Arizona: David

by David Safier

Today's Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Indiana, began a 3 part series about the corporation, Imagine Schools, and the charters it runs in Indiana. Compared to these stories, the posts I've written have handled these folks with kid's gloves. The first day's articles are serious stuff.

The Sunday paper actually has two interlocking stories, Private company skirts public boards in running tax-funded charter schools and Company’s compliance to tax policy in question, as well as an editorial, Who’s minding the charters? If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the same approach the East Valley Trib took in its investigative series on tuition tax credits and STOs.

by David Safier

Wednesday's ruling by the 9th Circuit Court could hurt the tuition tax credit program, but since the wheels of justice turn slow, it could still be years before it has any effect.

Basically, the 9th Circuit agreed with a previous ruling which said the tuition tax credit scholarships are too heavily weighted toward religious schools. Since many of the Student Tuition Organizations (STOs) only give scholarships to religious based schools,

"85 percent or more of the state financed scholarship money is available only to students whose parents are willing to send them to sectarian institutions. If these facts are proved true, the Arizona Department of Revenue's execution of the scholarship program (Section 1089) violates the Establishment Clause," the judges wrote Wednesday.

by David Safier

Occasionally I've linked to one of the weekly columns I write for The Explorer, but I've never copied them here. I'm breaking with tradition and putting this week's column below. It came out of some posts and comments on BfA about a quotation used by right wingers (I won't even say ultra right wingers, because it's spread further than that): “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Here's the column.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It was the worst act of homegrown terrorism in our nation's history.

When he set off the truck bomb, McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt that read: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I thought Sen. Jesse Helms, the unreconstructed Southern ultra-conservative culture warrior and unapologetic redneck racist from North Carolina, died in 2003? Apparently his spirit is alive and well in Tucson.

"Senator No" was a culture warrior who excelled at wedge issue politics. One of Helm's favorite targets was federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

I read in today's Arizona Daily Star that Tucson's Museum of Contemporary Art is defending itself in a preemptive press release against an attack ad apparently set to run soon against council members Nina Trasoff and Karin Uhlich. The attack ad focuses on an art exhibit that ran three years ago that allegedly featured "phallic imagery that some might consider pornographic.