An absolute must-read -- a Republican Senate staffer retires after 30 years and pulls no punches. The money quote:
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.
A longtime reader writes:
Twice I have sent this to the Courier editor for inclusion with no response and once to the high school without reply. I smell one or more rats. I think my questions are responsible. I can’t seem to let this go and see no reason I should. Maybe you have a better idea to gain answers?
What’s going on at Prescott High School?
Editor,
I read with curiosity an article printed in the Courier July 17th titled “Police, firefighters rescue 2 boys from locked car trunk”. We are fortunate that our public servants arrived at the high school and that the story had a happy ending, though the entire event does raise at least two important unanswered questions:
1.Why were 3 eleven year olds working on a car unsupervised, with know one else around, at the auto shop area on high school grounds, not even during the school year?
2.Whose Cadillac was being worked on, what work was being done and why were eleven year olds doing it?
I believe the first goal of our schools is to provide a safe place for students and faculty alike. What transpired to cause this event? How many hundreds or millions of dollars would the city be turning over to families of victims if the outcome had been much different? I have inquired to the schools principal via mail ten days ago and have received no reply.
Steven Major
Prescott
Update, Thursday night: Ask and ye shall receive, as Tim promised in the comments.
But wait, what gives? I went back to the original story to check it, and find that the phrase "working on," which I clearly remember and Mr Major quotes above, now reads "playing around." The original version is still on display in the July 18 edition on dailycourierpages.com.
Going back to reedit the online edition is an unusual move. I guess this, um, typo was a little more embarrassing than usual.
"I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
-- Karl T. Frederick, 1920 triple Olympic gold medalist in pistol events and President of the National Rifle Association in the 1920s and '30s
Fascinating read on the evolution of gun-control in the US by Adam Winkler in The Atlantic. My takeaway: The NRA has embraced and institutionalized the thinking of the Black Panthers.
On Monday I posted a comment on the story about this weekend's Prescott Antique Auto Club show at Watson Lake, asking whether anyone would confirm the rumor that after 37 years this will be the last event in the park because the City is raising the price to an unsustainable level. I got this reply yesterday, from "Car Guy":
It's kind of a kick in the pants really. PAAC is local and has brought a lot of people to this town every August for over 35 years. PAAC's local members raise funds to operate the club for another year. I'll bet many people don't realize how much time and effort the members put into charitable contributions that go back into the community. Parades, visits to the VAMC, Christmas presents for underprivileged kids. And the list goes on.I'd like to suggest to the Courier editors that in the context of the County Fair failure, the scattering of another decades-long tradition that draws statewide participation is what we used to call "news," and it would be a good idea to assign a reporter to talk with some PAAC members about that this weekend along with the standard photo review.
The real kicker is that the City wants to raise the cost of renting Watson Lake Park about 6 times what is contracted at now, to a fee of about $5200. PAAC currently pays for all garbage pickup and other expenses on top of their fee for the weekend. The first kicker is that the City wants to run PAAC out of town with unaffordable fees but will GIVE $20,000 per year to a group to bring in some bicycle racing!! Want a real kick in the pants? How about this? PAAC is currently rebuilding and restoring a City of Prescott fire engine with all volunteer labor and contributions from it's members!! Ask your council members to look into this. It's an absolute outrage.
Also failing to appear in dCourier today is a notice of candidate forums taking place in the runup to the Prescott Council election. It's on 6A in the print edition, and I'll summarize here for you who already have better birdcage liners in stock. Bear in mind that this is the Courier reporting dates and times, so doublecheck ahead of time.
Tomorrow, July 29, 3pm, Las Fuentes Resort community room
Mayoral candidates, Mal Barrett Jr moderating
Weds Aug 3, 6-8pm, Hassayampa Hotel Marina Room
Mayor and Council candidates, Rep Karen Fann moderating
Sponsored by Prescott Chamber of Commerce and other biz groups
Meet&greet at 5:30
Mon Aug 8, 1pm, Adult Center
Mayor and Council candidates, Tonya Mock moderating
Fri Aug 12, 2pm, Las Fuentes Resort community room
Council candidates
Sat Aug 13, 10-noon, Granite Creek Unitarian Universalist
Mayor and Council candidates, sponsored by CWAG (liberal-friendly!)
It's an unusual day when the Courier op-ed page carries no letters, and that drew my attention to the odd column that landed just under the cartoon, odd because its writer has not appeared before in the Courier. This tells me the editors thought what the columnist has to say is especially notable.
On reading this piece by Susan Stamper Brown, a name I'd never heard before, I find yet more oddness. (You can read it online here, as dCourier does not carry outside columns.) A quick scan of her blog (which seems to be her main outlet) shows that her beat is blaming liberals and Democrats for pretty much everything, without regard for facts or fear of over-the-top polemic. Yet she kicks off the column in question with a quote from famous uber-liberal ER Murrow, and launches into a why-can't-we-all-just-get-along whine.
In the back half, her real thesis gels. Parroting Bill O'Reilly, she tries to make a case that the Norway shooter isn't really a Xtian at all, and those evil liberals are just using the tragedy to pitch a new assault on Xtianity. In other words the editors heard the call on BillO and dug around for an opinion piece to chime in.
Breivik’s own writing extensively details how he built his ideology on Xtian tenets and history, inspiring him to take drastic action to stop what he sees as an invasion by Islamic culture and the pollution of multiculturalism. To pretend he is not a Xtian is poppycock, like saying Osama wasn't a Muslim because he was a bad one.
Stamper Brown is playing the old CYA game, diverting blame for her own intolerance by retroactively excommunicating a fellow-traveler who's jumped the shark. Through her, the editors are doing the same, pretending that Breivik's religious views are a matter of political interpretation and so just another volleyball in their endless culture war.
What's really sad about this reflex is that it prevents the sort of reflection and self-awareness that might lead to change for the better. You have to drive the snakes out of your own nest first, and to do that you have to be able to see them.
By recognizing how extremists use religion or other dogma to justify their violence, we can look for ways to moderate and qualify our own rhetoric or clearly disavow our criminal history to help prevent the sort of insane mental parody that leads to Oslo, or Oklahoma City, or 9-11, or Hiroshima. Dissociating ourselves from these acts wastes a multitude of opportunities. It's also un-Xtian, by the way.
No, his Xtianity did not make Breivik a mass murderer, but he did use it to justify his actions. A thinking adherent of any dogma should take this as a warning about stretching the ideology to suit motivations born in the darker cabinets of the mind.
Breivik's religion has a long history of stretching paternalism into oppression, evangelism into aggression, and faith into blood lust. No thinking adult can read any of that into the Jesus stories, yet for thousands of years that's exactly what's happened.
Breivik is no different from Hitler in how he stretched an elastic and ambiguous dogma to suit his radical authoritarianism. We see Muslims doing the same thing. Ditto with Marxists, corporatists and Tea Partiers.
What's always missing, and what allows these outriders to imagine that they're the vanguard of some grand and glorious movement, is the failure of whatever group they identify with to insist that peace and justice for all are their primary values, and consistently demonstrate that in word and deed.
You can run, editors, you can hide. But your running and hiding betrays some guilt you're not facing.
Note: On further research, I've rewritten this substantially.
Our hambone Republican Legislature makes another pointless, toothless law pretending to do something about revenues, and the unnamed Courier editor calls foul. He's right as far as he goes, that if they want to raise revenues, a new line on the annual tax form for volunteering your online sales-tax obligation is a dumb way to go about it. But is it really too much to ask that he think the issue through a little further?
Start with why online purchases have not been taxable till recently. This category was specifically exempted from sales taxes in the nineties to help get the industry off the ground (and attract a big operation by Amazon).
I always presumed that out-of-state transactions were exempt since the heyday of mail-order, but I'm informed that Arizona has been in theory taxing mail-order sales -- and legally, even purchases you make out of state and bring back in -- since 1955.
How legislators legally justify this is difficult to fathom. Out-of-state sales have no impact on in-state services. Other taxes infer some sort of cost-for-benefit element. How can we demand money for literally nothing?
With the rise of online purchasing, the Legislature decided to start trying to get at those lost transactions. So they're sticking a new line on your tax form so you can be right with the law, if you feel like it, and if you remember how much you spent. What they haven't figured out yet is how to enforce it. Before that happens, and I guarantee it'll be ugly, better we climb back in from this legal limb and find more sensible ways to generate state revenue.
Sales taxes are regressive, and the patchwork of state and municipal sales taxes we labor under is ridiculously complicated and bad for business. And because they're so easily circumvented in many cases, they lead to inequities in business and don't produce the revenue they're supposed to.
The people who get the most benefit from sales taxes are the investor class, who can engineer sales taxes in place of more progressive income taxes and more clearly justifiable corporate taxes.
If we continue to pick away at sales taxes, the result will be regressive for the state in terms of money flight, tourism impact, small business failures, and even less reliable state revenues.
In an unusually short piece, the unnamed Courier editor pumps the idea of setting up city districts that would elect resident representatives to Council. I've had to think this over for a bit.
I launched this as an idea balloon a year and a half ago, in reporting the results of the last city election. I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere before and since. For me it came out of what could be interpreted as voter dissatisfaction with the candidate list, and this year's roster isn't any more inspiring. What the editor left out, despite a couple of grafs of vague exposition, is exactly what problem he's trying to solve and how council districts would help.
So I'll just riff on that. In terms of a problem to solve, I see tedious repetition in the types of people who seem exercised to run for Council: good ol' boys, wannabe good ol' boys, and axe-grinders. We sorely need a higher proportion of people who are known and respected in the community and who can think clearly about the greater good. The trick is motivating such people to get involved in a 60-hour-a-week job (if you're doing it right) that gets you pretty much nothing but constant irritation and five hundred clams a month.
There is no reason to think that council districting is a bad idea per se, despite the protestations of certain anonymous cranks who see all sorts of dark shenanigans in just about anything. On the plus side, it would certainly bring new faces to the table, since a given district would have to send someone from within its boundaries. It would very likely make it simpler and cheaper to run for Council, and the elected would likely identify much more closely with a smaller group of voters. It would also give the office of the Mayor more gravitas and a clearer role in Council politics.
On the downside, it would lower the bar for axe-grinders. In the last election, which drew participation by 13,093 voters, it took about 6,500 votes to gain a Council seat. Assuming a roughly even distribution of voters city-wide (and that's a stretch), you could divide by six for a given district: 2,182 voters, or about 1,100 votes to win a two-way race. On that scale, very small numbers of single-issue voters in a coordinated campaign could swing some serious mojo.
That considered, I'm inclined to think that districting could be a good thing. So what are the practical considerations in getting there?
The first decision is how many districts. Are a couple of thousand voters per district too few, or too many? Say we keep it at six seats. The next is how to do the transition. Council has four-year terms so only half face election every other year. Would we set it up so we wipe the slate clean and start fresh? Would we require that half the districts only elect for two years the first time around? Might we even go to six-year terms and only elect two each round? Would we keep the Mayor as a two-year seat, or go longer to provide more continuity befitting the new gravitas?
There will be many more niggly details to solve, with no professional manager on hand at the moment. Does anyone think this Council could handle a project like this? Don't everyone raise your hands at once, now. Okay, so we go to the initiative process. Which group of axe-grinders would you want to write the initiative?
Let's not flap our arms too much over something so theoretical. Any system can work great for us if we elect the right people. That's always the trick.
See, the right people aren't showing up. Why should they? The hours are long, the pay insignificant, and most people think you're there to line your pockets from the public treasury. To do a term on Council you need an independent income, an astronomically high threshold of frustration, and a hide like a rhino. There are a thousand other ways for a civic-minded person to contribute that generate way more satisfaction and way less flak. Consequently it attracts a higher than average proportion of chest-puffers and rascals.
If we're out to solve the problem of better representation, we have to start by making the profession respectable. Better pay wouldn't hurt, either.
Tim is taking heat from the commenters on his most recent pseudoblog column, in which he cites some basic facts about gunshot death in this country, and expresses doubts about "how the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer over the past two years have almost completely dismantled, for example, the required training and certification for concealed carry permits here."
What's really sad here is that showing a shred of common sense about guns in print has become a courageous act. From me this warrants a cookie.
Notice that that the "local, local, local" Courier editors can find space for the sensational but meaningless Casey Anthony case, but not for a case that's far more important and local: the Minuteman murders. The third conviction came down yesterday in this horrific, politically driven hate crime.
This faceplants into the so-bad-it's-funny category. Starting with a wannabe-hip headline ripped from the cultural memes of 1979, the unnamed Courier editor plunges wildly through a paranoid landscape, unable to tell mountain from molehill, and pretty sure the moles are out to get him. It's kinda Alien vs Caddyshack, with the editor standing in for Bill Murray.
Because organized hackers broke into the Email accounts of DPS officers, says the editor, "assume that nothing in cyberspace is safe." Presumably the editor also keeps a weather eye out for meteors as he sprints into the building from his truck.
Yet on the same day this hawkeyed newsman fills his Friday column (below) with a viral Email containing the most insidious sort of infection there is: facile hate for the weak.
Better idea: Assume that nothing on the Courier op-ed page is safe. And keep laughing. We're all in it for the lulz.
In Thursday's musing, the unnamed Courier editor careens from one concept to another, creating a limp, damp word salad. Did you let JJ write this one, Tim?
He writes, "Chief Justice John Robert (sic) said the provision 'imposes a substantial burden on the speech of privately financed candidates and independent expenditure groups,'" and accepts it as writ without explaining how the ability of one to speak in any way limits the ability of another. Of course, if the Chief Justice doesn't understand this either, I spoze we'll have to give the editor a pass on that one.
He "won't debate whether the provision violated freedom of speech," which for most writers would mean he's neutral on the question, but he immediately goes on to "applaud the justices who recognized that possibility and walked on the side of caution." Right. The sort of caution that specifically allows corporations to spend as much as they like to buy offices for their favored candidates.
He calls the influence of big money on politics a "sad state of affairs," and finishes up by advertising the Republican push to eliminate all public money from Arizona elections. Apparently it's only sad when the money is nonpartisan.
In the name of "free speech," he advocates taking the megaphone away from the ordinary working person and giving it to the corporate huckster and his pro cheerleading team.
This sort of ridiculously distorted decision by the Supreme Court proceeds from a cascade of terrible past decisions. The idea that money is equal to speech is one. The idea that corporations are the same as citizens is another. They make it impossible for good sense to even be heard, let alone prevail. Arguing the points that follow from these cracked premises can lead only to deeper absurdity.
Forget campaign finance reform, it's not gonna come anytime soon. The only way to improve the quality of our representation is to organize the old-fashioned way, person-to-person, one vote and one ten-dollar contribution at a time. Given modern technology and the rise of social media this has never been easier, but real people have to get out there and do it in an organized, consistent way.
Al Gore presents a brilliant analogy for understanding how our mediated politics are not working for us in his Rolling Stone piece, "Climate of Denial." It's must-read stuff.
This is where he criticizes the President for his failure to follow through on his promises of progress on climate change. In the next graf he also predicts that the media would pounce on that criticism and strip away its context, which is exactly what happened this week.
In which the unnamed Courier editor parades his discomfort with cumpyewters.
He notes that a bidder on a county contract failed to respond to Email from the county, losing the bid because the communication was "in the company's junk mail, where it sat unnoticed until the deadline came and went." He blames the county for not wiping the contractor's nose for him and calling on the phone before the deadline passed.
By all means, editor, stick with proven communications technology. Presumably the Courier still gets its wire stories by teletype. I also gather the editor has better luck than I do getting through to people on the phone these days, and he believes that both businesses and government can get along fine without documentation of correspondence.
Reality check: This is not an indictment of the county for using a business tool that's been the standard for two decades, rather it's an indication of carelessness and/or incompetence at the company in question, and attempting to cover it with the 21st-century version of "the dog ate my homework." The editor wants this level of skill providing our public services. It's cheaper, after all.
What really launched my cheerios was the editor going on to warn us that "Demons fly around in cyberspace and sometimes steal what is sent from one computer to another. In a word, strange things can happen when we rely on computers to do what our voices should." No amount of snark from me could gild such a bizarre and hilarious lily.
Kudos to Joanna for her series on the Yavapai Downs fiasco, and to the editors for devoting a lot of space and resources to an issue that deserves serious research and long-form treatment. The last in the five-day series runs today, with links to the rest.
The track has been in trouble from the beginning, and I can't count the hours I've listened to track employees and customers count down the sins and weaknesses of the track managers.
It would have been useful to see this series come out long before the house of cards collapsed. I and many other readers have been urging the Courier to put more work into background and document research for years, to better inform the community about what's behind the stories that customarily flit through the paper unconsidered. Here's a cookie. I hope it helps motivate more timely work in the future.
In today's offering, the unnamed Courier editor complains about the rising cost of college tuition, and blames the AZ Board of Regents for jacking them up. He then compares the index costs of UA, ASU and NAU with the new extension NAU-Yavapai, concluding that the cut-rate school must be a higher value.
The reason state schools have traditionally been far less expensive than private and religious colleges is that they're nonprofit and subsidized by the state. Voters have always approved of investing tax revenue in our young people and giving the less affluent more access to higher education. It works both for the individual in upward mobility and for society in higher-value human resources. You basically can't have a broadly affluent society without it.
In Arizona our "conservative" Legislators have been systematically reducing state revenues for years, then crying poverty as an excuse to kill off social programs they've always hated. Public higher education is near the top on that list. All those subversive scientists and liberal eggheads teaching kids to think rather than just work for the man get under their skin.
So as state subsidies to universities have fallen, the Regents face the problem of reducing the quantity and quality of their educational programs or bringing in the necessary money from the students and their families. There's a lot of both going on.
The editor is right that reducing access to education by raising prices is negative, and not just for the students. Educated, capable workers are vital to economic sustainability.
Where he's completely off track is blaming the Regents, as if they're greedily gouging their customers. That's just idiotic. Fix the blame where it belongs, on the radicals in the Legislature who imagine that the state can function without funding.
In favorably comparing NAU-Yavapai to the Big Three, the editor is clearly inferring that it's providing the same education for half the cost. Does he really imagine that the experiences on offer are even comparable? Did he pick up his journalism degree in the stationery aisle at Wal-Mart?
