H is for How did we get here? How did Arizona, a state once known for its frontier spirit and forward-looking people, turn into the laughingstock of America? How did we get to a point where minority kids in Mississippi breathe a sigh of relief and say, “At least we don’t live in Arizona!” And how did we get to a point where lawmakers openly and proudly shirk their responsibilities and every crackpot idea, instead of getting laughed out of town, somehow becomes adopted and serves as a base for the next year’s even-crackpot-ier idea?

Y is for Your money. That’s what they’re spending to help send their kids (and their friends’ kids) to private schools. After the initial burst of revulsion at the passage of a “vouchers-for-everyone!” bill by the State Senate, I calmed down (if only just a bit). We are all aware that voucher programs don’t work—not here, not in Wisconsin, not anywhere. Lying about it and/or trying to convince oneself that maybe the next time will be different doesn’t really change the facts.

Much more important is the realization that only a handful of people are actually going to use those vouchers. Some, quite disgustingly, will be homeschoolers who will come to look upon their offspring as meal tickets with taxpayer money just falling from the sky. However, most of the money will probably go to people who are already well-off enough to send their kids to private schools.

Think about it this way: A $5,000 voucher isn’t going to get a poor kid into a private school that costs 10 or 15 grand. All that will happen is that current private-school parents will use the money as a scholarship, or maybe the school will just increase the tuition by $5,000 to increase their profits and make the school even more exclusive without costing their current clientele a penny. Nothing like a (taxpayer-funded) 33 percent bump in your tuition to help keep the Clampetts away.

P is for the Pockets of lobbyists in which many of the legislators reside. When it comes to the gun lobby (which apparently wants guns in schools, churches, and hospital delivery rooms), most legislators are like that little ball of lint down in the bottom of the pocket of those pants that are only worn when everything else is in the dirty-clothes hamper. That’s understandable. For decades, the NRA has been scaring the crap out of people with empty or only partially filled scrotums.

What’s weird is that Arizona’s Republican legislators appear to be equally afraid of (or maybe enamored with) charter schools and private schools. How else to explain two decades of charter school excesses with little to show for it, education-wise, and perhaps hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars unaccounted for due to an intentional lack of government oversight?

O is for Oversight. What is that, exactly? Oh, it’s what the Goldwater Institute wants to do to police unions, but that’s okay because we’ve been told that unions are evil. But the Goldwater folks don’t want it for charter schools, which grow fat off public funds, but don’t have to account for where the money goes. The feeble attempts to differentiate between the way the spending of public funds is scrutinized in some cases and shielded from the public in others don’t just ring false; they scream false.

C is for the state Constitution, which many Republicans treat as a mere suggestion when it comes to doing their sworn duty. All those years of not funding education properly, somebody in the state Legislature should have gone to jail. They still should. There’s no statute of limitations on greedy or stupid.

R is for Really?! You go running into the streets, screaming that the Socialists are coming and then you turn around and want to give parents $5,000 per kid to spend (or not) on “education?” That doesn’t set off alarm bells in your pinheads? May God have mercy on your sucked-dry souls.

I is for “In it for themselves.” See “Y.”

T is for the Thousands and thousands of good, dedicated, hard-working teachers who have been driven out of their profession and/or the state of Arizona by a Legislature that hates public schools, hates teachers, and therefore REALLY hates public-school teachers.

E is for Education … for everybody and not just the select few. I really, really don’t understand. People spend lots of time and money to get elected and then they don’t want to do their damn jobs. State legislators basically have two responsibilities. They need to make our state livable, meaning maintaining an infrastructure and providing for public safety. And they need to educate our young people. Two jobs—they suck at the former and refuse to do the latter.

Put it all together and you have HYPOCRITE, which describes just about every Republican in the Legislature. They cry and bleat and shout from the rooftops about how their very raison d’etre is to cut taxes (blissfully ignoring what a quarter-century of rabid and indiscriminate tax-cutting has done to our once-sturdy-but-now-gutted state). But present them with an opportunity to further enrich their already-rich buddies while driving another nail into the coffin of public education at the same time, and all that tax-cutting jibber-jabber goes away.

I’d rather deal with an admitted crook than with a smiling hypocrite.

This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2016.

14 replies on “Danehy”

  1. Some of the vouchers are for $23,000. (See the AZ Republic chart, p.5.) That certainly covers some tuition.

  2. It’s too bad that the public schools created their own demise, but we must move forward. Parents got tired of dealing with crooks.

  3. Can’t believe that this Danehy, with his juvenile empty scrotum comments, gets to spew his crap every week. How does he dare accuse REPUBLICANS of treating the constitution as a suggestion? Your liberal democrat president doesn’t know what the constitution is.

  4. Correction # one. He now gets to do it every other week. If the Geekly is smart, soon it will be monthly. Empty scrotums? This from a chicken who blows off someone he’s been friendly with for years and won’t even tell him why. Talk about a hypocrite!
    Correction # two. Obummer is very much aware of what the Constitution is. It’s on the floor right in front of the doors to Oval Office.

  5. Bingo Tom you nailed it. Club the dummies over the head in the hope that eventually they’ll get it. Arizona’s
    Republican party exists not to govern and manage the State’s resources but to get re elected to funnel the tax payers money to the wealth oligarchy and the religious crackpots who they pander to to get the funds to continue the process. I hate to sound like a communist but I have to say it, the Republican Party is the enemy of the people. Look at any proposition from the legislature that appears on the ballot and you see them presenting a knife to the voters so that a yes vote becomes an invitation to cut their own throats. Proposition 123 with no guarantees to aid education promises triggers to continue their destruction of Public Education and the promise to use the funds to defend these criminals in the continued court cases to to come to bring them to justice for their contempt of the voters. Prop. 123 another big money bag for the legislature to “balance the budget” now that they’ve almost gone through the education funds to steal from.. It will be interesting to see what creative ways they come up with.
    The nerve of these people to ask for an increase in pay for their mismanagement of the State was monumental. The refusal of the voters to agree with them gives a small glimmer of hope to the democratic process.
    The continuing efforts by men and postmenopausal women in the legislature, to pass unconstitutional laws obstructing the rights of all fertile women’s access to abortion, is a perfect example of their pandering to special interests and using it as an excuse to avoid their real job that we pay them to do. How about spending some time to come up with a FAIR tax code that gives all a chance to contribute?

  7. Calling it as it is. They genuflect to the Constitution when convenient. At one time the Republicans in this State including Goldwater and Barr, cared about what happened to the infrastructure of the State. That word meaning schools, and colleges, not just roads and bridges. And most particularly the CAP canal, which in a bi-partisan way was the political test case for caring about Arizona, or at least the land development therein. ( if you don’t think too much of the logic in bringing third or fourth priority water from Lake Havasu 400 miles, in an open ditch, uphill to Tucson). Now their incredible selfishness extends only to what they can get for their pals in private schools or private tuition organizations or for profit charter schools. If the whole rest of State infrastructure falls in or burns down, at least they won’t have to pay for it is their logic.

  8. You need to read “the Arizona Project” by Michael Wendlund to get a true picture of the Goldwaters. They were masters….

  9. Allow me to explain why Tammy ( no typo) is so concern with this particular subject. If God forbid her wife ever lost her job as a teacher, Tammy would have to go out and find a real job. Sadly, this won’t happen for two reasons. Tammy lacks both the brains and ambition to do so. Very sad if you ask me. If you want to list all my faults, you’d better pack a lunch and take a flashlight. But, I can say this in my favor…I always worked. At real jobs I might add.

  10. Politician – 1) a person for whom all questions of ethics, morality, accountability, responsibility and humanity are dependent upon the answer to a single guiding question “What is in it for me?”, 2) a liar, 3) a cheat, 4) a stealer of candy from babies.

  11. I love it. Now Tammy’s a food critic, too. That’s something else he can suck at. ” A touch of class” That’s rich. His idea of a classy restaurant is one that doesn’t use plastic forks and spoons !!

  14. 5th poorest city in America, and Danehy and his fellow communists in Tucson, (which is pretty much all of the council and board of stupids) are DAMN proud of it.

    Tucson, White Guilt Capital of America

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