Damn. Miss a few days due to technical difficulties, and all kinds of crazy-@$$ $#!t goes down in Arizona's political realm...OK, so it wasn't all that crazy, by AZ standards anyway. I just wanted to use the phrase. :)
Oh, and the "technical difficulties" weren't all bad - I finally finished the Gabby Giffords book (finally!), read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (pretty good. That Steinbeck guy has some potential. :) ), watched the final season of the Battlestar Galactica reboot on DVD (good, but a little too mystical for this fan of hard SF), and re-read Pearls Sells Out, a Pearls Before Swine treasury (not quite as literary as Steinbeck, but more likely to induce audible laughter. :) )
...On Thursday, Russell Pearce, Arizona's leading nativist demogogue, experienced a PR and fundraising nightmare.
First, a Pearce campaign fundraising event was booted from one Mexican restaurant, Macayo's, after the corporate office found out that there were going to be protests of the event and that efforts were underway to organize a boycott of the chain by Latino customers.
Second, the Pearce campaign tried to move the event to another Mexican restaurant, Oaxaca Restaurante y Cantina, which also put the kibosh on the event, for much the same reasons.
Third, when the Pearce campaign tried to move his event to the library of a public high school with a heavily Latino student population, they (and he) were rebuffed by the school district .because of the short notice.
...On Friday, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio showed both his solidarity with his fellow traveler on the nativist railroad AND his peevish self-righteous outrage at President Obama's new DREAM-like policy on immigration by arresting a six-year old girl. Wonder how that helps his self-publicized rep as "America's Toughest Sheriff"?
...Speaking of the new policy, Arizona Congressmen David Schweikert and Ben Quayle, Republicans both and facing each other in the August primary in CD6, responded to the new policy by trying to out-redneck each other with duelling bills to overturn the policy.
...News broke that a grand jury is looking into alleged campaign finance violations committed by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne. I don't expect it to go far though.
The FBI is handling the investigation, but the Maricopa County Attorney's Office is shepherding the grand jury itself.
...Candidate challenges have been dropped or adjudicated or candidates have withdrawn. The list from the AZ Secretary of State is here. Highlights:
- Jonathan Paton had to drop his challenge to the candidacy of one of his opponents in the CD1 Republican primary. He had filed suit, to great fanfare, challenging the signatures of Gaither Martin. It must have been embarrassing to Paton to have to back off, so the Arizona Democratic Party did its part to help Paton move past the pain of his humiliation over the failed challenge by launching a website to help publicize Paton's past. Awfully considerate of them, doncha' think? :)
- Jean Cheuvront-McDermott was removed from the Democratic primary ballot in LD24 because "Cheuvront-McDermott" isn't the name she has been using, just "McDermott." She's the mother of former state senator Ken Cheuvront, who is running for a return to the senate. Rumor has it that because the current electeds in LD24 wouldn't step aside for him, Ken got his mom to run as payback. That plan seems to have gone by the wayside.
...Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, not coincidentally Arizona co-chair for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, is continuing to ramp up his 2014 campaign for governor. First, he threatened to keep President Obama off of the November ballot unless the state of Hawaii provided a copy of Obama's birth certificate that met Bennett's standards. He backed off of that after bringing a load of national ridicule down upon Arizona.
Now he has taken the next step to sew up the wingnut vote in the R primary. Now he is saying that the President was actually born in Hawaii, but lied and said he was born in Kenya to help him get into college.
...And finally, in response to a poll that shows Democrat Richard Carmona within 2 points of him in the race for US Senate, Republican Jeff Flake went to Facebook to brag about his "real world" experience as a lobbyist for foreign corporations and the Goldwater Institute.
Flake is almost as out of touch with the "real world" as Mitt Romney. Probably not a coincidence there.
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