Santa's gonna need body armor when he visits the homes of Valley Republicans this year...

Normally, I'm not one to give free publicity to a GOP fundraising effort, but this one is way too juicy to accord a free pass...

As the calendar closes in on the end of the year, many groups are looking to do one last major fundraising effort before the election season fully ramps up.  While there is always pressure to raise funds felt by political groups, the ideal is to have most of the money needed to pay for outreach/campaigns raised early, because as election day gets closer, campaigns prefer to focus on spending, not raising, money.

Occasionally, that leads to some "colorful" fundraising efforts.

Like this one, from the Legislative District 26 Republican Party, based in Tempe and Mesa here in Arizona -

We are approaching Christmas (December 25), a time supposedly about sharing peace and love, and the one-year anniversary of the mass murder of 26 students and teachers in Newtown, CT (December 14), and the LD26 Rs want to make money off "sharing" a weapon similar to the one used by the killer in Newtown.

Take note of the delicious bit of insanity in the way that they are conducting background checks on potential recipients of the assault rifle that they are raffling off.

Hint: it's the kind of "background check" that even someone like Jared Loughner could pass.

I know that I'm a Democrat and we are talking about Republicans here and we don't agree on much of anything, but at what level of raging misanthropic insanity is this appropriate?

Maybe they're trying to appeal to the "let's stock up on reindeer meat so we can save our money to buy more meth" crowd?

To be fair to the LD26 Rs, this may not be a holiday fundraiser for them.  There's no date listed for the drawing, which may mean that this is a "forever" raffle where they are going to keep this going until they stop making money from it.

Something that would be worthy of a post of its own...and possibly a fraud indictment.

PS - If Santa decides to brave the skies over AZ, perhaps he should see if State Rep. Bob Thorpe can hook him up with some state-of-the-art gear.  Thorpe "knows" some people...


Picking nits part of the program:

Whoever runs/maintains their website needs to learn to spell, or at least how to use spell check -

Either the Republic's editors are idiots, or they think that we are...

...if this goes over well, perhaps I'll start a regular 'picking nits' series of posts...ok, probably not. :)

As part of its 'Viewpoints' section in the Sunday edition, the Republic ran a piece with twenty questions to determine how much American know about their "country, its laws, government structure and history."

Like most such quizzes, it's mostly intended for entertainment, not educational value, so my criticism isn't reserved for the "no-brainerness" of most of the questions.

One of the answers, however, cause me to raise my eyebrows - it either illustrates the Rep's editors' math illiteracy, or their expectation that their readers are math illiterate.

To wit (my commentary separated by [brackets]) -

4. How many U.S. senators are there? [That's a pretty straightforward question; no problem there.]

A: 50 (one from each state). [In a multiple choice format, this answer is a seemingly valid possiblity; it's wrong, but it makes a kind of sense to people who don't know the answer and will try to guess at it.]

B: 100 (two from each state). [In a m/c-format quiz, the correct answer should be included; no problem here.]

C: 300 (four from each state). [OK, now this is a problem. The fact that it's wrong is OK, but "four from each state"? Are the editors saying that there are 75 states? That would be fine, but it's kind of inconsistent with the first two answers, which have 50 states. Or perhaps they think we can't multiply 50 by 4?

Or perhaps *they* can't multiply 50 by 4.]

Of course, they could just think that 'dumbing down' the paper is a legitimate response to the Rep's plummeting circulation numbers.

...By the way, when I took the test -

20 out of 20 correct, and I only had to guess on the 'Flag Day' question (#7). Knew the rest cold. :)

Later!