Arizona

A Republican candidate for governor in Arizona has publicly resigned from that party and re-registered as a Libertarian -- after accusing the GOP of no longer standing 'for personal freedom.' ... Tom Rawles, a former Maricopa County supervisor, said he was ending his campaign for the GOP nomination for governor ...

Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has ... made the correct choice to help protect the property rights of its citizens. Ducey has just signed into law a bill that should seriously restrict the ability of law enforcement officers in Arizona to abuse the process of civil asset forfeiture as a way of generating revenue rather than fighting crime ... Activism has led to recent legal reform of the rules in many states. Arizona just joined the list ... Only one lawmaker voted against civil asset forfeiture reform in Arizona, but the governor still had to deal with resistance from police and prosecutors.

The harassment has prompted people around Arivaca, Arizona, 25 miles from the Mexican border, to demand that a local checkpoint be removed. According to Miller, people

were fed up with the obligatory stop between their small town and the dentist or the nearest bookstore. They were tired of Homeland Security agents scrutinizing their children on their way to school ... In late 2013, they demanded that the federal government remove the checkpoint ... At the beginning of 2014, small groups from People Helping People in the Border Zone — the name of their organization — started monitoring the checkpoint several days a week.

David is a remarkably diligent businessman from Mesa, Arizona, and his Goliaths are the many arms of the State. David made an enemy of the State because he dared to legally push the boundaries of the police state. He did so during a crusade aimed at the prevention of further regime encroachment into the lives of others.

In 1986, ... state and federal narcotics agents swept into Jerome, Arizona, a small ... town with 460 residents. The New York Times noted: "To law-enforcement officials, Jerome had become a 'hippie' redoubt ... where ... outcasts from ... the 1960s had taken over the local government, established their own rules and officially tolerated the production of marijuana in the nearby hills." One resident complained: "To bring 100 policemen into a small town at 5 o'clock in the morning, dragging women and children out of bed, scaring them half to death, to get 9 or 10 pounds of marijuana, is asinine."

The education establishment has long championed policies to lower teacher-to-student ratios. But when the Arizona legislature came up with a plan that may accomplish just that, the Arizona Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, didn't applaud--it threatened to sue.

Earlier this year, the Arizona legislature passed—and the governor vetoed—a bill that would have amended the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which holds that even a seemingly religiously neutral law may not "substantially burden" the exercise of religion in the absence of a "compelling government interest" and a less-restrictive method of advancing that interest ... The Arizona bill would have extended the RFRA to any "individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution, estate, trust, foundation or other legal entity."

I always wondered if most votes for Libertarian candidates were really just "none of the above" votes ... My "[NOTA] hypothesis" seemed to be disproved by results from an over-sample in Arizona. There, 15 percent of our Internet sample gave libertarian answers ... And of those, 7 percent said they had voted for the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, and 23 percent had voted for the Libertarian candidate for governor. Of the total sample, 57 percent of the votes for the Libertarian Senate candidate came from libertarian voters, and 68 percent of the votes for the Libertarian candidate for governor came from libertarians.

[A] bill recently signed ... by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer ... prevents private homeowners' associations from forbidding residents to fly the Gadsden flag. The flag, with its coiled snake and its "Don't tread on me" legend, protests government oppression and so has become a standard among Tea Party types, some of whom apparently think (or at least feel) they should not be held to the deals they signed. So they have appealed to heavy-handed government to protect their flags protesting governmental heavy-handedness. A primer on the social contract—or elementary logic—could have avoided that mess.