AZ Congressional Delegation

Hey Doug Ducey, don’t be coy about your health policy advisor!

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It must be true, since the National Journal picked up the press release from the Arizona Democratic Party and published it online.

For Immediate Release: March 18, 2014 Phoenix, AZ-DJ Quinlan, executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, released the following statement today regarding comments made by former U.S. Congressman,John Shadegg, a top healthcare advisor to Doug Ducey: “Last night during a tele-town hall conducted by gubernatorial candidate Doug Ducey,Ducey’s top healthcare advisor, former U.S. Congressman John Shadegg, called Governor Brewer’s expansion of Medicaid a ‘Ponzi Scheme’ and suggested that we should ‘get rid of Medicaid’ and ‘should not have a single government-run healthcare program, period.’ Government-run healthcare programs that Arizonans rely on today include Medicare, Veterans Administration healthcare, and Medicaid.”

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The “Managerial Republican” is mostly a fantasy

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I will say that Ronald Brownstein’s recent column in the National Journal is a bit better than what we’ve been getting lately from the hordes of DC pundits attempting to analyze Arizona. In particular, I liked this bit at the end:

After Arizona’s tax revenues plummeted with the housing market collapse, Brewer backed a temporary 1-cent sales-tax increase to limit spending cuts. But even so, since 2008, the GOP majority’s commitment to squeezing government has produced the nation’s third-largest reduction in per-student K-12 spending; the largest percentage reduction in per-student support for public higher education; and the biggest public tuition hikes. No other choices capture as starkly the contrasting priorities of a ruling GOP coalition that still receives almost all of its votes from whites (many older, rural, and exurban) and a minority population that now represents the clear majority of students in Arizona’s public schools.

It’s refreshing to see a conservative admit outright that Arizona Republicans have slashed public education funding (instead of doing the Goldwater Institute song and dance about how the schools are really funded quite generously if you look at all these charts and squint) and that the cuts are ideological and not fiscal in purpose.

Brownstein’s main thesis is that Arizona’s politics operate along fault lines of age and race, with the older whites voting overwhelmingly GOP and the Democratic base being younger and browner. I take no issue with that assessment. What I do dispute is this:

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(Update) Tea-Publican economic terrorists take Medicare ‘Doc fix’ hostage

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I warned you about this the other day. Tea-Publican economic terrorists plot to take Medicare hostage to delay ‘ObamaCare’.

REDOn Friday, Tea-Publicans took their fifty-second vote to repeal or to undermine “ObamaCare,” this time to delay the individual mandate for five years and to use the $138 billion resulting savings for the annual Medicare “Doc fix.”

For those of you keeping score at home, yes our Arizona “Blue Dogs” Ron Barber and Kirsten Sinema, once again, voted with the Tea-Publicans to delay the individual mandate. HR 4015.

They will argue that having once voted for the delay, they must continue to be consistent. There is nothing admirable in being consistently wrong. Admit your error and move on.

They will also argue that this was a “safety” vote, with no real consequences because the Senate will never take up the bill. So why enable Tea-Publicans with their manufactured crises designed for the conservative media entertainment complex and fundraising appeals to the GOP crazy base? Barber and Sinema just set themselves up to be used by Tea-Publicans as evidence of support for the GOP position.

Congress has less than three weeks to come up with a funding scheme for the Medicare “Doc fix” that the Senate will accept, and the House (likely Democrats and a handful of Tea-Publicans) will pass.

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Ancient Arizona Republic columnist befuddled by diversity

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

We can’t bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Now where was I… oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn’t get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

Grandpa MacEachern is projecting again.

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