Polk: Officials should follow sacred oath

Our County Attorney has her say in the paper after the editors took a stab at hamstringing her yesterday. This piece quotes most of what the Republic published, edited a bit for the local audience. Did Ms Polk submit this at the same time as the Republic piece? Did the editors mess with it to make it appear that she submitted it in response to the Courier coverage? Given past experience, it's not unlikely. I also notice that someone neglected to post the byline.

No matter, Ms Polk comes through loud and clear that Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa Attorney Thomas are far off the reservation and intent on worse. Joe's rabid fans will demand that she back up her opinion with facts, something she may not legally do. It's clear to me that she's gone about as far as she can with it.

Again, Sheila Polk is a stand-up girl and solid public servant. This will not please the power-brokers in her party, but I've never noticed that she cared much about that. Remember, she didn't have to do this, and there's no gain for her in it.

Update, Sunday: I see the byline eventually showed up.

Editorial: New deportation plan is a win-win

The unnamed Courier editor is all for the Accidental Governor's new plan to simply take the illegals out of our jails and give them to the Feds for deportation. What he doesn't ask is how we failed to think of this before.

So I took a look. The Daily Sun and other actual news outlets report that, surprise, this is nothing new. We've been doing it since 2005, azzamannerperfack, and

About 200 criminal immigrants are released early from prison in Arizona each month and turned over to federal authorities. Eighty percent of those are immediately deported to Mexico, while the rest are sent to federal detention centers, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Admitting that ol' Janet was actually doing this for years before new Jan announced it as a big budget savings might be inconvenient to the Republican memory hole, of course. But

Under a previously approved program Brewer now wants implemented, about 1,300 prisoners would be turned over to ICE in the coming 18 months, saving the state about $5.7 million.

Hang on, check those numbers. We've been handing over 200 prisoners a month, and the Governor wants to up that to 1,300 in 18 months? I smell an arithmetic fail, if nothing else.

But cutting the budget is really really important, right? Even if by a measly six million clams that apparently the system has already been saving for four years.

If this little dance is enough to fascinate the editor, it's no wonder he can't figure out what Steve Norwood is doing.

Prescott man's 'Peanuts' collection ...

I have to say it, as a news story this feature on someone's penchant for accumulating kitschy dust-collectors is an embarrassment. Perhaps the editors are nursing a case of Peanuts envy.

The news you didn't read this year

Among the many boring year-end roundups crowding the media, perhaps the most interesting to news junkies is the annual Top 25 Censored Stories, by Project Censored. Check it out, I promise you'll learn something really intriguing.

Stockmar: Santa's workshop in the form of proposed prisons

Steve takes his column from the prison controversy to the 50,000-foot level, and offers a better idea for how to use that land. I gotta wonder whether Brad Fain is listening, but Steve gets a cookie.

Mixed reaction to Polk's published letter

The Courier headline writer tries to soften the impact of Sheila Polk's amazing opinion in the Republic. If you haven't, go read it. It takes my breath away to see something like this coming from our stalwart county attorney, and it adds a lot of lustre to her already sterling reputation as a serious and dedicated public servant.

Linda Stein's story is solid, covering the issue and giving the other side maybe a little too much space to respond, and then going for a neutral view as well. All good. The headline, by pulling "mixed reactions" out of someone's butt, is clearly meant to confuse the picture. Bad editor, no cookie for you.

I'll also bet that Ms Polk's letter came to the Courier offices as well, and is languishing on a spike somewhere. Space considerations, I'm sure.

Editorial: Construction is on; bumps lie ahead

The unnamed Courier editor comes out clearly, if limply, in favor of widening WVR, and by extension in favor of housing and commercial growth in upper Williamson Valley. It may be that he's only really thinking in terms of his own convenience in maneuvering his oversized pickup, but let's consider for a second the wider implications, so to speak

The City has made it clear that it has no interest in more annexations in the valley. So new homes up there will be on county land, exempt from the state water regime. Williamson Valley is a smaller but significant watershed for the Big Chino aquifer, and exempt wells are a significant factor in whether we can achieve safe water yield.

Closer in, the road serves an area of mini-ranches: horses (and horse-trailers), wildlife, pedestrians without sidewalks, tractors and school buses clog a road that winds through trees, dales and homes. Farther out it's straighter and easier to navigate, but in town there's a reason it's slow.

Widening the road will cut back hillsides, level out dips and hills, clear back trees, cut into properties and put the homes even closer to the road. There's no question that it will permanently change the character of the area, complicate people's lives, reduce quality of life and squash a lot more coyotes, skunks, deer, cats and dogs.

What's the upside? Smoother, faster traffic flow to places that haven't been built yet. If that's your idea of a good investment of public funds, you're welcome to it.

Column: Publishing journal died suddenly

I'm sure a lot of readers are scratching their heads over this. E&P has been the primary trade journal of newspaper editors for a hundred years, and that's why it seems important enough to the editors to place on the op-ed page. Ordinary readers probably know nothing about it, of course, and could care less, so it was more than a little self-indulgent for the editors to do this.

But for those who are curious, check out the Wikipedia entry as a start. It's another casualty of corporate media dominance, and a sad loss to my profession. I hope they can pull something together and keep going.

ToMA: People need to learn about prison

The prison story broke in the Courier on Dec 17, a scant five days ago, so Councilwoman Lasker's column appears well ahead of the paper's usual two- to three-week publishing schedule for this sort of thing -- which only illustrates that they can get things printed in a more timely fashion when they want to.

I'm not taking a position yet on whether it's a good idea for PV to get into the prison business. I have to say that the idea of public officials panting after this sort of "growth business" is repellent, extending PV's history of rash, tasteless action for its own sake (the zombie civic center, the untenable public debt, the invented downtown, the tickytacky developments, the arena, the traffic cameras, ack). Having for-profit corporations operate such facilities is just wrong-headed as well, for a multitude of reasons. But if the project is necessary (debatable) and this is a good place for it, "not in my back yard" just isn't a good argument against it. And while I live in Prescott, I consider PV my back yard as well. The entire area has a stake in this decision, and PV officials should acknowledge that.

Ms Lasker plays the part of the smart shopper, but with no experience or homework to inform what she's seeing, she's a babe in the woods for a sales job, as we can infer from her comments here. The one thing a corporation will always do better than government is sales.

What concerns me most is the likelihood that a prison-town mentality will develop around it, a mindset that treats people as things. If we're to have a prison here, let's consider how we can do it better for everyone, the workers, the community and the incarcerated. Let's have some new ideas on facility and systems design to create a place where the people coming out are more likely to be better for the experience, and the community is as well.

Editorial: Water saving is worth turf plan

The unnamed Courier editor doesn't go far into the details of how he arrives at his numbers, but he concludes that the artificial grass will cost more over the long run and that this will be a good thing considering the water savings. This is a counterintuitive result in context, so I'm inclined to trust it, and the editor gets a cookie for choosing substantial water savings over a small margin of public money.

This goes a long way to clearing up the confusion that Ken Hedler left in the wake of his Nov 27 story on the deal, which implies the actual cost will be lower overall.

Never mind that we're spending public money of this order on sports, that's just stupid and it should be a subject for public debate. But at least they're planning to do it somewhat less stupidly. Now let's keep an eye on the contract fulfillment and see whether the numbers pan out.

Correction

An anonymous commenter writes:

"The Courier wrote an article several days ago claiming that a car crashed into the nonprofit People Who Care building at the Prescott United Methodist Church, seriously injuring one of their employees. It turns out they had the wrong agency and the accident actually occurred at Caring Presence, another senior care agency in the area. Despite a call from People Who Care correcting their mistake, the paper never printed a correction."

From Dec. 14: Truck crashes through Prescott building

Heather Murray pointed out the mistake in the online comments, but yes, it would be apropos for the Courier to publish a correction, because people might easily decide to not visit a business if the paper says the front's all caved in.

This leads to the issue of corrections policy, in my estimation always a weak area for the Courier. It appears that the editors believe that in general the readers don't notice or don't care about the paper's frequent egregious errors in reporting and editing, and what's published is already in the bottom of the bird cage, so why bother? It's apparently far more embarrassing to admit mistakes than to make them.

Feed-your-head Friday

Lightning bolts, river deltas and dust bunnies! Welcome to the world of fractal dimensions.

Editorial: Is APS reacting to conservation savings?

Sometimes I despair that the unnamed Courier editor is even capable of seeing past I-me-mine. Today's editorial notes that people are conserving energy (a good thing), and that APS wants higher rates (a normal thing), and jumps to another logic-free connection.

Perhaps someone should explain to the editor that people are conserving energy because they need to save money. If energy were cheaper, we'd have less conservation.

Meanwhile the fuels that APS uses are increasingly expensive and supplies are inevitably diminishing. The grid system we all rely on for electric power is technologically Stone Age and under-maintained, raising both fixed and labor costs. Shareholders demand profits, so managers must demand prices. That's just how it is. Reducing electricity use does not reduce generation -- the potential across the wires is always the same. So the only way to reduce costs in response to conservation is to reduce capacity, by taking generators offline. We're a long way from that kind of savings, and it'll probably never happen to any significant degree. What actually happens is that most of what we don't use here is used somewhere else. The rest is simply wasted as unused potential.

I have to say that higher energy prices -- prices that more faithfully reflect the true costs of the stupid system we have -- are good for us in that they force us to conserve and allow sensible alternatives to compete. Any sane projection for the future includes far higher prices for fossil fuels. Let's get used to it, and make lemonade.

CYMPO reaffirms elimination of Verde River crossing

Here's another case of failing to ask the most basic question. Cindy's CYMPO story covers the players on one side of the issue at length. But where is the quote from ADOT on why the river crossing is still on their maps? One phone call.

Fortune of events center ails with the economy

Notice anything missing from this story? It's the fans, the people the Fains have been counting on to make this unlikely venture work. Ken apparently asks questions of no one but those who are working to sell the idea. Consequently the reader can't trust anything in the article as fact.

Speaking as someone who's done a lot of shows, big and small, I've said from the beginning that the arena would quickly devolve to white-elephant status. Six thousand seats is just too big for people in this area, even including optimistic hopes of visitors, to reliably support. I grew up in an area where minor-league hockey is relatively popular and familiar, and I've seen how counting on that usually leads to bankruptcy. Trying to sell music in a barn like this one is iffy at best, and most ticket-buyers wind up hating it. The optimistic (for developers) population projections that sold Global Entertainment on the area are proving wildly wrong. It won't be long, I expect, before Global cuts its losses and pulls out, leaving PV with the question of what to do with the building. Maybe there's an opportunity here.

Maybe Ken's second half will include the other side of the story. I'll keep an eye out.

Update, Tuesday: Never happened. I'm so surprised.

Mason: Outlook 'bleak' for state budget remedies

I'm intimately familiar with what Rep Mason is saying to the District 1 municipalities -- we talk about it every week on The People's Business (2pm Sat and Sun, 89.5 and 90.1 FM) -- and while I wasn't there on Tuesday, I can be pretty confident that she said a whole lot more in her presentation to Council than shows up in Cindy's story. Tune in this weekend for the full megillah from Lucy, or check out the meeting itself on Access13.

The reason the outlook is so bleak is not because we don't have good choices available to us, but rather that the hardline Republican leadership, including our own Mr Tobin, refuses to consider those choices in favor of an ideology that demands taking advantage of every opportunity to kill off government services. Beyond reducing quality of life for all of us, this adolescent approach also stunts the business environment they think they favor.

Elections matter. If you've been resisting involvement in politics -- unlikely if you're reading this, I'm sure -- get up off your lazy duff and do your part to understand the issues and elect better people.

Editorial: Earmarked finances at risk of reallocation

Our legislators, continuously frustrated that voter protections keep it from exerting control over a large portion of the state's budget, are looking at how they can change the law to allow them to graze the forbidden fruit.

The unnamed Courier editor characterizes this as focusing only on "money that is not being spent," and while some lawmakers may be saying that, it would be supremely naive to imagine that any breach in the initiative firewall won't lead to wholesale withdrawal of any funds the Legislature wants. And bear in mind that our Legislature is currently owned and operated by the radical right, which risks the decimation of any program created by voter initiative that's to the left of Jesse Helms.

The editor goes further, imagining that the Legislature can simply repeal inconvenient initiatives. This betrays a gross lack of understanding of the Arizona Constitution. The initiative process is designed specifically to prevent legislative meddling in voter-created laws. It just don't work that way. This also implies a complete misunderstanding of the legislative process, in that programs and funding mechanisms generally go hand in hand, so repealing an initiative repeals its funding as well. That's a no-gainer, budget-wise, so you have to essentially siphon off taxes that the people have dedicated to a specific purpose and apply them somewhere else. That tends to piss people off.

There are a lot of good reasons for amending the Constitution to eliminate or restructure the initiative process. Voter-protection of funding really does impair legislative work to build constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, and as these protected chunks have built up over decades, everyone agrees the system is now seriously out of balance. Large out-of-state and corporate interests have also discovered that an initiative can be packaged and sold to voters like corn flakes, and this can be very convenient for snaking something into law that even the most expensive and devious lobbyists can't get through the normal process. We have a lot of bad and clunky law on our books as a result, and other states have found themselves facing bankruptcy over such idiocies.

What's happening now may result in the Legislature creating legal fig leaves for borrowing voter-protected funds to pay back later, while a Constitutional amendment goes forward to change the initiative process. This cannot legally change previous voter protections except by other specific initiatives, the Supreme Court will see to that. There's no going back, we can only go forward.

The editor's glib conclusion, that we should just "enact smart spending at all levels," is easy to say, but very hard to manage both politically and practically. The essential part he leaves out is gathering the necessary revenue and building a dependable tax structure, no surprise as he's never seen a tax he liked. We can only hope that our lawmakers are able to cobble together a more useful understanding of the complexity of our situation and more respect for voters and the law than our editor exhibits in this piece.

Update, 5pm: It seems our governor and legislative leadership aren't even competent to count days. ABC is reporting that tomorrow's special session will be too late to legally do anything about the March ballot measures on the agenda. (Readers of the linked story will note that Ken Bennett used to be Senate President, now he's Secretary of State, of course. Gad.) Now they're talking about a May ballot. Why not do the session anyway, aiming for May instead, rather than put it off again? I swear.

Editorial: Balancing bonuses in unbalanced times

The unnamed editor is cribbing from an article in The Arizona Capitol Times you'll find here. (Did the Courier carry this in the paper version, maybe?)

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the editor equates obscenely large bonuses for executives of big corporations with standard-practice longevity bonuses for non-executive employees of municipal authorities. The logic there is undeniably weak.

But his central point is that it doesn't make sense to pay bonuses to some employees while laying off others, not too strange on the surface, especially for the majority of people, who've never received workplace bonuses other than as holiday gifts and such.

A newspaper editor is supposed to have wider knowledge than that, though. "Bonus" is a hot-button word in the media context of big-bank bailouts, but that doesn't change its real-world value as a normal part of the pay package for many. It's clear from the Capitol Times piece that this is standard practice among Valley municipalities, and it's offered to reward and retain experienced employees.

Let's bring the numbers into human perspective. This year Phoenix is putting 14.3 million clams, from a budget of over a billion, into bonuses for about 7,000 employees. This amounts to an average of a little over two grand per employee. Not a huge differential, if you ask me.

Perhaps the editor forgets that the quality of municipal services depends on the quality of the people furnishing them, and that an experienced employee is usually far more valuable than a new one. The editor's corporatist worldview tends to see workers as interchangeable and disposable, but real-world business knows better. Quality specialized workers are in constant demand, regardless of the economic weather, and municipalities are never at the top of the list of high-paying employers.

But the big fail here is that the editor doesn't bother to ask the most fundamental question: do Prescott, PV or Chino Valley include this sort of bonus in their pay packages? If so, we have something to talk about and some numbers to look at. If not, he's wasting everyone's time, as no one cares what the Courier thinks about what Mesa is doing.

Krugman on reregulation

Pursuant to my point below, just go read.

The infrastructure clown parade

Following up on Karen Fann's two-part Talk of My Ass two weeks ago, today we see a letter from the Yavapai County Contractors Association neatly juxtaposed with the editorial saying essentially the same things Mayor Fann did, adding exactly nothing to the argument.

All three of these entities argue quite reasonably that our infrastructure is in sad shape and needs revamping. I agree completely. But none bothers to lay out any ideas for how to pay for it other than vague references to federal stimulus funds.

None seems to notice that we gave up trillions in revenue with the Bush tax cuts for the rich, that we've run our economy on the rocks with insane spending on pointless, self-defeating wars, or that we're giving away hundreds of billions to patch the mistakes of crazed profiteers in financial institutions. These are a big part of why there's no money, folks. And they all -- the editor, Ms Fann and I'll bet Ms Griffis -- supported every one of these stupid decisions to the hilt, so I wouldn't look to them for sensible solutions to the problem.

We're where we are, so what can we do about infrastructure? First we have to look at the problem in realistic context. A given bridge or highway is the responsibility of a municipality, the state or the federal government, so funding for the repair has to come to its governing authority. The federal government legally can't do it all, as our commenters imply. Even if it could, the money has to come from somewhere, just printing it at the mint would rob us all in a hundred ways. So we have to grit our teeth and admit that we have to pay for it.

At the state level, expenditures this year are still running around 20% ahead of revenues even after the draconian cuts the legislature has instituted, and the numbers continue to head south. Everyone who's paying attention on left and right agree that this derives from structural problems in the budget, specifically an overdependence on sales taxes (generated primarily by home construction) and neglect of more dependable revenue sources, specifically income and residential property taxes, both among the lowest in the nation. This is a bit like basing your weekly budget on your Xmas bonus.

We can do a lot to fix that and it won't hurt much, by raising the income tax a little or by broadening property taxes and lowering the rates. Our legislative Democrats are waiting with the ideas in hand for when the Republicans finally realize that their ideas can't work, cut their radical fringe loose and grudgingly let the Dems into the room. There's really no other good option on the table.

At the federal level, we need a massive rethink of our spending priorities, particularly on our war machine. We're like a 16th-century mounted knight, weighed down with so much armor that we can't stand up on our own (our Chinese squire propping us up), while our adversaries have switched to light infantry with economic rifles. Our dependence on war as an industry is serving everyone's interests but our own. Diverting just a small part of the resources we devote to warmaking instead to clean energy development would build us an industry for the future as well as bring that value back into our economy as vital long-term infrastructure.

On the revenue side, we still have to repair the damage done by the Bush administration. Allowing those tax cuts to expire will be a huge help and won't hurt anyone at all, and moving a portion of those funds into New Deal-style infrastructure-building is exactly what the doctor is ordering here. Going further and reregulating the financial industry, starting with reinstituting Glass-Steagall (the repeal of which was a Clinton-era mistake) will help stabilize our economy and get us back on track to sensible growth by repairing our credit infrastructure. This will require steady public pressure, as it appears the Obama administration is substantially favoring Wall Street over Main Street.

You may notice that while they are coming from the political left, all these ideas are deeply conservative at their core. Sensible revenue-generation, sensible spending on things that will have lasting value. The years-long binge by the political right has reached its inevitable sad end, much as it did in 1929, albeit with far less extreme results, and now we have to be adults and deal sensibly with the mess.

Please remove shoes and belt

I've been getting more frequent spam in the comments, so I've added a little security step to the routine. Sorry about that. It's too much like taking your shoes off at the airport for my taste, but the bad guys just never let up.

Radio news

As of yesterday morning KJZA/KJZP is running on 90.1 in Prescott in partnership with KAWC in Yuma. Hope you like it!

Feed-your-head Friday

Okay, so I stole the idea from Science Friday on NPR. So sue me. And yeah, I'm a day late. No cookie for you.

How snakes slither:

The Catch-22 list again, ack

Never mind how Joe Heller might feel about this ugly use of the title of his great novel. I'm wondering who's being served by our annual 22 Days of Prescott's Most Wanted (cue musical theme ripping off Highway Patrol).

If you thought a lot of these mugshots seem familiar, there's little wonder, just look at the dates. Many of them have been on the list for years.

Adam Stevenson, wanted since 2004. Manuel Acosta, 2002. Miguel Franco and Claudio Lopez, 2006. Hector Reyes, 2002. Joel Medina-Ortiz, 2006. Domingo Valdez-Anguiano, 2004. Others have no dates, but I'm sure I've seen them before, and not this year.

Yavapai Silent Witness, which is the primary source of these stories, carries the list. The Courier ran that list on May 1 of this year, and it contained all the same names as were on last year's Catch-22 list, one going back to 1998, one wanted for "prescription fraud," another a probation violation, locations from Holbrook to Wickenburg.

What does it mean when the annual push to "catch 22 felons in 22 days" focuses on the same people year after year? Maybe it means that there really aren't enough bad guys out there to scare us with. Averaged over ten years, that's only 2.2 per year.

I've seen and written about the tilt toward Hispanics we see on this list. Add in that the editors have at least ten years of bad guys to choose from, and the racial-profiling angle really lights up.

But what concerns me more is the suspicion that reportage is drifting over into newsmaking and adjusting public perceptions of reality for political purpose. Cherry-pick 22 uncaught, mostly Latino felons from over ten years, dump their mugshots and precious little else one by one on the front page over three weeks, and you might create the impression among those who aren't paying close attention that there's a lot of crime going on around here by scary brown people. Which spreads unwarranted fear, which sells newspapers and, not incidentally, Republican candidates for office.

Now note today's editorial, defending it as "a new list" of "the most violent offenders currently at large." Prescription fraud. Hmmm.

City use of pulverized glass on streets raises questions

Lots of people are clearly hopping mad about the glass-in-the-streets story, but a different factor comes to mind for me.

The point of recycling glass, going all the way back to the first new-era mandatory bottle deposits in Michigan in the '70s, was to keep the glass out of the environment and make more new glass with it, since it is so easy to recycle cheaply. It's not waste, it's a resource.

Recall a couple of years ago, when Mr Norwood removed the City glass containers from supermarket parking lots, calling the operation unprofitable? Now we see what should be reasonably valuable materials crushed and spread on our streets. We've come full circle, only where citizens were once the litterers, now it's our government.

The angle I'd have liked to see in the Courier's story isn't who's to blame for this little incident, but rather why a City asset is being systematically wasted in this manner. Has the raw-glass market crashed, leaving municipalities with worthless piles of glass? Have we failed to build the necessary market-to-manufacturer infrastructure to make recycling worthwhile? Are other materials similarly in glut or nearing it? Or are our administrators just unwilling to make it a priority and deal with it? There are many interesting questions of vital public interest to be asked here.

















This is from secondarycommodity.com, which tracks prices on recyclables, and this chart covers curbside-gathered materials over the past two years. I dunno much about interpreting these data, but it looks to me like prices track fairly well with the economy overall, and they're up substantially over a year ago. To me that means the City is wasting public assets of increasing value into our environment, not unlike burning a ten-dollar bill to light a cigarette.

I can see the amped-up Hollywood treatment now -- a film about Prescott City government with Heath Ledger as Steve Norwood.

Gettin' the ol' Xmas spirit on

Not a lot of time for blogging this week, we've got a big project to finish before the weekend, but but given the season I just had to get in here and deck the blog, as they say. This pretty well expresses the whole thing for me. Enjoy!

Feed-your-head Friday

The universe is quite likely weirder than we can imagine.

Holiday travel kept me away last week, so I've got a bonus for this week. National Geographic presents a piece in its latest issue to help us understand and teach about the carbon problem and why it's really important to get ahead of it. Check it out.

Editorial: DVDs free to use, not for the taking

This is exactly the sort of thing a careful reader might expect to see when editors get lazy. The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger has turned in yet another cut-and-paste version of yesterday's page-one story. But this time it ought to be particularly embarrassing, because he's failed to think through the basis for the story, uncritically passing on nonsense from a press release that seems designed to unfairly manipulate him and the public.

I like Toni Kaus and she seems to be doing well with a tough job as head of the library. This is the first indication I've seen that she or her staff may be doing anything less than above board. But the story of 1,500 stolen DVDs smells of week-old fish.

The library wants a new security system to mesh with those at other libraries in its network and reduce the workload on its staff and volunteers, and this will cost a lot of money. But to justify this expense, it points to people picking way too many things up and neglecting to check them out. This indicates to me that the library has been pretty well failing to provide adequate security against theft of public property. One might think that security would have been an important design factor in the recent total renovation of the library, but we must infer that it wasn't considered or isn't working. That's a fail worthy of note by a local paper. The editor misses it completely.

The library uses the value of the stolen DVDs to help justify the expense, valuing its donated, secondhand, hard-used discs at $25 each. Actual replacement cost for discs in better shape might run to six or seven bucks tops, more like four or five in my experience. Average that high with labor involved, factor in donations of a third of them, and replacing 1,500 DVDs might cost around $7K. Not cheap, but not any $37K. That's ridiculous price-inflation to justify the $93K price tag on the RFID system and imply that it will amortize in a fifth of the time. It may be in a good cause, but it's underhanded all the same, and a local newspaper editor ought to be asking why, if this is such a good thing for the library, the staff needs to use such tactics in pitching it.

We also see nothing but acceptance that the new system will be airtight -- it won't be, there will still be shrinkage, and we ought to know the relative projection -- and we don't hear how many DVDs wear out and have to be replaced anyway, another useful data point in gauging the importance of the security system relative to other spending priorities.

An important part of a news editor's job is critical thinking and skepticism about what people in authority say, particularly where it involves public policy and the public purse. On seeing this ham-handed move by the library, the editors could have asked pointed questions, or simply dropped the smelly elements from what is otherwise a perfectly good story. Instead the readers (and advertisers) get simple-minded stenography. Our city deserves better.

ToT: Fann on infrastructure

Since there was nothing in the first section, I was hoping that in her followup Karen Fann might suggest some ideas for solving the problems she copiously cites. I was disappointed.

It matters because Ms Fann is the anointed successor to Lucy Mason in the House, so her abilities as a leader and problem-solver are important. (The idea that a Dem challenger might beat her for the seat seems remote at this point.)

Ms Fann risks public derision for complaining about the state of public infrastructure -- because of her close ties to firms that do so much of it on the public dime -- so you'd think she would want to offer some sort of plan that makes sense. Instead we see nothing but complaints about other public initiatives that she thinks have little or no value, like research on how we can reduce the impact of climate change and keep Arizona habitable.

This illustrates exactly the sort of conventional pigheadedness that has rammed us full-speed into an obvious economic wall. It does not bode well for our legislative delegation.

I agree wholeheartedly that our infrastructure is woefully neglected, including portions of it that Ms Fann neglects to mention. But our problem is not addressing other problems, rather it's that Americans are unusually resistant to the idea that we have to pay for everything we need, and unwilling to accept that the majority rules on what we need.

In the comments, George Seaman brings up a good point. It appears that the editors are showing marked favoritism toward Ms Fann in getting her views published. I'm so surprised.

Restoration uncovers intact 1920s Elks marquee

I've been rubbing my hands hoping for this. The face work comes down and we can see the original electric-era sign. I'm guessing that certain people in the Foundation were hoping it had been previously erased, because now they'll have to figure out what to do with it.

They want to restore the theatre to its look before the electric era, putting that sign out of period. But no one will be able to even suggest taking it down, nor should they. There's also the little problem of the name of the place. It might be embarrassing after these several years of calling it an opera house (it is not, never has been and never could be an opera house) to have to go back and start calling it Elks Theatre again, as it always was. But with that sign there'll be no choice.

It's not the marquee, by the way, that would be a projecting structure holding the signage. It's the sign.

The mammogram tempest

I don't really wonder that a lot of people are confused by the media treatment of this week's announcement about mammograms, and clearly the unnamed Courier editor is among them. There are a couple of factors involved in this that shouldn't be, and they muddy the water considerably.

The first is that this is a science story, an area where we can count on our journalists to fail us pretty generally. Start talking about random trials, control groups and methodologies and their eyes instantly glaze over. They just want the bottom line, and they have a hard time remembering that the conclusion of a scientific study does not constitute a fact, but rather the best estimate the scientists can get of the truth given the specific conditions involved. Big difference.

In this case what we have is a new report from the US Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts on preventive care set up by the Reagan administration to "review the evidence of effectiveness and develop recommendations for clinical preventive services." The PSTF

"recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years. The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient's values regarding specific benefits and harms."

(Incidentally, this backs up a similar conclusion from a study not long ago in Canada.) It's a simple, straightforward message. On looking at the current evidence, the panel found that the benefits of routine mammograms for low-risk women do not outweigh the associated risks.

The second factor making a huge mess of this is that a small proportion of people in this country are convinced that health-care reform is about rationing, killing off Republicans early and making lots of Democrats, and so they jumped in with both feet on the idea that this is a a nefarious scheme to deprive women of their necessary cancer tests. (Like they ever gave a rat's behind before about preventive services for women.) They came out screaming bloody murder (again) over nothing, and this is where we are.

In a way I wish it were a little more like the screamers fear. The profit motive in US health care leads to huge amounts of overprescription, overtesting, unnecessary procedures and other highly profitable waste. I think it would be reasonable to infer that profitmaking insurance companies will look for a way to use this to deny reasonable coverage. This has nothing to do with the public plan, which of course does not yet exist.

But it just isn't that important. It's another data point in the continuing refinement of our understanding that science pursues, no more, no less, and if more experts agree, a consensus may emerge to stop pushing women to have these tests because they're not necessary.

The editor basically gets it right in describing how to respond, but his tut-tutting the experts for unclear communication is ridiculous. The media have messed up the message, not them.

Where do the elements come from? It's feed-your-head Friday.

Talk of My Ass: Kirkpatrick won't get his vote again

Fred Veil leads by calling Democrats "Neo-Socialists," ticks off a few of the outright falsehoods the radical right is flogging as talking points, then complains that the representative failed to respond to his list of nonsense questions inspired by those talking points. He's right in that she should have responded, preferably telling him to take his disrespect and attitude and stuff it.

The piece wouldn't matter a bit except that the Courier editors slapped a "Talk of the Town" flag on this idiotic rant, giving it column status, rather than leaving it in the letters box. Dumb move.

To the headline-writer: Where did Mr Veil state that he voted for Ms Kirkpatrick the first time?

Editorial: Peavine Trail calls for right crossings

I've looked at the design presentation for the Road 39 trail crossing, and none of the options look all that good. I have to disagree with the unnamed Courier editor and probably with most of the trail-lovers, though. Building a tunnel or a bridge for the trail would suck for the trail in terms of environmental damage and access problems for horses and wheels, it would suck for the adjacent properties in terms of acres of earthwork encroachment, and it would suck for the taxpayer in terms of untenable expense.

I notice something missing from the plan though. The at-grade crossing design does not include a traffic light. With pedestrian request buttons to stop traffic when necessary (estimating from current numbers, not that often), it seems to me that the at-grade crossing would be a lot safer.

Anybody know otherwise?

Wiederaenders: Should we buy gold?

Gosh, what a mess. I hardly know where to begin.

First, as some of you know, for 22 years I've earned a major portion of my income from work for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's business paper of record, equivalent to The Wall Street Journal. Japan's economy lives and dies on international currency exchange rates, so to stay current I read a lot about this stuff. I won't claim expert status, but I know more about it that your average Courier editor.

Next, two points of fact.

Tim asserts that "China is ... purposely deflating its currency." This is plain nonsense. In point of simple fact the yuan has been rising steadily against the dollar for many years, albeit more slowly than it would naturally because the Chinese government has been buying dollars like crazy. The purpose of this has indeed been to protect export values, yes. But deflation? No way. US and international pressure is what's causing the Chinese to slowly relent on their currency, and this is positive progress from our perspective. Everyone manipulates their currencies, that's the primary purpose of central banks. This stuff goes on everywhere all the time.

Tim goes on: "the world economy’s recession led Russia and China to call for a One World Currency – other than the U.S. dollar – earlier this year." Tim's conflating two different discussions. One -- which hit the news not this year but over four years ago, while the economy was still hot and oil was becoming stupidly expensive -- was not about a scary "One World Currency," as Fox News would have it, but rather the idea of denominating more international trade in one or more currencies in addition to the dollar, which would help hedge the risk of loss of value of the dollar. Our currency has been vastly overvalued for decades, in small part because of its hegemony in international trade in vital commodities like oil, but more because other countries (especially China) buy dollars to reduce their own currency values to support exports to us. The other, going back to October last year, involves China and Russia agreeing to oil trade between them denominated in rubles and yuan rather than the dollar, which is perfectly reasonable and beside the point.

It helps to understand that currency has no intrinsic value. It's like atomic structure -- it seems solid, but if you look really closely, there's almost nothing there. Currency is just a medium of exchange, and its value is always relative. Domestically we judge value by purchasing power -- how many burgers or gallons of gas it will buy. Internationally it's set relative to other currencies. These two factors rarely track together. So, with no intrinsic value, the idea that the dollar "should" have a high value is just wrong. The value you want depends on whether you're buying or selling.

Tim says, "Within the past week we have seen reports of the U.S. dollar’s value dropping." He's behind the curve by a couple of years. Against the yen, for example, the dollar has fallen by about 20% since June of '07.

That matters to me because I earn yen and spend dollars. But changes in the international value of the dollar mean almost nothing to you if you earn dollars and spend dollars. Think -- has the dollar's 'loss' of 20% of its relative value raised prices here by 20%? Of course not. It does affect the cost of imported goods, materials and resources somewhat, but bear in mind that exchange rate is only one factor in prices. No manufacturer wants to cut his own throat by allowing his prices to rise above norms in the world's largest consumer market, so exporters to the US are mostly eating the exchange losses. (What about oil!? I hear you cry. It's generally denominated in dollars, so no change!)

If anyone's been purposely deflating a currency recently, it's been the US, and that's generally a good thing. Since what goes up must eventually come down, artificial inflation of the dollar to improve international buying power caused international investors to gradually lose confidence in it, and the return to natural balance is restoring the soundness of the currency. It's also giving a little boost to what's left of our manufacturing base by making US goods cheaper internationally and foreign goods more expensive for us.

Now we get to the real nutty stuff. Tim says darkly, "Could the U.S. dollar fully collapse? I suppose so," imagining that the dollar could lose value to the point where it becomes useless, like Confederate scrip or the Iraqi dinar as the bombs were falling. Tim may suppose it, but the idea is plainly preposterous short of an asteroid strike. The US economy is huge and it has a strong (sometimes too strong) central bank. There is no risk of real military threat to us. Most important, the entire world is holding our bonds, which means both that our currency is the one they prefer when theirs seem shaky, and they have a closely vested interest in maintaining the value of that currency. Where people agree that something has value, for whatever reason, it has value.

Sure, go buy gold if you like, and make the gold dealers richer (both when you buy it and when you sell it later). But bear in mind that gold has volatile relative value just as currency does, so it carries exactly the same risks.

If you really want to maintain the value of what you own, on the other hand, invest in your community, vote against warmongers (the single most reliable cause of lost value is war), vote against oil interests, and help make sure everyone is healthy and the kids are well educated.

YCSO investigates alleged employee misconduct

This looks like another case where something comes in over the transom and the Courier hasn't the curiosity or wherewithal to ask a question.

A Sheriff's captain has resigned, apparently because he did the nasty while on duty. There's an investigation ongoing. The question any good cub would ask is why. If the guy just got caught with his pants down and quit, what's to investigate? Either something big is missing from the story, or something in the story is just wrong.

Editorial: Prescott's lucky Norwood is staying

The unnamed Courier editor is allowed his opinion of City Manager Norwood, whether or not it's assembled from a patchwork of plain misapprehension, assigning him the credit for other people's work, and wishful thinking. I have a different opinion. But the really odd thing about this article is that the editor has clearly missed the primary implication of recent events and got the news backward.

The headline and the editorial express relief that Norwood is not leaving his post. That's true for this week, at least. But what we know now that we didn't know last week is that while he hasn't found the right deal yet, the manager is openly looking to move on. Every headhunter in the country working this market now has him on a list of names. More deals will be forthcoming. If Council has any sense, they're already putting feelers out for the next manager.

The aficionados of dark conspiracy like to infer new conflict between Norwood and Council driving events, but such conflict would be neither new nor necessary here. Norwood is a young, ambitious player in a very specialized profession where success is measured in population and budget numbers. His priorities and focus since he came have been on resume-building projects. I've discussed this with many connected people across the spectrum over the years and all agree, most with a sense of relief, that he won't be here long.

Today's Chuckle

An anonymous commenter: "Reading comprehension can be your friend. Invite him in. Let him stay awhile."

Stockmar: Annoying – and healthy – facts

Steve turns in a smackdown today of the hysterical claims about health-care reform, and manages a still entertaining but more refined approach than I've seen previously.

This is how it's done, folks -- calmly, factually, confidently, with citations and good humor. Steve gets a cookie.

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.