National Elections

New House Speaker J.D. Mesnard strikes out on legislative priorities

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education_appleThe overwhelming majority of Arizonans agree that increased funding for public education should be the top legislative priority in the incoming state legislature. Arizonans support higher taxes for education, how about our Governor and Tea-Publican legislature?

The state’s projected $24 million budget surplus (see interview below) is wholly inadequate and well below the amount of restitution that the courts found our lawless Tea-Publican legislature owed to the state’s school districts for its theft of inflation adjusted school funding in previous years — which they used to give away corporate welfare tax cuts.

Even with the sham of Prop. 123 funding, “total aid to education will still be $600 million less than it was in 2009 in real dollars — and $863 million less if inflation is taken into account,” according to Dana Naimark, president of the Children’s Action Alliance. Prop. 123 will do little to restore education funding to K-12 schools.

Governor Doug Ducey’s sham Classrooms First Initiative Council failed to produce any proposals for increased funding for public education. Ducey’s Classrooms First Initiative Council produces bupkis.

Governor Ducey’s State of The State Address in January is likely to simply propose moving pots of money around without increasing tax revenues to pay for increased public education funding (the goal will be to pit interests groups against one another to fight over their slice of the budget pie, not to increase the size of the budget pie).

With this in mind, this AP interview of the new Speaker of the House, Rep. J.D. Mesnard, R-Gilbert, is deeply disturbing.

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Post-convention polling bounce for Hillary Clinton

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Last week an outlier CNN poll claimed Donald Trump had a “big bounce” after his apocalyptic convention in Cleveland. Donald Trump bounces into the lead. The short-fingered vulgarian trumpeted this poll to claim that he had a yuuuge post-convention bounce.
According to Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight, Trump’s polling average bounce after the GOP convention was 3 to four percentage points. According to Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium, Trump’s polling average bounce after the GOP convention was only one point (see below).

Hillary Rodham Clinton Signs Copies Of Her Book 'Hard Choices' In New YorkNow that the post-convention polls for the Democratic convention are being released, the short-fingered vulgarian has something else for which he needs to compensate for his inadequacy.

The CNN poll released today claims Hillary Clinton has a 7 point post-convention bounce. Post-convention poll: Clinton retakes lead over Trump:

Hillary Clinton emerges from her party’s convention in Philadelphia with a restored lead over Donald Trump, having earned a 7-point convention bounce, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll.

In a two-way head-to-head matchup, Clinton tops Trump 52% to 43%, and in a four-way matchup including third party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, Clinton leads 45% to 37% with Johnson at 9% and Stein at 5%.

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Fact checking Clinton’s acceptance speech

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Screenshot from 2016-07-29 14:15:45The New York Times says Hillary Clinton delivered an acceptance speech that was remarkably without hard facts, and offered few concrete numbers or assertions to examine. There were, however, a few factual assertions that could be checked — so we did. Fact-Checking Hillary Clinton’s Acceptance Speech.

Similarly, The Washington Post says Hillary Clinton delivered an acceptance speech that was relatively sparse in terms of facts and figures that could be checked. (We don’t fact-check opinions.) Here’s a roundup of some of the most noteworthy claims that were made. Fact-checking Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the 2016 DNC.

Other fact check organizations do not follow the Post‘s policy and subjectively rate opinions. Make of this what you will.

FactCheck.org suggests that Clinton and other Democrats played loose with some facts. FactChecking Clinton’s Big Speech.

Politifact found the few statements it fact checked mostly true (and took a different position than FactCheck.org in some cases, because both are subjective). Fact-checking Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of the Democratic Nomination.

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DNC Convention day four: Clinton offers an optimistic vision of the future ‘Stronger Together’

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I watched all of the speeches of both the RNC and DNC Conventions over the past two weeks.  Many of these speeches occured during the day on cable channels to which not everyone in America has access, nor does everyone have access to the Internet. The networks only cover the prime time speeches (I miss the old days of “gavel to gavel coverage” when the networks did actual news reporting).

There have bee some excellent speeches, largely at the DNC Convention, which many Americans did not see and that did not receive the attention due from our feckless media.

Day four of the DNC Convention is a good example. The Rev. William Barber II from the North Carolina NAACP and the Moral Mondays movement gave a rousing speech that brought the house to its feet. The Rev. William Barber dropped the mic:

Screenshot from 2016-07-29 11:44:20Well America, what the Rev. William Barber II stopped by the Democratic National Convention Thursday night to tell you was just about the most engaging version of everything that every other speaker touched on over the course of the four day event.

What he delivered — eight years after this brand of liberation theology took a beating from uninformed corners of the conservative commentariat — was evidence of a long tradition of liberal, religious patriotism. It was a call to action that, in Barber’s view, serves this cause — an articulation of a liberal and patriotic philosophy with what Barber said was the moral force to shock and resuscitate the heart of the nation.

“We are being called like our forefathers and foremothers to be the moral defibrillators of our time,” Barber said.

The call brought most of the audience in the convention hall to its feet.

Here is a video link, Reverend William Barber – Full Speech Democratic Convention 2016 and a Transcript from Daily Kos.

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DNC Convention day three: the Democratic Party is ‘America’s party’ that believes in America and American values

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Putin-Trump-KissDay three of the DNC Convention began with a batshit crazy press conference from Donald Trump in the morning “focused largely on questions about his possible relationships with Russian business interests, but that ranged much more widely, resulting in enough misrepresentations and falsehoods that we decided to simply post the full transcript and annotate what Trump said.” Donald Trump’s falsehood-laden press conference, annotated; Trump’s Press Conference – FactCheck.org. See also, Donald Trump’s Appeal to Russia Shocks Foreign Policy Experts.

This led to several speech updates before the afternoon session began, and Democrats pounded Trump. In a video played at the Democratic National Convention, dozens of military leaders and experts from both sides of the aisle said Republican candidate Donald Trump was not fit to be commander-in-chief. ‘Commander-in-Chief’: Military leaders denounce Trump in Democratic convention video.

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