Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (December 23

Skinny ONE MO THING: The many tributes paid to Morris King Udall all included his role in bringing us the Central Arizona Project. Only one story we noticed, by The Arizona Daily Star's Tony Davis, pointed out that Udall expressed strong doubts about the CAP at the end of his career.
Many of us suspect that Udall would have reversed his position on the CAP, as has one of his former colleagues who was also instrumental in securing passage of the CAP--a guy who comes from another place on the political spectrum, former Congressman Sam Steiger.
Both Steiger and Udall admitted that supporting the CAP was a mistake. A great and rare commodity in a politician is the ability to admit something like that.
ARE YOU RECENTLY DEAD? THEN WHY NOT JOIN THE GOP: Joe Pennington was re-elected last week as Pima County Republican Party chairman along with a hand-picked slate of officers. The role of political party leaders has so diminished in recent years that we're probably the only publication bothering to report this bit of trivia.
Once upon a time people actually cared about who the party bosses were. But currently, fewer than 300 of the 1,200 or so slots for GOP precinct committeeman are filled, and only about 130 of those bothered to show up to choose their leadership, with 40 more represented by proxy. Democrats are worse off.
This shameful situation can be attributed to the general cluelessness of those who still choose to participate in our ailing political system. Pennington--and we assume those he chose to serve on his executive committee--have no real agenda and no political principles to espouse. Pennington himself is the author of the nebulous party "vision statement" that basically points out the GOP likes such things as good weather. He and others like him are so afraid of "divisiveness" that they refuse to take a stand on anything or allow anyone else to either.
The net result has been that nobody can see any reason left to bother with participation in party affairs. Once upon a time political parties determined in large part what elected officials said and did. But today they've become mere gaggles of sycophants who are afraid to be more than a soft money conduit for the elected officials who now dominate them.
Pennington crammed his choices down everybody's throat by not permitting the nominating committee to make more than one nomination for any office. The move was protested by some, including respected former GOP Chairwoman Linda Barber, who reminded him that past nominating committees had presented options. Pennington, who wasn't around five years ago to know, told Barber she was wrong and he knew better--a pathetically inaccurate statement.
Some members showed signs of a pulse by rebelling and making nominations from the floor for the three positions of member-at-large. The last-minute rump got about a third of the vote, illustrating that Pennington really controlled only slightly more than 100 votes--or two thirds of two thirds of one fourth of the 1,200 allotted. Not very impressive, particularly when one of the rebels was long-time activist and recent GOP convert Scott Egan, aide to Supervisor Ray Carroll. That Egan could garner 55 GOP committee members at the last minute against Pennington's hand-picked slate should tell Pennington he's doing something wrong.
One of Pennington's picks was former County Supervisor Paul Marsh, who had exhibited his party loyalty by supporting Libertarian Gay Lynn Goetzke against Carroll in the last election. Once upon another time Marsh would have been asked to resign instead of being promoted, but apparently the new GOP is so non-political it doesn't consider Marsh's traitorous behavior to be an issue in an election for a leadership post.
Pennington stated that he wants an executive committee that will quit arguing and do things together. Best example we know of that is called a graveyard.
BROWN NOSING: Two weeks ago, The Weekly took a critical look at a proposed national sales tax being pushed by a group called Americans for Fair Taxation, which is headed by a gang of wealthy Texans who want to scrap the Internal Revenue Service and replace income taxes with sales taxes ("Tax Cheats," December 10).
Our report revealed, in a nutshell, that the group's "grassroots" efforts were really astroturf and that their numbers were deceptive.
Two days after our story appeared, The Arizona Daily Star ran an op-ed by Houston Mayor Lee Brown, who made the case for the national sales tax.
Brown started his article by attacking an element of the current income tax system: "What if a politician came up with the following idea: a tax on work that applies only to low- and middle-income wage-earners. The tax would start on the first dollar earned by a working person, but phase out once the person starts making good money, say about $65,000."
Brown says that "kooky" idea, which creates "the most regressive tax possible," is already law. What he doesn't mention, however, is that he's talking about Social Security taxes. While we agree that Social Security taxes are regressive and that the system absolutely needs reform, we find it disingenuous of Brown not to mention that those tax payments are an investment that's supposed to be returned to people in their sunset years.
Brown, who wasted plenty of our tax dollars while serving as the pointless White House Drug Czar a few years back, argued that the national sales tax would simplify people's taxes. But, in the case of the vast majority of taxpayers, it would raise their taxes as well. The real winners would be wealthy Americans who would easily escape taxes on investments, inheritance and gifts.
We can understand why Brown would get on the national sales tax bandwagon: Some Fat Cats in his hometown are pushing this fraud.
But why does the Star give Brown a platform for this kind of deceptive bullshit? We're all for an op-ed page that features strong opinion, but this perspective was just phony propaganda written by a political stooge. Oh, well--at least it wasn't another column about Monica.
LIGHT OF DAY: District 12 GOP state Rep. Dan Schottel had the folks in Tortolita steaming for a couple of days after he was quoted in the afternoon paper as saying he had a "burning interest" in supporting the incorporation of Casas Adobes, while Tortolita had the opposition of both Marana and Oro Valley.
Schottel would like to reassure Tortolitans that while both remarks are correct, the rest of his conversation wasn't reported--namely, that he still stands fully behind the incorporation efforts of both towns. He promises not to support legislation that abandons either.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ann Day's proposed incorporation bill would screw Tortolita by including a provision that new towns must include at least 5 percent commercially zoned land before incorporation can proceed. Tortolita could have the equivalent of all three of the biggest shopping malls in the valley and still not make it. That provision would even disqualify Marana.
The big question: Who wrote this abomination for the Senator, and how did the City of Tucson get a copy way ahead of everybody else? Phoenix sources tell us Day gave a copy of the bill to a reporter, who gave it to his editor, who then passed it on to Tucson Mayor George Miller, who then gave it to Tucson annexation czar John Jones. And we're also told the real author is Governor Jane Dee Hull's Tucson honcho, former local editor and publisher Steve Jewett.
That could explain why Jewett's hand-picked successor at Inside Tucson's Business Pants, human chihuahua Rob Smith, has been viciously attacking Tortolita since about 20 minutes after his plane from Hawaii landed. Now we may have at least one answer--he's been brown-nosing the boss, who apparently has rather low standards for competence otherwise.

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