Earlier this year, Citizens for a Better Arizona (CBA) — a “coalition of concerned citizens committed to improving the quality of life of all Arizonans” — filed paperwork with the Arizona state Secretary of State’s Office to start a recall drive against state Senate President Russell Pearce (R). As the coalition nears its May 31 deadline, CBA claims that it’s confident it will obtain the 7,756 signatures needed to put Pearce back on the ballot. A local Phoenix news station reports:

He was called “politically invincible,” but a recall effort against State Senate President Russell Pearce has quickly picked up in steam in Mesa. The people leading the effort have already collected thousands of signatures and they’re two-thirds of the way to the amount they need to trigger a recall election. [...]

In the aftermath of SB 1070, Russell Pearce’s popularity seemed to skyrocket. But then his own party members turned against him to defeat his latest immigration bills, word got out that he allegedly banned members of the public from the Capitol, and blocked the media from the chamber — and then add to that the scandal surrounding free football game tickets provided by the Fiesta Bowl and a potential ethics investigation — and Russell Pearce may have a problem.

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Snow also indicated that he is “absolutely positive” the group will get all of the signature it needs to force an election.

Pearce has dismissed recall backs as an “open border crowd.” “Their agenda is open borders. I don’t know how can they ignore the damage to our country,” he stated in February. “They think it’s OK to break our law and be rewarded for it.” Back then, he felt confident that most people in his district support his views, but “you take everything serious.” That was before news broke that he may have illegally accepted thousands of dollars worth of Fiesta Bowl tickets. Since the beginning of the year, Pearce also foolishly wasted the Arizona legislature’s time on a flurry of far-right immigration bills after promising his colleagues that he would use his position to focus on the economy.

Some political analysts have warned Citizens for a Better Arizona about the potential effects of a successful recall drive. According to them, Pearce may still prove hard to beat in a second election. If he wins again, he may see it as yet another mandate. Yet, that may just be a risk worth taking.

The Associated Press has a write-up today on defense and foreign aid cuts in the budget deal Congress and the White House reached last week which appears to come to the conclusion that it was a big victory for those calling for a reduction in military spending:

Tea partyers insistent on cutting military spending and foreign aid will find plenty to like in the deal struck by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders. [...]

The hard-fought deal negotiated by the president, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., calls for $513 billion for defense, a cut of $18.1 billion from what the administration envisioned but $5 billion more than last year’s amount. War costs for Iraq and Afghanistan would be covered separately at a cost of $158 billion.

Except there’s one problem. The budget deal didn’t cut $18.1 billion in military spending from what the Obama administration envisioned. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called for at least $540 billion for FY2011 and this budget deal funds DOD “just north of $530 billion” a figure that includes military construction, which the AP seems to have left out. Thus, as Defense News noted yesterday, “defense spending is left relatively untouched” in this budget deal. Moreover, as the AP correctly noted, the overall baseline budget is an increase of $5 billion from last year. How would deficit and debt hawks find “plenty to like” in that?

The AP also ignores the lopsided nature of the deal’s DOD spending versus State Department and foreign aid cuts. The $8.4 billion cut to the foreign affairs budget represents a 14 percent reduction. If the budget deal subjected DOD to the same level, the Pentagon would have lost nearly $80 billion. And while the AP highlighted some of the military programs that would be scrapped — many of which came with strong bipartisan and Pentagon support — it largely ignored how reductions in foreign affairs spending will effect U.S. diplomacy. CAP’s Sarah Margon has some details:

[C]hopping off $122 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s operating expenses and more than $1.4 billion from the State Department’s Economic Support Fund may cost us the ability to help critical countries transition to democracy, including Egypt and Tunisia. Turning our back on such assistance now is particularly problematic given how vulnerable nascent democracies in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as elsewhere, are to upheaval and violence.

“Democracy is about compromise. But it’s also about maintaining balance amidst evolving priorities,” Margon notes, adding, “Government officials patting themselves on the back for reaching a compromise budget that does nothing to address the bloat in military spending would do well to remember that.”