What are you smoking?

Lesley shot this photo from Jerome this morning. Tons of smoke over in the Verde from the Taylor fire.

Geez, who's running the show today?

In the editor's haste to get this critical midday story (from Sunday!) up on the Website, s/he apparently forgot to think about whether it was intelligible. The reader is left to consider whether this was written by someone at the Courier, or just passed through from the sheriff's report:

. . . deputies where able to located McCracken after he called the cell phone of a witness.

Editorial: Gun-toters hurt owners' rights

As the story of the nutbar with the AR-15 hanging around the Obama venue in Phoenix goes national, further confirming Arizona's reputation for adolescent behavior, the unnamed Courier editor gets it right for once and comes down hard on him and other irresponsible gun owners. Today the editor deserves a big cookie and my full support. (It's a point, though: what else could he do?)

We can hope that this will help inform the future debate on sensible gun restrictions that protect society while respecting individual rights.

Letter: How about 'clunkers' for low-income folk?

Carolyn Wiseman is taking some heat from the commenters, but she has a point: if the goal of the program is to move people into cleaner and more efficient cars, why don't used cars qualify? Given the same mileage differential, replacing an inefficient car with a more efficient used car would cost the government less, giving us more bang for our bucks, and reduce the overall carbon footprint substantially compared to making a new car. But one anonymous commenter is right to the extent that the program is clearly more for the car manufacturers than for consumers or the environment.

Man faces charges after he alleged assaults estranged wife

Today's chuckle: Another pitiful fail by the headline writer and the page editor helps make up for the lame cartoon page. Hint: It's really not that hard to proof your headlines, kids!

The answer to the puzzle: Peeples Valley man charged with assault

ToT: People need to get health care facts

Kathy Lopez contributes some fact-based reality and mature thinking to the sense-starved health-care debate, and the Courier wins a point for giving her the Talk of the Town banner.

Unfortunately, like other contributors she lacks pertinent credentials, and she gives us a whole lot of numbers without backing citations. Providing sources would help convince a lot of readers, and a good editor would have asked for it.

Update, 4pm: In the comments, "Truth Doctrine" offers us the anonymous blog post that started the Hitler-image-as-Dem-plant rumor. Click here to read a response from actual journalist David Weigel, who investigated the allegation for The Washington Independent.

Propaganda 101: Why screaming works

Courier scooped again -- or just ignoring the story?

It seems there's some illegal election chicanery going on in everybody's home town. Funny we aren't reading about it in the Courier, innit?

Update, Tuesday: Three days later, Jason Soifer turns in a story that seems to assume everyone's already hip to it, and on reading it I'm left with the impression that the Courier thinks push-polling is OK.

Army Sergeant with Prescott ties shocks wife on return visit home

This is a pretty run-of-the-mill feel-good story, notable only for its headline, which is I'm sure drawing lots of eyes by implying something more interesting. I guess that's one way to sell papers.

From the reality-based community

Paul Krugman, writing in the NYT:

"Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex. This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing."

Read the whole thing. It's a challenge to all of us to get up on our hind legs and push back.

Mathematicians love it, physicists hate it. Your Friday mind-expansion on the difference between really, really big and infinity.

Guest column: Cap and Trade bill bad for Arizonans

Now it appears we have a third category for local op-eds, adding "Guest Column" to "Column" and "Talk of the Town." I've noted before the use of "Talk of the Town" for out-of-town right-wing propaganda, maybe the editors got the message. (I know, dream on.) But putting that propaganda under a new heading doesn't much improve it.

For those who have other things to think about, the Goldwater Institute is an extreme-right lobbying group which has almost no remaining connection to the thinking of Barry Goldwater. It's the local enforcement arm of the Grover Norquist government-killing machine, widely feared among Republicans at the capitol.

Byron Schlomach's assertion that cap-and-trade will wind up baking Grannie to death in her condo because she can't afford the AC is classic fear-peddling of the lowest order. While everyone agrees the regime would raise costs to energy consumers, the darksiders are purposefully inflating cost estimates beyond reason, and ignoring the benefits in terms of direct returns of revenues to consumers as part of the program, restructuring of our energy infrastructure for sustainability (jobs!), and reducing the severity of global warming and its economic and social costs. Factcheck.org has plenty more.

Prescott Airport nears longtime commercial passenger goal

I can't wait to see the Courier editorial criticizing Commissar Wilson and City staff for supporting socialized air travel.

Prescott employee's discovery will save 2 million gallons of water per year

I think we can all applaud a hero of water conservation. I'm a bit put out that Cindy apparently didn't ask our City or County staff why it took so long to reach this dope-slap moment, but I guess I can understand it might be a little embarrassing, and we wouldn't want that. She gets a cookie, in any case.

Editorial: Line extensions hurt ratepayers

Today the unnamed Courier editor must make what he apparently sees as a Solomon-worthy decision between rural developers and electric utilities, and as the experienced Courier reader might expect, comes down on the side of I-me-mine.

Here's some background from AZJournal.com, which differs with the editor on when the rule went away and on whose initiative. The editor failed to mention that this came up on the official request of Navajo County, which no doubt is as developer-driven as Yavapai, but it ought to matter, especially given that the editor neglected to publish a news piece on this issue.

This story has a pretty low profile, and I have to wonder why it rates an opinion. Maybe someone the editor knows is worried that someone else might build a house on a neighboring property?

From what I read, the developers and growth-fascinated county officials want free extensions in a big way, and the utilities don't seem to mind one way or the other, so the ACC will probably reinstate the rule regardless of the editor's professed concern that he might wind up paying a few more pennies a year to run Fox News and old Westerns on his big-screen teevee.

I'm a little divided on it myself. Anything that slows human encroachment into unspoiled land seems like a good thing to me, but this could also affect the spread of distributed energy generation as more rooftops go solar and more ranchers build wind generators.

A flurry of letters

The Courier is carrying no less than eight LTEs today, all on the health-care debate, which looks a lot like a stunt to me.

Patricia Brockert tries to set the record straight on end-of-life counseling. Bill Holmes swears he'll be civil at the meeting that no lawmaker plans to attend. In the comments, Craig Mathews provides some interesting background on both the meeting and Mr Holmes. Tim Welte demands a pledge from Rep Kirkpatrick that she read the bill. Larry Lawlyes (sp?) and Paul Lopez call it on the obstructionist town-meeting strategy. Bernard Cygan is butt-hurt because Speaker Pelosi thinks shouting down your representatives is un-American. Sherry Denecker thinks the health-care reform is about letting old people die. And Robert Graybehl is just mad at Demmycrats.

I count three in favor vs. five against, better odds than we get on Fox. I wonder how many the editors left on the spike.

Fair and balanced

Media Matters has the numbers on Fox News and the health-care debate. How anyone can see Fox as a credible news source is beyond me.

Meanwhile, over in the Verde

Compare John Kinnamon's LTE in the Independent to the Courier's "Talk of the Town" below. That's what I'm talkin' about. This should be the Courier's editorial.

ToT: Elected officials have done enough

Barbara Briseno, whose only credentials seem to be that she's "concerned" and retired, gets "Talk of the Town" status for her standard wingnut rant containing exactly nothing that could be useful or informative. Circumspect readers would be right to ask why the editors use their precious page space in this way.

Might it be to simply provoke lots of heated online comments, thereby raising hit counts and justifying online ad rates? After all, everyone seems to so love reading idiotic arguments peppered with the personal attacks that the editor claims are off limits. If this is the plan, most of the commenters are just facilitating the lies and thickening the smoke screen.

If you care about the quality of the paper and public discourse, call the editors to account for fomenting a pointless food-fight and using personal attacks as a marketing strategy when it suits them. But don't take the bait -- stay out of the fray. There is nothing to be gained from engaging idiots.

Letter: America still remains a Christian nation

Gag me, yet another Xtian supremacist waving his persecution hankie. It's a waste of the reader's time, of course, but in the comments I notice George Seaman, a normally reliable defender of free speech, begging the editors to stop printing such letters. What I'm not sure George is noticing is that most of the responses seem to be calling the writer on his historical lies and logical tangles. This is how it's supposed to work -- you can say what you want, but you get to be accountable for it.

PS to the awful headline writer: "still remains" is irredeemably redundant.