Bloggers are, to some extent, a higher class of the trolls we so despise. We want to provoke a reaction. We’d like to be regarded as a thorn in the side of those in power.
This is why the biggest disappointment of the current John Huppenthal controversy is that I seem to have only caught his attention once. I had a state senator who posted anonymously on here for years, and the son of a now-disgraced former state treasurer used to come on here too. Still, the biggest blogging controversy in this state, and I have only a tangential relationship to it.
Bummer.
Three of Huppenthal’s internet aliases have been printed in numerous places. I went through the comments and didn’t find any from Thucky or Thucydides. I found a grand total of one from Falcon9.
Back in 2010, I did a short report about the post-election Arizona State Democratic Party Meeting. The report included Felecia Rotellini’s promise to keep being a watchdog on just-elected Attorney General Tom Horne. This prompted several very long comments from a fella named Jochas defending Horne’s record as Superintendent of Public Instruction. What the guy is saying these days, I’m not sure.
Anyhow, this prompted a comment from Falcon9 that seemed to be somewhat skeptical of Horne’s record:
Arizona’s graduation rate for 2002/2003, the year Horne was elected, was 75.9.
Arizona’s most recent graduation rate, as mentioned above, was 70.7%.
If you are going to make conclusions about Horne’s tenure using this data set, the best that can be said is that he held things steady, no statistically significant change.
However, we need the most recent data, for school year 2010, to make any conclusion.
Yep. That’s it. Not exactly provocative, but interesting that he was less than a cheerleader for Horne.
Three Sonorans published a list of comments made by Huppenthal under the name Falcon9. That one included several IP addresses. Those didn’t lead to anything new from Huppenthal, but I did find a guy at one of those IP addresses calling himself Doug. Doug seems to be a Republican, but he also had good words for Ted Kennedy. I doubt that Doug is Huppenthal, but if it was him, that post alone would probably lead to impeachment proceedings.
By the way, after talking to a few legislators, it seems that Huppenthal wasn’t exactly chummy with his fellow solons back when he was in the lege. This is probably the bigger reason for the lack of the usual wagon circling by the Phoenix civic establishment than the racism and general unhinged nature of his commentary.
Obviously, I didn’t catch the guy’s attention. That means I missed out on gems like this one posted in response to a bit on employer sanctions over at Espresso Pundit:
We have a whole lot fewer caucasians working now that the hispanics have left. But, crime is much lower. No money and no one is stealing it.
Jackass.
