2. Every so often I get a comment to a post I did months ago, probably because the person googled a topic and my post came up. Normally I just approve them and move on, but this poor creature was so upset about a post I did back in January about Rep. Judy Burges and her Birther Bill that I wanted to make sure y’all didn’t miss it.

Quoth Ronda:

NO. YOU SUCK. She is doing a great job and has a right to her opinion without trashy people like yourself making obnoxious comments. Judy…keep up the good work.

Judy sure does have a right to her opinion, Ronda. No matter how ignorant and bigoted it is. I hope you feel better now.

**UPDATE**: I facebooked Ronda and her full name is Ronda Burges-Apolinar. She’s Judy the Birther’s daughter.

To be sure, there’s been mud slung and some of our candidates have over-promised and exaggerated their own qualifications and their opponents’ shortcomings, which is to be expected in elections. But I’ll happily support every statewide and local candidate who emerges in tomorrow’s election for the general race. (Of course, I live in a lege district with no contested Democratic primaries so that’s easy for me to say.)

*I know. Some of y’all are really committed to a particular primary candidate and are convinced that his/her opponent is a putrescent scalawag of the worst order. But starting Wednesday we gotta put it behind us to face a tough, but not insurmountable, General Election season.

(P.S.: Good luck tomorrow, Katie!)

Best wishes to baby Luciana Reyes !

Hoping mom and her political allies will refrain in the future from using Ms Romero’s offspring as a political HUMAN SHIELD !!

Que Poca.

I’m going to hazard two guesses here. The first is that this is Bruce’s “clever” way of slamming Regina Romero for not attending Tuesday’s Tucson City Council meeting. The day after she gave birth.

My second guess is that Bruce’s cryptic comment was a reference to the propensity of a certain former Governor from a cold state up north to use her children as political props. Recently, she accused people from the opposing party of wanting to put her disabled son before a “death panel”.

Bruce, hon, one of those things is not like the other. But thanks for playing.

Jason Rose??!?

Rose has been a busy little turd-polishing flack these days. Just last Saturday he and another of his prominent clients, Joe Arpaio, helped to raise over $100k for JD Hayworth. No, not for Hayworth’s potential Senate run against John McCain. It was to help pay JD’s legal fees for being the target of investigation due to his association with former high-powered lobbyist and current jailbird Jack Abramoff.

Most people’s understanding of the Abramoff scandal is hazy – something about Indian tribes and gambling and campaign contributions and skyboxes – but there was a horrifying aspect of it that, in my opinion, was given far less coverage than it warranted. There are certain things you can know about a person that tell you everything you need to know about that person.

Jack Abramoff lobbied and paid off members of Congress to maintain sweatshops, sexual slavery, and forced abortions in the Marianas Islands. From the TPM article:

For months, activists and members of Congress pushed for labor reforms in the Northern Marianas, an American territory that was rife with cases of human rights abuses. The teenaged girl [Representative] Hall attacked (referred to by lawyers and activists by her stage name, “Katrina,” to protect her anonymity) was just one of those cases.

The billing records from Abramoff’s lobbying firm, Preston Gates, show that Abramoff and his associates logged long hours helping CNMI dodge such charges. Hall’s office worked closely with Abramoff’s team to compose the lawmaker’s statement on Katrina, according to those same records.

That’s JD’s skybox buddy. Make no mistake, Hayworth knew about it. I don’t know what Jason Rose knows about Abramoff’s efforts to protect the existence of sweatshops, sexual slavery, and forced abortions in Saipan. Somehow, I don’t think the knowledge would bother him that much. And that’s what bothers me about Phil Gordon, whom I find to be a likable and competent guy for the most part, when he sidles up to certain elements of the GOP in Arizona.

Phil, it’s not because they’re Republicans. It’s because they’re scumbags.

Newly elected Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio has development leases along the proposed 202 freeway route. He, and others, think he should have a seat at the table. What say you about that, Goldwater Institute?

To put it in perspective for you, Goldwaterites, it’s like City North, but on steroids.

I’m adding it to the blogroll and I encourage y’all to check out his post from Monday about his journey to understanding the unique challenges the sunniest state in the Union (okay, maybe we’re tied with Nevada) faces in establishing a thriving solar energy industry.

In my first position in the energy industry I was fortunate to work closely with the most experienced solar engineer in Arizona. Not only was I able to rapidly gain a wealth of knowledge through observation and practice, but my mentor was also a talented and generous teacher.

As my knowledge of the industry grew, I began to recognize the systemic problems that prevent solar energy from thriving in and around The Valley of the Sun. Initially, I had little more than an intuitive glimpse of these problems. The journey towards understanding the pervasive nature of these problems began early this decade with a simple and somewhat selfish question, “Does it make good economic sense to remain in the solar energy industry?”

The attempt to answer this question led to many long evenings with papers, books and spreadsheets. From this work, an economic model began to develop. The answer that began to emerge was encouraging.

It is encouraging, but maddening as well. We aren’t cranking out solar energy and are instead dependent on the lumbering husks of fossil and nuclear. It’s for the same reason Arizona is stuck in a stultified trap of sprawl instead of figuring out better ways to design communities and move people around. Because vested interests have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.

I’ve told y’all before and I’m telling y’all again. This is classic projection. A sitting City Council member and candidate for that position is caught in flagrante delicto trying to use that office make deals for a freeway that will enrich him personally. So of course he’s going to enlist rightie bloggers to create a ruckus and clutch their pearls about something his opponent is supposedly doing.

Only the usually fastidious Hedda was a little sloppy this time. He was supposed to be breaking this HUGE story about an OMG! SERIOUS IRS COMPLAINT! against Dana Kennedy. He came right out said Sal filed it on his blog post.

Here’s a link to the complaint since I’m having trouble with PDFs on my new netbook: link

As you can see from page 1 of the complaint, the “anonymous” filer checked off a box stating “I am concerned I might face retaliation or retribution if my identity is known”. And now everyone knows it’s Sal. Oh noes!! I don’t know how much retribution Sal faces for this but I’ll certainly hold up my “laughing at their dumb asses on the internets” part of it.

Arizona uses cheap land, few restrictions and public funding for infrastructure to make the growth machine rich. Cities and towns play along, greedy for sales taxes and development fees.

Aside from some private fortunes, the consequences have often been unfortunate. Everywhere there’s a disconnect between development and everything else, including transportation. Coherent planning is a joke.

Thus, Pinal County spreads out with tract houses while commuters wait on farm roads. Interstate 17 north of Phoenix remains a rural highway from the 1960s. The gridlock on Interstate 10 in the West Valley extends beyond rush hours.

And, apparently, the South Mountain Freeway will be built even if it eats everybody else’s road projects.

The most amazing thing about the mess is the utter lack of creativity.

Here we are, in the 21st century, armed with sobering facts about the direction of energy prices and temperatures, and Phoenix’s peculiar vulnerability to them. And we’re basing our plans on thinking and arrangements from the late 1950s.

When I ran for State Senate, I shamelessly ripped my transportation platform off of Talton columns. This one is about as succinct a take on the Loop 202 situation as you will ever find. It’s 100% right, too. The project needs to be scrapped and replaced with forward-thinking means to address transportation and growth. Talton explains what needs to be done:

Kill the South Mountain Freeway.
• Connect Ahwatukee to the central city with either light rail or commuter rail.
• Link West Valley cities to the rest of the region with commuter rail.
• Re-establish train service between Phoenix and Tucson in preparation for a bullet-train project.
• Upgrade bus service on the busiest or most promising routes.
• Put a moratorium on all new sprawl residential development until comprehensive plans can be drawn up to provide transportation and pay for it.
• Require all transportation projects to have multimodal components. For example, light rail running along a freeway route.

• Establish a consortium for 21st-century transportation research and implementation that would make Arizona a leader in new technologies and approaches.

That sums it up for me but I know that Dana Kennedy doesn’t oppose the freeway outright. She does, however, want it to be studied and to proceed with plans carefully. Because she is someone who wants to be on the City Council out of a desire to serve the community and not her own personal interests, I’d bet on her to be the one to be open to alternatives. For all Sal’s happy horsecrap about wanting to bring the community together to come to a solution, we know that Sal stands to gain hugely if the freeway gets built. No freeway, no cha-ching for Zenith Develpment. That being the case, those who oppose the freeway needn’t bother to listen to a word he says and should just go ahead and mark “Dana Kennedy” on the ballot right now. Those who support the freeway should ask themselves why they’d consider voting for someone as thoroughly compromised, and effectively neutered, on the issue as DiCiccio is. Everyone among us who is not a developer should ask themselves what we gain by blindly following outdated and unsustainable transportation modalities that benefit, primarily, developers.

DiCiccio has yet to respond to New Times’ request for comment, but immediately on exiting the press conference, we received a press release by email from his campaign flack, Jason Rose. Rose criticized Kennedy for taking a salary from the non-profit she helped to start to get women involved in politics.

Tax returns show that Kennedy was paid $24,000 to serve as the executive director of Emerge Arizona. (Duly noted, Jason.)

Rose and his army of RW blogger stooges have been trying like hell to get some traction on the supposed controversy of Dana getting paid for the work she did for Emerge for a while now. Remember that the first rule of GOP projection is whatever they accuse you of doing, they are doing themselves and usually in spades. So of course it would turn out that Sal DiCiccio is the one with the questionable (to put it mildly) financial dealings.

And of course they would try to draw a false equivalence. In this case the equivalence is laughably absurd. Yeah, Jason, Dana helped found Emerge. Organizations tend to be founded by people. Those people go on to run the organization and some of them do so much work that the board of the group decides it would be good to pay them for the work. As hard as it may be for you to believe, it’s possible to get paid for other things besides running sleazy campaigns and making creepy disgusting ads about a Sheriff’s candidate. Or being a dishonest developer like your client. Just ask the hundreds of women throughout the country who have gone through the Emerge program about the hard work Dana Kennedy did to earn her small salary.

Some Republican women were so impressed with Emerge that they formed their own group to train and mentor candidates. I wonder if any of the founders of that program earns a salary. I also wonder if anyone who helped form Goldwater, Center for Arizona Policy, Greater Phoenix Crisis Pregnancy Centers, or Arizona Right To Life ever drew a salary. Then again, if they did, that would be IOKIYAR.

• So How Much of a Cut Am I Going to Get, Sal?
• Things in Ahwatukee That Make You Go Hmm
• Now who could have seen this coming? DiCiccio stands to gain from freeway through Ahwatukee

But what does Sal say about it? See Stumbling Sal for yourself:

It doesn’t get better than that.