Thirteen people have applied to fill a vacant Democratic seat on the state’s five-person redistricting commission to replace a commissioner who suddenly resigned in May.

A legislative panel today killed the Medicaid expansion portion of the state budget, leaving supporters with options that include using a strike everything amendment on a new health bill to bring the measure to a vote from the full House or suspending the House rules altogether.

Gov. Jan Brewer’s federal government expansion plan, spearheaded by Sen. John McComish’s amendment to SB1492, denies our ability to decide what health care we want to provide our citizens and how much to pay.

The Arizona House of Representatives moved Thursday to temper a divisive bill that sought to wildly expand religious freedom protections and had drawn opposition from civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers.

Dem blogger, former lawmaker and DuVal supporter Tom Prezelski wants Campbell to bow out of the governor’s race. In an “open letter” to Campbell posted on Rum, Romanism and Rebellion yesterday (April 18), Prezelski laid out his arguments for why it would be best for the House Dem leader, who has yet to officially file his candidacy for governor, to stay out.

Gov. Jan Brewer forcefully declared that her proposal to expand the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System to hundreds of thousands of new patients is a pro-life plan. As a pro-life governor, she said, she will not sit idly by while people suffer. Since then, opponents of her plan have taken up the pro-life mantle in the Legislature.

If the recall effort against Rep. Chad Campbell is unsuccessful, organizers may end up doing a lot more good than harm to the House minority leader and prospective gubernatorial candidate, thanks to a unique loophole in Arizona’s campaign finance laws.

A bill that would make it more difficult for recently unemployed people in Arizona to collect unemployment benefits is likely to land on Republican Gov. Jan Brewer's desk.

A Democratic redistricting commissioner and the Democratic party’s interim executive director denied insinuations they were part of a conspiracy to rig the state’s legislative maps. But newly released records showed party leaders and incumbent lawmakers were at least included in mapping strategy emails sent to the commissioner on his non-commission email account. And phone records show more connection than the commissioner had previously acknowledged.

Few politicos believe the Campbell recall has a snowball’s chance of succeeding, and an increasingly prevalent school of thought is that the recall effort is actually a boon to the minority leader’s 2014 gubernatorial aspirations, since it gives him a platform to raise his public profile. And thanks to the vagaries of the state campaign finance laws governing recalls, it may be more of a boon than people realize.