Feed-your-head Friday

How figure skaters control spin speed, and how much fun you can have in a physics lab: angular momentum.

Editorial: Plan to keep Cubs in AZ is home run

Apparently the unnamed Courier editor has again forgotten that the editorial column is not a personal blog.

Stories about movie stars go in the entertainment section, stories about church services go on the religion page, and stories about sports go on the sports page. Papers traditionally do this so readers can conveniently toss out the useless pages en masse.

Stories about local sports a hundred miles away have no place in a local paper at all, and that doesn't change just because the editor happens to be interested in sports. Readers don't care about his saltwater fish tank or his stamp collection, either.

What's weird and noteworthy about this piece, though, is the editor's support for a new non-user tax to help pay for his entertainment. This follows his blanket refusal to accept any new taxes to balance the state budget just four weeks ago. Gotta have priorities, I guess.

Editorial: We need less blame and more solutions

On first read of today's offering by the unnamed Courier editor, you might think, "well, that certainly sounds reasonable." Who can argue with "Honest solutions and personal accountability"?

But taking a look into the right-wing codebook I boosted from the cloakroom at the Hayworth fundraiser, I find some hidden messages.

Code: "Good, because voters will have their say at the polls when it comes to foreign and domestic policies. Last month's shocking Massachusetts Senate race defined voters' strength in numbers."
Decoded: "Virtuous voters elect Republicans."

Code: "But voters will have to endure endless campaigns designed only to confuse, distort and generally raise rabble - hardly the hallmarks of a productive society. But is helping society the true agenda? Not in an election year."
Decoded: "Politicians only care about winning elections, and lying is the only way to do that."

Code: "The voters are acutely aware of what's wrong with our system."
Decoded: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

Code: "Access to 24-7 information, solicited or otherwise, magnifies the flaws and expands the blame game."
Decoded: "When the media notice that Republicans are doing everything they can to block all government functions and can't seem to keep their pants zipped, it's just political blame-gaming."

Oh yeah, and how about "Honest solutions and personal accountability"? The codebook says: "Simplistic thinking and you're on your own, bubba."

I've got a better idea. When you're in Congress and the other party holds the largest majority in living memory, you accept that the voters said something pretty clear last time and get out of the way, like when you weren't picked for basketball that time. When the majority invites you to bring your ideas to the table, you show up, argue your points, and look for ways to advance compromise. It's called cooperation, and it's wildly unfashionable since Newt began his scorched-earth campaign, but it's how the system is supposed to work.

So no, we don't need less blame, we need less blameworthy actions. We need more statesmanship and devotion to public service. Look for that in your candidates this year, and where you find it, support those candidates.

Reagan Loves the Tea Party

That is to say his son Mike, high priest and oracle of the Reagan cult, thinks he would if he were, you know, alive. Today on the op-ed page he announces his new ReaganPAC "to seek out and support those candidates who share the principles of my father." I've got an idea who that is:

Republicans to Nominate Zombie Reagan in 2012

Regular readers know what I think of Mike Reagan. But today there's a little chunk in there that I can agree with wholeheartedly: "... too many have quickly dismissed elected officials and potential candidates because they failed to (live) up to every possible expectation. If we are to accomplish our goals, we must remember that while our elected officials are imperfect, they must also be our allies."

He's trying to get a halter on the Tea Partiers and bring them in line behind the GOP, of course, but responsible citizens of all stripes would be wise to bear this in mind rather than treat all public servants as unindicted co-conspirators.

I love this guy's work

Letter: Court ruling forgets 'we the people'

Jeannette Myers writes protesting the recent ruling giving corporations free rein to spend as much as they like for or against any candidate for public office. Some of the commenters would have it that this is just another left-right tussle, 'cuz they loves them some right-wing Supremes. Turns out it's really not.

Today's WaPo reports poll results showing clear majorities left, right and center strongly against this ruling and the political environment it would have us all live in.

Like health care, this is an issue that should unite us in doing something positive about it. Instead we see our corporate media creating spurious controversy, dividing us and conquering us. The opposition leaders in Congress oppose any effort by the majority to head this disaster off. You who identify with the right have to ask yourselves, seriously, who those guys are working for. It's clearly not you.

Editorial: Proposed library fee sparks outrage

Most days it seems that the unnamed Courier editor has no difficulty cutting and pasting yesterday's front page into the editorial column. On this subject, however, it took from Thursday, when Cindy was writing up the Council retreat, to Tuesday night to come up with this little finger-wag. OK, it was a holiday weekend, there were a few dull, canned editorials already in the pipeline, and he didn't get to his desk to do anything about it till Tuesday. Anybody could understand that, right? (Well, except for Thursday and Friday. Dunno what happened there.)

What it tells me is that the paper is on autopilot not just on weekends but around them as well, susceptible to the Friday-news-dump strategy, and perfectly willing to be well behind the curve in responding, when it suits. Play the sleepy-small-town card.

PS Editor: You endorsed those boneheads for election, remember?

Changes at the top?

I normally skip completely over ads, so I'm three days late in noticing a box on A2 about a "coffee with the editors" scheduled for tomorrow and soliciting ideas and input for improving the paper. Fine idea.

What strikes me is that Exec Editor Ben Hansen's picture isn't in the ad, but that of formerly retired editor Karen DeSpain is, slugged as an editor, and she doesn't appear on the masthead. I smell change afoot. Karen is well regarded in the community and has been missed since she left the paper.

Where's the outrage?

Since Cindy's story on Friday I've been wondering when we might see a Courier editorial on the City talking about charging for customarily 'free' public services like the library and public parks and trails.

They're not free, of course. Our taxes pay for them. Now the City, or at least certain Council members, would charge us again to use them.

The free public library in particular is an American tradition that speaks loudly of our commitment to open government, education, free thought and responsible citizenship. I would think a newspaper editor, of all people, would understand the implications of making access to public information more difficult based on economic class, and say something about it. Something loud.

Format changes

Last week's revamp of the Courier's online offerings are overall very positive, I think.

The sleeker dCourier pages eliminate lots of clutter, fluff and advertising and look more professional, though I would like to see somewhat larger headlines to help distinguish the stories from one another. The home page is still a mess, trying to cram too much in, but it's easy to bypass.

I'm having fun with the new DailyCourierPages.com site, which brings back online pages as printed, following a long hiatus. The navigation and zoom work smoothly and much more quickly than the old version. Zooming in to read takes a little getting used to, as the zoom feature is maybe a little too sensitive to mouse movement, but you get the knack after a while. I'd only ask for a second zoom level for those of us who try to avoid getting too close to the monitor.

On the comments feature, I have to say that "requiring" first and last names, but disclaiming (above it, in red!) that you can use a pseudonym sort of defeats the purpose. Registering commenters with real names will lead to fewer but more responsible comments. You might also consider giving registered commenters pride of place and putting anonymous comments lower, or maybe a larger typeface for registered comments.

Here's a cookie for the IT department. Now marketing gets the challenge of making money on it.

One thing, though: The narrower pages of today's papers make the six-column format hard for readers. The lines are just too short. Go to five and you'll make it easier for your readers and have more interesting layout choices in the bargain.

U.S. debt will keep growing even with economic recovery

I guess the editors missed me over the past week, so to lure me back to my desk, they gave me this great big Monday-morning present, guaranteed to piss me off. They ran a politically charged opinion piece as news.

But wait, there's more. Having chosen this AP op-ed by Tom Raum for a box on 6A, they cut it on both the hard copy and dCourier to eliminate what little balancing information Raum used in favor of the Obama administration. (Sorry, cutting an outside story on the Website, where there is literally no space limitation, is just wrong.) Here's the original story in full.

I can understand it when subtle propaganda works its way into news stories. People often write from unexamined assumptions about the world and don't realize it. But this is far from subtle. The assertions of fact without references, the assertions of other people's motivations, the use of obvious opinions as facts all mark this clearly as an opinion piece. No editor could miss it. This was not a mistake, folks.

Slow blogging this week

I'm having a visit with one of my oldest and dearest friends, so there's not a lot of time for the paper. I notice big unannounced changes in the look of dcourier.com, and I'll have comments on that once I have a chance to get used to it. For now it doesn't seem that the editors are doing anything egregious or particularly interesting this week.

Something's missing -- again

I've been looking for the Courier's coverage of this week's press release from Rep Kirkpatrick on the budget, but nary a word.

It seems that our Mr Tobin can get his press releases printed anytime, but our representative in the big game is only covered when she's being criticized. A local newspaper monopoly ought to do better for us than that.

It's Feed-Your-Head Friday

What's cool about the seventh planet, and lots of talk about its funny name, which could have been George.



This silliness about the pronunciation might be avoided if English-speakers weren't so habitually bad at pronouncing classical words. The Greeks called the mate of Gaia Ouranos, and that was Latinized as Uranus, which in Latin is pronounced "oorahnoos."

Bonus: The Greek creation myth featuring Ouranos as a primordial player is wild and fairly gruesome, a fun read. Before you click through, a trivia question: From what dismembered organ did Aphrodite spring?

Signs of improvement

I've been a little hesitant to say anything that might jinx it, but I've been noticing that copy editing on the Courier has been much better of late. The rampant, glaring typos and embarrassing headlines that have been standard fare in the paper for many years are lately much diminished. I don't know who should get the credit for this, but here's a cookie for whomever you are. I'd love to hear from inside whether there have been relevant policy changes.

Editorial: A 'virtual fence' to nowhere?

The Bush administration's teevee-inspired border boondoggle turns out to be as unworkable as Reagan's "missile defense shield," and we're all just so surprised. But for once the unnamed Courier editor isn't hopping up and down about how the Feds are doing nothing to "control" the border against the illegals who are the root of all evil. While he doesn't really take any position, today he seems relatively thoughtful as he dips a few spoonfuls from the AP story (did this run in the print edition?) and scatters some numbers from 'studies' published by reactionary think-tanks.

Between this and the gun thing on Tuesday, one might wonder whether there's been a change in someone's medication this week.

Horse charity told to redouble efforts to win over neighbors

After years of searching, a charitable nonprofit providing disabled kids and adults with a very special, therapeutic service finds a permanent home, but can't get all the neighbors to sign off. If the comments are any indication, there's going to be some public pressure about this. If you'd like to help, here's the HwH website for a start. They can use it.

I've met with these people and put them on the radio. Their service is terrific and their community spirit is palpable. How anyone could think they and their ten horses wouldn't be the best sort of neighbors is utterly beyond me.

Update, Friday: I see the editor agrees.

Sweat Lodge organizer James Arthur Ray arrested

This is a nice, solid, researched and balanced news story, giving the subject its due without rehashing too much of the play-by-play that we've seen too often before. Lisa gets a cookie.

Editorial: Why do violent felons walk free?

If I read this correctly, the unnamed Courier editor is advocating mandatory life sentences for every violent offense. It would be fascinating to hear the editor argue this in a case of, say, a drunken bar brawl in light of the actual cost of incarceration and the inevitable effect this would have on his taxes.

Public safety matters, but perfect public safety is simply not possible in a nation that values freedom. Criminals will exist, cops and innocent people will be hurt and die, as long as we value our humanity more than imaginary safety. It's part of the price of liberty.

Before lightly dismissing the idea that our culture of adolescent worship of guns and violence might have had anything to do with this problem, the editor asks a few plaintive rhetorical questions demonstrating only his lack of imagination. Were he a journalist, he might have taken a more constructive tack with this and put those questions and others to some of our judges, prosecutors, corrections professionals and maybe a psychologist or social scientist. He might have got a good, informative story out of it. Instead, we get this pitiful waste of space.

Editing note: The editor leaves a crucial fact out of this piece, assuming that everyone knows it: the alleged shooter was in prison here for nearly four years on aggravated assault and related charges (AZ Dept of Corrections). That omission makes his argument nonsensical within the piece.

Editorial: Pearce's gun proposal sounds great to felons

The unnamed Courier editor displays some common sense in protesting Sen. Russell Pearce's attempt to roll back restrictions on firearms, even identifying Pearce correctly as "radical," qualifying for the cookie. I'm grateful that the Courier has lately been consistently applying a more nuanced position on guns than the blind devotion it did previously. It's just too bad the editor's not a little better at journalism, however.

Yesterday, before deadline, the bill passed out of committee carrying amendments addressing the editor's expressed concerns. In other words, the editor wound up writing about a different bill, getting his editorial completely wrong. Here's the update.

This might be just an "oh well,things change" moment, but the readers wind up utterly misled on the content of the legislation, so any input they give their representatives will misfire.

A newspaper editor should understand that the legislative committee process is where a raw bill gets hammered into something the body can vote on, and it's rare that a bill doesn't change substantially in the process. In Arizona it's relatively easy to find out online when a bill is being considered in which committee, and the state offers streaming real-time video of many committee hearings. It's not like the editor couldn't know what was going on.

A skilled journalist would have either published this before the committee process, when constituents still had time to weigh in on the raw bill, or held his fire until the bill was out of all committees and appeared on the floor agenda. On this the editor jumped the gun. (Sorry, sometimes I can't resist.)

Will we perhaps see a followup on the current bill?

Editorial: Make better use of 'call to public'

Befitting the regular Monday dump of press releases on the front page, here the unnamed Courier editor takes on a topic of kindergarten complexity -- public comments at City Council meetings -- and manages to live up to the challenge by saying pretty much nothing.

Windbags are a professional hazard of public meetings, and we have to face the fact that these opportunities exist every bit as much for the windbags as for anyone else.

Windbags do what they do because they don't feel they're being heard, either by the public officials they're addressing or by others in their daily lives. The only good way to reduce incidents of windbaggery is to build and resolutely reinforce a culture of caring respect, so people clearly understand that the officials aren't using the Council table as a wall between higher and lower classes, while reinforcing respect for the time of everyone in the room. But Council members must accept that windbaggery will happen on occasion, and they're drawing their pay in large part to put up with precisely that. Skilled leaders know that just expressing that they care to hear what the windbag is saying will reduce windbaggery by 20% out of the gate, and other leadership techniques can help a poor communicator get to the heart of what he wants to say and step down.

Even when those don't work, it's far better to have Council and the public put up with a windbag than to have the Mayor gaveling people off the podium to avoid hearing what they're saying, and the difference between worthwhile speech and windbaggery is in the ear of the beholder. The First Amendment does not say "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, unless it's boring or takes too long." Council must bear in mind at all times that they are elected to serve the public, not the other way around.

Note to editor: Where you wrote, "the presiding officer has the right to reign in a speaker," that should be "rein in." Given all the Western movies you so love to quote and our town's cowboy reputation, your readers expect you to know a little more about the terminology.

It could have happened

Editorial: High-speed rail won't make enough impact

Today the Courier extends its reputation for hipshooting into the area of transportation policy.

The unnamed Courier editor poo-poohs the paltry 13 billion clams the President is proposing for high-speed rail as inadequate to the task of building a national high-speed rail network. Of course, no one has promised any such thing. From the WSJ:

"Building a high-speed rail network like the one in Western Europe would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but Mr. Obama called the $13 billion effort 'a first step.'"

Perhaps the editor does not quite understand that a first step is necessary to getting anywhere at all. I'm sure he wouldn't be applauding the President if he proposed spending, say, $250 billion on high-speed rail over the next ten years -- a little less than we've already spent on the war in Afghanistan. But no, in the reactionary mind a step forward, if taken by Democrats, becomes a half-measure.

The editor is also miffed that the plan doesn't include us mountain states. (I have to wonder where the editor was when our genius city fathers decided it was a good idea to rip out our local rail line and sell off the land, but never mind.)

From The New York Times:

"The government has identified 10 corridors, each from 100 to 600 miles long, with greatest promise for high-speed development. They are: a northern New England line; an Empire line running east to west in New York State; a Keystone corridor running laterally through Pennsylvania; a major Chicago hub network; a southeast network connecting the District of Columbia to Florida and the Gulf Coast; a Gulf Coast line extending from eastern Texas to western Alabama; a corridor in central and southern Florida; a Texas-to-Oklahoma line; a California corridor where voters have already approved a line that will allow travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours; and a corridor in the Pacific Northwest."

There's a reason it's called "mass transit" -- it's designed for lots of people to use. Look at the graphic, editor: the lines are where the people are. The city of New York by itself has half again as many people in it than the entire state of Arizona. You want bang for your tax buck, right?

Once again the editor parrots the talking points of the reactionary right without analyzing them or bothering to try to understand what he's criticizing. My best advice to him: stick to your knitting and keep it local, where you have at least a chance of knowing what you're talking about.

Side note: All the facts and a lot of the actual writing in the editorial are lifted from Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor. (Note to editor: Unattributed copying of another's work is known in the trade as plagiarism.)

Update, 11:30pm: I sent part of this piece as a comment on the editorial, and it appears the Courier editor flushed it without a trace. Classy, boys. That sort of behavior is why I keep this blog.

Update, Monday night: Documenting my charge above before the stories roll off into the Nethernet:

CSM: President Obama’s $8 billion plunge into 13 high-speed rail projects nationwide has the potential to become either his “Eisenhower moment” – moving the US into a new phase of transportation modernization – or just a dead end “drop in the bucket."

Courier: On Wednesday, President Barack Obama spoke about a federal spending freeze, but not until 2011. The next day he unveiled parts of the second stimulus, including $8 billion toward high-speed rail projects. It will be either his "Eisenhower moment" - moving the country into a new phase of transportation - or just a "drop in the bucket." ... What Obama is doing as a substitute will result only in a dead end.


CSM: “It really is only a drop in the bucket of what the nation will need to get the kind of high-speed rail network it needs,” says Jack Schenendorf, who was vice chairman of the a blue-ribbon commission that studied the nation’s transportation needs in a 2008 study. “Obviously, for high speed rail, it is a good development. But it will take a lot more money to get these systems built out.”

Courier: "It really is only a drop in the bucket of what the nation will need to get the kind of high-speed rail network it needs," said Jack Schenendorf, who was vice chairman of the a blue-ribbon commission that studied the nation's transportation needs in a 2008 study. "Obviously, for high-speed rail, it is a good development. But it will take a lot more money to get these systems built out."

See where our editor even cribbed a typo? Cut-and-paste for sure. Naughty boy.

Update, 11pm Monday: Well, well, well, there are situations in which the editors will stoop to correcting mistakes online! An anonymous commenter alerts me that the editorial has been changed, sometime in the last four hours, adding attribution of the copied bits to the CSM. Pity he didn't get the typo while he was at it. Must've been in a hurry.

Letter: Equality must apply to everyone

Just read this great letter that cuts to the bone.

Editorial: Officials try to work around voters' will

I've been thinking about this one since it went up, but haven't had time to get to it.

The editor blasts legislators for having the unmitigated gall to try and walk back laws that "the people" gave us by initiative. He's talking yet again about term limits, his second editorial on the subject in three days. This writer wonders whether he'd be as protective of an initiative he doesn't like so much, but let's leave that aside for the moment. There's plenty of stupid here to deal with already.

His argument is that "the voters have spoken" on term limits -- 18 years ago -- and while he doesn't refute that "they deprive lawmakers of institutional knowledge and give too much influence to aides and lobbyists," to him that decision is carved in stone, apparently because it is infallible. Like the Pope.

He tries to reinforce this with Rep Tobin's aborted move to reintroduce as a bill the payday-loan industry's failed initiative of a year and a half ago. The editor sees a parallel there that evades me.

"A government by the people is supposed to be one in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them," says the editor, citing a principle of American civics that as far as I can tell he made up on the spot. Our system is not direct democracy, that doesn't exist anywhere. In representative government, supreme power is indeed vested in the people, but it is by design not exercised by them.

Our little direct-democracy option, the initiative process, was designed and built well over a century ago, and acts like it. It's primitive, allowing nefarious players to take advantage of us in many ways, and it's morphing into government by advertising. The idea that "the people" are behind most initiatives is either blindly naive or actively malicious. The idea that a few sentences scrawled on a bar napkin can pass through the initiative process and become good law is plain stupid, and most initiatives really are nearly that poorly vetted.

But the crux of the editor's argument is that "the people" can't be wrong in passing through these things. We've given term limits 18 years to prove out, and what we see is growing ignorance, disorganization, disarray and even corruption in our legislative bodies as a direct result. The state is functionally bankrupt, our Accidental Governor is trying to get her way by screaming at people, and our amateur Legislature is arranging duckpins on the poopdeck of the Titanic and thinking about a nice lunch. It's past time to repair this crucial mistake and start rebuilding our political culture.

The real 'duh' moment here is at the end, where the editor implies that the Legislature will pass this through the regular process and "the people" won't get to vote on it. The bill in process is a concurrent resolution, which if passed will result in a ballot measure. There's no other legal way to get around an established initiative. A newspaper editor ought to know these things.

Your political future

Mills sets up website in run for governor

It's funny, I must have missed the Courier stories about the candidacies of Dean Martin, Terry Goddard and the other front-runners for actual nomination. But we get the press release from our semi-local gun god verbatim as a news story. I have a feeling we know how this is going to go in everybody's hometown newspaper.

Embattled Obama declares in speech, 'I don't quit'

I've got just one thing to say about this AP story: In eight years of unending public controversy, the Courier never once associated the word "embattled" with George W Bush. Just sayin'.

Editorial: Are Olympics worth the cost?

Regular readers know that I was born without the sports gene and could not care less about the Olympics or any other spectator sports event. As a mediated pastime I consider sports less harmful than, say, eating bugs, but I'd still be happy to see the whole international-combat-via-sports thing dry up and fall off as we humans move through our social adolescence. I wouldn't bother to write an editorial on it, though. It's just not that important.

So when the unnamed Courier editor spends his daily inches to feign a question and opine clumsily that the Olympics are "so, so worth it," I have to laugh. So worth what, exactly? The games have never cost our community one thin dime, and the editor will get them for free on his teevee (albeit amid a relentless commercial assault that would melt my brain). It's just a non-issue.

So we come to the question: why did he write this? Logically all I can come up with is that the editor is so bored with our puny local issues that he's wrapping his brain in the primary opiate of the masses -- television -- and parroting its navel-gazing self-absorption, making its concerns his own.

So the editor offers an unintended public service here, exemplifying the danger in the same way a certain pan of frying eggs did some years ago -- this is your brain on teevee. Just say no.

Editorial: Term limits exist for good reason

The Legislature is considering a move to repeal term limits, and the unnamed Courier editor is predictably steamed that any politician might have the temerity to resist one of his favorite policies. He casts dark aspersions on their motivations, as usual, and farbles on about how we need a running clock to keep lazy pols from "wasting time" in office. Legislation is such an easy job, after all.

I've been there on a weekly basis through over seven years of legislative experience with Rep Lucy Mason, heard her stories (those we talk about on the radio and those we can't), and watched her evolution from fresh-faced, idealistic freshman to hard-bitten, tempered senior. I have no doubt at all that she is a far smarter and more effective legislator now than in her first term, and that no one comes into the job with much useful understanding of how the state works or any knowledge of the players involved.

Term limits shift institutional memory and organizational power to staff (who, if they're doing their jobs correctly, do not impart it to legislators) and lobbyists (who use it at least selectively and often strategically). A less-experienced Legislature overall means slower and lower-quality training for freshmen. A more tenuous institutional culture empowers newbies to reinvent the wheel with a square rim and call it innovation.

It's hard for people who are already convinced to understand, but the train wreck that we're currently experiencing at the Capitol is largely the direct result of inexperience in the Legislature and the Governor's office. And the Courier would have us not only maintain this as received wisdom, but extend it to Washington. As if our national politics aren't sufficiently dysfunctional.

Perhaps most convincing to me on this issue is that the freshman Rep. Mason was a true believer in term limits, and by her junior term she was completely convinced that the policy is idiotic, not because she will be unable to continue working 72 hours a week of constant frustration and flak from people who think she's a criminal for $25K a year, but rather because she really does care about effectively addressing the problems we face as a society. I don't always agree with her policy choices, but I'll defend to the end her sincerity and abilities in public service. She's better for her experience, and that's the sort of legislator I want working for me.

Term limits arbitrarily prevent me from voting for the representative I want.This I consider a substantial impairment of my most basic constitutional right. The editor makes his living on the First Amendment. One would think he'd be more protective of the body of that great document.

Editorial: No tax hike, even a 'temporary' one

The unnamed Courier editor is happy to spout off about refusing to raise taxes in any way. Why shouldn't he? What has he got to lose? Hating taxes is about as against-the-wind as hating bin Laden. It's too bad that public policy just isn't that easy.

Our state has a structural problem with its revenue policy. What I mean by "structural" is that the problems are built into the structure. What we're experiencing now is inevitable given the policies we've been using, and smarter people than I have been telling our leaders that for years. It's ironic that the editor quotes the old aphorism about insanity and in the same breath demands that we keep doing what we've been doing, which is blocking all necessary changes in tax policy except those that impoverish our state services and ultimately ourselves.

New ideas indeed, editor. And where are yours? I'm sure your state legislators would love to hear them.

Maybe the commenters were right ...

In today's NYT I notice an AP story on that jaguar who died at the hands of Game and Fish a while ago. It seems not everyone is convinced it was all on the up and up. Will the Courier carry this one?

Update: Here's the link to the story in March.

Stopped clock

I can't imagine that frequent over-the-top commenter Tom Steele is the best public face for the stop-the-prison group, but this time he's done his homework and happens to be right.

I'm persuaded by a contact inside the corrections industry that all the waving of arms is unnecessary, however. CCA's standard MO is apparently to get this sort of kerfuffle going on the local level, which sometimes leads to a local study, which sometimes leads to a state study, which sometimes leads to new state-supported business for CCA, usually someplace other than where it started. That's where I'll bet my five bucks.

Snow day

I'm out of town working on a major life-change project, so blogging's been light, sorry. It could be like this into February.

I have to say that while I can't vouch for their accuracy, I like the way the Courier has been keeping the weather-related stories flowing on the website. I imagine the newsroom is fairly jumping with people trying to get the latest and best information they can, and feeling the glow when they get it right and on time. For you hard-working Courier folks, a note: it should feel this way most of the time. Whatever the story, dig in, get it and get it right, and the job's way more fun.

Stay dry!

Editorial: Americans impatient for promised change

The headline is right, and the last line is right, both in ways the editor didn't intend. The rest is just horse hockey.

It's amusing to see most of the commenters doing just what the unnamed Courier editor is doing from their various political perspectives, and that is seeing what they all prefer to see in the Mass Senate election. The teabaggers see populist revolution, the Republican stalwarts see mass repudiation of Dems and Obama, and Dems see failure of Obama to deliver on campaign promises.

Near as I can tell, all of these may be minor factors, but all miss the obvious. The Mass Dems ran a campaign of entitlement with a candidate who largely didn't bother with voters, and lost. It was their seat to lose, and they did.

Nationally, neglect of the Dem base by the Prez and congressional leaders is becoming a serious problem. Reactionaries show up reliably to vote because they run on fear, but progressives need inspiration. Democracy is designed to operate by compromise, and I appreciate that principled people will try to work that way regardless of the tactics on the other side, but the unalloyed gutlessness of the Dems in pursuing vital change in our health-care system, failing to follow through on getting us out of Bush's military adventures and rescuing the investment portfolios of the Wall Street warlocks has caused widespread disgust among the base. I couldn't say from direct knowledge whether this was a significant factor, but the exit polls seem to indicate it was.

Be that as it may, the editor is playing out of his league again. Stick to your knitting, editor: keep it local. You don't generally have the gumption to research the stories that are near at hand, leave alone what's going on so far away.

Old Elks fire curtain reveals original artwork

Regular readers know that Courier coverage of the Elks is a regular feature here, and indulge me. This piece appeared over the weekend.

Cindy couldn't know that her lead --

For nearly 100 years, the asbestos fire curtain stood as a safeguard between the sometimes-combustible activities on the stage of the Elks Opera House and the people in the audience.

-- draws a chuckle from every theatre professional who's worked the Elks.

The fire curtain, known in theatre parlance as the asbestos, is a required system in every theatre since the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, which in killing 600 theatre patrons brought in many new rules for theatre safety systems and procedures. Asbestos systems are designed to bring the curtain down automatically to contain fire on the stage. They can be triggered manually as well.

Until it was taken down a few years ago, the Elks asbestos had been frozen and inoperable for at least twenty years and probably a lot longer. The Elks Theatre (is not, never has been and never could be an opera house) was almost exclusively a movie house for many decades, and so didn't need a working asbestos until Yavapai College took it over in the late '80s. The college never provided the funding to bring the theatre up to code, and so this and many other systems remained in neglect through the Prescott College period (when I rejected it as a venue for the Shakespeare Festival as unsafe) and the City's takeover.

The City's plans for "renovation" have so far not publicly included the necessary equipment and safety-system upgrades to pass a state inspection and open legally. I hope the City's not going to be surprised by this.

County supervisors oppose pro-union bill

Linda (or her editor?) steps right off into deep doo-doo:

"Hoping to stop a bill that would require states and local governments to unionize some employees, ..."

The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which passed the House in '07 with bipartisan support and remains stuck in Senate committee process, would not require any government to unionize anyone. Put it down to incompetence if you like, but this is exactly the wrong impression the radical corporatists would have you believe, and therefore the Courier is either taken in by the propaganda or complicit in it.

The bill's purpose is ensure the rights of police officers, fire-fighters and other specifically public-safety workers (hence the name) to form and join unions and to bargain collectively. If you don't think they should be allowed to do that, you should rightfully oppose this bill. The rest of us think it's perfectly OK, and that unions are not the threat to this country that the right loves to characterize. But allowing people to unionize, I'm sure every reader must agree, is not anything like the same as requiring employers to create unions.

I think the Courier ought to be getting a ton of letters and comments on this little agitprop move. It's ugly.

Feed-your-head Friday

The sun's low, but spring is ahead. At least it looks like it.

Editorial: HUSD should pick needs over wants

The unnamed Courier editor expresses just the right amount of ironic outrage over HUSD entertaining the idea of building a swimming pool instead of science labs.

This follows the the standard formula of rewriting yesterday's front page, but he covers the presented alternatives that I noted missing yesterday, as well as the astroturf controversy, and takes a firm stand on what he thinks the board ought to do. Much more solid and reasoned than usual. A cookie for you, ed.

Police urge people to lock cars to reduce burglaries

Lisa reports ten car burglaries in two weeks. She doesn't tell us where this is happening. We're left to wonder whether bad kids are prowling neighborhoods or the Row or the nasty dank parking garage or church lots or Wal-Mart or what. This failure makes the story both scary and useless. Ack.

Tourism study: If Prescott spends, people will come

The City Manager spends ten grand on a tourism consultant, who tells us that we need to spend more money on tourism promotion, presumably to some degree on more consulting. Cindy gets the facts right and seeks out more, that's all good. But the most fundamental question remains unexplored: what do we have to sell to tourists?

Everyone who lives here and didn't grow up here understands that Prescott is a great town in many ways, but that doesn't entitle us to any tourism dollars. The Courier inadvertently provides an example of what's wrong in its choice of a photo to accompany the story.

What the City bills as a "bluegrass festival" is one of the most amateurish hick-chic events I've ever seen in a city this size. The organizers take the path of least resistance and least cost, making an event that no one really cares about. Why should anyone come?

The rodeo is a reliable draw, but its demographic is pretty sharply limited, and the town takes on an exclusionary attitude when those people show up.

Meanwhile shows with more openness and vision, like Tsunami, are hobbled by lack of resources and forced to keep their goals attainable -- and second-rate.

If the City, PACT, PDP, the Chamber and our business community at large were to really get behind a quality arts-related event that spreads out over downtown and lasts for more than a couple of days, those advertising dollars could pay off in loyal repeat business. I've seen this work well in cities that had far less to offer than Prescott.

That missing baby case

Our 24/7 newstainment industry spits out hundreds of stories every day. What leads the editors to think that this particular one is more relevant to local readers than any other? There's no local angle, and from the looks of things it's already being covered pretty heavily on teevee (a drug I haven't touched in many years).

I recall a case a few years ago in which a Prescott man stole his child from his former wife, fled out of state, was eventually caught, tried and jailed, with nary a word about it in the Courier.

The only factor I see different here is that it's a woman doing the kidnapping, which leads to the conclusion that the editors are a lot more interested in the father's-rights angle. Gotta keep control of those women. y'know.

Fah. Waste of space.

Editorial: Project is a matter not of if, but how

The unnamed Courier editor says that there's no choice, we have to build it, even though home construction has crashed like an airliner through the City Hall roof, so we better pay for it. As if he had nothing to do with bringing us to this pretty pass. Shrug. Get over it.

Once again the build-or-die crowd hoists the community on its rank petard and fakes ignorance of a predictable outcome.

A responsible editor would be writing about how short-sighted Council and staff decisions over a decade forced the City into a legal corner it can't escape. About what amounts to an historic shift in City fiscal policy brought about by accident, for no useful purpose. About what this switch from conservative, pay-as-you-go spending to borrow-and-build bonding might bring, and how it fits in the context of the recent wildly popular Prop 400.

Instead, we have one of the genius cheerleaders for the uncontrolled, cancer-like growth that brought our economy low telling us that we just have to deal. Act of God.

Talk to the hand.

Mason: Making Arizona more competitive is key

I'll be asking Rep Mason about these business tax cuts this weekend on The People's Business (2pm Sat-Sun on KJZA/KJZP, 89.5 and 90.1 FM). I hope the Courier editors have something planned to follow up on this and explore how it makes sense to substantially reduce business taxes in the context of a crushing budget gap.

This idea came up in the Governor's negotiation with legislative leaders. The deal would have created a tax package to include new revenue through the temporary sales tax and expanded property tax base along with minor cuts in taxes on business -- a classic compromise. But apparently the radicals in charge of the Legislature decided they really didn't have to compromise anything, betting that the Accidental Governor will just roll over. They may be right.

PS: AZBlueMeanie has a very cogent take on Blog for Arizona.

HUSD Governing Board considering new aquatic center at Bradshaw

Yikes. Bond money (borrowed money) is available to use at BMHS, and the HUSD board thinks a swimming pool ("revenue flow"? Ack!) is the best way to spend it. Paula goes along with the gag unquestioningly, not even bothering to list alternatives presented to the board, leave alone what other schools in similar position are doing.

Here's a clue: We spend public funds on schools to make smarter kids. Neither swimming nor any other form of physical exertion for its own sake makes kids smarter. Waste of money.

The only person who seems to have his head even half in the game here is Richard Marks, in a quote near the end. Is Prescott Valley or the Courier smart enough to follow that rabbit trail?

Bobcat wasn't rabid, but ...

Joanna bases her story on a fact -- that the officially murdered cat's body tested negative for rabies. But pretty much the entire story consists of justification for killing it. Protesting too much?

The previous story included enough of that, but the editors felt compelled to pile it on here. It amounts to what feels like excess in defense of the PD action, which leads me to suspect that someone's afraid the PD really did overreact.

The context over the past year of an unusual number of rabid animal attacks and an even larger number of avoidable animal deaths at the hands of officials is inescapable. What with the followup editorial, I get the feeling the Courier is taking sides on the whole issue. Maybe that move out of downtown into the Prescott Lakes boonies wasn't such a good idea.

Editorial: It won't hurt to wait a bit longer

The Courier thinks we should hold off on more stimulus to see whether what we've done is enough to bounce the economy back. Historical note: that's what the Republicans thought in '33 as well, and they got Roosevelt to back off, putting the economy deeper in the toilet for another eight years. Just sayin'.

Editorial: Mayor's meeting plan makes sense

The unnamed Courier editor thinks it makes sense to cut Council study sessions. This is no surprise to anyone who's watched this column with half an eye open for over a week. Both the Mayor and the editor seem to have little respect for public process.

The Mayor is betting that the public generally doesn't care to know anything about the issues that come before Council, and won't miss the study sessions in which the issues and concerns are aired, giving a week for them to soak in and for affected people to respond. I expect he's underestimating the number of people who faithfully tune in to watch the meetings on access TV throughout the week.

He's betting that ordinary citizens, nonprofits and other players in the community outside City Hall really don't have that much of interest to bring to the table, and Council can do a fine job with just the analyses that staff provides and their own bodacious sit-upons.

This strikes me as just the sort of rookie mistake we were promised would not happen because Marlin is supposedly so experienced. Whether or not it's practical in some aspects, it's a really dumb public-relations move. In these more charged and complex times, Council should be doing more public meetings and outreach, not less.

This is a way bigger town than it was in Marlin's time on Council, there are a lot more interests and more at stake in Council's decisions. Moving immediately to reduce public input and deliberation bodes very poorly for the new regime.

Amster: The times, they aren't a-changin'

Randall's a teacher, not a pro writer, and for that may be excused if his columns are a little clunky, like today. He really wanted to write on the private-prison issue, which filled the letters pages over the weekend, but he felt compelled to try and make it an example of a more general condition, which got his first few grafs lost in the wilderness of weak research.

In the second half he does better, bringing some new perspective to the debate as well as an expert view. I particularly like the ethical points at the end. I just wish he'd gone beyond the Prescott College family to do it, though. There are a lot of great minds and great people working there, but way too many Prescottonians see PC as a politically charged egghead island about eight miles off the deck of reality. That's a lot of baggage to overcome in 500 words if you want to convince anyone.

Doctors, health center director see insurance problem, solutions

Ken takes on a view-from-the-trenches assignment, and all he proves is that the people in the trenches are uniformly clueless about the goals and specifics of health-care reform. Each person he interviews gets their own pet peeves off their chest, but few of their arguments and concerns are in any way related to the reform system.

The exception is the constitutional question, which I think is a pertinent argument. Orrin Hatch and a couple of pals lay it out in today's WSJ. (Rather than derail reform, if the courts agree I think there's a chance this will stop the individual mandate and leave political space for a public program.)

But the story amounts to almost nothing but more confusing chaff in the air. The comments are more interesting.

Crime coverage on hiatus, or what?

Shots fired in one of our local neighborhoods on Saturday, shooter still on the loose, and I have to read about it in The LA Times.

A YCSO detention officer no less is busted Sunday night for brandishing a gun and a knife in two bars on the Row, including pistol-whipping another patron, ditto.

Our local paper is AWOL so far. Neither perp is Latino.

Update, Tuesday: Both stories show up for today, although there's some disagreement over whether one happened on Saturday or Sunday. We also see the arrest story on the New Year's Eve stabbing on the Row. Is the Courier only running this sort of thing on Tuesdays, maybe?

Should medical marijuana be legalized? Pro and Con

Oh, this is rich. The Courier editors "debate" legalizing medical pot. Neither knows any more about the issue than what they've seen on teevee. They undertake a debate in which neither addresses the other's arguments. It amounts to a couple of kindergartners debating economic theory based on their knowledge of Santa and the Tooth Fairy.

On the con side of the argument, Tim can't seem to focus. He assumes that lawmakers might be interested in the taxable aspect as a budget supplement, but undercuts even this wild theory by comparing the paltry 300 million clams a medpot program might bring in to the 3.4 billion-clam deficit we're already not dealing with. Who might imagine that the money would be a significant factor here? Then he balances this non-issue against the non-issue of patient dosage, non-sick people maybe getting better pot (and paying taxes on it), the "purity" of a natural product that you can't overdose on, and pharmaceutical products that just have to be better, even though actual sick people can't stand them. In the end he reveals the extent of his reasoning abilities around this issue by chucking all his arguments in favor of the state "selling its soul to the devil" -- in other words, he just thinks pot is evil and that ought to be enough for anybody.

Ben does little better on the pro side. He starts off on familiar ground -- John Wayne movies (ack) -- and steps confidently off the cliff of complete ignorance. "Marijuana may be addictive," he intones, "but that is no concern for people who are dying or so severely ill they are incapacitated." Except that no good study has ever shown marijuana to be addictive, and no one has ever seen a clinical pot addict. Ever. No matter how hard they've tried. So even while he's trying to argue the point sympathetically, Ben can't help but reinforce acute misinformation and idiotic stereotypes.

What's really breathtaking is the hubris of these two in deciding that they are even qualified, let alone the best people, to write on this subject. The egotism here is palpable, the egotists make themselves ridiculous, and the paper's reputation accelerates on its toilet trajectory.

Happy 2010!

Best wishes to all for a better year and a better decade. We could hardly do much worse than the naughties have been, good riddance to them.

Today's (creepy) Chuckle

From the comments:

Incent people being victmized be the police and judges, property taxes going up when property velues is going down tax returns 640 to 1280 less this year and a presdient that bows to other counturies spells terisam to me. Some say we are not vilanet, we will handle this thru leagel means but the leagle system is tated and the civil war was not won with words but with bullets.

Makes my head spin.

Getting ready for your blue-moon party?

It's another boring Wednesday in the paper, and I've been saving this photo for something moon-themed, like the first blue-moon New Year's Eve since 1990. I know, it should be a full moon, but with the weather we're likely to be having, half a moon is better than no moon at all.

Here's something just a little geeky to read about blue moons and moon lore.

Editorial: We should learn from Leon Noe

Yet again. By now you probably know what the chair means. If not, see this. Or this, this, this, or especially this, which says it all.

Judge admonishes feuding neighbors

So today Linda turns in what could have been the complete piece containing what ran just yesterday.

Are the editors budgeting these stories at random or what? It really looks like scribbling unfinished, poorly thought-out stuff straight into the paper willy-nilly.

I just want readers to notice one thing about what's at issue here: one side in the dispute is not commenting, the other is courting media attention and getting it.

Problems plague City Council election

Cindy follows the standard negative media narrative we had during the fall, but to me our local election was the most interesting in a very long time, and the hitches in the gitalong only pointed up that more people were more engaged, understanding that more is at stake, than ever. This is a good thing. I just wish they hadn't run that goofy photo of Tammy Linn again.

Shout-out to out-of-towners

I just want to say hi to the regular Courierwatch readers outside our local area. Yo Page, Phoenix, Tempe, San Francisco, Dallas, Minneapolis and Stuart FL! Drop me a comment and let me know what brings you to this tiny corner of the blogosphere.

"It's a good day to die."

The Courier ran a story on the judge's release of documents in the James Ray sweat-lodge case, so I figured it would be interested in what's in those documents. So far, nothing.

The AP has some fascinating bits in a story today datelined Prescott. WaPo has it, and I saw others yesterday. Why doesn't the Courier?

Update, midnight: The story shows up for Wednesday, a few grafs longer than the WaPo version, with stuff added from the affadavits, which are fascinating.

Editorial: Benefit denials may help budget

Let's do a little parsing, just for fun. The unnamed Courier editor:

"The federal government's continuing refusal to do anything about illegal immigration ..."

The editor apparently misses how much money and effort our government really does spend on border control and immigration enforcement. It's huge, of course, but the editor calls it "nothing." This indicates a certain cavalier attitude toward the truth.

"The American people are fed up with the problem and are not going to wait forever for the federal government to act,"

... meaning that a small group of people having a nice greasy breakfast with the editor are fed up and will do nothing but complain about it, giving the Republicans an issue to run candidates on. They won't do anything about it because a) they can't, as they showed when they were in power, b) it would interfere with the very large corporate interests that pull the strings on the right, and c) complaining rather than doing what they say they want gives them a continuing campaign issue, where attempting it would immediately prove their incompetence and short-sightedness.

"In 2004 Arizona voters approved an initiative to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants, but Attorney General Terry Goddard interpreted the law narrowly to apply to only a few categories of benefits."

Of course, implies the editor, the state's most senior law-enforcement official could not possibly have made the correct interpretation, as one might infer from the lack of a countervailing court judgment. He's a Democrat, after all. Instead,

"the Arizona Legislature expanded the list of government benefits illegals may not receive,"

rather than demand that Goddard do as they told him to do, because they're really kindly people who wouldn't want to offend.

"The latest legislation also requires that people applying for benefits must provide at least one form of identification, including a birth certificate or passport, and sign an affidavit saying their documents are authentic."

We can be confident that this will be so scary to holders of false IDs that they'll turn themselves in.

"That quickly raised hackles with Democratic legislators who rely heavily on Hispanic voters"

... since the jackboots will only be checking the papers of Hispanics, right? No, the law says the bureaucrats have to check everyone's papers, which might bother legislators who care about such things. Republicans apparently don't.

"... and the Arizona League of Cities and Towns filed an unsuccessful suit challenging the constitutionality of the benefit restrictions."

Everyone knows that the League is just a bunch of namby-pamby immigrant-huggers. Mesa, for example.

"800 people seeking benefits have not been able to prove their lawful presence in the country."

or perhaps just couldn't find or buy their papers. How many people applied for benefits in that time, editor, just to put things in perspective?

"... the state should not be handing out money to non-citizens here illegally."

And it doesn't, since AG Goddard has been enforcing the ban on the narrow class of welfare programs that are the only ones that "hand out money." The editor fails to understand that "public benefit" is a really broad and vague category, and includes many things we take for granted. Municipalities fairly want to know how much hassle and expense they have to put out and how many of their citizens they have to piss off to keep a few people from getting such benefits, even where the evidence is slim to none that there's any significant loss related to illegals.

"The declining economy and the employer sanctions law clearly have pushed illegal immigrants off to other states."

The illegals are moving on because there aren't enough jobs here, and that by far has been the most effective factor in reducing immigration both legal and otherwise -- economic disaster. That should tell us all something very important.

How much of the state's money would the editor spend to support this Republican political theatre? I gotta wonder.

Sheriff's K9 unit nabs 2 men and 7 pounds of cocaine

Over the past week or so I've been hearing about how the state wants to remove convicted illegals from our prisons and send them back to their home countries before they've finished their sentences.

So that's in the back of my mind as I read this story, of two drug mules caught on the way to parts unknown with a few pounds of coke under the back seat.

There's no indication that these guys are illegal immigrants, that's not the issue. Rather, they're apparently from New Mexico and Colorado, and in all likelihood they fully intended to get back there with their booty. Yavapai County just happens to be on the way.

But they were caught here and if convicted they will serve their sentences here. At our expense. Even though we can be pretty confident that they would have done nothing in Arizona more obnoxious than speeding.

We're generally happy to dump the expense of Mexican perps back on Mexico. Would it not be similarly just to dump New Mexican perps back on New Mexico, for example? The logic ought to hold.

I'd like to see more followup coverage on these guys -- whether they're convicted, whether there are outstanding charges elsewhere, where and for how long they're incarcerated, when they get out, and where they go afterward. Follow the story and we all learn more about how our justice system works and what this sort of bust costs us.

Update, Wednesday: Must be something in the air, I just heard on the radio about a move toward forcing prisoners to pay for their incarceration. Debtor's prison, here we come!

Victim of the court system?

Whoopsie!

Looks like the editors thought they had few inches of human-interest in this story of a guy getting arrested on a littering charge that had already been dismissed. Pretty funny.

So Linda ran with that, but the story as published neglects to give any other perspective of what is clearly a rancorous neighborhood feud. The story encourages the reader to judge on the basis of nothing but this guy's story.

So readers are doing exactly that, as seen in the comments. They're judging the protagonist, the deputies, the judge, the unnamed neighbors, the postal system, the town of D-H, and society at large, charging anything that strikes their imaginations. All on the basis of reporting that would embarrass a first-year journo student.

The reader might reasonably ask how this story came to the Courier in the first place. Given what it covers, we can reasonably infer it was a phone call from Mr Waters or his attorney. Didn't that raise a red flag at the editor's desk? I gather not.

New Arizona law rekindles immigrant benefit debate

Here's yet another example of how people get to hyperventilating over an issue and consequently can't think straight when certain words come up. Today's words are "illegal immigration."

Senator Russell Pearce used his impressive grasp of the holes in the legislative process to get some language passed through on a budget bill that really shouldn't have been there. This happens a lot, and you don't have to be a partisan of the specific issue to understand that the way the Legislature does this sort of thing is just wrong.

The League of Cities and Towns hear about it and discover that they're suddenly on the hook for a whole lot of new personnel and material costs to enforce Mr Pearce's vague language. They pipe up and say "Hold on, what's the deal here?"

Mr Pearce calls them "open-border anarchists who refuse to protect the taxpayer," which illustrates what intellectual level he's working on.

The commenters on the story weigh in with their views about how simple the world is if only everyone would listen to them.

The people freaking out about illegals are utterly blind to the inevitably complex consequences of what they propose. To them it's all perfectly simple, but where the rubber meets the road, our municipalities have to figure out in irritating detail what to enforce, how to enforce it, how to pay for that enforcement and what to do with the people they stop.

Legislators always understand what they mean to write into law, but rarely do they have the communication and systems-thinking skills to understand the real effects of what they write. Would you rather have your representatives calling people names and fighting lawsuits, or asking them about their concerns and working to craft a better legal solution to the problem? I know how I vote on that.

Editorial: Public will judge Arpaio, Polk, et al

Writing the editorial -- the considered opinion of the paper as a community entity -- is about taking a stand. Not every day is a big-news day, so frequently the daily editorial column carries lighter fare, but when the editors choose to address a controversial public-policy issue, the reader fairly expects to learn what the editors, who deal with public policy every day and so are supposedly up on the details, consider to be the better course. Journos generally love to do this, because it's the most direct form of participation in the news that the profession offers.

So when I see an editorial on a hot issue and read something as smarmy and mealy-mouthed as this, my red flags go up and the BS collision siren goes off.

Notice, dear reader, how the unnamed Courier editor uses subtle equivocation and characterization to undercut the case against Arpaio and Thomas. Putting Arpaio and Polk in the same "et al." headline, as if they're all the same. Reducing the arguments to "vitriol flying thither and yon." Describing the public demonstration of the attorneys rather than their documented concerns. The unschooled reader would naturally conclude from this that the issue is some sort of angry food fight among a bunch of lawyers and doesn't matter.

No, dear editor, Attorney Polk's letter is clearly not "vitriol" in any way. Her accusations are serious and measured, not angry or gratuitous. The "200 lawyers on the lawn" are actually over 350 attorneys in public and private practice, including other municipal and county attorneys, calling out Thomas and Arpaio for abuse of their offices. This is serious stuff, but the Courier editor handles it like a barroom argument over an umpire call.

Why, one might wonder. I have a guess. Taking a clear stand in favor of Arpaio and Thomas would win a few points among people who don't read much, but ultimately come a cropper when the two principles take their inevitable fall -- the evidence is overwhelming. Taking a stand in favor of the majority of the legal profession and Ms Polk puts the paper on the side of lawyers, whom they love to hate, and against the sliver of the extreme right that the editors identify with most strongly. And this last group, we can all attest, holds grudges when its members fail to measure up to this week's standard of crazy.

Letter: Fann outsources jobs for WV road project

Greg Harkleroad writes to let readers know that only a third of the subcontractors on the Williamson Valley Road project will be local. If I were the Courier city editor I would put some resources into looking into this question, both for this project and other public projects. People want to know about this, in terms of jobs for themselves and their kids, and in terms of how much of their tax contributions stay in the area regenerating the economy.

A commenter on the story makes the point that the law requires us to take the low bid, regardless of local economic impact or benefit. This is mostly true, I'm sure, but that system cannot change unless voters understand how the system works and demand change. This is (or should be) the core purpose of our news media -- providing the factual basis for understanding the state of our society and making choices about it.

Update, Tuesday: Check out Mike Fann's reply in the comments.

Pushback from the legal profession

AzBlueMeanie of the excellent Blog for Arizona posts a nice map of the high-powered artillery coming to bear on Sheriff Joe and Andrew Thomas, and recaps the issues and the tactics that the Republic characterizes as "using the law to pursue political enemies." Our County Attorney is in the thick of a much bigger push by an appalled profession to get control of these guys.

Buddy Ross shares this photo from Lamington National Park in Oz.

Editorial: Senate scruples sell briskly lately

The unnamed Courier editor again betrays his confusion of reality and fantasy -- the little "anecdote" he opens with as "popular legend" is of course a distortion of a famous exchange in the Jack Englehard novel Indecent Proposal, which became a hit film with Robert Redford in '93.

I absolutely agree with the editor that the rules of the Senate need sweeping reform to eliminate the sort of venal tyranny we both see in the actions he describes.

The editor would have a whole lot more credibility on the issue, however, if he could claim any consistency in criticizing this behavior by Republicans. But we know what that's about. Even a stopped clock, as they say.

I notice that Ben didn't have much time to write this week, so he built this by recycling chunks that aren't about Republicans from the newish post on his pseudoblog, which rehashes the same lame message from months of these sporadic columns. Just once I'd like to see Ben invite an actual Congressperson to respond to his ignorant foolishness.

Op-ed page on autopilot

I notice that someone on the online op-ed page is apparently asleep -- no less than five pieces are posted twice as I write this, one under two different headlines. Yeesh.

Update, 2:30pm: The duplicates are gone, along with the comments posted to them.

The annual canned spam

We're now deep in end-of-year-roundup season, where most of the paper's space is devoted to enervating canned features to allow the staff time off. It makes reading the paper in search of news pretty well pointless for probably another week or so.

For the reader who hasn't shut down her frontal lobe for the duration, I have a few recommendations:

The Boston Globe has a succinct comparison of the differences that the House and Senate will have to resolve in their health-care bills.

The Guardian furnishes a first-person account of who killed the Copenhagen initiative -- maybe not who you'd expect.

A little obscure history on a serious, well-financed plot to install a fascist government in this country by military coup in 1933.

Enjoy!