Feed-Your-Head Friday

What's going on with Mars, and an exciting, inspiring mission that's ready to go. At 18 minutes this one's a little longer than usual, but way worth it.

Today's Chuckle

Tim fires off an angry column about a frustrating experience on the phone, only to have commenters point out that he just failed to follow clear instructions.

Editorial: ADWR closure not end of world

The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger was hard at work again yesterday rewriting Tuesday's story on the closure of the local state water-agency office. As opinion the overstuffed chair offers little more than "that's life" and that no one will care very much, and since growth has ground to a near-halt, the water problem is on hold anyway.

Perhaps if the editor were in the chair while this was going on he'd have remembered that we were declared in violation of regulations against groundwater mining over ten years ago, and plenty more still-thirsty people are here now. The lull in growth we're experiencing is an opportunity to regroup, reassess our situation and create a new, more sustainable vision for our area without the pressure of thousands more homes going up and millions more dollars skewing the picture. So it's arguably more important that ADWR maintain a presence here now, to keep tabs on what's happening more directly and to be a trustworthy resource for local policymakers.

The editor's history of advocacy for unsustainable growth and disregard for environmental concerns belies his unconcern about the loss of our state water watchdogs -- this really makes him happy.

Notice also that the the lull isn't stopping the pipeline builders: Big Chino bills move through committees

Editorial: Shift on drilling for oil is welcome

The unnamed Courier editor is mystified as to why the Obama administration might be willing to allow oil drilling off the East Coast and north of Alaska.

"Why the sudden change? We're going broke and supporting countries that harbor terrorists otherwise," he writes, giving himself a pat on the back for a pat answer. It's almost unsporting to point out that no, what the administration has done, even if it results in lots of new oil platforms dotting the continental shelves, will not begin to reduce oil importation or significantly change the country's economic prospects. There simply isn't enough oil there to make much difference, and getting the things built and producing takes many years. The arguments against it during the Bush administration still make the same amount of sense.

From what I've seen, the President is looking at two factors. In practical terms, well-run environmentally safe operations could be producing much higher-priced oil 15 or 20 years from now, when supplies are clearly dwindling worldwide and we'll still be shifting to sustainable energy sources. I suspect that despite the vast areas tagged for potential leasing, very few locations will both have useful oil in the ground and be suitable for extraction given environmental factors, so let's not get all twisted up in rosy (or nightmarish) scenarios just yet. I'll have a lot more trust in this administration to put rules in place to ensure that the southeast coast doesn't wind up looking like Alaska after the Valdiz than I would the Bush administration, which would have happily converted the Washington Monument into a derrick if it thought there were two barrels of oil under it somewhere.

The second and far more important factor is taking the issue away from the "drill, baby, drill" Republicans. With this move the President has effectively eliminated the criticism that he's only interested in solar panels on hippie domes as an energy policy. The Southeast can hope for thousands of jobs in building and operating rigs someday (not incidentally helping rebuild New Orleans as well), plus perhaps more environmental survey, assessment and monitoring jobs, building up a more useful and needed industry. It will also embarrass the financial Morlocks when they get what they've been saying they wanted all these years but won't actually take the financial risk and follow through. There's not enough oil there, see. The same goes for those Republican-run coastal states when the rich Republican folks in the beachfront condos start standing up for their right to a clear horizon and clean sand.

This will bring in better results for Democrats at the midterms, and could pull enough Dem votes together on energy to push through some more serious reforms quickly.

As for the editor's confidence that "Republicans surely will back Obama," I'm afraid he's in for disappointment on that score. The Reps have chosen a strategy -- no -- and they will be sticking with it at least until they take another drubbing in November. The current crop has neither the ideas nor the imagination to do otherwise.

McCain coloring outside the lines again

This is the kind of total BS that our Senator is dishing out (video from Mar 13).



The necessary questions:

Does he really know so little about what he's talking about -- he's supposed to be an expert in this area -- or is he just flat-out lying?

How could either of these scenarios possibly do anything but disqualify him from yet another six-year term representing us in the Senate?

Why the heck was he doing a town hall in New Hampshire?

Editorial: Battle ends; war on health goes on

I'll try not to make too much of the unnamed Courier editor's headline fail here, although it's really hard to resist something so Freudian-slippish as "war on health goes on" from so dutiful a soldier in that cause. I'll even skip lightly over his reuse of the photo from yesterday that makes Speaker Pelosi look so bad. What we need to talk about, once again, is content and propaganda.

The editor tries to make it look like he's rising to the 50,000-foot level and standing above the grisly fray. What's he's really doing is reinforcing myths and unreasonable doubts to make political points.

The "unanswered questions" the editor alludes to are in the main well answered, but the reactionaries won't hear it. (This is not unlike to the inability among a small minority to accept that the president was born in the US.) He asserts that few in Congress have read the bill, which may be technically true, but the implication is that few "if any" understand it, which is certainly not true, and further that the language just dropped out of the sky from somewhere, rather than evolved in the fire of intense negotiation. And yes, there will be unintended consequences, but that's true of every piece of legislation ever passed. The editor's dark foreboding is just theatre, and you'll notice that he doesn't even try to back it up with a single fact.

The parliamentary "hurdles" the editor mentions were apparently only important to Fox News commentators, as the bill is expected to breeze through the Senate this week. The constitutional challenges being mounted by a small minority of state AGs ("aspiring governors," as I saw it put so well this morning) are political theatre as well, though given our Bush-packed Supreme Court, a few nuts might try with not unreasonable hope to get slavery declared constitutional again.

He waves the red flag of abortion, always good for a roar from a certain small constituency. That straw man has been knocked down so many times it should be in the same bin with the birther conspiracy.

"Polls showed a majority of Americans opposing the bill right up until Sunday night's vote," intones the editor. He was accurate about that until today, sort of, but not in support of his argument that the Dems are risking electoral losses for it, since the same polls he was reading found that 52% of respondents either supported the bill or favored something more liberal. Even that's moot today, as new polls are coming out showing even higher favorables, vindicating several pundits I heard weeks ago predicting that once the thing was in the bag, the majority would embrace it.

Finally, evoking the tea-party wingnuts protesting the bill as some sort of decisive political force while ignoring the many more who publicly gave thanks for its passage is just silly. The editor is looking for what he wants to see in the world, and seeing it. He's either trying to fool you, or fooling himself. This is absolutely not the sort of person that you want running any news outlet.

Health care reform: Legislation makes numerous changes

Joanna takes a stab at laying out what's in the bill, doing what a reporter should be doing. Then the editors come in and turn it into a political debate piece by running a sidebar with comments from McCain and Kirkpatrick.

They won't let it go, it all has to be about politics. This keeps voters confused and stirred up emotionally so they can't think with any clarity about what's actually happening. The photos are more than twice the size of the sidebar, top of page one: so what's the message?

The animals are growing bold

Yesterday we saw several particularly scary comments from a guy signing himself "1 of we the people" and identifying with the tea-party cult, expressing that "only white men are responsible enough" to carry guns and make public policy decisions, etc. The editor came in this morning and trimmed out the worst of it, but we still have part of his rant about the military being "out to get us" to justify violence.

This sort of paranoia is the inevitable result of whipping up fear over nothing and using it for political gain. Readers have to bear in mind that as we chuckle over the juvenile political antics of the Courier editors, there are serious consequences for allowing our media to jump off into extremism. "1 of we the people" is among a tiny number of sick individuals who eat this stuff up, and as they move deeper into it, eventually one of them goes over the line and starts hurting people.

As it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and our only defense against it is prevention. A big part of that is moderating our public discourse and acting like responsible adults.

Update, Tuesday: Like I said.

News Analysis: Health care's political lift uncertain

Isn't it precious how the Courier editors found ways to undermine the news of the passage of health-care legislation?

The photo of Speaker Pelosi gaping in laughter is pretty bad, but this piece is a particularly egregious abuse of a news page in service to propaganda. Carried as news, it's nothing but political opinion, and obviously belongs on the op-ed page.

This is childish, guys, and your adult readers are generally capable of understanding it as such. Please make an attempt to grow up. You've got at least three more years of Democratic administration to suffer through. If you whine and tantrum like this over everything, why should anyone, left, right or center, trust anything in your paper?

This says it all

Happy anniversary, war fans

We get an editorial every Pearl Harbor Day, but Iraq Invasion Day is here again with no mention of it in the Courier. Maybe the editor would jump on it if we celebrated it with green beer. Or would red be more appropriate?




Update, Sunday: An anonymous commenter asks how many other papers covered this story. Consider this list to start.

Editorial: Kirkpatrick vote surprises no one

I'm so surprised: the unnamed Courier editor is blaming Rep Kirkpatrick, a Democrat, for sometimes voting like a Democrat.

I must have missed the many editorials wherein the editor excoriated her predecessor, Rick Renzi, for voting too often like a Republican, as well for not voting at all after the indictments started coming in. Maybe the editor was out sick that decade.

See, here's how it works. Since the editor voted against her for Congress but she still won, in order for her to properly represent The People (= The Editor), she has to vote as the editor would. Doing otherwise obviously makes her a puppet of the evil California liberals who want to put the editor in chains, take all his guns away and give them to North Korea.

Never mind that Ms Kirkpatrick is among the small group of congressional freshmen demonstrating the most independence from the party line. If she votes against the editor, she's been bitten by Nancy Pelosi and become one of her army of liberal zombies.

I'm sure it's also very confusing to the editor that the Representative has failed to demonstrate her zombieness on issues the editor holds dear, like guns, congressional pay and deficit spending. Those initiatives couldn't possibly be anything other than a "smokescreen of conservative credibility." I tell you, nothing gets past this guy.

Seriously, editor, why can't you just write that you don't agree with Ms Kirkpatrick's vote on health care, using research to back up your argument on the issue rather than personal attack and innuendo?

Do you even care what's in the bill? Wouldn't it make more sense to help inform your readers on its merits and demerits? Or are you really only concerned about whether your team is winning?

ToT: Budgets should go onto Internet

No sensible person will argue against transparency in government. More information is generally a good thing, and in principle requiring government authorities to publish their budgets and spending details is the responsible thing to do. But a couple of things bother me about today's screed from the Goldwater Institute.

First, it's from the Goldwater Institute, the primary purpose of which is to help wrest government functions out of the hands of the people and into the loving care of corporations. The Courier is all too often a shill for this group, printing its press releases and pseudo-news uncritically and often unattributed to cover the source. GI is a highly skilled propaganda organ, famous for framing issues to look reasonable in support of its radical agenda.

Which brings me to the second problem. We all want transparency (except, apparently, when Republicans are in charge, since GI never demanded anything of the sort during the Bush regime), but consider the next step: you've got the data, so what do you do with it?

It's entirely reasonable to infer that reams of searchable data on government expenditures can help agencies identify redundancies and possible savings. That's all good. I would hope that we were hiring managers whose primary responsibility is to do exactly that, and if they're not I have to wonder what our state thinks a manager is supposed to be doing. But there's a lot to do, and more eyes on the problem can help.

What I don't want to see is a horde of angry, self-righteous right-wingers, whipped up by television fearmongers, peppering our government managers with ignorant, politically motivated demands and judgments.

All the data in the world is useless unless you know how to interpret it and understand its basis in context. How many of Goldwater's public-spirited citizens will sit down and do the research to understand what's behind a given expenditure before passing judgment on whether they like it?

I have a feeling GI hopes to employ the old government-as-sausage-making saw to its advantage in tearing down government, betting that showing people more details of government while keeping them ignorant of the whole picture and hammering on the government-is-bad button will fuel the torches-and-pitchforks mobs that help keep people divided and corporations running the show.

Editorial: Remember the life of St. Patrick

Yeah, sure, celebrate St Pat, a religious zealot who helped subjugate the last free Celts for the Roman Catholic Empire.

It's so easy to forget the history when there's green beer around, innit?

Editorial: Congress lawsuit matter of sense

The editorial follows up on Friday's story by Paula about a dust devil in Congress between the school district and four people who've demanded to see lots of documents and speak at board meetings, two of whom are mother and daughter.

Clearly there are two sides to this story. What concerns me about the news story and the editorial is that they seem to be based entirely on a press release from the Goldwater Institute, which is not only an extreme partisan organization, but is legally representing the people who've been bugging the district.

I'm not saying it's impossible for GI to be giving out the straight dope, but since there are no other news sources (including the Republic, which parrots the same release), we can't know any more about it than what GI wants us to know.

There's an important clue in Paula's story: The GI lawyer says, "If the lawsuit goes forward and the district gets an injunction, it could completely negate the public records law, negate the First Amendment right to free speech and eliminate public participation for fear of being sued." This is legal poppycock -- the injunction would be sharply limited, against specific people in response to specific behavior. By framing it this way, GI is setting up the idea that there can be no limits to citizen demands on government entities, including harassment. GI's kill-government history shows that it loves to see bureaucratic wheels grinding to a halt (outside the military and police apparatus, of course).

It could also be that the district board is being run by a few hotheads who can't stand people calling them to account. A lot of details in the story don't add up. But without a clear account from the other side, we're left to guess.

Given that the unnamed Courier editor saw fit to run with Goldwater and no new information, I'd probably bet that the story is largely BS and the school board has a reasonable complaint. Watch for a followup story on how the judge rules.

Governor's chief of staff to Cattle Growers: AZ's woes should sound familiar

From all reports I've heard, Eileen Klein is a smart cookie, one who is probably completely aware that her show for the cattlemen was all smoke and mirrors.

In mirror mode, she evoked St. Reagan to justify her boss' support for the sales tax hike, and blamed Gov Napolitano for allowing "the government to grow as large as possible," as Heidi describes it. Perhaps Ms Klein forgot that both houses of the Legislature were controlled by Republicans for both Janet's terms and most of living memory, and the Governor does not allocate the state budget. That's the Legislature's responsibility.

In smoke mode, Ms Klein talks about how California's finances were a "house of cards, a Ponzi scheme" necessitating new taxes, setting that in direct parallel to Arizona today, but we hear no mention of how the structural weaknesses in Arizona's financial policy that led us to this pass can or should change to be more dependable and stable.

Let's not forget that the Gov has declared for reelection, so this was an early campaign speech to an influential chunk of her base. Ms Brewer may be telling the truth, but clearly she has no ideas for correcting the problem. In other words, if Jan gets everything she wants, it could all come down exactly the same way in another five years.

Shorter Klein: We got it really wrong in the past, so we should keep doing that.

We need a much more serious approach than picking the pockets of poor folk to patch a system that has proved catastrophically deficient. Sensible structural change means moving away from sales taxes as the primary revenue source, away from construction as the primary industry, and toward real property taxes, as we have a more settled population and more established businesses in one of the most attractive environments for living and working in the western hemisphere. We have to move forcefully toward renewable energy and sustainable industry, and away from dependence on retailing and extractive industry. We have to spread the tax base to raise revenues and improve fairness. That's the sort of ideas I'll be looking for from this year's crop of candidates.

Editorial: City should shift money to needs

Today the unnamed Courier makes the case that elections don't matter and the City should just do what the editor wants.

We know, of course, that the editor vehemently opposed the open-space allocation of sales-tax funds in the 2000 initiative. He and most of the representatives on city councils since have complained continuously about that vote and worked diligently to subvert it.

Somehow it's impossible for these people to understand that in voting to allocate money to buy open space, the voters of Prescott defined purchased open space as a need. So for Council or the editor to turn around and say it isn't is just beating a still-opinionated but entirely dead horse.

People don't vote to tax themselves thinking it might be nice if we could have this. They decide that the thing is necessary to their community at cost to themselves personally. That's fairly persuasive, if you ask me. I'm not saying that voters can't or don't make mistakes in the process, but that's our system, like it or lump it.

The editor can argue all day that we should overturn that initiative and spend the money on streets. He can't argue that such spending is objectively unnecessary -- the voters said otherwise, explicitly, and it'll take another vote to change that -- and he can't argue for just using the money to repair streets instead -- that's not legal or ethical. Given that revenues from that sales tax have far exceeded projections at the time and actual open-space purchasing is far behind intended schedule, he can't say with any authority that open-space purchases have impeded the intent of the initiative in terms of street repair. If the editor believes we need more money for streets, he is arguing in favor of higher taxes to pay for them. He should be advocating a new initiative for additional sales tax to cover better projections of how much money will be needed, and specifically overturning the open-space allocation.

Somehow I don't expect we'll see him doing that. It's so much easier to call for ignoring the will of the people. Things were so much simpler when we had kings, huh?

The language of the 2000 initiative left sensible room for Council to to operate in terms of specific allocations of funds at a given time. The voters trusted Council to follow the clear intent of the initiative rather than bind the City to hard schedules. Council has instead taken advantage of that trust and sensibility to resist the initiative. This short-term political opportunism risks long-term loss of options if the voters decide they can't trust Council. I'd urge sitting Councilors and staff to be very careful about treading on that flag.

Feed-Your-Head Friday

Some very cool demonstrations here on how charges work.

Editorial: Aim sign anger to do some good

The unnamed Courier editor takes the opportunity afforded by the antics of Councilmen Hanna and Blair to polish his rightist immigration credentials, managing in a couple of hundred words both to characterize removing the Spanish banner as "an extreme reaction" and to urge readers to elect more extreme reactionaries.

Along the way he betrays his lingual chauvinism (or is it racism?), calling it "an unfortunate fact of life that many legal American citizens still speak primarily Spanish in their daily lives," as if speaking Spanish is some sort of developmental handicap.

But he really kicks it into gear when he demonstrates that he really doesn't get the issue at all: "we at the Courier don't like an expression that encourages illegal residents to participate in the census," as if it's an illegal act, or participation in the census confers some sort of legal privilege.

Editor, we, all of us, including you, really do want illegals to participate. If they do, we have a clearer idea of how to apportion public spending (like roads and infrastructure, say) for the actual number of people in our community, as well as ensure that we get enough votes in Congress to account for that real number. More illegals on the census is an advantage to our communities, and does not change their status or public benefits one bit.

But I gather that's really hard to see through race-tinted aviator sunglasses.

ToT: Corporations don't count as people

My good friend George Seaman posits that the expansion of corporate freedoms awarded recently by the Supreme Court is a danger that we should be able to see equally from across the political spectrum. He's right, we should. So why don't we?

I have to wonder whether a lot of people who identify with the right are enthralled by corporations in much the same way a battered wife continues to defend her abuser. They've deluded themselves that the abusers really love them, despite what all their friends tell them, and if they can just be loyal enough and do the right things, the abuse will magically stop.

You can't penetrate this sort of self-delusion by stating the obvious. George's argument is cogent and clear to those of us who already understand, but our problem is that a whole lot of us don't or won't buy it.

George sensibly asserts, "Most of us don't have to think very hard to find evidence of this kind of collusion in today's 'unfree' markets," but fails to provide any examples to back that statement and help lead unconvinced voters to water. "Presidents from Jefferson to Obama, and many in between, have warned of the dire consequences of elevating corporations to an equal footing with the people," true enough, but the people we need to persuade do not understand what those consequences are.

We have to more clearly articulate the very real danger inherent in giving corporate interests unfettered license to use their financial and propaganda resources to influence elections and public policy. Many, perhaps most, voters already think that corporate influence is so deep that this ruling won't matter. The predictable difference might be expressed as a little water in your basement once in a while against a flood taking the house away. But this is not an easy sell against decades of daily corporate propaganda. We must be persuasive, persistent, factual and elementary if we're to have any hope for change.

I got a chuckle in the comments from one that characterizes ol'-hippie George as a rightwinger trying to pass as a libertarian. It's funny, but also illustrative of how people can read all sorts of things in that not only aren't there, but are completely opposite of reality.