Arizona Rebpublicans immediately begin to gut higher education

In the budget crisis situation Arizona Republicans in the state legislature finally have their chance to strike back at the evil liberals trying to spread dangerous knowledge.

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton states the facts pretty plainly in a report from UAnews today.

Arizona's state budget is already in deep doo doo, but now that Gov. Janet Napolitano is getting ready to go to Washington D.C. the Republican dominated Arizona state legislature is pissing all over themselves because they have their long-awaited chance to gut higher education.

Knowledge is a dangerous thing to these folks, people. And the excuse they've been waiting for has arrived. They can now gleefully cut the State University system's budget by what amounts to about 30%.

This will mean thousands of jobs; staffers and faculty both. Many, many folks are employed here in Tucson by the UA. This will also mean a drastic reduction in service to other people who are trying to get a college education.

Shelton mentions something not covered in the snitty piece published in today's AZ Daily Star. Republican micro-management of the State University system. How do ya like them apples? So I guess now it's gonna be mandatory classes in fundamentalist Christianity and financial aid preference based on how you vote? I'm not kidding, that is how most of Arizona Republicans are.

Arizona conservatives try to liberalize gun laws again.

In a further affront to the basic principles of civilization, Arizona Republicans, this time led by Rep. John Kavanagh of Fountain Hills, have come up with a bill that would allow concealed guns in cars- whether a concealed-weapons permit is involved or not. Almost thumbing their noses at another in a series of school campus gun attacks, the great right wing minds of Arizona have now united themselves to not only allow concealed weapons on school campuses, but to allow concealed weapons in cars too. Brilliant. Thanks for endangering more of the public, you fucking morons.

In this article, the AZ Daily Star details the brilliant logical process by which Kavanagh justifies this timely legislative action. It's sad that these great legal minds have a role in protecting the public.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said the current law regulating where someone can have a gun is confusing, not only to individuals but even to police.
"You shouldn't have to have a table of yes-no locations taped to your dashboard so you can figure out where you lay the weapon whether it's legal or not," he said.
Kavanagh said the current law can make a criminal out of an otherwise innocent citizen. For example, he said, a person without a permit might put a weapon on a car seat, where it is visible, only to have a jacket fall over it inadvertently. Or a driver could hit the brakes, causing a formerly visible gun to slide under the seat.

For Christssakes, ya dimwit, Arizona law already allows you to put your six-shooter in the glove compartment or trunk.

Return of the Pork Chops

Still relevant after 20 years! Damnit. Classes start the 20th and the worst of the worst are coming back to town. I once got in an argument in the middle of a class with one of these types who would not shut up during the lecture:

"Well if you're not here to talk alot and have fun, then what are you here for?"

"To get an education!"

I will quote from my friend at Shavedneck.com:

I made this flyer in early 1985 as a gut response to the recent infestation of the U of A campus with a strain of vermin known as College Republicans. Not sure their origin but they brought with them a "fashion style" that was soon to be ubiquitious: beach bikes, walkmen, oversized shirts and shorts. Unacceptable though was their attitude of "dont fuck with me cuz my daddy will sue your ass". They were almost exclusively fraternity members and were responsible for making the word "frat boy" synonymous with the Niedermeyer-asshole type frat (Animal House nemesis) it is today. (Once was a day when not all frats were conservative gross shitheads or trust fund hippies pretending not to be.)

Ugh! 22+ years later and I can still spew this hostility!! Its probably pretty easy for me cuz the Bush era we are struggling through makes those horrible Reagan years look like the Summer of Fucking Love in Haight Ashbury.

Me and my buddy Tim hung these all over campus. We actually had a pork chop see us hang one, read it and exclaim "i'm a pork chop!!" and instead of getting aggro on us he begged us for more copies. Now thats a good pork chop!

We also had to ride for our lives on fraternity row to escape their wrath at one juncture. Never underestimate the violence of a Reagan brainwashed (insert Rove/Bush today) humonculous.

As an added related note: it was Tim who first commented to me upon seeing a Pork Chop: "that guy just shaved his neck". We began calling Pork Chops "Shaved Necks". Now you know where the fucking ridiculous name for this website comes from!!!

Pima County tries to prevent mindless destruction of Davidson Caynon

The Arizona State Land department is committed to the mindless rape of pristine desert wilderness on a grand scale. Its latest effort to allow mining in a wilderness area on the flanks of a 9400 ft. mountain range south of Tucson is a good example of the typical AZ state land department way of doing business.

Most of it seems to center around Mark Winkleman, the department's current commissioner. Since he's entered office there has been a strong push for destruction of parcels of land best left alone. Conservation, environment, quality of life & pollution issues have been consistently ignored by the department in recent years.

The latest development (no pun intended) is detailed in small part here in the Arizona Daily Star. Winkleman and crew have crassly stated that the rape of this part of the desert is nobody's business but the land department's, and that the department is above legal challenges, and presumably, the law. Winkleman is allowing an open pit mine in the middle of a natural high desert area that rises up to the Santa Rita mountains, a lush sky island, part of the Coronado National Forest.

With this fucking moron working for the state of Arizona, it won't be long before we are facing the same kind of environmental devastation that folks in West Virgina are facing with so-called mountaintop removal.

State Trust land was purchased many years ago, to be leased to ranchers and eventually sold, and the money diverted to education in Arizona. However, most state land purchases are now in the middle of wilderness areas or national forests, or have become desert outposts in the midst of massive-scale housing developments.

A great example of the latter is the nationally known 3 square mile mountain biking area known as Fantasy Island. Opposition to the blading and grading of this area has resulted in an official OK to keep about 2/3 of it free of development. This is one fight where Republicans and Democrats came out together in force- mountain biking unites us, the desert unites us, the quality of life we share in Arizona unites us.

After all, true Republicans are in favor of sensible stewardship of the land, and conservation of natural resources. It's the new breed of republicans that's so bent on short term profit and the destruction that results. Everyone should realize that this is the only planet we have, and destroying it, does not, to put it in republican terms, make good economic sense.

A line must be drawn somewhere to stop the wholesale destruction of Arizona's deserts. Whether the sale of State Trust land to developers actually benefits education in Arizona has been the subject of a lot of argument around here. Evidence points to Winkleman and crew being heavily under the influence of developers and other industrial interests that have traditionally contributed to the destruction of Arizona's land.

Law in Arizona states that recreational use of State Trust land OK with a nominally priced 1 year permit. Mountain bikers for years went to the little restored house in downtown Tucson, shelled out their 15 bucks, got the permit and headed toward the mountain biking trail on the east side. A couple weeks ago I went downtown to renew my permit, discovered that the office had been closed down. Yesterday I looked up the new State land office, which is on the top floor of a tall downtown building. Inside the office was a richly paneled desk, deep carpet, and a million dollar view. The glizty receptionist apologized and told me the office no longer issues permits. You have to send the form and the money up to Phoenix now. This takes the place of some folks who used to simply sign and stamp the permit.

This kind of service also represents the new tack of the state land department under Winkleman.

Winkleman, get out. You're not serving Arizona in the least.

Moderates leaving the Repuplican party

I've said it for a long time. The Republicans are so fucked up that even Republicans are starting to hate them. I've called them "true conservatives" and stuff like that. This article in the Guardian, which I stumbled across on Rawstory.com, calls them RINOS, or Republicans In Name Only.

In Kansas, a place you think of as being totally right wing, people are sick of the shit and going democrat. The article points out that squabbles about gay marraige, abortion, evolution, etc, are ideological issues and a lot more people, whether you're conservative or liberal, are concerned more about things like taxes, jobs and education.

Go figure. The so-called Neocons and their divide-and-conquer strategy are running out of gas.

Sitting in his headquarters, the new Democrat is sticking to his guns. Republicans in Kansas, he says, have let down their own people. 'They were fixated on ideological issues that really don't matter to people's everyday lives. What matters is improving schools and creating jobs,' he said. 'I got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.'

...As the Democrats enjoy a resurgence, the Republicans are in disarray. Parkinson's defection encouraged other moderates to abandon a party controlled by right-wing religious zealots. In political terms they are called Rinos, or Republicans in Name Only. If enough Rinos desert, the strict ideologues in the party are likely to drift further right. 'A number of conservatives are actually pleased that the moderates are leaving the Republican party. That really could spell trouble,' Beatty said.

There is a long way to go. Larry Gates, chairman of the Kansas Democratic party, says his side is still vastly outgunned, but he is optimistic. 'The Republican party is just controlled by the neocons. They are not flexible. But in Kansas it is an issue like education that is foremost in people's minds,' he said. The Democrats bypass abortion and evolution to focus on jobs, schools and health. The Democrats' local slogan for 2006 sums up the mood: 'Hope in the Heartland.'

More about protesting against Republican policy in Tucson

Update, 4/20/06: the fuckin idiot who burned the Mexican Flag was arrested, according to the Star. They just mentioned it in passing and did not say why. Apparently 20 or so people attended a meeting and spoke out against the local police using pepper spray and etc, and that was the subject of the article.

It seems to particularly rile the state's backwards right wing legislators that youth have become interested in speaking out against Republican immigration policy. State Representative Jonathan Patton of Tucson is up in arms over local school district's use of buses to take kids back to school from protests. Patton is also busily working up the hocus-pocus machine against U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva- one of the few Democrats not afraid to speak out against Bush and Company- for giving a speech to students at Tucson High School about the current immigration legislation and Grijalva's role in it. The speech was after Monday's protests. So a congressman with an Hispanic surname giving a speech to students in his district is enough to get the congressman on our good local Republican Jonathan Patton's shitlist! Wow. I can't think of a better illustration of stupidity and racism and attacking freedom of speech than this. I can't think of a better illustration of current trends in "Nuevo Republicanism" - stamp out debate and opposition, create a fuss like there's something wrong with it, divert attention away from the issue at hand, etc. etc.

The story in the Star I refer to above is here.

The Arizona Daily Wildcat, the University's daily, ran a couple stories about the Monday round of protesting- one about the local side of things and the other about state angle. 100,000 to 200,000 people turned out in Phoenix, by the way, depending on who ya talk to.

One of the stories included an excellent picture of what is apparently a pair of fools or professional troublemakers burning a Mexican flag in the middle of the protest. Just trying to get people pissed off and make everyone else look like fools, give the protest a dangerous, violent, unruly subtext.

According to one of the Wildcat stories the current Republican bill, HR 4437, would "require church and humanitarian aid organizations to check the citizenship of parishioners before they provide any assistance." So if you're a U.S. citizen, or anybody at all, and you go to a church and ask for help, you have to prove your citizenship. There you have current Republican philosophy in a nutshell- no ethics, no presumtion of privacy, no attempt to mind their own business.

But the Republicans in government, as many "real" Republicans will tell you, are actually supposed to represent us the people!! Not xenophobes, people who think everyone has to join their church "or else," or other whackos, but those of us who are a part of civil society, who acknowledge that we all want the same things in life from the government, etc. The protests over immigration seem to say a lot of people's voices are not being properly represented in the current round of Republican domination. One student put it succintly:

"I think that there needs to be a counter voice to the conservative right that has been pretty outspoken," said Brett Lovick, a Latin American studies graduate student. "I think that (conservatives) are a minority, but I think that they have had a much louder voice."

Arizona Republican congress-people don't like protests

Republican morons in Phoenix are struggling to mis-characterize the subtance of recent protests, saying the protests are made up of "illegals" and comparing the people who exercised their right to peaceable assemble and redress grievances to, you guessed, terrorists.

Here is the story, GOP lawmakers assail assault on 'rule of law'.

The Star does breifly mention a Democrat's response to the Republican whining, a warm and fuzzy story of an 84 year WWII vet who attended the marches- this is an accurate representation of local Hispanic folk, i.e. a U.S. citizen who's been in the military, etc. Of course the Star does not go into detail about further Democratic congresspeople's arguments against the Republican stance. It's amazing how they boil it all down to a spunky 84 year old man, going up against wealthy Republican congressmen in Phoenix, who promptly respond that "it has nothing to do with race."

More on election fraud and Republicans

Here is a story that show business as usual among Republicans of today. This is how they win elections:

White House link shown in scheme to limit voting

Hiring a telemarketing company to jam the calls at a Democratic get-out-the-vote effort, with the intention of preventing Democrats from voting. Apparently there have been 3 convictions in this case, and the Republican Party shelled out millions to defend its accused employees. The case made the national wire service since one of those convicted was proven to have been in constant communication with the White House during the scam.

Imagine this on a nationwide scale- this why we have a moron backed by corporate criminals sitting in the White right now.

A Boehner masquerading as a fresh face. :)

This article in today's Arizona Daily Star was a little bit less of a propaganda piece in spite of its headline " Republicans' 'fresh face.'" This guy Boehner (I'm not going to make any jokes about his name but you can find them here and here in the sarcastic Wonkette blog) (but I guess you could speculate whether that's a halo or a condom in the photograph) is the Republican's new man as majority leader in the House, post- DeLay. As we all know. Ahem. What's good about the article in the star is that the article mentions something Boehner ought to be famous for (no, not his name, which I'd probably change to Jones), and has a description of him that matches the would-be famous incident.

The description:

"Distinctive for his perpetual tan and cigarette in hand."

The incident:

"Boehner was forced to apologize in the mid-1990s for distributing checks from tobacco companies to his colleagues on the House floor."

What?

Oh, man. The guy is not only from Ohio, the center of the universe in terms of Republican election scumbagery, he is not only involved in the Abramoff scandal ("Last month, Boehner — pronounced BAY-nur — refused to return some $30,000 in donations from American Indian tribes represented by Abramoff."), he not only runs his own Republican money-funnelling agency (The Freedom Project? Give me a break!), he actually distributed checks from tobacco companies on the House floor. On the House floor. To colleagues. Checks from tobacco companies. ...And he smokes. All the time.

Secret Prisons

Secret prisons are not secret anymore. This just does not sound like my country. I just sense something really horrible and ill about this. Rundown of the story is here in Newsday. ...Once again AZ Senator McCain figures prominently, speaking out against torture and things that are just plain wrong.

C'mon people, where are our tax dollars going? Secret prisons? Is it not time we all start wondering about such things?

Plenty of conservatives (McCain is one) have had it with this crap. Another prominent idea that seems to be behind what I see as a split in the Republican party and a massive loss of NeoCon power is the idea that the military should be for defense, i.e. for defending the U.S, that the military should not be spread thin overseas, leaving us here at home vulnerable to some catastrophe or other. Maybe that's what they want. Who knows what the Neocons will pull when they are driven to the wall, and the pattern of dishonesty, deception, deceit, disregard for the law, and destruction becomes increasingly exposed.

Other thoughts:
How long will it be before we start seeing pictures of u.s. prison inmates in hoods? How long before prisoners are exposed to cold temperatures, shocked, threatened with dogs, exposed to extremely loud noise, etc?

The press is fuctioning, at least somewhat. Things that're happening are at least getting reported. What a ray of hope. You can bet the spin at Fox and thru Limbaugh and his clones is in a heavy gear. I ought to be comparing some of the statements from that camp w/ others, ought to be holding them both up to quick analysis vs. accepted principles of journalistic integrity, vs. recognized attributes of persuasion.

I really think BushCo is on the run -always has been, in fact. That's what happens when a company weaves a web like that. But what will they pull next? I mean, it's getting popular for people to say, "hey, it's about time for one of their famous diversions of public attention!" -jokingly. The point is this strategy, knowledge of it, that is, used to be kind of esoteric. So, I think it'll be a "take wind out your sails argument-" maybe doing nothing, making no comment while working furiously to fix things behind the scenes, or else some crisis, real or otherwise, to divert people's minds from our fucked-up invasion, our fucked-up reasons for doing it, and the fact that people are not so divided as the Neocons want us to be.

Divided over a canard. I've said it before- we all want the same things: safety, family life, jobs, the chance to excel, succeed, do something good with our lives, socialbility, health, happiness, freedom. I used to think people were coming together when Clinton was president, then I started seeing us all somehow divided, mostly over a bunch of bone-head, primitive, old fashioned ideas that don't even deserve public debate.

McCain opposes allowing torture.

I can see people snickering about torture. In a giant SUV pulling up to the drive-in window of a McDonald's. Folks who buy into the whole BushCo rhetorical stlye. "Oh, the tree-huggers and the bleeding hearts want to prevent us from torturing the [insert whatever popular, misguided racial or or Limbaugh-generated object-word]'s..."

Who could have predicted, however, that a powerful Republican senator, who'd been locked up as a POW, and tortured, in Viet Nam, would put his foot down on the issue? Who could have predicted that once again, Democrats and Republicans are opposing BushCo policies together?

The news story is here in the Reuters news roundup of a couple days ago. The gist of the story is that the White House (via that rat Dick Cheney) is opposing regulations that forbid the use of torture by the CIA and similar agencies.

The regulations are supported by a crowd of higher-ups from both parties.

Senator McCain is a braver individual than most fat-asses in SUV's pulling up to McDonald's. A braver individual than most folks who hurriedly reach for the radio dial when it's time for Limbaugh's program. One of a large number of Republicans are unafraid to speak out against BushCo.

A couple of things I've said before and will say again:

Opposition to BushCo and BushCo ways is widespread in both parties and always has been. Opposition over conservationism, environmental issues, economic foolhardiness, civil liberties, the supression of scientific evidence, separation of church and state, is widespread and deep in both parties. It seems to get shellacked (sp?) over in the news media somehow, too.

You can't predict how this whole saga will come out- i.e. the truth will out. Even w/ all the thinktanks (i.e. professional bullshit-machines) in the world, you cannot predict exactly how light will be shed on secretive, destructive BushCo policy, and the lies used to legitimize and hide such policy.