By Mary Ellen Page

There are a lot of names swirling around the state Democratic party concerning the next party leader.  Current chair Don Bivens has said he's leaning toward running again if a successor can't be found, and he's been looking.  What this seems to say is that that there isn't enough leadership in the state party to find a leader.

This is an important moment for the state Democratic party.  It can't be said that Arizona dems had a great year.  After this last election the republicans have a super majority in the state house and senate.  Republicans won every major seat in the state government and dominate the national scene as well.  The progressive voice in Arizona is basically silenced by the staggering losses to the party.  So, with the muting of the Democratic voice in Arizona perhaps it's time for some new, more aggressive leadership.

According to an article in the Arizona Capital Times, Bivens an attorney at Snell & Wilmer, has been talking with a number of leaders in the state party about running for chair.  Bivens, who has been chair for the last four years, said, “I am not willing to step down and have the party not have the financial support and the infrastructure and the unity that we need to go forward.  

Friends,
An update for you from Arizona.

Now that the political posturing of the elections are behind us, it's time for those in office to get to roll up their sleeves and enact policies that will take our country forward.
 
This months elections were devastating in many regards; Arizona banned affirmative action as it reelected Jan Brewer to Governor and made the author of SB 1070, Russell Pearce, Senate President. Nationally, an author of the Sensennbrenner bill of 2005 that sparked the mass marches four years ago will be the chair of the House immigration subcommittee. From the campaign ads we saw, it would seem that we are going through a Re-Birth of a Nation.

However, the harder a ball is thrown down, the higher it rises.

While Arizona will continue to be the epicenter of anti-immigrant and racist fervor for years to come, we have long said that the best way to support the movement there is by fighting enforcement everywhere. In Phoenix, more than ten Barrio defense committees are meeting, preparing, and building resistance. Those who stopped raids from occurring on the first day of SB 1070 by shutting down sheriff Arpaio’s jail pled “necessity” in their first court appearances.  We were blessed by a visit from Dr. Cornel West whose brilliant speech is here on video if you haven’t seen it yet.  Artists, writers, and musicians all have very big plans for what’s to come.

"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"
--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe

By mikel weisser

UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."

 Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes.  Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.

by Robert Creamer

The Corporate CEO’s and big Wall Street Bankers must have been having a good old time celebrating their victories in the mid-term elections.

You can see them now.  High-fiving through the cigar smoke in their wood paneled Upper East Side exclusive clubs.  Laughing at how easy it was to put one over on so many everyday working people.  They are thrilled that they successfully convinced many Americans to vote against their own economic self-interests by playing on their legitimate anger that their economic well-being is under attack.

Of course, the cruel irony is that the people who funded the vicious TV ads and flights of mail urging everyday Americans to throw out the Democrats in order to demonstrate their fury at the economy, are the very people who have made a killing themselves by attacking the middle class.

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez

Uttering the word Arizona anywhere in the world nowadays creates a visceral reaction. For some, it evokes the specter of Nazi Germany; for others, a totalitarian regime. For some, legalized and mandatory racial profiling represents a return to the Jim Crow south, and for still others, it conjures up apartheid South Africa.

The 2010 elections have inflamed passions even further. For instance, Jan Brewer was elected governor, riding primarily on the wave of anti-Mexican sentiment prevalent in Arizona. Actually, with her hysterical and false statements about beheadings in Arizona, she was actually creating that sentiment. State Sen. Russell Pearce – the author of Arizona’s new racial profiling measure, SB 1070 and a host of most of the state’s anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican bills – is now majority leader of the state Senate. State school superintendent Tom Horne – the architect of HB 2281, which seeks to ban ethnic studies in Arizona’s K -12 schools – was elected the state’s attorney general. His successor, state senator John Huppenthal, has one-upped him, vowing to carry on Horne’s fight at the university level. Ward Connerly, who isn’t from Arizona, brought his anti-affirmative action initiative to Arizona – Proposition 107 – and successfully packaged it as a civil rights initiative.

Couple all this with Sheriff Joe Arpaio and well, he’s not going anywhere except national; next to Sarah Palin, he is the darling of the extreme right wing.