Editorial: Mexico's lawsuit reeks of hypocrisy

Maybe I'm confused about how this is supposed to work, but usually, if you set out a thesis, aren't you sort of obliged to back it up with something related to that thesis?

I've read it a couple of times, and I have to say today's editorial is, well, incoherent. I'll just jump over the lead graf, which reads like a transcript from an intermittent cellphone connection, and try to parse the unnamed editor's argument.

It appears that the editor is incensed that Mexico has joined the legal challenge to SB1070, in defense of the civil liberties of Mexicans, because he thinks Mexico is so bad at protecting civil liberties within Mexico. Hence the "hypocrisy" in the clunky headline.

As examples he cites Mexico's high unemployment rate and drug-related violence in the northern border towns. (Admittedly, this may well be all the editor knows about Mexico beyond its beer brands.) But neither of these has anything to do with civil rights protections, unless he thinks that Mexicans have a constitutional right to a job or an orderly smuggling market, which I tend to doubt.

Then he jumps to the Arizona boycott resolution by Chula Vista, which is pertinent to his thesis presumably because it has a Spanish name.

What the editor means to say, of course, is that he thinks Mexico should stay out of the legal battle over this legislation. There are straightforward ways of expressing that based on actual facts and cogent reasoning. He's just got tangled up in a lame attempt at snark. (Warning, editor: comedy is the hardest kind of writing. I should know, I screw it up all the time.) A better approach is to preserve the dignity of the editorial column and treat it more seriously.

For instance, you wouldn't imply to your readers that Mexico has filed an "actual lawsuit" against Arizona when in fact what's going on is that Mexico has filed a friend of the court brief in support of the existing federal suit. This is the standard way for interested parties without legal standing to legally express pertinent interests to the court. It's not scary, it doesn't cost us anything extra, and it won't alter the outcome. Calm down, 'kay? And try to spend a couple minutes on research before you decide what to write.

You might also want to consider what you would want your government to do if you heard that Mexico was about to start rounding up Americans with dodgy status in Mexico, running them through the prison system for X years and deporting them back here. If I know the Courier, you'd be calling for armed invasion. Makes an amicus curiae seem pretty mild, dunnit?

A story with a life of its own

Having broken the news that started the whole Blair-vs-mural hubbub, which went international and brought a whole lot of unkind attention on our fair city, now the Courier editors have had enough and wish it would just go away. Show's over, nothing to see here, move along.

Taking their cue from Mayor Kuykendall ("The public wanted the opportunity to speak, and now we're going to put this behind us"), today the unnamed Courier editor has decreed that further discussion of the topic is officially boring and we should be done with it, even promising additional censorship of the letters and comments. Nice.

This controversy touched a raw nerve in our town and opened a dialogue that's been a long time coming. It's no surprise at all that a lot of people want to be heard, nor that many are staking out extreme positions, nor that the champions of the status quo would like to vacuum the genie back into the bottle. It's an embarrassing story, and Prescott's customary way of dealing with embarrassment is to sweep it under the rug.

But is that any way for a news organization to act? Tim Weideraenders shows that this is a preferred approach in telling us he doesn't watch TV because tampon ads gross him out. After restating his own position, Steve Stockmar declares the argument over, clearly expressing the short attention span of the media in general and the public at large, as well as the typical offhand hubris of journos in deciding what's important and what's not.

Steve, Tim and the Mayor all seem to believe that their function is to lead the people in how to think, and what happened yesterday is not important. But they're all missing both the core of the story and the opportunity it presents, and forgetting that they are all in their chairs to serve the public.

Councilman Blair, Superintendent Kapp, Principal Lane and a bunch of racist yobbos all did things that were deeply offensive to the Miller Valley kids, their parents and teachers, and a large part of this community. Mr Blair has got some deserved blowback from his constituents and suffered some predictable cost in his commercial relationships. Messrs. Kapp and Lane walked their actions back and apologized, but that should not get them off without public discussion of how things are done in our schools, and how important political deals are made in secret among friends.

The Mayor blew an important and rare opportunity for sensible dialogue to address the day-to-day injustice and high background radiation of unacknowledged racism that splinters our community under its Leave-It-To-Beaver facade.

All of us overfed, comfy white folk would like to think of ourselves as friendly, open people who wave and greet passersby and treat strangers as new-found friends. But we all know or should know that we don't respond that way to all strangers, or even all of our neighbors. The majority here has grown comfortable in not seeing the ones who are different, or poor, or young, or mentally challenged, and there's constant pressure to make them even less visible. Many of us are in deep denial about how Prescott is changing with the world around it and refusing to go along, making Prescott increasingly neurotic.

This is news, one of the biggest news stories in our community. Refusal to talk about it, including by our local media, has built up the pressure we see being released now.

Rather than pulling the curtain and telling us the show's over, the Courier should be leaning into this story, seeking out the reasonable voices and different viewpoints, challenging rhetoric with facts, and pushing for answers to the very important questions it raises. Proaction, not reaction.

I don't know how long the story will sustain itself. Americans really do have the attention span of a gnat, after all, and in its current form the dialogue isn't very productive. The status-quo types will probably win. But be warned that the issue of racism in Prescott will not go away, it will only repressurize and emerge somewhere else, uglier and more recalcitrant. The editors have only kicked the can down the road.

Editorial: No more reasons to avoid parking garage

The editor chastises residents who prefer parking on the street rather than the city garage on Granite, with a headline discounting any excuse. Here we have mainly a failure of imagination, I'm afraid.

Consider someone who wants to buy something downtown, say a large ceramic pot, and faces the idea of carrying it across the square, around to the alley, up the alley and up several flights of stairs.

Consider someone who's planning dinner at Murphy's and a popular show at PFAA.

Consider the working musician (me) who has to show up at the club during the dinner hour and unload for the gig -- on Cortez St.

We have to face facts here: the garage is only practical for able-bodied people with destinations from the square on the east to Sharlot Hall Museum on the west, south to about Carleton and north to Willis. The eastern and most of the northern blocks of downtown are too far for most people even when parking is at a dire premium and you're able-bodied, leave alone those who are over 60, have little kids in tow, or are carrying more than five pounds of goods.

The idea of more and better signage to direct out-of-towners to the garage and other free lots is a good one. Forbidding downtown workers and juries from using on-street parking would be huge (although hard to enforce). A second garage on Union St, as per the original and smarter plan, would be better for the east side and far more visible and attractive to tourists and juries. Inside the garage, moving the spaces reserved for City vehicles to the top deck would probably raise garage occupancy by a third, since I'm sure lots of people give up looking when they see that block of white cars and trucks.

A lot of people complain that they're scared to use the garage because of poor lighting and nasty people hanging out there. Lighting in the garage is fine 24/7, but the alley behind the Row isn't exactly inviting all the time. A couple of electric four-place golf carts with drivers to ferry shoppers (free) around the square and to the garage might go a long way.

The central point is that the parking situation downtown has always suffered from inertia in accepting things as they are and a severe dearth of the necessary imagination to create multidimensional, positive solutions. Angled parking on our busy, narrow streets down there is dead stupid and we really need to upgrade or get rid of it entirely. Closing the streets around the square to cars would vastly improve the quality of the experience for everyone, and we ought to be doing some big-idea traffic planning to move in that direction. Simple public people-movers could knit downtown together over a much larger area than the frontage on the square, good for both visitors and businesses.

But standing up on the editor's soapbox, berating people to go park in the garage and belittling their concerns and practical needs is not going to help one bit -- particularly considering that the Courier so recently abandoned the downtown area.

I gotta say it

Prescott man gets 10 life terms in prison for kid porn and unsavory pursuits, and his name is what?

Christian Royalty?




Oh, that's rich.

Immigration facts slipping through the media fence

A great piece appeared in the Republic today confirming what the reality-based community has been saying for years about the phony "immigration issue." Just go read.

Feed-Your-Head Friday

Jay Rosen has a great think piece up on his blog offering a new way to look at press bias: Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press. Definitely worth a look.

Band coverage

Thanks Bruce, and we hope we'll see you at The Raven tonight. For more, check out the Big Daddy D website.

I told you it wouldn't work

Horizon's pulling out, and I'll bet Great Lakes won't be far behind. They can't make it work without public funding.

Watch those headlines

Courier headline today, p. 10A:
Dissatisfaction with Obama on oil spill mirrors Bush/Katrina criticism

Every other outlet's headline for the same story:
Obama defending Gulf effort in Oval Office address

Say no more.

The Kourier Koffee Klatsch

The idea of an editorial sit-down with readers is great, giving them the opportunity to talk and the editors to hear about how the paper is working for the community, ideas for change and improvement, kudos for what's right and accountability for what's not. What's not to like? But the point would be having the editors actually listen to the readers. Is that's what's happening here?

Reader Bob Bockrath ... discussed the differences between facts and opinions in editorial pieces.

"We have an editorial board that meets regularly to discuss positions we will take on editorials," Courier Editor Tim Wiederaenders shared during the discussion. "The editorials are opinions of the newspaper and of the board, not of an individual writer."

The fact/opinion question apparently went straight into File 13, and we get boilerplate about editorials that regular readers will instantly spot as hokum. This was the only bit where an editor even appeared to reply to a concern, leave alone offer a solution or change.

The event makes for some nice happy filler for the paper, but I'll bet it's massively frustrating for the reader participants. And don't even try to tell me that George Karsa showed up with nothing notable to say.

Rap on birthright citizenship

Rand Paul nationally and Russell Pearce locally are leading a nutbar charge against birthright citizenship, the concept that anyone born on US soil is automatically a citizen. Pearce is even proposing new state legislation to prevent the issuance of birth certificates to the children of illegals, thereby, he imagines, impeding the citizenship process, which is of course a federal function. It's another election-year stunt from our shadow governor, and he knows it'll go nowhere, but he can keep it in the news and use it to get himself and other nutbars reelected.

The senator is going about it in completely the wrong way, for clearly the wrong reasons. But at its core the idea has some merit, and I think we should be talking about it in a way that's rather less unhinged.

First let me set some bright lines on what I'm thinking. It's not the same as Pearce's proposal. There's no question that the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to anyone, legal or illegal. Congress wrote it this way over the express objections of the amendment's primary drafter, who wanted to include a provision for lawful presence of parents in this country. That was the 1860s, the US still had half a continent to populate, and Manifest Destiny was still public policy.

Things are different now. The entire world is overpopulated and migration pressures are strong and complex. Beyond the charitable aspect (the nice side of paternalism), I just don't see a clear public good in granting citizenship to babies born to people who are not lawfully here. Appeal to tradition if you like, but I'm not sold.

Making that change would require the full megillah of a constitutional amendment to specify that the mother must be lawfully present in the US or a territory, including good visa status. (I don't include the father because paternity isn't always clear; if the birth is happening in the US, the mother is here. Duh.) Since the 1980s the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa have made changes like this, specifying parental citizenship or minimum residence requirements. I think we can afford to remain a little more liberal than that.

I'm not among those who feel that the children of illegals are a huge problem, certainly not large enough to warrant a constitutional process to address it. But we clearly do need an entirely new regime for immigrant workers, giving much broader legal status and bringing everyone into our systems for worker protection and taxes. This modification of our traditional approach could be a reasonable measure to offer the right in making a deal for sensible immigration policy, and that would be a huge gain.

It's worth thinking about, we can hope a little more clearly than Messrs. Pearce and Paul.

(Hmm: a tasty treat -- the Pearce and Paul Nutbar!)

The Unquestioned Premise

An ironclad rule of logic is that if one of the premises is bad, the conclusion is bad as well. The primary tactic of a skilled debater, whether on the school team or the courtroom, is to go after the weak premises and shoot them to pieces. And one of the primary techniques of the propagandist is the unquestioned premise, a basic form of disinformation.

It goes like this. Say you want to prove that the sun moves around the earth. You point out that everyone can see that the earth is flat and no one falls off, therefore the earth isn't moving, therefore the sun must be moving. Just slip that "common (non)sense" premise in there, and your mark swallows the argument whole. It's as easy as pie. But it requires either self-delusion or the intent to delude, as well as a pliable mark. Us readers, in other words.

The unnamed Courier editor manages to work four unquestioned premises into today's editorial, which is ostensibly on immigration reform but is really about getting more Republicans elected. I know, just go with me for a sec.

The editor's argument, in logical form, boils down to this:

Premise 1: The federal government is "neglecting its own immigration enforcement."
Premise 2: The federal government is "unwilling to enact positive immigration reform."
Premise 3: If the federal government will not enforce immigration law, Arizona must.
Premise 4: SB1070 would be effective in enforcing federal immigration law.
Conclusion: The federal government should allow Arizona to enforce immigration law as per SB1070.

Just look at those premises! I'll bet you didn't think he had it in him to make such breathtaking leaps!

What we have here are not facts, but rather talking points -- ideas designed to persuade you to think in a certain way. The unrelenting media narrative holds that the border is out of control and the feds are doing essentially nothing as illegals overrun the country causing havoc, crime, cracks in the earth, hail of toads, what have you. Anyone who knows otherwise is forced to show over and over again in tedious detail that these concerns are just not justified by reality. But those who are paying enough attention to know generally have jobs, families and real lives, so they get tired. The media machine never gets tired, especially of a story that generates beucoup moola.

Some facts:

The federal government is spending more resources and personnel on the southern border than at any time in history. To the editor, that's "neglecting."

The federal government cannot "enact positive immigration reform," much as our president would like to. That's the role of Congress, one in which the minority party is using every available tactic to block any initiative by the president or the majority party. To the editor, that's "unwilling."

Recession, not enforcement, is reducing the number of illegal immigrants here: illegals are leaving our state in droves, causing reasonable concern about further depressing our economy.

If its backers are being honest in how they're selling it, SB1070 is essentially toothless. If it's not, it's likely to exacerbate the crime and other problems we already have and add new ones, licensing bad cops, vigilantes and garden-variety racists to go after anyone who looks sufficiently brown, including Puerto Ricans and Indians. What the bill amounts to is a legislative temper tantrum, and that's causing reasonable people to step back, but I'm positive it doesn't scare the criminals one bit.

Finally, on the idea that the states must do what the federal government won't (to their satisfaction): Let's say there's a gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and huge amounts of oil are threatening the coasts and industries of five southern states while the oil company who made the mess dithers around trying to save its investment in the well and avoid paying the cleanup costs. By the Courier editor's logic, because Louisiana doesn't like how the feds are going about fixing it, the state would be justified, even obliged, to nationalize (state-ize?) the oil company, direct the leak fix and take on the cleanup costs itself. You do the math.

The editor packs all this wrong thinking into his unquestioned premises. (Why bother thinking when the media are doing it for you, after all?) His conclusion is rotten to the core as a result, but in the context of the unrelenting narrative, it looks fairly reasonable.

Underneath, the message is quite pointed and partisan. See, in the editor's world, "positive immigration reform" is code for "closing the border and sending them all home," and that's the only approach the Republicans will talk about. The smart ones know the idea is preposterous in the real world, it just can't happen, I don't care how much money and manpower you propose to throw at it. But they also know that as long as they beat the drum, they have an issue that scares voters and gets them elected, and, as proven over the last decade, once they're elected they don't have to do anything about it, they can just keep beating that drum. It's perfect. A continuously winning issue that can't be resolved.

In the real world, "positive immigration reform" means eliminating the artificial shortage of legal routes to work, bringing all immigrants onto the level playing field of workplace protections, minimum wages and withholding taxes, and looking after U.S. economic interests in a flexible and skilled workforce. When the editor writes on those ideas, I'll consider the possibility that the Courier is turning a corner on the issue. But however reasonable it may appear on the surface, today's editorial is just the same old scary drumbeat. On with the stampede. Watch your step, there's a cliff over that way.

Editorial: In this case, what's in a name is a lot

The story of the Whiskey Row crosswalk is often told as Prescott lore, and there are many variations in the details. It may be that it's so often told that no one feels compelled to research the facts, but it would be nice if we could count on the unnamed Courier editor to take an interest in separating lore from reality, or at least not confusing them further.

I've been in town longer than Tim has, and while that doesn't confer any special knowledge, I may have heard the story a few more times. I've never before heard the idea that the City eliminated the crosswalk, rather it was ADOT, the reason being that Montezuma Street is officially a state highway (89), and unregulated crosswalks are not allowed on highways. One of the remarkable things about the crosswalk -- and I'm talking secondhand here, I haven't confirmed this with ADOT -- is that it is the only unregulated crosswalk on a state highway in Arizona. I've also never heard that when Sam painted the crosswalk he was operating only as an outraged citizen. Sam's reputation for stunts and gaffes while drunk is well established in the lore, extending to his failure to appear for his mayoral speech at the Y2K event ten years ago.

Some will say it's not fair to kick a man while he's down -- Sam suffered a severe stroke some years ago and is no longer able to defend himself -- but knowing him, I'd say he'd be the first to laugh at the idea of sanitizing his image for posterity.

If we're talking about putting up an historical marker, what we need is an official account, researched and confirmed, from someone with the authority to tell it. Another hipshot from the editor only muddies the water further. Prescott cares about history. I have to hope the editor does too.

Update, Tuesday: Daveinprescott asks, "Do you know anything about "The Prescott Western Heritage Foundation"? I have never heard of this group before and wonder what their involvement is with the local politics and why they'd be interested in putting this guy up front and center as a symbol of Prescott's past-as if it's something we should all admire? Is this a sizable group? Who are its members?"

Good question! This "group" filed with the Corporation Commission as a tax-exempt nonprofit on May 4 of this year, stating as its purpose "to provide charitable opportunities for children to a) participate in performing arts productions; and b) to participate in educational seminars and classes in the theatrical arts." Its articles of incorporation state that it will have no members, so it consists of just two directors: sculptor and Western art booster Dennis Gallagher, and former councilman Rob Behnke. Mr Behnke signed the filing and the organization's official address matches his home address.

Mr Behnke was on Council during Mayor Steiger's term, and is one of the prime movers of the foundation raising money to renovate the Elks Theatre, which the City purchased under Sam's leadership.

It's not clear to me how ennobling a crosswalk with Sam's name plays into theatrics for children, but the world's a funny place, y'know? I expect Mr Behnke came up with the idea on his own and is using the foundation's name to make the effort look a little bigger, gad bless'm.

ToMA: Selecting local subcontractors is truly vital

Sandy Griffis may be qualified to speak on the topic of hiring local contractors to remodel our schools, and what she has to say may be cogent. But it's hard to tell, because short of a few illiterate, drug-addled rants in the comments, this is the worst-written piece I've seen in the Courier in an awfully long time.

The language is murky, full of industry jargon, as if written as a personal letter between people with deep background on the issue. The syntax ranges from clunky to impenetrable. There are so many hanging adjectives it looks like a style preference.

While I have to wonder whether an introductory paragraph is missing from the top, I can have little doubt that the column pretty much came over the transom in this condition, since even a third-string Courier copy editor would have done something to clarify the acronyms and clean up hopeless garble like this: "The project delivery must be appropriate and as a community citizen it is important to ensure that each procurement and the selection process has been appropriately qualified and again, for the well being of our community and to ensure that local is used it is important to watch the weighting of criteria and data." Yikes.

I'm not saying that the awfulness of this particular piece does any significant damage to the body politic. But for me it's hair-raising in that I have to infer that the editors are either incapable of handling technical language, incompetent to determine that language this bad needs fixing, unwilling to put any effort into a prepackaged column, or simply not at their desks and the machine is running without an operator. In any case this is no way to build credibility for a news organization. Get your act together, people!

ToMA: Historic building, free speech take hits

Merry Nebeker, speaking entirely free of critical thinking or pertinent expertise, carries water for the extremists, lamely attempting to divert attention from the nastiness of the racists in our community and the antics that made Councilman Blair internationally famous last week.

She toes the lines well grooved by many of the hipshooting commenters -- that the mural is an inappropriate political statement, that it damages an historic building, and that critics are impairing Mr Blair's right to free speech. None of this is supportable in the slightest by facts.

The mural is by the kids and for the kids, primarily their own expression of ideas to help them be healthier. Because the largest image in the mural is of a non-white kid, the reactionaries see something different. The kids don't.

While the school is old, the part with the mural -- a cafeteria added relatively recently -- is neither old nor distinguished architecturally in any way. That's a classic red herring.

And Mr Blair has not only been allowed to express whatever dumbass ideas he has, he's been encouraged to do so and paid wages to do so for years -- up until he said something so dumbass that it threatened his employer's revenue stream. Now he gets to be a dumbass on his own dime, and if the recall effort is successful, as a private citizen rather than public official. The extreme right has grown altogether too comfortable with the idea that they can say stupid, hurtful things without consequences, but that doesn't come from the Constitution, sorry.

My question, again, is why this overlong LTE was promoted to a column under the Talk of My Ass slug. The writer has no expertise or even a fresh perspective. This is a waste of time that smells of old fish -- herring, I think.

Editorial: Safe-yield action is running dry so far

Not bad!

There's a lot to like about today's editorial. Where in the past we've grown used to seeing the unnamed Courier editor take sides and hector the players on his own simplistic ideas about how to achieve a sustainable water supply -- or, more often, to protect the interests of developers -- this time he holds back on the ego and firmly advocates more serious effort to find solutions that work.

Rather than tell the players how to think, he urges them to get to the necessary thinking. His tone is deliberative, reasonable, and impatient with those who have proven more concerned about themselves and their control of power than the real needs of our communities. On the issue of exempt wells, for once he focuses on fact over ideology, but again resists the urge to prescribe. Most notably he upholds the highest principle of the free press in holding official feet to the fire on this vital issue. No pointless digressions, no silly metaphors, no empty filler. Bravo. Here's a cookie.

I hope this is an opening shot in a serious campaign to move the process forward. A lot more needs saying about the vested interests -- and here I'm talking about money -- that have been sabotaging agreement on safe yield for far too many years, and about individuals in positions of power and responsibility in thrall to preconceived ideas or failing to do their homework. Voters need much more depth of analysis on the costs, impacts and real benefits of the pipeline idea, and the practical need to follow the clear intent of law in proceeding with it. Everyone has to take this issue very seriously, and while he has some long-neglected work to do in building editorial credibility, the editor is in position to lead by example. This is a very positive start.

Editorial: Mural comments shock citizenry

The unnamed Courier editor expresses mild consternation about the racist epithets being hurled from the street and Councilman Blair's bonehead comments about the mural. To that extent the editor is on the right side of history. But the editorial is so wishy-washy and slapdash I can't give him much credit for it. It reads too much like one of Tim's pseudoblog columns -- a reactive screed knocked off in his free time without much thought behind it. He speaks of outrage in the community, but not in the editorial office. In the end, he minimizes the whole issue. Disappointing.

What Mr Blair has done, taking into account his pattern for this sort of behavior, is unconscionable in a Council member. Saying he ought to be more careful about what he says is nothing but a nod and wink. The offense he has given to the community as a whole and the kids and educators at Miller Valley in particular merits serious consideration of his fitness for office. There ought to be no question he should resign immediately rather than put us all through a recall fight. Yes, editor, "racism is alive and well in 'Everybody's Hometown'," and our continuing tolerance of Mr Blair as a representative of the community is the clearest evidence. It's shameful for our city, and it's shameful that our local paper is complicit.

Update, 12:30: An anonymous commenter links me to some deeply ugly stuff. I think we can all, right and left, agree that we don't want our city represented like this.

Update, midnight: It appears KYCA doesn't want this sort of representation either: Blair Fired from Radio Show

Ability and Accountability?

Could someone in editorial authority please change the title on Richard Haddad's pseudoblog to something like "The Christian Corner"? He doesn't post columns often, but they're getting more religionist every time and farther away from his stated topic area. Today's offering wanders deep into Wacky World.

Editorial: Arizona gains support on immigration law

The unnamed Courier editor indulges in a little wishful thinking. It would be sort of endearing, really, if it weren't so, well, dumb.

Followup: The young Mr Pierce and police-blotter day

We have four stories from the police beat today: a drunken alien masher, a suspected child molester, a fugitive teen, and a DUI suspect. This last, of course, is the son of a rich and powerful land developer and state legislator.

Let's talk about special treatment.

A reliable factor in choosing what becomes news is that people want to know more about people they know more about. So it's natural that the Nelson Pierce story went on page one rather than with the others on page three. But it's also convenient in that it separates the guy with powerful connections from the dreary hoi polloi.

Comparing the raw police-book story in eNews with the more massaged Courier version, fascinating differences emerge.

Mr Pierce's name appears in the lead paragraph of the eNews story. In the Courier lead, he's "a man," and his name is relegated to the second graf. (The headline writer comes later in the process.)

The domestic-disturbance context runs in the second graf in eNews; in the Courier, it's third.

In the police report, he was shirtless and sweaty, with black and bloodied fingers. Those details do not appear in the Courier.

The police report says that on being informed he was under arrest, Mr Pierce "said that he wanted to run off." No mention in the Courier.

The police say they informed him that the full drug test was voluntary, and he expressed "he did not wish to participate in that evaluation." No mention of that in the Courier.

"Pierce admitted that he was addicted to heroin and uses this drug every few weeks," says the police report. In the Courier, "he knew what he did was wrong and that he is addicted to heroin." Later in the police report, ""Pierce indicated he felt what he did was wrong, but didn't feel like he was impaired, though he admitted to having a problem."

Mr Pierce's father, the Senator, gets three grafs to characterize his son's problem as addiction that deserves support and sympathy -- rather than endangering the public by operating a vehicle while impaired, for which he was actually arrested. He expresses concern that the news might hurt the wife and kids -- the same wife who called the cops to have the perp removed. I didn't notice a quote from the wife, which might have been interesting too.

It's natural that there's more interest in what Mr Pierce's powerful father has to say. What's not natural is holding the story for a day to gather only sympathetic quotes, or trimming out ugly details that would certainly appear in any ordinary crime story. I have to wonder whether Mr Bluemke or Mr Gann have friends or relations who'd like to say something in their defense -- in public, ahead of jury selection. (The friends and family of Mr Lopez-Nava, of course, probably don't speak English, so for the paper, they don't exist.) But see, they're not interesting enough, so they don't get that opportunity.

The Pierce story reeks of special treatment for the powerful and privileged -- exactly the sort of thing an independent, protected Fourth Estate was designed to resist. This does not say good things for the new Courier editorial team.

Elementary school mural getting a 'lighter' facelift

Cindy and Paula did a good job letting Councilman Blair vent on race, clearly pointing up the core of the story on criticism of the Miller Valley School mural. I have to wonder whether Mr Blair should really get so much credit for riling people up -- I'm not wild about that mural myself, for quite different reasons -- but given his history of race-baiting and generally dumbass remarks in public, he deserves it. "Diversity, it's a word I can't stand." Now there's a great little campaign bumper sticker!

I dislike the Miller Valley mural for the same reason I dislike the old mural in Council chambers -- pointless, self-congratulatory sentimentality and not particularly good art. I'm also getting a little tired of seeing murals from a single source all over town. Mr Wall is making a personal career on public money meant to support diverse community projects. If we're gonna do this and celebrate diversity, let's spread the wealth to some diverse artists and styles. Better yet, let's quit with the murals already. Remember the old Hillside grocery mural? I like it better now.

There is one common criticism the project doesn't deserve, though, and that's historic desecration. Miller Valley School is an historic structure, yes, built in 1916, but the muralized addition is clearly no older than the 1960s and not historically or architecturally significant.

What the reporters apparently did not explore is the shocking spinelessness of school officials in changing the mural to better suit the racists. In a paper known for an ironclad rule against the passive voice, that voice is used to hide who ordered the changes. I know Mr Wall would never alter the art on his own in this fashion.

PS, 3:30pm: Wow, 122 comments so far! And notice how many of them are under what look like real names. Good show, readers! Steve Stockmar also has a column up on the subject.

Update, Friday: Comment count now over 200, and over 50 on the editorial!

Another missing story

From the Republic, an incident on Sunday night: Vandals tag 18 vehicles, 3 homes in Prescott Valley is an unedited PD press release, something the Courier knows how to do, and timely in terms of finding the perps. The Courier should have run it yesterday.

Ditto this: YCSO Seeking Hit and Run Vehicle/Suspects

Update, Friday: They show up today, here and here. Perhaps the editor would like to explain why his local crime stories are coming in so far behind other outlets.

Editorial: Stakes are sky-high in coming election

The Courier editor says he thinks an informed and vigorous electorate is a good idea. I can't write a response much better than this comment by Elijah Middlebrook:

Dear Mr. New Editor,

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments. Please help us avoid being "easy sells" by improving the coverage of city and county politics in the Daily Courier. Please encourage your reporters to do real investigative journalism rather than just repeating the information that is given them. The voters of Prescott need your assistance. Only you can transform the Courier into the kind of paper we need to be an informed, critical thinking electorate. The current approach to covering local politics and news is grossly inadequate. Thanks for listening.

I might add, however, that if he is at all concerned about the paper's reputation and building its credibility in the community, Tim could do worse than to write a byline column on his vision for the paper and how he intends to address the sort of concerns that Mr Middlebrook expresses. Set a standard, publicly, for yourself and your staff to meet.

Missing: Senator's son arrested

Hat-tip to Mayor Wilson for alerting me to yesterday's story in Prescott eNews on the arrest of Nelson Pierce, 33-year-old son of LD1 Senator Steve Pierce, on a raft of charges related to heroin, meth, X and acting like an idiot.

Lynne posted the story at about 5:30pm yesterday, before deadline at the Courier, and Tuesday is usually police-blotter day at the paper anyway, so I don't see an excuse for not running it in today's edition.

Maybe the assigned reporter had already gone home or whatever, but this was a big fail for the editors as it's so easy to infer that they buried the story out of concern for Sen Pierce, who is running for reelection. If it doesn't show up online by about 10:30 tonight, readers should definitely smell a rat.

Update, 6:30pm: And it appears.

Our former mayor has an interesting exchange about this today on his Facebook page with Tricia Lewis of Lewis Marketing & Public Relations, which claims as clients, among others, the City of Prescott, Country Bank and Fann Environmental.

Editorial: We forget heroes at our own peril

The unnamed Courier editor waxes adjectival today: "we need to remember that more than 1 million American men and women gave their lives in steaming jungles, freezing forests, rancid flooded trenches and desert furnaces to win us the freedom to go where we want to go, choose the work we want to do and buy the things we want to buy."

The things we want to buy?

Yeesh.

I'd just like to put in a word here for the large proportion of those dead, and many more maimed and emotionally destroyed, who knew going in or learned in the process that what our leaders asked them to do was stupid, pointless or designed only to further enrich the rich, but they still did as they had pledged to do before they lost their innocence about war, and they did it with valor in the fight, generosity in victory and concern for the horror they were helping visit on the innocent.

The best way we can honor their sacrifice is to do all we can to end the institution of war.

PS, Tuesday: Just what is the "peril" in the headline supposed to mean, I wonder? Could it be something like this?

Change of the guard

Proving my hunch in February, the paper announced the retirement of Executive Editor Ben Hansen on Friday, and the weekend masthead shows Tim Wiederaenders as Editor (rather than Managing Editor) and Karen Despain as Managing Editor.

The quality of copy editing and proofing rose substantially when Karen started "filling in" during Ben's recovery from surgery in the spring, and drifted back down a bit since. Karen goes back a long way with the paper, and I hope her influence helps bring its 'local, local, local' mission back into focus and its use of English back up to snuff.

With Tim's elevation to the helm I expect that the editorials will be a little better thought-through and researched. Tim has less extreme reflexes politically, but I rather doubt that editorial positions will change much. I do hope that he will do more to reduce evidence of those political biases on the news pages.

I'm encouraged slightly to find the announcement of the new team in the business section rather than on page one. The big pics and double headline above the fold are still immodest, but it could be worse.

Phoenix-area hospitals fight toxic 'supergerm'

MSM coverage of this sort of thing frequently leaves out important facts that the public really should be more conversant with in understanding the problem. Taking this story at face value, the reader might reasonably infer that the bug is invading hospitals from somewhere else and it's just a wild, unpredictable mutation out of control. An accident. Act of gad.

What the AP story doesn't tell us is that this bug has been manufactured in hospitals from our normal gut flora due to the overuse of antibiotics. The story implies that treatment with antibiotics is the best course, when it appears that the normally effective course is withdrawing antibiotics and replacing depleted gut flora to rebalance the system.

Hospital administrators and public health authorities have understood these mechanisms for decades, yet there has been almost no effort to curb the use of antibiotics, let alone public policy in that direction -- probably because the drug companies would instantly gin up TV campaigns accusing public advocates for such policy of working to kill off grandma to reduce the deficit.

An important part of the responsibilities of journalism is to ask the questions that the press release raises, and look beyond the curtain to the deeper issues. This story takes a nasty tumble on that score.

Editorial: Obama simply doesn't get it

The unnamed Courier editor has two complaints about the President, which he rolls into a conclusion that he is "not leading" and "can't govern." One is that he isn't going to Arlington to lay a wreath this weekend, and the other that he "hasn't done much" to fix the oil leak in the Gulf.

On the first, a couple of commenters are already ahead of me on the fact-checking, pointing out that the editor is plain wrong in calling the wreath-laying "a task every American president has performed every year since 1868." I'm still looking for the editorial calling for the President to respect the troops and keep them out of unnecessary and illegal wars. I'll let you know if I find it. I also wonder what the editor would write if the President were to come to Prescott to speak at the vet's cemetery -- as he is doing in Chicago.

On the second, I've heard a lot of this criticism in the media from the President's political opponents, and I've heard essentially nothing about what he was supposed to do better or faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the bureaucracy has been slow -- that's a weakness of every large organization, and I notice that the MMS director was fired this week -- but I haven't heard that the orders from the administration have been slow or confused. I'd love to hear specifics. Gad knows this is a disaster of epic proportions. But there are also practical limits on what can be done, particularly given that the regulatory structure has been thoroughly gutted by previous oil-loving administrations. Perhaps the editor is holding back something he knows. On the other hand, it seems a little more likely that the authoritarian mindset simply imagines that elected officials are kings or superheroes, who can simply order a thing done and it is done. But I'll take another slice with Occam's Razor and bet that the editor hasn't thought any more about this than what his Fox News heroes are ranting.

As for the President's ability to govern, I have to point out that neither disaster-management nor wreath-laying have anything at all to do with governance. I admit this might be a bit too subtle a point for the editor.

National news is not your beat, editor, it's not your forte and it's clearly not even of particular interest to you. Stick to your knitting.

Followup: WSJ, today

Update, Saturday: This comment really stands out for me, from "Phoenix Journalist": You are a small community publication, and while that may be cause for lower distribution and salaries, it doesn't equate to lower standards. If you don't understand a subject, and you don't have staff with the skills set needed to research it, either don't write about it or hire staff with well-established experience. Your audience may have certain biases and perhaps you are simply playing to those, but you do it a greater disservice by creating or encouraging false reports and distortions of the facts. Truth in journalism is paramount to a free society.

Update, Sunday: Could it be that the editor is calling on the administration to nationalize BP America?

Editorial: Needs, not wants should rule plans

Once again we find the unnamed Courier editor arguing against something he doesn't like by asserting that he is the best judge of what the city "needs." Yet he does not bother to build an argument for why this particular expenditure would be a luxury, other than an utterly spurious dichotomy comparing it to manhole covers.

I happen to agree that spending a quarter million clams to remodel the old clubhouse for event rentals is dumb on several fronts, not least because the City should not be in the event-rental business (any more than it should be in the golf-course or restaurant business, but that's a rant for another day). I know something about that building from when the City tried to trick my struggling nonprofit into paying for the asbestos abatement a decade ago. The location is awful, the neighbors will adamantly oppose any new traffic, and the market for rentals is already oversupplied and will be for another dozen years. The City needs to give up on that albatross -- which it made redundant by building the new clubhouse ages ago -- pull it down, clean up the site and move on. (What the City Manager and golf-course manager really want is more office space, but they have to keep that ambition sub rosa.)

The Courier isn't arguing from practicality or economic sense, instead the editor offers only sloppy thinking, propaganda techniques and uninformed personal prejudice. This is no way to inform the public or convince anyone. Do your research, editor, think through your argument, and try to spend a little more time on your editorials than I put into a blog post.

Related: City should shift money to needs

Search for fugitive leads to 3 unrelated arrests

I'm sure that there's a lot more to the story behind this transcribed police report, but what's here raises red flags.

Three Hispanic men drive by a sheriff's deputy, from all accounts minding their own business. The report says the deputy thought one of them looked like the white teenager who's accused of having sex with another teenager and is on the run from the law as a result. That's a whole 'nother level of stupid, but I'll stick with the story in front of us, as the Courier should have done, other than to say that if the deputy was profiling these guys as illegals, it's a likely cover story.

The deputy orders them out of the car, but they don't raise their hands as ordered, and I have to wonder whether they didn't understand what he said. One panics and pandemonium ensues, we're left to speculate why. Two of them are illegals.

I'll go over the cliff and predict that we won't hear a single word more about this case in the Courier. No one will question why the deputy chased these guys down, nor whether he did something that might have caused the panic and the charges. I'll also bet that there will be more stories like this, and the Courier won't ask followup questions.

Immigration: Documentary draws small, receptive audience

Whatever your political take on it, how does a film that draws 12 people rate coverage on the front page above the fold with pic? Could it be that the Courier editors hope to drum up some more angry comments (read: page hits) over nothing?

Followup, Monday: Ten comments -- almost as many as the film's viewers, not bad!

Editorial: Boycotts aren't a mature tactic

The unnamed Courier editor characterizes the call for boycotts of Arizona in defense of civil rights as immature. I have to wonder what the editor would consider a mature tactic other than the sort of approach one takes in a dinner conversation with someone of a different political persuasion: don't talk about it.

Of course, for the editor there's nothing at stake. He believes that an open season on brown-skinned people for lawnforcement is a perfectly reasonable response to unsightly men seeking marginal work on a certain street corner. Why fight about it?

For those of us who understand the fragility of civil rights and the lessons of history, however, the law is a breathtakingly large hole in the wall of legal protections against official abuse. Sure, it's popular here, as was Jim Crow in its day and segregation in its. But growing outrage in the better educated parts of the country brought it down. That will happen for Arizona as well, and far faster, I expect, as the courts have more practice at this now.

The editor can't avoid this fight by wishing it away -- a truly immature tactic. Whatever you think of the specifics of the law, it's clearly on the wrong side of history.

And what's the big "no" sign supposed to mean, editor? Could it be the new logo of your preferred political party?

Update, Tuesday: “Abominations such as apartheid do not start with an entire population suddenly becoming inhumane. They start here. They start with generalizing unwanted characteristics across an entire segment of a population. A solution that degrades innocent people, or that makes anyone with broken English a suspect, is not a solution.” -- Desmond Tutu, today

Taxes rising, where's the outrage now?

I notice on page three a legal announcement by the county that residents of the Community College District can expect to see a small increase in their property taxes. This is exactly what I've been predicting since the fraidy-cat Legislature turned in its deficit budget -- what the Legislature won't provide, the counties will have to raise anyway. And you can bring a lot of money in on small increments of obscure property taxes.

Given the level of recent rhetoric I might hope to see the tea-party crowd down at the public-comment meeting threatening armed rebellion against six bucks a year to keep the county's potholes filled. But they won't -- they take their orders from the Fox nutbars, who don't really care about the nuts and bolts of actual governing.

Hint: there will be more of this.

Catch-22: Perp-walks and race, again

I held off talking about the Courier's biannual "Catch-22" feature until all the journalistic perp-walks were done and I could compile them statistically. Each time this thing comes through there are accusations in the comments that Yavapai Silent Witness is unfairly favoring coverage of violent Latinos on the list, and the political implications are obvious. I've had this feeling myself, and this time as I watched the grainy old photos and tedious story reruns go by, I wanted a more objective take.

This was the fourth run, done each May and December (why those months, I wonder?) for a couple of years. The first run isn't fully archived. We've seen 14 of these names at least three times, and only three are new.

The results are interesting. Of the 22 names, 13 are Latino, not a statistically significant preponderance in a sample this small (unless you're looking at it as relative percentages of the larger population). But when I break them out by offense category, a quite different picture emerges, in which the violent criminals are almost exclusively Latino.

I separated the violent crimes (murder, mayhem, domestic homicide and sexual assault) from the non-violent (drugs, theft and administrative charges). In this group of 22 there are 15 alleged violent criminals, and 13 of those are clearly Latino. Of the two non-Latino exceptions, Travis Brewer is featured for ordinary assault and as caught already, and Adam Stevenson was a 26-year-old accused of "sexual assault on a minor female," meaning one between 16 and 18.

The rest of the violent scale is reserved for Latino suspects, reaching back as far as 1998. Further, of the 14 names appearing three times on the overall list, only three are non-Latino. I don't see how an ordinary reader could come away from this with any feeling other than that violent criminals are almost all Latino.

But this is a list specifically of people that police are seeking, so a thoughtful person might instead infer logically that our police agencies could simply be less competent at catching violent Latinos than violent non-Latinos. The nearby international border adds some weight to that inference.

Is Yavapai Silent Witness cherry-picking violent Latino suspects to present a racially slanted picture, or is it just allowing that picture to form out of what it doesn't say? The only way to get a handle on that would be to show us who's not on the list -- a breakdown of violent crime for the entire ten-year period by race and prosecution outcome, including acquittals. I think that would be a very illuminating piece for the Courier to present as a followup. In the context of deep public concern about crime by illegal immigrants, I'd also like to see that breakdown include immigration status, which is entirely absent from the Catch-22 features, thereby allowing scared people to see what they want to see.

Finally, I'm struck that with space for 22 violent criminals, we only have 15. I think it says something very positive about our county when a third of our Most Wanted are non-violent offenders, including a teenage sneak-thief, a bail-jumping drug mule and a drunk driver.

Here's my breakdown.

(murder)
Miguel Franco: murder, 2006 3x
Claudio Lopez: murder, 2006 3x
Domingo Valdez-Anguiano: murder, 2004 3x
Joel Medina-Ortiz: murder, 2006 2x
Manuel Dera: homicide, 1998 2x
(mayhem)
Valentine Hernandez: vehicular assault, 2003 3x
Luis Florez: vehicular assault, 2000 3x
Joel Vidrio: assault with a deadly weapon, 2004 3x
Pablo Arredondo-Herrera: att. murder, agg. assault, kidnapping 3x
Carlos Pimentel: home invasion, 2007 3x
Travis Brewer: assault 2x
(domestic)
Ruth Cardoso-Gomez: negligent homicide, child abuse 3x
(sexual assault)
Jose Herrera-Martinez: child molestation 3x
Adam Stevenson: sexual assault on a minor female, 2004 3x
Ernesto Romero-Salcedo: sexual conduct with a minor 2x
(drugs)
Tony Thomas: "drug-related charges" 3x
Robert Michaels: aggravated DUI 2x
Kory France: drug mule, jumped bail new
Kristen Martin: meth possession and auto theft, 2005 new
(theft)
Jason Niedermeyer: theft and burglary 2x
(administrative)
David Dehart: failure to register 3x
Herschell Scott: failure to register new

PS in defense of the language: "Catch-22," invented by Joseph Heller for his novel, expresses the bureaucratic weakness of creating conflicting or self-referencing rules that effectively prevent sensible action. Using this expression as a catchy (sorry) slug for a wanted list is illiterate and ironically ridiculous, and erodes understanding among the reading public.

From December: The Catch-22 list again, ack

A failure of political courage

Yesterday afternoon I was talking with a younger guy who's lived here since '74, and he admitted that at that point he still hadn't decided how he'd vote on the sales tax. He's running a small food business, and understood that the higher tax would be hard on other retailers, if not him. He could not be convinced that the tax will expire. He understood the immediate impact on schools, etc. of non-passage, but believed none of those programs are run well and there is still lots of waste to squeeze out of the system. Overall it seemed to me that he was mainly angry at the government for putting him in the position of having to decide.

I think that anger is fully justified. Our legislators have known for many years that our fiscal house is built on sand, but refused to deal with it out of fear that the anti-tax crusaders might say nasty things about them in print. Gov Napolitano wasn't any more forthcoming about this issue either, although it's understandable given that for her, speaking up would have accomplished only her unelection. With their clear and longstanding majorities in both houses, however, and their hype about fiscal responsibility, Republicans should have stood up like adults and undertaken the hard choices to avert the disaster they should have seen coming. Instead they've passed the buck, leaving the voters to wipe up some of the mess with this nasty dishrag of a tax increase.

What's important to understand about this vote is that it doesn't fix anything. It will probably depress retail sales (and jobs) somewhat, and it will stave off truly awful consequences and cuts in important programs, but it does nothing to address the structural problems that got us here or make our economy any more sustainable. Doing that will require the sort of vision and political courage that's become vanishingly rare in the state capitol.

So think about this sales-tax vote, and the political failures behind it, when you're considering your votes in September and November. We desperately need serious, high-quality people in office, across the board. Don't settle for party labels, slogans or your pet issues. Seek out the public forums, get in close and talk to the candidates so you can gauge them as people. Do the research necessary to learn what they've done in the past and, importantly, how they've done it. Then gather up your own political courage and vote for those who exhibit intelligence, maturity, strength of character and real concern for the community.

Let's aim higher this time.

Clarification

For readers who saw the band listings for last weekend in the arts section, we have not changed the name of the band. It's still Big Daddy D and the Dynamites, and "Dynomite" is still only a reference to a truly awful '70s TV show.

Column: 'Free' health care bankrupting system

I have little to add to Tom Cantlon's comments on the scattershot 'argument' presented by Dr Eck here. But there are a few notable factors that readers have yet to note.

First, it's not noted in the footer that Dr Eck and her husband are not only practicing physicians, but they're set up a Christian nonprofit to provide free health care to the poor, running it on donations and volunteer labor. She has also been an activist working to eliminate government programs from health care for many years, and is particularly alarmist about the recent health-care reform, quite freely making up her own facts in print.

Notice her anecdote about the Liberian missionary? Apparently she thinks the US should have just let him in and given him free health care too, like the unspecified tourist in the previous story. She seems to be complaining that we don't let people access health care for free if we know they're coming in sick. Or maybe that we should be doing that for everyone except Christian missionaries.

This treatise is remarkably free of solutions to the problems it trumps up, and more than a little alarmist about those devious foreigners out there -- leaving aside that if hospitals and health-care providers really have a problem with indigent care, the vast majority of it is related to serving legal Americans, and that's a clear argument in favor of public reform.

The Courier editors are very happy to fan the flames with an alarmist headline that's patently untrue and a photo in the online version prominently featuring people of color in a waiting room. The message is blatant and ugly.

It also has no connection with our area. You might think the editors could find a similar polemic by a Yavapai County author, but they either couldn't or didn't bother.

Editorial: ADOT should do the right thing

When I read on Monday that ADOT had destroyed the memorial obelisk that stood at Prescott's entrance for 55 years without so much as a by-your-leave, I was aghast. It then struck me that for over a year I'd been under the impression that the agency moved it out of the way of construction at the intersection and would put it back when that was complete. How did I miss the news that it wound up as rubble in a dump truck at 5am, skulking out of town? With a little research it appears I missed it because the Courier didn't tell anyone.

In every article over the past year, primarily about rededicating the park, the paper wrote about the obelisk, but failed to mention its actual condition, i.e. pulverized. You'd think that would be news at some point.

It takes the veteran's groups agitating for a replacement to wake the unnamed Courier editor up on this act of official vandalism by ADOT.

Anyone who's had a home or business located near an ADOT project is familiar with the agency's habit of wrecking first and not apologizing after. Ask the merchants of Tlaquepaque, for instance. But to discover that this attitude extends to historic monuments and public property ought to raise an eyebrow for everyone.

I'm not going to say that the obelisk was especially beautiful, but it was old, it was ours, and ADOT just sent its yobbos in and smashed it. This ought to raise calls for a lot more than replacement cost. Public scrutiny ought to extend as well to the City bureaucracy that allowed this to happen and has apparently done nothing in response. Or is that yet another question that the Courier has failed to ask?

Editorial: Speeders likely to kill photo radar

One of the oldest tricks in rhetoric is to characterize your opponent in a certain way, then argue against that caricature, avoiding a more difficult contest over facts. It's called the straw-man argument, and we see it used extensively (albeit amateurishly) in yesterday's editorial.

In this case the unnamed Courier editor characterizes everyone who opposes photo radar, particularly those working the initiative process to ban it, as heedless speed demons who are only trying to avoid paying tickets. This of course completely sidesteps the very serious issues of due process, habeas corpus and community character that are the hard core of this issue. The editorial is clumsy and an embarrassment to my profession, regardless of its political intent.

In his flailing the thought-free editor manages to squash his own argument: "The safety advantages of the system became obvious early on, however. Phoenix television stations frequently showed film snippets from the cameras of people going through the camera at 120 miles per hour." Does anyone else notice that in this example, the criminal speeder does not at any point slow down? He'll get a ticket later, maybe even a summons if the court allows it, but the actual improvement of safety in the moment is nil. Frequently. on the other hand, put a patrol car in that situation and watch what happens.

This is just one more example of the editor's schizophrenic political philosophy: libertarian for himself, authoritarian for everyone else.

Sales tax followup

I've noticed a few comments accusing the Courier of favoring passage of the temporary sales tax boost in its coverage. Looking back, it appears that apart from letters, the op-ed page has carried only pro-tax comments since Senator Pierce's TOMA on April 30. News-side coverage has been about predicted impacts of non-passage, and I have to reiterate that writing about things that haven't happened yet is not news, it's opinion. So, strictly speaking, those commenters have a point.

I'm not sure how the editors could change the coverage to satisfy the anti-tax crowd other than to come out against the tax editorially and carry nothing about the possible consequences. But if you're going to wade into a political question, you've got a responsibility as an editor to balance your coverage, even on questions far clearer than this one. A few more guest columns against the tax would be apropos.

Blogpause for new album

Blogging's been slow to none recently while I work on other projects, including producing a new album by Big Daddy D and the Dynamites. That's about to go to pressing, so keep an eye out for the album release party at the band website.

Sales Tax Day on p. 4

We've got three bits on the sales-tax initiatives on the oped page today.

First the unnamed Courier editor performs some entertaining contortions in an attempt to protect his bona fides as a tax-hater while supporting a vote in favor.

Next Sen. Steve Pierce covers his own butt on whipping the ballot measure through the Senate, apparently most concerned that reactionaries will blame him for allowing them to vote. I don't understand why anyone pays attention to the know-nothings, but it demonstrates the kind of thinking our legislators are using to guide their actions in office. He's against the tax. I knew you'd be surprised. Tom Cantlon provides the smackdown in the comments without breaking a sweat.

Third, in the letters, Carl Tenney makes a plea from Chino Valley in favor of the tax.

Below all of these, most of the commenters are screaming in protest, citing all sorts of myths, misperceptions and irrelevant political irritations.

I gave my take on April 9, but here I just want to emphasize one point. If the sales tax doesn't pass, the Legislature will reduce funding to the counties for schools, corrections, health care and many other important functions. The counties will not be allowed to just drop those balls, people won't stand for it and doing so would only expand costs elsewhere. So they will require us to pay for most of the cuts, by adjusting property tax rates. In other words, if you vote against the sales tax, you're voting for higher property taxes instead. This vote is the legislative equivalent of an offer you can't refuse.

Editorial: New tourism plan makes good sense

"Tourism or bust." Ack.

At several points in today's editorial the unnamed Courier editor admits explicitly that the City staff's plan to bring tourism promotion in-house is short-term thinking. He's following up on yesterday's story by Cindy in which Council applauds shearing off years of ties to PACT, rejigging the City bureaucracy and reallocating funds to pump up tourism.

Tourism is all very nice for kitschy downtown trinket-sellers, hoteliers and restaurants, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone thinks of it as a reliable foundation for economic activity in general, good jobs or municipal revenues. Communities that rely on tourism wind up out in the cold when the fashion changes or fuel costs rise, leaving their already overstretched minimum-wage workforces bankrupt, jobless and further reliant on public services for which funds have dried up. Tourism should be the frosting on economic planning, not the cake, and it's extremely disheartening to see our Council and staff so bereft of ideas that this is being hailed as some sort of great leap forward.

Does no one notice that the plan includes dropping the office of economic development director? This was the person charged with marketing the city's advantages to large companies and manufacturers. Does that effort go away while we goof around with tourists? The Courier apparently didn't ask the question.

I'm not convinced it was a great idea in the first place to privatize the bed-tax revenues by employing PACT, which farmed the whole thing out to an ad agency. But I'm also not convinced that City staff has anything like the marketing savvy to employ those funds effectively. Right off the bat they're talking about building events and a marketing plan from the ground up, and I have to wonder what we've been spending money on all these years that apparently leaves nothing useful in terms of planning from the previous regime. I also recall how eager certain City department heads have been to expand their personal empires. Finally it seems to me that with these new salaries City staff are recommending an overall increase in expenditures for tourism promotion, and I have to wonder what PACT could have done with those additional funds. It reads like an apples/oranges comparison designed to favor salaries to City staff.

In the new director's position the City is proposing to spend 10% of bed tax revenues on one person -- not on ad buys, not on communications or infrastructure, on the person in the chair. How can they possibly justify that expense in terms of benefits to our residents? The editor isn't bothering to ask. But I imagine it's occurred to more than a few business owners and managers who rarely see benefits from tourists on the square.

A rap on immigration

While today's Courier editorial is entertaining in its clueless confusion, I'm going to depart from accustomed practice today and try to say something more substantive than usual, from the perspective of a tenth-generation American citizen who's also had some experience as an illegal immigrant.

Only North Korean spies, Russian mobsters and American military get into Japan without some sort of documentation, so "undocumented" doesn't work for me, but I don't mind "illegal" at all. The Japanese immigration system is a maze of catch-22s, so most anyone who goes there for the work has to play the margins, working illegally until you can get someone substantial with a company to personally sponsor a work permit. This can take years. Meanwhile you're in more or less constant danger of sudden deportation if you run afoul of the notoriously rule-embracing authorities. Did I break the law? Yes, repeatedly and at length. Did I hurt anyone by it? It's quite safe to say no. Neither did the 35,000 other foreigners living in Tokyo at the time, serving the needs of businesses and individuals in an affluent and expanding economy.

So it is with illegals in the US. Crossing the border without official permission violates the law, but of itself it hurts nothing and no one. What matters is what you do after that.

So as the furor over AZ'a new anti-immigrant (or, materially, anti-Mexican) law plays out in the national media, I start there. If we seriously hope to resolve this issue and move on in a civilized, practical manner, we have to look past the political pantomime to the real, living challenges we face.

Immigration, legal and illegal, is an issue only because of political choices that ignore nature and practical reality. The idea that we can use an imaginary line in the sand to keep poor, hungry people from filling available jobs and taking the money back to their families is as dumb as a box of rocks, anyone with half a brain can see that. The people running this country for the last 200-odd years, their peace officers, their military, their businesspeople, their criminals and clergy, have generally been of at least average intelligence. So it's safe to conclude that the system is rigged to not work -- for a purpose.

That's how it was for me and thousands of other illegals in Japan. The system's official purpose is to protect Japanese jobs and society at large from international miscreants. But, like I said, the mobsters, spies and other criminals have no difficulty getting around it, nor do most legitimate job-seekers. Its true functions, demonstrated every day on the ground for anyone who cares to look, are to placate the voters' fear of foreigners while creating a cheap, pliable pool of off-the-books, politically powerless laborers. The same is true here, and it has been since immigration controls were first imposed.

Periodically, when economic conditions erode slightly here in the richest nation on earth, public attention turns to the 'foreigner problem' and how to address it. It's always been an easy sell politically, so it's been exploited by fearmongers since time began. This time is no different.

Today's illegal immigration is qualitatively the same as at any time since we've had a southern border, and quantitatively it only varies with the relative economic conditions in the US and the nations of Central America -- as you may have noticed, when Arizona's economy went south for a spell, lots of immigrants split for greener pastures. There is always a small contingent of people for whom fear of foreigners is the top concern, but the only reason we've seen "immigration" become a big public issue in recent years is that it's politically convenient for certain interests to make it so.

When you're selling something, you have to keep stock on hand, and if your product is fear you have to have an object for it. When the commies imploded, the fearmongers started selling Muslims. That pitch got old, and now they're flogging brown people from the south. It's so juvenile it would be funny if it didn't have such serious implications for our economy and national character.

But here we are. Lots of Americans are invested in the idea that illegal immigrants are suddenly "flooding in" to steal their jobs and stereos, make "anchor babies," defile their daughters, empty the government ATMs and cause general mayhem. Many shady businesses large and small depend on illegal workers to make their plans and balance sheets work. Many underqualified politicians need to provide voters with a reason to elect them. And I don't care if you throw a trillion dollars and every state militia at the border, you're not going to do much to separate poor, hungry people from available cash without an ocean. They're better motivated than we are.

For decades, immigration has been a safe issue for fearmongering authoritarians. They knew in their hearts that no amount of effort would actually have much real effect, so they could demand pretty much anything without risking success -- and losing the issue -- or substantially threatening the balance sheets of their buddies in the chambers of commerce. It was perfect.

But this time their shortsightedness has come home to roost. Having failed so miserably and spectacularly at governance for so long, they ran out of other issues to run on, and so had to ramp up the immigration issue to such a pitch that something had to give.

Enter the Arizona legislature, facing an election year with nothing to show but a bankrupt government and every fifth home in or on the brink of foreclosure, and its governor, Peter-Principled by happenstance into an office which she has neither the intellectual depth nor the leadership qualities to fulfill. When an out-of-state front group for old-school upperclass white-supremacists dangled what looked like a robust response to the "problem" of illegal immigration, our elected officials took the bait like a pike on a wiggler.

It's completely illegal, of course, the consensus among those who know is pretty clear. There will be an injunction, probably at the state level but perhaps from the federal level as well, and this legislation will not stand. The Rs only need it to get through the midterm elections, and I expect most of the survivors will back away from it after that.

But there's a new factor to bring the old edifice down. The Obama administration and the Congress are making noises about doing something, perhaps before the midterms, to intercept the ball and take back some yardage.

Obviously they can't out-fascist the fascists, so what could they do to successfully address the voters' fears and maybe do some good for us economically at the same time?

My answer is to expand NAFTA to include labor. Don't try to close a border that can't be closed -- open it further, and handle it like an adult.

Speaking as an illegal immigrant again, nobody with any sense prefers shady status. We have illegal immigrants because we impose artificial limits on how many we allow to be legal. The job demand exceeds the supply of legal visas, so more people come however they can. We can only eliminate illegals by making them legal.

We can live up to our rhetoric about free trade. We can allow Mexican (and Canadian) workers to compete on a level playing field, under the same worker protections and minimum wages, and paying the same taxes. After work we can let them go home to their families rather than force them to live as a vulnerable underclass. They can be free to speak up against criminals without fear of the legal system breaking up their homes and livelihoods. They can pay a fair share for the government services we all need. We can live up to our principles as we never have, and accept them into our society as people with dignity and and important roles to play. And we can fairly ask the Mexican (and Canadian!) government to reciprocate for US workers.

The mechanics of this are simple and relatively cheap -- way less than trying to build and staff a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall. We'll need to register everyone individually so they can be tracked and taxed, the same way we citizens are, and check them in and out at the border. Registration will not convey the vote -- only citizenship can do that, and that will remain an arduous road. We'll probably also have to modify the Constitution, though, to eliminate the blanket grant of citizenship based on birth on US soil, and instead require parents who are citizens or legal permanent residents. We're not trying to fulfill Manifest Destiny anymore.

We'll still get some criminals, of course. Everyone's human, and seven to ten percent of all humans are bad enough to be criminals. We won't keep them out as long as there is profit in smuggling. We can talk later about drug laws. But they won't be smuggling people anymore, and that's a big plus for us all. There will be challenges -- language, tax cheating, health care, education -- but we're already dealing with all of those, badly. They'll be more easily handled when the people involved aren't classed as criminals.

The businesses that have benefited from unfair compensation will have to find new ways to get by, and the fearmongers will have to find a new boogeyman to scare us with. We win. Show me the downside.

The hard part is getting past the core fear of The Other. Americans are not much different from any other group in that we identify as a group only when faced with people in other groups. For this to ever work, and if we're to ever resolve the "immigration" issue, we have to get past that irrational fear and start seeing not scary invaders but ordinary people, just like us, living in different circumstances but with the same human values.