Tag: arizona

Vexing Vax Performance Puzzles

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
4213
 

justice and COVID-19Bloomberg is hardly right-wing conspiracy central, nor is it a Hollyweird lefty anti-vax, anti-fluoride media organ. So, their recent straight reporting article on the comparative efficacy of natural versus vaccine-induced COVID-19 immunity against the Delta variant is a noteworthy from the leftist scientism party line. Bloomberg reports on a very large sample study of the Israeli population, and commendably links directly to the medRxiv paper.

While not conclusive, this study reinforces a century or more of human experience and underlines the abject failure of every single Republican executive, from your favorite governor to President Trump and Vice President Pence, to compel truth-telling in public health bureaucracy web graphics. From Day 1, we should have seen a steadily increasing number of Americans with naturally acquired immunity, eventually joined by a faster-growing number of Americans with vaccine-induced immunity. The first governor to force this truth into the open will be the prohibitive favorite for presidential nomination in 2024.

medRxiv is “the preprint server for health services.” All papers, and the web portal, bear the proper notice:

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Desert Rains

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
23
 

DesertRainThis evening, God picked up the blue bowl of the desert sky and gently set it upside down, the pale orange inside glowing faintly overhead. Rain drizzled gently, steadily from the pale orange bowl high overhead.

The rain moved quietly across the desert valley floor. No great gusts of wind, bright flashes of lightening, or cracks of thunder heralded the soft rain, that gently settled the dust and soaked slowly into the hard-packed desert floor, gradually forming puddles just deep enough to dampen a walker’s sneaker-clad feet. Mind you, the wise desert dwellers deployed a compact umbrella or donned a rain-resistant poncho, and kept a weather eye out for drivers peering through windshields poorly cleared by seldom used wipers in poor repair. What a perfect evening for soaking in the scent and sound of gentle desert rains.

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Lee’s Ferry

tigerlily
tigerlily
146
 

Lee’s Ferry

It’s not much more than a small dot on a map; but, despite that Lee’s Ferry has had an outsized import over the years. And, where and what is Lee’s Ferry you may ask? The where is on the Colorado River about 9 miles south of the Utah- Arizona border and, as later would be determined, also as good a boundary as any between the river’s upper and lower basins.  The what is the only location along the river between the small hamlet of Hite, Utah (now submerged under Lake Powell) and Black Canyon (the site of Hoover Dam), a distance of over 450 miles at which it is possible to access and cross the Colorado River with relative ease. Otherwise, the rest of the river between these two points had steep canyon walls making access to and crossing of the river difficult if not impossible, while the Lee’s Ferry area had gentle slopes that could easily be traversed.

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Member Post

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
87121
 

The summer monsoon rains finally broke through the heat shield in the Valley of the Sun Thursday evening, July 22. Until now we had rain on the hilltops, rain on the trees, but not on the valley. The monsoon rains bring with them the usual warnings about flash flooding and the stupid motorist law. When […]
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Blake Masters for Senate in Arizona

Titus Techera
Titus Techera
348
 

So here’s a young man running for an Arizona Senate seat in 2022. Were he to win, that would help get the GOP back in the majority, if nevertheless in opposition. His name is Blake Masters. He runs Thiel Capital for Peter Thiel. Masters is a populist running on two issues: The border wall and the restoration of the middle class. His idea, which has made him the enemy of all liberals, most of America’s elite, is that a family should be able to do alright on one income. I dunno the guy personally, we are no closer than what are called Twitter mutuals, but I’m writing to get you to support him. His politics is like J.D. Vance’s and I’m for that guy, too. I think with such senators, the GOP will finally treat its electorate with respect & take America’s troubles seriously. Once their fellow Americans get them elected, these men are very likely to retire after two terms or so. You will get public spirit instead of dooming the country to the incumbency of vaguely polished mediocrities. Do everything you can, friends!

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Member Post

Kelly D Johnston
Kelly D Johnston
57110
 

Maybe We Should Ask Native-Born High School Seniors to Take the Oath of Citizenship Along With the Naturalization Test Innumerable events and venues in honor of our Independence Day dot our family’s history. When deciding where today we should commemorate America’s true birthday (yes, 1776, not 1619), we settled on George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Kudos to […]
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Three Martini Lunch

Arizona Election Laws Stand, SCOTUS Protects Donor Privacy, & Former Staff Bash VP Harris

01
Hosted by Jim Geraghty
With guest Chad Benson

Jim and guest host applaud SCOTUS for upholding an Arizona election law that is similar to Georgia’s election integrity laws which dooms Democrats’ hopes of overturning them. They give another round of applause to SCOTUS for protecting donor privacy, overturning a California law which forces nonprofits to disclosing donor information. Finally, they giggle at former staff members’ complaints of mistreatment from VP Harris which seem to be a little too critical.

 

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The Platinum Rule

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
198
 

The Golden Rule, “Whoever has the gold makes the rule,” has turned into the Platinum Rule: “He who has the government’s American Excess Platinum Card makes the rules.” Because state politicians lack the power to spend significantly in excess of annual revenues, thanks to state constitutional balanced budget provisions, they turn to Uncle Sugar. The first taste may be free, but then come the demands. This bipartisan political dynamic has pernicious effects on the constitutional balance between states and the federal government. nationalizing much of our policy, right down to local government and so right down to where you live.

But wait, we hear all the time about states in debt, what is this state constitutional limit talk?

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CEOs Whiff on Election Integrity

Tom Patterson
Tom Patterson
145
 

Members of the Public Policy Committee of Greater Phoenix Leadership recently endorsed an editorial titled “Disenfranchising Voters is Not Election Reform.”

“As an organization of CEOs at the helm of hundreds of thousands of employees in Arizona,” they felt it their public duty to warn of efforts in the legislature not only “undermining our carefully crafted voting system” but also “actually attempting to suppress the votes of Arizonans.”

They were especially incensed by the “stringent new identification requirements for those voting by mail” and the “purge of voters from the Early Voting List.” They grouped these bills with other less important measures, then claimed that all of them had “one thing in common: making it more difficult for Arizonans to vote.”

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Member Post

Kelly D Johnston
Kelly D Johnston
67184
 

One of the more distasteful aspects of the 2020 election was local election boards accepting substantial private donations for “official” election operations. My now-former home of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, was one, accepting a $2.2 million private donation to fund the placement of 32 dropboxes and to promote voting by mail, on a narrow 2-1 vote by […]
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Arizonans Are Revolting

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
2619
 

Filling the restaurants and small venues in the beautiful outdoor weather. While Lord Governor Ducey talked out both sides of his mouth*, desperately trying to split the difference between Abbott/Desantis and Cuomo/Newsom, the bikers rolled back into downtown Mesa for bike night without permission or Mesa city hall control. Live music from an earlier rebellious era filled Main Street, punctuated by the sound of more Harleys rolling in. It was the sound of freedom.

Beyond the biker crowd, people jammed into every surviving eatery and watering hole, including new ones optimistically opened by small, true entrepreneurs. For the first time in nearly a year, you had to search for parking on a Friday night.

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We Are in a War for our Constitutional Republic in Every State

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
3118
 

Red Green AZ Jump PointArizona is a swing state that has swung hard left in key offices and will likely go entirely woke if Arizonans do not fully mobilize the working class against the real upper class. We must do so in every state for the sake of ourselves, the rising generations, and our constitutional republic. We are late in the game, as the Arizona Department of Education has already shown.

Before you reflexively roll out the usual line about “conservative” and how “class” is a leftist concept, read this excerpt from “A Modest Proposal for Republicans,” then go read the whole article after this post.

Yeah, yeah, “class” sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you’re supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn’t a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You’re already doing class warfare, you’re just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words “class” and “classism”.

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Member Post

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
62
 

2021 marks the 150th anniversary of the Congressional Medal of Honor (MOH). Over time, the Medal of Honor changed in its meaning, moving from the only United States military award to America’s most prestigious military award. To accommodate degrees of recognition, for accomplishment or merit, Congress and the military services added a variety of medals, […]
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Member Post

Clifford A. Brown
Clifford A. Brown
1111
 

It has been a wonderfully grey winter week in Arizona. We have been waiting for rain for the better part of a year this time, with almost no summer rains. True the rains have been relatively light in the valleys, but several inches of snow have fallen in the Arizona high country. A few nights […]
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Member Post

MartinKnight
MartinKnight
50
 

Two disclaimers; first of all, I am not a lawyer. Second is that I have learned to never assume that any politician is some super-genius executing a plan above my capacity to discern or comprehend. I watched too many people fool themselves with the idea that George W. Bush’s politically disastrous silences were part of […]
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Arizona Voters Pass Billion-Dollar Tax Hike; Lawyers Say ‘Not so Fast’

Jon Gabriel, Ed.
Jon Gabriel, Ed.
150
 

Arizona has been a welcoming environment for voter-led initiatives. If you produced enough signatures, you could get damn near anything on the ballot. The statehouse tightened up the requirements after 2006, which featured 19 propositions — some of which contradicted each other.

This year, there were only two: legalizing weed and hiking taxes on the wealthy for education. (This, after the state increased teacher pay by a whopping 20 percent.) Both measures passed but in Arizona, that just means the lawsuits begin.

First out of the gate is the Goldwater Institute, a limited-government nonprofit with a strong track record of holding tax-and-spenders’ feet to the fire. They’re taking on the education tax hikes … because they are utterly unconstitutional.

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ToryWarWriter
ToryWarWriter
6018
 

Dear National Review Editors, Please cancel my subscription. I can’t believe I have been a supporter, reader and now buyer of your product when you conduct such shoddy, incompetent and disgusting reporting as you have done since the USA election of November 3rd, 2020. Do you not know who your customers are?!?! Preview Open
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Arizona Voters Foolishly Choose New Taxes

Tom Patterson
Tom Patterson
170
 

Arizona voters have some serious ‘splaining to do about the passage of Prop. 208, which raised education funds by boosting income tax rates up to 98% for high-income filers. How could this have happened?

Arizona schools have already received over $1 billion in new sustainable monies over recent years, with more coming. More importantly, Arizona public schools, without receiving much credit, have become a remarkable success story.

Academic achievement gains for minority students are among the highest in the nation.  Arizona charter schools excel in competitive rankings.

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