Remember, there is still time for you to go out and support your favorite candidates. There is also still plenty of time for your unfavorite candidates to act like complete idjits.
As usual, you'll find that after the jump.
First, My Ongoing Frustration: My ongoing frustration with political journalists is their complete inability to see the policy implications of political claims. Back in the last cycle, Ron Barber hammered Martha McSally on her support for privatizing social security and medicare. McSally's response was that she did no such thing, but she supported the Ryan budget which did precisely that. McSally, like many Republican candidates, supported the Ryan budget because it made them sound serious, but they didn't support the major parts that made it tick. No reporter bothered to ask McSally, or anyone else, about the contradiction.
It works like this:
Candidate: My opponent wants to kill children.
Reporter: We fact checked that, and it's not true.
Candidate: But if you check the policy section of his website, it says he wants to kill children.
Reporter: No. Our fact check found that what his website says is that he wants to bake and eat children. It says nothing about killing them. Our gimmicky rating system rates this Whopper Plus.
Yeah and both sides do it.
Okay, took me a while, but I needed to get that out.
And Speaking of Children: There is one kind of lawyer that the legislature loves: the kind that would otherwise be unemployable but works for a conservative organization that sues the government over perceived slights against the white establishment violations of the Constitution.
To further facilitate wingnut welfare in Arizona (because we have so much surplus money after adequately funding our schools), the lege and their pals are pushing Prop. 122. Their campaign has claimed that it is about "Keep our money in Arizona," but they haven't added "and give it all to attorneys from the Goldwater Institute" for lack of space.
Prop 122 would ostensibly allow the state of Arizona to ignore federal dictates that the legislature doesn't like, which would lead to the above lawsuits. And the state would win all of those, right?
I haven't seen 122 polling, but it can't be going well. The pro-122 crowd has taken to claiming it's about protecting abused children.
As Laurie Roberts from the Arizona Republic points out, the proposition would be worse than doing nothing for children, it might actually allow the state to duck out of federally mandated protections for youth.
Oddly enough, Roberts didn't include her usual "both sides do it" caveat. It takes a pretty cynical campaign to do that.
It's Culturally Relevant Because Mariachis: For those who haven't been paying attention, Tucson's fight over Mexican-American studies is still on a low burn. One notable Latino organization that has sat out the fight is the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
It isn't a big surprise, but the Hispanic Chamber also supported SB1070 and was silent when other business groups in the state were urging the governor to veto Russell Pearce's last group of anti-immigrant legislation. The group has been more interested in kissing up to the Republican establishment, no matter how racist, rather than standing up for Hispanic issues.
Both MAS and the Hispanic Chamber came up in a debate last night, where according to one observer, conservative TUSD school board candidate Debe Campos-Fleenor suggested that students should attend Hispanic Chamber events rather than do Mexican-American studies classes.
Eh, what?