaign, according to DuVal Press Secratary Geoff Vetter. As a result only the 400 people who attended the debate got to see it live.

It’s obvious that the Ducey campaign wants to tightly control communication at all levels, particularly on social media and in the streets. (Why else would you have a debate on the outskirts of town, away from the bus line, on private property, after dark?) He wants voters to base their decisions not on real information from debates and public forums but on the dark money TV commercials bankrolled by his corporate benefactors.

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Strike Fast Food

Fast Food Giants Want Congressional Lackeys to Protect Them from Unionization

Strike Fast Food
Burger King workers in Tucson went on strike in early September 2014. It was part of a 150-city nationwide action organized by SEIU.

Over the past few years, fast food workers have made strides in their fight for a living wage, fair treatment by their corporate masters, and the right to unionize.

Nationwide fast food strikes organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have brought the issues of chronically low wages and wage theft in the fast food industry into the limelight.

Since millionaire franchisee owners and their billionaire corporate parents are not succeeding in their fight to keep the highly-profitable status quo, they are turning to Congress for help in fighting to keep their workers poor and non-union.

From Think Progress

The fast food industry is hoping that a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill can blunt the momentum that fast food workers have gained through nearly two years of strikes and multiple lawsuits.

The International Franchise Association (IFA) is flying fast food store owners and other franchisees into Washington on Tuesday to drum up congressional opposition to a recent legal decision that could make corporations liable for how franchise employees are treated. The trade group expects more than 350 business owners from both the franchisee and franchisor sides of the business model to show up at its event this week, according toThe Hill. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and former Republican Governors Association head and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour are scheduled to speak to the group, and the paper reports that top Senate Republicans will introduce legislation targeting federal labor regulators in general later this week.

The top attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined in July that McDonald’s exerts so much control over how franchisees operate that they are responsible for labor law violations committed by franchise owners. That finding has yet to be tested in court, but if it holds up and is applied beyond the nation’s largest fast food chain, it would make it much harder for industries that rely on franchising to stymie workers’ attempts to exercise their labor rights.

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