Editorial: "Questions abound around shooting"

Yeah: one of my questions is why the unnamed Courier editor can't seem to spend more than five minutes writing an editorial.

For example, did anyone else notice this paragraph-long sentence fragment?

This terrible tragedy and how officials analyze the underlying motive and how the shooter, a man who reportedly went first to a coed residence hall in search of his girlfriend and shot two people then showed up two hours later at an engineering classroom building, was able to kill another 30 people and himself.

But for once the Courier editor comes up with a useful thought around a gun incident:

Who was the shooter, what drove him to do it, and what signs did people miss that might have allowed counselors or law enforcement to keep him from going through with it?

Relatively speaking, this almost rates a cookie.

A1: National news

For the record, I'm covering what the Courier does, so I'm not planning to post on dropped-in wire stories. There are occasions where a local paper really has no choice about running a national story prominently, and since it seems that everyone is focusing on this one right now, the Courier might be seen as out of step to do otherwise.

In response to this I'm sure we can look forward to an editorial defending the right of whacked-out students to keep and bear arms on campus.

Wiederaenders: "Don't be a zombie behind the wheel"

In this long ramble about paying attention when you're behind the wheel, I'm thinking I see a clue as to why the Courier has so far ignored the many calls from readers for investigation of the yellow-light and radar-camera practices in PV: Tim lives there, and he thinks everything's fine.

A3: "Analyst has her doubts about the future of healthcare"

If our local paper's mission involves informing voters on the issues that will affect their futures, Derek Meurer's story from the Arizona Town Hall should have been on A1 in place of the history talk by the Holocaust survivor.

The speaker on health care clearly pulled no punches, and we read about some of the reactions, which come across as largely skeptical. Was that really the case? No way to know without attending in person. Some responses from our local health-care leaders might be informative as well.

A1: "Police suspect same teens in second robbery"

At last, the Saturday-night story arrives, in which the same guys do the same robbery exactly one month later. We learn that PVPD has nothing on them and hopes for a tip.

Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work.

A1: "City officials agree 1-percent sales tax should be permanent"

In the followup on the announcement on Sunday, Cindy Barks once again firmly soft-pedals the impact on open-space acquisition from Rob Behnke's initiative. Clearly City officials have some reservations about it, but we don't learn much about why. It feels like this story went to press a few days before it was ready.

Editorial: "Deductions take pain out of taxes"

Everybody loves to hate taxes, right? So why not yet another bit of harmless fiction about the evil politicians and bureaucrats laughing at all of us for lining their pockets with our money?

I'll tell you why: this BS is not harmless. It's designed to make you stupid -- about government, about taxes, about how our civilization works -- and lead you to use your vote to make yourself poorer and less powerful.

There is a lot of perfectly valid debate we can conduct around what we do as a society and how we pay for it. But debating whether taxes are good or bad carries no more sense than gad gave a chicken. What adults want to talk about is the value we get back from what we put in. Focus on that idea and you'll get a useful discussion.

And what's with that headline?

Amster: "Community means having a dialogue"

Randal gently reaches out to his critic last week and tries to make a larger point with it. Good on you, Randal. We have to talk up the philosophy and responsibilities of community to make it happen -- it's not something we can take for granted.

I suppose in this talking-up there's not a lot of room for the unfortunate reality that population density and technology are conspiring to push people into smaller, more tightly delineated communities and mentally out of the larger, healthier communities we inhabit physically. I think it'd be useful to try to point out that this is happening and how we individually drift this way. Holding up a mirror to dis-community might be a wake-up call for some.

That said, I will wholeheartedly second Randal's softly put but nonetheless sharply drawn point about respect on the Courier editorial page, and for that he gets a cookie.

Readers will please forgive a moment of classicly educated geekiness. Sorry, Randal, my references agree that "community" derives from one source, that is the Latin communitas, an extension of communio, meaning first the area inside the city wall, secondarily and more abstractly the sharing of responsibility. This derived from con + munia, 'with' + 'duties,' building the concept of serving together. Now munia could have evolved from something from a previous culture, that's not really known, but let's not tangle the path unnecessarily. Moneta, which led to 'money,' is a quite different word, originally in Roman culture a surname for the goddess Juno describing mindfulness, leading to English words like 'monitor.' The Latin communicatio, actually something of a pun on communio, named the oratorical device of inviting audience response. None of this interferes much with your point, but you didn't need shaky etymology to make it.

Letters: Air service

I'll say it again, scheduled air service from Prescott to Phoenix is for rich people who think they're too cool for the bus.

There's some talk about flights to Las Vegas, for example, which might have limited utility, but it's hard to see that happening with runway slots already full. Some numbers in the Courier on this might be informative.

Missing: Another Walgreen's robbery

My spies tell me there was another robbery at the all-night Walgreen's in PV that was hit last month. Courier readers might like to know about that, as well as what the PVPD has done about it.

A1: "Human Resources works behind the scenes for county employees"

Paula turns in a nice puff piece on a county department, promising regular installments. I suppose that Monday is the day for this, since no one's working on Sunday to get actual news. It just seems like this would fit better on B1.

By the way, Mr Vigneron's name shouldn't be so difficult to spell.

A1: "A common voice"

Paula Rhoden reports on a meet-and-greet between local seniors and a couple of our legislators at the Adult Center. Both pols and seniors come off as whiny, and I gotta wonder if that's an accurate characterization.

Online edition: Monday blues

John K, are you working today? I found a bunch of busted links in the online edition.

Blog: "Blair's "taco" comments aren't too intelligent"

I'm a little behind here, as I don't check the blog section every day, but I'm keeping an eye out to see whether traffic picks up.

John Kamin makes the first mention I've seen in the Courier of a story I pointed out on April 4, and doesn't pull the punch, so he gets a cookie. I've got a couple niggles and a prod, though.

Niggle 1: Blair wasn't referring just to illegals, but rather to everyone of Hispanic heritage. In the back of his mind, I'm sure, was the Lincoln neighborhood's common nickname among Prescott natives: Taco Flats.

Niggle 2: He angered more than the direct targets of his derision. There are a lot of us out here who think this sort of behavior is absolutely out of bounds for a public official, radio host or no.

Prod: 'Jackass Flats' has sort of become the derisive name for PV, but it didn't start that way. It was the standard name for the area until about '66.

A1: "Immigration, water issues top City Council agenda"

Cindy Barks' regular Monday agenda rundown is pretty dry reading, but important in that we all get a nudge to show up and say something about the issues involved, rather than a report on what Council has done after the votes have been cast.

I've been here long enough to remember when Council followed a pretty strict no-debt policy. How things have changed, eh?

A1: "Assessor explains agricultural designations"

Paula Rhoden runs it down, but nowhere did I find why it's a page-one story.

Free at last

DC's Emancipation Day marks the beginning of the end for American slavery.

Talk of the Town: "The alternative to global warming stinks"

Ah, good. Tim W told me a few weeks ago that he was working to facilitate public debate about the climate crisis. So here we have the opening remarks from the tiny minority of people who call themselves scientists, don't think humans are changing our climate and don't think climate change is necessarily a bad thing.

I'm no scientist, and Terry Lovell is -- he teaches business and computer science at YC. No meteorology or climatology, nor any earth sciences, for that matter, but what the heck, he understands the scientific method, right? And apparently he believes he understands it better than the rest of the scientific community, which views climate change as not only human-caused, but threatening to civilization worldwide.

One thing Prof Lovell apparently does not understand is the difference between the CO2 you exhale, "you global climate criminal," you, and the CO2 spewed into the atmosphere in burning fuels taken from underground. This tells me that he may have skipped the class on the carbon cycle.

But I'm no scientist, so I'll look forward to another prominent and long Talk of the Town next week from another scientist, one who joins the vast majority of her peers worldwide in calling for immediate, decisive action to limit CO2 output and the extent of the impending climate disaster.

Thanks for doing this, Tim, your readers could really use some solid information about this issue.

Editorial: "We need more culture, less pop"

The unnamed Courier editor riffs incoherently on this week's cannibalistic media feeding frenzy on Don Imus, wrenching things around to find a way to work in a whack at his favorite inflatable punching clown.

• When she was first lady, Hillary Clinton allegedly called a campaign contributor a "Jew bastard."

I gather this little meme has been circulating among the Bill-Clinton-is-Satan crowd for a while, but I hadn't heard it before, so I checked it out. I was not really surprised that the private he-said-she-said moment in question allegedly happened in 1974, rather before she was Mrs Clinton, let alone a resident of 1600 Penn Ave, her accuser was a campaign staffer rather than a contributor, he was disbarred for malpractice and mentally unstable, and she released a written apology from him.

You gotta wonder whether this meets the Courier editor's normal standard for reporting facts.

Did I mention that the cartoon running next to this editorial (link is busted) is another whack at Hillary? Anyone else think someone's got an obsession going here?

In the comments, early-riser Jane goes after similar distortion of Rosie O'Donnell, who's also been a frequent Courier target recently. Think we'll see a reply?

A1: "Initiative on sales tax could make ballot"

Okay, so we have a new group of half a dozen people getting started on an initiative to make the temporary 1-percent City sales tax permanent. But there's an important piece missing.

Quoting from the initiative, we see, “Starting Jan. 1, 2016, funds from the 1-percent Transaction Privilege Tax shall be used exclusively for ‘street maintenance.’”

Presumably this use of 'exclusively' references the current uses of the tax revenues for both streets and the acquisition of open space, and would eliminate the latter. Open space has been an issue of major contention since the campaign to approve it in the first place, and it's no surprise that some people might want to knock it out.

But Cindy's story only mentions the open-space angle in the background graph. It seems clear that this could easily be the primary motivator for the initiative backers, especially considering that they hope to pass it eight years before any possibility of implementation. That demands exploring.

If it's on A1 it's a news story, and shouldn't be treated as a simple inside-page press-release dump. Did Cindy do this, or the editors?