Just waking up to greet the heat? Good. Now put on sunscreen, grab a hat and bring your water bottle. It's time to celebrate our city's 235th birthday. You missed the Prayer Walk on A Mountain, but if you've been living right, voted early or plan to vote next week, you're doing OK.

Here's a rundown on the birthday offerings for today. For a complete list go here:

San Xavier Mission Celebrates Tucson's Birthday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., free at 1959 San Xavier Road. Enjoy Native American arts and crafts, food booths and entertainment all day with present-day members of the original community at Chuk Shon. All proceeds will benefit the Wa:k Community.

Southern Arizona Transportation Museum, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., free at 414 N Toole Ave. The Museum will have a Diesel Simulator for young engineers and Locomotive 1673 (featured in the movie Oklahoma ) will be available for photo shots. Cake and popcorn and "goodies" from Amtrak will be served.

The Buffet Bicycle Bonanza, 5-8pm, free, but if you want to participate in the bicycle ride it is $10 per rider. Go to the Buffet Bar at 538 E 9th St. Dress up like Tucson's Birthday and win up to four free tickets to the Loft Theatre! The Buffet Bicycle Bonanza, celebrating Tucson's Birthday, will raise funds for Project Power - an HIV/AIDS prevention/awareness program. Project Power is part of the non-for profit organization Positively Beautiful.
Participants/bicyclists: Meet at the Buffet and bike to selected bars that carry New Belgium beer. At each bar the participant must pick up a particular New Belgium pin and return to the Buffet, proving their completion of the circuit by collecting each bar's particular pin. Everyone who has proof of completing the event will receive two raffle tickets. Participants may bike, skate, unicycle, tricycle, BMX, walk, skip, run ... as long as it's human powered. There's also a costume contest and you can register in teams.

Investigative reporter John Dougherty, one of four Democrats who want a shot at U.S. Sen. John McCain in November, is sending tweets from his four-day, 40-mile hike as he wraps up his campaign. Follow ’em here.

Meanwhile, Feathered Bastard amplifies the ongoing turmoil for Democrat Rodney Glassman's team here. Whatever's going on over there, it's a safe bet that Rodney isn't seeing the ROI that he'd hoped for when he launched the campaign.

Yet the recall is having various effects on the Buckeye, Ariz., company.

There’s this report that several cities are turning to the company for a supply of untainted eggs. Then there’s this report that the recall could still cause company officials serious indigestion, albeit far less than what salmonella enteritidis is capable of.

The recall has not officially affected Arizona, but there are reports that health department officials are pulling eggs before they reach grocery stores.

All we have to say is that mega-farming like what takes place at the farms that produced the eggs related to the recall is gross and often inhumane. There aren’t many places to get local eggs in Tucson, other than Hickman’s, but if you’ve ever considered buying more local food, this might be a good time to start.

Arizona Illustrated's Roundtable gang sizes up Tuesday's primary election, with a focus on the Paton-Kelly race in Congressional District 8, the U.S. Senate race and more!

Republicans Jesse Kelly and Jonathan Paton, who are facing off in the Congressional District 8 Republican primary that voters will decide next Tuesday, Aug. 24, both say a federal judge should not have ruled that Prop 8, the California law limiting marriage to one man and one woman, was unconstitutional.

“It was an example of judicial activism that overturned the will of the people in that state,” Paton says.

Kelly echoes that sentiment.

“It really is a travesty that, once again, an activist court overruled the will of the people,” Kelly says.

Paton says that if federal courts continue to say that bans on gay marriage are unconstitutional, he’d support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

Kelly is more nuanced in his approach to amending the U.S. Constitution.

“Marriage should be defined by the states,” Kelly says. “However, if activist courts continue to overrule the will of the people, then what we need is a constitutional amendment driving home the fact that the states decide marriage.”

Both men oppose efforts to expand federal benefits to domestic partners of unmarried federal employees, as the Obama administration has granted in some cases. (Details here.)

“Now is not the time to be increasing government benefits,” Kelly said via email. “We need to move toward personal ownership of our health insurance policies, similar to how auto insurance and term life currently work. We should allow individuals to deduct health insurance costs and to pool their buying power in order to make coverage more affordable. I also support purchasing coverage across state lines.”

Paton said he’d support efforts to legislatively block benefits for the partners of gays and lesbians, but declined to elaborate.

The winner of the primary will face Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in November.

Former state lawmaker Jonathan Paton has had some success in his push for more campaign cash: Our sources tell us that yesterday, he dumped another $50K or so into a TV advertising blitz for the last weekend of the campaign against Jesse Kelly in the GOP primary that will determine the Republican candidate who will face Democratic incumbent Gabrielle Giffords in November.

How much good it will do remains to be seen. Our last review of the CD8 early ballots show that about 55,000 were requested and more than 24,000 have come back in, so a lot of votes have already been cast. (And a big chunk of those early ballots will probably not come back; roughly one out of every four people who got early ballots in the sales-tax election didn't return their ballots.)

But it ain't over ’til it's over.

David Safier at Blog for Arizona has been diligently unpacking this week's Goldwater Institute's report contending that Arizona's university's are heavy with administrative bloat. Here's one example:

Maybe, I said, based on G.I.'s history, some of the facts and figures in the report were distorted and misrepresented, and someone who knows how to critique research reports would discover problems.

Remember that G.I. still maintains that Bus Drivers are Bureaucrats, I reminded the press. Based on G.I.'s past history, maybe a bit of academic review of this report is in order.

A visit to blogforarizona.com will yield more.

Greg Patterson at Espresso Pundit takes the opposite tack in suggesting that a university education really isn't all that valuable:

Meanwhile in all but a few fields such as (Accounting and Engineering) the future economic benefit of the degree is worth less than the cost, while many degrees (sociology, literature, gender studies) have nearly zero economic benefit.

Students are beginning to realize that they will be left with very few incremental skills, limited additional earning power, enough student loan debt to finance a decent house—and the same job at Starbucks that they had while in high school.

Maybe Greg is right about the uselessness of some college degrees—although this chart, lifted from Matthew Yglesias' blog, suggests that you're a lot better off with that degree than without it.

We're of the opinion that there's more to college—and to life—than learning how to be a good earning cog in the machine. YMMV.

Espresso Pundit shares a shocking letter from Maricopa County Supervisor Andy Kunasek and notes that he "can't do justice with excerpts—the letter has to be read to be believed. Take a moment and read the whole thing." You should do just that by clicking here.

Republican Jesse Kelly, whose comments about Sarah Palin have become the talk of his Congressional District 8 Republican race with former lawmaker Jonathan Paton with just days to go before the Aug. 24 primary, doubled down on his statement rather than walking it back during an appearance on the Jon Justice radio show this morning. Said Kelly:

The video speaks for itself. YouTube it. I don't — I said spoke honestly. I spoke from the heart, and I said what I said and I meant every single dang-gone word of it. I wouldn't take anything back. And now it’s being used by the other side as an attempt at distraction from us talking about the issues. Everything right now is trying to distract you from the issues that matter, and they’ll keep using it that way. But the voters are not stupid and that’s simply not going to be enough. We know the issues that matter to us as conservatives and we don’t sacrifice them for anybody.

Politico takes notice of the Sarah Palin flap in the CD8 Republican primary that we told you about a few days ago.

The story notes—as we did in coverage this week—that the race between former state lawmaker Jonathan Paton and political newcomer Jesse Kelly is coming down to the wire:

The Palin flap is the latest in an unexpectedly heated primary race that comes to a close next Tuesday. Paton, who jumped into the 8th District race after urging from national Republicans, raised more than $500,000 in his first three months, making the incumbent Giffords take notice. The Arizona Democratic Party started attacking him as “Payday Paton."

But in the second quarter, his fundraising dropped precipitously, to $167,000. Kelly outraised him in the pre-primary period between July 1 and Aug. 4, bringing in $78,500 to Paton’s $46,400.

Paton also spent much of his money early on, and Kelly has spent considerably more on TV ads in the past two weeks than Paton.

“Paton made some very serious mistakes about how he spent his money and where he spent his money. If it wasn’t for those mistakes, the race would have been over weeks ago, if not sooner,” said one longtime Arizona GOP operative.

In the past 10 days, Paton has hired the Lincoln Strategy Group and has intensified efforts to woo top Republican financiers, a consultant said, a strategy that, according to FEC reports, has already yielded $26,700.

Scarpinato, the Paton spokesman, said the campaign is raising money at a rate on par with what they were raising between January and March.

Read the whole Politico piece here.

Scarpinato tells us the campaign has "not made any changes to our team," but declined to comment on whether campaign has hired Sproul as a vendor or consultant. Sproul, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, made headlines in in 2008 after sending out a mailer linking state Sen. Russell Pearce, the architect of SB 1070, to Nazis.