Editorial: Law should ban feeding bears

What do we do about a bear in the neighborhood? It's not an easy question for a thoughtful person. The bear is just doing its bear thing, and killing it for that is truly awful. Leaving it alone justifiably freaks people out, since they have no idea how to deal with it and are left to inflate the threat to the limits of their imaginations. So we try putting it back in its safer habitat, but it finds its way back because it's become habituated to humans, so its preferred habitat has changed. Problem.

The unnamed Courier editor, in good Republican fashion, advocates tort reform as the answer. Just "restore the immunity" of the state from suits by people who believe it's part of the state's job to protect them from animals, and it's all fixed. People who are maimed by bears must have been feeding them, we gather, so no foul.

It fascinates me how easy it is to blame the victims. The editor cites two cases in which people who were hurt won judgments against the state, infers that Game and Fish has to kill bears because it's afraid of more suits, and leaps to the conclusion that the law is the problem. These people won their cases because the court saw it as reasonable for them to expect protection from the state and the state did something wrong. That's not a political opinion, it's a legal ruling. It demands that the state do right.

So the editor twists this basic, practical problem to his own political end of reducing public access to the courts, essentially ignoring all the practical aspects. It's a stunning mental trick.

Lacking interest in any real problem-solving, the editor misses that Game and Fish is not talking about other options for these animals. There's more we can do than kill the bear, leave it alone or send it away. Right here in town we have an institution dedicated to the care of animals that cannot be released into the wild -- the Heritage Park Zoological Sanctuary. We could be exploring the possibility of moving human-habituated bears into sanctuary as a "third way," perhaps involving some state funding to help. I'm sure there are other options available as well if we really care more about these animals than whether they're convenient to us.

Editorial: Immigration calls for action

It feels like the unnamed Courier editor really wants to tell us that illegal immigration is a huge and costly problem, and to find some way of criticizing Secretary Napolitano, but he can't quite find a way to do it. I could put a different headline on this piece and it would read like a bouquet for Janet and a statement that the problem really isn't all that big.

His biggest number is $150 million for health care, supplied by the hospital lobby, which of course inflates its numbers to the max to justify more subsidies. (Hospitals don't ask about legal status, after all, so there's certainly some windage in there at least.) Not even an eighth of the jail budget for illegals? That's not bad! Considering how much thunder we've heard about this for years, one might expect it to be more like 40%.

Then he gives us a couple of grafs on the sensible approach Napolitano is taking, and closes with an ambiguous non-opinion that could be read as approval or not.

Seems like the editor, after years of table-banging about this non-problem, is more than a little perplexed all of a sudden.

Hansen: Let' check the national pocketbook

Another extremely dull Monday at the Courier forces me to turn to the funny pages -- the pseudoblogs. Ben offers a column today in which he puts on his pundit's mitreboard and tries to take us to school on the national debt and budgets. As we've come to expect, he fails miserably.

Let's just breeze by the headline failure by our self-described "pit bull about spelling, grammar and usage." He writes,

The current national debt is $11,998,747,017,892.96. That’s 11 trillion dollars. A trillion is 1,000 billions.

Now we’re getting to the root of the problem. The last time the U.S. had a balanced budget was 1957. I was 12 years old. Congress, over a long period, under presidents and congressional majorities of both parties, has lost all sense of fiscal responsibility.

Let's take a good look at the inferences that Ben hopes his reader will make, since he is apparently incapable of just writing them out.

First, the national debt is really, really big (and if you don't know what a trillion is, he'll explain it in billions, which, since you're under age eight, you probably don't understand either), and that, we gather, is really bad, for reasons Ben apparently figures we all know.

A little historical context could be useful here. Check this out:

This is national debt as a percentage of GNP, the index that economists and investors use. Notice that they don't pay much attention to the hard number, as Ben does above, because it's meaningless except relative to the size of the economy supporting it, not unlike the size of your mortgage relative to your income. So in historical terms, yes, the national debt is high right now, but not anything like as high as we've experienced in living memory.

This one breaks out the more recent figures above by administration, which is enlightening:















I also think it's important to compare our debt with other big economies for a relative credit score:

So we see in hard numbers that our current national debt is not exceptional relative to our own history or to the rest of the world. I won't go so far as saying it's a non-problem, but given the new confidence investors can have in our decision-makers relative to the Bush administration and the interest we all have in responding decisively to our credit and employment problems, it's nothing like as scary as Ben would like to imply.

Next he makes a claim about balanced budgets. I went on a little fact-checking tour and I found where he got this idea. It's (gasp!) a blog by an anonymous guy selling stock-market advice and opining occasionally on "reckless government spending." His unusual take on the budget requires us to add government trust funds to outstanding debt to get what he sees as total public debt. If we take a somewhat more rational and conventional approach, we see that the Big Dog managed several balanced budgets in the '90s:

The way Ben juxtaposes these two ideas -- national debt and balanced budget -- he creates the impression that he thinks they're pretty close to the same thing. If he truly won't be satisfied until we clear off the national debt, he'll likely have a long wait. That's occurred exactly once in our entire history, for about a week in 1835.

Ben skims quickly over this twisted history to support his real point, and it's the usual one -- that Congresscritters can't be trusted with anything, that they're only interested in getting potted, laid and reelected, presumably so they can get potted and laid some more. I'd just love to see him say that to the face of any of the people he's criticizing. (Quite frankly I'm guessing he's just projecting what he would do if he got to Congress.)

Looking at this column as a whole, I'm having a hard time imagining what good public purpose Ben thinks he's fulfilling by publishing it. Who would be served if readers further adopt his cynicism about politicians? How would that make anything better? Does he imagine that angry voters will rise up and elect better politicians, even as he trashes everyone in Congress? What would he have them do differently?

Fueling anger without clear purpose leads only to mob mentality. Is that Ben's vision for a better America?

Update, Tuesday: I just ran across this version of the debt graph, which includes a pair of interesting projections. Notice that the editor of the graph is confusing the debt and deficits as well.

You've heard about nanotechnology, and you know it means really small stuff. Here's a good explanation of just how small for your Friday mind-expansion.

Naked contempt for workers

The Courier's coverage of the Safeway/Fry's labor action over just a day and a half cuts a window into the editors' minds.

Over on the front page, Jason Soifer's story is sourced entirely from two unhappy union members. It includes no balancing facts or opinions. He wouldn't have had to go far to get some, such as Frank Cuccia's letter, which appears on the opinion page today and so must have been bouncing around the offices for a couple of weeks. But Jason's source-challenged story was enough to spark an angry broadside from the unnamed editor, condemning the union for withholding the vote from the membership. Tut tut. (His use of a quote from a company PR flak defending the rights of the poor downtrodden union members was particularly entertaining.)

Then, within hours of the editor's rush to judgment, comes the breaking story that, surprise surprise, the union's tactics have won a better settlement from Safeway and the union will vote on that rather than the crappy deal the company offered two weeks ago, before the strike threat.

The labor action had been coming for months and had been an active news story for weeks, but the Courier had nothing to say. The first word it offers its readers on the subject is shamelessly biased against the union. The slapdash editorial extends this bias, slamming the union for not settling while it was in the midst of hardball negotiations, and spuriously accusing it of anti-democratic practices.

I can think of no example of Courier coverage over the last few years that more clearly illustrates the radical bias at work at the Courier.

Will we see an editorial retraction now that all this has become clear? I'll give nice odds to anyone who wants to take that bet.

Stockmar: Naysaying global warming won't stop it

I've been watching Steve's newish pseudoblog for a while, appreciating his street sense and entertaining approach, and wondering when he might surface in print as a columnist.

His first attempt is a little shaky, sorry to say. He refutes the climate-change deniers by adopting a superior, talk-down-to-the-kindergarteners tone to explain a couple of aspects of the planetary feedback phenomenon that we're experiencing. By using clumsy metaphors and failing to disclaim his examples as such, he leaves the impression that he's outlining the crux of the problem and critically weakens the argument. He also skirts the issue of the human cause as if it doesn't really matter. But if you're arguing in favor of human intervention in something as big as this, you have to first establish that we're capable of having that global effect, then that we should.

The subtle changes in complex, interdependent, chaotic systems causing climate change are a lot to get one's head around. The best researchers and educators in the world are having a hard time putting the message across. Journalists who hope to help in this effort, as Steve clearly does here, must be very careful to avoid making things worse. While expressing the frustration a lot of us feel, flip, offhand and arrogant squibs like this do nothing useful to educate those who could learn, and do a lot to further alienate those who won't.

Steve admits (brags?) on the pseudoblog that he hasn't seen "An Inconvenient Truth," the Oscar award-winning documentary that inspired a Nobel Peace Prize for Mr Gore. I have to wonder about a journalist writing on this topic without exercising himself to undertake even this most basic bit of research. I fear that Steve may have already succumbed to the Courier's hipshooting tradition.

Norwood explores options, Courier scooped again

After more than six years in the office, City Manager Steve Norwood is competing for a new job in an Austin suburb. When he came on, my bet was three to five years, so he's lasted a fair bit longer than I expected. I hope he gets the job, moves on, and we can start breaking up the little empires that he's created in the staff and rationalizing the management-heavy mix at City Hall.

Lynne McMaster got what looks like a nice leisurely interview with him on the subject. The Courier has nothing yet.

Update, Friday: Cindy turns in nothing new to account for tardiness.

Our forgotten veterans

In honor of our veterans the Courier offers four different pieces, but manages to avoid any mention of Iraq, Afghanistan or the men and women who have been part of those conflicts. This is just appalling. The editorial headline says "Our protectors deserve thanks" even as the editors brutally snub them. I'm having a hard time seeing this as any less awful than spitting on surviving combat troops coming home.

Socialist Paradise or Corporatist Hell?

I'm promoting Mia's comment on the health-care bill so I have a chance to farble on about it more publicly. She says,

I do applaud Kirkpatrick for voting in line with the majority of those who elected her. I wonder though, if the insurance companies have come out the really big winners here. Mandatory insurance, with a public option that "will probably cost more than private insurance". Even with the added cost of covering preexisting conditions, not charging women more, and whatever else, how many millions of new customers will insurance companies get? I don't see how this is a move toward socialized healthcare, maybe even quite the contrary. Insurance companies will grow in power tremendously. Look how much power they've flexed during this debate. Am I missing something?

I think that if the House bill were to pass through the Senate funhouse and come out the other side more or less unscathed, it will substantially diminish the power of the insurance companies.

First, the public option, contrary to your quote above, will almost certainly operate at substantially lower cost. Profitmaking companies must produce profits for their shareholders, and that can be seen ultimately as a dead loss from the system, meaning higher costs out of the gate. To balance that higher cost-structure, the companies will have to cut corners on personnel and benefits to the customer. Meanwhile the public plan, because it has less motivation and scope for denying coverage, has to focus on reducing costs through prevention and keeping its customers healthier.

An important piece of the picture will be the lifting of the antitrust exemption that insurance companies have enjoyed for so long. This will lead to breakups of the largest companies in favor of local competition.

With more reliable and lower-cost benefits and larger scale, the public plan will then become the biggest player, furnishing more economies of scale and negotiating clout. As in Europe, eventually the private insurers will get mostly out of standard care and into boutique and specialty benefits covering things the public plan can't or won't. They will also have steady customers among the many Americans who can afford to throw away some of their money because they don't trust the government.

One thing we'll still have to fight for in the public plan is coverage of non-allopathic care. We're discovering and rediscovering so much in medicine that's useful and effective but (so far) outside the scope of the Physician's Desk Reference. It will be very important to start building in the acceptance and coverage of treatment and care modalities that are not taught in the medical schools if we are to see any of the vast potential cost-savings and life benefits they offer. With a public plan, which is more focused on reducing costs by making people healthier than reducing benefits to customers, this will be far easier.

Anonymity vs Civility

In the comments, Mia says

I feel like I can't blog on the Courier site anymore since some people called my friends and me moronic, fecal matter, simple-minded, sheeple, full of horse pucky, and all kinds of other really mean stuff. It makes me want to meet them by the swings and kick their asses!

Online spleen-venting has been a problem ever since online communities began, and I've been doing this nearly that long. It's hard to prevent where you want open dialogue, but there is one factor that guarantees it: anonymous posting. Where there is no social cost for acting like a baboon, that's what some people do.

Further, where this element is allowed to spit its bile unfettered, it drives out people who value civil dialogue, and so the proportion of bilious comments inevitably rises. In my experience it slowly rises to a majority and holds there for a certain amount of time, then participation falls off suddenly as the community dies gasping in its own stink. I expect that this will happen with the dCourier comments within a couple of years if editorial policy does not change.

Adding to the outrage is the Courier's capricious editing of the comments, and their failure to understand their own comments policies. Despite the written policy barring them, I see many, many comments that are nothing more than personal attacks on previous commenters. Name-calling is rampant and egregious. And trust me, it will get a lot worse.

I came back to this blog for these very reasons, as I found that my comments weren't safe from editorial screwing around. The name-calling from those who have no better communication tools I don't mind, as it says more about them than me and I have eliminated the reflex of responding to it. I do regret that they drive away sensible people who have less tolerance for this sort of BS, so on this blog I promise to maintain a higher level of decorum.

I encourage everyone who cares about this to demand of the editors that they require registration on the site with a real name or regular handle for all comments, and bar those from commenting who abuse the privilege. This will not eliminate the problem, but it will reduce it by at least three-quarters, I guarantee it.

Editorial: Let's get people back on the job

The unnamed Courier editor offers yet another example of willful short-sightedness today in decrying the administration's efforts to reconfigure our clearly broken health-care and energy systems while people are out of work.

We used to rely on journalists to look into the implications of public issues and supply us with the information we need to see the bigger picture and make better decisions as voters. It seems that those journalists are in the unemployment lines now, too, since corporations realized in the 1980s that all they really need to do to reliably get what they want is buy up the news business, knowing that over time the media organizations would steadily make small changes in policy and mindsets favoring corporate views.

Let's postulate, for example, that a cap-and-trade regime really could "put and end to the coal business," as the editor egregiously misquotes the president. Could he really imagine that the transaction ends with all the coal people out of work? Can he really not see that the shift to renewables will create an order of magnitude more jobs than the modern coal business could ever provide? How could a supposed journalist miss this plain-as-day linkage?

The problem here is that ideology is simply blinding the editor to the facts. He sees what he wants to see (and the person who hired him knew that would happen). The challenge for the reader is to avoid seeing only the bit that the editor is able to see. Bear in mind that the decisions the editor makes in the open on the editorial page indicate the sort of decisions he makes subtly on the news pages.

Today's Chuckle

Prescott and PV officials set up events befitting a visiting head of state for a big dead tree. Am I the only one in town who finds this embarrassingly juvenile on multiple levels?

Not everyone happy with House health care bill

Some editorial decisions just take my breath away. It plumb evades me, for example, how any editor can see news value in person-on-the-street interviews. I know, the "wisdom" of the volk, right? What's true is that 90% of the time you're going to get the wise old volk feeding back exactly what they saw on teevee last night. I expect it feeds an editor's ego to hear people saying what he's been telling them. But what value can it possibly hold for the reader? Somebody splain this to me.

As for the headline, here's today's 'duh' moment.

Editorial: Will health bill really help folks?

On behalf of the entire community, I want to thank the unnamed Courier editor for this ringing endorsement of HR3200 and health-care reform.

Oh, I can see that he tried to cover up his enthusiasm with some token objections. But they're so weak that one can only conclude that he's not serious about them.

For example, he says he doesn't "like" the bill because "Members of Congress continue to receive taxpayer-subsidized, gold-plated benefits packages." If the reform passes, most Americans will maintain the same health plans they're on now, although with more security about their coverage, and most corporations will continue to offer the same plans, so Congress isn't special in that regard. It's completely beside the point.

He goes on to warn that "A strong public option would let the hand of government reach too far into yet another industry." Leaving aside that this is nothing more than a vague ideological point, the bill does not include a strong public option. It's really pretty weak. But we can make it stronger later, as it becomes clearer to more voters that we really need it.

His third and strongest point in opposition to the bill is that "it requires individuals 'who can afford it' to buy insurance in the interests of distributing costs. No specifics exist on what parameters define 'who can afford it.'" That would be a tough nut if it were true. Of course, it isn't. "Affordability credits are provided under the House health care reform bill for families with income below 400 percent of the Federal poverty level," says the FAQ from the House Ways and Means Committee. That's a clear means test defining exactly "who can afford it."

Always standing up for individual rights, the editor adds that "it's still an American's right to remain uninsured," apparently quoting fine print in the Constitution that only he has seen. But even this is provided in the bill -- if you really don't want to buy coverage, you don't have to. You'll still have to pay a little bit to help support the system that will be your safety net when you get sick anyway, of course. But that's only fair.

So most readers will see that these quibbles are just a paper-thin attempt at balance, covering the editor's clearly unmitigated enthusiasm. We should all thank him. And give him a cookie.

How news goes interactive

Check out the comments on the story on last night's mayhem on Hwy 69, offering a very high signal-to-noise ratio and enough different viewpoints to give the reader an almost three-dimensional perspective.

What does it take to turn space inside-out? The Schwarzschild Radius for feed-your-head Friday.

Ooh, the bigtime!

I just noticed today that Courierwatch now has a link from the dCourier.com page of mostly dead pseudoblogs. Welcome to all six of you new readers who happened to be rummaging around in the basement over there. Lemme know what you think.

Older readers may recall that the Courier began linking to blogs a couple of years ago, and this one was among them. That's when they made the approximation of my mascot J Fred Muggs as a logo. They told me about it at the time and asked my permission, but that was the extent of my input. This time it was a surprise, so an apparently belated thanks to whomever at the Courier doesn't mind my twitting his/her bosses.

Editorial: Law judge decides correctly on water

The reader may notice something odd about the leader of the opinion page today: it doesn't offer an opinion.

Oh, there's an opinion of sorts in the headline, but there's no supporting argument in the text for characterizing the decision as "correct." There's only a recitation of the facts of the ruling.

The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger is hard at work again, turning in an echo of the front-page story, something that would better fit a breezy column on the business page. It's like he just wanted a little vacation today.

What it really means is that while the editor understands intuitively that the court result has some sort of meaning, he can't quite figure out what it is beyond an apparent win for the side he prefers in the contest. A reader would be excused for concluding that his grasp of the complexity of the pipeline issue is weak and shallow.

The facts are that this ruling was expected by everyone involved, ending a technical, preliminary bout that opens the doors for the brutal main events to come. The results there are far less clear, all we know for sure is that they'll be complex and very costly, involving many stakeholders beyond Prescott and SRP.

Challengers sweep election for Prescott City Council

These local results are in line with many other elections around the country this week. We see clearly once again that where conservatives are dogged about voting, progressives need inspiration, and our local slate was anything but inspiring. It also shows that for all the sturm und drang among those of us who pay attention, Prescott remains a sleepy place overall, and Prescott residents in general really don't think Council matters all that much. This is a self-fulfilling idea, I'm afraid, furnishing power over our lives directly into the hands of the developers and corporatists who will be most happy to exploit it to their advantage.

Okay, let's do our sums.

There were 13,093 Prescott voters this time.
Mr Hanna got 7,548 votes.
Ms Linn got 6,979.
Mr Blair, 6,708.
Mr Luzius, 5,888.
Mr Peters, 4,337.
Mr Katan, 2,104.

Notice something missing?

The total of that column is 33,564. At three votes for each of 13,093 voters, the available total for Council was 39,279, leaving 5,715 votes missing. In the vote trade we call that the undervote.

The final tallies will change slightly, but by any standard that's a big number relative to what would have been needed to alter the results substantially. Compare this to the results on the props:

400: 8,809 ayes + 3,329 nays = 12,138; undervote 955
401: 8,233 ayes + 4,183 nays = 12,416; undervote 677

It's academic to the result, of course, but it would be interesting to know how many of those undervoters were either protesting the weakness of the Council candidates or voting strategically, reducing the totals overall in favor of a single candidate. I'd bet five bucks their preferences are not evenly spread statistically.

It might also play into the idea that Prescott has grown beyond the current regime and we could be better served by a borough system, in which each Council member represents a specific area of the city.

Radio news

Regular 89.5 listeners will have already noticed our format change this week. This will be coming to 90.1 in Prescott once we jump a couple more bureaucratic hoops, bumping KJZZ off the air here.

Some listeners will not be happy about this, and I want to get the word out that it wasn't our idea. Rather, the boss tells me that KJZZ in Phoenix, our erstwhile partner for many years, unilaterally abrogated its contract with us.

Our new network partner is KAWC in Yuma, providing community-based programming as well as selections from PRI and other public media outlets. KJZA weekend programming will also start earlier on Saturday. If you're a member of KJZZ, we hope you'll also consider membership in KAWC to help support community radio here and across the state.

The new format is just the beginning, and you can expect to hear new shows and features coming online over the next few months. I hope you'll give it a try, tell your friends, and let me know what you think.

For you early birds I especially want to recommend The Takeaway weekdays 6-8am, produced and hosted live by my old school chum and bandmate John Hockenberry, who's found his way back to public radio after a long, storied career with NPR, ABC and NBC News. And on Saturday mornings we'll be hearing the familiar voice of Bob Edwards 8-10am. I hope you'll join us.

Talk of the Town: Teachers take multiple hits on pay

Barring unforeseen circumstances, along with an update on the deal to open a special legislative session, I'll be discussing Victoria Kendall's letter with Rep Mason this weekend on The People's Business (KJZA 89.5FM, Sat and Sun at 2pm).

Talk of the Town: Global warming data not current

Actual scientist and ecologist Tim Crews gives us a sparkling smackdown of climate-change denier, corporatist tool and non-scientist Terry Lovell. I'm sure we'll see a long list of comments to say that Crews can't possibly know anything because he teaches at Prescott College. Logic like that is what's giving the blockhead right* such stunning electoral victories lately.

* VP George HW Bush, speaking privately to Soviet Premiere Gorbachev in '87: "Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him."

Letter: Mother seeks help for late son's unit

Maybe one of my anonymous Courier employees will pipe up here. In Jasmine Crowl's letter seeking donations, she thanks "the following originations for their support ...." The editors spend untold hours screwing around with people's letters to control the message, but they couldn't be bothered to fix this obvious spell-check error for a Gold-Star mother? You guys kill me.

Deputies arrest man after chase in Dewey-Humboldt

Gad the paper is full of editorial mistakes today. In this entertaining little chasing-the-nutbar story, Ken manages to omit the first reference to a witness only called "Grugel," who might have been the bad guy's target, but the story's so deeply muddled I can't really tell.

Today's Chuckle

Or maybe Today's Wince -- this headline: "Small swine flu vaccine shipment lets county give doctors some."

In the lead, Jerry describes "5,000 doses of H1N1 (swine) flu vaccination." That should be vaccine, of course. The story is riddled with errors that any freshman copy editor could have handled. Ack.

Further down, we see in Bruce's story on the Supes meeting that the Centennial Committee wants to issue a "cache" and commemorative stamps. It's "cachet," of course. I'm sure there's a dictionary in the office somewhere. Check under the dust in the broom closet.

Broken limbs and relationships: Property owner, APS at odds over tree trimming

A rich white lady is mad at APS for trimming trees in her rental yard that she should have pruned back years ago. Why in the world is this a news story, leave alone on the front page? Electric utilities are constantly pissing people off by taking liberties with the trees. Should we expect a front-page story next week on how the credit-card company raised the interest rate on some nice grandma?

By the way, Jason, that quote should have been "... we couldn't in good conscience re-energize that line ..." rather than "conscious." Really basic.

Amster: 'Call to service' worth encouraging

Today Randall turns in what I think may be the best-written piece I've seen from him. Good show, Randall!

Editorial: Progress is fine, but let's be open with it

In his Sunday editorial, the unnamed Courier editor complains that "The Republicans were left knocking on the door" to be involved in health-care reform. Anyone with half an eye open can see that the Rs have not only refused to contribute positively despite a huge and politically costly effort to get them in the room, they've proven repeatedly that they will do all they can to derail even the mildest reform.

The editor can go on like this without a hint of irony, having consistently applauded the Rs for keeping the Ds out in the cold through the eight Bush years and decades in the Arizona legislature, today's slap on the wrist notwithstanding.

An honest negotiation needs two honest negotiators. Since the Gingrich years the radical authoritarians, religionists and corporatists running the Republican party have demonstrated that they are interested only in power and gamesmanship. Statesmanship and citizenship have fallen by the boards. It's past time that we all clearly understand that, the editor included, and play the hand we're dealt.

Dems need to grow a spine and stop pretending that Reps are negotiating in good faith. Reps who truly want to act in good faith, and there are a lot of them, must disavow those who don't, separate themselves from the radicals and take back their party.

Elks renovation gets boost

Cindy's nice little update piece on the Elks Theatre is notable for the first mention I've seen or heard of any interest in replacing the stage draperies. These are not "decorative," as the story would have it, but rather are essential stage equipment in dire shape, ready to explode in flame with just the right spark. It's this sort of upgrade and maintenance of equipment and facilities, neglected in all talk I've heard about the project, that I've been harping on for years,

By the way, Cindy, what you're groping to call a "stage archway" is what's known as the proscenium. This indicates to me that you're still talking to people who know nothing about theatre.

Letter: Election snafus frustrate council member

There are a couple of interesting inside-baseball aspects to this letter from Councilwoman Lopas.

Lora sent this to Courierwatch as a comment on The Katan Saga on Oct 17, so I have a clear comparison. I presume that she sent it to the Courier on the same day, and, since the text is the same but for editorial changes, that she sent it electronically, so there was no mail delay or typing time involved.

Despite the high profile of Ms Lopas, the timely nature of what she had to say and the importance of the issue, it took the editors fully two weeks to get her letter into print, and then not as a Talk of the Town or other column, but as a simple letter. That looks a lot like disrespect to me.

I also notice that the editor knocked down Lora's consistent (and perfectly correct) capitalization of "Council," "Charter," "City" and "Mayor," but left "City Manager" and "City Attorney" capitalized. Even if the editor chooses to argue this on the basis of house style, it was clearly applied inconsistently, and in a way that favors the staff with more respect.

Once again, my position on this is that editors can and should maintain a hands-off policy regarding letters, comments and bylined outside columns wherever possible. If it has someone's name on it, the reader should be able to trust that the person wrote it. Fiddling around of this sort is nothing short of arbitrary control of the message, and must not be tolerated.

Friday came quicker than usual this week, and brought some cold air with it. In honor of that, some basics on temperature and how we can make things really cold.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Today, the Friday before Election Day, the unnamed Courier editor awards his endorsements for candidates to City Council. I expect the timing of this event is something of a tradition in the Courier editorial suite. Too bad the election is not so traditional, and most of the ballots have already been turned in. The editor has apparently failed to account for the change to a mail-only election and so pretty well completely undercut any clout he might still have with the voters. Pity.

Younger readers may not remember when local newspapers kept a sharp eye on the people's business, a finger on the pulse of public opinion and a full reporter's notebook on every candidate for public office. In those days we could rely on managing editors to have a comprehensive view and access to information forming a perspective that we readers couldn't hope to gain in the course of a campaign. An editorial endorsement meant something, even when you could also count on a paper to be clear and unashamed of its political bias.

Today in Everybody's Hometown it seems that the editor is just going through the motions and his Barcalounger is once again doing all the work. I suppose it's just as well. But he'd be wise to reflect on whether the negligible credibility of his opinion page has anything to do with his plummeting ad sales.

The Mystery Deepens

In today's installment on the DeMocker murder trial, Bruce Colbert uses and defines the term "Chronis hearing." I'm completely baffled about what he's referring to, all I can be sure of is that 'chronis' not an English word and does not appear on the web in any context other than as a person's name. I suspect it's a misspelling, but I haven't found the right word. Can anyone help?

Today's Chuckle

A lobbying group gives Rep Tobin one of a pile of cheapo plaques (I've seen this sort of thing littering the walls and furniture of many legislative offices), he thinks that's special enough to write a press release about it, and the Courier editors think it's so newsworthy that they print it verbatim (hint: that's what "Special to the Courier" means).

The reader should ask: is this the best the Representative can show us? Is this the best good-news story the Courier can come up with about the district's junior representative, who's also in leadership?

Finally: Why does Mr Tobin insist on labeling himself "R-Paulden" rather than just "AZ District 1 Representative" or "Majority Whip"? Would he maybe prefer to distance himself from the voters in Prescott and Cottonwood who elected him?

Today's Chuckle

"Community activist" Paul Baskin recommends that we bring back the King.

Editorial: Others should follow CV course

The unnamed Courier editor comes out in favor of a small energy project in Chino Valley that will save the town a ton of money pretty quick. The numbers make it a dead obvious choice, so obvious that it should be unremarkable. But to the editor, and to an unaccountably large number of our fellow citizens, solar energy projects are still thought of as exotic and experimental.

After the reader slogs through his customary cut-and-paste from the front-page story a couple of days ago, the editor whacks out, "one of the nation's most pressing imperatives is to adopt a program on the order of President John F. Kennedy's effort to reach the moon before 1970 to achieve independence from foreign energy, especially oil." This sort of rhetoric was inspiring when Jimmy Carter presented it to us in the '70s. Now it seems more than a little antique.

The challenges we face with climate change and dwindling petroleum resources should be carrying us to a vision of not just independence from foreign oil, but total independence from fossil carbon as an energy source. As the Chino Valley project and a vast number of other more ambitious plans and projects are proving every day, we have the economically obvious technology in hand. What we don't have is the political will to reduce the market incentives favoring petro energy and big corporations, or to level the playing field for clean energy and smaller-scale production. That's the sort of vision that the editor could be offering, and, for the good of us all, should be offering.

Editorial: New laws could be model for nation

Yes, Russel Pearce's ideas, as recounted by the unnamed Courier editor, could indeed be a model for the nation. But which nation? Given the xenophobic, isolationist police state they advance, I'll nominate North Korea.

Blaming the foreigners for (your issue here) is an easy sell most times in this country, where people generally have so little contact with non-Americans, but it's especially easy in hard economic times. As the political right descends further into extremism and madness, immigration is about all it has left to attract reasonable people to vote with it. It's inevitable that the extremists will present proposals like this, so we should get used to seeing them. What we shouldn't do is accept that this country must therefore continue down the path of increasing xenophobia and subsequent economic ruin.

From his quotes even Sen Pierce does not expect to pass his agenda through the Legislature. This is a game to hold the media spotlight, keep the dwindling radical base whipped up and maintain the untoward power he holds in the Capitol.

But if these proposals were to pass -- and that's not out of the question, make no mistake -- here's what we'd get.

By expanding the jurisdiction of local police to immigration status, we get harassment of all Latinos in less tolerant communities, which will selectively cripple those local economies as people leave, and create decades of court battles as these practices are litigated and the laws slowly thrown out as unconstitutional. Meanwhile local and federal taxes will go up or important services will be squeezed out to pay for all that extra enforcement.

Attempting to make it criminal for undocumented workers to solicit day labor will cause harassment of brown-skinned day laborers (and most of them are certainly legal), triggering suits and more economic problems, catch almost no illegals, and lead law enforcement to demand new forms of ID for legal workers. Consider how you'll feel when you're standing on the corner waiting for a friend and a cop asks for your papers.

What the unnamed Courier editor identifies as the piece missing from Pearce's proposals, a rational and effective guest-worker program, is in truth the only piece we need to accomplish every practical goal most Americans want. It won't, however, accomplish what the radical right wants, and that's to whip up racism and win elections on fear.

It appears that the editor is a bit dubious about Pearce, but he can't quite bring himself to renounce a plan that is sure to "backfire badly." Perhaps he sees the danger to our own local economy, but he also sees benefits in harassing Latinos wholesale for political gain. Until he's willing to stand up and say no, he's a big part of the problem.

Today's Chuckle

Check out Tim's pathetic attempt to control what the commenters can say in response to his pseudoblog entry.

Update, Saturday: An interesting followup question would be whether readers changed their votes because of the events of the past few weeks, and how.

News from my favorite planet for Feed-Your-Head Friday!

Editorial: Democracy gets boost, takes shot

The unnamed Courier editor puts on his sage hat and weighs democratic principle against -- what?

In the front half of the piece, the editor makes a clear case for upholding the integrity of the voting process. Admirable.

In the back half he undercuts that and tries to say that principle can be fairly balanced by practical considerations. We shouldn't necessarily hold up the initiative process to serve the guy who came almost last in the primary, right?

Well, let's look at why we have primary elections. The clear purpose of doing two elections rather than just one is to have the general election ballot produce a useful result. A simple election involving (say) ten candidates for three seats would inevitably lead to people being elected by minority votes. The primary reduces the candidate list to produce majority results.

We also know from clear experience that how people vote can change as they receive new information. The space between the primary and general allows voters to focus on the general candidates and refine their judgments of them.

In characterizing Mr Katan as "a candidate who got a Dear John letter from voters at the polls already" and saying, "The people did speak, after all," the editor asserts that the results are already in. By that logic, there is no need for a general election at all and Ms Linn and Messrs Hanna and Blair, the top three primary vote-winners, should simply be seated on Council. Top candidate Hanna got a little less than 6,000 of the over 13,000 votes cast in a constituency of about 25,000 voters. A clear majority didn't vote for him, but he and two others supported by even fewer votes would become the representatives of all.

The only result that counts is the general. The people have not yet spoken, and getting on that ballot is essential to any hope of a fair contest. Mr Katan received exactly 25 fewer votes than Mr Peters did. I'd say their chances of winning a seat are very similar.

In training poll workers, election staff drills into us that we're to err on the side of inclusion. We're to do all we can to facilitate rather than impede the voter. At the front end of the election, we want everyone in, because participation is a sacred right and more is better for the process. Qualifying the ballots and weeding out the mistakes come later.

We should clearly follow the same principle in the candidacy process, for the same reasons. Where there's uncertainty, we should err on the side of inclusion, and that's what the City Clerk should have done to head off the situation we find ourselves in.

The editor's argument that it's reasonable to proceed with the election despite the dispute is completely specious and inimical to the democratic process. My ancestors didn't participate in the Revolution because democracy would be simpler, cheaper or easier, and to the extent that we allow those values to enter the conversation now, we're tossing our heritage and way of life on the dump.

Rural areas protest proposed water cuts

Important bits are missing from Joanna's story today.

First, ADWR management anticipated the state budget shortfall and was ahead of other agencies in implementing cuts in its own budget, thinking reasonably that this would insulate it from arbitrary cuts later. This proved optimistic when instead the Legislature demanded uniform cuts from all agencies on the same baseline, regardless of what they'd already done. No good deed goes unpunished, after all, and this scattershot approach essentially punished responsible agencies more than the slackers.

Second, LD1 Rep Andy Tobin and Sen Steve Pierce have been leaders in blocking any effort to raise revenues to partially make up the shortfall and prevent this story from happening. At the same time they have pushed for substantial cuts in taxes on business.

I understand that no newspaper story can convey the entire web of factors contributing to a given event, but voters should always bear in mind that there's more to the story, and reporters must attend to the fifth basic question: why.

Legal wrangling continues as city ballots reach voters

Cindy's piece today brings in information from this week's court filings, and it would have been enough to report that without the massive rehash of past events that obscures the new info. But that's no big deal.

The characterizations of the legal process as "wrangling" that "drags on," however, seem at odds with reality. The courts have been right on it in this case, responding to the short timelines left for clearing up the mess before the election deadlines. At the end of the article Judge Gemmill says the court will "try to get a decision out shortly" after Monday's hearing. That's a quick decision, in my experience.

The reader would be wise to consider that in recasting this efficient, pretty-quick court process as dragged-out wrangling, the editors are creating a subtext implying that this eminently reasonable legal issue is a waste of everyone's time. That's a standard tactic in yellow journalism.

Editorial: Park trailer plan not a good idea

The unnamed Courier editor has a problem with mobile homes, but he won't quite say why.

Go ahead and look, you won't find it. He says they're small, and that's "not the way most of us would choose to live." So what? Does the county propose to require that everyone live in mobile homes? I guess I missed that part.

No, the editor's problem is that mobile homes are less expensive, meaning they're preferred by people with less-than-princely incomes. And those people are, at least in the editor's neighborhood, undesirable.

This is where the "reduces my property value" argument tends to show up. Somebody puts Mom up in her own trailer across the back yard, and the grasping, snobbish neighbor down the road thinks that's ugly. He wouldn't like to buy in to "that sort" of neighborhood, so he infers that no one would, and from that he infers a threat to the value of his house. (For my money, if a condition keeps the snobs out, I'm all for it. They make rotten neighbors.)

Has the editor ever come across the Catch-22 wherein if you want to build your own house on your own county land, up to now you weren't allowed to live there while you did it? I wonder how the pioneers the editor pretends to so admire might react to that kind of restriction.

We all know real the dynamic at work here. So why can't the editor just say it out loud? Only because that might make him look like a grasping snob who can't abide the lesser classes. Here's a clue, editor: we already knew that.

Medical examiner: Blows Kennedy received could have been fatal

Someone in the comments pointed it out before me: an awful, awful headline. It'd be laughable if it weren't about a brutal murder.

Letter: Chamber should seek volunteers, not money

Andrea Smith suggests that the Chamber seek volunteers rather than cash to put up Xmas lights. Better yet, let the Chamber hire people to do this and so contribute to the local economy. Its interest in the Xmas display is purely as business promotion, after all. Why should businesses get this service for free?

Editorial: Holiday forecast looks brighter

Here's another entry from the unnamed Courier editor's empty Barcalounger.

Excepting the last line (a wan suggestion that readers spend more, presumably at retailers who advertise in the Courier), this is nothing more than a business-page filler. A waste of time for both writer (even if the writer is just a chair) and reader.

Interesting that it didn't show up on the website till after 3pm. Maybe the staff was just ashamed and hoped no one would see it. I know I would.

Election update

And so the City-election vaudeville continues. The appeals court stays the stay, and the election that was on and then off is on again. A few thousand people will need replacement ballots that the court will review again next week to determine whether they should have Mr Katan's name on them. It may decide to prescribe a new, separate ballot for Council after results of the current ballots are in. Winners on the current ballot could be different on the new ballot. There will be additional expense, the people's business will be held up, voters will be confused about what to do, and even the unnamed Courier editor agrees that the City botched the job and needs to start from scratch. What a Chinese fire drill.

So what's a voter to do? This is the most important question the Courier should be addressing rather than focusing entirely on the legal wrangling. The answer is simple and reassuring.

If you threw away the first ballot, call or visit the registrar's office to get a replacement. If you want to vote for Paul Katan, write his name on the line under the other candidates and fill in the oval. If you want to give him (or any other candidate) a little better chance of winning, don't vote for anyone else. Mail the ballot, right away. If another ballot comes, vote that one too. And if you really want to help, make sure your friends and family know what to do.

Above all don't blame Mr Katan for this. The City staff screwed the pooch here, and deserve to take every bit of the heat.

Update. 4:30pm: Council held an exec session on this subject this afternoon. Perhaps we'll hear more from Council members on how they feel about the situation now that they're (I hope) fully in the loop.

Climate change film debut draws supporters, critics

Ken's piece, which might be appropriate for the entertainment section, finds its way to the front page -- why? What makes this not just news, but urgent news?

This was a political event masquerading as an academic presentation. That's obvious to anyone with half a brain. The arguments are hackneyed, anti-science and fully discredited, on a par with the Black Helicopter and Chemtrail conspiracy theories.

There is no justifying this coverage as credible news. The editorial decision to front-page this rot clearly indicates the bias of the paper's managers, and it should inform readers about everything they see in the Courier about climate change and politics.

Our society and our planet cannot afford to continue allowing the media to pretend that this sort of thing is an equal viewpoint offering balance. There is no equivalency here, no debate. This is nothing more than insane obstructionism against defending ourselves from a clearly known and existential threat. Large corporate interests fund it, and it's being sold to people who are ill-equipped intellectually to understand the complexity of the situation, so they retreat into la-la-I-can't-hear-you denial of the deeply scary scenarios we're rushing into headlong. We must resist that in ourselves and in our media.

County sheds light on dark sky ordinances

Here's another case where the headline writer is so interested in a pathetic attempt at cleverness that s/he obscures the story. County P&Z is actually proposing more exemptions to the lighting ordinances, further eroding the nighttime view county-wide.

Elks contract, incorporation top Prescott city agenda

I find it fascinating that Mr Norwood is proposing accounting tricks to shift stimulus funds designed for energy conservation over to the Elks Theatre. It's creative and for an arguably good cause, but it sorta smells like fraud to me. I just don't see how you can use conservation money to buy early 20th-century plaster decorations. I wonder what Mr Lamerson might have to say about that.

My boilerplate on the Elks:
* The theatre will only survive if we put the money into equipment and major improvements to make it work better and be truly rentable. Every dime spent on decoration is wasted if artists and promoters can't use it.
* Bring theatre pros in as primary advisers, designers and contractors. Unspecialized architects and contractors will screw it up every time.
* It is not, never has been and never could be an opera house.

On the incorporation of Williamson Valley, I think it would be dead stupid to add yet another separate municipality to Quad City. This area needs coordinated planning, shared resources and a stronger sense of shared community. For a practical future we should be eliminating arbitrary boundaries, not making more. It will be far better in the long run to annex WV into Prescott than create another parochial suburb and sales-tax competitor.

Editorial: The right call at the right time

The unnamed Courier editor thinks good ol' boy and reliable Republican Kenton Jones is a good choice as judge. I'm so surprised. Yawn.

The Katan saga

So far the Courier's coverage of the current flap over Paul Katan's ballot status seems pretty straightforward, better then it has been on occasion. The comments are fascinating, in that so many people can blame him for filing suit and "costing the taxpayers money" after the judge has agreed that yes, the City screwed up and really is legally out of bounds.

Should Paul have done the big-man thing and quietly retired from contention when the City told him to sit down and shut up? I expect that argument only flies with those who would have liked him to sit down, shut up and not run again. And perhaps Paul learned a thing or two from Bush v. Gore a few years ago.

I've known Paul since he started getting involved politically years ago at Access13. In those days he similarly refused to shut up and sit down, it caused friction with the established order and got him chucked out of the room a couple of times. But he usually had a point, and the establishment learned that chucking him out did no good. We also learned that he is honest and conscientious, and while he keeps an eye on his ideals, he also knows how to express them in practical terms and work to build useful consensus.

I know directly that this lawsuit is not the path Paul would have chosen, rather that he feels bound by principle and loyalty to the people supporting his campaign. The City can't be allowed to get away with scotching his bid for office out of hand, no matter what his real chances are of winning. Our system of law is not based on who's the strongest. It's about a fair shake for everyone, and I applaud Paul for taking that stand.

Why things fall apart. A little on entropy for your Friday instant mind-expansion.

Editorial: SRP profligacy no real surprise

And the unnamed Courier editor's petty outrage is no surprise, either. But seriously, so what?

The editor fulminates breathlessly about executives of a big, overprivileged corporation throwing money around as if it's news. Sorry, editor, that's the norm in this country, and a large proportion of our voters are so used to it that they'll defend to the death a rich guy's right to spend the shareholders' dividends and the employee pension fund on whatever makes him happy, simply because that's how we measure success, after all.

I'd love to see the editor extend this logically and point out how drug and health-insurance companies hold us all hostage to their expense accounts, or how arms manufacturers find ways to gin up convenient wars. The editor might even find some common ground with Michael Moore on this if he were to really think it through.

But that's a forlorn hope. The editor is only peeved that SRP, using entirely legal means, is slowing down a certain massive public-works boondoggle that the editor thinks is a Good Thing. So he undertakes the only political tactic he can remember, which is to smear the opponent in hopes of making ill-informed people mad. This worked so well for Karl Rove, after all. Unfortunately all the public outrage in the world would have exactly zero effect on SRP. The company simply does not care, and it's above regulation.

I'm no fan of SRP, and I'm looking forward to the day the Legislature gathers enough political will to begin limiting the company's purview and power. So rather than sling gratuitous mud at SRP, I suggest that the editor put some effort into research on why the company's constitutionally secure position is a Bad Thing and what we can all do about it.

Our worst problem is hipshot media

Ben Hansen's pseudo-blog, purportedly about "words, media and ethics," today carries another of his extremely occasional columns, this on one of his favorite themes: "power, perquisites, pork and paramours," a formulation he's used eight other times in editorials in just the last three years.

The premise is painfully simplistic, that when a person is elected to Congress, s/he is immediately consumed by a Washington "culture of corruption" and becomes a depraved, power-mad pork-dispenser.

Somehow Ben can see no difference between Jeff Flake and Rick Renzi, between William Jefferson and Raul Grijalva, or between John Ensign and Olympia Snowe. To him they're all the same. What this tells me is that Ben knows literally nothing about what happens in Congress, and is making his accustomed hipshot at an easy, accustomed target. I'd love to be on the extension if Mr Flake were to call Ben on this insult to his integrity. He won't, of course, because, thanks to this sort of thing, a Courier editorial swings so little weight.

There's no question that there are some rotten apples in the Congressional barrel, and neither party can claim purity. That's true of every human organization, and it should be dead obvious to anyone over the age of twelve. But focusing on the rotten fifteen percent and tarring the rest with the same brush is insulting to the good ones and handicaps them in getting anything positive done.

The real tell on this is that if these ideas actually mattered to Ben, his editorial endorsements of candidates would focus more on their personal integrity than on the political positions that they say they espouse. Ben's record on this shows quite the opposite, reflexively endorsing corporatists and authoritarian radicals whatever their integrity problems. He endorsed Rick Renzi once after it was clear he was a carpetbagger sent in as a representative of the Pentagon rather than Arizona, and a second time after the Bush Justice Department called him on his extortion and land schemes.

Aside: I first met Renzi in July of '03, when he was just six months in office, and after talking with the guy for half an hour I knew exactly what he was and what would become of him. One would think that a man of Ben's experience and position would have had many opportunities to sniff out such a stinker. Why didn't he?

Ben, if you want to raise the bar on someone, start with your own profession. The American media in general and your paper in particular have failed us spectacularly over the past two decades, because people just like you put ideology ahead of citizenship. Drive the snakes from your own nest first.

The sweat-lodge story -- twice!

Today's paper offers an interesting perspective on the editing process by carrying two different edits of the same AP story.

I suppose it's remotely possible that this was a newsroom screwup, wherein two different Courier editors pulled different versions of the same story and shoveled them into the paper without checking. But that would be just too amazingly dumb to believe.

So readers have the opportunity to view some of the inner workings of how a story can drift and change with the editing process. For example, in one, "Sheriff's spokesman Dwight D'Evelyn said Tuesday that authorities have not yet spoken with Ray," while in the other, "Authorities said Ray has refused to speak with authorities." Same fact, different slants. Collect 'em all!

Why are there multiple versions? Different papers want different slants on the news. Here we see the focus-on-the-family version vs the focus-on-the-perp version. If he wanted both perspectives, a good editor would have merged the stories rather than repeat so much verbatim. Usually, though, editors choose the version that resonates with their own prejudices, which is what they think their readers really prefer.

OK, it was a colossal screwup, no matter how it came about. No getting around it.

Something else to consider: have you noticed how little we read about Sedona or the Verde Valley in the Courier? Might there be a prejudice in play in the editorial office that puts more value on this particular story?

Finally, this event took place adjacent to Senator McCain's place, nearer Cottonwood than Sedona. But the stories are all datelined Sedona, purely because of the 'new-age' event involved imho, and McCain's name has been kept out of it despite its human-interest value.

Talk of My Ass: Prop. 401 seeks to kill pipeline

Bluntly as ever, the Mayor states what is obvious to anyone who's been less than half asleep for the past two years. What he doesn't get is that if voters understand that 401 will lead to a vote on the pipeline, they're more likely to support it. With this piece he's working against his own interests.

I've never agreed with the 401 group's strategy of trying to separate the initiative campaign from the pipeline issue. That was doomed from the start as a laughable fig-leaf tactic any four-year-old would see through. What they don't fully get is that there is very broad discomfort with how the pipeline issue has been handled officially, and people will vote against it, the only question is how many.

If CWAG had sponsored an initiative to stop the pipeline itself, I think it would have a good chance of success. Mayor Wilson knows this too, hence his ill-considered position on 401. (If he really thinks the voters support the pipeline, 401 would be not much of a threat.)

The good argument against 401 is that it will be a permanent block on any kind of major infrastructure project, hampering future Councils in making big commitments that we may need to create the sort of city we really want.

Editorial: The recession is over? It's news to most

The unnamed Courier editor once again demonstrates his pitifully poor understanding of the English language.

"Recession" in this context means "reverse growth," i.e. a shrinking economy. It does not mean the effects of economic shrinkage. The end of a recession is the economic low point, crudely speaking, and it takes sustained expansion to make up the lost growth. This is not difficult to understand at all.

But the editor is confusing the technical pronouncements of economists with what he wants to hear about real-world effects on investment and employment. One might defend this as keeping intellectual pace with his audience, but I'd really prefer to avoid such cynicism.

Big G, the most important force in the universe. It's Feed-Your-Head Friday!

Editorial: Tracker, friends, deputies do their jobs

Oh great, another copy-and-paste of yesterday's front page in case you missed it. More hard-hitting analysis from the unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger.

Honestly, guys, this is so boring.

ToT: Cap and Trade novel is all too realistic

Retired engineer Don Harney illustrates why the media don't usually interview retired engineers about economics. See, they are quite different skill sets.

Mr Harney spins a yarn about awful things resulting from a hypothetical cap-and-trade system, and concludes that instituting one would be just awful. This is how a retired engineer does economic research: by "writing a novel" in his head.

An economist, or dare I say anyone with a working brain, would do the research by looking at existing systems empirically. Like all of Europe, which has been trading emission credits since 2005 following a three-year test in the UK.

The results have been mixed, depending largely on how the credits are allocated, but the criticisms of the program include nothing like what Mr Harney writes in his imaginary novel.

You'd think the editors, in considering this piece for Talk of the Town status, might evaluate it for its possible value to the readers. But apparently talking straight out of your ass about something the editor reflexively doesn't like is enough to get you a column in the Courier. I know, maybe we could just mentally slug these as Talk of My Ass instead.

You can't make this stuff up

Talk of the Town: Special interests don't care about jobs

Rep Kirkpatrick defends her vote against cap-and-trade. Apparently the heat has not gone down since this hit the news several months ago, and she's feeling it.

Let's start at the top. The Representative characterizes the League of Conservation Voters as a "special interest," and the headline writer collectively characterized them as uncaring about jobs. Rep Kirkpatrick did not say that anywhere in the piece. That's the opinion of the editor, who insists on seeing all environmental advocates as zealots.

The Representative asserts that "global warming is the most important environmental issue affecting our country," yet somehow doing something real to curb carbon emissions and address global warming is not in the interest of rural Arizonans. The logical disconnect here is palpable. Climate change will pretty clearly hurt Arizona more than most other states, and rural areas more than urban. But the representative believes that saving a few pennies on our electricity bills in the short term is the greater good.

Yes, this is a disappointment. I had hoped for a stronger sense of leadership and willingness to take on the very serious challenges that we face, both as a state and as a nation. Coal is literally killing us, Representative. Keeping it a little cheaper is not the way to a secure future. Rather, introducing real market mechanisms to deal with the real cost of environmental damage will reduce the market disadvantage of cleaner energy technologies that will create substantially more jobs and economic activity than coal and oil do now.

PS: Does anyone have a take on what she might mean by "greater Arizona"? I'm pretty sure she doesn't mean that Arizona has claim to territory outside its borders (Sonora, perhaps?), so this smells like she thinks the reader thinks that Arizona is Maricopa and Pima Counties and needs reminding that there's more to the state. It's just a really odd construction to give to home-district press, and she used four times.

Arizonans can see first-ever crash of rockets into moon

Another fail for the headline writer, who saw "We've never done this before" in the story from a NASA press release and apparently jumped to the conclusion that crashing a rocket into the Moon had never been done before.

Moon exploration actually began with just this sort of experiment -- Luna 2, a Soviet vehicle, hit the Moon on Sept 14 1959, three months before the US put a Rhesus monkey on Little Joe 2 and got him all of 85 km up into the atmosphere.

Update, midnight: The comments on this story are just too funny/scary. Could all these people really be this dumb? Houston, we have a problem!