Interesting. I might be tempted to say that the 21st century has finally arrived at the Courier, as commenters call the writer out for what smells like a fictional, politically motivated letter. Check it out!
So the Courier's official position, as put by the unnamed Courier editor today, is that "We are a community that cherishes our arts and culture." That's great! It's also news, given the Courier's long history of short shrift and vanishingly small financial and political support for arts events and the art community.
Fine, anyone can change. I'll tell you what, editor, how about a corporate sponsorship for Tsunami, or PFAA, or PAAHC, or Sharlot Hall Museum, for that matter? How about getting involved in expanding, organizing, or at least promoting these events through your vast media empire? How about an ad discount for nonprofits, even? How about making an attempt to get the names and dates right?
Practice what you preach, I say.
And, please, I'm begging now, reassign the headline writer, huh? Garble, garble, garble.
Here's a hoot-out to Tom Steele for brightening my day, from the comments on the letter from Coyote Springs school staffers in response to the Courier's story last week:
I am more concerned that teachers are indicternating children in political matters whenever possible. Since most teachers are liberial that is a long term danger.Here we get a hilarious mix of paranoia, jackboot authoritarianism, hipshot thinking and amazingly creative spelling and grammar power-packed into just a few words. Good one, TS! I'm putting "indicternating" and "liberial" into my special lexicon of joke words. (At least he spelled "principal" right!)Communnity watch dogs should be reviewing text books and seeking permission to audit classed unannounced to keep check on "real" issues. Question. Can the principal listen in on classrooms via the PA system? They could when I was in school but that is probably "illegal" now thanks again to teachers unions and the ACLU.
The ugly headline notwithstanding, Jason's exploration of opinions in bars ahead of implementation of the new booze-and-bullets law is at least the sort of exercise in journalism that the paper so sorely lacks. I'm not wild about the style, of course, mixing weak and often pointless quotes from random people with a few facts to give it some humint.
The facts are limited to the provisions of the law, leaving out, say, lawnforcement assessments of its likely effects (or assurances that there won't be any), or how the bouncers who will have to physically deal with these newly empowered gun-toters feel about it. But a little is better than nothing from the Courier.
That 41 states also allow this indicates that public opinion is at least neutral and the effects aren't huge, OK. But we have to admit that it's also an indication of the sort of people that Americans want to be and the sort of society they want to live in.
I wonder whether anyone's done a study on how many skilled professionals have emigrated elsewhere in the world because of our collective idiocy about guns.
The Courier editors are taking a lot of heat in the comments about printing this letter from a sadly misguided reader with an impaired sarcasm response. What the commenters forget is that the Courier selects letters to publish not on the basis of useful information or informed debate, but on entertainment value.
I have to say it's more than a little tasteless to exploit the handicapped in this way, though. The editors really ought to have more respect for their less able correspondents.
The headline is another 'duh' moment, of course, but the editorial itself is equally dull. The unnamed Courier editor understands that the project is another screwup and the people up here on the Heights are variously hopping mad and scratching their heads over what the heck is going on. But he has essentially nothing to offer but the usual ignorant armchair quarterbacking.
I don't know any more about what's going on with the project than anyone else who lives within earshot of it, but I can tell you what most ropes people off. It's when the backup beepers and rock loaders start up at 6am. It's when citizens come home from work to find that the contractor failed to draw the right lines and their trees have been cut down by mistake. And it's when nothing at all happens for days at a time, showing that the City isn't exactly on the ball about getting the mess cleaned up.
When these things happen, it tells us that the City doesn't care about its citizens. And for that attitude alone, heads should be rolling.
Similarly, the Courier should be doing more serious research, bringing in the facts and details rather than competing vague opinions, and calling for those heads where the facts show that incompetents are drawing public salaries. These lacks confirm for us that the Courier doesn't care about its customers, either.
From The Arizona Guardian (sub req) comes a story not reported elsewhere. I wonder why?
Goddard announces $900,000 settlement over inflated drug prices
(Phoenix, Ariz. -- Sept. 23, 2009) Attorney General Terry Goddard today announced a $900,000 settlement with Bristol-Meyers Squibb (BMS) over allegations that the pharmaceutical company set fraudulently inflated prices for certain drugs purchased by consumers, insurers and other payers.
Goddard filed a lawsuit in 2005 against 42 pharmaceutical companies, alleging that they engaged in deceptive trade practices by manipulating the Average Wholesale Price (AWP) of their prescription drugs, causing buyers to overpay.
This state's settlement is the third since the lawsuit was filed, bringing in a total of $1.97 million. Last June, the state reached a $930,000 settlement with 11 drug companies. In 1996, GlaxoSmithKline settled with the state for $140,000. The money goes into the office's Consumer Fraud Revolving Fund, which supports consumer fraud investigations, consumer education and litigation.
"These drug companies have broken the law and been grossly unfair to consumers," Goddard said. "Many of the people ripped off by these artificially high prices are seniors citizens living on fixed incomes and having to choose between expensive medicine or food and housing."
Drug reimbursement rates are based on pricing data supplied by drug manufacturers. The lawsuit alleged that the drug makers manipulated the prices, resulting in inflated costs to consumers taking chemotherapy and other drugs for serious illnesses. According to Congressional research, Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
The lawsuit also alleged that drug manufacturers provided financial incentives to physicians and suppliers to stimulate drug sales, such as volume discounts, rebates, off-invoice pricing and free goods, at the expense of Medicaid and Medicare programs.
So I'm having a nice relaxed weekend (four gigs in three days plus home improvement work), and the Courier interrupts my endless leisure with with a brain-bending exercise in antilogic.
It fascinates me how ideologues can mentally remake the world to fit their ideas about it. Today the unnamed Courier editor asserts that extending unemployment benefits hurts businesses by adding costs, which could cause them to reduce employment further. This might be a concern, except that extending benefits does not change costs to business by a penny. The government offers extended access to the pool of money that businesses supply, reducing the pool, but the businesses pay at a constant rate. (With employment down by around ten percent, businesses are currently paying that much less in unemployment insurance, in point of fact.)
Businesses that have laid off personnel pay longer to assist those employees, true. But those are clearly not the businesses that might want to hire. They have reduced costs by reducing personnel, and the unemployment is a chip off that reduction. They're still ahead, cost-wise.
This is a laughable and truly desperate reach to find a way of blaming unemployment support for reducing employment. The editor is still fighting the advances in labor conditions of the 1930s.
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.
