Tag Archives: Arizona

International news

'Insurrection' is such an insidious term

The word “insurrection” has been raised in the debate over opposition to President Obama’s constitutionally mandated authority.

I looked it up to be sure it is being used in the correct context. The trusty ol’ American Heritage Dictionary says this of the term: “The act or instance of open revolt against civil authority or a constituted government.”

Scary, yes? Absolutely.

Colbert King of the Washington Post suggests and insurrection may be mounting against Obama’s authority in states that are clinging to some notion that they can ignore federal mandates.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rising-insurrection-against-obama/2015/04/03/d00e39f6-d94f-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html

The lead in his column says this: “It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?”

King isn’t sure Republicans in Congress would stand with the president. Take a look at his column.

He cites a recent Arizona House of Representatives decision, approved on party lines, that “prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the President of the U.S. that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.”

Do you get it?

It means the Arizona legislature would oppose a constitutionally valid executive order that didn’t have congressional approval.

Arizona’s elected representatives are trying to stick it in the president’s eye.

The state Senate has to approve it before it becomes law.

Suppose it does. Arizona then would claim authority to ignore any federal decision made by the White House that is supposed to affect all 50 states. Arizona is one of the 50.

Colbert wonders why this issue has gotten the silent treatment on Capitol Hill: “The word ‘insurrection’ does come to mind. Yet the resistance out West to federal authority has been received in virtual silence on Capitol Hill. It’s almost as if the GOP Congress wanted an uprising against the president.”

It’s one thing to disagree with a president, or with Congress, on policy matters. The idea, though, that some Americans are pondering the idea of open revolt — an insurrection — simply goes beyond the pale.

Something quite dark and sinister seems to be brewing out West.

 

national news, political news

If you can't lick 'em, get rid of 'em

John McCain is getting ready, it seems, for yet another run for re-election to the U.S. Senate from Arizona.

What’s more, he’s launching a pre-emptive strike against the wing of the Republican Party that is likely to challenge him. I’m talking about the TEA party wing of the GOP.

McCain is making an effort to purge the Arizona Republican Party of TEA party activists and replacing them with mainstream Republicans — like himself.

Not that he cares what a Texas liberal thinks, but hey — go, John, go!

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/john-mccain-arizona-tea-party-113849.html?ml=po

As Politico reports: “The ambitious effort — detailed to POLITICO by nearly a dozen McCain operatives, donors, and friends — has stretched from office buildings in Alexandria, Virginia, where strategists plotted and fundraisers collected cash for a super PAC, to Vietnamese-American communities across Arizona, where recruiters sought out supporters eager to help the incumbent defeat the tea party.

“Team McCain’s goal? Unseat conservative activists who hold obscure, but influential, local party offices.”

I believe that’s how you play hardball politics in Arizona.

Arizona political rules are a bit strange, according to Politico. It allows for the election of precinct committee men, who then elect party chairs — who then assume powerful roles in recruiting candidates to seek public office. As of this past August, most of those party chairs and precinct committee folks were considered McCain foes. He’s working now to replace them with friends, allies, loyalists — those who favor his re-election to his umpteenth term in the Senate.

TEA party activists and other Republican conservatives consider McCain to be too moderate. He’s just not tough enough on immigration, for example. They want his head on a platter — so to speak, of course — because he’s just too darn chummy with some Senate Democrats. I would hasten to add that the media love McCain because he’s, well, quite quotable. He makes “good copy,” to use the journalist’s parlance.

Many conservatives consider McCain to be washed up, past his prime, part of the problem. He knows the Senate. He understands the art of legislation.

I hope he’s just getting warmed up.

 

Uncategorized

Did condemned man die from 'torture'?

John McCain knows torture when he sees it.

The Republican U.S. senator from Arizona was victimized by it as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years. So when the 2008 GOP presidential nominee says an Arizona inmate was tortured before he was executed this week, I tend to listen.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/25/justice/arizona-execution-controversy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

I’ll declare here that I oppose capital punishment, largely because keeping someone alive to think about the crime he or she committed is punishment enough — in my book.

Well, this week Joseph Wood became the latest condemned man to die in what amounts to a botched or nearly botched execution. He gasped, moaned, snorted and writhed on the gurney for nearly two hours before succumbing to the drugs pumped into his body. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, another Republican, has ordered a complete review to determine what went wrong; the state attorney general has halted future executions until the review is complete.

Wood wasn’t a good guy. He committed a terrible and violent crime that put him on death row. Hardliners out there say they feel not a shred of remorse over what happened to him on the death chamber gurney. He still got off easy compared to the pain he inflicted on his victims, they will say.

Still, the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” States that used to hang, shoot, electrocute or gas inmates to death have gone to lethal injection as a form of supposedly “human” execution. Well, James Wood didn’t die humanely. Neither did the Oklahoma inmate who was executed in a hideously botched process in which the lethal drug was injected into tissue, rather than into his bloodstream.

What are states to do? Texas, which had gone on a death row killing spree in recent years, has somehow slowed the pace of executions. We still kill inmates more regularly than other states. We’ve had none of the instances lately of the kind of torture that John McCain described in the Wood case.

“The lethal injection needs to be an indeed lethal injection and not the bollocks-upped situation that just prevailed. That’s torture,” Sen. McCain told Politico on Thursday.

Yes, the state should review its capital punishment procedures. However, if states cannot guarantee prevention of the type of agony suffered by a condemned inmate, perhaps there ought to be some serious debate about ending the procedure altogether.

Let these inmates rot in prison for the rest of their natural lives.

Uncategorized

Proof of citizenship to vote? Oh, please

My friend and former colleague Jon Talton calls it the Kookocracy that’s run amok in Arizona.

I think he’s on to something.

The Arizona — and now Kansas — kooks have been handed a court victory by a judge who says that, yep, it’s OK for those states to demand voters prove their citizenship if they intend to vote.

http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2014/03/keep-out-the-vote.html

I’ve been voting in every presidential election since 1972, starting in my home state of Oregon and — since 1984 — in Texas. Not one time has an election judge asked me to produce either a birth certificate or a passport to prove I’m a citizen of the U.S. of A. Never has any elections official looked sideways at me — at least none that I’ve ever noticed — and wondered whether I’m a red-blooded American male.

For the record, I am.

Now, though, the fight to make it more difficult for people to vote is heading down a curious path.

The courts — or shall I say those courts presided over by Republican-appointed federal judges — are notching up victories for the GOP-led effort to curb what they call an epidemic of voter fraud by illegal immigrants.

Of course, no such epidemic exists, except in the fanciful minds of those who want to suppress voter participation by those who might be inclined to vote for those nasty Democrats.

As Talton notes in his blog: “Real instances of serious voter fraud are almost nonexistent, and the few recent scandals have involved Republicans. On the other hand, minority and poor citizens are less likely to be able to produce a passport or birth certificate in order to exercise the franchise.”

I want to be clear about one thing. I join my fellow Americans in upholding the sanctity of the vote. We shouldn’t allow non-U.S. citizens to cast ballots in a rite that is reserved only for those who either swear allegiance to the Constitution or those who earned their citizenship by birthright.

These efforts to make it harder for people to vote, though, simply are un-American.