Thursday open thread

We all look at things differently. Share what you think.

Editorial: Increased pool fees better than closure

As I have in the past, I have to point out the unnamed Courier editor's habit of ripping copy from yesterday's front page, massaging it slightly, adding one or two original sentences and passing it off as an editorial. I appreciate that by staying within his comfort zone he doesn't do any damage, but I imagine that with a little more gumption he might be able to come up with something worth the read. Waste of time.

Letter: Innovative show sent Elks out with a bang

I don't imagine that anyone in the Courier offices remains unaware that Kim Kapin is the City communications director. So why does that title not appear on the letter? This is bald PR for the City, and the paper should inform readers of that.

If the City's PR flack feels compelled to pump up the event in this shady way, I suspect the event was another dud. Would any witnesses like to illuminate me?

Supervisors want to modify land-swap terms

I'd like to hear from anyone who knows more about this story, it seems like something important might be missing. The really odd thing here is the unexplained accompanying pic, a Remax promotional map of Prescott at resolution too low to read on the site. Is the Courier selling a new kind of ad?

Inside skinny on the Lowe's engineering?

One thing I love about open commenting is that sometimes someone who really knows something tells all. In a long comment under "the real truth," someone claiming to have worked inside City bureaucracy when the Lowe's deal was going through describes a series of shortcuts in the plan-approval process clearly designed to duck under the red tape and ram approval through quickly. Read it all.

It's unfortunate that there's no way to verify this story, since the commenter remains anonymous, but I got the impression s/he doesn't have that job anymore, and I think it would be a great public service if s/he were to stand up in a Council meeting and tell the story to the TV cameras. If this is true, it's explosive and it should get the City Manager (at least) relieved of duty.

I suppose it's too much to ask that the Courier assign a reporter to do the homework outlined by the commenter, check out those stamps and dates and verify this. It's work, but it'd be worthwhile.

Senate president taps Prescott rancher Pierce as president pro tem

This is interesting. I'd heard that leadership changes were coming because of the budget process collapse, but I didn't imagine that Burns might tap the utterly experience-free Pierce for anything like this. While there's not much real power in this position, it's an important statement in that it demotes Verschoor, who's been counted among the anointed for several sessions. Given the radical credentials of Gorman and Verschoor, this feels like a slight drift toward the middle, but it also might just be flailing. Burns has lost many allies over his handling of the session.

Keep an eye out, I have a feeling other important changes could be coming for the Legislature before the budget is in the bag.

Nice that the Courier continues to tag bigtime developer Pierce as a "rancher." I'm so fooled.

Verde News: Jerome declares urgent water shortage

Seems like Courier readers might like to know about this too. Maybe work it into an update on water conditions all over the area.

Hump day open thread

Now this is funny. And scary.

Council takes Lowe's to task

I can just see Cindy Barks struggling to keep a straight face while taking the notes for this. She was there when these same people were rushing through the infrastructure and engineering on the Lowe's boondoggle, so watching their ass-covering faux outrage now must have been pretty funny.

Editorial: Lion had a long life in 'big city'

So it appears I was wrong -- not one comment about the risk of the lion living in neighborhoods. Instead we see more criticism of Game and Fish for killing big predators around people, even this one, which was apparently already maimed beyond saving. I'm a little confused by those commenters who would have liked to see the bear caught, relocated and released so that amateur hunters would have a shot at it. Like stocking a fish pond, I guess. Brrr, it's weird out there sometimes.

The unnamed Courier editor hopes another cat moves into the vacated territory, lives long and prospers. He gets a cookie today.

Letter: How would lawmakers like RIF letters?

Steve Harbeck takes legislators to task, wondering rhetorically how they'd like to work without pay or knowing whether they'll have a job in the coming season.

Um, Mr H, that's exactly how it works for your state representatives every two years, when they have to go through the election process from scratch, putting their lives on hold again to work for you for a pittance. In this particular week the letter is particularly ironic because our supposedly part-time legislators have been working for over two months for nothing while a few power-crazed radicals have held up the process and left everyone else sitting on their hands.

Letter: Rodeo ceremony snubs non-Christians

I read John Lorant's letter and said, well, duh, you knew that was gonna happen when you bought the ticket. But I also knew at once that this would bring a hail of stones from hard-ass Xtians, and from the looks of the comments -- four pages so far, more than I've ever seen -- we can expect to see letters on this for at least a month. Now that's entertainment!

Open thread, Tuesday

A nice shot by Lesley from our recent trip to the Mendocino County coast.

Since you're reading this, so you're not vacationing, there are several gigs this week to check out: jazz jam at The Raven Thursday 8-10, the trio at Tlaquepaque Friday afternoon, the quartet featuring Susannah Martin at Ken's Creekside in VOC Friday 9-12, and Big Daddy in front of the PV Harkins on Saturday 5-9. Hope to see you out and about.

Scene from my window: Talking nonstop, holding his cellphone to his left ear, a driver tries to manhandle his street-sweeper with one hand through a U-turn among the parked cars in front of my house, wiping out some edging and narrowly missing my fence, backing up nervously, then sailing back down the street, leaving the usual dirt cloud and muddy trail behind him and missing the gutter completely. Who trains these guys?

And just for fun, a nine-minute instant mind-expansion on what this means to a physicist or mathematician.

Prescott's lion finally loses to urban perils

The story-under-the-story here is what really fascinates me. We learn that Game and Fish collared a mountain lion living inside the city limits and tracked it for three years to study its habits. What we don't see in Joanna's story is whether the City or Game and Fish informed the people in those neighborhoods about what most residents would see as a risk that little Janie might be plucked out of her sandbox and dragged into the bushes for lunch. I don't have any argument with the science, but I gotta wonder about the informed-consent part of it, and I look forward to the comments.

Editorial: Money gets more and more scarce

Today the unnamed Courier editor illustrates a couple of very basic propaganda/marketing techniques: oversimplification to confuse, and recasting events to fit the desired narrative.

Never mind that there's a whole lot more to understand about the budget situation, both fiscally and politically. The editor wants to spoon-feed you a simple good-guy/bad-guy story. The bad guy is the governor who wants to tax you and spend the money on stuff you don't need. The good guys are the noble anti-tax legislators who won't "break faith with their constituents." I'm surprised he didn't throw in a scene from High Noon to add some thrilling drama.

Readers who understand basic logic will notice that his argument is founded on a cracked premise. He writes, "Many of Brewer's fellow Republican lawmakers won their legislative seats on promises of no tax increases," implying that those Grover Norquist-inspired anti-tax pledges so adored by the extreme right have a real vote-getting effect. Since blind anti-tax zealotry is only shared by a small minority of voters (generously, 12-15%), and they have no one else to vote for, it's obvious that they can't really affect a close race, even a Rep primary. They take credit for what they didn't do just to puff up their importance, and it often works in the public mind, giving them more influence on legislators than they truly warrant. I've seen the threatening stuff the Goldwater Institute and its attack dogs circulate to legislators, and folks, I gotta tell you it's definitely ugly and I'm sure scary to spine-challenged pols.

The truth is that the radicals who 'signed anti-tax pledges' did so not because a significant body of their constituents demanded it, but because they truly believe, like Norquist, that the best government is a dead one, and they don't give a rat's ass about the majority of constituents who would prefer that politicians engage their brains before making law. These are the same pols who have been holding up the budget process (in the train-robbery sense) for months. Contrary to the Courier editor's narrative, they are really the black hats in this movie.

The white hats are the sensible moderates, including the Governor, who are trying to get through the hail of black-hat bullets before the deficit train runs down Little Nell Arizona. Ack, enough!

So why does the editor want you to accept his Bizarro recasting of the story? Because he's in the gang with the bad guys. He would happily deprive you of needed government services like infrastructure, education and health care because he's got his and he truly believes that he shouldn't have to pay for any more. It's a short-sighted, adolescent worldview, not conservative at all, but radically anti-government. And he'll wrap himself in the flag to pitch it to you.

So if his narrative is so twisted, what about his supposed paradigm-shifting point, that "states are out of money?"

It's easier to see in California, where in '78 the anti-tax zealots won the day and instituted tax rules designed to bankrupt the government. It took a couple of decades, but it worked. Meanwhile those darksiders got to work on financial and corporate deregulation to maximize profits, and we found ourselves holding the bag on a hollow, deindustrialized economy and a financial system looted by gangsters. The issue is not that the states are out of money. It's that the bad guys stole it. And they've got the gall to feed us D-Day's line from Animal House: "You fucked up -- you trusted us!"

This particular paradigm hasn't shifted. Our system is basically sound, but it needs repair, particularly a big hole in the wall of the vault. If we can reindustrialize based on clean energy production, play hardball against the corporations who demand to use our infrastructure for free while draining us of money, and keep the professional gamblers from playing high-stakes roulette with our financial system, we'll be able to get back on track. But we weren't insured for it, so we'll have to pay to fix that wall, no question about it.

Open thread, Monday edition

It's a great day out there, I hope you're having fun too.

Quote of the day:

"When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or you know maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, “Man that doesn’t do us any good — women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country.” I don’t think it bodes well for her, a statement like that. Because, again, fair or unfair, it is there, I think that’s reality, and I think it’s a given. I think people can just accept that she is going to be under the sharper microscope." -- Gov. Sarah Palin, August 2008

Editorial: Every agency needs scrutiny

As might be expected, the unnamed Courier editor is all over the idea of knocking over the Department of Education. Public schools have been a bugbear of the right since they began, and eliminating any chunk of the bureaucracy is attractive to the anti-tax and anti-government crusaders. Notice that he paraphrases (read: misquotes, adding grammatical error) the representative as saying, "diminishing if not eliminating the Department of Education could save a substantial amount of money as well as enhancing local control of schools," both consistent right-wing memes.

But as Rep Mason has laid out directly on The People's Business, her ideas are not as simplistic as either extreme will paint them. It's not really about saving money so much as spending less on administration and more on teachers and classrooms. It's not so much about enhancing local control, but rather about giving teachers more freedom to teach.

I think it's entirely possible, even likely, that there is a lot of redundancy and essentially useless activity going on in the DofE building. Rooting that out, eliminating it and moving the money into classrooms in a safe and useful way will be a massive legislative undertaking. I can confirm that Lucy's got the energy for it, but she'll be pretty much alone against an impressive bulwark of entrenched interests. In any case, the entire discussion is premature, as was the Courier's query to Superintendent Horne, because nothing will even begin to happen on this before next session, and then not without a great deal of work to gather allies and formulate some concrete proposals. Lucy isn't a hip-shooter.

I'm sure she'll thank the editor for his support, but it's looking like the Courier will be among her many fair-weather friends on the right trying to hijack her ideas for their regular agenda. With friends like these ....

Amster: Noise competes with information

As a professional propagandist I have to admire the establishment meme that the online world is all noise compared to the corporatist bunk that passes for big-market journalism. While I wouldn't say that Randall is totally falling for it here, readers might be excused if they take away that message, thanks to some cloudy writing and the ever-undermining headline writer.

The really amusing part is that the darksiders claim to believe that free-market competition can solve all problems, yet since the Internet began freeing our information market, they consistently denigrate it as worthless. That sorta smells of vested interest to me.

I look at it through the other end of the telescope. Just as more stuff to buy at big-box stores has generally reduced our quality of life, the vast expansion of information access we've experienced has had decidedly mixed results in terms of informing and educating the electorate, because so few people have the media savvy to separate jewels from junk. But it's inescapable that more choice has opened space for higher-quality writing and thinking, in large part because the lower overhead of the Net (you don't need a printing press anymore!) reduces the media's dependence on monied interests. That's truly independent thought. Darksiders hate that.

For me it's both positive and negative that just as anyone is allowed to get their message out, everyone's accountable now and anyone can throw bricks at it. This is the sort of lively media environment that would have been more familiar to readers of the yellow-journalism days early last century, when specialized political-issue papers multiplied like bunnies, sold on the basis of sensational headlines and their rhetoric was often over the top. Eventually government and corporate interests got a handle on that, just as now they're trying to get a handle on the Net. You'll want to keep an eye on that.

I'm sure the Courier isn't paying Randall enough to make him happy to bend over and take the regular tongue-lashings he gets from readers. But Randall, that's how it is now, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Whining does not help.

Sen. McCain talks about health care, Sedona effort

Joanna gets an interview with McCain, but like many other experienced journos she wasn't able to get him to say anything. It's no surprise to me, and you can't blame the reporter, but I don't see in the copy any reason to carry this non-story. Maybe it's just designed to add some front-page ballast to the puff piece on McCain's new campaign HQ, er, local office.

I'm struck that most of the commenters really excoriating the Senator seem to be coming from the extreme right.

Holiday open thread

Some cool summer imagery from the Cascades by Ross Hilmoe, who really needs to get out shoooting more often. Enjoy!