Category Archives: Current Events

Arizona Legislator Reveals Who Really Runs The State.

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During an interview on All In With Chris Hayes, Arizona State Senator Steve Pierce tried to explain why he voted for SB 1062 before asking the governor to veto it. He said that he really didn’t know what the bill said – that it was written by the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP), which describes itself as “Arizona’s leading prolife, pro-family organization.” In reality, CAP is one of the unelected right wing ideological groups of puppet masters that control the Arizona legislature.

For example, CAP’s website boasts that “since 1995, 123 CAP-supported bills have become law.” And that number pales in comparison to the more than 1,000 bills introduced annually to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN).

What Sen. Pierce was really saying is that Teapublican legislators don’t write legislation and they rarely even read it. That job is left to a network of corporate and ideological groups such as CAP, ALEC, SPN, the Goldwater Institute and the NRA. The job of Teapublican legislators is merely to raise money, get elected and pass the bills they’re given. In essence, these groups have made voters little more than enablers who are largely ignored by their own Teapublican legislators.

It is because of these ideological groups that we have experienced an enormous shift in tax obligations from corporations to individuals; from the wealthy to the middle class and the working poor. It’s why most of our laws now favor large corporations. It’s why funding for public education has been shifted to private religious schools. It’s why discrimination is being institutionalized in what amounts to a new set of Jim Crow laws. It’s why we have “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow racists to get away with murder. It’s why our legislators seem hell-bent on allowing corporations to destroy our environment so that extraction industries might increase their profits. It’s why the Arizona legislature continues to introduce nullification laws that would nullify regulations by the federal government.

However, don’t get the idea that the influence of these groups is limited to Arizona. Arizona’s legislature simply makes the state a sort of petri dish for right wing legislation…the cutting edge of wackadoodle ideas. Don’t believe me? Check out this exchange between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Arizona State Senator Al Melvin.

Remember this: What happens in Arizona doesn’t necessarily stay in Arizona.

Vote For SB 1062? Who Me?

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Since the bill legalizing discrimination on religious grounds passed the Arizona Senate, three of the Teapublicans who voted for the bill are now calling for our finger-wagging governor to veto it. They claim that they really didn’t understand all of the bill’s implications in their rush to vote it into law. But now that the state has, once again, become a laughing stock, they have changed their minds.

That presumes, of course, that they had minds to begin with.

You see, the Tea Party brand of hate is so strong in Arizona, it seems that our legislators are always in a hurry to embarrass the state. No time to listen to Democrats. No time to seek advice from leaders in the business community. No time to seek the advice of mainstream religious leaders. No time to listen to reason. If it will harm minorities, including Democrats, they must act fast.

And this isn’t the first time. Last year, the Teapublican-led legislature passed a bill making sweeping changes to the state’s election laws that would make it more difficult for non-Republican candidates to get on the ballot and to raise campaign funds. When Democrats, Libertarians, and other parties collected more than enough signitures to place the issue on the ballot, this year’s Teapublican-led legislature repealed the law. They’re now in the process of trying to sneak the law past the electorate one piece at a time.

In other words, they haven’t changed their minds. They’ve merely changed their tactics.

And now that the public outcry against SB 1062 has made it difficult to institutionalize discrimination in the state, they’ll look for new ways to demean and diminish the rights of minorities. After all, this is the state that refused to accept Martin Luther King Day until it cost Arizona the opportunity to host a Super Bowl. It’s the same state that passed SB 1070 making it illegal to have brown skin and speak Spanish, then spent tens of millions trying to defend its racist agenda in court.

Make no mistake. SB 1062 certainly won’t be the end of discriminatory and mean-spirited laws in Arizona. As long as Teapublicans control the legislature, it will always be in a hurry to embarrass the state.

Does Freedom Of Religion Include Freedom To Discriminate?

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As you know, the First Amendment of our Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Unfortunately, there is a segment of our society that believes those words give them the right to infringe on others’ civil rights. Some of that segment are members of the Arizona legislature.

They’re called Republicans.

As proof, I direct you to SB 1062, a Teapublican-sponsored bill which if signed into law would allow businesses to refuse service to anyone based on the business owners’ religious beliefs. The bill is intended to target the LGBT community. But, as you will see, it impacts everyone. The bill reads: “Exercise of religion: means the practice or observance of religion, including the ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.”

In other words, Teapublicans in the Arizona legislature believe that the exercise of religion includes the ability to deny civil rights to others.

We’ve seen this play out before. If SB 1062 is signed into law by our finger-wagging governor, it will be almost immediately challenged as unconsitutional. Like the ill-conceived racist law known as SB 1070, it will cost the state tens of millions in lost tourism and wasted legal fees. Indeed, Arizona is just now beginning to recover from that fiasco.

Worse, if the bill is somehow found constitutional by the constitutionally-illiterate majority of the US Supreme Court, it will open the door to more discrimination. We’ve already seen business owners file lawsuits to allow them to impose their religious beliefs on employees by refusing to pay for health insurance plans that include contraceptives for women while, at the same time, paying for men’s “boner” pills.

If business owners can arbitrarily refuse service to the LGBT community, what’s to prevent business owners from refusing service or employment to African-Americans, Asians, Latinos or Native Americans for supposed religious reasons? What if a business owner claims religious objections to refuse service to liberals, Democrats, Teapublicans, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, military veterans, children, seniors, homeless, poor people, rich people, men or women?

As I’ve often said, there is no such thing as partial equality. The concept of equality is absolute. We either have equal rights or we don’t. Whatever god or gods one chooses to worship does not change that.

Given that this is an election year, and the fact that the same law is being proposed in other Teapublican-controlled states, I don’t think the bill’s sponsors seriously believe that SB 1062 will ever go into effect. As with all of the party’s previous “social issues,” I believe the real intent is to divide and distract; to rile the mouth-breathing Teapublican base into a religious fervor in order to ensure high voter turn-out. Meanwhile, it’s likely to serve as a distraction for Democrats and independents, causing them to spend precious time and resources on the issue instead of on candidates who can repeal such idiocy.

Similar strategies have worked many times in the past.

The Growth Of Hate.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate groups and other extremists throughout the US, reports that the number of hate groups has grown by 67 percent since 2000. The SPLC website states, “Currently, there are 1,007 known hate groups of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes and others.” It lists as reasons for the increase “anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president.”

Based on those criteria, I would suggest that nation’s largest hate group is the Tea Party. After all, the Tea Party is virulently anti-immigrant. It displays its racism on rally posters showing President Obama dressed in Nazi attire with a Hitleresque moustache. It continues to make unsubstantiated charges that the president is a socialist, a communist and a dictator. The Tea Party has launched relentless attacks on government institutions from the Environmental Protection Agency to the US Postal Service…even first responders and local school boards. Virtually every Tea Party meeting is devoted to tales of government conspiracies and fears of a “New World Order.” Moreover, Tea Party members continue to display guns at rallies and talk of “Second Amendment remedies.”

All of this paranoid nonsense is fueled by obstructionist Teapublican members of Congress, anti-government lies spread by Fox “News” Channel and right-wing hosts of hate radio, in addition to vicious attack ads paid for by a few angry billionaires. The resulting growth of hate has not merely divided our politics. It has pitted friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, one race against another and the wealthy against the poor.

At its worst, this growing culture of hate can be seen in the recent “Stand Your Ground” slayings which have seen a teen killed for wearing a hoodie, another teen ruthlessly murdered for the volume of his music, and a military veteran killed for texting during movie previews and for throwing a bag of popcorn.

It may seem that these events are unrelated. They’re not. They are likely all symptoms of a growing national anger created by our toxic political environment and enabled by easy access to guns.

We have to ask ourselves, “Where will it end?”

Patriots Across The Border.

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Last week, KPHO-TV in Phoenix aired a story about US military veterans who have been hired as assassins by Mexican drug cartels. It noted that at least four US veterans have been arrested in Mexico and charged with working as hit men for the cartels and others have been approached by the cartels. One of those who had been recruited served as a US Marine despite being an undocumented immigrant. Upon returning from war, he apparently suffered from PTSD leading him to be arrested for alcohol and drug abuse before being deported to Mexico.

It should come as no surprise that cartels would seek the services of US Marines and Special Forces veterans. They are, after all, among the very best soldiers in the world. They have been trained to kill with great efficiency. Many have used their military training to become “private contractors,” the modern-day euphemism for mercenary.  Many suffer from PTSD and struggle to adapt to civilian life. Many are unable to find good paying jobs.

All of this points to the problem with downsizing and privatizing our military.

In past decades, our soldiers tended to serve one combat deployment of 1-2 years before being sent home. Often they were given rest and recreation time away from combat during their deployment. Even then, many struggled to re-acclimate to civilian life at the end of their deployment. (It’s estimated that as many Vietnam veterans committed suicide as those who died in battle.)

By contast, today’s soldiers have been asked to serve multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have been deployed as many as a dozen times. That not only lessens their chances of survival. It places them at far greater risk of PTSD. When they return home from the insanity of war, they often struggle to adapt to civilian life, which explains the atrocious backlog of cases through the Veteran’s Administration.

With each deployment, it must become increasingly difficult for soldiers to distinguish a “good” kill from a “bad” kill, especially when there are no obvious front lines making it difficult to tell the enemy from civilians. Given that, I can easily see the temptation for some soldiers to cash in on their skills, whether it’s as a “private contractor” for companies like Blackwater or as a hit man for a violent drug cartel.

How can we help them?

For one thing, instead of mindlessly repeating the words “thank you for your service,” we can avoid unnecessary wars like Iraq. If we absolutely must go to war, we can give our military clearly-defined goals. We can spend whatever money is necessary to help our soldiers deal with the trauma and after-effects of war. And we can retrain them to help them find jobs of comparable importance and responsibility that don’t involve weaponry.

Maybe then they would be less susceptible to selling their services to the highest bidder.

Has Our Education System Failed Teapublicans?

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Over the last several years, it has become obvious that Republicans and their Tea Party Parasites lack basic comprehension skills. For example, when the President made a speech talking about the role of government, he said, “…look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

It was obvious that President Obama was referring to the fact that businesses benefit from government-provided infrastructure. But Teapublicans couldn’t grasp that. All they heard was “you didn’t build that.”

Likewise, during a lengthy Senate hearing on Benghazi, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had tired of answering the same loaded questions over what led to the attack on the consulate, she finally said, “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest? Or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they would go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information.”

Teapublicans failed to comprehend the content of her testimony. All they heard was “what difference does it make?”

More recently, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that, among other things, noted the impact of the Affordable Care Act (for you Teapublicans, that’s “Obamacare”) on the labor market. The CBO report stated that the ACA would result in as many as 2.5 million people voluntarily leaving their full-time jobs because they would no longer be bound to those jobs for employer-based health insurance. The impact, according to the CBO, is that up to 2.5 million jobs openings would be created by 2024.

Teapublicans, of course, failed to comprehend the report. They believed that 2.5 million jobs would be lost…not created…and immediately labeled the ACA a “job killer.”

No wonder theTeapublicans are so angry all the time. They seem to lack the basic hearing and reading skills to comprehend the spoken word and written reports. Obviously, our education system has failed them.

GOP Identity Thieves.

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Last week, it was revealed that the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has created numerous websites pretending to be fundraising sites for 18 Democratic Congressional candidates. For example, if you Google Kyrsten Sinema, you may be led to a site headlined “Kyrsten Sinema for Congress.” But unless you notice the small subhead that reads, “Make a contribution today to help defeat Sinema and candidates like her,” your donation will actually help Sinema’s opponent.

That’s a dirty trick that would make Tricky Dicky Nixon proud!

It’s the same kind of scam that ticket resellers use to sell you theater tickets or concert tickets at exhorbitant prices. They buy a URL designed to make you believe it’s an official site for the theater. They let you choose your seats and pay for them online. Then, when you receive the tickets, you discover they are for nosebleed seats you could have purchased for a third the price.

It’s obviously fraud, but no one in authority seems inclined to prosecute.

Of course, authorities are even less likely to prosecute a political party or campaign committee. In politics, virtually anything goes…especially if you are a Republican or a Republican-leaning Super PAC. While advertisers of products and services are held accountable for claims made in their advertisements, the same cannot be said for political ads. If you’re a political campaign committee, you can lie, slander and libel your opponent(s) with no repercussions. The candidate simply says that he, or she, was unaware of the lies. And the campaign committee is dissolved as soon as the election is over.

You can’t sue an entity that no longer exists.

Of course, Republicans and Independents would like to believe that both sides are equally guilty. They’re not. Republicans mastered the art of lying and scamming during the Nixon administration and they’ve been using these tactics ever since. And what’s too despicable for them to do or say themselves they leave for Fox “News” Channel, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and others to do.

No one on the left remotely resembles these liars and scam artists.

The Great Debate.

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On Tuesday, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” debated Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum…you know, the place featuring dioramas of Adam and Eve sharing the Earth with dinosaurs.

I give credit to Ham. Not only did he pay Nye’s substantial speaking fee for the event. He risked exposing his supporters to a dose of reality. Nevertheless, I doubt Nye changed any minds. That’s the problem with trying to debate the faithful…they accept things based on faith and ignore anything that would contradict their beliefs, including actual scientific evidence based on centuries of observations and objective data.

For example, Ham and his followers believe the Earth is 6,000 years old based on the book of Genesis in the Bible. Ham says that the Bible trumps scientific research. “I find there’s only one infallible dating method,” said Ham. “It’s a witness who was there, who knows everything and told us, and that’s from the word of God.”

Ham fails to consider that the Bible is a written account of Judeo-Christian traditions and that it’s not necessarily any more accurate than the creationist accounts of other tribes – accounts such as the Chinese belief that humans came from a cosmic egg; the Tibetan belief that humans are the offspring of a monkey and a great demoness; the Egyptian belief that all creatures were created on a potter’s wheel; the Mayan belief that humans were created from wood; the ancient Greek belief that humans are the progeny of the Earth and the sky; the Hopi belief that man emerged from a hole in the Earth; and the Navajo belief that the first woman was created by blue and yellow clouds and the first man was created by black and white clouds.

All of these deserve as much credibility as the Judeo-Christian account. Moreover, unlike Ham, many civilizations believe the Earth is far older than 6,000 years. Indeed, Hindus believe that the Universe is 4,320,000,000 years old, a figure that more closely aligns with the dating of modern science.

But other traditions and science don’t matter to people like Ham. Ham believes the Judeo-Christian creation story is the only one that matters. He believes that the Bible was not written by man. He believes it is the actual word of God and anyone who contradicts anything in the Bible is simply wrong. It’s a matter of faith. The only one who could possibly convince him to accept the evidence supplied by historians, geologists, anthropologists, astrophysicists and archeaologists is God.

And the Judeo-Christian God hasn’t yet authored a sequel to the Bible.

Worse Than Iraq.

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This past Saturday, the United Nations reported that at least 733 Iraqis had been killed and at least 1,229 wounded in January as the result of violence. Worse, the UN said that the numbers did not include Anbar province due to problems verifying the numbers killed. Those numbers are startling and they justifiably made headlines in newspapers throughout the US.

But there was one nation that experienced even more violence last month – the United States of America.

As I noted in a recent post, there are more than 11,000 gun homicides in the US each year. That means that, on average, there are more than 916 gun homicides in the US each month…nearly 200 more than the deaths that occurred last month in Iraq! And, if you include those killed by other means, the US likely experienced more than 1,330 homicides last month…nearly double the number killed by violence in Iraq!

Looking at it another way, the US experiences nearly one-third the number of violent deaths each month as Syria, which is immersed in a cruel civil war. Yet I don’t recall seeing any headlines decrying the violence in the US. I don’t see humanitarian groups running to the aid of those in our most violent neighborhoods. I don’t hear conservative politicians calling for military intervention to help curb our violence.

Are conservative politicians so afraid of the National Rifle Association, that they have become willing to ignore our own violence? Have ordinary citizens become so accustomed to mass murders, gang violence, revenge killings, road rage and domestic violence that we no longer notice it? Or worse, yet, no longer care?

Congress Versus The American People.

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Politicians, especially Republicans, are fond of saying that they have faith that the American people will always do the right thing. Hmmm…that raises a number of questions.

If politicians believe the American people are so smart, why don’t they do what the people want them to? Why have they refused to vote for universal background checks on all gun purchases when more than 90 percent of Americans demand them? Why has the House refused to support bills that would create the jobs Americans want? Why has the House delayed action on immigration reform supported by more than 70 percent of Americans? Why has the House refused to vote for equal pay for women? Why has it refused to raise the minimum wage? Why do Republicans refuse to vote for gay marriage? Why do they refuse to decriminalize marijuana? Why have they failed to vote for tax reform and equal enforcement?

Why do more than 80 percent of Americans despise Congress?

At least we have an answer for one of those questions.