Arizona Republic

EJ Montini would like people to discuss jailing women for abortion more politely

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

EJ Montini

Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini finds the way that some people engage in the ongoing debate over the fair use of the female breeding chattel to be unseemly.

What?

No placards? No shouting? No exchange of insults and accusations?

Actually, no. Just people with different opinion having their say and responding to others in a way that suggests that they actually listened to the other side.

It began when a long-time anti-abortion advocate I hear from now and then wrote to me with this question:

“Was throwing away a baby worse than abortion?”

She was talking about the case of Samantha Perez, who was 16 years old when she gave birth to a baby girl in her family’s bathroom then dropped the newborn out a window into an outdoor storage room, where the injured infant was found by sheriff’s deputies. (The child is fine now, according to authorities.) Perez had hidden her pregnancy from her parents.

This week she was sentenced to five years in prison and lifetime probation.

“Do you agree with her getting prison time?” the woman asked me.

Yes.

“And yet if she’d had an abortion nothing would have happened to her, how is that right?”

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“Both sides” nonsense and REAL IDs

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

real id

This past session the GOP majority in the Arizona Legislature whiffed on a chance to address the dumb and unforced dilemma the state is in with regard to our drivers licenses and IDs not complying with federal REAL ID standards. Here’s a brief overview of how it went down from the Republic back in March:

Sen. Bob Worsley, R-Mesa, introduced Senate Bill 1273 to avoid what he says could be a disaster when the January deadline arrives. Many travelers don’t have a passport, he said, and the cost of getting one is much higher than a driver’s license — potentially nine times as much.

Worsley’s bill passed the Senate, but House Speaker David Gowan, R-Sierra Vista, failed to assign it to a committee in time for consideration. However, Gowan’s spokesman said Friday that the speaker wants the bill to move forward and is exploring “procedural options.”…

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Arizona is being groomed for the eradication of income tax

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Steven Slivinski
Steven Slivinski, from handout

Doug Ducey ran on the promise of eliminating Arizona’s income tax in 2014. It wasn’t taken seriously by most political observers and the candidate himself walked his proposal back and characterized it as an aspiration when pressed on how it was possible to implement it.

“No one’s talking about eliminating the income tax,” he said. “I’ve talked about an ever-improving tax situation, where year after year, we have an improving climate and if we can get it as close to zero as we possible, that’s a positive. Because the nine states that don’t have an income tax have double the job growth of the highest-tax states.”

He later said his talk of driving the income tax rate to zero is a “direction.”

His campaign literature says otherwise. In his “My Pledge to the People of Arizona,” which is online and distributed to voters, Ducey’s No. 1 promise if he’s elected is to “Submit legislation to reduce taxes every year, with the goal of eliminating personal and corporate income taxes in Arizona.”

On April 30, he told The Arizona Republic eliminating the taxes is a “long-term goal, it is one I embrace.”

The Republic asked Ducey on Tuesday evening to clarify the remarks he made during the debate in light of his campaign literature and prior comments. Ducey said, “Elimination is a severe word. Reduction and improvement (in the tax code), people will get that. We will do that over a couple of legislative sessions.”

Now that Ducey has been elected, elimination (that severe word) of the income tax appears to be fully on the table. Keep your eye on a guy named Steven Slivinski. He’s a former “senior economist” for the Goldwater Institute (huge red flag) and he has nabbed himself a spot as a “senior research fellow” at ASU’s (wait for it) Center for the Study of Economic Liberty (freedom!). If you guessed from the name of that endeavor that it was funded by the Koch Brothers without looking it up, you win the door prize.

Slivinski explained in an op-ed to the AZ Republic how this income tax-free nirvana can come to be:

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AZ Ed Supe Diane Douglas, of all people, demonstrates how Republicans can be sensible about sex

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

pearl clutch

A bawdy little tempest is brewing over a website run by an aide to AZ Superintendent Diane Douglas.

Michael Bradley, who is in charge of day-to-day operations at the Arizona Department of Education, runs a website featuring items of general interest, including pictures of dogs and quirky news items, as well as thousands of photos of scantily clad women in costumes, and sexually suggestive images and humor.

It’s the racy imagery, including an image of one woman touching another woman’s breasts and women eating phallically-shaped foods that has caused concerns.

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Former AZ Legislator says US House might impeach Judge Snow

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County is having a less than stellar week, as he stands trial for contempt of court. On Thursday afternoon he was asked by US District Judge Murray Snow if what had been reported by Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times in June 2014 and January 2015, … Read more