Short Attention Span Musing...

...I don't often make predictions about Republican primaries (mostly because I'm usually wrong - something about not being a Republican :) ), but I don't think that it's going too far out on a limb to predict that Pinal Sheriff Paul Babeu is toast in the R primary in the new CD4.

One thing that I won't predict is whether the information in the linked article from the Phoenix New Times was planted by the Gould campaign or the Gosar campaign, but I'm guessing that both campaigns spent Friday night toasting to the fact that Babeu is toast.

Babeu held a press conference Saturday where he admitted that he is gay, but he denied all of the other allegations in the article.

In a Democratic primary, the fact that he is gay wouldn't be relevent; in a Republican primary...well, R primary voters hate gay people (and brown people, and poor people, and women, and...) even more than they love nativists and "Joe Juniors". 

And Babeu is a Republican.


,,,Seems we have a two-fer in the category of "certain messengers shouldn't carry certain messages":

- Regardless of what one thinks about the Catholic Church's opposition to the recent rule changes published by the Obama Administration (requiring religious employers that provide health insurance for their employees to cover birth control measures, with the exception of direct employees of a church), is the hierarchy of the Church the best choice to carry a message based on moral credibility?  Really?

- Back here in AZ, the legislator who is fronting bills to bar improper language from teachers and barring the teaching of partisan doctrine in the classroom is not the best judge of what is improper behavior or the inappropriate use of a position of public trust to disseminate partisan propaganda.

That last would pretty much bar the teaching of anything mandated by the state lege (while the measure is mostly targeted at the supporters of Tucson's ethnic studies program, it is written so broadly that many of the mandates that the lege has added or will add to AZ's classroom curricula fall under the measure's rubric).  As for the first, barring teachers from using profanity and other "inappropriate" material, the measure would ban the reading aloud in class (or at least the watering down) of the following books, some of which you may have heard of:

Catch-22
1984
Romeo and Juliet
As I Lay Dying
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Bible
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Clockwork Orange
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
Of Mice and Men

The full list is much too long for inclusion here, but the list of books with "offensive" material includes many of the classics of Western literature and even some volumes to which the Rs profess near-absolute devotion.

...Later...