A Republican state lawmaker wants to prohibit people from video recording law enforcement agents up-close without their permission. 

The bill proposed by by state Sen. John Kavanagh would make it a crime to film cops without their consent within 20 feet of "law enforcement activity," according to a report by the Arizona Capitol Times. A first violation could mean $300 in fines, and any more than that could be punishable with up to six months in jail. 

Daniel Pochoda with the American Civil Liberties Union told the Times that SB 1054 is a violation of First Amendment rights. And an attorney who works on media issues, Daniel Barr, questioned whether the state even needs such prohibition.

Kavanagh, who is a retired police officer, says he's just trying to protect the safety of law enforcement agents.

He said people are free to stand 21 feet away. And he rejected contentions that someone standing that far back might not be able to record important details, like whether someone was reaching for a gun or a cell phone.

“Most cameras have great resolution where you don’t really lose anything when you’re 20 feet away,” Kavanagh argued. “At 20 feet you can pretty much pick up small objects.”

What’s behind the measure, he said, is the safety of police officers who may be doing anything from questioning a suspicious person to making an arrest.

"Having one or more persons suddenly walking up behind and around them with cameras is a distraction,” Kavanagh said. “The officer doesn’t know if this is somebody who’s a friend of the individual he’s doing law enforcement action against or what,” he continued. “But it distracts the officer which creates a safety problem for the officer.”

“So we’re going to make it a crime?” Barr responded. “If you’re actually interfering with them in some way, interfering with his movement or something like that, I can see that you can be sanctioned for that,” he continued, saying there already are laws on the books to cover that situation. “Whether you’re filming him or not has nothing to do with it."

According to the Times, Kavanagh says he is open to amending the bill at the time of a hearing to address any concerns.

5yrs ago on @space_station I got awful news from Earth. Recognizing the victims & my sis-in-law @GabbyGiffords today https://t.co/O2TtQJDLY9

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) January 8, 2016

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who is completing a year in space aboard the International Space Station, asked his colleagues to participate in a moment of silence in space-to-ground communications.

Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt five years ago, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post supporting the Obama administration's latest executive actions on gun violence:

The president’s reasonable proposal addresses a lethal problem: People who are in the business of selling guns can avoid the current requirement to conduct background checks on their buyers by claiming not to be gun dealers. Go to a gun show, for example, and in booths right next to licensed gun dealers whose customers have to undergo background checks, you will see others who operate outside of the rules, selling dozens or hundreds of the same guns each year without background checks.

The steps announced this week will narrow that gap by requiring anyone who sells a significant number of guns or operates like a commercial dealer to get a license and require each buyer to pass a criminal background check. Truly private sales, such as simply selling a gun to a neighbor or a friend, will not be affected. But, based on analysis by the gun-violence-prevention organization I co-founded, millions of firearms transactions that currently happen with no questions asked will be subject to background checks.

The president’s proposal makes another key improvement: It addresses the weakness in the background-check system that authorities say allowed a dangerous man to buy a gun and murder nine innocent people in a Charleston, S.C., church. It does this by making the system more efficient and effective, including by increasing the number of background-check examiners and related staff members by 50 percent and reporting which states do and don’t provide essential background-check records to the FBI.

Other important provisions will require gun dealers to report lost and stolen guns, making it easier for law enforcement to crack down on the illegal gun trade; and will increase investment in gun safety technology and mental-health treatment. These are just common sense.

Almost three years ago, when a minority of senators caved in to their fear of the corporate gun lobby and blocked sensible, bipartisan background-check legislation in Congress, I said that those senators had failed their constituents and, with every preventable gun death, made shame their legacy.

Many of those same senators, along with a lot of other elected officials and some candidates for president, will be quick to haul out the talking points the gun lobbyists in Washington gave them and attack the president’s reasonable action. They will warn of dire consequences and willfully spread misinformation. But the truth is this: These new steps will hurt no one, and they will protect many.

Around mile 32 of the bike ride I did in November, I almost gave up. I’m mostly paralyzed on my right side, and even though I had been training for months, my body was tired and it was hard to keep going. But I remembered my goal. I had a team of friends and supporters with me, so we just kept pedaling together. And then we crossed the finish line.

Reducing the number of Americans murdered or injured by guns is also not easy. It’s a long, hard haul.

But we cannot falter now, and we cannot wait for a Congress in the gun lobby’s grip to prevent any of the 12,000 gun murders that happen in our country every year.

Read the whole thing here.

This post is an homage to the famous line from Will Rogers, who died 80 years ago: "All I know is what I read in the papers." And it tips its hat to Dolores Huerta's statement, "Republicans hate Latinos." Actually, Huerta didn't assert that Republicans hate Latinos; she commented that based on the actions of Republicans in power, it sure looks like they do. I would never assert that Republicans hate children. They're not monsters. But sometimes the actions of elected Republican officials make you wonder.

Here's what I read in the papers.

In Friday's Star: "Push to reduce number of uninsured kids in Arizona set." According to the article,

Arizona’s rate of uninsured children is 10 percent, the third highest rate in the country—only Texas and Alaska are worse, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. The national rate of uninsured children is 6 percent.

The reason our uninsured rate is so high is, the legislature decided in 2009 that we couldn't afford to keep children healthy.

[I]n a series of budget-cutting decisions, the Arizona Legislature decided to end coverage for KidsCare parents in 2009 and the following year froze enrollment in KidsCare. By July 2011, the KidsCare waiting list had grown to more than 100,000 children.

A temporary KidsCare program, KidsCare II, was created in 2013, but expired when most provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect at the end of January 2014. Enrollment in KidsCare remained frozen and is expected to dwindle to zero.

Will Arizona restore the kids' insurance it wiped away? The article says a bill is being drafted, but that's a far cry from the bill passing through the legislature and making it to Governor Ducey's desk. A statement from Ducey leads me to believe it ain't gonna happen. Ducey say he's OK with the idea of giving children health coverage—"receptive" is the term his spokesman used, a word which implies he isn't eager to do it, but he's willing to listen to people talk about it—but only if it's "fiscally responsible"—which means in Ducey-speak, it can't cost any money.

“The governor is receptive to ideas to improve coverage so long as the options are fiscally responsible and provide reliability and certainty in health-care matters,” [spokesman Daniel] Ruiz said.

We can't let money for children's health interfere with tax cuts for Ducey's rich friends, now can we? It may be open to debate whether or not Republicans hate children, but there's no question, they love them some rich donors.

Also in Friday's Star: "Including teachers in reform efforts is key to retention, expert says." The article is about a meeting of 500 educators, business leaders and community members in Tucson Thursday where teacher shortages and teacher retention were discussed. Lots of factors lead teachers to leave the profession, but with Arizona's teacher salaries being so much lower than other areas, it's especially hard to keep them here.

Hank Stephenson of the Arizona Capitol Times breaks a blockbuster story about how House Speaker and congressional candidate David Gowan has been using a state vehicle to travel across his would-be congressional district:

In the weeks surrounding his congressional campaign announcement, Gowan was zig-zagging across the massive CD1, which is nearly as large as the state of Iowa. It spans from Four Corners and Flagstaff in the north, down to through Casa Grande and the northern suburbs of Tucson. In his travels, Gowan spoke to Republican groups and voters in Tuba City, Casa Grande, Flagstaff and Safford.

Public records and social media show Gowan wasn’t alone on some of those long drives.

The records show Cloud, a public employee, rented a state-owned vehicle and drove Gowan to several political events in CD1, hundreds of miles from the Capitol or his legislative district in southern Arizona.

Gowan declined to comment on the travels, but House Republican spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said the events were strictly related to his job as speaker, not his campaign for Congress.

“Gowan always says he’s the speaker for the whole state of Arizona, and I think it’s been pretty clear that he is. He goes all over the state. He tries to speak at and appear at as many things as he can when he gets invited, and he wishes he could do more,” Grisham said.

She said Gowan and his staffers are very careful about not using state resources for campaign events, and frequently have discussions about whether events could be construed as campaign-related.

But Tom Ryan, a Chandler-based personal injury attorney who has made a name for himself as a crusader against Arizona political corruption, reviewed some of the records obtained by the Arizona Capitol Times. He disagreed that the events could be considered anything but campaign-related.

Ryan said the violations of state law are so “stunning” that he intends to bring a legal complaint against Gowan and several of his close allies. He accused them of violating not only the laws governing the use of the state vehicle fleet, but also violating the state’s prohibition on using government resources for a campaign purpose.

A great detail from the story:

More voices are joining criticism against the Obama administration's campaign to apprehend and deport hundreds of women, youth and children from Central America. This morning, the New York Times Editorial Board came out to ask, why is the federal government removing migrants who pose no threat to national security?

During the first weekend of 2016, the Department of Homeland Security began its apprehensions of hundreds of undocumented families from the region. The agency quietly announced during the holidays its plans to deport asylum-seekers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, who were denied refuge in the country, and were issued removal orders. 

Last weekend, the department says that 121 individuals were taken into custody—primarily in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. The families, made up of mothers and their children, were being temporarily held at Immigration and Customs Enforcement "family residential centers" for processing, while arrangements for deportation were made. 

Immigration officials aren't focusing on workplace raids this time around, rather they are coming to these people's homes to take them away.

Sure, the Obama administration is in its lawful right to decide who gets to stay in the U.S., but immigration rights advocates say that this is "counter to the higher mandate the White House should be abiding by. International humanitarian law actually dictates that these desperate parents and children be granted protection from the persecution and violence they have fled in their home countries," according to a post by The Nation.

The New York Times Editorial Board today called the administration's raids shameful. 

President Obama once said this about his administration's deportation priorities: "We'll keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. That means felons, not families. That means criminals, not children. It means gang members, not moms who are trying to put food on the table for their kids."

Encouraging words, a year go. But a new year has dawned upon an appalling campaign of home raids by the Department of Homeland Security to find and deport hundreds of would-be refugees back to Guatemala, Honduras and  El Salvador. The targets are those who arrived in a recent surge of people fleeing shockingly high levels of gang and drug violence, hunger and poverty and who offered themselves at the border to the mercy of the United States, but ultimately lost their case in immigration court.

The co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, sent a letter to Obama today urging him to stop the "aggressive" home raids and deportations being carried out by ICE.

Former astronaut Mark Kelly, who runs Americans for Responsible Solutions with his wife, Gabby Giffords, wrote an op-ed for CNN explaining why he supported the president's announcement this week that he would take executive action to expand background checks, provide more resources for the mentally ill and increase funding for the ATF, among other steps:

The President acted because Congress hasn't in the face of our country's gun violence crisis that claims 32,000 lives a year. Our kids are 14 times more likely be murdered with a gun than kids in other countries. Women in America are 11 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in our peer countries.

As a nation and a people, this is not how we want to stand out. But Congress has decided to stand down; almost every time, it has stood with the gun lobby.

So the President used his authority to act. His action narrows gaps in our laws by requiring anyone who sells a significant number of guns or operates like a commercial dealer to get a license and require their buyers to pass a criminal background check, just like existing licensed dealers already do.

With the law clarified, our law enforcement officials will be better able to enforce the laws already on the books.

It requires dealers to finally have to report lost or stolen guns. It increases the number of people processing background checks by 50% so that more dangerous people are blocked from making a purchase. And it works to strengthen funding for mental health treatment by $500 million.

This is hardly the stuff of massive upheaval. It is the stuff of common sense.

Already, though, the gun lobby's leaders have handed out the talking points to the people they back. If you haven't yet, you'll probably hear them on your TV soon.

You'll hear that this action is another step toward our government taking away the rights of law-abiding gun owners. The reality is that this proposal doesn't restrict how many or even what kinds of guns people can buy or sell. Gabby or I could go buy another gun tomorrow just the same as we could before.

You'll hear that the President's proposal is out of step with the American people. Research done on behalf of the organization Gabby and I started three years ago Friday, Americans for Responsible Solutions, found that 73% of Americans said they approve of Obama specifically taking this kind of action to narrow the loopholes in our background check laws.

And gun owners? Some 64% of them said they support it.

Read the whole thing here.

By now you’ve likely heard the news that refugees coming to Greece are being sold fake life jackets.

I’ve personally seen this, and it’s every bit as despicable as your gut reaction tells you it is. Unfortunately, the life jackets are the tip of the iceburg. If smugglers sell water-absorbent life jackets for only 45 euro (roughly 45 U.S. dollars), imagine what they’ll do for real money.

I hate writing this, but the media seems to ignore everything except the headline-grabbing life jackets. Someone has to tell it…

Bademli, Turkey and Lesbos, Greece are separated by less than 10 kilometers. The Aegean Sea lies between the two, with generally calm water and a mild climate. This short trip between Turkey and the European Union has been the most common route into Europe for refugees, with over 500,000 refugees arriving on Lesbos in 2015. A raft can make the trip in less than two hours on a clear day.

The trip is almost always done on a dinghy boat. These are made of rubber and will pop like a balloon if they hit a rock. These inflatable boats come from China and cost smugglers 1,200 euros. An average of 40-60 refugees are packed into each raft. 40-60 people on any of these rafts is far beyond any safe limit, with refugees sitting in the middle and hanging off the sides of the raft. Most arrive to Greece with only what fits in their pockets, as any bags on the raft with them are tossed into the sea to make room for more people. On top of all of this, refugees are told to steer the ship themselves. The price for all of this? 1,000 euros each.


The tickets are so expensive that many refugees wait in Turkey for up to a year, working under the table until saving enough money to be smuggled. This makes them easy targets for gangs and human traffickers. Or sweatshops. Sweatshops where they make fake life jackets. Once you’re able to save 1,000 euro, you are able to be smuggled into Europe with only the clothes on your back.

For the second year in a row, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has delivered the year’s best film. The best movie of 2015 is The Revenant, an eye-popping western thriller that gives Leonardo DiCaprio the role that should finally score him that first Oscar.

The innovative Inarritu was also responsible for last year’s Birdman. DiCaprio gives it everything he’s got as Hugh Glass, a scout working with some fur traders on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Glass, while doing his job, gets a little too close to a couple of bear cubs, and Mama Grizzly is not all too happy about such an occurrence. What follows is a lengthy and vicious bear attack where Glass tangles with the nasty mother not once, but twice.

Inarritu, DiCaprio and some amazing visual technicians put you in the middle of that bear attack, minus the searing pain of actually having a bear’s claws and teeth rip through your flesh. Trust me when I tell you, it’s an unforgettably visceral moment when that bear steps on DiCaprio’s head. DiCaprio is incredible here, as are Tom Hardy as a villainous fur trapper who wants to leave Glass behind, Domhnall Gleeson as the commander forced to make horrible decisions, and Will Poulter as the compassionate man who makes a big mistake. It’s a revenge tale amazingly told.

In a few months, we will find out whether any of the initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana proposed by several different groups—including the Marijuana Policy Project and Arizonans for Mindful Regulation—will be up for vote this November. 

If  MPP's measure is the one to make it through, marijuana sales could raise at least $40 million in revenue annually to go toward funding education.

Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas completely opposes legalizing weed, and she doesn't give a shit about the possible economic benefits on both education and healthcare that would come from taxing marijuana sales at 15 percent (per MPP's initiative).

Douglas issued this statement:

By using drug money to educate our children, regardless of the drug we choose, we’re creating a world where we’re funding our schools by betting against the people graduating from them, and I cannot morally support that stance. How can we tell our kids, in one breath, not to do drugs, and in the next, tell them that drugs bought their health textbooks? How do we maintain the authority to tell them not to deal drugs when the state of Arizona is running a cartel?

There is also the potential for government abuse when we create a revenue incentive for the state to increase drug consumption in our communities. I agree with legislative leadership, including House Education Chairman Paul Boyer, that maintaining a drug-free school system is a cornerstone to creating a bright future for our students.

All Arizona children deserve a great education. I believe we need a system that is based on what is best for all of our children. When we look for ways to fund that system, we must not be tempted by potential profits from evil drugs like marijuana. We owe it to our children to find a more responsible way to ensure our schools have the resources they need to succeed.

Initiatives have until July 1 to gather more than 150,000 signatures to land on the ballot.