After more than two decades in public office Ann Day has announced she is not running when her term is up in 2012. In addition to serving on the Pima County Board of Supervisors, Day spent a decade in the Arizona Legislature.
Day grew up on a cattle ranch in Southern Arizona along with her brother Alan and her sister, retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' voted Monday to raise the debt ceiling, surprising many of her colleagues by appearing on the House floor for the vote.
She's been out of the public eye except for a few occasions since she was shot through the head at a constituent event Jan. 8. Monday's vote was her first vote since the shooting. But Monday she was front and center on C-SPAN coverage of the vote, footage many other networks picked up, showing her greeting her colleagues and thanking them for their support.
Giffords sent this message on Twitter before the vote: "The #Capitol looks beautiful and I am honored to be at work tonight."
Giffords managed her own Twitter feed before the shooting, and the last tweet that she clearly wrote herself came Jan. 8. That morning, she wrote, "My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now. Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later."
It was minutes later at that event a gunman shot Giffords and 18 others. Six died from their wounds.
Since then, her account has been a steady stream of messages about her congressional office's activity, but they've been written and signed by staffers.
By his own admission, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's strength is not the economy. Yet he discusses it in a way that makes one think he is expert in the field.
Take this interesting exchange he had with Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois on the U.S. Senate floor Sunday during part of the ongoing debt-ceiling debate.
McCain asked Durbin to recall the year 1982, which is when they both first were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, in the midterm elections of President Ronald Reagan's first term. In one of their first actions in the new term, McCain recalled, according to the Chicago Tribune: "We cut taxes. ... We had one of the strongest recoveries in recent history of this country because we didn't start spending and add spending without paying for them."
Durbin, according to the Chicago Tribune, parried: "Does he recall what happened with the Reagan tax cuts? Because what happened was we tripled the national debt during that period of time, and President Reagan came to Congress 18 times to extend the debt ceiling. He holds the record. So to argue the Reagan tax cuts led to great long-term prosperity is seriously in doubt, if we are going to use the deficit as a measure."
As many an economist has noted, Reagan's tax cuts did not do what Reagan and his economic advisers said they would do -- stimulate the economy through the "trickle-down effect." In fact, after the cuts, the trickle-down effect was a recession.
Arizona's Attorney General, Tom Horne, continues to look into two allegations that the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission may not be doing business on the up-and-up.
His office received a complaint that the commission had violated open meetings laws and that it didn't follow a proper procurement policy when hiring contractors, including the company that will assist in drawing the congressional and legislative district maps.
Horne said today he's continuing to look into the complaints.
"There's a lot of public interest in this so I've asked people to give it a priority and do it as soon as possible," Horne said.
"We are going to be investigating the documents the minutes of the executive session and interviewing the commission members and doing whatever else we need to do to ensure there have been no violations of open meeting laws or procurement laws. If we find no violations, I think people will be relieved to find that out. If we do find violations, then we'll have to pursue them," Horne said.
Last week, Ray Bladine, the executive director of the redistricting commission, said in an interview the commission followed the state procurement policy for hiring its contractors. That policy requires meetings to be held in executive session, not accessible to the public.
Two Mesa-area Republicans stepped up this week to run against Republican Russell Pearce in his recall election.
Olivia Cortes and Jerry Lewis have filed paperwork with the state to launch their campaigns. They join independent candidate Tommy Cattey, who is also hoping to be on the recall ballot. They’ll each need to turn in signatures from voters in the Mesa legislative district before they qualify for the ballot. Pearce doesn’t need to do that, the recall process means he’s already on the ballot.
Any number of candidates can run in this recall election. Whoever earns the most votes in the election will be the next Senator in legislative district 18. The term expires next year, so the winner would serve just one year, and could run for reelection in 2012.
One other candidate filed to run for the seat, but it's unclear at this point whether Democrat Robert McDonald is entering the recall race, or readying for a 2012 campaign.
Republicans still claim the largest party registration in the state, with a little more than a third of the registered voters here joining the party.
Democrats and independents come in just under a third of the state's voters, while Libertarians and Greens still claim less than 1 percent of the registered voters in Arizona.
Total voter registration fell in Pima County after the 2010 election, and all parties have lost ground with voters here in that time. The only category of registered voters that grew in Pima County since November 2010 was "other," including people who select no party or independent on their voter registration forms.
Pima County voter registration:
Democrats 182,707
Republicans 148,823
Other 143,602
Libertarians 3,830
Greens 1,242
Voter registration statewide:
Republicans 35 percent
Democrats 31 percent
Other 33 percent
Libertarians less than 1 percent
Greens less than 1 percent
News, commentary, analysis from the AZPM political team: Christopher Conover, Andrea Kelly, Michael Chihak.
