I'm having a visit with one of my oldest and dearest friends, so there's not a lot of time for the paper. I notice big unannounced changes in the look of dcourier.com, and I'll have comments on that once I have a chance to get used to it. For now it doesn't seem that the editors are doing anything egregious or particularly interesting this week.
I've been looking for the Courier's coverage of this week's press release from Rep Kirkpatrick on the budget, but nary a word.
It seems that our Mr Tobin can get his press releases printed anytime, but our representative in the big game is only covered when she's being criticized. A local newspaper monopoly ought to do better for us than that.
What's cool about the seventh planet, and lots of talk about its funny name, which could have been George.
This silliness about the pronunciation might be avoided if English-speakers weren't so habitually bad at pronouncing classical words. The Greeks called the mate of Gaia Ouranos, and that was Latinized as Uranus, which in Latin is pronounced "oorahnoos."
Bonus: The Greek creation myth featuring Ouranos as a primordial player is wild and fairly gruesome, a fun read. Before you click through, a trivia question: From what dismembered organ did Aphrodite spring?
I've been a little hesitant to say anything that might jinx it, but I've been noticing that copy editing on the Courier has been much better of late. The rampant, glaring typos and embarrassing headlines that have been standard fare in the paper for many years are lately much diminished. I don't know who should get the credit for this, but here's a cookie for whomever you are. I'd love to hear from inside whether there have been relevant policy changes.
The Bush administration's teevee-inspired border boondoggle turns out to be as unworkable as Reagan's "missile defense shield," and we're all just so surprised. But for once the unnamed Courier editor isn't hopping up and down about how the Feds are doing nothing to "control" the border against the illegals who are the root of all evil. While he doesn't really take any position, today he seems relatively thoughtful as he dips a few spoonfuls from the AP story (did this run in the print edition?) and scatters some numbers from 'studies' published by reactionary think-tanks.
Between this and the gun thing on Tuesday, one might wonder whether there's been a change in someone's medication this week.
After years of searching, a charitable nonprofit providing disabled kids and adults with a very special, therapeutic service finds a permanent home, but can't get all the neighbors to sign off. If the comments are any indication, there's going to be some public pressure about this. If you'd like to help, here's the HwH website for a start. They can use it.
I've met with these people and put them on the radio. Their service is terrific and their community spirit is palpable. How anyone could think they and their ten horses wouldn't be the best sort of neighbors is utterly beyond me.
Update, Friday: I see the editor agrees.
This is a nice, solid, researched and balanced news story, giving the subject its due without rehashing too much of the play-by-play that we've seen too often before. Lisa gets a cookie.
If I read this correctly, the unnamed Courier editor is advocating mandatory life sentences for every violent offense. It would be fascinating to hear the editor argue this in a case of, say, a drunken bar brawl in light of the actual cost of incarceration and the inevitable effect this would have on his taxes.
Public safety matters, but perfect public safety is simply not possible in a nation that values freedom. Criminals will exist, cops and innocent people will be hurt and die, as long as we value our humanity more than imaginary safety. It's part of the price of liberty.
Before lightly dismissing the idea that our culture of adolescent worship of guns and violence might have had anything to do with this problem, the editor asks a few plaintive rhetorical questions demonstrating only his lack of imagination. Were he a journalist, he might have taken a more constructive tack with this and put those questions and others to some of our judges, prosecutors, corrections professionals and maybe a psychologist or social scientist. He might have got a good, informative story out of it. Instead, we get this pitiful waste of space.
Editing note: The editor leaves a crucial fact out of this piece, assuming that everyone knows it: the alleged shooter was in prison here for nearly four years on aggravated assault and related charges (AZ Dept of Corrections). That omission makes his argument nonsensical within the piece.
The unnamed Courier editor displays some common sense in protesting Sen. Russell Pearce's attempt to roll back restrictions on firearms, even identifying Pearce correctly as "radical," qualifying for the cookie. I'm grateful that the Courier has lately been consistently applying a more nuanced position on guns than the blind devotion it did previously. It's just too bad the editor's not a little better at journalism, however.
Yesterday, before deadline, the bill passed out of committee carrying amendments addressing the editor's expressed concerns. In other words, the editor wound up writing about a different bill, getting his editorial completely wrong. Here's the update.
This might be just an "oh well,things change" moment, but the readers wind up utterly misled on the content of the legislation, so any input they give their representatives will misfire.
A newspaper editor should understand that the legislative committee process is where a raw bill gets hammered into something the body can vote on, and it's rare that a bill doesn't change substantially in the process. In Arizona it's relatively easy to find out online when a bill is being considered in which committee, and the state offers streaming real-time video of many committee hearings. It's not like the editor couldn't know what was going on.
A skilled journalist would have either published this before the committee process, when constituents still had time to weigh in on the raw bill, or held his fire until the bill was out of all committees and appeared on the floor agenda. On this the editor jumped the gun. (Sorry, sometimes I can't resist.)
Will we perhaps see a followup on the current bill?
Befitting the regular Monday dump of press releases on the front page, here the unnamed Courier editor takes on a topic of kindergarten complexity -- public comments at City Council meetings -- and manages to live up to the challenge by saying pretty much nothing.
Windbags are a professional hazard of public meetings, and we have to face the fact that these opportunities exist every bit as much for the windbags as for anyone else.
Windbags do what they do because they don't feel they're being heard, either by the public officials they're addressing or by others in their daily lives. The only good way to reduce incidents of windbaggery is to build and resolutely reinforce a culture of caring respect, so people clearly understand that the officials aren't using the Council table as a wall between higher and lower classes, while reinforcing respect for the time of everyone in the room. But Council members must accept that windbaggery will happen on occasion, and they're drawing their pay in large part to put up with precisely that. Skilled leaders know that just expressing that they care to hear what the windbag is saying will reduce windbaggery by 20% out of the gate, and other leadership techniques can help a poor communicator get to the heart of what he wants to say and step down.
Even when those don't work, it's far better to have Council and the public put up with a windbag than to have the Mayor gaveling people off the podium to avoid hearing what they're saying, and the difference between worthwhile speech and windbaggery is in the ear of the beholder. The First Amendment does not say "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, unless it's boring or takes too long." Council must bear in mind at all times that they are elected to serve the public, not the other way around.
Note to editor: Where you wrote, "the presiding officer has the right to reign in a speaker," that should be "rein in." Given all the Western movies you so love to quote and our town's cowboy reputation, your readers expect you to know a little more about the terminology.
Today the Courier extends its reputation for hipshooting into the area of transportation policy.
The unnamed Courier editor poo-poohs the paltry 13 billion clams the President is proposing for high-speed rail as inadequate to the task of building a national high-speed rail network. Of course, no one has promised any such thing. From the WSJ:
"Building a high-speed rail network like the one in Western Europe would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but Mr. Obama called the $13 billion effort 'a first step.'"
From The New York Times: "The government has identified 10 corridors, each from 100 to 600 miles long, with greatest promise for high-speed development. They are: a northern New England line; an Empire line running east to west in New York State; a Keystone corridor running laterally through Pennsylvania; a major Chicago hub network; a southeast network connecting the District of Columbia to Florida and the Gulf Coast; a Gulf Coast line extending from eastern Texas to western Alabama; a corridor in central and southern Florida; a Texas-to-Oklahoma line; a California corridor where voters have already approved a line that will allow travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours; and a corridor in the Pacific Northwest."There's a reason it's called "mass transit" -- it's designed for lots of people to use. Look at the graphic, editor: the lines are where the people are. The city of New York by itself has half again as many people in it than the entire state of Arizona. You want bang for your tax buck, right?
Update, 11pm Monday: Well, well, well, there are situations in which the editors will stoop to correcting mistakes online! An anonymous commenter alerts me that the editorial has been changed, sometime in the last four hours, adding attribution of the copied bits to the CSM. Pity he didn't get the typo while he was at it. Must've been in a hurry.
I've been thinking about this one since it went up, but haven't had time to get to it.
The editor blasts legislators for having the unmitigated gall to try and walk back laws that "the people" gave us by initiative. He's talking yet again about term limits, his second editorial on the subject in three days. This writer wonders whether he'd be as protective of an initiative he doesn't like so much, but let's leave that aside for the moment. There's plenty of stupid here to deal with already.
His argument is that "the voters have spoken" on term limits -- 18 years ago -- and while he doesn't refute that "they deprive lawmakers of institutional knowledge and give too much influence to aides and lobbyists," to him that decision is carved in stone, apparently because it is infallible. Like the Pope.
He tries to reinforce this with Rep Tobin's aborted move to reintroduce as a bill the payday-loan industry's failed initiative of a year and a half ago. The editor sees a parallel there that evades me.
"A government by the people is supposed to be one in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them," says the editor, citing a principle of American civics that as far as I can tell he made up on the spot. Our system is not direct democracy, that doesn't exist anywhere. In representative government, supreme power is indeed vested in the people, but it is by design not exercised by them.
Our little direct-democracy option, the initiative process, was designed and built well over a century ago, and acts like it. It's primitive, allowing nefarious players to take advantage of us in many ways, and it's morphing into government by advertising. The idea that "the people" are behind most initiatives is either blindly naive or actively malicious. The idea that a few sentences scrawled on a bar napkin can pass through the initiative process and become good law is plain stupid, and most initiatives really are nearly that poorly vetted.
But the crux of the editor's argument is that "the people" can't be wrong in passing through these things. We've given term limits 18 years to prove out, and what we see is growing ignorance, disorganization, disarray and even corruption in our legislative bodies as a direct result. The state is functionally bankrupt, our Accidental Governor is trying to get her way by screaming at people, and our amateur Legislature is arranging duckpins on the poopdeck of the Titanic and thinking about a nice lunch. It's past time to repair this crucial mistake and start rebuilding our political culture.
The real 'duh' moment here is at the end, where the editor implies that the Legislature will pass this through the regular process and "the people" won't get to vote on it. The bill in process is a concurrent resolution, which if passed will result in a ballot measure. There's no other legal way to get around an established initiative. A newspaper editor ought to know these things.
It's funny, I must have missed the Courier stories about the candidacies of Dean Martin, Terry Goddard and the other front-runners for actual nomination. But we get the press release from our semi-local gun god verbatim as a news story. I have a feeling we know how this is going to go in everybody's hometown newspaper.
I've got just one thing to say about this AP story: In eight years of unending public controversy, the Courier never once associated the word "embattled" with George W Bush. Just sayin'.
Regular readers know that I was born without the sports gene and could not care less about the Olympics or any other spectator sports event. As a mediated pastime I consider sports less harmful than, say, eating bugs, but I'd still be happy to see the whole international-combat-via-sports thing dry up and fall off as we humans move through our social adolescence. I wouldn't bother to write an editorial on it, though. It's just not that important.
So when the unnamed Courier editor spends his daily inches to feign a question and opine clumsily that the Olympics are "so, so worth it," I have to laugh. So worth what, exactly? The games have never cost our community one thin dime, and the editor will get them for free on his teevee (albeit amid a relentless commercial assault that would melt my brain). It's just a non-issue.
So we come to the question: why did he write this? Logically all I can come up with is that the editor is so bored with our puny local issues that he's wrapping his brain in the primary opiate of the masses -- television -- and parroting its navel-gazing self-absorption, making its concerns his own.
So the editor offers an unintended public service here, exemplifying the danger in the same way a certain pan of frying eggs did some years ago -- this is your brain on teevee. Just say no.
The Legislature is considering a move to repeal term limits, and the unnamed Courier editor is predictably steamed that any politician might have the temerity to resist one of his favorite policies. He casts dark aspersions on their motivations, as usual, and farbles on about how we need a running clock to keep lazy pols from "wasting time" in office. Legislation is such an easy job, after all.
I've been there on a weekly basis through over seven years of legislative experience with Rep Lucy Mason, heard her stories (those we talk about on the radio and those we can't), and watched her evolution from fresh-faced, idealistic freshman to hard-bitten, tempered senior. I have no doubt at all that she is a far smarter and more effective legislator now than in her first term, and that no one comes into the job with much useful understanding of how the state works or any knowledge of the players involved.
Term limits shift institutional memory and organizational power to staff (who, if they're doing their jobs correctly, do not impart it to legislators) and lobbyists (who use it at least selectively and often strategically). A less-experienced Legislature overall means slower and lower-quality training for freshmen. A more tenuous institutional culture empowers newbies to reinvent the wheel with a square rim and call it innovation.
It's hard for people who are already convinced to understand, but the train wreck that we're currently experiencing at the Capitol is largely the direct result of inexperience in the Legislature and the Governor's office. And the Courier would have us not only maintain this as received wisdom, but extend it to Washington. As if our national politics aren't sufficiently dysfunctional.
Perhaps most convincing to me on this issue is that the freshman Rep. Mason was a true believer in term limits, and by her junior term she was completely convinced that the policy is idiotic, not because she will be unable to continue working 72 hours a week of constant frustration and flak from people who think she's a criminal for $25K a year, but rather because she really does care about effectively addressing the problems we face as a society. I don't always agree with her policy choices, but I'll defend to the end her sincerity and abilities in public service. She's better for her experience, and that's the sort of legislator I want working for me.
Term limits arbitrarily prevent me from voting for the representative I want.This I consider a substantial impairment of my most basic constitutional right. The editor makes his living on the First Amendment. One would think he'd be more protective of the body of that great document.
The unnamed Courier editor is happy to spout off about refusing to raise taxes in any way. Why shouldn't he? What has he got to lose? Hating taxes is about as against-the-wind as hating bin Laden. It's too bad that public policy just isn't that easy.
Our state has a structural problem with its revenue policy. What I mean by "structural" is that the problems are built into the structure. What we're experiencing now is inevitable given the policies we've been using, and smarter people than I have been telling our leaders that for years. It's ironic that the editor quotes the old aphorism about insanity and in the same breath demands that we keep doing what we've been doing, which is blocking all necessary changes in tax policy except those that impoverish our state services and ultimately ourselves.
New ideas indeed, editor. And where are yours? I'm sure your state legislators would love to hear them.
