Democratic Diva

I couldn’t stay for the press conference after the Tuesday Arizona House floor session, but I did arrive at the gallery in time to see AZ Rep. Juan Mendez deliver his now-viral secular invocation on the House floor.

Hat tip to Hemant Mehta for the transcript:

Most prayers in this room begin with a request to bow your heads. I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you to take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.

This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration. But this is also a room where, as my Secular Humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences. We share the same spectrum of potential for care, for compassion, for fear, for joy, for love…

Carl Sagan once wrote, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” There is, in the political process, much to bear. In this room, let us cherish and celebrate our shared humanness, our shared capacity for reason and compassion, our shared love for the people of our state, for our Constitution, for our democracy — and let us root our policymaking process in these values that are relevant to all Arizonans regardless of religious belief or nonbelief. In gratitude and in love, in reason and in compassion, let us work together for a better Arizona.

Awesome! The most satisfying (to me) part of the AZ Republic report on it was this:

House lawmakers appeared to have no reaction to Mendez’s remarks.

But in a statement Monday on the Supreme Court case, Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, defended the practice of praying before government meetings.

“The outcome of this case could very well preserve or eliminate one of the great American traditions, which poses no threat to the secular nature of the business of the state,” he said.

Not only could they not react without looking like intolerant jerks (thanks to secularists being so forthright lately!) but Tobin had to insist that public prayers don’t threaten secular governance. I’m pretty sure he wishes they would, though. I’m guessing Tobin would be keen on the idea that pressuring elected leaders and citizens to bow their heads and mouth prayers would lead them to agree with him on how (his) religion should dictate public policy. And that atheists are terrible people because, well they just are. Mendez’s invocation was a hearty “to hell with that!” It felt good to watch him give it from the gallery. It was yet another occasion, happening with more frequency these days, where I had cause to feel confident and comfortable being a non-believer in public.

When prominent non-believers step forward, it makes it more okay for others to do so. It’s happening at an astonishing rate and it is making this a more tolerant and better country than we were only 11 years ago when columnist Kathleen Parker had no qualms about dissing atheists after the 9/11 attacks and pushing religion and nationalism as the cure for the nation’s grief and confusion. Frighteningly, she saw 9/11 as an opportunity to declare war on secularism.

…There are no atheists in foxholes, we’ve always known. There were none in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, we can guess. And now there are none anywhere to be found. America today is about God and country, but then it always has been. We just lost track.

We lost track when we evicted God from our public institutions and when we stopped honoring our nation with the songs and rituals that defined American childhood until a few decades ago. We of a certain age remember beginning each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag, singing My Country, ‘Tis of Thee and, finally, reciting The Lord’s Prayer.

We twitched and fidgeted because we were children. We mouthed words we couldn’t pronounce and didn’t understand. For years I thought we were “pegging legions” to “Publix for witches,” but no matter. We were united in song and prayer and a shared, if immature, understanding that we were a whole dedicated to a common purpose.

That unity of purpose has been resurrected through an unspeakable tragedy and expressed in the language of God and country such as we’ve not heard in my adult lifetime. Since terrorists brought down the twin towers and part of the Pentagon, we’ve repeatedly witnessed America’s leaders praying, singing, pledging and asking the nation’s citizens to join them.

Which is to say, our children must be awfully confused. Reared and educated in godless institutions that also scarcely acknowledge the importance of patriotism — watching adults sing songs they’ve never learned — they must wonder “wassup.” It’s as though America’s adults belong to a secret society to which their children have never been exposed…

…I don’t know how we reconcile the legal separation of church and state required by law with the marriage of God and country demanded by our national psyche, but I’m sure we can figure out something.

If we’re to win this war — sure to last into our children’s futures — we have to reweave the rituals of God and country into our institutions. We can’t expect children to understand and someday defend a heritage that they have never been given.

I remember being revolted by that column and I was not alone it that, but at that time we had to scurry to dark secret corners of the internet on atheist and freethinker message boards to express our outrage. Kathleen Parker is still clutching her pearls over secularism today but the difference is that she would be getting a mountain of pushback from out atheists and others on a column like that if it ran today. If you think we haven’t made substantial progress in normalizing non-belief, consider that a tornado survivor in Oklahoma told Wolf Blitzer she was an atheist.

The great thing about secular humanism getting a “fragile toehold” (to borrow phrasing from Parker) in the public discourse is that it can lead to holding up to scrutiny unsupported-by-evidence beliefs about the economy, climate, health care, etc., that lead to ineffective and downright harmful public policies. It opens the door wider to policy making that is rooted in reason and compassion, as was expressed so eloquently in that invocation.

You may remember (I do since I blogged about it) back in late 2011, when ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, held a big conference right here in the Valley of the Sun. Some folks from the Occupy movement wanted to welcome them with signs and In These Times reporter Beau Hodai tried to talk to some of the attendees of the event. The ALEC organizers did not take kindly to that. They enlisted the hotel and local police to eject Mr. Hodai from the premises.

Making my way to the door, Lowe in tow, I was approached by two women with resort security.

“Hi … you’re the one on the motorcycle, right? You’re with ALEC? You’re a guest at the resort? Just so you know, this is a private function, so we just ask that all our regular guests stay in the main area… Okay?”

No problem. I left.

So, when Black accosted me at the bar the following night and claimed I had been asked to leave numerous ALEC events at the hotel, I explained that this was the extent of my one and only ‘incident’ and nodded to Sgt. Lowe over my left shoulder. “Ask him,” I said.

“Nevertheless,” said Black. “The ALEC people don’t want you here … and we understand that your reservations were made under false pretenses.”

I asked Black why–given the fact that I had not been accused of any crime–I was surrounded by armed, uniformed cops. Were Phoenix police usually engaged in evicting hotel guests who were suspected of having made hotel reservations under supposedly “false pretenses?” Must be a slow night…

And, how could a person even make a hotel reservation under false pretenses, I asked. I had given the front desk my valid photo driver’s license and my credit card for incidental expenses. I was planning to stay in the resort for two days and those two days had been paid for by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) … “False pretenses?”

Black would not elaborate further, limiting his conversation only to statements emphasizing the resort’s urgent need for me to vacate the premises immediately.

Black said that he would–with the help of these nice police officers–escort me up to my room and help me pack.

I was, as Sgt. Lowe explained, being “trespassed”–which meant that I was being formally advised that I was not welcome on Kierland property. If I returned, or refused to leave following this advisory, I would be arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

It turns out that the Occupy folks in Phoenix got a good bit more than the stink-eye of hotel security and local cops. Beau Hodai is back with a report for the Center for Media and Democracy about how ALEC coordinated with federal, state, and local authorities to monitor and infiltrate Occupy protest groups at the behest of corporations. The title of the report – Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street – illustrates the difference in how political activism is treated, depending upon whom and what the activism is directed toward.

On May 20, 2013, DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy 
released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror:
 How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With 
Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”

 The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained
 from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how
 state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall
 Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012.

The report also examines how fusion centers and other counter terrorism entities that 
have emerged since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have
 worked to benefit numerous corporations engaged in public-private
 intelligence sharing partnerships. 

While the report examines many instances of fusion center monitoring
 of Occupy activists nationwide, the bulk of the report 
details how counter terrorism personnel engaged in the Arizona Counter
 Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC, commonly known as the “Arizona fusion center”) monitored and otherwise surveilled citizens active in
 Occupy Phoenix, and how this surveillance benefited a number of 
corporations and banks that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest 
activity.


While small glimpses into the governmental monitoring of the Occupy Wall Street movement have emerged in the past, there has not been any reporting — until now — that details the breadth and depth with which the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.

At this time much of the mainstream media’s attention is focused on a “scandal” involving IRS agents inconveniencing Tea Party groups trying to attain nonprofit status by scrutinizing their applications, which delayed their tax-exemptitude for some of them. We are supposed to understand this as a hideous attack upon the civil rights of Tea Party groups, which we are supposed to believe were totally not involved in electioneering!

Here are the not-so-known facts of a few of those cases:

• The First Coast Tea Party Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida, for example, which applied for 501(c)(4) status in 2009 and received it in 2011. Commenting about the recent IRS controversy on Facebook, the group declared “We file a tax return, account for every penny.. We do not endorse candidates that is a no no.” Yet the group’s activities included public bragging about directly helping Republican campaigns. In an August 30, 2012 Facebook post, for instance, the group advertised a Jacksonville rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, adding, “bring your chairs and your signs, make sure they know that the First Coast Tea Party is and has been helping their campaign.”

It must be noted here that three weeks after receiving 501(C)(4) status the group declared a “state of emergency” on their Facebook page, pleading with supporters to campaign for Romney.

THIS is just one example of why the IRS wanted all their Facebook postings.

“FLORIDA FRIENDS, IF YOU LIVE IN ANY OF THESE 3 COUNTIES GET OFF THE COUCH NOW, GET YOUR FRIENDS OFF THE COUCH. GET TO THE REPUBLICAN HEADQUARTERS AND OFFER AND THEN DO SOME WORK. PHONES, (YOU CAN EVEN DO THESE CALLS FROM HOME) AND WALK AND KNOCK. NOW. WE CANNOT LOSE FLORIDA TO OBAMA.. NOW. THIS IS MOST CRITICAL.”

[Emphasis in Original]

That plea came from the official Face book account of the organization as opposed to coming from random supporters.
• Similarly, the Louisville Tea Party was granted 501(c)(4) status in 2009. Nevertheless, it published a list of “officially tea party endorsed candidates for the 2011 Kentucky primary.” They also published an article “The Rationale for Romney-Ryan,” arguing for Tea Partiers to vote for the Republican candidate.

Then there’s…

…More!

Okay, for all the pundits and establishment-types out there wringing their hands over “polarization” and “extremism on both sides!” – let me explain the crucial difference: One side fights for the interests of people with money and power. Those would be right wing groups. Therefore they get members of Congress demanding inquiries and even talk of impeachment of the President because the tax exempt status of their “grassroots” bullcrap outfits were delayed.

Left wing groups represent people without money and power. So they get destroyed. Or they get people trying like hell to discredit them with lies. Or they get the government colluding with corporations to silence them. See the disparity? It’s why the “both sides!” canard is simply absurd.

So budget bills got through the Arizona Senate Thursday, which were surprisingly decent, and the Medicaid expansion won a decisive majority vote. Political strategist and former legislator John Loredo said it best on his Facebook page:

Tonight Senate Democrats along with a handful of courageous Republicans passed a reasonable, responsible budget. Dems learned that when you have serious leverage, you can hold out for some pretty amazing victories – if you don’t throw in the towel too early. Dems held their votes on Medicaid until they Rs agreed to remove permanent cuts to public education, stop the voter suppression BRB, removed a sweetheart deal for Arpaio and passed several other amendments. If you want to win big you have be willing to risk it all. Tonight we all won big.

I guess we have to shower those Republicans who did the right thing with praise in the hope it will serve as positive reinforcement for future good decisions. So yes, I’m very appreciative of their votes. I have contacted my Senator, Adam Driggs, to thank him for his yes vote on the expansion. But what I’m really grateful for is the fact that Democrats took away the GOP supermajority in both chambers, which is making a less austere budget and the restoration of Medicaid to the working poor even possible. Anyone think this could have happened last year when there were only 9 Dem Senators? Anyone?

While we’re at it, imagine how much sooner the Medicaid expansion would have been a done deal had Democrats won majorities in both chambers.

Craig McDermott captured an interesting thing Rep. Steve Smith said Tuesday about a ridonkulous bill before the Arizona Legislature, that prevents the evil Federal Government from sapping our Stately essences. Or something.

Per Craig:

The text of his “explanation” (emphasis added) -

Mr. Speaker, I think just since we’re talking a little bit about history, I think it would be fair to point out that history of virtually every nation on the earth has come about from one people taking from another. Going back to biblical times. If we stand on this argument, then God’s people never should have occupied God’s land. ‘Cause they took it from people, too. I guess I wanted to say that some people look at the United States as a taking nation. I look at it as the most benevolent and the most giving nation, certainly in our time and frankly, ever. I vote yes.

The scariest part isn’t that he said what he said. It was in how he said it, with the same matter-of-fact tone that former legislator Sylvia Allen proclaimed that strip mining uranium was OK because the Earth was 6000 years old and doing just fine.

Of course he was matter-of-fact about it! Wingnuts are fully armed with their own revisionist history and the deep conviction that their crusade is just and right. Commandeering land, resources, and bodies toward that end is what they’re supposed to do. And they truly, honestly believe they are acting out of benevolence and that God is on their side. Newsflash to everyone who thinks we can reason and engage in civil dialog with these poor benighted rubes: that’s impossible. They need to be resisted.

My friend Bob Lord has been taking flack from Phoenix City Council candidate Warren Stewart’s campaign over his posts about a disparaging comment that Maricopa County Supervisor and Stewart supporter Mary Rose Wilcox made about Kate Gallego, who is also running in that race.

I missed this last month, not sure how. Because this is a shining example of how voters lose respect for politicians.

According to The Phoenix New Times, Pastor Warren Stewart, held a telephone town hall last month, moderated by his buds and campaign supporters, Mary Rose Wilcox and Danny Ortega. Apparently, Wilcox couldn’t help herself and resorted to full on ludicrous to disparage Stewart’s opponents. It just doesn’t get any more pathetic than this:

“The other candidate recently started using her married name from Widland to Gallego. I’m going to be frank with you, there are all kinds of political tricks to confuse the Latino and African-American communities, but in this election, those tricks are not going to work. Let me echo what Danny Ortega said: There are no Latinos or Latinas running for City Council, period.”

WTF? She’s actually accusing Kate Widland Gallego of taking her husband’s last name to play a “political trick” on the voters and “confuse” them about her status as a Latina. Really, Mary Rose? Why, then, is it that Kate still includes her maiden name “Widland” in her name? But, while we’re on the subject of playing tricks on voters, isn’t it a tad deceptive to state that Kate “recently started” using her husband’s last name, without mentioning that her use of the name Gallego is “recent” only to the extent that her marriage was recent? And does anyone really doubt that if Kate didn’t take her husband’s Latino surname the Mary Rose Wilcox’s of the world would be maligning her for not doing so?

There’s no substance here. This was just a baseless, unprovoked attack on another candidate’s honesty and character.

But this election isn’t about Mary Rose Wilcox, no matter how much she’s willing to embarass herself.

What do Wilcox’s remarks say about Pastor Stewart? More specifically, what does Pastor Stewart’s failure to disown Wilcox’s scurrilous remarks say about his character? In the 2012 Presidential campaign, we witnessed repeated failures on Mitt Romney’s part to call out various Republican cranks for their craziness. Those failures told us all we needed to know about Mitt’s character.

Bob says that Stewart has not denounced Wilcox’s baseless accusation. He did get (something of a) response from Stewart’s campaign consultant Mario Diaz.

Let me disclose that I support Gallego in the race and consider her a friend. And you know what? I have no earthly idea why Kate took Ruben’s surname. The reason being that I have never asked Kate why. Because that would be an incredibly rude and invasive question! It is not my business whether or when any woman changes her name after she marries, and neither is it of anyone else who is not that woman or her spouse. Look, I understand that the custom of women taking their husbands’ names is (rightly) the subject of feminist criticism but the vast majority of women are still doing it today. Are all those women doing so to “trick” their communities, or only the ones Wilcox opposes politically? Does Wilcox, who took her husband’s Anglo surname, think that women with Anglo surnames should not take their husbands’ Hispanic surnames? If so, that’s a puzzling double standard.

As for Pastor Stewart, he is known for having a very traditional view of marriage, judging from statements he made condemning same-sex marriage in the strongest possible terms last fall (they’ve been scrubbed from his church’s website but can still be found elsewhere). A woman in a straight marriage taking her husband’s last name is about as traditional as it gets. I should think Stewart, of all people, would approve of that.

At any rate, Stewart cannot claim ignorance of Wilcox’s inflammatory remarks since he was present at the telephone town hall when she said them and his consultant then doubled down on supporting both him and Wilcox in response to Lord’s posts. I get that tempers flare in campaigns and sometimes people involved in them blurt out inappropriate things. The thing for Stewart, Wilcox, and Diaz to do right now is to apologize to Kate Gallego for that defamatory accusation against her. The longer they remain silent on it the more it looks like a deliberate tactic, once shouted at a town hall and now muted to a whisper campaign.

AZ Eagletarian has a concise run-down of a rumored deal by AZ Senate President Andy Biggs (which I hinted at on my Sunday Square Off appearance) to ram a budget through the Senate by tacking a Medicaid expansion amendment on it and dangling some district pork in front of a few Dem Senators to get their votes.

Here’s the scenario as it was set forth to me earlier this evening:

Senate President Andy Biggs, who has been declaring all along that he is dead set against the Medicaid expansion, will tomorrow (or Wednesday) have a budget bill (or bills) for members to vote on. The budget will likely look very much like a Tea Party austerity budget with notable exceptions.

There are apparently five Republican state senators not playing ball with Mr. Biggs. People watching the state legislature this year know those names to be Rich Crandall, Adam Driggs, John McComish, Steve Pierce and Bob Worsley.

Without those five votes, Biggs has to come up with Democrats to support his budget bill(s).

Scuttlebutt has it that Biggs has been meeting with Senate Minority Leader Leah Landrum Taylor (D-South Phoenix) and Assistant Minority Leader Linda Lopez (D-Tucson) and a handful of other Democrats to do some wheeling and dealing to peel off enough of the opposition to get his bills passed…

…Oh, and as to Medicaid expansion, everyone outside the legislature expects Biggs to oppose it. He has said so on several occasions. However, the scenario described to me had Biggs including Medicaid expansion in his budget bill(s) with the very strong expectation that it would be stripped out in the House.

Despite Andy Tobin reportedly being open to passing the expansion, my source says that’s not a lock and there are several ways he can justify withdrawing any support people might expect him to be ready to offer at this stage.

In a field as unequal as ours in Arizona is, where Republicans and Democrats are concerned, Democratic lawmakers should not make side deals with Republicans on major issues like the budget or the Medicaid expansion. There is so little to be gained from it, and so much to lose. This is no time to be “bipartisan”. Republicans are intent on imposing austerity on us – crushing education, healthcare, sustainability, and basically everything nice we could ever hope for here. No Democratic legislator was elected to go along with that. Democrats in the Senate should stand strong, as a bloc, and say NO to it and demand something better. It’s why you got elected.

Christine Bauserman, whose Facebook page proudly boasts all her conservative and Republican affiliations, believes that poor people getting health care in Arizona is a Marxist plot. She wrote a hilarious LTTE to the AZ Capitol Times about it.

Just how desperate are Gov. Jan Brewer and political wizard Chuck Coughlin to force Obamacare on an unwilling Arizona? Dwindling resources, loss of votes, and lackluster public support seem to be a reason for the fraught Republicans to enlist the support of a Saul Alinsky based organization. What exactly do Brewer and Coughlin want the Occupy Wall Street types to do?

Brewer graces the Industrial Areas Foundation website (under IAF in Action), attending an event at the Valley Interfaith Project. With the Republican governor are Senate Majority Leader John McComish and Rep. Heather Carter.

IAF, established in 1940 by Alinsky, “trains community organizers in the tactics of revolutionary social change.” It is a Chicago-based community-organizing network consisting of 59 affiliate groups, and Valley Interfaith Project is one of those groups. IAF is not a grassroots network; its local affiliates are created as the result of careful planning by its national leadership.

So was this meeting with the governor who signed SB1070 a result of careful planning by its national leadership? What are they planning — the implementation of Obamacare in Arizona, which is second only to Texas as a leader in states’ rights, or the defeat of the Republican majority in the 2014 elections?

Valley Interfaith Project proudly proclaims a Marxist mission defining itself as “a nonpartisan organization of dues-paying member congregations, schools, unions and nonprofits committed to building relational power through organizing people for sustainable social and economic improvement.”

At the meeting, McComish states, “If you don’t have these kinds of gatherings, organizations lose momentum.” This is Republican leadership in our state Senate? The majority leader, a Republican, is publicly spurning his party and the legislative district he is supposed to represent, which happens to poll as the highest legislative district in Arizona at 78 percent as being “less likely to re-elect a legislator who votes for a hospital tax to fund the expansion of Medicaid.”

Christine is, of course, strongly “pro-life”. Which, as we know, means “Those babies are gonna get born dammit!” – but then – “Health care? You want health care? What are you, some kind of commie?” Christine also appears to lack basic reading comprehension, since she ends her letter with this:

While governors of states like Florida, with legislators rejecting Obamacare, are facing the fact there is a system of checks and balances and branches of government are indeed separate, Brewer refuses to accept the fact that the public, including Democrats, overwhelmingly reject Obamacare and any new taxes.

Sorry Christine, that poll was of GOP primary voters only. But thanks for that letter, it was a riot!