Just to follow up on the debate over banning smoking in public places, particularly the bars where I work as a musician, it seems the science is panning out in up to 36 percent fewer heart attacks community-wide once smoking bans are established. So for all your friends who thought we were being a bunch of pansies for not wanting to live with smoke, here's how their right to smoke violates everyone's right to life.
Today the unnamed Courier editor expresses his discomfort with the week's teevee tantrum about the race factor in criticism of the President, going out of his way to bash Jimmy Carter for speaking the truth and giving the teabaggers a slap on the wrist for their unsporting signs (while ignoring the really scary stuff).
To claim that there is no racism driving any of this is poppycock, of course, just as it's fallacious to say that racism drives it all, which is clearly not what President Carter or any other thinking being is doing. Across a nation so racially charged and full of empowered loonies as the US, it's inescapable that racists will be in the mix. This causes a problem for the right wing, because they want to present the teabaggers et al. as mainstream. The truth is quite the opposite. The people who are chanting and waving misspelled signs are in a small minority, as they always are, so the true-blue nutbars have disproportionate influence.
We on the left have always had to deal with the tiny red-star Mao-suit brigade that has always been in the mix, inviting characterization of liberals as socialists. And so the right has to deal with the snakes in its own nest, the white-supremacists, the greed-is-good corporatists, the nuke-all-the-wogs militarists and other extreme reactionaries. They exist, and they show up at the rallies. Pretending otherwise just makes you look dumb.
The editor is simply chiming in on whatever his preferred agitprop sources are telling him to say. In the Courier offices this somehow passes for "analysis." Again, I urge the editor to stick to local issues, which are better for the paper and its readers.
Just a quick note to point out a feature by Howard Fischer, carried on the religion page of the Independent today. For practicing Protestants this will probably seem eminently moderate and reasonable, but for me and I suspect a lot of non-religious people, it's a little creepy. See for yourself.
As usual, Friday is the start of the extra-busy part of the week, but I just had to write a quick note on this silliness about ACORN, the gnat that the right-wing scream machine has been chasing for over a year now. If you buy on its face that a couple of Republicans dressed up as a pimp and a hooker with a hidden camera fooled employees of an urban nonprofit into helping them defraud the gubmint to open underage cathouses, I have to say you really ought to have your credulity meter checked out, it's broken.
The story is wacky, but what matters to me is that the unnamed Courier editor is wasting his op-ed inches on an issue that has no local component and matters not at all locally except as another political distraction.
Stick to your knitting, editor. We have plenty of important issues to consider here at home. Useful analysis of them will require more homework than this lift from Fox News, of course, but it's clear you have some time on your hands.
Every year our plaza is forced to put on cheapo bling and gaudy makeup to work the street, attracting tasteless tourists for her pimp, the Chamber of Commerce. We call this "economic development," and the businesses downtown depend on it like an annual balloon of strychnine-laced street heroin, buying completely into the most-wonderful-time-of-the-year junkie's delusion. The rest of us stay away, repulsed by the open displays of naked avarice and the simultaneous degradation of our city and the majority religion.
Well, fine. Willing seller, willing buyer, more or less victimless crime, all that. What I don't get is why this supposedly high-profit endeavor can't pay for the decorations itself. Every year we taxpayers buy the makeup, spikes and colorful thong for the square in return for a small cut of the proceeds in sales tax. Apparently we can't even hire local people to string the trees, instead that money fattens the economy in Mesa.
This is a business promotion, and the businesses that profit from it should pay for it. It does nothing for business elsewhere in town, and I hear often that it's negative for them. Where is Mr Lamerson now, thumping his Constitution on the table, demanding that we reserve our scarce public funds for essential services? Oh yeah, he was the one making the stink a few years ago over a City Hall sign that wasn't Xtian enough for him, while running one of those junkie downtown businesses.
The moneychangers have taken over the temple, folks. Why must we pay for their advertising?
I agree with the unnamed Courier editor today, this part of the budget plan is dead stupid for a number of reasons. But he clearly doesn't understand them.
As I pointed out in July, where the budget seems to authorize selling the buildings, what the state would really be doing is pawning them. It would retain control of the properties in what would amount to secured loans with open repayment. (Notice that Treasurer Martin called it a "mortgage." That's more accurate, but still a bit misleading.) Eventually we would buy them back, paying substantial interest, and the "buyers" (lenders) would make a bundle on essentially no risk. I haven't been able to determine what would happen if a building is damaged in the meantime, say by fire. Presumably the specific contract would take care that, but I'll bet a buck the taxpayers wind up holding that bag as well.
So any deal like this would result long-term in a large net loss of state funds into the pockets of the bankers. Anyone with a lick of street smarts knows that once you're at the pawn counter, you're on the ragged edge of impoverishment, and those three balls mean it's two-to-one you'll never get your stuff back at all.
So what sort of dummy would write such a no-win provision into law? This came to the legislature from extreme-right elements in the bureaucracy, supported in the legislature by bottom-feeders who are working every angle they can to kill off government. They're also insisting on major business tax cuts, so it has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.
Presumably the editor has more and better information resources than I do, and this isn't hard to figure out. Reading past someone else's headlines would be very helpful in putting together an editorial position that properly informs the voters.
Tim tries to place the primary results in retrospective context, and his best analysis is that the people who get the most votes tend to get the most votes, except when they don't. Now there's an insight.
Waste of space.
Here's another one of those Courier editorials in which the unnamed Courier editor does a copy and paste of a front-page story, gives it a light massage and a little spin, and calls it good. He seems confident in the knowledge that no one reads his stuff anyway, so why bother?
It's another opportunity lost on an important issue. The key pieces missing in yesterday's story were the per-capita numbers on those top-end residential users and whether industrial users were included. Commenters pointed out these factors, and I know the editor reads them religiously. He seems to want to put a positive spin on this, yet he accepts the numbers at face value.
Does he call for investigation of excessive use? No. Does he think we should look into further disincentives for excessive use? Apparently not. Does he care? It sure doesn't look like it.
So why write this piece? I'm damned if I can say. It seems he didn't think much about it. Just filler.
The unnamed Courier editor comes out in favor of clean energy, investment in mass transportation, respectful dialogue and the President's plan in general. Among his usual cheering squad, heads will explode.
Do you notice that the unnamed Courier editor, apparently newly aware of his website's search function, is astonished to learn that he's been frequently budgeting sex-crime stories? Is this a multiple-personality problem, or what? In any case it's pretty weak beer.
I think the headline here should be "A Few Hogs Suck Up 35% of Our Water." I've been talking to people for years about getting a handle on conservation and the really egregious overuse we see so often, but this just tears it: we clearly need some seriously punitive rates at the upper end.
The comparisons to the ridiculous waste of Scottsdale and Vegas are an obvious editorial diversion so high up in the story. What people do elsewhere is not pertinent to what we do here -- except what they're wasting in Scottsdale in large part comes from here.
The graphs say we're doing better, and that's all good, but look at the scales on those graphs -- on a zero-based scale, those changes would be pathetically shallow.
Cindy could have been more detailed in the section on pricing, but what's there shows just how weak our "incentive" system really is.
Doug Cook describes the issue and reiterates the arguments on the "Taxpayer Protection Initiative" (gad, I hate that title). This may be boring stuff for those who are paying attention, but we have to keep in mind that most voters aren't, so an occasional rehash is a good thing.
Paula barely skims the surface of what's in the 2050 report, and from her description Council seems to have told the group to basically take a hike. It'd be nice if the Courier were to better inform the voters on what's really in the report, I'm sure it would provoke some interesting public discussion. You can read the executive summary here.
The AZ Republican confirms what I've been hearing about creepy old Fife Symington "considering" another stab at governor, "regardless of Brewer's plans," saying, "I would be very surprised if the Republican base sides with her in a vigorous Republican primary." Leaving aside his reelectability, which is low imho, I think he's getting a good reading of the political tea leaves. Ken Bennett has all but declared a challenge as well, and I think the odds are better than even that after the ugly spring session that's coming Brewer will cede the field.
The events of Brewer's tenure so far and a primary fight on the Rep side create a lot of room for a solid Dem candidate. Many are looking at AG Terry Goddard, who's sitting now where Janet Napolitano was before she became the most popular gov in living memory. But Symington beat him once before, and I'm hoping for a candidate with a little more horsepower.
There's a political aeon between now and the real campaign season, but that's what it'll take for any of these people to get in position for a credible campaign.
No time for blogging, I'm in Sedona helping friends clean up after the flood. Here's a shot by Lesley from yesterday at Tlaquepaque.
Update, Sunday: Did anyone else notice that the Courier hasn't carried a word about this national story in our backyard, involving our friends and neighbors?
The Courier carries the full text of yesterday's speech on health care, hard on the heels of the speech to school kids on Tuesday. Tim Wiederaenders noted on his pseudoblog that it took reader "requests" to get him to publish the latter, so maybe this is all more reaction than journalistic sense, but I'm feeling generous today. Have a cookie, Tim.
The unnamed Courier editor returns to one of his favorite themes: that amazing high-tech border wall that will keep the scary brown people out of Arizona. "Once we have that minimal control," he intones, then we can start dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.
Too bad the sort of "minimal control" he has in mind is so far beyond practical reality as to make it literally impossible. 
With moon-shot priority he wants us to build a 500-mile physical barrier and staff it with enough guards to stop thousands of desperate people from penetrating it. Remember the 87-mile Berlin Wall. Now imagine six of them in a row, across rugged desert terrain. And that's just for Arizona.
No, he doesn't really mean it. Since it can't be accomplished by anything short of a police state, the whole "control of the border" meme is nothing more than a political protest sign that the right knows it can use over and over again to rile up Americans who are scared of brown people.
What the editor and his pals just don't seem to get is the inescapable logic that if 12 or 20 million people are living in this country illegally, there must be room for them in the labor force. Sure, a lot of legal Americans are out of work now. But we're also hearing that a lot of immigrants are going home. This is not a coincidence.
Almost everyone coming over the border would do it legally if they could. Our "illegal" problem is not one of enforcement, but rather an artificial scarcity of legal status imposed by our government in the form of quotas and delaying procedures, much of it rooted in racism.
Immigrants, by and large, are not looking for citizenship. They're looking for work. Forget the "path to citizenship" distraction, focus on the path to payroll taxes, and we'll clear up 90% of this issue in a jiffy.
So I'm reading along on today's "Special to the Courier" (read: press release) piece on the PV World Arts Festival, that annual "mecca of excitement" (koff), and out of nowhere I encounter,
"Musical entertainment will begin at 11 a.m., a half-hour after Persephone arrives at the main stage ...."There was no previous reference to Persephone, so I had this vision of the hapless Greek queen of the underworld handing out plaques, and maybe a pomegranate or two.
