Ed Supe Kathy Hoffman proves too much is never enough

Hoffman’s ‘State of Education’ speech demands additional teacher’s salary increases, as she thumbs her nose at 20% raises

It was easy enough to miss — but Democrat Kathy Hoffman, Arizona’s newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, delivered her fledgling State of Education speech.

A committed leftist, her campaign of smoke and mirrors promised a sound education benefiting Arizona’s school children, many of whom are in ESL classes and not up to speed in the basics. Yet Hoffman regards sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including clear policies, support groups, and activities for LGBTQ students on the top of her list.  Her campaign website stated, “Welcoming family diversity promotes exclusivity and must be a priority for our state.”

Hoffman’s intransigent opposition to charter schools is abundantly clear, with these irrational words addressing her fears, “I do not support the expansion of ESA vouchers and will be voting NO on Prop 305 come November. If passed, Prop 305 would further defund our public schools. This is terrifying.”

The proposition was ultimately defeated by the public school teachers’ union activists* who couldn’t compete with the proliferation of excellent Charter Schools and want to deny parents choice in the education of their own children. While public school teachers went out on strike, none of the charter or parochial school teachers joined their Socialist-led parade.

Paid month’s long maternity and paternity leave is another of the policies Hoffman advocates, saying such plans would help retain teachers. Apparently working a part-time job, with lengthy holiday vacation days and summer’s off isn’t enough of an enticement.

Kathy Hoffman notes she “proudly voted to walk out” with her fellow #REDSforEd striking teachers who abandoned a reported 840,000 Arizona students for over a week in violation of their contractual agreements as they followed Socialist Pied Piper Noah Karvelis a 24-year-old hip hop music teacher and avowed Socialist. She says she was “inspired by unity within the movement.”

Lacking any leadership experience, Hoffman has spent more time as a student than as a teacher, having taught preschool for two years and two additional years as a years as a speech therapist.

After initially rejecting the outrageous demands for a 20% pay increase for their part-time jobs, Gov. Doug Ducey caved in to their threats while lying about the lack of a tax increase, using inventive language to deceive Arizona taxpayers.

We’ve been had…by politicians of both parties.

* Center for Responsive Politics

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Odd border comparisons underscore news dishonesty

“Mormon migration” was never illegal. LDS settlers were American citizens

The local newspaper is up to its trickery again. This one is so bizarre readers can be excused for wondering when the punch line was coming, thinking it was a gag —- as in funny story, not retch. April is months away, but this could have passed as the intro to an April Fools’ joke.

The Arizona Republic is simply reprising its old antics, but with a new twist. The difference between illegal aliens invading and Americans relocating is clear.

Reporter Dustin Gardiner begins his article about a proposed bell monument with these words:

Tens of thousands of Arizonans trace their roots in the state back to a mass migration of Mormon settlers, who made a harrowing journey from Utah over a century ago.

They walked hundreds of miles, through rugged desert and winding red-rock canyons. The most perilous portion of the journey came when they crossed the Colorado River, then a raging force without dams. At Lees Ferry, the only safe crossing between Utah and Arizona for hundreds of miles, they ferried or floated countless wagons and livestock across the untamed river.

They made the fraught journey in search of fertile farmland and new opportunity, directed by leader Brigham Young. Many had already fled religious persecution in the Midwestern United States. Today, the legacy of that migration can be seen throughout eastern and southern Arizona, where they established communities like Mesa, Gilbert, Safford and Snowflake.

It’s the sixth paragraph where the bell, being considered for a state monument, is described as being used at the Lee’s Ferry schoolhouse.

The obvious scheme is to entice readers to make the comparison to thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans caravanning from Central American through Mexico to breach the U.S. border, waving flags of their native countries and hurling rocks and bottles at ICE border agents as they stampede our border. Make no mistake, the magnet is birthright citizenship.

Drawing parallels between Mormon settlers and illegal aliens is the driving farce of this force — not a typo. The Mormons were Americans. There is a vast difference between invaders and Americans moving from one place to another. Facilitating moves within your own nation is how the Schoen family who founded the U-Haul trailer and truck rental empire became billionaires.

It’s easy to envision members of the open borders editorial board thinking this comparison was nothing short of sheer brilliance, especially on the heels of U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez’ (D-IL) sneering rant (brief video) comparing the birth of the Christ child to illegals, though he admittedly had his facts skewed. He then rudely walked out of the hearing before the response from U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

The AZ Republic, which inventively used the word “seekers” in place of the overused and erroneous “migrant,” in a recent front page headline, gets it wrong again.

Violent federal prisoners fast tracked to our cities via “reforms”

A Democrat-led contrivance, S. 3649 known as the“First Step Act,” touted as a bi-partisan criminal justice reform measure has passed the senate by a vote of 87-12.  Check out Arizona senator’s votes. This is the revised text of the 149-page bill. It now proceeds to the House.

Leftist members of congress who live in walled and gated communities, claim minorities are more frequently incarcerated for crimes, and S. 3649, a kid-glove solution to reduce recidivism is the answer to getting these good folks back among us.

When the far-left Washington Post falls into deep swoon mode heaping accolades on President Trump for this ineffectual response to rising crime rates, it should set the antenna of knowledgeable conservatives on high alert.

This laxity toward criminals is what former GOP House Majority Leader Tom Delay characterized as a “Hug A Thug” policy in 1994. Only the dates and players have changed.  The radical agenda remains the same. This inanity was pushed by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law in alliance with Illinois liberal Sen. Dick Durbin, who previously joined with Chuck Schumer and other radicals to push amnesty for illegals, as a member of John McCain and Jeff Flake’s ill-conceived Gang of Eight.

The legislation gives judges more discretion in sentencing offenders for “nonviolent crimes, particularly drug offenders.” Those who have personal experience dealing with drug users or sellers, whose targets are often teens, would be less likely to refer to them or their often deadly activities as “non-violent.”

Another warm and fuzzy aspect involves ensuring violent federal prisoners are incarcerated no more than 500 miles from home, making it easier for family to visit more frequently. Engaging in vicious criminal activity that results in federal prison sentences is for punishment, not reunions.  Expansion of home confinement rather than time in a cell is also in the mix.

Supervised early release of some minimum or low-risk prisoners who have earned credits by participating in programs to reduce recidivism —- setting up a risk-assessment system to determine whether an inmate is likely to commit more crimes when released and improved rehabilitation programs for former prisoners are among the more reasonable aspects of this otherwise questionable program, that ultimately releases more criminals into American neighborhoods.

There are no provisions in the bill to require the Bureau of Prisons to notify victims when a prisoner is released early or to track further arrests of ex-convicts.

In this National Review op-ed titled, “What’s Really in Congress’s Justice-Reform Bill,“ Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) makes his case for opposition to the measure, he calls “flawed legislation.” It’s well worth your time.

How will Ducey handle non-striking state workers seeking raises?

Sixteen state agencies* are reported to be “requesting” pay increases for their employees. Though merit based raises have provided some pay boosts, across-the-board pay hikes haven’t been given in nearly 20 years.

Unlike the left-wing, unionist public school teachers who abandoned 840,000 Arizona students as they walked off the job in the final weeks of last school year —- in violation of their contractual agreements —- the approximately 27,000 state employees have not followed a Socialist Pied Piper or made demands.

This randomly selected school calendar clearly shows the vacation days, half days for teacher planning and teacher collaboration, lengthy Spring break, and Spring holiday (once known as Easter), Winter break and Winter holiday (previously called Christmas) —- before being neutered by liberal educrats —- including months of summer vacation time.

State workers typically get two weeks of vacation and national holidays off. They work full days and don’t get paid time off to collaborate with co-workers.

Gov. Doug Ducey initially said he would not be held hostage to the teacher’s 20% salary increase demands, then quickly acquiesced. He should have emulated President Ronald Reagan (brief video) when the PATCO union air traffic controllers walked off the job in 1981. He ultimately fired 11,345 strikers who refused to return to work, and banned them from ever holding a federal job again.

Ducey appeased educrats again by putting a liberal Dem on the Arizona Board of Regents. This action came after they showed their gratitude with a unified take-down of Republicans during the Nov. 6 General Election.

*  Departments of Child Safety; Corrections; Economic Security; Health Services; Industrial Commission; Insurance; Liquor Licensing and Control; Public Safety; Real Estate; Registrar of Contractors; Revenue; School Facilities Board; State Parks and Trails; Transportation; Veterans Services; and Water Resources.

Higher education reaches its nadir*

Illegal invaders now charity recipients, courtesy of Berkeley

Gone are the days when a university degree was indicative of attaining a higher education. Nurtured in a curriculum of liberal indoctrination from the earliest grades, students are pawns in an ideological crusade. This appalling example from Edina, Minnesota is not an anomaly, but is reflective of teaching throughout the United States.

Is it any wonder that by the time the barely out of wet-diaper toddlerdom, kindergartners are propagandized, matriculating as brainwashed high school students, ultimately reaching institutions such as Berkeley or Princeton, they engage in full-throated lunacy?

The student government at the University of California, Berkeley, “voted to financially fund the migrant caravan in a resolution passed by the student senate,” as Breitbart reported. “US imperialism and white colonialism has been implemented in Central American countries,” said a teary-eyed student, adding that she would be ashamed to see anyone in the student senate vote against funding the migrant caravan. Once again students illiterate of history accuse anyone they disagree with as being “Nazis,” although there are no brutal labor camps with ovens specially constructed for humans or gas streaming from shower heads, killing men, women and children given bars of soap to make the victims more compliant. Janet Napolitano, formerly Arizona’s radically leftist governor and Obama’s appointee as a worthless Homeland Security chieftain, is now the president of the University of California system.

On the East coast, Princeton sophomore Noa Wollstein was so offended by the “toxic masculinity” expressed in the song, “Kiss the Girl,” she was moved to write to the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian to complain.  She declared the Disney song performed by an all-male a cappella group, the Princeton Tigertones, was misogynistic and dismissive of consent. In the cartoon film, The little Mermaid, it is sung by Sebastian a talking crab, urging him to kiss Ariel, the little mermaid.

“Remove the context of magic and mermaids,” Wollstein wrote, “and the lyrics blatantly encourage a man to try to make physical advances on a woman without her consent.”

FrontPage mag exposed, “Another week of leftist lunacy,” writing, “One worrying illustration of this comes from – none other than – the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) with, chapters at more than 500 universities and colleges throughout the U.S. According to Campus Reform, the AAUP is urging its members to combat legislative proposals meant for “the protection of free speech” on campus.”

Imagine that?

* That’s ‘rock bottom’ for those of you who graduated from an Ivy League school.

Sen. Sinema: AZ Republic applauds voting for plumbing over competence

Capable women have long impacted Arizona politics, with voters sending Isabella Greenway to Congress in 1932. Lorna Lockwood was the nation’s first female Chief Justice of a state Supreme Court in the 1960’s, Jewel Jordan was elected Maricopa County Sheriff in 1944.  Ana Frohmiller was elected State Auditor in 1926. Read more:

The front page of Sunday’s edition of the local newspaper is topped with a large photo of select past and current women elected to statewide office in Arizona. Centered among them and more prominent than the others in bold color — not muted or in the gray tones used for some, is Kyrsten Sinema their latest heroine, in a bared-shouldered dress. Sinema is the far left, newly elected U.S. Senator, the first woman in that role in the history of Arizona. 

Arizona has been in the forefront of electing women for the better part of the century, since our 1912 statehood. Countless women have served in the state legislature, including Polly Rosenbaum, a Democrat from Gila County, who was in the House of Representatives for 46 years (prior to term limits), until age 95, when she lost due to redistricting.  Republican Barry Goldwater lamented her defeat. Until her last day on the job, she was still taking the stairs rather than using the elevator.

We’ve had had a long list of female Arizona governors, including Rose Mofford, Jane Hull, Janet Napolitano, and Jan Brewer. Five women have held the office of Secretary of State, next in line of succession to the governor. The courts are filled with female judges. Arizona’s Supreme Court has been populated with women, including several who have been Chief Justice.

Lorna Lockwood is notable for being the first woman in the nation to become Chief Justice of a state Supreme Court — serving two terms in that role — after being elected in 1960. Lockwood was born in 1903 in the Arizona territory, passed the bar in 1925 and was a state Legislator and Superior Court Judge before ascending to the Arizona Supreme Court — paving the nearly identical career path Sandra O’Connor eventually took to the U.S. Supreme Court as the first female justice. SRAZ covered this history in 2012 complete with a photo of Justice Lockwood.

Arizona didn’t just fall off a repressive election train. In fact, back in 1944 Jewel Jordan was elected Maricopa County Sheriff. The state treasurer’s office was led by Carol Springer, elected in 1999. It is currently held by Eileen Klein and soon will be under the capable leadership of former state senator, Kimberly Yee.  However, before any of them where ever heard of, Anastasia “Ana” Frohmiller (1891-1971) was elected Coconino County Treasurer in the 1920’s. She became the first woman to serve as State Auditor, an office to which she was elected in 1926. She held that office until 1950 when she ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor against Republican Howard Pyle.

Karan English, Gabrielle Giffords, Ann Kirkpatrick, Martha McSally, Debbie Lesko and Sinema have all been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. But, Isabella Greenway (1886-1953) preceded them all as Arizona’s first female U.S. Representative. She was elected as Arizona’s sole at-large Representative to the 73rd Congress in 1932. She won reelection in 1934. Greenway Road and several schools are named in her honor.

Yet despite the fact that Arizona women have held elected leadership roles for decades, the Arizona Republic treats the election of Kyrsten Sinema — clearly not the one to brag about (links to a series of revealing posts) — as though electing women is an anomaly.

Elections should be based on ability, not on plumbing. Once again, the Arizona Republic reveals its foolish leftist bonding to political correctness, when Arizona has clearly not fallen in lockstep with that contrivance. Accomplished Arizona women have ably represented the state long before the word “bi-sexual,” Sinema’s chosen identifier, was ever heard of.

Watch almost jobless Jeff Flake audition for a CNN gig…

…as he runs interference for Islamist Invaders

Despite having to abandon his lifetime senate plans due to embarrassingly low 18 percent approval ratings, Jeff Flake still creates his own reality.

Interviewed at CNN’s ‘CITIZEN’ conference, Flake said President Trump’s tweet stating, “Unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” with the caravan of invaders headed toward the U.S. border is a “fear tactic.” When asked if he knew what Trump was talking about, Flake said, “No. That’s long been pretty much a canard and a fear tactic.”

A canard and fear tactic?  Hardly. We posted, “Hezbollah on our doorstep: Radical Muslims in border towns,” in 2011.

Here is the delusional Flake, (same video below) so consumed with Trump hatred, he Is unable to think clearly.

Interviewer Jake Tapper, who personifies the liberal media, unable to control his sputtering, referred to President Trump, “The fact checkers can’t keep up with the president these days, he’s saying so many things that aren’t true, that have no evidence behind them. The president constantly says things that are just not  true…they’re lies…it’s difficult to understand why he keeps doing this…on a political level or a psychological level?

Flake responds, “What is troubling is to look behind him and to see the reaction of people behind him.”

That’s most of us, folks. Tapper calls us, “the resistance,” then sympathetically notes, “How lonely it must be to be Jeff Flake.”

Republicrat Flake, bizarrely describing himself as a conservative, denies Democrats want open borders, though he was a member of the Gang of Eight. The group was a failed amnesty promoting scheme he and John McCain cobbled together with a quartet of the most liberal Democrats, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Robert Menendez, Michael Bennet and two other McCain sycophants, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

Tapper then prompts Flake with another inane question, saying, “I know it’s not your tendency to be immodest.” What are you proudest of in terms of accomplishments?”

Obviously Jake Tapper missed the self-aggrandizing, prone to pontificating to an empty senate chamber, Flake’s 2011 vanity ladened solo survivalist trip to a deserted island, taking only his camera and tripod.

Tapper reminds Flake that he previously described Trumpism as a fever in the Republican party. Flake responded, “It’s a long fever.”

Since he doesn’t want to risk infection, Flake, who speaks Afrikaans could always move back to the African nation of Namibia, where he worked as a registered foreign agent lobbying in D.C. on behalf of a uranium mining company with financial ties to Iran.

And Tapper? An obvious leftist, he once worked as campaign press secretary for Democrat congressional candidate Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, (D-PA) and later as her congressional press secretary. Her former husband, onetime Iowa Congressman Edward Mezvinsky, was convicted of fraud and spent five years in a federal penitentiary. The Mezvinky’s are the parents of Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Mark.

It’s a full circle.