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Caught this story in my inbox today — apparently, an Asian American family recently moved into a suburban area called Hapy Valley outside of Portland, Oregon. The family claims that they returned home one day to find racial slurs spray-painted onto the house. They also found a book of matches and a clear bottle containing a liquid that might have been gasoline, along with a note threatening arson.

Here’s the full article:

Asian-American family receives threats after moving into suburban Portland home

HAPPY VALLEY (AP) – Clackamas County sheriff’s officers are investigating a racial harassment case involving an Asian-American family moving into a home in the southeast Portland suburb of Happy Valley.

Sheriff’s Detective Jim Strovink says the FBI is also investigating whether the harassment of Sang Huynh and his family constitutes a federal civil rights violation.

Racial slurs were spray-painted Monday afternoon on the outside of the home. The family also found a book of matches near a clear plastic bottle of what police think is gasoline. Warning notes included one that said, “We will burn your house down if we have to.”

Fourteen-year-old Lisa Huynh says her parents are upset by the threats and her little brother is now afraid to sleep in his own room.

Happy Valley Mayor Rob Wheeler called the harassment “totally unacceptable and disturbing.”

According to its Wikipedia article, Happy Valley is a small community that had about 4,500 residents in 2000. Nearly 90% of the residents are White, and Asian residents make up the next largest racial group at less than 9%.

To me, Happy Valley doesn’t sound like all that happy a place to be.

I might get some flack for saying this, but I really can’t wait until that day, in the far-flung future, when climate change denialists are shunned and mocked to the same degree that our society currently treats Holocaust denialists.

I’m, of course, not trying to belittle the Holocaust, but the fact that humanity’s impact on the planet is causing a slow (by our standards) but certain destruction of Earth’s ecosystem is simply not up for scientific debate. The vast majority of scientists in the scientific community has seen the overwhelming (and growing) pile of evidence that humans are harming our environment and we agree: the effects of humanity’s pollution of our planet could, if left unchecked, be the extinction-level event that jeopardizes our species’ very existence. Folks who deny climate change are those who let fundamentalism, morality, irrationality, and personal bias impede logic, fact and reason, and should be viewed as silly anachronisms, not elected to public office.

Yet, here we have Representative Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, who is a ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has been running wild in this week’s hearings on climate change. With a smug grin reminscent of the cheshire cat, Barton has been lobbing questions at those testifying, as though he’s delighted at the chance to showcase how much cleverer he, a lowly Congressman from Texas, is compared to these climate change experts. Yet, it seems Barton has his head so far up his ass, he’s no longer seeing daylight: a simple listen to this week’s shennanigans demonstrate that it’s Barton, who appears dim-witted, not those he’s trying to put on the hot-seat.

Consider this: earlier this week, Barton took the final six seconds of his time to ask Nobel Prize winner Dr. Steven Chu, current Secretary of Energy, this question: how did oil under Alaska get there? Let me reiterate — Representative Barton, looking like the cat who just swallowed the canary, asked Dr. Chu to summarize — in six seconds — the entire process of fossil fuel formation.

Forget that the process of fossil fuel formation is a field of study or an entire group of scientists. Forget, even, that a simple Web of Knowledge search for the terms “arctic” and “oil” yields more than 600 manuscripts, a number dwarfed by more than 3,500 manuscripts pulled up when searching for the terms “fossil” and “fuels”. Forget that any explanation of where oil and natural gas comes from requires that the audience have a pre-existing, working knowledge of geology, plate tectonics, and the history of the planet. Representative Barton betrays his own anti-intellectualism when he asks — no, demands — that Dr. Steven Chu explain the process of fossil fuel formation in six. seconds. And later, after Dr. Chu tried to boil down a topic that is frequently taught over a year’s time in upper division college classes into something tha even Rep. Barton could grasp, Barton twitters that he “stumped” a Nobel prize winner with his question. Dr. Chu was stumped, alright — stumped that Barton would even ask such a silly question.

Then, this morning, as I was getting ready for work, I caught this exchange on C-Span between Representative Barton and former Vice President Al Gore. Gore (who is my hero for his performance in this back-and-forth) takes Barton to task for citing a crackpot “scientific” opinion by Dr. Craig Idso (founder of the “Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change”) that presents a red herring hypothesis, refutes the red herring, and then uses this observation to refute the argument that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may have a deleterious effect on marine biology. Barton quotes Idso, but fails to note that Idso’s group is funded by private donations from major oil and gas corporations, including Exxon. This calls into question any and all findings that Idso publishes. 

Gore hammered Barton on his citation of misleading, and arguably biased, pseudo-science, funded by the oil and gas industry to refute the accepted scientific fact of global warming and climate change. I was delighted to see Gore refuse to let Barton slip his reference to Idso into the record; rather, Gore demands that Exxon and other oil companies apologize for the continued attempts to slip one over the American people, and in so doing, destroy this planet. Barton looks flummoxed that he ran out of time; and while right-wingers are going to call Gore dodging the question, I think Barton was just upset he was made to look like such an uneducated fool in front of a live audience.

I hope that Barton learns to sit down and shut up — his degree of anti-intellectualism is breathtaking, and it’s about time somebody embarassed him for it.

(Hat-tip: Angry Asian Man)

Just when I thought that parody commercials couldn’t get more awesome, this parody commercial hit whole new levels of awesomeness.

Earlier this year, a group calling itself Nation For Marriage put together this wonderfully melodramatic ad, trying to make the case that gay marriage will destroy your (yes, your) freedoms. Also, gay people marrying clearly means fire and brimstone will rain down on us all.

Then, George Takei, along with a group of other Hollywood notables put together this concentrated dose of awesome. Words cannot describe; you have to see it for yourself.

I just got wind of this through Asian Pacific Americans for Progress and I was so flabbergasted, I actually turned off my Pandora (playing a rousing Rick Astley song) to listen to one of the most ignorant comments ever uttered (in recent weeks) from an American politician.

Ramey Ko, a well-respected Asian American activist who was an integral part of Asian Americans for Obama, was testifying in public hearings before the Texas House Elections Committee as a representative of the Organization for Chinese Americans earlier this week when State Representative Betty Brown (R-Terrell) suggested that Asian names were just too difficult for Americans to deal with, and that the community should change our names to make the lives of poll-workers easier.

Here’s an abbreviated transcript:

Brown: Well, rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese, I understand it’s a rather difficult language. Do you think that it would behove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here. Such as, you’re talking about — I’m not talking about changing your name, I’m talking about the transliteration or whatever you refer to that you could use with us.

Ko:Well, transliteration typically is technically governed by certain academic standards. For Chinese, there’s the way Giles transliteration system and the Pinyin transliteration system. For Korean and Japanese there are other various systems… That’s basically where you try to keep the pronounciation of your name but you write it in English alphabet. But a lot of Asian Americans will for the purpose of daily use adopt “American” names… A problem that arises frequently with Asian Americans is that as time passes, people do one of three things: 1) they choose to adopt a more Americanized name given name to make it easier, as you said, for people to communicate and for documentation purposes, but 2) sometimes they will alter the transliteration of their name because they will learn that — because not everyone is familiar with how to transliterate names – so when they first come they kind of give it their best shot with what they think it sounds like an English, but then they will learn later that they should actually write it differently.

Brown: Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for both you and for people who are pollworkers, if there were some means by which you could adopt a name just for your poll identification purposes that would be easier for the Americans to deal with?

Ko: What I’m saying is that there may be difficulty obtaining that ID because there would be discrepancies between those names, or because of discrepancies between the name on the ID, because it was obtained with a certain document…

Brown: Not evidently compared to the difficulties that presently exist, from what you tell me…

Ko: Yes, I mean there are, Asian American Justice Center represented several Asian American voters in Florida who had this problem. Although, a lot of times with them, the problem was, as you transliterated names, basically being mangled in the course of being transcribed by government workers.

Brown: Alright, I see a need here for young people like you, who are obviously very bright, to come up with something that would work for you, and then let us see if it will work for us.

The argument here is that “Americans” can’t handle the “difficult” names of Asian Americans, so rather than forcing Americans to adapt to the presence of transliterated non-Western names in the American landscape, Asian Americans need to come up with a system of romanization that suits English-speaking Americans better. The nativist sentiment in this exchange is breath-taking: Brown not only distinguishes between Americans and Asian Americans (as if Asian Americans aren’t really Americans), but she expects an entire diaspora of people to change our very self-identification to suit American sensibilities.

Let’s make it clear: changing your name — whether its for your passport or for a poll identification purposes – is altering your own name to suit someone else. People of colour have suffered a long history of having our names (and thereby our identities) eradicated and replaced: African slaves were re-Christened upon arriving on American soil in an attempt to save them from their “heathen” roots, while Chinese coolies were unilaterally referred to as John Chinaman because their own names were too unusual. At Angel Island and Ellis Island Immigration Centers, Asian, Irish and other non-English-speaking immigrants were routinely renamed by immigration officers because those immigration workers couldn’t be bothered to Romanize an unusual-sounding name correctly.

America calls itself a racial and cultural melting pot, yet too frequently we still come face-to-face with the xenophobic mentality that White Anglo-Saxons are “true Americans”, and that the rest of us need to change to fit that ideal. There is an expectation that non-English-speaking immigrants must learn English to naturalize whereas many Americans resist the mere existence of non-English languages in their midst. Here in Arizona, we face recurring referendums to eliminate Spanish classes in schools, in automated phone services, or even in federal translation services. Consider Brown’s double-standard: it’s too much to ask federal or state-employed poll-workers to learn enough about non-English languages to cross-reference a transliterated Asian name on a piece of paper, but it’s not too much to ask 3% of this country’s population to file name change cards?

Most immigrants practice transliteration, but it’s one thing to choose a new Romanization of one’s name, and another to have that name thrust upon you for someone else’s convenience. America was built on a foundation of self-governance and self-identity; I think the right to self-identify is one that should be enjoyed by all citizens. For Asian Americans to be expected to come up with a system for altering our names merely to make life easier for poll-workers is not only ridiculous, it is patently racist. After all, Representative Brown doesn’t seem to have a problem with “John”, or “Sarah”, or “Lucretia”, or “Karl”.

In addition, Brown’s assertion that Asian Americans (and specifically Ramey, I guess) should come up with a system for re-naming all Asian Americans puts the blame of voter disenfranchisement squarely on the shoulders of Asian American voters. Apparently, Brown believes that Asian Americans who were denied their voting rights in the last series of national and state-wide elections were not victims of an unfair system: no, it’s our fault because we don’t come over to America, and immediately (and enthusiastically) re-name ourselves John Smith. If only we were more willing to have a name Betty Brown thinks is American enough, well then, of course, we will be allowed to have access to our Constitutional Rights, like the right to vote. But, since we insist on maintaining a link to our family history and cultural practiced by maintaining our Chinese-, Korean-, Vietnamese-, or Japanese-sounding names, we should expect routine voter disenfranchisement and trampling of our other civil liberties?

My middle name is Shea-Ying, which is a romanized transliteration of my Chinese name. And, Representative Betty Brown, you’d better get used to it, because it’s here to stay.

Act Now! Please write Representative Betty Brown an email detailing why you plan on sticking with your Asian name.

Update: Angry Asian Man blogs about this story here and here. And according to the Betty Brown-Approved Name Generator, my name should actually be “Tiffany ‘Cracker Barrel’ Brown”. Awesome.

Update: 8Asians also weighs in.

Update: Join the new Down with Betty Brown Facebook Group here.

Update: Miya Shay, who blog with ABC13, a local Texan news affiliate, blogs about Brown-Gate here.

Kal Penn is my new hero.

CNN’s Political Ticker writes that Penn has chosen to quit his job as a main cast member on House to join the Obama administration. And not only is Penn going to be working in politics, he will be dealing directly with Asian & Pacific Islander Americans in the arts. Could this mean that the Obama administration is actually interested in increasing the number and quality of APIA representation in media and the arts, both as actors and producers?

I could not be more excited about this!

CNN writes this:

Actor Kal Penn joining the Obama administration 

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Actor and longtime Obama supporter Kal Penn is joining the Obama administration, the White House confirmed to CNN Tuesday.

The actor will be part of the White House Office of Public Liaison, which is run by Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Penn will be primarily involved in dealing with Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and the arts community.

Penn’s new gig was first reported by EW.com, which shares parent company Time Warner with CNN.

Penn told EW.com that the new position comes after some soul-searching.

There was “’something aching in me to do something completely different and take a break from the acting thing for a while’” Penn said he told the executive producers of the TV series “House” when he explained his decision to get involved with politics full-time.

The actor also said his interest in politics has deep roots. “I’ve been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while. I love what I do as an actor. I couldn’t love it more. . . . .probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service.”

“It’s probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me. They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, and that was always in the back of my head. So the past couple of years I thought about it a little more.”

But Penn also is leaving the door open to returning to acting at some later point. “Who’s to say where any path leads? I still have a passion for it. But for the time being, I won’t be acting,” Penn told EW.com

Penn endorsed Obama’s White House bid in late 2007, and was a frequent campaign surrogate on the trail last year.

This is particularly exciting because Penn appears to exude talent in this kind of a role. Electroman, who attended the Inauguration earlier this year, reported that Penn spoke at-length during the Inauguration Staff Ball about his time as an Obama surrogate on the campaign trail. More so than many of the other “more noteworthy” speakers, Penn earned rave reviews for his ability to excite his audience, motivate them to keep on working, and his humility when working with lower-level campaign staffers and volunteers.

Although I’m sad to see Penn leave House, I can’t wait to see what he does with this new position.  

This past Sunday, electroman and I spied a truck with a bumper sticker that read: “Beat the Rush… Impeach Obama!” Such anti-Obama sentiments seem a growing fad amongst the Far Right extreme of the Republican Party. Just days before the Inauguration, Rush Limbaugh famously proclaimed that he hoped President Obama would fail in his presidential endeavours.

I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work.  So I’m thinking of replying to the guy [who asked Limbaugh to comment on his hopes for the Obama presidency], “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.”

Today, actor Fred Thompson, who unsuccessfully ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, echoed Limbaugh’s words. Speaking on CNN’s American Morning:

“I want his policies that I believe take us in the wrong direction to fail,” Thompson told Roberts on CNN’s American Morning.

“If he takes us down the road of tripling our national debt in ten years and making us vulnerable to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and things of that nature, I want all those policies not to succeed,” he said.

Last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal defended Limbaugh, Thompson and other Republicans who have expressed ill-wishes for Obama’s efforts. Jindal, who seems desperate to ingratiate himself with Republicans in hopes of running for the presidency in 2012, said:

“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Jindal said at a political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. “This is political correctness run amok.”

Calling it the Democrats’ “latest gotcha game”, Jindal was nonetheless hesitant to wish failure upon Obama, himself. Instead, Jindal avoided committing himself to a bad soundbyte. ”My answer to the question is very simple: ‘Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do,” he said.

So, let me get this straight: criticisizing Obama’s policies is freedom of speech, but criticizing Republicans for criticizing Obama is ”political correctness run amok”? Yet, Limbaugh and his ilke have repeatedly denounced Democrats and Progressives for criticizing the Bush administration during President George W. Bush’s eight years in office. When MoveOn.org published the infamous “General Betray Us” ad on the morning of General Petraeus’ testimony before Congress, Limbaugh decried the ad as “indecent” and “contemptible”. In 2001, Limbaugh compared former Democratic senator Tom Daschle to Satan for “claiming that George Bush is incompetent”. Ann Coulter titled one of her books “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism“, and in it, she argued that Democrats and liberals were an unpatriotic party that, as she summarized in an interview, “supports killing, lying, adultery, thievery, envy”.

I find it deeply hypocritical for Republicans to be wringing their hands over political correctness and free speech now that they no longer have a Republican in the Oval Office: a mere year ago, it was Democrats whom Republicans were calling unpatriotic for their criticisms of President Bush’s failed policies.

Bottom line, some of us are far too quick to label our intellectual opposition as unpatriotic. Limbaugh’s ill-wishes for Obama are no more demonstrative of his patriotism than Kanye West’s wild rantings about Bush “hating Black people”: both were ill-advised and reactionary words, perhaps, but neither West nor Limbaugh should be chastised for voicing opposition against the sitting president. Last I checked, this is not a military state, and citizens are under no particular opposition to keep their mouths shut. That being said, Republicans need to stop playing the victim to some vast left-wing conspiracy to infringe upon conservative First Amendment Rights.

I think Limbaugh needs to shut up; not because he has no right to speak, but because he’s too intensely stupid to be worth the oxygen he consumes to talk.

Dean Harold Hongju Koh, Dean of Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor for the Clinton administration, has been confirmed as Legal Advisor for the State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Times:

Mr. Koh, who is considered an authority on national security law, was a frequent critic of the Bush administration’s handling of suspected terrorists in detention. In June 2004, he bluntly described the quality of legal work in Justice Department memorandums on torture as “embarrassing” and “abominable.”

And when Bush administration spokesmen suggested that the language in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions barring “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” was too vague, Mr. Koh dismissed this as nonsense.

”Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.”

While those who have served as the Legal Advisor of the State Department have traditionally been overlooked by history, Obama’s focus on detainee treatment, torture, and Guantanamo have elevated the influence of Mr. Koh’s new position. I’m delighted not only that another Asian American person has found a position in the new administration, but also that a man who has been so outspoken in favour of human rights will now be in a position to affect this country’s mistreatment of detainees under George W. Bush’s misguided Patriot Act.

Congratulations, Mr. Koh!

Former Washington Governor Gary Locke, a Chinese-American, was unanimously confirmed today as Commerce Secretary. With the slumping economy a growing problem that threatens to smudge the sheen of Obama’s first 100 days, all eyes will be on Locke and his plans to improve the American job market.

The nomination was approved by unanimous consent. As commerce secretary, Locke, 59, will lead a Cabinet department of about 40,000 people with a diffuse role, including compiling economic data, protecting fisheries, guiding the transition to digital television, adjudicating trade complaints and running the 2010 national Census.

So, I’m excited to see Locke, another highly-qualified Asian American, be confirmed to a prominent position in the Obama Administration, after Nobel-award winning Dr. Steven Chu’s confirmation as Energy Secretary and General Eric Shinseki’s confirmation as Secretary of Veteran Affairs earlier this year. I expect that both Locke and Chu all three will serve the Obama administration well in their respective roles. In particular, I’m excited about Dr. Chu, whom I think will bring a much-needed scientific perspective to an energy debate that has been thus far dominated by ideology and political mudslinging.

Yet, I have a nagging issue that I’m a little afraid to voice: is anyone else unnerved to see that the two two of the three Asian Americans who have found themselves in high-level Cabinet positions in the Obama Administration are in charge of, well, science and money?

Update: Shoot! I totally forgot about General Eric Shinseki, who is currently serving as Obama’s Secretary of Veteran Affairs. This post has been updated to reflect the foot I so gracefully rammed down my own throat. 

Science is the very definition of reason: logical hypotheses are tested and confirmed (or rejected) based on scientific experimentation and exploration. No supposition goes untested, no belief left to faith. Our brains’ ability to think, to reason, and to analyze is what separates us from our ape cousins.

The last eight years have been governed not by the rationality unique to our species’ large brains, but by strict fundamentalism that would close its eyes and ears to scientific progress.

In so doing, we were rendering ourselves little better than our primate ancestors, denying the very advances that makes us human.

Today, President Barack Obama signaled an end to fundamentalism and a much-needed return to reason. This morning, President Obama reversed President Bush’s executive order barring stem cell research. Citing his belief that government should make policy decisions on science that are “based on facts, not ideology”, President Obama has done so much more than merely help save millions, perhaps billions, of lives afflicted by incurable congenitive disorders, progressive and fatal disorders, and catastrophic injuries; he has indicated that the Obama administration, unless the Bush administration, believes in intelligence, logic, and critical analysis — not immutable religious doctrine and polarizing political winds.

As the American economy implodes, there have been a number of debates on how to resurrect the once powerful American dollar. I think the answer lies in shifting America away from manufacturing, and towards making the workforce competitive in high technology and research industries: after all, with the wealth this country continues to boast, there should be no reason why our students rank so poorly against students of other nations. Yet, as a country and as a culture, we have consistently undervalued education, and thereby undervalued science and technology. Consider: we are still having debates over teaching intelligent design — a thinly-veiled repackaging of pre-Darwinian creationism and, by definition, an unscientific fairytale — in public schools in science classes alongside evolution. Rather than apply our critical brains to the world around us, a large swath of this country remains adherent to ideology over intellect, rewarding fundamentalism over skepticism, encouraging faith over science.

There’s been a firestorm of blog discussion over recent (racist) comparisons of Obama to chimp and monkey imagery. But, in point of fact, I think Obama’s message of bringing scientific credibility back to the federal government is actually evolving this country away from the feral instincts and blind faith of our primate forefathers. I’ve been waiting for this return to reason for eight years, and needless to say, today, I am excited. 

I know I don’t normally talk about local Arizona politics on this blog, but recent state-wide idiocy has really gotten me up in arms. Arizona is one of this country’s last true bastions of Spaghetti Western libertarianism, where “get your government off my guns” meets “First Amendment = legalize weed” arguments plastered on the bumper of every GMC pick-up truck and in the shoddily-written editorial pages of every campus paper. This is a state that boasts a healthy population of Minute Men.

Arizonan’s notoriously hate state and federal taxes, and most state-level politicians campaign on platforms to lower state taxes in order to win their elections. Yet, Arizona’s state taxes have not been increased since the mid-1990’s when personal income tax rates were cut during a budgetary surplus (coincident with the booming economy of the Clinton years). Since 1993, massive tax cuts resulted in an estimated annual loss of over $1.5 billion dollars in state revenue. Simultaneously, in 1992, a public referendum altered State Legislature voting requirements, allowing tax cuts to be passed with a simple 50% majority in the Legislature whereas any proposal that would increase existing taxes or create new taxes needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The passing of this ballot initiative essentially eliminated Arizona’s ability to generate additional state income, particularly during times of need.

Arizonan reticence towards taxes has resulted in a massive state-wide budgetary crisis. To put it simply: Arizona is flat broke. For the last several years, Arizona has had trouble balancing its budget because the state is simply not generating enough tax revenue to cover its operation. Most state-level politicians are Republican, and Democratic legislators are hard-pressed to find the votes needed to build a two-thirds majority that could raise taxes to pull the state out of the red.

More than 15 years after this state drastically cut its tax rate and prevented any tax increases from ever being passed (ever again), Arizona now ranks 37th in personal tax burden (the percentage of income each Arizonan pays in taxes), and 42nd in per capita tax revenue. Put in context, Arizonans cough-up less in state taxes than the residents of such wealthy states as North Carolina, Nebraska and Montana. Operating at a more than $1 billion dollar deficit for the last several years, Arizona’s budgetary crisis has the dubious honour of being ranked the worst in the country by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

To compensate for the severe lack of funds, Arizona has implemented annual cuts in state-funded public projects and services to try and stay afloat. Last year, then-governor Janet Napolitano instituted a state-wide hiring freeze that cost the state more than 2.8% of its state jobs. Budget cuts have reduced or eliminated much-needed state programs that are impacting virtually every aspect of life here in Arizona.

Arizona is well known for the natural beauty of the desert, and in 2005, we generated over $17.5 billion dollars in tourism revenue. Yet, since the start of the year, three state parks have been closed, with eight more at risk, due to insufficient state funds. The Tucson Unified School District has come under heavy fire for proposing to close four public elementary schools in the wake of massive state and federal budget cuts. A friend of mine who works for Arizona’s Child Protective Services, where caseworkers are so over-worked that they frequently juggle over 30 cases of abused and neglected children at a time, is facing lay-off next week, and it remains to be seen what will happen to the thousands of children who will be trapped in the system without caseworkers, and the many more children still in-need of CPS intervention. The state unemployment rate reached a record high at 7% since January, while the salaries of state employees and faculty at state universities are amongst the lowest in the country.

Recently, the three large Arizona state universities were subjected to nearly $150 million dollars in cuts in the 2009 Arizona budget, which has prompted a wave of cost-saving plans that have handicapped the operations of The University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. These cost-saving ideas include raising tuition, capping freshmen enrollment, increasing class-size, laying-off faculty and administration, eliminating or merging popular degree programs, and eliminating university resources (such as a number of journal subscriptions I rely upon to keep up-to-date with the literature in my field of study). Personally, my graduate degree program has been in jeopardy for two years, with at least two comparable graduate programs announcing their termination in the last month.

The effect of such drastic cuts to state education programs is widespread: Southern Arizona relies on state universities, the military, and large technology firms (such as Raytheon) to supply jobs. Direct budget cuts have frozen hiring at state universities, while Arizona has lost a number of major high-technology employers who complain about the inadequate supply of high-educated new employees. In other words, state taxes have a direct correlation with the state’s economy: the more we cut taxes, the more we jeopardize our own individual abilities to achieve financial success here in Arizona.

Since 1992, when Arizona income taxes were first slashed, the state has not seen a single boost in the state economy; rather, we’ve seen a slow but steady deterioration in the state’s economic stability. Yet, proponents of “smaller government” argue that these reductions in state funds are producing “much needed” decreases in the size of the Arizona Legislature, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, will (miraculously, I suppose) stimulate the state economy. This past month, I was galled to discover that 39 Republican state legislators actually signed the following “Taxpayer Relief Pledge”:

I, ____________, pledge to the taxpayers of the _____ district of the State of _________ and to all the people of this state, that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes. __________________________ Signed     __________________________ Date __________________________ Witness     __________________________ Witness

The last thing we need is fewer taxes here in Arizona! Yet, 39 Republican state legislators, facing a collapsing state economy, are nonetheless willing to pledge that they will not raise the taxes we need to stem the state’s hemorrhaging cashflow problem. This pledge flies in the face of a recent proposal by Governor Jan Brewer to implement a temporary tax hike to help the state remain solvent during these tough economic times. But, who cares, right? These 39 Republican lawmakers are literally strapping us all into the handbasket for our collective one-way ticket to hell. More frustrating, of these 39 Republican state legislators, several were newly elected Republicans whose seats were lost from Democrats last November.

The 39 Republican lawmakers (including representatives of the district I currently reside in) are:

In the Senate: Sylvia Allen, Bob Burns, Pamela Gorman, Ron Gould, Chuck Gray, Linda Gray, Jack Harper, John Huppenthal, Barbara Leff, Al Melvin, Russell Pearce, Steve Pierce, Jay Tibshraeny and Thayer Verschoor.

In the House: Kirk Adams, Frank Antenori, Cecil Ash, Ray Barnes, Nancy Barto, Andy Biggs, Tom Boone, Judy Burges, Sam Crump, Adam Driggs, David Gowan, Laurin Hendrix, John Kavanagh, Bill Konopnicki, Debbie Lesko, Steve Montenegro, Rick Murphy, Warde Nichols, Doug Quelland, Carl Seel, David Stevens, Andy Tobin, Jerry Weiers, Jim Weiers, Steve Yarbrough.

With an estimated $3 billion dollar state deficit next year, those of us in state-funded institutions and programs are wondering what more could be cut. And the answer is obvious: nothing. Grover Norquist, leader of anti-tax group that first authored the Taxpayers Relief Pledge, famously said his goal was “to reduce government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.” Well, his group has certainly succeeding in dismantling state government here in Arizona, and thanks to him and his 39 cronies in the Arizona State Legislature, we’re all feeling the licking flames of hellfire.

Clearly, Arizona desperately needs to raise taxes to levels comparable to that of other states of its size in order to prevent total economic anarchy. It’s not a difficult concept: you can’t resist paying money into the system and then continue to wonder why Arizona is crumbling under our feet.

And the 39 Republicans who value re-election over the state budget? Idiots, the lot of them. Blog for Arizona’s AZBlueMeanie said it best:

Of course, any politician who has sworn allegiance to an ideology which desires the destruction of government has no interest in making government more cost effective or making government work more efficiently and effectively. Their only desire is to destroy government, and Arizona Republicans are well on their way to succeeding. These are dangerous people who have no business being anywhere near the levers of power in government.

If you happen to be in Arizona, and your representative is amongst the 39 morons who recently pledged not to increase taxes, write to them here and give them a piece of your mind about this fresh idiocy.