Hateful Words Fired Like Bullets Destroy Our Families, and Arizona Republican Politicians Like Jeff Flake Stand By and Say Nothing

Richard Cohen has a great column, "On the Right, Hateful Words are Fired Like Bullets," in today's Washington Post, discussing in part the 1970 Kent State massacre, something some of us remember as if it were yesterday and not over forty years ago:

I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear.

"Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio National Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this happen? "This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

The hills slow me. I grind at them, going so slowly that when the song comes on I can listen intently to the lyrics. The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concussive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had devoted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor.


Saturday, on the bike, I listened hard: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

I had been a reporter back when the killings occurred and it was a huge story to me. I longed for a chance to cover it, but I was young and raw, and the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, hailed a cab, jumped a plane and wrote the story -- the story. The story will keep you sane.

But it is a story no more and so, on the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro-democracy rallies of last year -- not any of those places. This was America, just yesterday (take my word for it) and yet it had happened. How? I thought hard and then I remembered. Bullets had killed those kids, sure -- but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians.

The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent."

That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.

Back in the Vietnam War era, the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!

On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words -- that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding -- can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words -- homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was enthralled by toughness, violence.

I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.

Green Party Candidate for Congress AZ-06 Richard Grayson Poll: SHOULD ARIZONA BE KICKED OUT OF THE UNITED STATES?

Many supporters have suggested that, in the highly unlikely situation that I do get elected to Congress, the first piece of legislation I introduce should be one to eliminate my job -- and those of John McCain, John Kyl, and the other Arizona members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In other words, they want me to sponsor a bill that would kick Arizona out of the union. This would eliminate the state that's dead last in job creation and education and which comes in second in the percentage of its residents living in poverty.

They say Arizona's anti-American attitudes -- its racism, xenophobia, crazy right-wing nativist tea-party wacko majority's weirdo beliefs -- make it so sucky that the Cactus State needs to be given the boot. The residents seem to hate the federal government anyway.

Miss Wit, aka Deborah Goldstein, designed this t-shirt that shows a map of the proposed improved Arizona-less United States ("Piece Out, Arizona"). We'd like to ask those who stop by our website here to vote in the poll at right over the next week and tell us what you think: Do you think Arizona should be thrown out of the Union?

Pinal County Greens Endorse Rodney Glassman for U.S. Senate, Oppose the "Siphongate" Green Party Candidate Jerry Joslyn

On their website, the Pinal County Greens, who previously endorsed our campaign for the House, made this announcement:

Apache Junction, Ariz., September 13, 2010 - The Pinal County Greens, a political organization made up of members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, today announced its endorsement of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rodney Glassman, whom it called "a good man, excellent on Green Party issues, and someone who actually has a chance to unseat John McCain."

At the same time, the Pinal Greens announced that they were opposing the candidacy of Jerry Joslyn, the phony Green Party candidate who was put on the ballot as part of a scheme to siphon liberal votes from the Democrats and re-elect Republican John McCain.

"Jerry Joslyn pretty much announced that he's part of the vote-siphoning scheme," the Pinal Greens said. "At his campaign website he said he wanted to beat Rodney Glassman, not beat John McCain."

"We urge all progressive voters to shun Jerry Joslyn, who advocates the same kind of flat tax put forth by right-wingers like Steve Forbes," the Pinal Greens said. "For progressive unity, we want Rodney Glassman in the U.S. Senate."

Stop Jan Brewer before it's too late! "28 Days Later" (in Arizona) Parody

To prevent "28 Days Later in Arizona," please make sure you vote for the great Democratic candidate for Governor, Terry Goddard. I certainly will.

AZ-03 Green Party Congressional Candidate Leonard Clark Describes Sickening Conduct by Arizona Green Party at Today's Federal Court Hearing

Our fellow Green Party candidate for Congress in District 3, Leonard Clark - who was not named as a defendant in the flawed lawsuit by Arizona Green Party bosses against us and other outsider candidates - eloquently described the scene at today's hearing at the AZCentral website:

I have to tell you I felt sickened today by what I saw taking place in the federal court room in Phoenix, Arizona and no it wasn't the Tuna salad I had for lunch but instead it could have been "the rotten fish in Denmark" whose odor I was smelling wafting through the court room as the lawyers for the Green paty (of which I am a member) we're trying to subvert the rights in concert with the democrat party of the "Grandpa candidate, who has been in the news over the last month or so. I watched this hard working man harangued and insulted by the Green party lawyer over and over !
At the end of the hearing, I went up to Grandpa, the candidate and told him how much I disagreed with what the leadership of my party was doing and that in my opinion it was a subversion of his civil rights. Outside, I hugged Grandpa and told him: "Welcome to the Green party brother."
I have to say, that due to my being homeless in the past and having to work my a** off, I felt respect and sympathy for this older man called Grandpa and really infuriated at how his rights were being spat upon ! I was surprised to see Paul Charlton in court to represent him and I must say he did a good job showing what a despicable action our party leadership is taking in concert with the democrat party.

Folks, this is not the right message to be sending. We are a "Big Tent" party and should be welcoming and inclusive. In my opinion, this violates at least three tenets of our own party's ten key values: 1.) Grass Roots Democracy 2.) Decentralization and 3.) Social Justice and Equal Oppurtunity
For more information on these Ten Key Values and where our party stands please go to: azgp.org
I could also smell the stench of hypocricy coming from the lawyers for my Green party as I thought of how the Republicans stole the 2000 elections by judicial coup and how Gore tried to throw out the overseas ballots of my fellow American soldiers also in that 2000 contest.
Politics may be dirty but that doesn't mean we in the Green party have to constantly let the Republican and Democrat gangs make us copy their undemocratic subversion of votes and candidates who disagree with us and scare us !

I make this pledge to myself and to all of you now: If Grandpa is kicked off the ballot and therefore has his civil rights to vote and run for office arbitrarily taken away than I Leonard Clark, Arizona Endorsed candidate for the 3rd Congressional district will withdraw from this race because I will not stand by while one man is unfairly denied his civil rights by the democrat and leadership of the Green parties and I...am unfairly allowed to run as a write in for the Green Party of Arizona.
Leonard Clark
Arizona Endorsed Green party candidate Congressional district #3
9-9-10

We are very proud of our fellow Green Party congressional candidate, Leonard Clark - a real mensch.

Federal Judge to Rule on County Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Flawed Arizona Green Party Suit Against Qualified Candidates

Very soon, Federal District Judge David G. Campbell will be ruling on a motion to dismiss in the case of Arizona Green Party v. Bennett, et al., in which we are defendants.

The motion has been filed by Maricopa, Greenlee, Mohave, Navajo, and Yuma Counties. It asks that the case be dismissed on grounds of laches.

This essentially means that the plaintiffs sat on their rights for far too long and filed this eleventh-hour suit at an unreasonably late time when the deadline for printing ballots is early tomorrow morning.

As the motion states, the Arizona Green Party knew by July 15 who had filed as write-in candidates for Green Party primary elections. Yet they did nothing.

In my case, as the Secretary of State's records show, I filed as a candidate for Arizona's Sixth Congressional District Green Party primary on May 28, 2010. I know that date well because it was my parents' 61st wedding anniversary. Yet the Arizona Green Party did nothing to challenge me.

In fact, they gave me access to their Yahoo Groups listserv of candidates and party documents; allowed me to vote at a party meeting on endorsement of other candidates; and interviewed me.

Yet their complaint filed with federal court lists me with ten other "sham" candidates and says we all registered with the party just a few days before filing, which they contradict in my case in another part of the document, though the complaint admits it doesn't actually know when I registered as a Green voter. In fact, all the other candidates' registration changes are listed as exhibits, but mine is curiously missing.

Anyway, back to the motion to dismiss. It goes on to say that the Arizona Green Party had notice of all they are alleging regarding the qualified (not "sham") candidates were by mid-July, but they did nothing. You can see that in that document I posted here back on August from Claudia Ellquist, one of the plaintiffs.

As the motion states, "Though the plaintiffs were well aware of these candidates before and up to the Primary Election, the Plaintiffs waited two weeks, till September 6, 2010, to file their Complaint. and motion for TRO [temporary restraining order], all on the eve of the General Election ballot. This delay will create significant problems for Maricopa County and the other counties if the Court orders deletion of these candidates from the General Election ballot.

Then it explains the difficulties, which some stupid people are oblivious to or ignorant of.

The motion says the complaint must be dismissed under the doctrine of laches, something every first-year law student learns. (And we've taught plenty.)

It quotes an Arizona Supreme Court case that says "a party's failure to diligently prosecute an election appeal may in future cases result in a dismissal for laches," then says:

This is one of those 'future cases.' See also McClung v. Bennett, 235 P.3d 1037, 1040 (Ariz. 2010) (Arizona 2010) (Arizona Supreme Court rules that dilatory conduct which unnecessarily accelerated litigation and jeopardized election officials' timely compliance with statutory deadlines, supported dismissal of the appeal)

Laches generally bars a claim when the delay is unreasonable and results in prejudice to the opposing party. . .

In this case, the Plaintiffs offer no justification for their delay. They had ample advance knowledge of the write-in status of the challenged candidates by at least mid-July, of their nominee status since August 24, 2010. However, they failed to file their Complaint for two weeks, a large and critical time period that will prejudice the Counties, given the printing deadlines and other statutorily mandated deadlines. . .

Further, the record reflects that while Plaintiffs have had many weeks to prepare, research, and perfect their lengthy Complaint and motion for TRO [our comment: not enough to catch the misstatements of facts or pure lies contained in it], the County defendants have been afforded less than two days (September 7 and 8) to review the Plaintiff's lengthy pleadings and the record, and to draft their Response - at the same time their clients are attempting to finalize the ballots on a timely basis. . .

Plaintiffs let these issues languish for weeks and months (as early as mid-July) before bringing it to the Court's attention. They should not be rewarded for their delay.

That was filed yesterday. Just this morning an answer to the Arizona Green Party complaint was filed by Laura Dean-Lytle, in her official capacity as Recorder for Pinal County, and Bryan Martyn, Pete Rios and David Snider, in their official capacity as members of the Board of Supervisors for Pinal County (hereinafter "Pinal County Defendants").

The Pinal County Defendants stated they were "without sufficient to form a belief as to the truthfulness" of most of the allegations, specifically including the allegations about my own party registration as a Pinal County Voter, and thus were denying the allegations.

Richard Grayson Certified as Nominee of Green Party in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District

Thanks so much to Arizona Secretary of State and his legal staff, as well as to attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, for helping us in our quest to be officially recognized as the duly-elected nominee of the Green Party for the Sixth Congressional District of Arizona.

L'shanah tovah to everyone else who is celebrating the Jewish New Year.

New York Times Covers Arizona Green Party Write-In Candidates

As we wait for today's canvass of the primary election two weeks ago to see if we made the November ballot as the Green Party candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, we felt a moment of pride when we picked up the New York Times from our stoop early this morning and saw that the national newspaper of record is covering us Arizona Green Party write-in candidates:

Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket

By Marc Lacey

TEMPE, Ariz. — Benjamin Pearcy, a candidate for statewide office in Arizona, lists his campaign office as a Starbucks. The small business he refers to in his campaign statement is him strumming his guitar on the street. The internal debate he is having in advance of his coming televised debate is whether he ought to gel his hair into his trademark faux Mohawk.

[We say go with the faux, Benjamin!]

Mr. Pearcy, 20, is running for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission, which oversees public utilities, railroad safety and securities regulation. Although Mr. Pearcy says he is taking his first run for public office seriously, the political establishment here views him as nothing more than a political dirty trick.

Mr. Pearcy and other drifters and homeless people were recruited onto the Green Party ballot by a Republican political operative who freely admits that their candidacies may siphon some support from the Democrats. Arizona’s Democratic Party has filed a formal complaint with local, state and federal prosecutors in an effort to have the candidates removed from the ballot, and the Green Party has urged its supporters to steer clear of the rogue candidates.

[Note: We are not homeless and in fact have more than one home: a ranch house in Apache Junction and a townhouse in fashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from where we are writing this.]

“These are people who are not serious and who were recruited as part of a cynical manipulation of the process,” said Paul Eckstein, a lawyer representing the Democrats. “They don’t know Green from red.”

[We bet if you test them trying to walk across Mill Avenue, it will be readily apparent that this last charge is false.]

But Steve May, the Republican operative who signed up some of the candidates along Mill Avenue, a bohemian commercial strip next to Arizona State University, insists that a real political movement has been stirred up that has nothing to do with subterfuge.

“Did I recruit candidates? Yes,” said Mr. May, who is himself a candidate for the State Legislature, on the Republican ticket.

[Steve, the one thing gay people like you and me have never done is recruit, but your Republican buddies are the ones that keep charging this.]

“Are they fake candidates? No way.”

To make his point, Mr. May went by Starbucks, the gathering spot of the Mill Rats, as the frequenters of Mill Avenue are known.

“Are you fake, Benjamin?” he yelled out to Mr. Pearcy, who cried out “No,” with an expletive attached.

“Are you fake, Thomas?” Mr. May shouted in the direction of Thomas Meadows, 27, a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name who is running for state treasurer. He similarly disagreed.

“Are you fake, Grandpa?” he said to Anthony Goshorn, 53, a candidate for the State Senate whose bushy white beard and paternal manner have earned him that nickname on the streets. “I’m real,” he replied.

[He proved his point to our satisfaction. These are not fictional characters. Neither are we, though we've created many.]

Gathered around was a motley crew of people who were down on their luck, including a one-armed pregnant woman named Roxie whom Mr. May befriended sometime back and who introduced him to the rest.

The Democratic Party is fuming over Mr. May’s tactics and those of at least two other Republicans who helped recruit candidates to the Green Party, which does not have the resources to put candidates on ballots around the state and thus creates the opportunity for write-in contenders like the Mill Rats to easily win primaries and get their names on the ballot for November. Complaints about spurious candidates have cropped up often before, though never involving an entire roster of candidates drawn from a group of street people.

[Disclaimer: our candidacy is entirely unspurious. But for some reason, we are just as not endorsed by the fiasco-creating Arizona Green Party poohbahs as these guys. Maybe it's that we have a sense of Yuma?]

“It’s unbelievable. It’s not right. It’s deceitful,” said Jackie Thrasher, a former Democratic legislator in northwest Phoenix who lost re-election in 2008 after a Green Party candidate with possible links to the Republicans joined the race. “If these candidates were interested in the democratic process, they should connect with the party they are interested in. What’s happening here just doesn’t wash. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Arizona, where Democrats, Republicans and independents each represent about a third of the populace, is known for its political hardball. Challenging nominating petitions is common. Election-related lawsuits are filed with regularity. This is not the first election in which a party has accused another of putting forth candidates to hoodwink voters.

[There was one in the Republican primary, too. By the name of McCain, we think.]

Besides the Mill Rat candidates, the Democrats smell a rat in other races, including one in which a roommate of a Republican legislator’s daughter ran as a Green Party candidate in a competitive contest for the State Senate. They cite a variety of state and federal election laws that the Republicans may have violated in putting forward “sham” candidates for the Green Party.

The view, though, is different along Mill Avenue, where the first-time candidates appear to have been emboldened by the exercise, as Mr. Pearcy’s street corner campaign speech last Thursday night attests. Dressed up spiffily, he described himself as the illegitimate son of a stripper who had had run-ins with the law and a tough childhood but who had pulled his life together.

“I’ve been homeless,” he said, his eyes darting back and forth. “I got a place. Anyone can do it. We’re all good enough.”

[The first of the Ten Key Values of the Arizona Green Party is Grassroots Democracy, which begins, "Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another."]

There was nodding all around, more than when he went into his pitch to solve the budget deficit through the installation of solar panels. As Mr. Pearcy went on, Mr. May whispered “focus, focus, focus” into his ear to get him back on track and help prepare him for a debate in early October, which will be televised across the state.

Reading tarot cards has taught Mr. Meadows, who is known for his purple and green jester hat, to talk a good game. “This is not the land of the free,” he told the loungers on the sidewalk, pitching himself for treasurer. “It’s the land of what’s for sale.”

Grandpa, widely known in the area through the pedicab he drives for hire, is against higher taxes and for God in the classroom. The other night, he was supposed to debate his Democratic and Republican rivals in the race but after seeing only the Democrat on stage, he decided to watch from the back. “I got a bad vibe,” he said.

[We got the same bad vibe watching Gov. Jan Brewer debate.]

Mr. May, who served as a Republican legislator from 1998 to 2002, said, “Even if I wanted to control these guys, they’re uncontrollable.”

[Steve strikes us as more into submission than dominance, anyway.]

We are proud to be a member of the Arizona Green Party, providing lots of laughs and chuckles to all Americans in an otherwise bleak election year.

Arizona Republic article discusses Richard Grayson's Green Party campaign for Congress in AZ-06

Today's Arizona Republic has an article that discusses our campaign for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. Relevant portions highlighted:

Green Party is opposing 12 primary
write-in hopefuls

by Mary Jo Pitzl


Green Party candidates who won their party's primary last week say they don't want to be confused with a slate of write-in candidates being dismissed as "sham" candidates.

The Green Party is actively opposing 12 write-in candidates from last week's ballot. They include candidates for secretary of state and treasurer as well as seven legislative candidates. These candidates switched their party registration just before the filing deadline for the primary and have been called out by the Arizona Democratic Party in a complaint seeking a voter-fraud investigation. Many of the candidates were Republicans until mid-July; one was a Democrat, another was a Libertarian and two others were not registered.

Democrats argue that the candidates are not standard-bearers for the Green Party and could attract the support of Democrat-leaning voters.

"We strongly advise all registered Arizona voters to not waste their votes on these individuals," party co-chairman Claudia Ellquist wrote on the Green Party's blog.

But the party has backed a slate of candidates, including Leonard Clark, who won a spot on the Congressional District 5 ballot as a write-in candidate.

Clark said he switched his voter registration from Democrat to Green at the beginning of the year, disenchanted with the Democratic Party, and does not want to be confused with the so-called "sham" candidates.

Richard Grayson, a write-in candidate for Congressional District 6, might still win the Green Party's seal of approval. Party officials said they vetted him but decided to withhold an endorsement decision until they see if he qualifies for the Nov. 2 election. It took only one vote to qualify, under a provision of Arizona election law, so if Grayson voted for himself, his name will be on the November ballot. Candidates are not certified for the general-election ballot until the state does its canvass Tuesday.

The Arizona Republican Party ridiculed the Democrats' request, claiming the party is trying to limit voter choice. . .

Why Reviving Revenue Sharing Would Be Good for America -- and Arizona

The number one issue of this campaign, and of the last couple of years of the Great Recession, is how to get our economy moving again. Right now, policy makers seem paralyzed by outdated notions, fear, and political dissent by those like Jeff Flake, who are wrong, wrong, wrong about everything.

Jeff Flake and the Republicans' solution to our economic crisis and terrible unemployment is their usual laissez-faire, trickle-down, supply-side, yada yada crap that started us on the path to extremes of wealth and poverty but mostly great gains for the very, very richest of Americans and bupkis or losses for the other ninety percent and more of us.

Their solution to everything is to cut government spending (which they certainly failed at spectacularly during their years of federal control in the Bush adminstration) and lower taxes: Grover Norquist's "Starve the Beast." Because Jeff Flake - although he's got his sinecure right in the middle of it - hates the federal government and thinks it can do nothing.

So when the Republicans take control of Congress, and if they gain the White House in two years, will drastically cut out needed spending just as they opposed the stimulus. Yesterday we reprinted a column by Laura Tyson explaining why the first stimulus did work but was too small to be effective in such a virulent Great Recession caused by a major financial catastrophe and why we need a second stimulus.

Today we post a column, from the Business section of yesterday's New York Times, by economist Robert J. Shiller on one form the stimulus can take, "The Case for Reviving Revenue Sharing." Revenue sharing is something that even conservative Republicans should like because it takes decision to the state and local level, but real fanatic extremists like Jeff Flake can never be satisfied in their irrational hatred of government at all levels. (We wonder if Jeff Flake's toilet training caused his psychological problems.) Herewith, Shiller's proposal:

PROTRACTED unemployment is eating away at millions of people. And the economy’s failure to create enough jobs for them is part of a vicious circle that could keep turning for years to come.

In my last column, I called for big, temporary government programs aimed directly at putting people back to work. But how might we best accomplish this? The clock is ticking, and we don’t have time to create new national organizations to employ people. Instead, the most efficient approach is to use existing organizations for specific ideas and projects.

State and local governments as well as nonprofit and other organizations need to be mainstays in this effort. We need to enlist their help — without telling them exactly what to do. As for a framework, think of the general revenue sharing program adopted by Congress in 1972.

In his 1971 State of the Union message, President Richard M. Nixon advocated general revenue sharing to offset the tendency for power to be concentrated in Washington. Give local governments the money and “put the power to spend it where the people are,” he said.

Support for the idea was not confined to Republicans. A leading Democrat, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, supported it in 1972, saying that federal taxes were more progressive than state and local ones and that federal money could be spent more effectively by people with local knowledge than by “some agency head in Washington.”

General revenue sharing came under attack in the Reagan years, and Congress ended it in 1987, arguing that by breaking the link between taxation and local needs, it encouraged higher taxes.

We are in a different time now. State and local governments are in severe fiscal trouble, and their constitutions often prevent deficit spending. In these circumstances, the federal government, which does not face such constraints, needs to raise revenue for them.

Legislation providing the states with $26 billion, which President Obama signed into law this month, took an important step in this direction. It did not create true general revenue sharing, because it tied the funds to specific needs — mostly hiring teachers and paying for Medicaid. But it did free states to use other resources as they saw fit.
(Illustration by David G. Klein)

It is time to bring back true general revenue sharing — temporarily — to stimulate the economy. Hundreds of articles in political science and public policy journals have studied past efforts, and analyzed the concept of fiscal federalism, without establishing general revenue sharing as a fundamental pillar of Keynesian stabilization policies. This lapse is understandable: most of these articles were written before the current economic crisis, the most serious since the Great Depression.

The need for a Keynesian revenue-sharing program is clear. After Congress approved stimulus legislation in 2009, Lawrence H. Summers, head of the National Economic Council, said that “it’s harder to spend $300 billion within a year on quality projects than you might think.” And no wonder the task was tough: decision makers in Washington were removed from local needs.

Martin Shubik, a professor of mathematical institutional economics at Yale, has proposed creating a “Federal Employment Reserve Authority,” a permanent agency that would do extensive research and maintain a detailed list of ready-to-go public works projects should a recession come. That’s a great idea, but we do not have such an agency now, and, if we did, it might still suffer from a Washington bias.

Now, local governments are laying off a wide variety of employees, including teachers, police officers and social workers. So why don’t we embrace general revenue sharing? Unfortunately, when faced with a need for stimulus, members of Congress seem to prefer to start their own projects, for which they are likely to get more credit from voters. Local governments, meanwhile, which are more likely to know where spending is really needed, remain in deep trouble.

It’s time for the public to assert loftier expectations. We need to respect existing government bureaus and organizations for their ideas, and get down to the business of financing important jobs temporarily, and on a huge scale. This will avert more layoffs, and perhaps give cities and states time to recover to the point they can pay local employees from local revenue.

When the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt began its vast job creation program in 1933, it had to accept certain practical realities, which limited the immediate stimulus that could be provided. Foremost among them was that the government had to work largely within the framework of existing organizations — whether state and local governments, the military or nonprofit groups — which provided much of the economy’s infrastructure.

Economic stimulus is not a matter of turning on the money spigot, as some economists are wont to describe it. It is about getting the widespread cooperation of dispersed organizations to provide jobs, at least for as long as the economy is weak.

When the Roosevelt administration and Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, it was done within the framework of the Army. There seemed to be no other organization that could move hundreds of thousands of young men into wilderness encampments where they could work on conservation efforts. But the Roosevelt C.C.C. placed no more than a half-million people in jobs. We need to reach further than that.

Labor unions, which represent workers who naturally fear displacement by people in new jobs, might seem to be an obstacle. But unions do have an idealistic base, and working union members have sons and daughters and friends and relatives who are unemployed. The unions need to be consulted if new jobs are to be created in a relatively nonthreatening way. In a savvy move, President Roosevelt made a union leader the head of the C.C.C.

The concept of general revenue sharing can also be extended to the nation’s nonprofits, including charities and foundations. The government has long given support to such organizations, but usually in the form of narrow grants. But broader general revenue grants could be made in times like these.

Millions of people need jobs, and there are organizations that could help put them to work. It’s time to move forward.

Tea Party Voters: You're Using the Wrong Utensil!

Instead of using a teaspoon, you should all go fork yourselves.

Congratulations to Democratic and Republican Primary Winners in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District

We would like to congratulate Rebecca Schneider on her victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. She ran a valiant, basically DIY campaign in 2008 without any discernable help - indeed, little notice - from either the Arizona Democratic Party (which at one point did not even list her on its website with the other congressional candidates) or from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. With little funding, she managed to get about 34.5% of the vote.

We would also like to congratulate Rep. Jeff Flake on his victory in the Republican primary on Tuesday. He beat his opponent by about two to one, but his opponent was clearly inferior to the incumbent in numerous ways. We certainly think Rep. Flake is a right-wing extremist, but at least he is intelligent whereas his opponent was clearly stupid and never made a compelling rationale for his candidacy even among the troglodytes who vote in East Valley Republican primaries.

Rep. Flake is assured of election to his fifth term in November. Arizona's Sixth Congressional District's PVI is +15R, making it all but impossible for any candidate but a Republican to win. Given that 2006 (when Flake had no Democratic opponent) and 2008 were elections in which Democrats made huge gains and 2010 is shaping up as a wave election in which the Republicans should recover their House majority and Arizona Democrats need to defend threatened incumbents in the First, Fifth and Eighth Congressional Districts, no one but Jeff Flake - who's never gotten less than 63% - can win in November.

The status of the Green Party primary is unclear at the moment. The unofficial election returns from the Secretary of State show that 40 write-in votes were cast, but we don't know who they were for or how the Secretary of State will interpret the statutes regarding write-in primary candidates. In 2008, Green Party write-in candidates who did not receive the same number of votes as petition signatures they would have needed to get their names on the primary ballot were not placed on the November general election ballot.

Although the statutes haven't changed, the Secretary of State's Election Division has apparently decided - in what seems an arbitrary and capricious manner - to interpret the write-in statutes differently in 2010. We'll see what happens.

As noted in an earlier post, we have been "vetted" but "not endorsed" by the Arizona Green Party, which says it will consider endorsing us if we go forward to the general election. We will not seek their endorsement. To say that we are not impressed with the leadership and candidates of the Arizona Green Party would be an understatement.

With the exception of the Sixth Congressional District race - where we're waiting to find out if we'll be on the ballot - we will be voting a straight Democratic ticket in November.

A state canvass to certify official election results for federal, statewide and legislative races is scheduled for September 7. Stay tuned.

How Conservative Republicans Played the Inept, Bumbling Arizona Green Party

The Arizona Green Party today issued this press release:
Arizona Green Party (AZGP) announces endorsed candidates for 2010 elections

The following Green Party candidates have been endorsed by AZGP. We encourage registered voters in Arizona to vote for, support, volunteer, and donate to their campaigns:

1.Jerry Joslyn: U.S. Senate; http://joslynforsenate.com
2.William Crum: U.S. Congress (CD 2); write-in candidate for General Election; http://www.newmenu.org/williamcrum
3.Leonard Clark: U.S. Congress (CD 3); write-in candidate; http://www.newmenu.org/leonardclark
4.Rebecca DeWitt: U.S. Congress (CD 4); http://www.dewitt4congress.com
5.Deborah O'Dowd: State Representative (LD 6); write-in candidate; http://www.newmenu.org/deborahodowd
6.Justin Dahl: State Representative (LD 12); http://www.newmenu.org/justindahl
7.Luisa Valdez: State Representative (LD 15); http://www.luisavaldez.com
8.Angel Torres: State Representative (LD 16); http://www.newmenu.org/angel_torres
9.Gregor Knauer: State Representative (LD 17); http://www.gregorknauer.com
10.Linda Macias: State Representative (LD 21); http://www.newmenu.org/lindamacias
11.Kent Solberg: State Representative (LD 27); http://www.kent4house.org

The following Green Party candidate has been vetted, but remains non-endorsed by AZGP. If he is successful in the Primary Election, we may reconsider endorsing him for the General Election.


1.Richard Grayson: U.S. Congress (CD 6); write-in candidate; http://grayson-green.blogspot.com

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

There are several Green Party candidates that are actively opposed. We strongly advise all registered Arizona voters to not waste their votes on these individuals during the August 24th Primary Election or the November 2nd General Election (assuming they advance). The offices include: Governor, Secretary of State (write-in), Treasurer (write-in), Corporation Commission (2 write-in candidates), U.S. Congress (CD 5, write-in), State Senate (LD 10, 2 write-in candidates), State Representative (LD 17, write-in), State Senate (LD 17, write-in), State Representative (LD 20, write-in), State Representative (LD 22, write-in), and State Senate (LD 23, write-in).

If you don't understand why a political party would actively oppose so many of its own candidates, including its candidate for Governor, upon whose vote totals the party is dependent for maintaining continued ballot presence in Arizona, perhaps this memo to Green Party candidates from a week ago will explain what happened:

Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010

Green Party candidates:

At yesterday's skype meeting I gave a report about the current status of the carpetbagger candidate situation. I just sent you the first of two parts of that report, and this is the second. The part below contains information from the perspective of the Arizona Green Party, and some of it is confidential, so please do not share it except talking among AzGP SC members or endorsed candidates.

But we particularly need input from candidates about where to go next, so please respond. Time is short before we have to either act, or not act, so think it through, but give your input in the next day or two.

claudia

As you know, a number of candidates who have signed-up to be write-ins in our August 24 AzGP primary are strangers to us. But there are three things about them that we DO know:

1. None of them has anything Google can uncover about them [no paper trail],
2. They were all Rs the day before, and
3. Derek Lee, who gathered signatures, through his professional company, for Larry Gist [the pirate who is on the ballot as our candidate for governor], is now the campaign manager for Gist, AND for at least some, and possibly all, of the others. It is unclear whether Derek organized all this at his own behest, in the hopes of raking in Clean Elections monies for advising their various campaigns, or by somebody who is paying him to do this mischief, or -- well, whatever else would explain it.

Regarding Gist, we had hoped to field a write-in against him, and defeat him in the primary, replacing him with someone who would use that megaphone to really run a Green campaign, and provide some coat tail for our other candidates, or at least not embarrass the party in the way that we are fearful Mr Gist will. It didn't happen. We approached a number of possibles, and they all had good personal reasons why it could not be.

But the problem with Mr Gist has been eclipsed by the staggering number of similar unknowns who are now pirating our ballot line, by filing on July 15, at the last minute, so that we would have no chance to oppose them. If Arizona law were even-handed [read that as "constitutional"], we could still remove them, by the simple expedient of contacting Geen Party registrants, and telling them NOT to write these guys in. The Democrats had the same idea, and even contacted us offering to pay for such a mailing, since these pirates will be spoiling races which their candidates might otherwise win.

However, ARS § 16-645 D would make such a letter, by itself, merely symbolic, because this statute allows, in our Party and only in our Party, for a person to become a Green the day before, submit write-in documents on the last possible day and minute, and then, unopposed, elect himself to the November 2 ballot. All by the expedient of having a single vote-- his own-- cast in the form of a write-in, on the August 24th ballot.

We have been silent about this statute, which is tucked away in a section of the statute book about 200 pages from the sections dealing with write-ins, candidates, signatures, etc. It is in the section that has bureaucratic formulas for the process that county election officials follow in canvassing the vote, and reporting the results to the SoS, who then puts them on the November ballot.

Some of you have asked why we didn't tell you all about this provision, to save you having to get signatures. The answer is three-fold. One is that we did not want the information publicized, because we did not want the very problem we now confront-- pirates.

Second is that it would have made it impossible for the candidates who are going to be Clean Elections qualified to do so in time. Third is that we don't think it is constitutional, and if we had used it, all acting at the last minute, all of our candidates could have been challenged in court, and bumped off the ballot, making all our ballot access signature gathering worthless.

So we've been looking for an attorney with federal court election experience, to see if we can make the challenge ourselves, and bump the pirates. NOTE: If we talk about this, the pirates will know that they have to get more votes than just their own, and will set about to do so-- a quick mailing to all the registered Greens in the state. Derek Lee is easily set up to pull that off. So DO NOT TALK ABOUT IT, except among ourselves.

Ten talks have been:
1. To the law firm that represented us Arizona Green Party v Bennett. They agreed about the law, but they only have 4 lawyers, and only one is an election lawyer, and they are already committed to a case elsewhere, that is going to take all his time for the next two months.
2. To a contact in the Arizona Libertarian Party. They pursued a successful lawsuit a few years back, to overturn the law about open primaries, as it regarded to them. They won. The bad news is that they had to pay the lawyers up front.
3. To contacts within the Arizona Democratic Party, including their lawyer, pointing out that they cannot achieve their stated desire -- to protect their candidates from a spoiler effect by persons who are not even serious candidates, unless we join them in a lawsuit, funded by them, to overturn this statute. Waiting for a response.

We are not adverse to spoiling races in order to run our candidates, as that is what makes democracy work, unless a run-off or instant/same ballot run-off is used to tally votes. But the Arizona Green party does not spoil races for the sport of it. So we offered, instead, to be plaintiffs in a federal suit to toss this law out.

So here are the choices:
1. If we get a lawyer, we go forward. We may or may not win [I'd call our odds 60-40]. The downside is that we might lose our own, endorsed write-ins, if they don't get enough Greens to write them in under the rule that applies to all other political parties. The upside is that we won't have to deal with these carpetbaggers again, and any pirates trying to board the Green ship in the future will know that we can stop them.

2. If we don't get a lawyer, we call a press conference as soon as these turkeys become official, and we denounce them, denounce those who sent them our way, denounce those who wrote the law, denounce derk lee, denounce the Ds for not caring enough about their own candidates to fight this. We'll feel better, and it will at least not be the press ferreting it out with their own spin on it. But the downside is that we will be in the position, in November, of asking the average voter to remember which Green Party candidates are the endorsed candidates, and which the pirates. We end up hurting our own, endorsed candidates. It's kind of like when a weed grows to closely to the crop that you can't pull the one without getting the other. So you wait til the harvest, when you can better deal with it.

3. We do as little as possible now on the negative side, and just work doubly hard for our endorsed candidates. And we challenge the law later, when we have the time.

Candidates, what are your comments?

claudia ellquist
AzGP

=======
ARS § 16-645 D "Except as provided in subsection C of this section
[about precinct committeemen --ce], a certificate of nomination shall not
be issued to a write in candidate of a party which has not qualified for
continued representation on the official ballot pursuant to ARS 16-804
[this would be us --ce] unless he receives a plurality of the votes of
the party for the office for which he is a candidate."

Rep. Jeff Flake: "Deficits Don't Matter. The Federal Government Needs to Send Three Million Dollars Each to the Richest 120,000 Americans."

Here is Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today. One thing Jeff Flake is passionate about is making sure checks averaging $3,000,000 to each of the richest people in America. How about sending $250 a week to Arizonans who've been laid off and can't find another job? Nah. Jeff Flake says that's wrong:

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

If you want to make sure the richest 120,000 Americans get their average checks for three million dollars and at the same time make sure laid-off Arizonans get bupkis in unemployment compensation, vote for Congressman Jeff Flake or his even more moronic opponent Jeff Smith in Tuesday's Republican primary.

The Center for the Future of Arizona's "The Arizona We Want" Survey of Candidates

A couple of weeks ago, the Center for the Future of Arizona asked candidates to answer questions from voters in a survey called The Arizona We Want.

I submitted my answers the next day. The Center for the Future of Arizona asked candidates to post their answers on their websites, along with a link to the survey and other candidates' responses. After two weeks, no candidates for U.S. Senator, Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Corporation Commission State Mine Inspector, State Treasurer have responded, nor has a single candidate for State Senator.

One candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jason Williams, a Democrat, has responded, as have just four candidates for State Representative, all Democrats: Aaron Jahneke in District 10, Ken Clark in District 15, Pat Carr in District 2 and Steve Farley in District 28.

Two other candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives have also responded to The Arizona We Want survey: Republican candidate Ed Winkler in the Third Congressional District and the very capable Green Party candidate, Rebecca DeWitt, whom I support, in the Fourth Congressional District.


Here are our reprinted survey responses:

Composite Questions

Your Vision
What is your vision for the state? How will Arizona be different if you are elected to office?

Arizona needs to suck less.

It's dead last in education rankings among the state. The state's economy has been based on the unsustainable growth of the real estate industry, and of course that bubble has long burst, with the predictable disaster. Now in the rest of the country, when I am among civilized people, when you do say you're an Arizona resident, they invariably say something disparaging about the state - usually, but not always, regarding the state's intolerance - but sometimes for other reasons.

The truth is that Arizona, among the fifty states and District of Columbia, is not a good place to bring up children. It is not a good place to be a student at any level of P-16 education. It is not a good state to be a senior citizen because of the inadequate services for the elderly. It is not a good state to be if you are highly educated, because the jobs aren't there - nor are the important cultural and social amenities are largely absent as well.

And even those bigoted nativists who designed the odious SB 1070 would say Arizona is not a good state if you are Hispanic/Latino. Or different from their white-bread-with-mayo-and-Tea-Party regressive, repressive, antediluvian Weltanschauung - which, for all I know, may sound slightly better in the original Germany. It's far from a coincidence that the anagram for "Arizona" is "or a ****."

The state's transportation system is a disaster brought about the suburban sprawl that Arizona is almost synonymous with. The state's tax system is antiquated. The entire state has been judged in a dysfunctional manner by a moronic legislature pursuing an extremist, un-American agenda.

That's why I'm running for the U.S. Congress, not the rented ******** that is the Arizona Legislature. What idiot would want to associate with the uncultured, unintelligent baboons who run the worst state in the union?

At least as a Congressman I'll get to live in the Washington, D.C., metro region most of the time and it will get me out of Arizona. As bad as it is, Arizona still deserves adequate representation on Capitol Hill Rep. Jeff Flake *brags* about doing nothing in bringing jobs, capital improvement projects, individual government benefits and assistance to the voters of the Sixth Congressional District.

Since your group is about Arizona's future, here's my guess on that: The majority of Arizonans under 18 aren't white and soon that'll be true not just in seven states as it is now, but the entire U.S. But the same time, the country is also aging, as the massive baby boom generation (I'll be 60 next year) moves into retirement. But in contrast to the young, fully four-fifths of this rapidly expanding senior population is white. That proportion will decline only slowly over the coming decades, with whites still representing nearly two-thirds of seniors by 2040.

As a recent article at the National Journal by Ronald Brownstein ("The Gray and the Brown," from which I've taken some of this), notes: A contrast in needs, attitudes, and priorities is arising between a heavily (and soon majority) nonwhite population of young people and an overwhelmingly white cohort of older people.

Already, this plays out in Arizona over the tension between the older white and younger nonwhite populations in the dispute over the sucky SB 1070. It's not entirely along ethnic and age lines, as my own old white guy's positions attest, but look at the 2008 presidential election: young people (especially minorities) strongly preferred Democrat Barack Obama (again, to be fair, so did many "young-thinking" oldsters like myself and my 83yo dad in Apache Junction), and seniors (especially whites - but again, also a few "old-thinking" chronologically young people, mostly white Young Republicans with acne and bad haircuts) broke solidly for Republican John McCain.

Over time, the major focus in this struggle is likely to be the tension between an aging white population that appears increasingly resistant to taxes and dubious of public spending, and a minority population that overwhelmingly views government education, health, and social-welfare programs as the best ladder of opportunity for its children.

As Brownstein says, there's an irony here: "The twist is that graying white voters who are skeptical of public spending may have more in common with the young minorities clamoring for it than either side now recognizes. Today's minority students will represent an increasing share of tomorrow's workforce and thus pay more of the payroll taxes that will be required to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits for the mostly white Baby Boomers. Many analysts warn that if the U.S. doesn't improve educational performance among African-American and Hispanic children, who now lag badly behind whites in both high school and college graduation rates, the nation will have difficulty producing enough high-paying jobs to generate the tax revenue to maintain a robust retirement safety net."

The future of America is in this question: Will the Baby Boomers recognize that they have a responsibility and a personal stake in ensuring that this next generation of largely Latino and African-American kids are prepared to succeed?

I think many more progressive states will answer that question with a resounding Yes. As for Arizona, things don't look so hot. We may need for the Joe Arpaios and Russell Pearces and the doddering Tea Party crowd and backward-looking Republicans to die off first. But it won't happen soon enough, in my opinion, to save Arizona from disaster.

I tell young people in Arizona to vote with their feet and get the hell out of here.

Other states have great advantages - like a functioning state government and not being the worst state for education, por ejemplo.



Your Issues
What issues are most important to you? What positions on those issues will cause voters to support you?

Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs ad infinitum.

Unless we can get Americans back to work in good jobs at good wages, we're ******. Obama's stimulus package has saved millions of jobs, but it was too small to be truly effective to get a vibrant recovery going. We need for the federal government to do what it did in the New Deal: be an employer of last resort. We need to adequately support those who are currently out of work. We need to put in place policies that will encourage small business hiring and corporate hiring. We need a better educational system, a better transportation system, single-payer health care (Medicare for all), a fairer tax structure, policies that will reverse the decades-long severe income and wealthy inequality that, as many of our other policies, makes the U.S. the odd (and struggling) duck among the developed nations.

Jeff Flake's laissez-faire free-market fanaticism caused the fiscal implosion that made the effective bank bailout necessary, but he and the other crazed right-wingers apparently have not learned their lesson. The recently enacted financial regulation, like the stimulus and health care reform passed in this Congress, are a good start but inadequate to bring vigorous safety and prosperity to the system.

I would immediately withdraw our troops from the useless, unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and I will not vote to add another penny to the $1.15 trillion these foreign misadventures. As a Jew who has taught at Jess Schwartz Jewish Community High School in Phoenix, I strongly support an independent Palestinian state and an end to the repressive occupation and a return to a secure Israel within the pre-1967 war borders. I support engagement with democratic elements in the Green movement in Iran, a fair trade policy without protectionism, cooperation with the UN, our allies in Europe, aid for developing nations, assistance to forestall and fight the genocide we've sadly witnessed in the past decade, and renewed talks with our hemispheric and contintental neighbors.

I favor a carbon tax. I favor a one dollar a gallon "Patriot Tax" on gasoline to help "green" industries and jobs develop. I oppose offshore drilling. We must curb greenhouse gases and end our dependence on fossil fuels which has made our whole society captive to the dictatorships of many oil states and their tinhorn dictators.

I favor comprehensive immigration reform with a clear path to citizenship for the hard-working undocumented people among us. I favor equality for all in terms of gender, race, religion, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability status or any other differences, which ultimately are all trivial because we are all Americans and the Constitution guarantees us equal protection under law.



Your Politics
Partisanship and divisiveness are becoming endemic at virtually all levels of government. As a candidate, what kind of assurance can you give that the interests of Arizona citizens are going to be put before party, special interests, or personal ideology?

I'm not a Republican or Democrat and I'm not an ideologue. I'm a progressive, but I support valid and well-thought-out conservative ideas. Look, I'm not stupid enough to think I'm going to win this election, or even come in second, but I suggest that you can't get this kind of assurance from any candidate who answered this survey.

Voting for someone is always, in some ways, a leap of faith. Jeff Flake, the incumbent, has a clear record of putting first his obstructive political party, the special interests who've given him millions in campaign funds, and his obsolete, discredited personal ideology that says that the best thing a government can do in any situtation is absolutely nothing.

And in eight years in Congress Jeff Flake has been excellent in doing nothing for the people of Arizona or the U.S. In contrast, I'd put regular people first, not last.



Your Approach
If elected, you will be expected to take action on a number of issues that are important to citizens. Many of your decisions about one issue will affect other issues. Your decisions on education will affect job creation, for example, and your decisions on healthcare will affect state finances. Please describe your approach to dealing with the multiple implications of these kinds of decisions.

Read, study, talk with people, get out there and see what's happening. Make my decisions based on reliable evidence, not narrow ideology. Wait until all the information and feedback is in before taking action.

Unfortunately, ideology is all Jeff Flake and the even more regressive (and much stupider) Republicans who control Arizona base ther decisions on.

A 1978 rebellion against spiraling property taxes in California morphed like a virulent virus into a national attack on public spending in general. Measures like Prop 13 and its progeny have created a fiscal crisis for states like Arizona, one which they "solved" by slashing funding for education and other public programs.

The Great Recession offers Arizona and the U.S. an opportunity since it underscores the foolhardiness of tax cuts favoring the wealthy and other polices that have fueled spiraling inequality over the last generation. Such regressive right-wing programs favored by Flake and other "free market" conservatives have produced a less just and stable country, contributing to actions like the dismantling of public higher education in the more backward states such as Arizona.

Just to use that as an example, federal financial programs have softened the blow of reduced state funding for public higher education - but only at the cost of ensuring tat the public subsidizes private colleges and universities attended primarily by wealthy families and the take-the-student-loan-money-and-run frauds of the for-profit criminal enterprises like the University of Phoenix which dominate Arizona's feeble private higher education "system." Call it "socialism for the rich" or kleptocracy or whatever, it's the Arizona right-wing way.



Issue-specific Key Questions to be Answered



Job Creation

1.What is your perspective on the value of incentives for economic development? How important are incentives, and should they be planned at the state level or at the local level?
As I stated above, incentives for economic development and job creation are important at the federal level - which would be my concern as a member of Congress - as well as the state and local level.



2.What kind of collaboration do you desire between education and industry? How would you foster that collaboration to generate more jobs and better qualified employees?
I've been a college professor, a law school faculty member and administrator, and a high school teacher since 1975. I could write a lot about this. There needs to be collaboration between education and industry, but it has to be carefully planned as to best practices.

But I'd commend to you two recent books, "Saving State U" by Nancy Folbre and "Unmaking the Public University," by Christopher Newfield. These books, particularly Newfield's, explaining the dismantling of public higher education systems like California's excellent one and Arizona's middling-but-something one.

The rise of the knowledge economy after World War II, and with it a mass college-educated middle class, presented a threat to conservative U.S. elites. Writers such as John Kenneth Galbraith heralded the rise of this new class of knowledge workers in the 1960s by celebrating their capacity to generate not simply economic growth but also far more capacious forms of human development.

Back in my day, the university was the key locus of these attempts to challenge widespread forms of social alienation. Activist academics argues that while late capitalism had generated notable economic development, it was simultaneously promoting underdeveloped people who channedled all their energies into the office cubicle to the service of monolithic corporaations.

This critique of one-dimensional humanity, voiced from within and to a certain extent against, the mass university of the postwar period, overlapped with the sweeping denunciations of the racist, imperalist, sexist, homophobic values embraced by the country's elite and embodied in much of the established currriculum. As an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, I was a student representative on the Faculty Council curriculum committee (student power had gotten us equal representation) in the early 1970s.

The reaction of elites to all this, according to Newfield, was to unleash a renewed wave of red-baiting, the likes of which we see today in primitive states like Arizona and media outlets like Fox News. For the culture warriors, the critique of a system managed for the benefits of the powerful few was not only wrong - it was dangerous, since it threatened to fatally compromise what they mistakenly believed was the "strength" or the nation: their own hold on power.

Newfield argues that this cultural attack by the right effectively diminished economic claims of the middle class by trashing its key sources of cultural legitimacy. Why should public funds be spent to support the work of professors if those professors are "dangerous" to the country and its fehkokteh values.

So, getting back to your question, now, in place of an expansive and inclusive approach to the intellectual development of well-rounded human beings, we have what the right wing has championed (and the implication behind your somewhat moronic question): the effective resegregation of public education and the dominance of narrowly economic benchmarks -- in other words, what critics like Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have termed "academic capitalism."

In this increased pinched world view, probably shared by your organization for political reasons even though I suspect that in your heart and mind you know better, non-quantative disciplines such as those in the humanities are a drag on the university since they produce far less lucrative intellectual property.

But if you read Newfield's book, you see that he demolishes the common myth that scientific research brings in external funds and therefore supports the university, while fields like art history and anthropology are non-marketable boondoggles. The truth, Newfield shows, is exactly the reverse: scientific research may be important, but it rarely leads to immediately profitable applications. Instead, relatively inexpensive fields like the arts, humanities and social science that subsidize the natural sciences.

Instead of concentating, as your sniveling question does, on "industry," and viewing, as you and your conservative allies do (though you of course would be shocked, shocked to find yourself on the dias of the same banquet as the Russell Pearces of the state), education as a ****ing "investment" that will pay off in higher wages (which of course, it does, which is why - with a J.D., M.A. and M.F.A., I and my similarly well-educated friends, are suffering very little or not at all in this recession), education's function is not a "collaboration" between itself and "industry" = but to better equip people to be effective actors by providing them with the tools for critical thinking.

Countless people have emerged from college with a completely different and far richer sense of themselves, their interests and their abilities. It's this kind of transformation, of which being an informed civic actor is just one part, that Newfield and to some extent Folbre discusses in their books. Access to education is crucial because it enriches people's *lives*, not just their bank accounts or the coffers of anyone else.



3.I’d like to ask the candidates what they will do to create green jobs for Arizona? It’s been our experience that this draws young people. It’s a very exciting occupation for young people, and I think that would do a lot to turn around our per capita income.
As a Congressman, I'd be creating green jobs for all Americans. What the state legislature can do is up to them, and given its recent experience and worldview, it ain't gonna do ****.

So while you're 100% correct that green jobs draw young people, it's probably too late for Arizona unless the state suddenly changes directly drastically.

For now, I'd recommend young people in Arizona who are interested in green jobs move to New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, other states, or - if they're really adventurous - China.



4.In Arizona, 97 percent of the businesses here are run by small business owners. What are you going to do to help the small business owner create jobs?
For one thing, create Medicare for All so that they can avoid offering health insurance to employees and incurring expenses that are a drain on their businesses.



5.Do you really believe that we need to diversify our business base rather than just waiting for real estate construction and tourism to recover? What actions would you take to foster that?
Duh. Real estate is dead. Construction is dead. Tourism, thanks to the boycott of this misbegotten state (which I support), is dead.



Education

1.Do you believe that the success of public education is the most important role of government in the State of Arizona?
Yes. Arizona's being dead last in education and the very low percentage of residents who've got bachelor's degrees is why it is a failed state. If you are a parent interested in your child's education, move out of Arizona if you can.

Arizona now is lucky to produce graduates with the intelligence of "Jersey Shore"'s Snooki, who brags that she's read only two books in her entire life (one of them the crappy "Twilight," written, or course, by an Arizonan).

Arizona's Snookis aren't on MTV reality shows but in the halls of the state legislature.



2.There’s been a substantial reduction in funding for higher education in this state, and I’d like to know specifically from candidates what level of investment you will support in higher education and how you believe that will support our economy.
Hey, I live much of the year in a state other than Arizona because I work in higher education and Arizona funding is so poor, there is no way I can make a living in the Cactus State. Funding for higher education needs to be at least doubled. On the federal level, I can't help you that much. Ask the legislative and statewide candidates.



3.How would you ensure our students rise to national/international standards? How will they become “career-college ready” with the state’s current education fiscal budget?
The only way Arizona's students can rise to international standards is to move to another country or another state.



4.Every candidate says they support education. What specifically will you do to change education in Arizona?
Stop electing Republicans who hate education and believe it is not the government's job.



5.Knowing that getting a child ready for kindergarten begins at birth, how do you plan to support a P-20 educational system?
Yes. This is crucial. Don't hold your breath in Arizona, though. It's a vicious cycle because the leaders are so uneducated; many in the legislature barely have a K-12 education.

Ironically, the older whites who currently are so vocal in their anti-minority prejudices and who favor reducing funds for education (see question #4, above) will increasingly depend on the payroll taxes paid by younger minorities to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits, as well as state benefits in Arizona, which already has a majority-minority demographic among those under 18.

The number of whites in the workforce will decline over the coming decades, and all of the increase in the labor market will come among minorities. Today, only about three-fifths of Hispanic and four-fifths of young black people complete high school, compared with about 90 percent of whites; similarly a much larger share of adult whites (about 30 percent) than blacks (17 percent) or Hispanics (under 13 percent) have obtained college degrees.

So oldsters like myself have a tremendous stake in investing in the education of young Latinos and African-Americans so they will get good jobs and we can tax the daylights out of them to support the baby boomers' retirement. The racial gap in achievement has to be narrowed if there's any serious hope for American competitiveness in the global economy.

Indeed, if the U.S. does not significantly improve college completion rates for African-Americans and Hispanics, the overall share of American adults with college degrees will decline very sharply in the next 10 or 15 years. That's an ominous trend in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

Arizona probably will not be part of that global economy, just some third-world backwater unless it make a 180-degree turn.



Natural Resources

1.Do you support having the whole state comply with the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which requires that you cannot pump out any more groundwater than is naturally or artificially replenished? Right now there are vast areas of the state, mostly in the rural areas, that do not have to comply with that law.
Yes.



2.I would ask any candidate if they're willing to support continuation of the Growing Smarter program, which helps protect our natural resources. In particular, do you support bringing back the scorecard program, which was never fully implemented?
Yes.



3.What is your position on state trust land reform, and would you be in favor of giving the State Trust Land Department more latitude in the way they manage their lands for the benefit of Arizona schools?
Yes.

The Department is a single entity, an "it," not a "they." You must have learned grammar and usage in Arizona schools.



4.What is your commitment and plan to keep all of our state parks open? And should they be publicly funded?
Duh, in a civilized state or country this would not be asked. Yes, yes, ******* yes.



5.Will you look beyond the needs of Maricopa and Pima counties? To what extent will you consider the needs of smaller cities and rural areas with regard to water and environmental issues?
Yes, this is important.



Healthcare

1.If elected, will you work to expand Kids Care again to deal with the 40,000 children that are on the waiting list at the time?
Yes.



2.What will you do to close the gap for the working poor who do not qualify for AHCCCS but cannot afford private insurance?
Medicare for All.



3.We have a shortage of healthcare professionals in Arizona, and the University of Arizona has gone through extensive planning to expand the medical school in Phoenix. It requires a great deal of investment. Are you supportive of continuing this investment or increasing it?
Supportive.



4.Given the current extreme shortage of doctors in the State of Arizona, what would you do about tort reform to help more doctors want to practice here?
When Arizona sucks less, doctors will want to move here. Other states with the same tort system don't have this problem.



5.Do you support additional funding for Graduate Medical Education, which helps put medical residents in rural community hospitals?
Yes.



Immigration

1.The majority of Arizona citizens support SB1070, despite the fact that some communities have decided to take legal action. Do you specifically support or oppose SB1070?
I oppose this piece of ****.



2.Do you support the removal, in whatever way, of the 600,000 estimated illegal immigrants? Or do you support creating a process in which some of those would be able to stay in the state and in the country legally?
I support amnesty, if you call it that.



3.My question is about the children who come to this country at three years of age and have gone through elementary school and high school. Are you in favor of sending them back, even though they had no reason to be in this country except their parents brought them here?
What are we, ******* *****? No, don't send them back. The fact that you ask this question is truly nauseating.



4.Will you do everything possible when you get into office to make sure that the federal government does the job it has been constitutionally mandated to do, which is to protect our borders from illegal entry?
I'll be in Congress and pass comprehensive immigration reform.



5.What kind of influence can you bring to bear on our Congressional delegation to secure a comprehensive immigration policy for this country and especially for our state?
Duh, I'll be in Congress, so I can influence myself by giving myself a good talking-to every morning when I shave and look in the mirror, all right?



Leadership & Government

1.How do you feel about an open primary concept for legislative office, where anyone can vote in a primary election and the general election is a runoff between the first and second (place) candidates?
This system sucks in Louisana and hasn't worked out that well in Washington. In Louisiana it produced David Duke. Arizona has too many extremist neo-***** who in a multi-candidate field could make the runoff with a small percentage of the vote. So I oppose this system.



2.In almost every election, we have propositions on the ballot. How do you feel about proposing some kind of legislation that these voter-mandated programs be revisited periodically and referred back to voters on some kind of regular basis?
Generally, I don't favor legislation by voters. Of course the legislature is filled with assholes and is even more incompetent.



3.Do you support changing the position of Secretary of State to Lieutenant Governor?
Yes.



4.Do you support term limits?
No.



5.Do you support a redistricting process that results in more politically competitive districts?
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my ******* all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.



6.Will you support a constitutional convention to modernize our state government?
No. I don't trust the people who would be delegates. They wouldn't "modernize" it; they'd do the opposite.



State Finances

1.If you want to decrease taxes in Arizona, you can do it with a simple majority. But if you want to increase taxes, you need a two-thirds vote. Are you willing to do anything about that so we can increase or decrease easier as needed?
This 2/3 law is moronic and should be repealed.



2.Every issue we’ve talked about really has some cost to it. What I want to know is what your top priorities are for state spending? Where should the dollars go first, and where should they go last?
I'm a federal candidate, but education first.



3.It’s my understanding that there’s a cap on the amount of money or revenue that can go into the rainy day fund. Do you favor removing the cap?
Yes.



4.We are experiencing a severe economic downturn, and I think part of that is because of the tax structure we have in Arizona. What do you feel the appropriate mix of taxation should be in the state?
This is a state issue. The taxes in Arizona are too low, though.



5.Oftentimes our cities are burdened with unfunded mandates. I want to know the candidates' opinions about unfunded mandates and if they would be willing to lessen them or eliminate them altogether.

Sometimes the federal government needs to tell the stupider states like Arizona what to do, like to make sure their citizens are treated like human beings. Burdensome unfunded mandates should be eliminated.

Here is the June 8, 1010 press release from the Center for the Future of Arizona:

ARIZONANS, CFA WORKING TO ADVANCE CITIZENS’ AGENDA
FIVE JUNE TOWN MEETINGS TO HELP DECIDE QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATES
DURING 2010 ELECTIONS

PHOENIX – This month Arizonans have some new opportunities to shape the conversation with candidates as part of the 2010 elections. Residents from five communities will participate in The Arizona We Want citizens' agenda through a series of invitation-only town meetings in Peoria (June 8), Flagstaff (June 14), Mesa (June 17), Tucson (June 21) and Sierra Vista (June 22).

Additionally, all Arizonans are encouraged to submit their questions for candidates online at www.TheArizonaWeWant.org.
The town meetings will help frame specific questions for candidates in seven areas: job creation; education; healthcare; natural environment and water management; tax policy; immigration; and quality leadership and the modernization of Arizona's state government. The forums are being co-hosted by the Center for the Future of Arizona, the cities and local community organizations.

CFA will carry forward the citizens' questions in a consolidated report to be made available to all candidates, the media and others interested in the 2010 election. The questions will be compiled and published twice – prior to the start of early voting in the primaries, which begins July 29, and prior to the start of early voting in the general election, which begins October 7.

According to Lattie Coor, chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona, the effort is designed to address the serious disconnect between citizens and elected officials. According to Coor, who is spearheading The Arizona We Want citizens' agenda, the Gallup Arizona Poll commissioned by CFA found that only 10 percent of Arizonans believe that their elected officials represent their interests. Recent online polling on The Arizona We Want Web site indicates that only three percent of those responding strongly agree that their elected officials represent their interests.

“Despite the perception that Arizonans have very different perspectives and interests, the Gallup Arizona Poll found there is remarkable consensus among our citizens on a broad range of issues and public policy positions,” Coor noted. “The challenge now is to make sure we elect public officials who will help move Arizona forward in a way that is consistent with what our citizens want.”

Every Citizen’s Voice Matters

“The Arizona We Want is a powerful new wave of civic engagement that has huge potential formaking our government truly representative of our citizenry," Coor said.

The center encourages all citizens to contribute to the “citizen voice” by submitting their questions online and taking the Gallup Arizona Poll at www.TheArizonaWeWant.org.

Thousands of individuals have participated online since the formal poll was completed last year, including members of more than 50 Arizona organizations.
"Increasing the number of citizens who are taking the Gallup Arizona Poll online will strengthen our shared commitment to greater civic engagement," Coor said. "It will also encourage candidates for public office to take our collective concerns seriously."

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR THE FUTURE OF ARIZONA
The Center for the Future of Arizona is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Phoenix. It is helping to shape and define Arizona’s future through an action-oriented agenda focused on issues and topics critical to the state. More than a think tank, the center is an independent “do tank” that combines public-policy research with collaborative partnerships and initiatives that will create opportunities and quality of life for all Arizonans.

It's typical of Arizona candidates that only a handful cared enough to respond to this survey after all that effort.