FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 15, 2010

SCOTTSDALE BUSINESSMAN URGES HAITIAN RELIEF EFFORTS

Healing Hands for Haiti is on standby to assist

Critical support to Red Cross is urged and needed

A Scottsdale businessman, who has for years been involved in helping Haitian people rebuild their country and develop basic human services infrastructure, is now leading the charge to get vitally needed support for the hundreds of thousands of victims of Tuesday’s earthquake that has devastated this small island country.

Robert Graham, a board member of the nonprofit Healing Hands for Haiti, is calling for all his business associates and partners to help with monetary assistance for those suffering and in great need in Haiti. Graham is calling for crucial support to aid groups – especially the Red Cross – as help is desperately needed.

Healing Hands for Haiti (www.healinghandsforhaiti.org) is a non-governmental institution with no religious or political ties who work with government and local organizations to help the Haitian people overcome extreme challenges. In the past, these efforts have focused on rehabilitation education, clinical treatment, disability prevention and increasing public awareness of disabilities and rehabilitation.

Now, 100 percent of the focus is on saving lives and getting support to Haiti. “This is a desperate situation and I am asking everyone in my circle of influence – friends, family business associates – for help,” said Graham.

Graham is compiling a video of the people and lives Healing Hands for Haiti has helped over the years to educate and personalize the current reality. The video will be distributed to everyone Graham knows with the hopes that by paying it forward he can help when help is so critically needed. U.S. contingents from Healing Hands are on standby to be deployed as soon as possible – communications with onsite staff in Port-au-Prince have been unsuccessful and their status is unknown.

I watched the comment fly all day on the Mecum post (below) and have to admit that I agree with a lot of what our readers have said on both sides. But allow me to clarify even more.

The word “lynch mob” came up several times and I would have to agree with those who brought it up that we need to be careful not to become one.

We know nothing about the relationship betweet Mr. Mecum and the woman mentioned in the complaint. It could have been an acquaintance or even romantic situation but that is none of our business. If Brett was infatuated to the point of pursuing her or in today’s politically correct language “stalking” her, she obviously didn’t harbor the same feelings and felt compelled to file a complaint with the authorities.

I am surprised that he felt that Voter Vault was the most appropriate way to find out how to get in contact with her. Why not use Facebook, the phonebook or the Maricopa County Assessor’s website which contains the names and addresses of individual homeowners? Unless she was a renter, he could have stayed within the boundaries of the law by accessing another source of data. However Commenter #29 has a point if that is what the Voter Vault agreement actually states. As a precinct committeeman, I’ve had to sign a non-disclosure usage agreement to access voter data. And it’s hard to argue with the fact that the law states that it is a class 6 felony. Of anyone who should know the terms and conditions of using  Voter Vault and it’s proper usage, you would expect it to be a party official. Right?

Let’s face it, incidents like this whether fabricated, conspired or true, are a serious public relations problem for the Arizona Republican Party. I would presume that the State Executve Committee would investigate and make a decision whether there are personnel issues it needs to address and whether it needs to take actions to avoid further public relations or even liability issues. Any inquiry by the EC should be thorough and deliberative and avoid embracing a lynch mob mentality.

I don’t know if Brett has “enemies,” as he claims, who want to destroy his career. We know very little about the woman Brett was pursuing. Could she have been a Democrat trying to set him up? Thus far, she hasn’t stepped forward to verify her story. That leaves it up to MCSO to make a determination.

To the broader question. This is where I would really love our reader’s feedback. Should incidents like this ever be posted on Sonoran Alliance? I decided to allow the post to stand because it was not merely a disagreement over policy matters. In the past we have covered stories about Republicans who have been caught doing illegal or unethical activities. Commenter #9 alluded to Mark Sanford, Larry Craig and Mark Foley – all Republicans who did something that got them into trouble and hurt the party (and probably cost elections from a collateral damage standpoint).

Would our readers prefer NOT to see posts that reveal Republicans who break the law or act unethical? Is it better if we sweep it under the carpet, look the other way or just remain silent? Does our silence equate to condoning these acts and ultimately causing more damage? Democrats are always quick to remind us about the log in our own eyes whenever we point out the splinter in theirs. Has anyone in our party ever thought about getting our own house in order or, do we always want to respond with, “well, they do it too?”

Back to the question. Are posts like the Mecum post from the “genre” of the circular firing squad or do they really have a value in the long-run? Do they hurt us more than help us and do they restore credibility to our principles and agenda? I always believed that we were the party of reason, consistency and moral absolutes. If we can’t strive for those ideals then what’s the point of trying to make our lives and country a better place?

Now it’s your turn…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Calling All Republicans –

AZ GOP Invited to Commemorate the Big 50

NOVEMBER 10, 2009. Later this month Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker will hit the half-century mark. In celebration of this, well, momentous occasion, all Republicans are invited to revel with the man himself, and remind him how 50 is the new 40!

At 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22nd, the Parkers will host this event at their Paradise Valley home. All that is required for attendance is for guests to bring ten, five dollar Clean Elections contributions and forms. Forms can be downloaded at www.Parker2010.com.

For more details or to RSVP, please contact Travis Junion at 602.770.2890, or email info@parker2010.com.

************************

Parker is the current mayor of Paradise Valley, Arizona. He has previously served the administrations of George H.W. Bush, George Bush, as an Assistant Secretary for the $90 billion United States Department of Agriculture, small businessman, and as a pastor for two years at a small non-denominational church in Paradise Valley.

Parker has the most compelling life story of any candidate emerging for governor. Raised by his grandmother in a severely underprivileged neighborhood in Long Beach, California, Parker was able to escape the drugs and violence through love, education and the commitment of family.

For more information contact Jason Rose or go to www.Parker2010.com.

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Contact: President Brad Dacus (916) 857-6900

Atheists Tell Federal Appeals Court: Public Prayer Makes Us Sick

Washington, D.C. – Briefing is nearing a close in a high-profile case challenging prayer at Presidential inaugurations, currently before the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawsuit, filed by hundreds of atheists and atheist groups, led by frequent litigant Michael Newdow, was thrown out by the lower federal court. The two ministers who offered prayers at President Obama’s inauguration, Dr. Rick Warren and Dr. Joseph Lowery, are named defendants in the lawsuit and are being represented by Pacific Justice Institute.

In its Opposition Brief filed last week, Pacific Justice Institute countered the legal arguments of atheists who said public prayer traumatized them to the point of illness. Among the more dire claims, one plaintiff declared, “[W]hen Chief Justice Roberts asked the President to say, ‘So help me God,’ I felt threatened and sick to my stomach.” Another plaintiff stated in court documents, “As I watched this inauguration, I cringed with disgust as I witnessed this special secular event again being poisoned with sectarian religious nonsense.”

The plaintiffs in this case include numerous individuals, and groups such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, The American Humanist Association, Atheists United, Atheists for Human Rights, and Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers.

PJI Chief Counsel Kevin Snider, who authored the opposition brief submitted last week on behalf of Drs. Warren and Lowery, commented, “Prayers designed to solemnize public events have a long and venerable history in our nation.

Are you familiar with this symbol?

The Constitution simply does not demand that our public institutions be amoral or atheistic.”

Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute, stated, “The First Amendment cannot be divorced from common sense. While atheists, humanists and freethinkers are a tiny minority in America, they are free to express and practice their lack of faith as they please. That does not mean, however, that the vast majority of God-fearing citizens and public officials must be silenced in order to appease them.”

I’m still shocked that a person as unfit and anti-American as Obama got elected president. He’s not just your average destructive Liberal. How did it happen? How did a closet-Muslim named ‘Barak Hussein Obama’ get elected? Was it the flaccidness of the Bush administration? Was it the uncompromising weakness of John McCain? Maybe those things contributed but, I think that real answer lies in the social conditioning  infused into our culture by our universities and pop culture over the last five decades—especially in the area of race relations.

A critical element of this conditioning is the untrue teaching that America is a “racist” nation and that black people are an oppressed group who are constantly being exploited by the greedy, white majority who ought to feel shame and guilt for the oppressions they inflict—even the unintended ones. The Liberal solution to these oppressions (after a hefty dose of guilt) are “Affirmative Action” programs—programs where blacks and other minorities are given preference in hiring and other areas over white applicants. That’s right, the same folks who insist that race shouldn’t matter want race to matter.

During the election I heard many a white Liberal say that “it is time our nation had a black president”. Like any Affirmative Action program the racial outcome is more important than the qualifications. All of these decades of conditioning have bestowed upon Obama a layer of protection never experienced by any previous president; just watch how many of his critics will continue to be labeled a “racist”.

You can bet that Hillary Clinton is one Democrat who isn’t enjoying this presidential Affirmative Action but other Liberals remain obsessed with racial issues. Why stop with the presidency? Let’s go whole hog. I think that every Democrat in congress should resign their seat in favor of a minority replacement. Let the healing begin!

Last Thursday, Espresso Pundit’s Greg Patterson broke a story about the release of a list of “Joe’s” who have patronized a valley VIP prostitute ring known as the Desert Divas. The story on this actually went public when the Phoenix New Times wrote an article back on February 12th that seemed to go nowhere.  Thursday that list of “Joe’s went public. Patterson explains that hew was able to walk into the Phoenix Police Department’s office of public records and obtain the list in a CSV file and it’s now online for the whole world to see.

Once Patterson posted the list at Espresso Pundit, he left it at that. (He even turned comments “off.”)  The Phoenix New Times was quick to jump on his story and also posted a link to the list and spun the story as a heads up to valley wives who may want to see if their hubbies were on the list.

Until now, no names have been mentioned in writing. Saturday, I received several phone calls informing me that two well-know political operatives show up on the list. I verified this myself.

Since Saturday, I’ve sat on the story after hearing that Dennis Welch of The Arizona Guardian was not going to publish. Well, Welch went public on Sunday. Sean Noble also picked up on it today and even reprinted Welch’s article on his blog, Noble Thinking. And one of our own, “GOP Cannon” posted his/her take on it earlier today. So now I’m going to chime in on the story and what I know.

The first name which may come as a surprise is that of Charles Jensen, the founder and President of Politics on the Rocks. I spoke with Charles on the phone and he catagorically denied any involvement or association with Desert Divas or any prostitute or prostitution ring. According to Jensen, he rented one of his properties to someone he won’t identify earlier (in 2007) who probably was a client of the Desert Divas. That means that the list was actually based on addresses given to law enforcement by the Divas. That address was tied back to the owner, Charles Jensen, who did not reside there. When I spoke with Charles on Saturday, he said that he was obtaining legal counsel in order to chase down the actual evidence provided by the Diva to Phoenix PD (probably a police report or transcrpt). That attorney will also likely go after anyone who attempts to libel Jensen. So the key to the Jensen’s innocence hinges on whatever evidence the Phoenix PD used to create their list of “Joe’s.” I happen to believe Jensen and think that one of his renters was the “Joe.”

The other name that shows up on the list is lobbyist, G. Michael Williams of Williams & Associates. I spoke with Williams Saturday night and he knew nothing of the list and catagorically denied it. It even appears that Williams and Associates  may not have even been at the address shown on the Diva List at the time that the alleged incident took place.

Having spoken to both gentleman, it appears that this is all a matter of mistaken identities tied to the addresses where the supposed acts took place. I’m going to take both men at their word especially since they appear to have alibis and attorneys.

Will this taint the GOP brand here in Arizona? I tend to doubt it. I also agree with the earlier post by GOP Canon. There are probably individuals in the GOP who will take advantage of this perception of a scandal and use it as leverage to advance their position of power in the party. That’s sophomoric, unethical and disgusting and it needs to stop.

Pat Buchanan has a provocative assessment of the current political climate posted over at World Net Daily in which he asserts that American may be coming apart.

Given the growing dicension and unrest, I would have to agree with him. And we should have expected it. For several generations, American attitudes have been shifting between those who give and those who take; those who reap the benefits of government and those who pay for them.

It’s an attitude of entitlement and that everything other than life, liberty and property is a “right.”

We’ve been warned about this already many many years ago by a Scot named Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler when he supposedly said:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

I’m not certain that Tytler had our situation in mind when he made his famous statement given that we are actually a Constitutional Republic, but I would have to agree that once a certain number of the population realizes that they can vote themselves into dependence on the state, we have a real problem.

I can easily see the other portion of the population revolting and collectively shutting down funding of the entire system. Already some conservative celebrities have suggested they’re gonna stop paying taxes into the system probably through tax avoidance (not to be confused with tax evasion). Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they will be blatant in their refusal to fund the federal government. Regardless, I get a sense that those who have been funding the system are a day short from refusing to pay any more. And why should we expect anything but that when we’ve already escalated our everyday financial vernacular to the use of the word “Trillion” with a capital “T?”

I hope I’m wrong about this but I have a terrible gut feeling that our economic political and social system is about to collapse under the weight of entitlement.

If or when that happens, life in America will be very different. A post-American senario has already been predicted by Russian political science professor, Igor Panarin, but I don’t give total credence to his disintigration of the US hypothesis. We may be weak but not to the point where other countries rapidly infiltrate and balkanize us into six separate nation states. But his assertion that we are overwhelmed with financial turmoil and to a certain degree, moral degredation, does worry many of us.

Back to Buchanan’s column where he says:

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming, “birthers” and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

“E pluribus unum” – out of many, one – was the national motto the men of ‘76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Sounds to me like our motto may be changing to “E Pluribus Discerpo” but I pray I’m wrong, if praying is still allowed.

This is awesome.

My congressman, Jeff Flake, was recently interviewed by Chandler Councilman, Jeff Weninger on the Chandler’s cable show Chandler in Focus. The interview was the regular superfluous listing of accomplishments and updates but then it gets very interesting.

During the last three minutes of the interview, Congressman Flake reveals that he recently spent seven days on a 50-acre deserted island in the south central Pacific. During his island getaway, he took a pole spear, a water desalinization pump, and some salt and pepper and his snorkling gear. For seven days he remained completely alone on an island in the middle of the Pacific. He ate lots of fish and even swam with the sharks.

Flake made no mention of bringing a volleyball along on his getaway.

Hat tip to Len Munsil for posting this ever-so-appropriate video featuring comedian Tim Hawkins.