A frequent contributor of opinion columns in Arizona and other national publications, Coughlin is an accomplished writer and speaker on national and Arizona political topics; including illegal immigration, campaign finance, infrastructure, education and campaign strategy.

Coughlin was asked to serve by then-Secretary of State Jan Brewer as the Chairman of her Transition Team when she became Governor in 2009. As the Transition Team Chairman, Coughlin assembled a diverse team of business and community leaders who recommended to the Governor her executive management team, senior policy positions, cabinet recommendations and coordinated her swearing in ceremonies. Coughlin chaired the search committee which recommended the succession of Secretary of State Ken Bennett into the role left vacant by Brewer’s ascension to the office of Governor.

As the President of Highground, Inc., Coughlin has managed hundreds of statewide and local elections lobbied on behalf of numerous clients and played key roles in several public affairs campaigns including: the development of a new stadium for the Fiesta Bowl and the Arizona Cardinals; the extension of Maricopa County’s ½ cent sales tax for transportation; the creation and funding of the Maricopa Integrated Health Care District in Maricopa County; and the passage of Proposition 100, the temporary one-cent sales tax increase passed by 64% of Arizona voters to stabilize the State’s budget picture in 2010. Most recently, the firm has been retained to ensure the passage of a Mesa ballot proposition in support of a new Spring Training home for the Chicago Cubs.

If you’ve ever watched experienced and successful political consultants in action, you know one thing about them immediately: The message is everything and every word is carefully chosen. So when Chuck Coughlin gay-baited Terry Goddard in response to queries about Jan Brewer’s health, know that he did it absolutely 100% deliberately.

UPDATE: I posted a comment to HighGround’s blog post where he links to the AZSCAM testimony. I said that Coughlin should be ashamed of himself. They deleted it.

The reason? It’s simple. The Republicans’ message won’t stand up to scrutiny. They prefer the hit-and-run sound bite and the 30 second ad to the kind of honest discussion that lets voters make informed decisions.

Sure, plain cowardice plays a big role in this but their evasions also reek with a palpable stench of arrogant entitlement.

Today’s editorial was basically the Republic repeating Arizona GOP talking points about unions and Democrats. I suppose they didn’t want it to be too obvious so they added a lugubrious dose of concern trolling about low wage workers and Dem electoral prospects.

Low-paid workers, many of them immigrants, would lose their jobs in the hotels, resorts and convention facilities most immediately harmed by a boycott. The organizers deemed the job losses worth it in service of the mission. However inconvenient, they were expendable.

Now, the boycott is producing still more unintended victims. Other expendables.

Some of Arizona’s top Democratic political aspirants, all of them opposed to an economic boycott of their state from the very beginning, are being tarred in campaign ads for their association with the unions flogging the boycott, notably the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Republican Gov. Jan Brewer is running ads tying her Democratic opponent, Attorney General Terry Goddard, to the unions, which have contributed to Goddard’s campaign.

I had no idea they cared so much!

The state has to provide a response to the brief by October 21st. I expect that Terry Goddard will commit to defending the law vigorously just as he did SB1070. And Terry should insist that the Brewer administration commit to fighting forcefully for employer sanctions despite the fact that Jan Brewer enjoys the endorsement of staunch opponents of the Legal Arizona Workers Act such as the Arizona Chamber of Commerce (which has joined a lawsuit against it).

While we’re at it, Jan should go ahead and proactively renounce the AZ Chamber’s endorsement because they’re against employer sanctions. As should every other pro-SB1070 and (nominally) pro-employer sanctions Republican candidate. It’s pretty outrageous for politicians who claim to be against illegal immigration to accept endorsements from business organizations that want to shield illegal employers from accountability. Don’t you agree?

If Brewer agreed to another debate it immediately sets up the IOKIYAR Lowered Expectations Mulligan. You know what I’m talking about: When a Republican faceplants in a debate, because he/she is a Republican everyone decides to vastly lower the expectations in the next debate. It happened with GWB in the 2004 Presidential debates. Shoot, Palin got it right off the bat for her debate with Biden in 2008 due to her already demonstrated poor elocution and lack of knowledge of, well, anything. Under the lowered expectations rule all the Republican has to do is not fumble too badly at the debate and the punditocracy will swoon before such a valiant attempt at mediocrity. (Democratic politicians don’t benefit from mulligans or lowered expectations, you understand. One flub and you never live it down. I chalk it up to people having higher expectations of us.)

The low bar for a future Jan Brewer debate has broken a new record for the IOKIYAR Reduced Expectations Mulligan. Terry will win every debate with Jan on the technical merits because he knows what he’s talking about and she’s clueless but Jan will “win” the next one no matter how deplorably she actually does. Her handlers will double down on prepping her and if she burbles out the talking points in anything resembling the English language, there will be swooning en masse.

Which makes you wonder why Brewer’s handlers aren’t jumping at the chance for another debate.

On edit: “There but for the grace of God, I have did.” QED

Next up, I’ve been asked to encourage y’all to contact Jan Brewer to demand that she participate in debates with Terry Goddard. He wants to do 6 and she intends only to do the Clean Elections one, and you know she’d try to wriggle out of that one if her participation weren’t mandatory. Phone number is 602-542-4331 and you can contact her via email here.

Here’s what I’m sending:

Dear Governor Brewer,

Governor of Arizona is an incredibly important responsibility and this state has problems far too numerous and pressing for you to be avoiding debates with your opponent. If you have time to be interviewed by national cable news networks then you have time to face Attorney General Goddard and let voters know where you stand and how you plan to address issues ranging from education to the economy to public safety.

Okay. Fine. Leave aside the other issues, such as human error at the Kingman facility and the unholy alliance of the private prison industry, the Brewer administration, and Republican legislators. Look at Arizona’s inmate classification directive. You can find it in a 23 page pdf right on the AZ Dept. of Corrections website. Something stands out right away, doesn’t it? I’ve helpfully circled it for you.

Pop Quiz: Who was the Governor of Arizona on February 25, 2010?

I didn’t even know about the date of the order until Terry Goddard brought it up in his rousing speech at the AZ Democratic Party State Committee meeting yesterday. Brewer owns this – lock, stock, and Inmate Classification order. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Goddard Beefs Up Security with Border Crime Prosecution Team

PHOENIX — Attorney General Terry Goddard announced today a new Border Crime Prosecution Team, based in Tucson, which will investigate and prosecute the smuggling of weapons, humans, drugs and money across the border by the Mexican cartels.

Funding for this prosecutorial team will come from the $94 million money laundering settlement that Goddard secured from Western Union in February.

“We’re doing our part in Arizona to beef up the prosecution of border crime,” said Attorney General Goddard. “However, we can’t do it alone. It is time for the Federal government to step up more aggressively and do their part.”

Goddard has led the fight against border crime committed by drug- and human-smuggling cartels. His groundbreaking work in this area has included:

• Targeting wire transfers of cartel profits
• Seizure of tens of millions in cartel assets
• Major prosecutions of human and drug smuggling rings
• Training of over 400 Mexican prosecutors in an effort to help them be more successful in putting cartel members behind bars in Mexico.
• Creation of the Southwest Border Alliance to better coordinate efforts of local, state and federal law enforcement throughout the entire Southwest border in attacking the criminal cartels.

Today’s announcement is the latest major step in the Attorney General’s ongoing fight against border crime.

Going after drug cartel money and drug and human and weapons smugglers too?? Say, that looks like competence! A welcome contrast to what we’ve seeing on the news lately.

We now return you to the Jan Brewer/Russell Pearce immigration political-posture-a-thon currently in progress.

Although the maintenance-of-effort requirement has been part of the legislation since Dec. 19, Brewer apparently did not become aware of this funding issue until Monday, when she was contacted by a Democratic state representative.

One of the things I like about the health care bill is the Medicaid expansion. Raising the eligibility to 133% federal poverty level means that a lot more people, including a lot of childless adults who tend to fall through the cracks, will get health care. But Brewer and the Governors and AGs of 13 other states are suing to get out of the maintenance-of-effort requirement, using a constitutional challenge over the mandate as cover.

As I’ve noted here before, most public assistance programs are really subsidies to low wage employers. Conservatives rail against them as “welfare”, seemingly unaware that the majority of recipients of Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, free and reduced school lunches for their children, etc., work in poorly paid jobs with no benefits. Despite the fact that welfare was reformed under President Clinton such that no one gets to luxuriate on the dole for very long, the notion that millions of layabouts are getting generous handouts persists in the minds of conservatives.

Which may explain why Republican legislators and Governor Brewer are so sanguine about cutting thousands of low income Arizonans off of health care and foreclosing the possibility of billions of federal funds to cover more people in our state. Most elected Republicans in AZ appear to be noveau riche movement conservatives. Even if they run businesses I suspect the whole “Medicaid = employees or contractors getting health care that I don’t have to pay for” equation doesn’t compute with them. I honestly believe they think that cutting thousands of people off of AHCCCS will only affect non-working people and won’t hurt businesses at all.

With that in mind, I have to ask, where is the business community on this?