Democratic Caucus staff members in the Senate have intimidated Senator Bee into stacking the Senate Ethics Committee with members that will attend the hearing to persecute Senator Jack Harper for referring the Marriage Amendment to the ballot.  Yesterday, the committee members were Democrats, Arzberger, Landrum-Taylor, and Republicans Leff, Blendu, and Tibshraeny.  Tibshraeny is a wildcard, [...]

There will be eleven initiatives on this year's ballot and perhaps the most controversial will be the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. That's the proposal to eliminate affirmative action in Arizona. I think most people think that the disadvantaged should get... Greg Patterson

Associated Press reports the results of a national survey, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center, showing that 66 percent of Hispanic registered voters support Democrat Barack Obama, compared to 23 percent for Republican John McCain. The other 11 percent were undecided.

Obama’s big lead among Hispanic voters includes support from the vast majority of those who had voted for rival Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

Obama is even leading in fundraising in Arizona.

So this is what McCain threw Conservative Republicans under the bus for?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 24, 2008 Contact:  Andrew Compton, Communications Director, 480.298.3421 Adam Armer, Candidate for AZ State Representative Endorsed by District 22 Representative Eddie Farnsworth Mesa, AZ – Adam Armer, a candidate for Arizona Representative has been endorsed by current Republican Representative Eddie Farnsworth of Gilbert. Armer was also recently endorsed by Representative Andy Biggs. He is proud [...]

     The LD 30 Republican Clean Elections debate will take pace tonight starting at 7:00 pm. The location is the Pima County Community College Board Room at 4905 E. Broadway. That is the north side of Broadway just behind the TGI Friday restaurant. Plenty of free parking and ample seating inside.

Just days after taking brick bats for his questionable endorsement of a five-day Republican running in a district legislative race, it turns out Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker has much more serious issues to deal with.

Today’s Arizona Republic, which often features Parker in the Sunday Viewpoints section, reveals that that Parker submitted misleading information in order to qualify his diversity oriented business, VBP Group, LLC, for certification through a government agency. Based on his falsified filing, Parker received a contract worth $1.2 million dollars from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The contract paid VBP Group to coach small businesses on how to apply for government contracts.

The SBA’s Office of the Inspector General, an independent arm that investigates claims of fraud and abuse within the federal agency, has released the complete report. The report is based on findings of an investigation into VBP Group’s 8(a) certification that the Office of the Inspector General conducted from Feb. 11 to June 2.

In addition to placing blame on Parker, the Office of the Inspector General also criticized the SBA for not conducting a thorough review of the documents he submitted. Parker, who was recently appointed Mayor of Paradise Valley, the affluent community where he resides, applied for certification through the SBA’s 8(a) program for disadvantaged businesses in February 2006.

Disadvantaged? Michael Stamler, a spokesman for the SBA in Washington, D.C., wrote in an e-mail that the agency has already taken “aggressive steps” to terminate VBP Group’s 8(a) certification and cancel the company’s contract to administer the 7(j) program. The agency has also started to “put in place stronger oversight procedures and training to see that something like this doesn’t happen again,” he wrote.

Following the four month investigation into Parker’s false reporting, the SBA started “debarment” procedures, which would prohibit Parker from obtaining other federal contracts.

“I went through pains . . . to sit down with the SBA even before I submitted the application and to ask them page by page, ‘Is this accurate?’” he said.

It would appear that the accuracy of the filing is Parker’s responsibility to authenticate, rather than the government agency to which he was applying.   Parker, who is on a family vacation in New Zealand, has retained former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton as his lawyer.

Ken Blackwell talks about one of the most important elements of quality education: the family.

The Associated Press reports on this disturbing ruling.

-Gayle Plato-Besley No Child was Left Behind, but bipartisan debate was thrown under the bus. On June 26,  Republican representative, Rich Crandall of Mesa, shoved in AIMS legislation, HB2011, during the education budget voting.  Maybe the children aren’t left behind but they are shoved to the side as the state representatives play hide and go seek.   Democrat [...]

The Freedom of Choice Act would overturn every pro-life law on the books and would basically enshrine the Roe vs. Wade decision into federal law.  Our friend Tom McClusky at the Family Research Council has prepared a paper on the Freedom of Choice Act which explains the effects it would have and reveals how the major presidential candidates stand on its passage.

From U.S. News and World Report

Allow me to geek out for a second here...

The Patent Office is sending out signals that it will not honor and will in fact invalidate software patents from here on out.

In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”

This is really, really big news, as it's a major shift in Patent Office policy. Before this, if you wanted to patent, say, the very idea of a World Wide Web, a database or a spreadsheet, you could, but what you were patenting is, in essence, a very long mathematical equation. This led to the creation of the "patent troll"; people and/or organizations whose livelihood was solely based on suing other corporations for all manner of alleged patent infringements.

Now you can't. Now you have to prove that your patent is tied to something physical and tangible, not just a concept. This will bring about new innovations from the IT industry, as the worries that someone hunkered down in a basement somewhere will go after your new product with a questionable software patent is now gone forever.

Now, on to copyright law!

 I received the below press release from the Wilderness Society today, though I don't know how I got on their misinformation SPAM list.   The Wilderness Society is spamming Americans trying to establish that this one small poll is indicative of the nation as a whole, labeling the answers under the guise of "the public believes." The poll was taken of 821 "Americans" who were so lonely they needed someone to talk to.  

Even worse than that, the poll fails to ask the obvious questions such as would those being polled be for drilling if drilling could be done safely and protect wildlife and beautiful natural environments, as has been done for decades.   It also failed to ask if those polled were OK with drilling if they thought the price of gas would cease going up.  It also failed to ask if those being polled agreed with the ban on oil drilling in areas where China and Venezuela are drilling without the environmental safety concerns that would be used by US companies.  In other words, are those being polled OK with those countries taking oil off our shorelines while we Americans cannot.

These type of bogus polls only hurt the cause of protecting the environment because they show a zero tolerance policy by environmental groups for anything that could be in the public's economic interest.  They are extremist, plane and simple, and lead to people believing there is no middle ground, which isn't the case.  The fact is that we can drill and protect the environment.  It's been done for decades, can be done on a much broader scale, and could help our economy.  Groups such as The Wilderness Society, though, are so left-wing in their beliefs that they can't understand reason.  It's a shame, because some of those groups used to do some real good in the world before they themselves got lost in the wilderness.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 24, 2008

CONTACTS:  Kathy Westra, The Wilderness Society, (202) 429-2642 or kathy_westra@tws.org

                        Cindy Shogan, Alaska Wilderness League, (202) 544-5205 or cindy@alaskawild.org

 

Americans  Don’t Believe Bush, Industry Claims on Gas Prices, Poll Shows

Majority Says New Drilling Would Enrich Oil Companies Rather than Benefit Consumers,

and 76 Percent Support New Technology Development Over Drilling

 

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />

Washington

,

DC

—The American public is not buying the arguments of President Bush and the oil industry that new drilling will lower gas prices, a new poll finds. Despite a well-funded campaign to convince lawmakers to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in

Alaska

and the offshore waters of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling, and to allow new oil shale projects in the Rocky Mountain West, a majority (54%) of Americans do not see more drilling as a solution to high gas prices. Instead, the public overwhelmingly believes (76% to 19%) that policymakers should focus on investing in new energy technologies including renewable fuels and more efficient vehicles rather than expanding exploration and drilling for more oil. These findings were reported in a national poll conducted over the past week by Belden Russonello and Stewart, and released today.

 A significant majority of Americans (63%) said that the President’s proposal to open up public lands to oil and gas drilling is “more likely to enrich oil companies than to lower gas prices for American consumers.” A substantial majority (66%) said that “the small percentage of public lands still protected from oil drilling should remain off limits because they are valuable natural resources that cannot be replaced.”

When asked the question, “Do you think that allowing oil companies to drill in public lands and offshore areas that are currently off limits to drilling will result in lower gas prices for American consumers or not?”, 54% of poll respondents said they did not believe more drilling would lower gas prices. Although Americans were initially divided on a general question of opening protected public lands and offshore areas to drilling, with a slight majority (53%) in favor, and 41% opposed, the poll found that support for drilling weakened significantly when those polled were presented with other energy policy options. When asked the question: “Looking to the future, which one of the following do you think should be a more important priority for government: Investing in new energy technology including renewable fuels and more efficient automobiles, or expanding exploration and drilling for more oil?”, more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents favored new technology and renewables, and only a small number (19%) favored expanded oil drilling.

 ###

The poll, conducted by

Washington

,

D.C.

, research firm Belden Russonello & Stewart, was a nationally representative telephone survey of 821 adults between July 16 and 20, 2008. The margin of sampling error is

± 3.5 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. A copy of the complete survey is attached.

Drew F. Bush

Communications Associate

The Wilderness Society

drew_bush@tws.org

Phone: (202)-429-7441

Fax: (202)-429-3945

The Wilderness Society's mission is to protect wilderness

and inspire Americans to care for our wild places.

JP race offers voters clear choice

The Sonoran News has a masterful piece on the race for Justice of the Peace in the newly constructed Desert Ridge Justice of the Peace Court. The Northeast Regional Court Center at 40th Street and Union Hills Drive will serve portions of legislative districts 6, 7 and 8.

Investigative reporter Linda Bentley does a comparison of two candidates vying for the position, tagging it with this descriptive line:

JP candidates have logged plenty of hours in court, one as a lawyer, one as a defendant.

Paul Henderson brings a wide array of legal experience and vitality to the post. He has also won the endorsement of the PAChyderm Coalition. Many knowledgeable voters regard the thought of a scalawag such as Clancy Jayne, a man simply in need of gainful employment, wearing a judicial robe, as more than disturbing.

 William (Bill) Ponath, a lawyer, is also a candidate for the JP seat. 

The complete article is available here.

Tucson Weekly’s Scramblewatch ‘08 and Blob for Arizona have been going crazy with excitement because they finally got their photo of the President and Senator Tim Bee. What these two blogs do not realize is that they have the unofficial version of the picture. Because of an inside connection to the party we were able [...]

On Wednesday, Governor Napolitano used her weekly press conference to blast the Majority Rule initiative. That's the proposal to change the Constitution so that a majority of the electorate has to approve tax increases. Under the current system, if half... Greg Patterson

Duh.

Two State Senators filed an ethics complaint against state Senator Jack Harper. There was pretty wide coverage when the complaint was filed but very little news about Senator Harper’s response. The Arizona Capital Times has published a full story on Harper’s side of the event. It is paid subscription site so we will not link [...]

     In February and March we covered the false hysteria that the left puts forward over lake levels. Yes we live in an arid desert climate but there are these things called rain and snow pack. Yesterday the Phoenix Business Journal reported that several Salt River Project administered lakes are filled to capacity. Another doom [...]

Now, can we please shrink this to fit into a light pickup truck?

Look, I love my Civic Hybrid. It's a great little car, and I love how it sips gas and allows me to drive in the carpool lanes at rush hour.

But it is, after all, a car, and I'm a small pickup truck kind of guy, especially Nissan trucks. If/when Nissan comes out with a hybrid Frontier, I'll be first in line to get one.