Editorial: Not the way to analyze teachers

In another deadly fail, the hapless Courier headline writer inadvertently warns the reader correctly about the content of today's editorial.

Our "local, local, local"-ly focused Courier editor sees something on his teevee about a proposal for teacher performance evaluations in New York City, and through some trick of logic (or lack of a better idea) decides it's relevant to his readers. I suspect it's just because the teachers union doesn't like it, and the editor likes pretty much anything a union doesn't.

Two things about this piece stand out for me: the editor's disdain for teachers, and an inflated image of his own competence in judging their expertise.

The editor wants to see teacher "ratings," simple labels he can use to determine whether a teacher is "deserving" or "undeserving." He calls this "transparency," even as he runs down a few of the ways such systems can do more to obscure than elucidate. He imagines that with public pressure based on ratings, "Deserving teachers get raises. Undeserving teachers get fired or reassigned."

Out here in the reality-based community, even the best teachers get little more respect in their profession than fast-food counter workers, and similar pay. They're expected to fill out acres of state- and federally-mandated paperwork daily, make unpaid time for regular required "trainings," pay for their own continuing education as well as classroom supplies to support the curriculum, and in their small slices of remaining time turn your spoiled little monster into a model citizen this week.

Now you want them to wear ratings on their chests so that parents can decide they know who's a good teacher and who isn't. That sounds to me like a great way to quickly drive more smart, self-respecting people right out of the profession.

At some point we have to realize that there is no single most effective way to teach anybody anything, and that each unique individual teacher has her own strengths, just as each student has his. What every parent wants is to find the teacher that will do the best job with her own kid right now, and that depends entirely on how those two personalities interact. It's not something you can possibly rate with a number or statistics. The highest-rated teacher in the world won't necessarily be able to reach your kid.

If we hope to be more effective at educating our young people, what we really need to do is turn the whole argument on its head. If you haven't done it yourself professionally, don't presume to judge a highly skilled and artful job. Find ways to help rather than hinder, and stop treating teachers as if they're trying to hurt your kid just because they're better informed than you are. Stop being suspicious of the teachers, instead start being suspicious of ourselves and demand that we're providing as much support and respect for this vital profession as we can. That attracts better people to the job, and that makes better teachers.

Editorial: Mixed bag of prop endorsements

Editorial endorsements of election issues and candidates are a very old tradition in the press, so much a part of public dialogue that a paper pretty much has to do them. Given the unusual length of this year's proposition list and the Courier's 750-word editorial block, there's not a enough room to build cogent arguments for these endorsements in a single column. Since the unnamed Courier editor didn't spread the topics out to provide the space to be clear, this quickie crib sheet from Sunday tells me that he didn't really have his heart in the job. It's like he sent out an email to his people asking for a show of hands on the issues, then dashed this off during his coffee break. Such treatment doesn't demonstrate much respect for the electorate, his readers, or his own job.

In any case, let's run down the editor's text-bite arguments. There are a couple of unexpected positions.

On 106, the editor says, "we believe 'choice' is important" and so votes yes, which tells me that he's bought into the doublespeak on a measure designed specifically to prevent the choice of government-backed health-care. No surprise here.

107 gets an editorial no vote because "discrimination still exists," demonstrating that the editor is still capable of grasping the obvious, which on this issue surprises me.

Another surprise is the no vote on 109, the constitutional right to slaughter defenseless animals for fun. This is the best evidence yet that Ben Hansen has left the building.

It appears that no one in the state has much problem with 110, involving state land swaps and military reservations, or 112, moving back the deadline for initiative filings, and neither does the editor.

The Courier likes 111, creating a lieutenant governor and joint ticketing of gubernatorial candidates. No surprise, it's easy to miss the negatives here.

The yes vote on 113 is another case of parroting the propaganda, this time against one of the editor's favorite bugbears, labor unions. Expected.

As one commenter pointed out, many readers will be aghast to see the editor endorse 203, the medical marijuana system. I'm not quite so surprised, given the editor's libertarian posturings, that we've passed this out before, and that there's been negligible negative effects in other states that are doing it. Many Republicans can smell the money involved as well.

The editor's negative reaction to 402, citing fear of a "trash monopoly," indicates that he doesn't understand the measure. Again, libertarian thinking plus ignorance equals reactionary bunk. But the City deserves this reaction for its laziness about explaining itself. You can't expect the editor of a local daily paper to actually go and ask a question, after all.

The editor's reaction to 403, the residency requirement for ballot eligibility, shows that parochialism trumps libertarianism in the editorial suite. No surprise.

404-409 all codify practices that already exist or should have existed, so the editor, as a good conservative, passes them all out without thinking much about them. Again, no surprises.

You can see my full take on all the measures here and here.

It may be that the editor feels little need to speak about these issues on the op-ed page because he's done most of his editorializing on these issues in the news pages, via sneaky characterizing headlines and the injection of irrelevancies and misleading propaganda in quotes.

What most interests me about this piece is the editor's reference to the Courier Editorial Board, which as I've said before is most likely the thing on which Tim makes his sandwiches. No one who regularly reads the editorials with half a brain can sincerely believe that a real board process guides editorials on a daily basis. I think it could, and it should, and the editor who writes them up could be a lot more careful with the product.

If there is a genuine process behind the decisions described in this piece and in general for determining editorial positions, the Courier editors would do well to name names and describe it in detail, thereby setting up a contract with readers that the process will be handled with integrity. Own it publicly, editor, and it will make you better at your job.

Editor hates babies too, but knows it's a waste of time

The unnamed Courier editor doesn't have a problem with the logic of denying birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants, citing the myth of "monumental costs" to society to support illegals and those children (who as citizens are as entitled to public services as regular white folk). He just doesn't think it can work legally.

The editor utterly fails to see that the phony "immigration" issue, including this push by the far right to punish children for the status of their parents, is nothing more than a strategy to win elections. These candidates don't hold any delusions about following through on their rhetoric, they know it won't hold up legally. They just know that if you get people scared and angry enough, you'll win the power game.

It would be so refreshing to see an occasional editorial that looks beyond the current teevee narrative to consider the real costs of what too many politicians and public pundits are saying. Please, editor, try to give these issues some genuine hard thought before you sit down to dash off another 300 words.

PS: "Ditch drive"? What's that supposed to mean?

Gosar backs out of today's TV debate

It's no surprise that Mr Gosar ducked another debate. It seems to be a theme for the extremists this cycle. What's surprising is that if I'm reading correctly between the lines here, the Courier is genuinely miffed about it.

It could have been a simple three-line item stating that the candidate had canceled the event, but Joanna's story on the withdrawal of the millionaire tax-dodging dentist from a high-profile debate on KAET at the last minute includes a fair amount of "context" that's just short of snarky. The subtext accuses the candidate of hypocrisy and disdain for the press.

Many of these radical-right candidates clearly decided early on to follow the Palin strategy of playing for home-court advantage, counting on the idea that voters are so angry with the Dems that they don't need to do anything to win but stay out of trouble. I have hope that once the ballots are counted this will prove less successful than they imagine.

But it's amusing that the Courier is taking umbrage at this point. Just look at the smug smirk on Gosar's official campaign photo. These candidates have been thumbing their noses at responsible public dialogue from the beginning, and the paper should have been on that long ago. Having given them a free pass for months, getting irritated about it now, with voting already under way, just looks self-centered and petty.

If the editors are genuinely surprised that the candidate is giving them and the voters the finger, it would be more on point to say so bluntly in an editorial than to waste ink on subtle implications in the news pages.

Maybe the editors fear damaging their cozy relationship with the Republican establishment. If that's the case, someone has to tell them that the rules have changed, and now if you're not a shameless and open booster of the TeaBirchers, you're their enemy.

Lawmakers prepare legislation to deny citizenship for anchor babies

Once again the editors tip their racist hand with this headline. Using the framing and terminology of extremism shows the careful reader that you're in bed with extremists. (Notice that "anchor babies" does not appear anywhere in this AP story.)

What the editors should have added is that Senator Pearce is the leading contender to be Senate President for the next two years and likely longer. Not only will this hateful extremist continue peddling his bile, most of which will be thrown out by the courts after long and expensive litigation, he will be setting and enforcing the agenda for the entire Legislature. We're facing an ugly future here.

Shilling for gangsters, editor plays blame game

Today the unnamed Courier editor, ever the amateur economic policy wonk, blames the Obama administration for aggravating the negative effects of recession by "vilifying" the national Chamber of Commerce. Apparently the Chamber is so sensitive to criticism that it is withholding economic prosperity from its members to assuage its own hurt feelings. If that makes sense to you, what follows probably won't.

At issue is the President's assertion that foreign money is helping fund the Chamber's unprecedented spending against Democrats in this election cycle. No one disputes that this is true, including Factcheck.org, which the editor cites as refuting it. Factcheck says that "no evidence has been presented to prove" that the money goes into campaign media, but since the money is going into the Chamber's general fund and the campaign money is coming out of it, that's weak beer. Read the investigative results here.

No one is claiming that what the Chamber is doing is illegal, as the editor wrongly implies. The editor also claims that attention to the Chamber's funding sources is a "smokescreen" to somehow make us forget about high unemployment and "meager economic growth on the Democrats' watch," implying Democrat culpability for eight years of Republicans driving our economy into the ground. This must be how it is in the editor's looking-glass world, because as far as I can see it's completely divorced from reality.

The editor somehow missed that serious Republicans are also asking that the Chamber disclose its funders or undergo FEC audit, and that whole Chamber chapters are quitting in protest.

But the editor's right that the issue of foreign money isn't a huge deal in the greater scheme. What he's not seeing is that the traditionally non-partisan Chamber is using it and a whole lot more to fund a $75-million anti-Dem campaign. This is a challenge that cannot go unanswered.

The editor puts on his concern-troll hat and warns that the government might look like it's anti-business for saying bad things about the Chamber. Given that the President has bent over backward to be pro-business for nearly two years, bailing out big companies that didn't deserve it, reducing taxes and holding off on repairing the regulatory ruin left by the Bush administration, the more pertinent question is why business is being so anti-government.

I'm certain that Dem political strategists aren't concerned about Obama appearing to be anti-business at this point. The voters who respond to that meme are so deep in the other camp that they won't be moved by anything. The challenge for Dems this year is getting demoralized Dem voters to come out again and hold back the midterm tide.

Right now the media narrative holds that the Rs will sweep the Congress on the basis of "voter anger" over better, cheaper healthcare coverage and 10% unemployment instead of 18%. If that comes to pass, we can look forward to several years of even worse governmental paralysis as the American Taliban reasserts itself to do nothing but make things worse. Why is Big Business betting heavily on that future?

Have you noticed how the Mexican drug gangs have made their world safe for profits? They've taken over the government, creating their own fiefdoms and installing their own legal structure in the form of owned police and judges, freeing them from interference by the forces of public interest. It's not that different here, and that's exactly what the Chamber and its big-business members are trying to do. As we give away our power to regulate business for the public good, we fall further into gangster capitalism. That's not a world you want to live in, I don't care how libertarian you think you are.

Editorial: Elks' history, future are better than present

I've been writing about the Elks Theatre* and the poor management decisions related to it for many years, so it's no surprise to me that it's in the ditch again.

I was one of the people responsible for convincing the City to take it over from the foundation that had been running it into the ground for a couple of decades, and I don't regret that decision. Unfortunately the City stopped listening to us after the first line of the pitch, and didn't absorb the intelligence we presented: that once acquired, in order to be viable and work as an asset to the City, it would require separation from the general fund and professional management with operational and capital autonomy. We (PAAHC) recommended a nonprofit model in which the City would own the building (bought back for $1) and provide only backup financial security and logistical help, while the nonprofit would handle fundraising, renovations and operations.

Instead the City chose to try to run it alternately like a public department and an ordinary business, applying minimum funding and hamhanded decision-making in both capital and management functions. After several years of operation under the Parks and Rec Department, City Manager Steve Norwood eventually placed it in the hands of his Administrative Services director, former retaurateur Mic Fenech. The results have been predictably disastrous, culminating in the indignities of the past couple of weeks.

I've met and worked with Dawn Castaneda, and while I can't say with any authority whether she was pilfering the cookie jar, I have strong doubts. I've dealt with Mic Fenech, and I know the man is not to be trusted. You can take it from there.

Today's editorial glorifies the ancient history of the building and the recent success in making it a pretty museum piece, while completely glossing over the awful management decisions that have made it a continuing failure as a working City asset. Where is the demand for accountability that we should be able to expect from our only local daily? Heads should roll over this, and the responsibility goes all the way to the top.

Yes, editor, "capable hands" should be running the Elks operation now, as they should have done from the beginning, but you fail to inform your readers on what "capable" means in this case.

A capable management team for a theatre of this size is at least a full-time house manager and a full-time technical director. The house manager runs booking, marketing and audience-related operations. The technical director runs stage operations and plant maintenance. Both are separate and specialized skill sets, perfectly able to get decent pay, so we can't cheap out. We'll also have to give them a capital account and an operational budget to run on their own, and not expect to see anything like break-even for four or five years. With the capital budget they will have to do a lot of serious improvements to the stage facilities and equipment to bring the theatre up to something like modern standards to support today's contract riders, or you can forget seeing professional acts on that stage. The City needs to reduce expectations, be the sugar daddy and just get out of the way while professionals do what they can to clean up the mess the City has been making. Pretty seats do almost nothing for the bottom line, I'm afraid.

This matters to Prescott in general because the theatre could be one of the primary drivers of downtown foot traffic and related spending, as well as a regional draw and quality-of-life asset for all of us. The City has to stop goofing around with it and take it seriously, or put it in the hands of someone who will.

*: Is not, never has been and never could be an opera house.

Don't listen

You'll be hearing lots of silly stuff in the media in the last weeks before the election. Just don't listen, or at least take it all as light entertainment. Terry Goddard is not gay, and Jan Brewer is perfectly capable of horrifying public brain farts without drinking, drugs or a stroke.

Jorge Garcia dies

The Capitol Times is reporting this morning that Corporation Commission candidate Jorge Garcia has died suddenly.

City issues, etc.

In case you didn't notice, I've completed my take on all the issues on the ballot in the pages on the sidebar at left. (Excepting judges, since voting will have no effect on those.) Choose from the list under "Election Issues and Candidates."

Q&A with John McCain, Rodney Glassman

Take a good look at the first question here:

How much do you think government should be involved in the creation of jobs? What would you promote to inspire entrepreneurship and small business development rather than government-created jobs? What are your thoughts about the outsourcing of jobs to other countries?

The subtext here is clearly that government jobs are less desirable than private-sector jobs, piling on with the Courier's long-held position that government is bad. Here's the thing -- a person producing value through labor is just as valuable in either sector, perhaps more so in the public sector, where there are no profits escaping into the ether. The properly neutral (unrigged) question would have been:

What do you believe is the best strategy for creating and supporting good jobs for Americans?

This is a great example of how editorial bias can subtly slant a story. It's no surprise to any reader here that the Courier favors Grampy McCrankypants. I'm just fascinated by the how.

Cookies for the editor

Tim merits a cookie for today's op-ed page overall.

The editorial decries harassment by radical religionists of the families of gay soldiers at funerals as morally indefensible (I'll add that it's anti-Christian), but doesn't cross the line to advocate suppression of their right to speech, leaving that for the court to sort out. It's hard to find the line between competing rights, and the editor wisely keeps both feet on the ground and out of his mouth.

Tim's Friday column debunks a common hatemail circulating among right-wingers, even citing Snopes.com, and calls for reasoned thought.

Finally there's the cartoon, which for once is fact-based and warns against right-wing extremism.

Enjoy, Tim!

The vote is on

I hear that some voters have already received their early ballots, so the election is under way. I've been working on my notes on the candidates and initiatives, and I'll be posting those over the next few days as separate pages, accessed on the sidebar at left. I'm flattered and humbled that some of you think my opinions are useful, and I want you to know that I take these endorsements seriously.

I'll add pages as they happen.

Update, Wednesday: Finished, finally!

Something like a debate

I'm not wild about linking to a Fox video, but it's pretty much all we're likely to get this month in terms of one-on-one between Goddard and Brewer.

White America has Lost Its Mind

Fun piece in today's Village Voice.

You will vote

For anyone reading this blog who's thinking of skipping the vote this time, I'm invoking my Rasputin-like liberal thought-control. For the rest of you, don't look!



Listen to my voice ... you are slowly waking up ... you're almost awake now ... you're coming out if it ... now you're fully awake and you realize just how awful things could become if we let the nutbars win.

Make sure you're registered at your current address BEFORE MONDAY. Then vote. I recommend asking for an early ballot, so there's less chance something goes wrong to keep you away from the polls.

If you haven't had time or inclination to do your homework, I'll be writing about the candidates and propositions in the coming week. Stay tuned.

Mayor leans on commenter

Cindy's story today describes official fallout from last week's story on the old Antelope Hills clubhouse boondoggle and comments thereto. Specifically, PAAHC Exec Director Deb Thurston commented critically, and the Mayor summoned her to a meeting with him, Councilman Lamerson and the new tourism director to 'splain things to her.

During nine years as a director and chairman of PCAC Inc., a City-funded nonprofit, I carefully kept my mouth shut about most of the corruption and incompetence I dealt with almost daily in City Hall to protect the organization. I also did a three-year term on the PAAHC board, which has taken more than its share of abuse by Council over the years, and I have some familiarity with the terrain here.

So I fully understand Thurston's frustration over the issue as she watches arts funding diminish, and I admire her pluck in standing up to publicly call the City on its decisions. I'm sure many readers will find it appalling that the Council and City staff think they can push people around in this way, but be assured that this goes on in more subtle ways all the time. There's a culture of entitlement and authoritarianism in City Hall that runs deep, and even Sam Steiger couldn't crack it. With the exception of Councilwoman Lopas, the current Council members are all enthusiastic participants in that culture.

While there may be backlash against her organization, which Council has been steadily starving out for years anyway, this treatment by the Mayor confirms that speaking out publicly and, most important, using your real name in comments can have strong effect on public issues in Prescott.

So thumbs up to Deb Thurston, but don't let her stand alone in the heat. Keep up the pressure, and keep commenting.

State: Case of Arizona deputy's shooting reopened

This AP story details followup on the claims of a Pinal Co deputy that he was jumped and shot by pot smugglers in the desert. Apparently there's some doubt about his veracity in this matter.

The story leaves out what may be an important factor. The deputy's boss is Sheriff Paul Babeau, who's been doing a lot of grandstanding about the new anti-Mexican law, lining up directly behind Joe Arpaio and running for reelection on the issue. The deputy's quite possibly self-inflicted bullet wound has put the sheriff on national TV and got him miles of ink in the local papers.

No one likes to think that a law-enforcement professional might do anything so corrupt and craven as to fabricate evidence to whip up hysteria and win an election. But we always have to bear in mind that any group of humans includes a small proportion of people who are self-absorbed, greedy and evil, so vigilance and caution are called for whenever someone benefits hugely from "happenstance."

Rock concert benefits fallen officers

Speaking as a working musician, this press announcement raises concern.

Recently we've seen a several local benefits for the families of the Camp Verde corrections officers killed on 69. Now another pops up for more general benefit to cops. But there are a couple of odd things about it.

This "benefit" at Moc's will distribute only 15% to the charity (a statewide aid org for cops and firefighters, with little local presence), and the "promoter" listed here apparently doesn't have a Website.

I've done benefits that held back outlay costs, but never on a percentage basis. If you're doing a benefit, you want to minimize costs and furnish every possible penny to the charity. Musicians usually do this sort of thing for free.

This smells like a fly-by-night operation trying to make a few bucks using the generosity of our community as a marketing tool, so I'd advise prospective patrons to ask questions ahead of the gig.

Followup, 7pm: In the comments, the promoter invites the public to call him to ask just the sort of question I had in mind. Have at it: 928-499-4116.

Editorial: Public education needs transparent accountability

The unnamed Courier editor pushes his professorial eyeglasses down his nose and snores, "Have we let our universities become sacred cows?" Who is he hoping to kid?

Conservatives love to beat up on public schools, whether it's teachers unions indoctrinating first-graders with proletarian class rage, textbooks that don't give quite enough preference to superstitious drivel or the heroic struggle of the Confederacy, or public universities stamping out commie elitists like Xmas cookies. It's a conditioned reflex: say "public education" and a good conservative will always burp out some form of "socialist boondoggle." This goes back to the invention of public education, when people decided they'd prefer to tax themselves for an education system to build informed citizens rather than suffer with the one provided by the churches to frighten children and build good little tithers.

Conservatives love "accountability," which in real terms usually means blaming employees for the decisions made at the top. In Arizona's case the big decision is decades of underfunding our schools, and the big lie is blaming teachers for the results.

Here the editor urges the reader to keep an eye on the Board of Regents to make sure that our public universities don't cost the student too much. Sounds great until you realize that the Board of Regents has almost no control over that in real-world terms. The people controlling tuition prices are our state legislators in the budget process, when they determine the base funding of the universities every year, and they've been doing everything they can to divert public funds away from the universities. In their reelection appeals they won't tell you that they raised your kids' tuition, rather they'll brag (and lie) about "balancing the budget" and obfuscate about how they just transferred the real costs of government to the schools, counties, cities and towns, which have little choice but to shut up and deal with it in usually vain hope of avoiding worse treatment next year.

So if the editor is truly worried about the rising cost of public tuition, he should be asking pointed questions of Arizona's legislative majority leadership, particularly Senate whip Steve Pierce and House whip Andy Tobin. As should readers.

For politics junkies

For readers who care about the details of how things are shaking out nationally for the general election, I recommend Electoral-vote.com, which monitors polling and provides an interactive map of state races as well as daily news for political geeks. It's mastered by an academic statistician and it's been operating since the 2004 cycle.

Elks Opera House shake-up prompts city investigation

Cindy's story on the blow-up at the Elks Theatre* carries about a quarter of what's circulating in the theatre community, and some of the 'facts' presented are in dispute. Tip: Dawn Castaneda is not necessarily the target of the City's legal "investigations," despite the implication in the story. If there's any justice in this process, Mic Fenech has some 'splaining to do.

(He's the Director of Administrative Services, a mini-empire created by Norwood just for him some years ago. It appears an editing error cut out his first reference.)

I love that the City Manager is quoted as commenting on a personnel matter, then says that City officials do not comment on personnel matters. This is just the sort of snaky/incompetent move that drives so many people crazy in dealing with Norwood.

As background, Castaneda had taken on a job that paid a part-time salary for the work of what would normally be five skilled full-timers. Everyone who's seen the RFP on the job and knows anything about theatre management agrees it's an awful deal that sets the employee up for failure. City staff has been living in la-la land for years about the theatre's revenue possibilities, and no one in City Hall has a clue about how theatres are managed since Bob Bell left the building.

*: Is not, never has been and never could be an opera house.

Editorial: What does future hold for fairgrounds?

Today the unnamed Courier editor uses the editorial space to give us a vague and lazy retrospective of years of failure at the Fairgrounds and advocate:

Nothing.

No solutions, no ideas, not much beyond a limp interest in the outcome. Great, editor, so you know all this stuff. Who has good ideas? What do we do about this mess? When can we expect real change? Where is the money gonna come from? And above all, why should we care, either about the fairgrounds as a facility for -- what exactly? -- or the editorial column while you're so ignominiously wasting it?

(Personally, I think we ought to turn the whole thing over to the Tea Party crowd. They're a great fit for the conditions out there -- constant hot wind blowing up chaff, with monster trucks.)

This use of the editorial box for personal windbaggery has just got to stop. It clearly indicates an impacted, self-referencing culture in the Courier editorial offices that readers can smell on every page. If you want your staff to step up and readers to rely on you, editor, you're gonna have to take your own responsibilities more seriously. Get someone in the room with you who's not afraid to tell you that your column isn't up to pro standards, listen to them and do the work.

Wish I'd written this

Gene Weingarten in WaPo:

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

Read the rest.

Tip: Trouble at the Elks

I got some inside skinny today on a conflict between staff and management at the Elks Theatre over just the issues I've been warning about for years. I'll be looking for a news story in tonight's Courier deadline dump.

Tim bobs and weaves on comments

Here's a good example of my experience in asking for reasonable treatment of Courier readers:

Q: * I'm still waiting to hear why you do not post all comments submitted on articles. I've talked to many people who have submitted comments only to never have them appear. I would think that a newspaper would believe in Freedom of Speech...

A: Editor Tim Wiederaenders answered: We try to post all comments that do not violate our Terms of Use agreement for the site. The Use of Service states, "If you use the Service ... you agree to abide by and be bound by the following:

1. You may not post, upload, or transmit any material or links to material that is libelous, defamatory, false, misleading, obscene, indecent, lewd, pornographic, violent, abusive, threatening, harassing, discriminatory, racist, vulgar, invasive of another’s privacy, illegal, constitutes hate speech, or harms minors in any way. You may not post content that degrades others on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual preference, disability or other classification. Epithets and other language intended to intimidate or to incite violence will not be tolerated. Debate, but don’t attack. The Daily Courier encourages vibrant discussions and welcomes active debate in its discussion forums. But personal attacks are not tolerated, and are a direct violation of these Terms of Use."

To include as many comments as possible, we try to edit out the offending parts, but some comments are beyond help. We try to e-mail the people who post such comments, but their e-mail addresses are not always valid. If you have further questions about this, please call me at 928-445-3333, ext. 1095. Thank you.

Well, Tim, my personal, direct experience has included comments that are at least as compliant as others you routinely post being edited arbitrarily and simply disappearing without notice and without any attempt to contact me by Courier staff. I have read similar complaints by many other reliable commenters. Your response to this question is blatant hooey to anyone who's been doing this more than a couple of weeks, and I guarantee nobody's buying it any more than I am.

I maintain this blog as a safe place to speak for myself and for other readers. I recommend that commenters compose comments offline and keep copies for reference, including the day and time you upload them to the Courier. If your comment goes missing or is edited unfairly, I'm happy to host it here (subject to my own comments policy, at left) and call the editors on their behavior.

What would help build credibility on this issue is if the Courier appended the comments policy with a statement promising fair dealing, direct notification for the user and explanations of edits (seeking permission) and deletions, and editorial-side compliance with the policy banning personal attack, including user-on-user attacks. Everything's being handled far too capriciously as it stands.

PS, Sunday: A questioner asks about online content vs print.

"A: The printed Courier will always contain more by it's very nature."

There's no diverting the blame for this one, the Q&A section is clearly marked as written by the Courier editors. Pardon my geekiness, but an editor who doesn't know the difference between the possessive and the contraction, or who can't see it in his/her own copy, should be interning, not editing.

Editorial: Measures should stand on their own

Today the unnamed Courier editor condemns Congress for using longstanding standard procedures in an attempt to push through legislation that's favored by clear majorities of Americans.

The practice of using must-pass bills to carry other legislation goes back decades, and is a common tactic, made more so since the Republicans decided to start filibustering everything. I didn't see the editor complaining when the Rs have used it, but suddenly it's an issue for him. Why?

Could it be that he's more concerned that these bits of popular legislation might actually pass into law, fulfilling the promise of majority rule? Heaven forfend!

We'd all be better served if the editor would man up and just say that he wants to enforce exceptions on civil rights for homosexuals, reduce available manpower for the armed forces, and punish children for the sins of their parents and prevent them from becoming fully productive in the only country they know. These crocodile tears over Senate rules aren't fooling anyone.

For the record I would agree absolutely with the editor about eliminating bill riders if he would also accept the abolition of the other legislative rules that senselessly impede progress, like filibusters, imperial chairmanships and secret holds. Our state legislature is similarly bound by rules that ensure dictatorial powers for majority leadership. If voters in general knew the whole megillah on the nonsense that goes on as a result of ridiculous rules, there would be torches and pitchforks.

But bitching about a rule that just happens to not favor your minority argument at this particular juncture is childish, editor.

Editorial: Recession is over, but stress is not

If you haven't heard the recession is over, you probably don't read economic news and probably aren't real clear on what "recession" actually means. Most people think it's a synonym for "hard times." This widespread misunderstanding is the entire basis for a whole lot of snarky punditry as well as this editorial. It would help to try to educate on this, assuming the editor understands it himself.

At left is a graph from Japan's "lost decade," which many smart economists see as an example of what we're likely to experience here. This is not your ordinary recession. More on recession types here. Note that the recession is "over" when the numbers turn up again (1993), not when they return to positive territory (still hasn't happened). It's really pretty simple.

As far as the editorial goes, who can disagree that we don't accomplish much by "arguing and blaming each other"? But that's not the editor's real aim. See, once we're coming out of active crisis mode, people naturally start looking around for the factors that caused the crisis, hoping to learn and do better next time.

The editor's "arguing and blaming" is code for what most people see as reasonable research and learning from mistakes. That would be bad for the editor, who's been an unabashed cheerleader for the massive policy mistakes that brought us to this pass: deregulation, profit first, converting personal savings and mortgages to gambling stakes on Wall Street, "free trade" that outsources jobs, crippling public education, defunding government services, ridiculous reductions in taxes on the rich and large corporations, and not least by any means, terrible warmongering.

These errors in judgment and failures of sense will keep us in the economic doldrums for another eight or ten years, if the history of previous structural downturns is a useful guide, and at war with the millions of enemies we've created for generations. But the editor would prefer that we forget about them, not quibble about who was right and who was wrong, just face the future shoulder-to-shoulder and keep digging.

It is vitally important as we approach the midterm election that voters stay engaged and ask serious questions about why we're here and how the candidates intend to apply themselves to rebuilding our economic base, employment and retirement security. Dumping our experience down the memory hole will only ensure a continuing status quo that's bad for everyone but ideological peacocks and the very rich.

Editorial: It's lion territory: what do you do?

The unnamed Courier editor tries to educate the reader about what to do in the vanishingly small chance of a personal encounter with a cougar. Fine, but it should have contained authoritative quotes rather than bald personal assertions, and it should have been a sidebar to the Friday story, not an editorial three days later.

What this shows is a lack of ideas for editorials within the Courier's famed "editorial board," which I'm daily more convinced is actually a piece of wood on which the editor makes sandwiches.

Amster: Brewer brings only embarrassment

Randall's back after a hiatus of a few months, and going after the slo-mo train wreck that is our Accidental Governor. While I'm happy to agree with him that electing Ms Brewer to the job for four more years would be a very bad move, we're not gonna get any other result if we're loose with the truth.

Randall writes, "During Brewer's tenure, Arizona has moved to the bottom of the charts in education, health care, and economic vitality." Blaming her for any of this is simply unfair. Our Legislature has been working hard to spiral us in on all these measures for many years, and if anything we were headed for even worse until Brewer intervened with her own budget late in the session this year. (I won't give her credit for the budget, though, that's her staff, and it was still truly awful.) The Legislature would have slashed education funding further by an order of magnitude and sold off most of our parks and public buildings to boot. The economy is a macro problem that the Legislature aggravated by its failure to address our idiotic revenue structure. Blame Brewer for failure of ideas and failure of leadership, but not for the failures of others.

You can blame her for signing 1070 (which Gov Napolitano vetoed several times), but not for making Arizona a national embarrassment over it. That was a big team effort, including Sen Russell Pearce (currently a favorite for Senate President, be afraid), Sheriff Joe Arpaio, nutbars like Chris Simcox, the Corrections Corporation of America and many others. Brewer was essentially the bystander who gets to answer the media questions. Blame her for failure to stop it, don't give her credit for driving it.

What really ropes me off is Randall bending over backward to blame Dems in a misguided attempt at "balance" (or did the editors stick this in?): "Janet Napolitano didn't exactly leave us in an enviable financial position, nor has she been proactive in managing the border situation that has so many people up in arms." We would certainly have been far better off if Gov Napolitano had been able to get her own policies implemented by Legislatures full of hostile and idea-free Rs, but blaming her for their policies is wrong. As for the border, as I recall it she did everything legally within her power to increase border security and bring federal attention to the issue here. That Rs are willing to pursue illegal means does not make them better at it. "Brewer's gubernatorial opponent, Terry Goddard, has likewise been mostly missing in action during his tenure as Attorney General." By what measure, Randall? As I recall Mr Goddard has done more than any other state official to reduce cross-border traffic in guns, drugs and cash, and crime in our state is down substantially since he took office, due to several factors including the quality of our law enforcement efforts and policies -- set by Mr Goddard and Ms Napolitano before him..

Even in calling Brewer out, Randall has trouble getting it right. He writes that she "capitulated to extremists" over immigration and ethnic studes, but "capitulated" implies resistance. No, she was a partisan there from the get-go. "Cooperated" would be more descriptive, in the sense that she arranged the cookies while the principals wrote the bills.

Yes, Brewer is a disaster in the past and in our future if we don't wake up and get moving. But her critics have all the good ammo in the world and no need to resort to the sort of mischaracterizations and misdirections so emblematic of the right. If the left can't write clear, honest critiques, why should anyone trust us more than them?

Here's that opening statement again, just in case you missed it:

Country music legend inducted into Hall of Fame

The Greater Arizona Country-Western/Swing Music Association (an obscure org with a dormant Myspace page, the website is dead) inducts Ray Gardner into its Hall of Fame, but Bruce didn't get around to asking the association why they chose him, and gives no credits for Mr Gardner other than the Prescott Playboys, a truly awful local band (sorry, guys). Instead we get some sketchy biographical notes and a misspelling of Willcox. Sure, it's cool that an old guy is still playing music, but that's not enough for a news story, guys.

Better to run down Rob Carey, who recently parked his cornet under the bed after a seven-decade career, and ask him about all the truly great music he's been in on.

Casserly: Another flying-monkey takedown!

I was planning to simply ignore JJ's patthetic partisan rant today, but the extensive fact-checking and cogent rebuttals in the comments make this piece worth reading. This is exactly the sort of reader response that makes best use of the online model for newspapers -- instant accountability, clear and insightful responses from different, authoritative angles that help readers sort the wheat from the chaff. I hope JJ is reading them and reconsidering the joys of a quiet retirement. Big props to the commenters, you made my day.

Missing the point

In today's editorial the unnamed Courier editor lends support to the City Council's decision to hire a consultancy as expert witness in legal action over the Demerse St improvement debacle. The editor misses the crux of the issue completely and simultaneously from two angles.

The argument between the City and the contractor hinges on whether the City specified the job properly in the bid process. The contractor says it found a million clams' worth of surprises under the street. The City responds that the contractor should have known about that before it committed to a price.

I don't know what was in the City spec for the RFP, but we can be pretty sure it was more detailed than "tear up this street from here to here, put in curbs and drainage, and pave it." Lots of commenters seem to think it was the bidders' responsibility to do underground surveys before bidding, but I have a feeling that getting useful information that way would likely cost a lot of time and money you can't get back, and here's a detailed City spec showing utility lines and at least a certain amount of geology. From my own experience, I know that opening up old work always brings surprises and overages that are hard to predict, and I imagine a company that does this for a living probably knows that too. So there's certain to be a lot more to the argument than the editor's dismissive, "To dig here and think you won't run into rock is naïve." It's really more a question of how wrong the City spec was about that rock.

The other aspect of this, and the one that sets people's hair on fire, is hearing that the City will be blowing another wad of cash the size of a house on an outside consultant. The editor agrees with the Council that the consultant will bring valuable information to the table for the City. But that's not what people are against. They and I believe that the City, being far and away the largest construction contractor in the City, should have this expertise in-house working for us every day, and it's outrageous that when we need someone who actually knows something about an issue so clearly part of a normal business day, no one working in City Hall can be trusted to carry the ball.

As I say all the time, at the end of the day voters care less about how much they pay in taxes than how much value they get in return. On this issue, the problem is that it looks like we're paying through the nose for a City legal department staffed with chumps and second-raters who are unequipped to handle a simple, predictable job. This will never win trust among taxpayers.

Graphs help

Editorial: GOP's gain offset by credibility loss

The commenters aren't seeing the forest for the trees here. This is the first example in my recollection of the unnamed Courier editor acknowledging and disavowing a Republican dirty trick. This is progress, people.

What the papers, including the Courier, all seem to have missed is that Steve May's recruiting fake Greens in LD17 might have helped him personally, but it could easily be part of the larger plan for knocking Harry Mitchell out of CD5 -- Tempe is the primary population center of both, Mitchell is considered vulnerable in November, and there's a lot at stake nationally. A lone Green on that ticket could draw out a few idealistic Green-only voters to dilute the whole Dem ticket. Notice that May quickly jumped lightly off the bus as if he were expecting it. If I were a reporter down there I'd be sniffing around for trails to the RNCC on this imbroglio. Not saying that there's any evidence (yet) that any national players were in on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if this traces back to Karl Rove and that crowd. It's their style.

PS, editors: Better brush up on further/farther.

Where's Randall?

I notice that Dr Amster hasn't turned in a column since June. Is this the end of the token local liberal on the op-ed page, or what? Anyone know?

Rare bird: An outside column worth reading

Tina Dupuy gets it spot-on in a widely carried column also available on HuffPo.

Editorial: High reward, low risk in Chino Valley

The headline is correct as far as it goes. It's far easier and smarter to build public transit system with a municipality than try to graft one on after the need becomes acute.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but Chino Valley is probably the least likely municipality in the area to make a success of public transit, because its large-lot platting and intermittent commercial strip spreads its population and businesses much more thinly.

The likely best result will be an infrequent short-bus schedule specialized for group-home seniors and maybe a few hospital workers, leaving out kids and general riders. There just won't be the money to support a system that residents more than a block away from 89 can practically use. That's not my idea of success. (And I can only imagine how quickly the calls will rise to scrap it all when the first bus gets involved in a collision on 89.)

This is the problem for mass transit everywhere in this country: underbuilding the system with lowball schedules and few destination options inevitably leads to underuse and hasty accusations of failure. Doing it right takes real vision and massive commitment, qualities I fear Americans at large and Arizonans in particular no longer value.

Chino Valley police making shift to hand-held e-Citations

A couple of points in this story should have merited followup questions.

"... citation information is ... stored in a central data base with Brazos, the company making the device's computer program ...." These are public records and must be handled securely and economically. Why is a private company doing this, and how much does it cost?

"... the money to pay for the devices will not come from the General Fund but rather a special improvement budget, much like a capital improvement item, bringing a return in revenue for the Town." How much money does the Town expect as a "return in revenue," and how does the Town assure residents that the new technology won't be used as a cash cow rather than enforcement tool? The Chino Valley PD has long carried a reputation for excessive enforcement. Will this get worse, or better?

Districts let teachers decide if they will air Obama's 2nd back-to-school speech Tuesday

Correction, Paula: the president's speech last year didn't cause controversy, at best it triggered controversy. Better writing would be "The president's first back-to-school speech in 2009, which encouraged students to study hard and stay in school, was the target of criticism by political opponents throughout the country, as well as locally."

The story infers that the "controversy" anticipating the speech was justified, when in reality it turned out to be idiotic once everyone heard what the President had to say. By writing it this way, the editors feed the sort of ridiculous flames we see in the comments.

Graphs help

Ezra Klein:

"From December 2007 to July 2009 – the last year of the Bush second term and the first six months of the Obama presidency, before his policies could affect the economy – private sector employment crashed from 115,574,000 jobs to 107,778,000 jobs. Employment continued to fall, however, for the next six months, reaching a low of 107,107,000 jobs in December of 2009. So, out of 8,467,000 private sector jobs lost in this dismal cycle, 7,796,000 of those jobs or 92 percent were lost on the Republicans’ watch or under the sway of their policies. Some 671,000 additional jobs were lost as the stimulus and other moves by the administration kicked in, but 630,000 jobs then came back in the following six months. The tally, to date: Mr. Obama can be held accountable for the net loss of 41,000 jobs (671,000 – 630,000), while the Republicans should be held responsible for the net losses of 7,796,000 jobs."

This should make you nervous

Kansas City Star:

J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi who recently began conducting heavily armed desert patrols in search of “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County, told The Kansas City Star that he was working on a proposal seeking state approval for his group, the U.S. Border Guard.
“I’m putting together a package and presenting it to the Arizona Legislature and saying, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and make the border rangers official, or completely reactivate the Arizona Rangers and we’ll work together,’” he said.
The Arizona Rangers were created in 1901 to protect the territory from outlaws and rustlers. The group was re-established in 1957.
But watchdog groups say Ready’s patrol illustrates why states should not sanction defense forces.
“We know that the neo-Nazis carry guns, but here’s an example of neo-Nazis with guns trying to position themselves to become an instrument of state policy,” said Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
...
Ready, a neo-Nazi, says his border guard includes heavily armed militias that search for “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County.
“We have fully automatic weapons — legally registered — grenade launchers, night vision, body armor,” he said. “We’re definitely going out there fully armed and equipped. When you’re going up against people with AK-47s and grenade launchers, you don’t want to go out there with a slingshot.”

Betcha we don't see anything about it in the Courier.

And why should we care, exactly?

Today the unnamed Courier editor takes a big chunk of the editorial page to write up a story about a coming labor action in pro football. Somehow I missed it, but apparently Prescott has a pro football team, so this is relevant to our area, and sports is way more important than I ever imagined, which is why this piece didn't go in the sports section.

I'll say it again: I was born without the sports gene, and I could not give a rat's ass about physical combat as entertainment. So I don't read that part of the paper. If you care, be my guest and write your own blog.

But what creeps in here is the editor's inability to pass an opportunity to bash unions. See, the editor loves democracy, and the editor is devoted to the idea of market mechanisms, but when individual workers come together to employ those principles for their own betterment, somehow that's a bad thing.

In this case he doesn't quite take a side in the labor dispute (which, I notice, won't come to a head for six months). Rather, he seems peeved that the players made a gesture that forced him to think about the issue for a second, delaying his enjoyment of the violence and threatening the editor with withdrawal from his violence habit next year.

Pity the poor editor, esconced in his Barcalounger, remote in hand and beer and chips at the ready, channel-surfing in vain for his favorite entertainment as one of the few remaining American unions with enough clout to meet its management in a fair fight tries to make its members a little richer through nonviolent negotiation. What a nightmare.

Psst, Tim: "Local, local, local," remember?

Our national bugbear: "States' rights"

Since the creation of the idea of the United States we've been plagued by conflict and tension between our "one nation, indivisible" ideal and our fascination for pointless distinctions to separate us from one another. Reactionaries have always exploited this distrust of the guy on the other side of the invisible line to divide Americans and gather power for themselves. Sunday's editorial is a clear example of how the idea of "states' rights" is used selectively to block or promote change according to what the speaker happens to want politically.

The unnamed Courier editor sets up what s/he sees as a clever dichotomy between SB1070 and state initiatives allowing wider use of marijuana, saying that the federal government is selectively asserting the primacy of federal law by opposing one and not the other. This amounts to pure right-wing talking points.

As one astute commenter put it, the difference is apples and oranges.

In the case of 1070, the state is trying to assert a right to preempt federal enforcement policy in an area clearly reserved to the federal government. The feds have no choice but to injunct this action, and they will.

With widely enacted medical marijuana initiatives and California's Prop 19, the states are repealing their own blanket prohibitions. They are explicitly not attempting to prevent the feds from enforcing federal law, that would be stupid and counterproductive. Rather they are saying that it's up to the federal government to do its own enforcing and they're out of it.

We've seen this process before. The New York legislature, having suffered exponential growth in smuggling and gang violence as well as a doubling of its federal prison population, was first to break the wall of Prohibition by calling for a Constitutional convention and refusing to enforce federal law, starting the cascade to repeal in 1933. Now Arizona and California are similarly suffering the brunt of the effects of prohibition, and it should be no surprise that sensible people are saying enough is enough.

Rather than the feds, the editor is trying to have it both ways in support of reactionary political groupthink, and is unashamed to employ disinformation in pursuit of those goals. Again, our community deserves better.

The smell test

I'll let you make the call on the Courier's front-page Sunday banner graphic with the Fann logo, related to a feature on the company's 50th anniversary. Was it:

* Toadying to a powerful, well-heeled potential advertiser/patron?
* A not-so-subtle free plug for the Karen Fann campaign?
* Incompetent naivete about its political effect?
* All of the above?

Remembering 9-11, appropriately

Susie Madrak:

The appropriate way to honor the people who died on 9/11 is to go on with your own life. And don’t turn on your teevee! Just don’t. Please. Don’t encourage them in pushing the myth of American exceptionalism, or the need to live your life as if we’re in the cross hairs, even if we are. (In fact, especially if we are.)

And I will feel exactly the same if – when – terrorists attack us again. I think they will. Working yourself into a paranoid frenzy in the meantime won’t change anything. And destroying our personal liberties and our way of life means that bin Laden is the one who really gets to say "Mission accomplished!"

Krugman: Things could be worse

Today's NYT op-ed by one of the world's most distinguished economists covers our economic dilemma from the perspective of Japan's parallel example starting in 1989. It's a worthwhile distillation of how policy choices affect a bust economy, lessons worth learning. It's also a stark warning that our votes this November will set direction for the near term, and that direction could be very much downward.

Editorial: Harsh consequences lead to better decisions

In which the unnamed Courier editor tries to play the tough-love mentor to teens about drugs. Have you ever read anything so fatuous?

Every reputable statistical and field study proves the headline's premise completely false. Punishment does not work. That's counterintuitive for most people, though, so we persist in treating drug abuse as a criminal problem.

I have a clue for you, editor: the cause of the recent "alarming number of juvenile drug arrests on Prescott Unified School District campuses" is not more kids doing drugs, it's more narcs in the schools. The results will be far more damage to the lives of the kids being arrested than they'd have experienced if we'd left them alone, and most of the the kids who haven't been caught will just get smarter about avoiding arrest, more loyal to the freak group and more alienated from community values and institutions.

Talking to kids like you're their dad is guaranteed only to make you look foolish, editor. One approach can help, and that's to speak clear, consistent truth about drugs. That starts with understanding the truth yourself. You don't.

Kids hear so many lies about drugs through their lives that the smart ones are naturally cynical about what adults have to say about them. Our crazy drug laws effectively prevent responsible adults from teaching kids how to handle and safely use illegal substances, so they generally learn from other kids who don't know. The results are predictable, with kids creating and maintaining myths of their own and learning everything the hardest way.

As long as ignorant, reactionary mythology about mind-altering substances drives otherwise sensible people into frenzies over drug use, many more kids will get involved with drugs than otherwise, with a broad range of motivations. The editor's pious admonishments based on that mythology just aggravate teenagers and reduce the paper's credibility further.

Casserly: It's high time to cut the fat

Now I'm completely convinced that JJ is a personal favorite of someone powerful at the Courier. The suddenly regular frequency of his columns, their general lack of content, the weird, scattershot writing and apparent absence of editors indicate a protected writer who's getting a paycheck as an indulgence. I'm afraid he's offering less value to readers than the wacky rants of Cal Thomas, and for me that's saying something. Waste of space, and an insult to the op-ed page.

Editorial: Getting on the same county page a challenge

The unnamed Courier editor seems more than a little distracted in today's editorial. We have the headline confusion, of course, but more telling is that the editor seems to have forgotten to write up the point s/he intended to make.

The piece starts out with the Board of Supes taking "no action" on a couple of infrastructure plans, and ends with an accusation that " the board members cannot seem to get beyond their turf wars and work together." In between the editor provides no justification for saying this. Very sloppy, and I'm sure it makes no friends among the Supes, who no doubt are being justifiably careful about capital plans right now.

On top of that, we get this little gem on the Sheriff's request for improvements at the jail: "The sally port, another name for a prisoner holding area, could hold as many as 80 prisoners awaiting their court hearings or trials." Clearly the editor misunderstood what the Sheriff was talking about and didn't bother to check the technicals.

"Sally port" is a very specific term referring to a passage through a fortification for troops to venture outward, and it's been adapted in the prison context to describe double-door passages for prisoner control. It's a door, not a room or enclosure or area. I imagine the Sheriff presented a plan for improvements to the prisoner holding area that include a double-door security passage, and I see with a quick Google search that at least one maker of security doors is using this fanciful term to describe its products.

The editor, as a communications professional, should have checked understanding of the term and then translated it into understandable parlance (e.g. "security passage") rather than apply a mystifying term like a kid showing off a shiny new toy.

Call the fouls

In today's editorial, the unnamed Courier editor calls for the right ideas, but in doing so contributes to the problem and ducks responsibility.

Yes, absolutely, we need representatives in government who will bury their egos and work together for the greater good. But the editor does us all a disservice by pretending to stand on the lofty mountaintop, saying both sides are equally at fault. It only takes one obstructionist to halt a negotiation, one criminal to steal your purse.

The primary constitutional responsibility of the press is to inform the voters so that we may make better decisions about what we want government to do and who we want to represent us in doing it. So when one party is trying to get something important done and the other is telling lies and obstructing that work only to gather more power, it's the editor's responsibility to tell us that.

Instead it's become the fashion for the commercial press to pump up the conflict and cast the contenders as equal in everything, like sports coverage. With no sustained interest in the integrity of the process, the ideas put forward or the real consequences of previous decisions, the only value left is who is winning the fight today. That's pro wrestling, not political analysis.

Here's the truth right now: the Republican minority in Congress is preventing the healing of our economy, the creation of vitally needed jobs and a sensible solution to our health-care disaster because they calculate that voters will blame the Democrats and vote for Republicans instead. Neither side can claim perfect integrity, but the Rs are playing a dirty game. At the state level, the Republican majority, which could easily be focusing on the state's economy and jobs for Arizonans, are instead cementing their hold on power by whipping up fear of Mexicans, without reference to truth or reality. All this is being covertly manipulated by very rich men for their own gain at the expense of the vast majority of us. None of this is conspiracy theory. All these statements have been extensively and carefully documented, and that reporting is easy to find. But the commercial press in the main will not tell you about it. It doesn't fit the narrative.

One factor in this is that people seem to prefer to hear sports coverage over boring old facts and careful analysis. I think that's chicken and egg -- they watch it because that's pretty much all there is to watch, and it molds expectations. The other, far more important factor is that the commercial press is owned lock, stock and smoking barrel by those large corporations whose political interests run counter to ours. The descent of news to where it's indistinguishable from entertainment is no accident.

The editor is one of the few people in our community who has the power to buck this trend and do some real good. He could bury his ego and his political agenda, and be the fair umpire dedicated to a clean game rather than the sports promoter trying to sell more tickets. But that requires watching the players closely and being unafraid to call the fouls. To do that fairly, he can't bet on the game. Passing over fouls by one team indicates the fix is in.

You're reading this blog, so you know all this and I'm preaching to the choir. But every day you talk to people who don't get this, and, lacking a trustworthy fourth estate, the respected word of one person to another is the only avenue left for communicating these things. Please, speak up.

Dirty Tricks

You need to know about this:
Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket

Update, Wednesday: Green Party files suit to stop them. (sub required)

Fox News: "Kirkpatrick for President!"

Debate: Governor Brewer's opening statement

Every Arizonan should see this performance. Repeatedly.



Update, 4pm: Take 2



And for those of you who are doing your homework, here's the full debate, sans snark.

Casserly: Court rulings complicate police work

Today's column by JJ reads like a pile of random notes from incomplete research for a story on local police work. It's a real test for the reader to figure out what points he intends to make. Perhaps he got off an a rant and sidetracked himself. In any case it's rambling and incoherent. The editors should not have let it go out like this.

Purcell: There's a Sucker Born Every Minute

I don't always look at the midweek outside columns (not on dcourier, sorry), as they're generally so predictable. This one fooled me.

Purcell goes on and on about his dumbass performance in selling a car. But rather than admonishment to readers to have more sense than a fence post in dealing with strangers, he winds up with a completely gratuitous and unsupported swipe at the President.

It just astounds me that any literate person, leave alone the editor of a newspaper, would lend any credence to this sort of thing. I don't care what political point of view it espouses, it informs no one and only aggravates public hostility. Bad choice, editors. Worse than Mike Reagan.

(Here's the column as carried in the Ironton Tribune.)

Editorial: Misplaced 'Days Past' feature

The unnamed Courier editor loves these paeans to wars past. And why not? They're so easy to write and so unlikely to draw criticism. What's next, a tribute to the heroes of the Spanish-American War? Give Jerry this stuff, it's a bit mouldy for the editorial page. For this, the first Barcalounger of the post-Hansen era. Waste of space.

Cartoon: Glass Recycling

Today's editorial cartoon twits the City staff for cutting off recycling service for the whole area. We've been talking about that here, too. Why is it that Flag and even Cottonwood can make it happen, but we can't? It's hard to believe there's anything at work here other than a lack of imagination and an excess zeal about making City services "profitable." Mr Norwood.

Perhaps the Courier would consider an investigation of this issue, including cash-flow numbers and exploration of options for the ground glass.

Rail service plan could start as far north as Prescott

Here's the money quote from the report: "It will not be possible to accommodate growth and avoid traffic congestion by improving roadways alone, . . .." Not possible. That's a pretty strong statement from a bureaucratic report, and I'm sure the planners would have qualified it if they could.

So all the commenters heaping scorn on the idea of a state rail corridor either don't understand the words in front of them or are happy to accept limits on growth and permanent traffic congestion.

Smart people have known this was coming for decades given AZ's growth-powered economy, of course. It's a big project that just gets bigger the longer we delay starting it. I'm glad the planners are thinking big, because it's the only way to create a system that will really work. No doubt the final report will recommend a phase-in starting with the corridor from Tucson to Sky Harbor and there'll be plenty of foot-dragging when the debate comes to starting the second phase. But for a dozen reasons this needs to be done, and I have little doubt that, barring a new Dark Ages, it will be done eventually.

What I don't get is why the report so far leaves out Williams. Failing to connect with Amtrak and Grand Canyon Railway at Williams (via Drake and Ash Fork) would be dead stupid, despite the expense.

PS: Thanks to whomever eventually corrected the headline fail in the original online version. Too bad about the print version, but at least the editors have discovered enough care about the product to correct where easy.

Park51 update: with friends like these ...

Newsweek:

Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” [...]

Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. “I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.

Here's what you get when you start trying to selectively dismantle Constitutional protections for certain people you don't like. This should inform our phony "immigration" debate as well.

Previous entry

Hope for the pseudoblogs

New entries in two of the Courier's woefullly neglected "blog" sections offer signs of life.

The third entry in the "Eco-Logic" pseudoblog section brings us a new writer, Deb Weissmann, and some practical, readable advice on how to set up home landscaping for better use of water. Good work.

Steve Stockmar has posted a column in "The Inbox" that at last gets around to looking critically at some Courier content (every editor's primary job) rather than making pointless fun of online commenters. This is a good direction, Steve.

Editorial: Leaders must work to regain our trust

Yesterday the unnamed Courier editor showed up with a reaction to the five-year anniversary of Katrina. Like most in the media, s/he reinforces the clearly wrong idea that it was a natural disaster.

It would have greatly reinforced the editor's point about rebuilding trust in government to properly characterize the disaster as a predictable and predicted result of decades of shoddy engineering and negligence by the Army Corps of Engineers and state and federal regulators. So why sidle around that opportunity? Could it be related to the Courier's penchant for deifying the military and demonizing regulation?

'Utopian' Arcosanti near Mayer still uncompleted

I first heard about the Arcosanti project back in the mid-'70s while still in Michigan, and if we'd been able to scrape up a few bucks in those days of inflation and unemployment, my best friend and I would have been there helping build. Many years and happenstance eventually brought me to Prescott, and one of my first local trips was to visit Paolo Soleri's urban experimental laboratory.

The feature on Arcosanti casts the project as incomplete, "utopian," and cultlike, none of which is fair. The writer ignores or doesn't understand its context and important influence in the development of modern architecture and urban design, preferring to reinforce the derisive narrative that has helped keep the project small and grossly underfunded for decades.

While it necessarily has an overall design, Arcosanti is a laboratory and prototype, not a town, and its success cannot be measured in terms of "completing" the evolving design. Because of its rural location, high ideals, radical vision and participation by young people, the media have regularly painted it as some sort of hippie cult in the desert, which is where the "utopian" idea comes from. Soleri's vision is central to the experiment and he exerts firm control over its expression, and that has drawn both fair and unfair criticism, but he's an internationally respected, award-winning artist and educator, not a cult leader. The unnamed writer mentions his "workshops," but not his faculty position at ASU. Why is it "near Mayer" in the headline rather than "at Cordes Junction" or "on I-17"? All this would seem calculated to minimize if I weren't so familiar with the Courier's general disinterest in research.

Arcosanti is not about the buildings or its population, it's about the ideas. Much like Prescott College, it is underappreciated by most Prescott residents as a value feature, educational resource and attraction for our area. As Soleri nears the end of his life, major change is certainly coming for the project. The value we place on it as a community will have an effect on what it becomes going forward. This would be a worthy subject for newspaper coverage, also ignored here. Even the many arts events that Arcosanti hosts are left out.

The big question for me is why this story now? What's the news value here? And why didn't the Courier add local knowledge to this wire piece?

Update, Tuesday: Today's editorial offers a defense of the project (which only needs defending because the editors failed to deal with the bogosity of the AP story), touching on several of my points. Oddly, the editor still insists (twice!) that it's "a stone's throw from Mayer." (My maps put them about nine miles apart. Perhaps the editor is better at throwing stones than I'd imagined.) How about "on the edge of the Aqua Fria National Monument" instead?

Channeling Norm Crosby

Learning language is often like a huge game of telephone. We hear someone else put something in a certain way, and we say it that way too, passing on the usage to others and reinforcing it. When it works right this process teaches us about usage and builds living language. But sometimes it goes off the rails. We don't generally stop and check an authoritative source to see whether the usage is correct. In print, that's what editors are for.

A misusage becoming increasingly common in street speech and creeping into print is the substitution of "reticent" for "reluctant," seen in the Courier here and here in the last week.

"Reticent" means "inclined to silence" or "uncommunicative in speech." Try plugging that meaning into this phrase: "Solop is reticent to narrow the potential field of winners." This construction is common, but it's nonsense. (Red flag: "Reticent to" is always wrong.)

Watch out for situations where two words sound similar and have related meanings. In this case "reticent" can be taken to mean "reluctant to speak," and away you go.