Editorial: GOP candidates crack crooked

In which the unnamed editor expresses some frustration that the Republican presidential candidates aren't offering useful rhetoric on addressing issues that engage Republican voters.
   I'd be lying if I said I feel the editor's pain, since idea-free platitudes and tired playground taunts are the standard playbook for the Rs in election season, and this year it appears that voters really are looking for something more substantial, which is good for the country.
    It's hard to know what to make of his penultimate paragraph, where he rolls out three disjointed sentence fragments with question marks after them. But sometimes I know we have to write for length on short deadlines.

Not much of a photographer, either.

   You have to admire how the editor manages a way to bring in this week's media hoot-fest over Sheriff Paul Babeu, though. For a journalist it's irresistible, of course -- he had to write something about it. So he shoehorned it into this column using its possible effect on Romney's campaign, uprightly naming only the real issues -- Babeu's alleged threats and romantic connection with someone he may have thought was illegal -- and saying nothing about the ones that will really ick out the right-wingers -- he's gay and he put nekkid pics of himself on the Web. You can't make this stuff up.
   The editor should know that the Babeu imbroglio will have negligible effect on the primary -- if it's not in commercials on Fox, most R primary voters won't hear about it.
   What's funny is that while the editor never did anything of the sort, some of the right-wing commenters are jumping up and down on him for playing the gay card, showing exactly how much it really does matter to them even as they insist it doesn't. Precious.
   In case you missed it, it was the Phoenix New Times that broke the Babeu story, and deserves more readers for it.

Cantlon: Garbage in, garbage out

In his column today Tom highlights the danger of monocultural news-sourcing, which not only can but inevitably does skew your perspective on the world. He frames it in terms of left-right politics, and I'm afraid he doesn't go anywhere near far enough.
    Most Americans believe that we live in the most open society in the world in terms of the variety of opinions and perspectives that our media bring us. But most anyone who's done any serious time outside the wire in the larger world will tell you that it's not what it seems.

It may seem alarmist, but it's truer than any of us
would like to believe.

    We live in the North Korea of materialist consumerism. What look like competing, opposite worldviews here are only subtly different flavors of the same pap to the rest of the world. The American ideological landscape is a giant ant-lion trap, pulling us closer to the jaws even as we think we're walking away. And the idea that we're free to choose makes the pervasive propaganda more effective. North Koreans think they're free, too.
    I learned how this works when I first got involved professionally in the propaganda business, back in the mid-'80s. I started getting work editing business news and communications, still my bread and butter today, and I needed more depth in the lingo, so I subscribed to The Economist. As its title suggests, this weekly publication, part newspaper and part magazine, primarily covers news and analysis about business and economics. But at least half its pages are dedicated to some of the best detailed news reporting in the world, bar none. It is erudite, excellently written for educated professionals, and its coverage is broad, worldly and international. It's dense and meaty, making Time and Newsweek look like supermarket coupon flyers, and it takes days to get through it. I studied up and it helped me a lot in my business.
    But after a couple of years I noticed that I had gradually started seeing everything in terms of money. The core perspectives of the paper's editors, despite their obvious high value on editorial objectivity and integrity, had seeped through between the lines and stained my value set. I spent a couple of months looking for conscious propaganda moves in the paper, but never found them. I canceled my subscription, and after a few months found that I got better. Since then I've been a lot more guarded about what I read -- not reading less, but rather reading more consciously.
    Our pervasive consumer culture, with its attendant sense of powerlessness, its low regard for spiritual and community values, and its mechanical simplicity, is the blinders on American culture today. Its messages are literally everywhere, inescapable if we're engaged with the world at all. Its central purpose is to get us to buy stuff, but the related values and methods infect everything we see and think, especially our politics. While I don't believe in a grand malevolent conspiracy, the results are indistinguishable.
    There exists no wonderland of objectivity anywhere on the planet, but outside this country the values and cultures are far less powerful and more competitive. Many nations actively control their media to better reflect the values of their culture, and while this sounds like totalitarianism to Americans, it also helps keep the consumerist wolf at bay, and there's a lot to be said for that. The competing voices coming across borders, so hard to find here, provide broader and more diverse perspectives for those willing to pay attention.
    So when Tom writes, "constant exposure to only one view really does ... limit your thinking," I hasten to add the warning that American media, left, right and "center," really do give us a remarkably uniform view of the world that is broadly inimical to our interests as individuals and communities.Our only defense is to be constantly and positively skeptical and conscious about the messages that bombard us daily, checking in with our internal values and aware of the larger context and bias of our mediated culture as a whole.

PS: Commercial television sucks your brain out through your eye sockets. There is literally no value there. For the survival of your own ability to think, get it out of your life. Try it for a couple of weeks and see what happens to your head. More here.

Editorial: So now you're sick of campaigns

As the Arizona Republican presidential primary approaches, the unnamed Courier editor is getting tired of all the political campaigning, and proposes taking a few moves from the UK system, including limits on campaign expenditures by parties, a ban on purchasing broadcast time, and shorter campaign seasons.

    With this he demonstrates utter cluelessness about the differences between the US and UK political systems, which is not all that surprising given the limits and Amerika-centricity of our education system and media. More to the point, he seems to have missed  the entire debate over campaign finance reform of the past couple of decades and the crushing blow to our democratic institutions that was the Citizens United decision by our sadly misguided SCOTUS.
    The editor's innocent fantasy of getting political attack ads out of his football games on teevee is literally impossible now without an amendment to the Constitution revoking corporate personhood and the direct equivalence of money and speech.
    Sure, we can wax romantic all we like about candidates taking the high road, but we might also hope that the guy with the butter knife might win against the guy with the tank. If you want a fair fight, editor, you'll have to start advocating stronger medicine for our failing system, and quick.
   You can join the campaign to amend the Constitution here or here. If that doesn't interest you, you're blowing smoke, so enjoy the mudfights.

Sincere, innocent bungling will hamper public-art policy

I've been watching the developing story of a public-art policy for Prescott, and as usual our town is a few years late to the gate, so the insane events at Granite Creek Park and Miller Valley School have sparked a reactionary process that will inevitably be about preventing controversy. Artists will be perfectly right to look on this with doubt if not suspicion.
    Unfortunately the City exacerbated the problem with its first move, in which it handed the hot potato to Elizabeth Ruffner and the Prescott Area Arts and Humanities Council with practically no public process.
    I served three years on the PAAHC board of directors and I believe the organization has the potential to be useful to artists and contribute to the community in important ways. But its modern incarnation has yet to find a clear mission or clear benefit for membership, making it a small, self-selected interest group, plagued with the inevitable weaknesses of such groups.
    This is not to say that PAAHC is incapable of doing the job. Rather, Council should have spent some time hearing public input on who should take on the responsibility and establishing credibility both for the process and the decision-makers. Score another hamhanded, amateur move for Council.
     Now PAAHC has to step up and establish its credibility with the public on its own. From what I've seen, it has selected a committee of officers and members, again without public process or deliberation, and set to. Score another hamhanded, amateur move for PAAHC.
     Elizabeth Ruffner's status as spokesperson for the arts community is entirely informal, based on her decades of work on behalf of the arts in Prescott as well as her status as matriarch of one of Prescott's old cowboy families. I do not doubt her sincerity or her political clout, but her political style favors the good-ol'-boy network and keeping things controlled and inside, which will lead inevitably to doubt among outsiders about any decision the group makes. Her organizational and leadership skills have been formed entirely in small-town Prescott, and her history over the past twenty years or so demonstrates her limitations in this area.
    Cindy Gresser is also a sweetie-pie and will bring a lot of positive energy to the project. But like Ms Ruffner, she's a fan, not a professional, thrust into a position of responsibility at Smoki Museum by circumstances rather than merit or training. The political situation at the museum has been in disarray for years, with Ms Gresser continually at the center of the storm. This does not inspire public confidence, whatever the facts are behind it.
   The best thing PAAHC could do at this point is rethink its strategy and start over. The obvious political heat around this issue requires a wide-open process that puts respected arts professionals in the key positions, publicly referencing established, successful precedents in other cities and inviting both professional and public input in open sessions that have been carefully and widely promoted. No one in Prescott should have the slightest reason to believe that they could not have participated if they'd just got up off the couch, or bitch about it afterward.
   PAAHC has a few extra-smart people already working on the committee (you know who you are), and I hope they'll be able to persuade the good-ol'-boy network to loosen up on this and stand back for the good of the project.
   Getting this one right could finally boost PAAHC up to organizational credibility. Getting it wrong, as it seems to be going now, will doom both the policy and the organization.

La Grande Vitesse by Alexander Calder, commissioned in 1967 as the centerpiece of the new government complex in Grand Rapids, MI, my home town. It was instantly accepted as the city's logo, a tradition that continues today. Public art matters, and can have huge impact if we let it.

Update, Saturday: Note the comment below by Charlene Craig, which is right on point and adds a lot to the discussion. On reflection, I'm concerned that the process will go beyond preventing controversy to the active exclusion of whole categories of human thought, issues and even people. Bear in mind that the manufactured controversy over the Miller Valley School mural was about excluding people of color as "not representative of Prescott." We could easily see the process pandering to the culture warriors and ensuring that the policy requires public art to be pretty, dull and non-threatening to right-wing sensibilities. I'd have to wonder whether the Vietnam memorial on the square would pass muster in the current political climate.

Editorial: Hang 'em high

One of the inherent weaknesses of conservatism is the inability to stop doing something when it doesn't work. The conservative's response instead is to do more of it.
   So it is with the unnamed editor and today's editorial, stumping for Rep Eddie Farnsworth's HB2373, which would increase minimum sentencing for certain repeat felons and maximum sentences for others in cases first- and second-degree murder.

Tell me how this improves anything.

   The editor agrees with Rep Farnsworth that judges, juries and parole boards cannot be trusted to fulfill their responsibilities to evaluate the character and actions of individuals in assigning and enforcing sentences. He prefers that we legislate sentences instead, removing the human element and therefore, he thinks, the possibility that scary criminals get out of prison to scare again. On some people he wants to throw away the key.
   What he's also apparently willing to throw away is our justice system, or more precisely the parts of it that focus on anything other than penalties. In the editor's world, all we'd need are cops to develop evidence, laws that describe the penalties, and prison guards to warehouse the transgressors.
    I certainly understand the reflex to punish those who break society's rules. It'd be nice if punishment worked. But it doesn't, particularly for the sort of person the editor imagines as "the worst of the worst." True sociopaths are mentally ill, and incarceration with other bad actors only exacerbates that illness, increasing the risk to society. Less enlightened societies simply kill them (or sometimes elevate them to dictator status). If we hope to reduce the risk of violence by people with mental challenges like this, we really need to focus a lot more on treatment.
   What the editor's conservative blinders won't admit is that non-sociopaths will be swept up in this hang-'em-high net, and mandatory sentencing takes a bad act and turns it into a career, again increasing the risk and cost to society.
   Violent crime has been decreasing steadily for decades, and will continue to do so, not because of incarceration but in spite of it, due to inevitable demographic changes. Aren't we better off trusting our judicial professionals and our juries to do their jobs? I expect the editor would certainly feel that way if he found himself in the dock.

Doing my job for me

Thanks to commenter "Silly Editorial" for the response to today's editorial, in which the editor buys the Republican propaganda move wholesale:

Do you not get that the point of this was to deny government employees a cost of living raise? I agree that Congress' performance has been terrible, but 595 people making $174,000 per year is probably the smallest impact of this vote. The real impact is on millions of federal employees, and is totally unrelated to their performance, other than the fact that they are being scapegoated for people's dissatisfaction with American politics.

Couldn'ta said it better.

Cantlon: Occupy redistricting!

In today's column Tom rightly calls foul on the efforts of Speaker Andy Tobin and Senate President Steve Pierce to subvert the will of the voters and get around the independent redistricting process. There is far too little reporting on this in the press and it really deserves much more extensive public attention.
    I spotted an interesting piece in The Atlantic today that I think adds a very significant but underappreciated point. Republicans are inspired to resist the redistricting changes because they see increasing political clout for minorities and Democrats, and from that they infer a biased process. Nate Berg reports that demographic changes over the past decade are turning the entire mountain West more Hispanic, more urban and therefore more purple. Any fair redistricting effort will naturally reflect these changes.
    If you need some sort of good news to get you through the day, you may appreciate the back half of Tom's column, but it's unrelated to his main point and feels like filler to me.

Tree, meet forest

In today's opinion headline the unnamed Courier editor exhorts us all to "Hang up, or a law will tell you to," but as his thesis he seems to have cast a handful of random thoughts into the air and printed them as they fell.
   He is of course referring to today's public irritant du jour, the cellphone, and the threat that our clown-car Legislature may pass one of various flavors of law against using one while driving. He cites statistics, then says the statistics don't matter. He recognizes that there are all sorts of distractions that can cause driving hazards, then refocuses on cellphones as somehow exceptional, without an argument to support the idea. Overall he seems to berate the reader to be responsible to prevent a new "restriction on our freedoms," one of which is presumably the freedom to talk on the phone while driving.
   As usual, it's not seeing the forest for the trees. From the perspective of everyone outside that car, it's not the cellphone that's the problem, it's the driver's distraction. Neither the bills' sponsors nor the editor apparently understand that we already have a law in place providing a substantial penalty for distracted driving. There's simply no point making more. This is another case of lawmakers (and the editor) jumping up and down over their pet peeves and skipping their homework.
   This kind of reactionism isn't new or unusual, of course. What's instructive here is that in exercising his knee reflex, the editor demonstrates the helpless simplicity of shouting at traffic. The irresponsible minority will never hear a message like this, addressed to another minority, antiques like me who still read newspaper op-ed pages. People distract themselves while driving because they don't take driving seriously. For this minority, it takes direct acquaintance with serious danger and physical consequences to provide the wake-up call, not laws and not op-eds.

Editorial: Moral obligations outweigh logistics

CVFD: Should we stay or should we go?

In discussing the awful story of a rural house burning down while the nearest fire department refused to respond because the homeowners hadn't paid for the service, the unnamed editor seems to say that "moral obligations," as he puts it in his headline, should stand above the few bucks involved, and that's good. But he says it in such a mealy-mouthed way that the editorial seems to have a foot on either side of the fence.
   This situation has come up several times since I've lived in Prescott, it always makes the non-responding organization look bad, and nothing changes, because it's accepted that the homeowners didn't pay, therefore they accepted the risk of losing their homes. Fire resources have to be reserved for those who pay.
   But consider this: CVFD is saying that it could have responded if the homeowner had paid, so the only real logistical difference between a saved house and cinder pile is a few bucks in the district's bank account.
   The editor's sadly muffled point is that if you have the ability to help, you have the responsibility to help. That makes a lot of sense to me. Either the fire crews can or cannot reach the scene and be effective, and if they can, their own organizational mission should require that they try. People get this instinctively. When larger-scale catastrophes occur, fire crews will transport out of state to help. It makes no sense that they can't respond to a fire at this house when they can to one a quarter mile farther down the same road.
   The core problem that the editor seems afraid to touch is the subscription system, which favors those who are more able to pay. This really needs to go, and rural communities have to start thinking in more inclusive terms than who's willing to put up twenty bucks a month. The system as it stands clearly does not work.

Update, Monday:  The CVFD chief responds in this Sunday story, but the focus remains entirely on the finances and resources and off the mission. The comments add some pertinent details, such as how close the house was to the district line.

The wagging-finger story

The now-famous pic of Governor Brewer wagging her finger in the President's face is clearly overhyped on both sides of the political spectrum and another case of the media leaping on events that reinforce the preferred narrative, whether or not the facts support it. But when there are actual lies involved, we have to pay attention.
   Paul Davenport's AP story, carried in today's print edition on 9A, repeats Brewer's assertion that Obama "walked away" from her while she was in the middle of a sentence. The White House responded to this with dismissal, but no apparent denial. Not widely reported is the account of Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, who was there and says that it didn't happen that way at all.

Out to lunch for the weekend

Remarkably incoherent even for the Courier, today's editorial had my head spinning trying to parse the unnamed editor's carnival-ride argument, in which he attempts to paint the President as a socialist for -- get this -- deporting illegals.
   He starts out with standard right-wing magical thinking, identifying "to close or control the border" as an "easy answer." He then advocates a "contrarian approach" that he never gets around to describing.
   Then he goes right off the rails, claiming without citation, "according to the Associated Press, President Barack Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Yup, he's saying that over two terms Bush the Younger followed a "socialistic" approach, and then Obama took it further.
   He explains with this whipsaw head-spinner: "Socialists like to control the workforce and the freedom to roam, so aggressive immigration policies come naturally."
   So it appears that the editor accidentally flipped the channel away from Fox News for a second and has discovered that the Obama administration has been deporting far more illegals than the Bushites, for all their yammering about the Brown Peril, ever got around to. The only way he can explain this to himself is to confuse socialism with authoritarianism.
   But then the crafty socialists switched strategies again, and it must be to win back those illegal voters, who were presumably thinking of supporting Newt. Ultimately the editor seems to like the change, but blames the Prez for playing politics with the issue.
   Here in the reality-based world, what happened is that the Obama administration came into office and immediately began working on practical policy to address the widespread fear the Republicans whipped up over nothing -- in other words, responding to a popular complaint with practical action. It focused on apprehending and deporting criminal aliens, reporting record numbers and putting the Bushites to shame. Regular non-criminal illegals were not a target in the federal plan, that was Arpaio, Babeu and their ilk. There's no new policy, only a restatement of what's already working and a PR connection with the Utah Compact, which has been gaining traction here as well. This is the part that the editor suddenly likes, because some Republicans have given him permission to like it.
   The editorial demonstrates in excruciating detail how a dedicated right-wing mind has to contort itself to approve of any action by a perceived adversary -- cramming square pegs into round holes, scrambling the timeline and finding any possible way to see it as objectionable.

And no, I can guarantee that the AP never said "Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Some wacko pundit sold as part of the AP suite may have said something like that, but ascribing it to a news source is completely wrong and a vile distortion.

Editorial: Anti-piracy bills

The unnamed editor gets it right, more or less, but about two weeks late. When we're talking about public policy in the making, you have to inform people while it's still possible for them to have a say in it. Reactive editorializing is useless here.

Wiederaenders: A little harmless brown-nosing

In his weekly "whatever" column, Courier editor Tim Wiederaenders can't help but leak some foamy effusion over getting a personal audience with our LD1 legislators, with an extra lick or two at the boots of Speaker Tobin for his "heck of a memory and ... his eye on the ball." The commenters are doing a good job identifying the sort of ball Mr Tobin has been eyeing, and all I need add is a Congressional desk in Washington.

Lest we forget

   While I understand the optics of getting us out from under the awful deal our Legislature (including the three Tim is praising here) made to pawn our state buildings -- and not incidentally eliminate it as an election issue -- I agree that we could be spending the money on higher priorities right now. (Thanks to the impressive negotiating powers of the Leg, the buyback will cost exactly the same at any point in the coming nine years or so.)
   But where Tim writes, "Said another way, instead of burning the mortgage on three state buildings this year, it would be better to, oh, provide healthcare for however many thousands of people through AHCCCS," I'm confident that he's going a lot further than Mr Tobin ever will. Andy's spending priority will be on more tax breaks for business, leaving health care for the working poor somewhere around dead last.

Must read: Obama's long game

Andrew Sullivan has a piece in Newsweek giving the view from 50,000 feet of Obama's first term and the great deal he's accomplished despite unrelenting vilification from the right and unrealistic expectations on the left. The election will keep us deep in the weeds for the coming ten months, so this is a good opportunity to take a breath and reassess: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

Editorial: Scared of the dark

Today the unnamed Courier editor hops up and down about the idea of cuts to the military. Apparently he missed how much we've spent and how little we've gained in warmaking over the past, oh, I dunno, six decades or so.
   We've all grown up as citizens of the American Empire, so it's no surprise that the editor is enthralled by the myths that have sustained it for so long. It's disappointing, however, that someone we depend on to understand public policy issues is so poorly educated in them.
   In our warmaking policy, the concept of "threat to national security" is defined so broadly that it can be stretched to justify military intervention in any economic dispute or ordinary criminal behavior. The underlying purpose of this is not security for Americans, but rather securing profits for warmaking corporations and votes for warmongering politicians. It is also a license for allies to spend their money on building social and business infrastructure instead of defense, thereby eating our lunch for us in business and quality of life, or worse, maintaining policies of aggression against their neighbors and even their own people.
   If we were to redefine "threat to national security" to sensible limits, such as "imminent military threat to the physical security of US persons or the territorial integrity of the US or treaty allies," we could obviously reduce our military commitments by 80% or more.
   This will not happen, as most Americans have bought into the editor's idea that we are under constant existential threat by dark forces everywhere, and our military policy is insane as a result. But what we learned in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that it never had anything like the capabilities or aggressive motivations that our government ascribed to it for so many years, ought to give everyone pause.
   We have a ridiculously big military not because there's any real threat, but rather because we are collectively frightened of our own shadow. It's time to grow up and get over it.

No-news Wednesday

I've been hearing lots of news of online content providers going dark on Wednesday, and I realized I'm an occasional provider as well, so I should get with the program. So Courierwatch will be offline on Wednesday as well, in solidarity. (I know, big whup.)
   The issue is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the new legal tools it would provide for censoring online content, as well as its scattershot, blame-the-messenger approach. Regular readers know I'm no fan of the Wild West online atmosphere so beloved of fourteen-year-olds, nor of taking intellectual works willy-nilly without paying for them, which is the baby in this bathwater. But Congress does not have this right, and protests are having some effect in forcing the bad guys to climb down. Again. (Hint: they won't ever quit.)

Update, 5pm Wednesday: Wow, I had no idea my readers are so influential! Support for SOPA crumbled in Congress today. Power to the people, man.


  Editorial: Stop Blaming Public Ed Big cookie for the unnamed Courier editor today as he lambastes the Legislature and parsimonious voters for defunding education and complaining about the results.
   This editorial shows progress in style as well as substance, moving past the forced folksiness of late to a more direct and real voice.
   He slips a bit where he tries a little too hard to distribute blame equally -- the schools don't decide how many days of instruction to provide, that's the Leg again.
   But the sentiment is correct. We can't go on with this regressive minstrel show. Education is far too serious an issue to play political games over. I might hope our legislators take this to heart, but let's say I have reason for doubt.

Must read: Half-Truths About the American Dream

Bob Lord has a fascinating think piece on Blog for Arizona about the millions of Americans who are left out of the conversation on economic justice even by the Left, and why it's important to expand our values beyond mere opportunity.

Worth your time: Half Truths About the American Dream

Everyone should know: Romney Owns Rush, et al.

Wouldn't it be weird if national opinion leaders owed their livings to a national political candidate?

Check it out: Bain Capital Owns Clear Channel (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Etc.)

Instructive historical example: William Randolph Hearst

You could see it another way as well -- if Romney's depending on Rush et al. for income, Rush owns Romney. Given Romney's demonstrated willingness to bow to idols of the far right that he clearly doesn't believe in, this may be the more salient angle.

Bill's back

Bill Moyers is returning to teevee tonight in most markets, and I expect a lot of us in the blue spectrum are looking forward to his committed, intelligent discussion and discourse on issues vital to our society. You'll be able to view the new show, Bill Moyers & Company, online starting tonight. Bookmark billmoyers.com.

Editorial: Showboats for Jesus

Who says Jews can't play football?

Regular readers know that I don't do sports and don't give a rat's behind about them, but the editorial today is but one example of how sports stories leak out into the adult media, so I've been aware of the sports idol of the week and his onfield antics.
   The unnamed editor deserves the rolling eyes he's getting today for his feigned puzzlement with religious showboatry. You'd have to be much thicker than I know the editor to be  to not get what's going on out there.
   The editor's supposedly parallel examples prove that Tim Tebow is an exception even as he asserts that his onfield prostrations are somehow normal. Greenberg and Koufax chose not to play -- stayed off the field -- humbly following the rules of their religion. In clear contrast, Muhammad Ali boasted of his religion as an expression of pride, and that's exactly what this silly quarterback is doing. You can't stand on a field with millions watching and pretend you're not playing to the crowd.
   The silliness of casting oneself as a warrior for gad while playing a child's game of mock combat is beyond laughable, and in a sane society might be properly diagnosed as a call for psychological help.
   But beyond the obvious pridefulness that somehow the editor doesn't get, these are expressions designed to include fellow devotees and exclude infidels, to separate the believer from nonbelievers. They are clear acts of culture war that break with our common traditions of sportsmanship and public decorum, which till now always cast such things as errors of taste at best. That's why they get attention, from the rabble and from the editor. This evangelical is in effect daring anyone to call him on his self-absorption, so he can bask in the glory of imagined persecution.
   The reader would be wise to bear in mind that commercial sports competitions are no more real than any other entertainment, and the characters you see are actors on stages, whether they're walking footlights or astroturf, scripted and directed. The play is metaphorical, the messages often subtle, and if you only look at the surface, you've wasted the price of your ticket.

Shocked, shocked!

The prurient finger-wagging going on over the Marines who were dumb enough to get caught wagging their extra fingers over some dead opponents (or victims) is pushing my ack-meter to the limit.

   Anyone involved in war on the ground knows firsthand that this is not aberrant behavior, it's common and always has been. How could it be otherwise? We train kids to be brutes, to kill, to hate whatever enemy is convenient today, yet we can't stand to see the brutal results. From the media to the pious government and military officials to Joe Six-Pack at the business end of his glass teat, it's hypocrisy of the highest order.
   What these kids are being pilloried for isn't what they did, but rather letting the folks back home find out about it in all its graphic ignominy. I'm sure this sort of behavior is no secret to the Afghans and Iraqis we've been routinely brutalizing for a decade.
   If we really hope to ensure that this doesn't happen anymore, our only choice is to get out of the war business, folks.

Editorial: Whaddaya expect?

The unnamed editor fuzzily reacts to recent examples of large corporations having to back down on boneheaded, tone-deaf attempts to wring a few more pennies out of their customers. Like the rest of the media, he misses the forest for the trees.

If you haven't seen "Network," do. Right away.

   I'm gratified to be able to note an unusual agreement with frequent commenter Tom Steele (who I know to be much more personable over coffee than in his writing), who gets an important piece of the truth when he writes, "it seems the link between top management and the real world has broken down." This is a lot of it, in a nutshell.
   The people who inhabit the top echelons of large corporations do not live in the same world that we do. The wealth that they take for granted does not allow ten bucks a month to matter, or even register as real. So when a bean-counter comes to the boss with a proposal to boost profits by .01% (and the value of their stockholdings by 2% = a couple million clams) by adding an insignificant fee, why not? Who would care?
   We 99%ers have historically accepted this sort of monetary paper cut without complaint. Have you thought about the fee breakdown on your phone bill or water bill lately? And whole industries have been able to successfully institute fees that most of us see as outrageous simply by acting as cartels. The airline fuel surcharges and baggage fees leap to mind. The top corporate dogs have been given every reason to think they can probably get away with this stuff.
   But it's not that corporate leadership is any further out of touch now than at any time in the past few decades. What's changed is that regular, normal people are finally reaching the limits of what they'll take without complaint. They've had enough, and they're not gonna take any more.
   Events like this encourage me to hope that the Occupy movement has moved from the streets into the popular consciousness. If we can now move beyond the I-me-my concerns of the individual purse to concern about how our society actually works, we'll be making real progress.

Missing letter

Odd: The letter from Alexandrea Horner about child sexualization is in the print edition, but not dCourier.com. Why, I wonder?

Editorial: What PV said

Today the unnamed Courier editor earns his second Barcalounger since the departure of Ben Hansen for a shameless puff piece for Prescott Valley in the editorial space, involving neither analysis, editorial opinion nor even a public issue. Waste of space.

Brewer vs medpot

A story by Phoenix state-beat reporter Paul Davenport in today's edition reports that Governor Brewer has been thrown out of court again in her attempt to establish that state workers are liable under federal law and so the state cannot license dispensaries for medical cannabis. A lot of commenters are throwing well deserved  heads of overripe cabbage at her for this, but there's another angle worth considering.

Brewer: "Triffids! Run!"

   The court is saying that the state has no standing to sue until it has credible evidence or threat of harm, and that rings true, but there's also no question that the federal gubmint really does not want a ruling on the core question, at least not yet.
   The eventual ruling on this question will turn either on a real case of a state worker being federally indicted for administering state law, which has not happened so far and seems vanishingly unlikely (unless Rick Santorum somehow wins), or on the clear absence of federal action against any state worker.
   If the latter proves out, and it seems likely to me, the federal courts will have said in essence that the feds have been doing the right thing and may not interfere with state laws in this regard. This will turn the issue over to the states, invalidate any federal policy on medpot, and open the door wide for more medpot programs and state regulation (and taxation) of cannabis.
   The unavoidable inconsistency of both federal and state laws regarding cannabis will eventually force the public to face the issue of broader legalization in a more practical context. California may pass its legalization initiative soon, which will put an accelerator on the process nationwide.
   So Governor Brewer, in her clumsy haste to stop medpot here, may be doing more to ensure its institution. Go, Jan!

Update, Jan 13: Damn, she dropped the suit!

Must read: Krugman nails it again

Before the Occupy movement stole the headlines, Americans heard a lot about how terrible it is to use debt to leverage our economy, create jobs and prime the economic pump. The headlines are behind us for the time being, but a lot of reasonable people have adopted concern about public debt. Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman speaks for the majority of real economists (as opposed to political economists) in continually trying to educate Americans about vital economic issues, and his current NYT column covers our common misconceptions about debt in a very informative way: Nobody Understands Debt

Editorial: Lessons in responsibility

Today the unnamed Courier editor references the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killings of six others last year to make a responsible point about the tenor of our public discourse that encourages the weak-minded to radicalization and violence. This vital topic has been missing from these pages till now, and hear, hear.
   But there's one important element missing. The editor writes of "a political discourse that, while considered provocative for generations before, now takes vile viral. Previously-unheard of levels of amplified propaganda spread like wildfire via the Internet and 21st century social networks. Self-editing is a thing of the past. Untrue statements become permanent public record for billions to access in minutes. Scurrilous opinions become the information superhighway's proverbial red meat for an audience looking to radicalize their (sic) own ideologies."
    Yup, the trash talk the editor despises is only on the Internet. Not in the mainstream media, not in The Daily Courier. Not his fault.
    I'll be more convinced of the editor's sincerity when I see evidence that he's vetting the weekly right-wing rent-a-columns, ranting letters and his own editorials to eliminate the lies, distortions and hate speech that fuel resentment, bigotry and intolerance. Perhaps he can then move on to assign someone to enforce his comments policy against personal attacks. There's a lot to do. Drive the snakes from your own nest first.

New Year's Day hike

Lots of people, dogs and horses out on the trail on Sunday. Great day for it too!

Juniper snag near Williamson Valley trailhead, Sunday

Thought for 2012

Let's not wait for the end of the world as we know it -- let's bring it on, and make a better world happen.

Editorial: Sen. Gould's priorities

I just thought I'd like to top off the year with a cookie for the unnamed Courier editor, who today calls down Sen Ron Gould (R-Bizarro World) for leading off his legislative agenda for the new session with the critical issue of making sure he can carry his concealed weapon onto any public campus of higher learning, whether or not anyone on that campus believes it would be a good thing.
   If you think Mr Gould is an outrider with goofball legislation, I'd recommend that you keep an eye on the Legislature's website for daily updates on the bills that will start dropping next week. Any whacked-out right-wing idea you can imagine is likely to show up. This session will be at least as crazy as the last, and likely more so.
   I appreciate the editor's attention to this. Now I hope he'll remember it when it comes time for the paper to endorse a candidate for Congress from our newly constituted district. Mr Gould or someone just like him will likely be the Republican candidate. If he's too extreme for our capitol, could he be not too extreme for Washington?
   Anyhow, here's your cookie, editor, and happy new year!

New Year's Eve

Join the party at The Raven Cafe with Big Daddy D and the Dynamites, 8:30 till you drop.

Follow the money

Something that may cause some head-scratching among the deficit weenies: If our deficit is so scary, why are our bonds doing so well?

Bloomberg: Obama Wins Most Demand for Debt of U.S. Presidents Since Before First Bush

More in The Atlantic

Great Ape news

"He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between" --  Cheetah dead at 80

More blaming the teachers

"The assumption that teachers are really doing their best for kids is being lost somewhere in there. ... I see these mysterious bad teachers everyone talks about as (teachers who are) overwhelmed, underfunded and unsupported," says high-school teacher Alaina Adams in an AP story on A1 today, echoing a point teachers have been making for decades as the "accountability" meme has infested public policy on education. The stark failure of the ironically named No Child Left Behind program should be an object lesson for us in moving away from result-oriented standard testing and back toward process-oriented teaching and valuing the profession.
    But the infusion of 25 million federal clams coming from the Race to the Top program will instead go to yet more testing and "accountability," and the unnamed Courier editor likes that just fine. From where I sit it's just more of the same going down the administrative-cost crapper. That the Obama administration set up the parameters for this is just disheartening.
   The editor adds another numbskull column by Tom Purcell on the same page that only reinforces the 19th-century ideals of education, adding a religious element. Perhaps the editor thinks of education in those terms, with religious leaders civilizing savages using equal parts propaganda and pain.
    Getting us back on the right track with education -- meaning most kids coming out of school prepared for good, productive lives in the 21st century -- will require that we stop looking at schools as factories that make standardized workers, managed with incentives and disincentives for the factory workers (teachers). If we truly believe that people are individually unique in their talents and potentials, we have to see teachers as research scientists who study their subjects and work with them to maximize those potentials. This can never be easy, cheap or standardized.
    The editor will sit back and watch to see whether the results of Arizona's worker-bee assembly line are any better in three years. I can guarantee they won't, not from this.

 Update, Thursday: In The Atlantic today: What Americans Keep Ignoring about Finland's School Success

Must read: Getting real about class

The new issue of Esquire carries an unsettling piece by Stephen Marche:

There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you're gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you're gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.

This sets out some important principles for how we should be thinking about ourselves as Americans and about how we are generally failing to address reality in our political calculus.

Worth your time: We Are Not All Created Equal

When editors don't edit

The piece on the guy who was arrested in PV on an allegation of exposing himself while in his car has drawn the most uniform response I've ever seen in the comments, amounting to: WTF, you mean you can go to jail based on nothing but someone's word? (This is not news to anyone who's been keeping an eye on our budding police state, of course.)
    I'm sure it makes a difference to readers that the guy is older, white and distinguished-looking, even wearing a tie for his mug shot, but when I saw this story last night I thought the same thing. The usual paucity of information in the parroted PVPD press release really makes you wonder on what basis this man's life is being summarily destroyed. Even if he's completely exonerated, he and his family will probably have to move out of state to escape the stigma, there to pursue years of civil litigation.
   Our popular obsession with "sex crimes" is way out of hand.
   The editors could have held back a bit on this one and given the poor sap a chance to clear himself before they splashed it into the paper. But I have a feeling that obsession lives in the editorial suite as well.

Update, Tuesday evening: The editors have added a "correction" to the online version redacting the  man's name and photo, and saying that the charge was a misdemeanor. I'm not clear on whether the Courier reporter got that wrong, or PVPD did in the original report. What's clear is that PVPD is doubling down on the righteousness of the bust without any new basis for it. In any case the correction reinforces that the many critics were correct and the editors should have held back in the first place. Barndoor shut, horse gone now, boys.

Editorial: Ethics and the Legislature

The unnamed editor high-fives Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery for advocating some technical legal changes to clarify rules and keep lobbyists from offering and legislators from accepting the kind of "gifts" that led to the Fiesta Bowl imbroglio. He intones thusly, "Herein lies an ethic. Elected officials serve the public and its best interests. Their constituents give them a gift when they elect them to office."
   Leaving aside  the endless frustration, public suspicion and flak that make up the largest part of this "gift," it's ironic that the editor can manufacture umbrage over the small potatoes of the Fiesta Bowl tickets while actively encouraging the vast suspension of ethics that our political culture has become.
  Should we really care about football tickets when huge international corporations are legally allowed more influence in our state and national governments than our citizens, or when we collectively attend far more to celebrity and advertising than policy or wisdom in choosing the people who will guide our future?
    Rules to prevent legislators from accepting a gift do nothing to keep people who would sell themselves so cheaply out of office. If anything they'll just find another way to get it.
     It's unrealistic to expect office-holders to act more ethically than the people who sent them there. Unless voters can get up off the couch and elect people who care most about making life better for all of us, who put service ahead of profit, who are unafraid of pressure and excited about doing the homework, our Legislature will be just as lazy and short-sighted as the rest of us.
   Imagining that a free football ticket will do anything real to change a vote in the Legislature is ridiculous. It's far more important to build a culture of collegial debate over serious public-policy issues, because the sort of person who cares about that will naturally and easily discredit anyone coming to him with trinkets and flattery. It's junior high down there now, because people like the editor care more about the color of a candidate's team jersey or what she's willing to say publicly about a litmus-test non-issue than how he works with people, maintains an open mind or does the mountains of homework. Let's get above the small stuff and talk about intelligence and commitment.
   The editor can show just how much he cares about ethics when it comes time for him to endorse a presidential candidate. Keep an eye out.

Must read: The competitiveness debate

Today's letter from Charles T Queen decrying our self-defeating ideas about competitiveness has drawn the predictable lashes from our local economic dunderheads. I happened across an article on the wonderful site Remapping Debate addressing a big question that's been hiding in plain sight of our punditocracy for years: how do German carmakers maintain  high profits and high output with high wages and good conditions for workers? If you've bought into the idea that we have no choice but to race to the bottom, the answers may surprise you: A Tale of Two Systems.

Must read: Extreme weather and why we can't study it

The New York Times is running a story today covering the weather record for 2011:

    A typical year in this country features three or four weather disasters whose costs exceed $1 billion each. But this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tallied a dozen such events, including wildfires in the Southwest, floods in multiple regions of the country and a deadly spring tornado season. And the agency has not finished counting. The final costs are certain to exceed $50 billion.
    “I’ve been a meteorologist 30 years and never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,” Jeffrey Masters, a co-founder of the popular Web site Weather Underground, said last month. “Looking back in the historical record, which goes back to the late 1800s, I can’t find anything that compares, either."

William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News, via AP

  But the more important and core thrust of the story is why our government agencies are not doing all they could to build good analysis of extreme events, which would help inform business and government about what to prepare for in the future:

   Lately, scientists have been discussing whether they can do a better job of analyzing events within days or weeks, not years.
    “It’s clear we do have the scientific tools and the statistical wherewithal to begin answering these types of questions,” Dr. Santer said
But doing this on a regular basis would probably require new personnel spread across several research teams, along with a strong push by the federal government, which tends to be the major source of financing and direction for climate and weather research. Yet Washington is essentially frozen on the subject of climate change.

    This year, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tried to push through a reorganization that would have provided better climate forecasts to businesses, citizens and local governments, Republicans in the House of Representatives blocked it. 
   The idea had originated in the Bush administration, was strongly endorsed by an outside review panel and would have cost no extra money. But the House Republicans, many of whom reject the overwhelming scientific consensus about the causes of global warming, labeled the plan an attempt by the Obama administration to start a “propaganda” arm on climate.

There's a lot more, it's worth your time: Harsh Political Reality Slows Climate Studies Despite Extreme Year

Editorial: Prescott's popularity has its drawbacks

When I see a comment I should have written myself, I can only say 'bravo' -- and wish the writer had used his/her name. From "True West – True Prescott,"  commenting on today's editorial:  

With only a few days remaining in 2011, we may have a new frontrunner in the “Dumbest Courier Editorial of the Year” competition. The writer of this piece could stand to “appreciate the city’s history” with a bit more, uh, appreciation.
   Settlers of European descent began coming to Prescott over 150 years ago. In every year since, more have arrived, and wouldn’t ya just know it, almost immediately upon arrival nearly every damn one of them set about to “do everything they could to change their new community into the place from which they moved.” Decade after decade, established residents have complained vigorously about newer residents upsetting the delicate balance of all that is good and decent in our community. It is, far and away, the oldest and most ubiquitous lament in Arizona.
   Remove the gauzy, serene veil of nostalgia long enough to examine the true history of Prescott. Mixed in with our many dedicated and upstanding civic leaders over the years were some scalawags, tinhorns and drunkards, along with more than a few numbskulls. Just about every decade included episodes of shouting, name calling and near fist fights during city council meetings. We’ve had more recall drives than you can count. In short, our town has experienced its share of cultural turmoil and political upheaval. But not to worry – it always survived and moved forward. Sometimes it even changed.
   Certainly, the dominant local Democrats of the first half of the last century must have been resentful when the Republican ranks swelled during the second half of the 1900’s, creating the current political landscape. Dad-blasted newcomers.
   Paradoxically, it’s Arizona’s large landowners, developers and business owners who have been the greatest facilitators and beneficiaries of our continuous in-migration, yet on a personal level, they are often the people who complain most loudly about the unwanted influence of newer arrivals. (You can hear them wishing, “If only there was a way to take their money, but make them shut the hell up – at least for the first 20 years or so.”) But, alas, it’s easier to stop a Tsunami.
   For any newcomers who may be reading this, the word “naysayers,” as used above, is the favored way for the folks who currently run Prescott to refer to those who are in any way critical or even questioning of local government. It is often used interchangeably with the word “whiners.” Pay no mind, and disregard this silly editorial. Speak up, share your ideas and don’t be afraid to make your mark, just as true Prescottonians have been doing since the very beginning.

Editorial: Feds shrug off right-wing kibitzing

In today's editorial the unnamed Courier editor seems to anticipate a ruling by the SCOTUS that Arizona's beloved SB1070 is an illegal encroachment on federal jurisdiction and must be struck down. In a tone reminiscent of "Remember the Maine!" (does anyone?), he says, "as we have stated before, if the states are not to do the immigration work, then the federal government must. The legislation is a result of that lack of work."
     Yup, the editor's right -- federal responsibility over federal jurisdiction is correct. What he implies, though, and the reason for the whole argument in the first place, is this: "if the states are not to do the immigration work, then the federal government must according to how right-wing state legislators demand." This, I hope, is about to get the slapping-down it so impertinently deserves.
     The entire "immigration issue" as it's currently formulated was invented out of nothing by political manipulators and spread far and wide by political opportunists and unabashed racists with the sole aim of electing more Republicans. There is not and never has been any kind of public emergency or unusual problem related to illegal immigration. With Bush Jr showing just how badly a president can do in his second term, the Right needed something to run on, it's that simple, and it was brilliant in that it presented a problem that, in large part because it didn't exist, could never be solved in any practical manner.
     It worked. Lots of Republicans, with no better understanding of how the political world works than a hamster, got elected. But the legal wheel has at last turned to deal with the fundamental issues involved, as we always anticipated, and the customary overreach of the Right could well bring the whole shaky edifice down.
     Oh, and that Arpaio bust the editor mentions -- ICE refused to take Arpaio's prisoners because Arpaio has demonstrated severe malfeasance in how he arrests people, thereby screwing up the cases against them very broadly. This was Arpaio's fault, not the feds', and yet another clear example of why Maricopa County should boot Sheriff Joe from office forthwith.

Drive-by column shows aversion to homework

In his "Friday catch-all" column today, Tim features a cartoon from 1878 that the contributor says is "talking about stimulus funds and is accurate for our times today." Tim buys the line wholesale, since it fit so nicely with his own ideas about today's economic challenges. Had he done a little homework, he might have got a fresh perspective, as well as a warning that his line of thinking has failed repeatedly and spectacularly in the past.

     The cartoon was published near the end of what was known until 1932 as the Great Depression (now the Long Depression), a currency and banking crisis that raised unemployment in this country above 14%, beginning as the Panic of '73 and lasting into '79. In Europe, where it began with a currency pinch designed to raise interest rates, it lasted for 20 years and set the economic stage for WWI.
     Here it began with market manipulation: demonetization of silver in favor of gold. The opening of the West had led to large discoveries of silver, particularly in Nevada, destabilizing prices and leading to a crisis of confidence in it as currency. The panic spread to the markets through the previous decade's overbuilding of railroads, leading to a crash in railroad stocks and thousands of corporate bankruptcies, a stock bubble not unlike the housing bubble we've just experienced.
      As a result the Republicans, in power since the Civil War, were turned out nationwide starting with the elections of 1874. The cartoon seems to refer to the debate over the Bland-Allison Act of '78, which restored silver as legal domestic coinage and directed the government to buy silver, and the broad class of government actions considered inflationary, ringing out the ancestors of the alarms the deficit weenies are tying us to the tracks with today.
     There was no large-scale stimulus support for the economy of the kind we know today. That was invented during the 1930s and codified in the Keynesian Revolution. The depression ended here earlier than in Europe primarily because of another unforeseen event, the great wave of European immigration starting in '79.
     So the editor, trying to defend the neoclassical economic theory popular in the 19th century, uses an example from one of its great stumbles. If there's a lesson to be drawn from this cartoon, Tim, it's that the Right continues to employ long-discredited arguments and theories and turn a blind eye to their spectacular failures.

Redistricting: The bad news

We've been working the redistricting story hard on The People's Business because it's by far the most important government-beat story that voters need to understand, and the commercial media have handled it so badly. Lucy and I have defended the process against the Republicans' campaign to derail it, and we believe that given the complexity of the job, the results have been within spec.
     That doesn't necessarily lead to happy days for everyone, of course, and for those of us in Yavapai County hoping for more competitive elections and more responsible representation, there's only coal in the stocking this year. The AIRC has issued its final maps (tentative pending Justice Dept. approval), which shave off Yavapai's most progressive areas in the Verde and leave us in deep-red districts both legislatively and congressionally.
     The biggest heartburn over the new maps has come where incumbents have found themselves separated from familiar, reliable base voters.  On the legislative side, all three of our current LD1 representatives are safe in the new LD14, so we can look forward to Messrs Tobin and Pierce consolidating their power and continuing as the House and Senate leaders. With the loss of the Verde we have less chance than ever of electing a sensible progressive.
     It's worse on the CD side. With our new CD4 sprawling over a third of the state, one might've thought it could take in a more balanced electorate, but it includes progressive powerhouses like Lake Havasu City, Kingman, Parker, Florence and Colorado City up there in the FLDS reich. It's rumored that we gain a few blues in Carefree, Cave Creek and on the north side of Yuma, including a strong working Hispanic community, but not nearly enough, leaving us with a 27.8% Republican advantage in the district.

The flattop is the perfect metaphor.

     The scariest part right now is the candidate map. CD4 contains no congressional incumbent. Those of you who wanted to be rid of Paul Gosar have got your wish, but not as you hoped. The only known candidate for Congress in this district is state Senator Ron Gould of Lake Havasu City, he of Tea Party and haircut infamy.
     Electing a Democrat in this district is beyond hope, so if we want to have any credible representation in Washington, it's up to my Republican friends to get behind someone more reasonable and competent. And quick!
     If I had anything to say about it, I'd have Ken Bennett out of the Secretary of State's office and in Washington instead. Lacking an unexpected health issue for Governor Brewer, he hasn't a chance at the governor's office till 2014 anyway.

Update, Saturday: I learned today the Pinal Sheriff Paul Babeu  has formed an exploratory committee aimed at this district as well. I'd rather have Gould.

21st Century Snowmen

We saw this idea online and had to swipe it. Lesley made 'em: Global Warming Snowman Cookies!

 Happy Hols!

Must read: The Racist Record of Ron Paul

With Ron Paul's star rising again in the runup to the Iowa caucuses, and with the Republican presidential bench so, um, weak, I know a lot of sensible people are looking at him as a credible candidate, most of them with little knowledge of his record. The Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a solid summary of the evidence of Paul's recurrent racism in the past and his continuing defense of it today.

Must read: More on showing up

Here's some important factual reinforcement for my November screed in Muggs via Matt Yglesias on Slate:

90% Of Life Is Just Showing Up, And The 99% Don't

Second-guessing the courts

Today the unnamed Courier editor takes what looks like an easy shot, and blows his toes off again. In the editorial he excoriates Yavapai Superior Court Judge Tina Ainley for making the call on a plea deal that makes a "free man" (um, with lifetime probation) of the defendant.

The editor bases his judgment not on the facts of the case (he wasn't there and doesn't know what happened) or his knowledge of the plea deal (he has none), but rather on what seem to be the aesthetics of having someone charged with a crime and pleading guilty, but not going straight to jail.

I don't know why this is necessary, but: the reason we have judges is to prevent the rule of the mob. Here the editor is speaking for the mob, not realizing that he's speaking against the rule of law, and through his hat to boot.

We cannot know the specifics of what went on among the court officers or the factors that led the prosecution to advance and the judge to accept this deal. If the editor thinks he can do better, I think he ought to spend his time productively working toward becoming a judge, rather than waste it and ours undermining trust in our system with no basis in fact.

Visit to the real world

Bull Sluice on the Chattooga River, part of the border between 
Georgia and South Carolina (properly pronounced 'Sacuhlaina').

Last week Lesley and I traveled to the Appalachian redoubt of my mother, sister and brother-in-law for a little family gathering, which included some horsing around in the protected lands around the Chattooga River, famed for its grade-five rapids and starring role in Deliverance.

Along the way we endured the pleasures of modern air travel in the Land of the Free as well as navigating around Atlanta, and it struck me how different our lives in Prescott are from those of most people out in the real world. We had a swell time and all, but we are very happy to be home again.


You may notice a new box at left with links to my Muggs columns in Pop Rocket. The archive there doesn't seem to be working, so I'm making sure that my purple prose remains deathless and searchable.

Abandoned 19th-century hydropower plant and corn mill on Fall Creek, SC

Guest editorial by Chicken Little

Today the unnamed Courier editor is inflamed by the news that Saadi Gaddafi, ex-football player and third son of the Libyan nutbar dictator, had failed to get into Mexico on false documents. He'd hoped to retire to obscurity there at a luxury resort under a false name The editor makes an Olympian logical leap to use this as an example of dangerous criminals coming though Mexico to hurt us, and scolds the federal government for "failing to secure our borders" again.

I really don't see a need to waste a lot of pixels explaining why this is just stupid. I'll distill it to this: show us a real problem, editor.

Dumb stuff about smart meters

Pop Rocket readers will recall I covered this subject at length in Muggs, and I'd have thought that since PR is a Courier subsidiary, the editors might have considered what I'd sold them in the mix, but there's no evidence of it here.

Starting with this op-news piece (meaning pseudo-news based on non-facts) on Sunday and carrying through to today's editorial, the Courier editors fall for the manufactured controversy around smart meters and conclude that since no one knows the real story, the technology is a real cause for concern. This is utter hooey, it just gets people stirred up over nothing, and worse, it leads people to slow down on a technology that will be important in moving forward on critically necessary energy infrastructure, as the unnamed editor advocates.

Talk about the possible dangers of RF radiation all you like, the source still has to be powerful enough and chronic enough to make a measurable difference. The smart meters that APS is installing put out very very very small amounts of energy in very very very short bursts just once an hour. These are just facts, they're not subject to interpretation. You get more RF radiation from five minutes in the sun than from these guys in a week.

There's no way this signal can carry any useful information about what you're doing in your house other than how much power you used in the last hour. The Big Brother scenario is neither plausible nor even possible with this technology. (Get over yourself, you're really not that interesting to The Man.)

But papers sell on controversy and journalists aren't expected to know anything about the real world, so from the editor's desk the unsubstantiated 'concerns' of people with no scientific or even mechanical skills rank as high as the clear assurances of scientists, medical professionals, engineers and everyone in Europe.

The reason that the press gets special dispensation in our Constitution is that we recognize the need for good information on which voters can base public policy. By playing the if-someone-disagrees-then-no-one-knows-anything game, the editors neglect this mandate and the community in favor of making a few bucks.

More egregious is the concatenation of the smart-meter issue with the larger issue of high-yield EM radiation from things like high-tension power lines and cellphone towers. This stuff is in a different part of the spectrum and orders of magnitude higher in power, making it a different beast altogether. But the Courier's editing makes them all the same. The WHO director talks about cellphones, and Dr Zieve talks about EM in general. Neither mentions smart meters (or baby monitors, or satellite clocks, or any of the other myriad tiny sources of RF and other radiation in a given home), but the article puts them all on the same footing as hazards. This is just wrong, and grossly misleads people who are unfamiliar with basic physics like the inverse-square law. A continuous video feed via wi-fi in your lap is massively different from a pokey little meter on the outside of your house, I don't care whether it's adjacent to your bedroom. (If it is, you should be far more worried about the EM field generated constantly by the wires in the wall, and at that it's not much.)

Please, readers, we can no longer afford to be ignorant about the complexities of the issues we have to deal with as voters. The future is arriving ever faster, our problems are more complex than ever, and we haven't got time to screw around with superstition. We have to learn to sniff out unexamined assumptions and do our homework.

Must read: The path to single-payer

A post today by karoli on Crooks & Liars nails down why we should all be more hopeful about the Affordable Care Act than the pundits have allowed. It's a pretty rosy view, but hard to dismiss when a writer for Forbes magazine says, "If you thought that the Obama Administration chickened out on pushing the nation in the direction of universal health care for everyone, today is the day you begin to understand that the reality is quite the contrary."

Like the arrest of Al Capone, it's about the money.

This is wonky and it requires a tiny bit of math to understand, but what's going on is the issuance of final rules on a vitally important but underappreciated part of the ACA package, the mandate to reduce the Medical Loss Ratio, meaning the percentage of income that insurers don't apply to health care. The new law requires that this ratio come down from 40-45% to 15-20%.

When it let the ACA through the legislative process in response to public outcry, the industry expected that the Department of Health and Human Services would ultimately provide enough loopholes to protect its gargantuan profits. Now it's quietly screaming. Good for us all.