Sunday, July 30, 2006

Our governor?

Last Wednesday's Citizen featured a bit of political analysis borrowed from USA Today on the relative ease with which female governors, such as Janet Napolitano, get re-elected.

To quote:

"Jeanne Shaheen, director of Harvard's Institute of Politics and a former three-term governor of New Hampshire, says female leaders tend to be "more consensus-building, more interested in getting input from other people and less interested in taking credit." She adds: "Women don't often have the need to be macho, to put it very bluntly."

Our Janet? Janet Napolitboro? The governor who took a macho stand just about for its own sake on the education corporate tax credit, and then only let it pass without her signature?

Friday, July 28, 2006

Will all law-enforcement policy be put to a plebiscite?

Imagine if there was a vote over whether or not local police should make jaywalkers a higher priority.

Something similar may be going on in Phoenix. According to the Tucson Citizen, a group called Protect Our City may have put an initiative on the ballot in Phoenix that will require the police and all city officials to aid in enforcing the flawed Federal immigration policy "to the full extent permissible by law."

"The full extent permissible by law" means one heck of a lot more than now. Going after people without the right visas--that's all "illegals" are--would be higher priority than rape, murder, or property crime. Police have opposed using local law enforcement to do Immigration and Naturalization Services' work because of the time and resources it would take to do so. Protect Our City would have it take up most of their time.

From whom are they protecting Phoenix, anyway? The construction worker, the seamstress, the student, and the nanny?

Want your local taxes to go towards bringing real criminals--that is, ones with victims--to justice? Vote down the initiative, also called Protect our City, this November.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Found a purpose for this...

Why the name change?

Having originally established this weblog as "Free Perspectives" to get politics off of my "friends and family" type Livejournal blog, I quickly lost interest.

The PCLP weblog gives a venue to write about local issues, state news or personal positions that I don't want people to think are the official Party line are at best marginally appropriate there. Unaffiliated with any political party, this space gives me and perhaps a few others freedom to take any position whatsoever on any matter concerning what should be the Goldwater State.

Given this narrowing of focus, from "anything" to "Arizona", the name change is in order.