Commentary
Pursuing power with propaganda: The ties that bind Brnovich and Fox News
Maybe Mark Brnovich should get a job hosting a show on Fox News. It’s clear that Arizona’s former attorney general and the propaganda channel’s premier hosts share the same instinct for lying to their followers about invented election fraud claims for purely selfish reasons. On Wednesday, the world learned that Brnovich both hid the results […]
Katie Hobbs should try to veto her way to a Democratic legislative majority
Seven weeks into her tenure as governor, Katie Hobbs is battling with the GOP-led legislature at every turn, and it seems unlikely that she’ll be able to accomplish much, if anything for the foreseeable future. She has proposed a budget with dead-on-arrival components that skewer GOP sacred cows, vetoed Republicans’ political theater budget, openly dismissed […]
Biden’s infrastructure and inflation reduction laws are transforming the boilermaker trade
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has created 100,000 clean energy jobs, and my profession will be a growing part of that workforce. As a third-generation boilermaker, the profession runs in my blood. My grandfather moved to Tucson in 1948 to help build the Hughes Missile site. My father worked in copper mines and power plants all over […]
The death penalty does nothing to keep us safe. Let’s end it now.
I was a 35-year-old military veteran working for the U.S. Postal Service in Phoenix when my life was turned upside down. I was arrested and charged for a crime I knew nothing about. My trial only lasted four days and the jury convicted me after deliberating for only four hours. A Maricopa County judge sentenced […]
White nationalism gets a hearing in the Republican House
Xenophobia is the original offense of the Trump era. The former president launched his campaign in 2015 by saying of Mexican migrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” It was a gross mischaracterization of facts, but the nativist message resonated with a Republican base primed by far-right media figures to despise non-white immigrants. […]
Biden may be old, but don’t underestimate his political stamina
A State of Union address is a weird animal. As a writer, I find it to be an extremely clumsy rhetorical device. For one thing, it’s not easy for a president to keep people glued to a screen for an 80-minute speech without a bathroom or commercial break, no matter how many people draped in […]
LGBTQ kids need protection from bullies and violence, not adults targeting and bullying them too
I grew up in a struggling, post-industrial Ohio town in the 1990s where ignorance and intolerance often reigned. I stood up to bullies my whole life, and when put under physical threat, I fought them. No bully can intimidate me, and so even though I was definitely a weird kid, I was also funnier, smarter, […]
So far away, so close to home: International Holocaust Remembrance Day
On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz camp complex in occupied Poland. What the Soviet liberators found was grim enough, but most Auschwitz prisoners still alive in 1945 had already been forced by the Nazis on death marches weeks earlier. An estimated 60,000 of them were brutally driven westward to other camps. Whoever […]
Fear and loathing in the Arizona legislature
The Republicans who run our state legislature are terrified. They’re terrified that their policy proposals are deeply unpopular. Terrified of facing even a tiny bit of accountability. Terrified of anyone knowing what they’re doing or who they’re talking to. They’re terrified of being forced to work with Democrats. Terrified of compromising even a little bit […]
Ruben Gallego seizes the high ground in the Arizona Senate race, while Kyrsten Sinema is sinking fast
U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego is a Marine Corps combat veteran and it shows, as he guns the engine on his U.S. Senate campaign. He is reading the terrain well, surrounding himself with good commanders and has just seized the high ground. Gallego entered the race for the U.S. Senate race in Arizona and immediately outmaneuvered independent […]
Environmental racism in Arizona, fueled by the presence of military bases
As a global phenomenon, environmental racism occurs when communities of color are disproportionately impacted by toxic exposure because of the neighborhoods they live in. Due to factors such as the inaccessibility of affordable rent or land, historical racism, and lack of power to fight corporations, Black, Latino and Indigenous people are usually forced to inhabit […]
Katie Hobbs may not speak all that loudly, but she has a lot to say
Stop me if you’ve heard this, but Gov. Katie Hobbs is not exactly known for her oratorical skills. She’s no MLK, Jr., or Barack Obama, or, thankfully, Kari Lake, who spent decades behind a mic at the local Fox affiliate honing her speaking chops before taking Hobbs on as the GOP nominee in November. But […]