Backpacks, markers, glue sticks, oh my! Help the kids of Tucson start the school year off right, prepared with supplies by donating school essentials to the La Escuelita South Tucson back to school supply drive.


Bring school supplies to help students, donate anything from pencils to paper, you can even bring a backpack full of school supplies if you're feeling generous. 

The UA Museum of Art and the UA Norton School of Family and Consumer Science are supporting the drive by acting as drop off sites for the donations. 

You have until Tuesday, Aug. 2 to drop off donations at the UA Museum of Art (1031 N. Olive Rd) or the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences (650 N. Park Ave.)  

Have items that need to be picked up? Email meyer.kate88@gmail.com. 

Don't worry if you find more school supplies after that date: The Tucson Desert Art Museum's supply drive starts the next day and continues through Sept. 30. 

The Tucson Desert Art Museum is even offering a discounted admission to anyone who donates supplies.  

More information about the La Escuelita drive and the Tucson Desert Art Museum drive is available online.

Dylan Smith at the Tucson Sentinel has got his hands on a whole bunch of the emails that Pima County Supervisor Ally Miller keeps insisting do not exist—and he presents a damning case of an elected official driven by paranoia and a weird rage. The central takeaways:

The hundreds of documents provided, along with those previously released by former staff, show that:

Miller has continued her longstanding practice of routinely using personal emails, Facebook and text messages to direct her staff.

Miller has directed her employees to avoid using county email accounts or computers to carry out many of their duties.

Miller scripts her radio appearances, working with a host to plot out precise language for questions and answers.

Miller's staffers have reviewed drafts of purportedly "independent" blog posts prior to their being published.

Miller worked with the Goldwater Institute to prompt a lawsuit over the county's World View deal, despite publicly denying doing so.

It's easy to see why Miller did not want to turn over the emails, as they reveal Miller to be a lying looney-toon who thinks Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry has planted bugs in her walls. (Also, she evidently doesn't like me very much, probably because I was warning voters about her bullshit back when she was running for office in 2012 and continued writing stories like this about her.)

A year ago I created a chart showing TUSD's total enrollment from 2000 to 2015, using figures from the page on TUSD's website, School Enrollment by Gender & Ethnicity on Any Day. I've expanded the chart to include 2016 figures.

Like last year, I used the enrollment numbers from the 175th day, which seem to have fewer random ups and downs than other school days I looked at. On this year's chart, I expanded the width of the bars for the last six years so they could be seen more easily.

Here's the new chart.

The chart shows a decline in enrollment from 2000 to 2016 from 61,280 to 47,661, a loss of 13,619 students. But it also shows the rate of loss of students changed over the years. From 2000 to the 2006-7 school year, the district lost an average of 350 students a year. Starting in 2007 and continuing through the 2011-12 school year, the average losses more than quadrupled, to 1,600 a year. After that, the rate slowed, then increased, then slowed again. TUSD lost 417 students during the most recent school year, which is significantly lower than any loss in the previous eight years.

While it’s been over twenty years since the great Frank Zappa left the planet, there’s been surprisingly little in the media about his life and times.

Director Thorsten Schutte finds a nice way of getting Frank back in the public eye, through a solid documentary featuring Zappa interviews, concert footage and appearances. Like The Beatles Anthology before it, Eat That Question tells the artist’s story by using his own words.

I’m a big fan, so I’ve seen some of the footage Schutte utilizes, like Zappa playing bicycle with Steve Allen and Frank’s final interview before dying from cancer. Thankfully, Schutte (with help from the Zappa Family Trust) has unearthed a lot of rare footage, footage even the most ardent fan might not be familiar with.

This isn’t a concert film, but it does have some great concert moments, enough so that fans of his music will be satisfied. The fact that Zappa was a brilliant philosopher and extremely wise man was sometimes lost in the controversy he could cause with his lyrics, especially in the late seventies.

Schutte’s film gives us plenty of Zappa talking, and he’s simply one of the most engaging speakers who ever walked the planet. It’s also quite the kick to see this gathering of interviews and interviewees, some of whom Frank didn’t exactly hit it off with. If he didn’t like the interviewer, he still made the session interesting. I found myself missing the man very much when the movie was over. 

Talking with Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein at the Bernie Or Bust The DNC rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Democratic Party Convention—American Babylon asks the candidate, "Is your new campaign slogan 'Bernie or Bust?"

Sharing helps, sharing is love, share, or don't, as long as you share...with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and even Donald J. Trump.

A few thoughts going into Tuesday at the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia:

• There is a big difference in the geographic layout of the two conventions. In Cleveland, everything was right downtown. The convention itself was less than a mile walk from Public Square, where most protest and democratic activity was located over the four days. In Philadelphia, the main protest activity is going on downtown near Penn Station and City Hall, with the actual convention itself going on nearly five miles up Broad Street inside the relative sterility of Wells Fargo Arena. There are protesters at the arena, but they are separated from all convention activity by a well-constructed metal wall and a distance of a few football fields. There is no realistic opportunity to voice grievances, which is kinda the whole point of protesting and exercising one's democratic/free speech rights.
   
  
• Protests will continue. A few animating issues are present everywhere you look: "The system is rigged" and #NOTPP and #DWS and "Lock Her Up." Anti-Trans Pacific Partnership sentiment runs rampant, the image of the letters TPP slashed out in a circle is ever present. Whatever the reality of TPP, the issue is proving to be the wedge with which Trump is attempting to peel off Bernie supporters. For those who are incredulous that Bernie supporters would or could ever become Trump voters, you really should come down and talk to people in Philly right now. I met three dudes outside Wells Fargo Arena who would blow your mind with their "We support Bernie but we want to build the wall" talk. The point being that these protesters and eventual voters are deeply motivated to get involved by specific issues, not specific candidates. Which is to say that many of Bernie's most ardent supporters have abandoned Bernie for suggesting they should throw themselves behind Hillary's campaign. It is complicated. 
  
  
• "Lock Her Up" sentiment every bit as strong here in Philadelphia as it was in Cleveland. Many sport t-shirts and signs with some turn on the phrase. When pressed, a variety of offenses are named, none of them criminal according to the FBI Director James Comey and others. The question of those in power playing by different rules lingers over all of this. The day started out as a slow-motion debacle, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz booed and humiliated at her own delegation's meeting, then stepping down but immediately accepting some kind of functionary role in the Clinton campaign. The protesters were animated by all of this, to be sure, and were not interested in anything anyone pro-Hillary had to say. I witnessed numerous arguments along the line of "The system is corrupt and she's a big part of it. The emails prove they were actively trying to bring down Bernie from the get go" and the response: "Hillary's a flawed human being like all of us. So what? Do you want Trump?" 
  

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Talking with Dr. Cornel West and Chris Hedges on the street about the Bernie Problem.

Congresswoman Martha McSally has told The Range she won’t be endorsing Donald Trump in this year’s presidential race, although she might vote for him.

“I have never endorsed a politician in my life and I’m not going to start now, so you can ask me for the next three and a half months, but it’s not happening,” McSally said on Friday, July 22. “Who we each vote for is our responsibility as a citizen and a voter and, in that role, have a vote just like you have a vote and I personally believe that is between me, God and the ballot box.”

The two Democrats who are competing in the Democratic primary, former state lawmakers Matt Heinz and Victoria Steele, have both worked to link McSally to Trump, as has the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They’re hoping that Trump will prove so unpopular with voters that he’ll affect down-ticket races.

After Trump clinched the nomination, McSally said via a prepared statement that she would spend time between now and Election Day evaluating Trump’s character to determine if she could support him.

There was a great deal of talk about the “low protester turnout” problem at the GOP Convention last week. Many people in the media and on the ground in Cleveland expressed dismay at the ratio of media to actual protesters. It is true that certain times at Public Square resembled a summer camp for media trainees, everyone clamoring for access an argument between a geriatric “Bikers for Trump” delegate and a People’s Resistance spokesman or an anti-fascist and a “Jesus hates everything” enthusiast.

Months ago I was at a Donald Trump rally in San Diego and witnessed some intensely wrought protests and counter-protests which repeatedly devolved into violence. By and large, Cleveland was not that. Certain members of the media expressed private dismay at the “lack of action” - the relative tranquility seemed welcome to everyone on a personal level but could prove challenging on a professional one. “If it bleeds it leads” is alive and well. There was little to no bleeding at the GOP Convention. There was intense conversation and argument and protest. There was back and forth. There was democracy, but it didn’t get to fists. This is good progress.

Which leads us to the first day of the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia. We just arrived in Philly an hour ago and downtown is packed. There are traffic jams everywhere you look. There is a vastly smaller police presence here as compared to Cleveland, where it was customary to look to your right and see a dozen cops waiting in riot gear across from two dozen of their counterparts on the same street. There are small protests going on each corner. The obligatory “Jesus loves you but wants you to suffer” guys have been reduced to a small sideshow on a block far away from the main stem.