Can’t we all just get along? Guess not.

by David Safier
Let me try to sort this out. Dem legislators don't like the R budget. Guv doesn't like the R budget. R legislators don't like Guv's sales tax increase, and they won't even dignify the Dem budget with a comment. Dem legislators don't like Guv's sales tax increase, because it's the wrong tax increase.

Have I left anyone out?

Who's on first?

The latest scuffle is around Brewer's 5 hour budget hearing, where she asked for "public input." R legislators say she stacked the deck, only inviting people who want to raise the sales tax. "A trough-feeding event," Burns called it. (Good phrase, Bob. Evokes the smell of pork.) Gould got in two slaps: ""She set up a panel of essentially tax spenders to come in and whine and cry about how the legislative budget is going to cut their budget." (Tax-and-spenders and whiners in the same sentence. Nice work!)

Brewer replied, it's true, she wanted to hear from the "stakeholders." Then she got in a few digs of her own.

I imagine the Rs who are fond of saying, 'We're cutting a mere 2% from the education budget, and people who complain that they're not getting public services should get a job,' weren't happy with her use of the verb "decimate," not once, but twice. Everyone is pulling out the heavy verbal artillery.

The AZ Dem party, not to be outdone, put out a press release blasting what it called Brewer's "Spinning Wheels Tour":

Spinning Wheels Tour. That's one of the cleverest phrases I've heard from Dems in a long time. They're beginning to learn from the focus-group-tested phrases that have been thrown at them by Republicans for years.

Party Chair Don Bivens extended the metaphor, commenting, "Governor Brewer needs to work on the budget, not on her camera angles."

Just one big, happy family, sitting around the dinner table hashing out the family budget.