SEDONA AZ–“I have been in education for over thirty years. I arrived in Arizona thirty years ago and was elected as County School Superintendent in Greeley from 1992 to 2000. I was an elementary schoolteacher, as well, and worked in three out of the eight counties. I got to know the people, the issues and the communities. I decided I wanted to run because I don’t agree with what is going on in the government,” said Jon Jensen, Republican candidate for U.S. Congress-AZ CD1.

Jensen thinks the incumbent freshman Congresswoman (Kirkpatrick) is not listening to the issues and the needs of the community, citing her votes with the Democratic party leadership on all bills; health care, regulations, the stimulus package and others. Jensen feels that most people of the area don’t feel a direct connection with Congress.

Jensen believes that the federal government has become oppressive with mandates. He cites as examples that the state accomodate illegal immigrants no matter the cost; the Healthcare bill that does not necessarily reduce cost or increase coverage, and the excessive restrictions on the environment and natural resource uses.

“The Constitution says the government’s job is to protect our borders and keep us safe from the enemy. That is all and that is why I feel they are interfering too much.” candidate for U.S. Congress Jensen said and added, “Moses said ‘Set our people free” and the government needs to set our people free and do what the Constitution says.”

Returning to the border issue, Arizona candidate Jensen said, “I used to be a business manager in Sells, Arizona and the Chief of Police, 60 miles from the border said you can’t go out at night because the “Federales” are on our side of the border and they will kill you because they are protecting the drug runners. Why our government would be allowing this to happen is a problem. They don’t want to deal with the issues. They want to ignore them and hope they will go away. Most of us in Arizona live paycheck to paycheck. We can’t afford to allow these things to go on and just look the other way.”

In terms of economic policy, CD1 candidate Jensen would not support any more stimulus of any kind. “No more funding of anything that is not constitutional,” he said, “My mom is 94 and she is still alive and says if you don’t have it, you don’t spend it. I saved her two bucks by crawling under the house to fix a drip and we need to go back to that. We have so many agencies, so many various multiple agencies, slash those, cut them back and do bare essentials. And when they cut back on taxes and quit micromanaging so much it will stimulate the economy.”

Jon Jensen is not in favor of long wars or occupation of other countries. While he does support a strong high tech national defense, Jensen does not believe in providing policing power to foreign governments.

“It isn’t the proper role of the United States to support failing or weak governments for years on end.” Jensen said disclosing that he has two sons in the military service who did tours in Iraq. He does not want to see the job left half-finished but “occupation is not the proper role of a military whose primary purpose is to fight and defend the nation.”

“Education is really important,” said Jensen. “We need to get our students in CD1 a rigorous education so when they go to college they are ready, and don’t have to take classes over again. I also like competition with charters and home schooling. I don’t see why a little bit of that education money can’t be distributed to homeschoolers so they can at least buy books. I would also support vouchers and that is going to be coming in the future. There is a lot of waste in education. They need to stop the waste. They don’t need to send people to conferences in Las Vegas and Hawaii when they could get all the information from those conferences on the Internet, but teachers are important and I support incentive pay in the classroom.”

Jensen is in favor of SB1070 and believes that it is very important that we made the statement.

Jensen comes from a religious perspective as well and believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. He is in favor of dramatically lower taxes and a dramatically reduced federal government.

For more information, go to http://www.jensencongress.com/

Article written by Joni Dahlstrom, sedonaeye.com Staff Writer  JoniD@eSedona.net  Sedona Times Publishing Election Central   c2010