Jonathan Hoffman is a friend of mine and like some (many) of my friends, he is occasionally (often) full of crap. Bile-infused, wrong-headed, short-sighted, painfully misinformed crap.
Jonathan used to hang out with us when I did the radio show with the late, great Emil Franzi. (I can’t believe Emil’s been gone a year now.) Jonathan would line up guests; he once got us an interview with Andrew Breitbart. (The real person Breitbart; not the pathetic, hit-piece website that Steve Bannon ran into the ground.) Jonathan would also scour the internet to find things to bolster his and Emil’s flimsy arguments. I’ll give this to Mr. Hoffman: He knows all the white websites.
Oops, I mean all the right websites. After all those decades of hard-won progress, we have degenerated back to a time where white and right are interchangeable.
Republicans in Arizona have long turned their noses (and middle fingers) up to teachers. The vitriol toward teachers from Arizona Republicans is nastier and deeper than just being about money. Twenty years ago, I interviewed a Republican state legislator and asked him why the hate for teachers. He replied that teachers vote for Democrats, even though they shouldn’t (his words). I suggested that maybe since teachers are on the front lines of society and see all the bad stuff on a daily basis, they might tend to be more open-minded and sympathetic. No, he said (I’m paraphrasing), they just like unions and want to make more money than they deserve.
That was the prevailing attitude until the Legislature (unconstitutionally) gutted the teachers’ unions and then (criminally) stiffed teachers of a billion dollars over the next few years, claiming that they couldn’t fulfill their sworn duty by paying the 301 moneys while giving ridiculous tax breaks to their big donors at the same time.
We all know the argument. Well, if teachers wanted to make a lot of money, they could have studied how to rape, pillage and screw over one’s fellow man. They chose to be teachers and they must have known that, in doing so, it comes with a built-in vow of poverty.
In May, when the 65,000-strong, highly educated flash mob descended on the State Capitol, demanding that lawmakers do their damn jobs after a decade of pissing all over Arizona’s teachers, Jonathan wrote a column in which he whinily asked the question, “Can teachers do that, I mean is it legal?”
They had already done it, so the question of whether they could was moot. As for its legality, Hoffman asked some clown from the Goldwater Institute, an organization that holds the distinction of being the only group that hates teachers more than Republican legislators do. The guy took a few minutes away from his main job of helping charter school operators get rich on taxpayer money to tell Jonathan that those evil public-school teachers were committing an illegal act. Well, suck it, Goldwater Institute.
Then Jonathan asked why people were taking shots at Gov. Ducey. Gee, let me see. All that faker did was cut taxes that had already been cut beyond the bone to give corporations a tax break they neither needed nor even wanted, accelerating the death spiral of public schools in the process. Then, when re-election year rolls around, he promotes a one-half-of-one-percent pay raise and declares himself “The Education Governor.” Even in the Time of Trump, that’s a whopper too far.
Now, Jonathan is back at it again. He’s still all butt-hurt that Arizona’s teachers banded together for their common good, won widespread public support in the process, and ended up getting much of what they demanded. I mean, what do they think this is? Real America?
He thinks that Arizona’s teachers got more than enough money to tide them over for the next decade or two and he doesn’t want any efforts to be made to bring the state’s funding for public schools back up to where it was when George W. Bush was President. In his latest column, he manages to use the phrase “illegal strike” four times in five paragraphs. I think that one of the Koch brothers offered to slip him 20 bucks if he could pull it off.
Good job, Jonathan. That only makes you look petty and bitter, and only mostly maniacal.
The Arizona Constitution allows the people to pass common-sense laws when the Legislature refuses to do so. Over the years, the people have implemented Clean Elections, the bipartisan gerrymandering commission, Prop 301 for school funding and (perhaps my favorite) a constitutional amendment that says that the Legislature can’t take an axe to something the people legally passed.
While some Republican legislators at least have the decency to not even pretend that they give a crap about public education, there is still a craven bunch who have the nerve to make outrageous statements. I’m sorry, but when I hear a Republican legislator say that he/she supports public education, in my head, I hear George Wallace saying, “I’ve never made a racist speech in my life.”
Jonathan sums things up by offering a comparison between the long-suffering teachers and people of Arizona and the self-serving back-stabbers in the Legislature. He ends the column with “Who (sic) do you want creating the laws of Arizona?”
I tend to believe that even Jonathan knows the overwhelming answer to that one.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2018.
“If you can read this, thank a teacher.” — Anonymous Teacher
Tom Danehy’s column is 100% correct about Jonathan Hoffman. I used to subscribe to the Arizona Daily Star. When I realized that the Star mistakenly publishes Hoffman’s blathering right wing screeds, I cancelled my subscription and will never renew, as long as Hoffman’s crap appears in the Star’s pages. Years ago, before the Star lost their standards by including Hoffman’s junk, I crossed swords with Hoffman over his idiotic opinion that desert bighorn sheep do well around open pit copper mines. He wrote that sheep were seen on mine tailings, so the giant chasms that go deeper than the water table must be okay and should not be limited by concern for the survival of desert bighorn sheep. Jonathan Hoffman is an idiot, just like Mr. Danehy’s column clearly points out.
Could it be that as bad as the Red Star is, they believe in the 1st Amendment? Unlike you.
TD,
I’m seriously interested in learning what positions characterize ‘progressive democrats’
What are the requirements, and who are the leaders/spokespersons of this political group??
What does Jonathan do for a living? That fact is conveniently left off his column bio.
I was a little more interested to understand, just what is a white website? It reads like some kind of a racist comment. You must be oblivious to the movement of blacks and hispanics to support Trump. His popularity is growing amongst minorities.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/economy-good-enough-for-minorities-to-give-congress-to-gop-reelection-to-trump-pollster_2581069.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/economy-good-enough-for-minorities-to-give-congress-to-gop-reelection-to-trump-pollster_2581069.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilycanal/2016/11/18/where-donald-trumps-charitable-giving-goes-against-his-politics/#36c0a4d2bde8
He has a real problem with white socialists. The ones that hate our economic system and would prefer we all get the same pay for everything. Mention that one to your doctor, just before surgery.
It was nice knowing you.
I once knew Jonathan Hoffman pretty well when we were both working at the IBM plant in Tucson. He took the “buyout” when IBM offered that to many of their employees in 1988. I always got along well with Jonathan and thought he was a good guy.
Obviously, in the years that have passed since that time, Jonathan has become something of a local champion for conservative politics in Arizona. Unlike one of the previous commenters, I still have my subscription for the Arizona Daily Star. Under the auspices of the Editorial Page Editor, Sarah Gassen, the ADS has added some conservatives to their roster of weekly opinion page columnists including Jonathan Hoffman.
I virtually never agree with Jonathan’s columns, but if he provides some different perspectives for readers of the Arizona Daily Star I’m not adverse to his inclusion. In the final analysis the press is not, as Trump often has stated, “The Enemy of the People”, it is an institution that truly merits its description as the “Fourth Estate”. Democracy will truly whither and die if it passes here in this country.
Mr. Small has me confused with someone else. I never wrote about bighorn sheep and mine tailings.
Yes, you did, Hoffman. You wrote that desert bighorn sheep survived fine around open pit copper mines.
JCC, you make a great point about newspapers and are certainly welcome to keep paying ADS via a subscription. I won’t ever again, because Hoffman represents a highly objectionable viewpoint that is grossly mistaken and does serious damage to our society. Giving him space in my home town’s daily paper is an abhorrent editorial policy that I will NOT help pay for. He can write his crap on s**t house walls, not in any paper I will subscribe to.
When I bother to read Hoffman I seldom find anything with which I agree but I think I understand why the Star publishes his columns. Local conservative writers are perhaps few and far between and Hoffman may well be among the more articulate. And if you have read the countless comments in the letters pages, you’ll recall that lots of local folks beg for the alternative views of conservatives in the Star’s op ed pages. And last time I looked there was no local ordinance, state or national law, constitutional provision or divine command that anyone actually read Hoffman’s columns if they prefer not to.
The part of the article I found was offensive was his take that somehow the citizens’ use of the initiative process was somehow subversive. It was a cutting edge proposal in the Progressive Era that allowed citizens the ability to go around the legislature when the citizens felt their voices weren’t being represented there. I wonder if he wrote about his indignation that the Legislature intentionally ignored another law passed by the voters that designated a portion of the state sales tax to go to education. I’ve never understood the conservative’s hatred of public education where almost every employee is underpaid but love the idea of cutting taxes for wealthy Americans.
Let me help you understand it. The NEA forced membership dues from the and then used them for the candidates and parties of their choice. They introduced curriculum that changed, ignored or deleted historical facts. they promoted government dependency rather than individualism.
As far as tax cuts go, almost all tax cuts go to tax PAYERS. Not just the wealthy. And I believe the idea was born out of massive fraud and waste with very poor results.
If the public schools could right the wrongs I believe the issues would disappear. But is anybody willing? I see the so called young adult protesters with bandanas on their faces that came from public schools. How did they get so radicalized?
Mr. Small, Please provide a link to your bighorn sheep article. If that is not possible, maybe you could supply the name of the publication and an approximate date.
I would like to clarify something. I do not object to the initiative process generally. My concern is that it is being used to replace the legislative process. It is a good check on the legislature, a way to stop some wildly crazy act that is either corrupt or self serving in some way. The ESA legislation that was forced on to a ballot prop was neither of these. It was a modest expansion of existing law that was working well. An example of another inappropriate use of the ballot prop is one that increases income tax to fund education. Increasing education can be a good thing, but this particular ballot prop is so poorly worded that it has already drawn a number of legal challenges, and ballot props are very poor ways to enact taxing or spending bills. They are virtual constitutional amendments that are virtually impossible to modify in any significant way. Hanky Panky is correct in that income taxes are not taxes on wealth, they are taxes on earned income; earned income is not the same are interest income or capital gains which are taxed separately. In other words, income taxes are taxes on productivity.
I think it was one of the two geologist that used to frequent the comments that talked about the sheep on the tailings.
And yes, the sheep are thriving on several mine sites.
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2017/05/22/mines-and-wildlife/
@ Hanky Panky: the NEA cannot (by law) force membership dues on any member in AZ. You are not “helping people” to understand anything when you are either factually incorrect or willfully ignorant.
“The unions financial support of Democrats is not new or unusual. What is news though is the extent to which unions have gone to hide the aggressively partisan nature of their expenditures.”
This Forbes article does a better job of explaining the NEA’s actions as it pertains to the use of membership dues.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/11/03/big-political-spending-by-unions-paid-with-dues/#18651f5f4de2
I’m not sure why they go to such lengths to hide it.
Mr. Small, Good news. It appears that Hunting Guy solved the mystery as to the article you read. It appeared in the ADI, and was co-authored by Jonathan DuHamel and a Mr. Briggs. Hope youre not too disappointed.
Thank you, Mr. Danehy! I love your column!