Should medical marijuana be legalized? Pro and Con

Oh, this is rich. The Courier editors "debate" legalizing medical pot. Neither knows any more about the issue than what they've seen on teevee. They undertake a debate in which neither addresses the other's arguments. It amounts to a couple of kindergartners debating economic theory based on their knowledge of Santa and the Tooth Fairy.

On the con side of the argument, Tim can't seem to focus. He assumes that lawmakers might be interested in the taxable aspect as a budget supplement, but undercuts even this wild theory by comparing the paltry 300 million clams a medpot program might bring in to the 3.4 billion-clam deficit we're already not dealing with. Who might imagine that the money would be a significant factor here? Then he balances this non-issue against the non-issue of patient dosage, non-sick people maybe getting better pot (and paying taxes on it), the "purity" of a natural product that you can't overdose on, and pharmaceutical products that just have to be better, even though actual sick people can't stand them. In the end he reveals the extent of his reasoning abilities around this issue by chucking all his arguments in favor of the state "selling its soul to the devil" -- in other words, he just thinks pot is evil and that ought to be enough for anybody.

Ben does little better on the pro side. He starts off on familiar ground -- John Wayne movies (ack) -- and steps confidently off the cliff of complete ignorance. "Marijuana may be addictive," he intones, "but that is no concern for people who are dying or so severely ill they are incapacitated." Except that no good study has ever shown marijuana to be addictive, and no one has ever seen a clinical pot addict. Ever. No matter how hard they've tried. So even while he's trying to argue the point sympathetically, Ben can't help but reinforce acute misinformation and idiotic stereotypes.

What's really breathtaking is the hubris of these two in deciding that they are even qualified, let alone the best people, to write on this subject. The egotism here is palpable, the egotists make themselves ridiculous, and the paper's reputation accelerates on its toilet trajectory.

Happy 2010!

Best wishes to all for a better year and a better decade. We could hardly do much worse than the naughties have been, good riddance to them.

Today's (creepy) Chuckle

From the comments:

Incent people being victmized be the police and judges, property taxes going up when property velues is going down tax returns 640 to 1280 less this year and a presdient that bows to other counturies spells terisam to me. Some say we are not vilanet, we will handle this thru leagel means but the leagle system is tated and the civil war was not won with words but with bullets.

Makes my head spin.

Getting ready for your blue-moon party?

It's another boring Wednesday in the paper, and I've been saving this photo for something moon-themed, like the first blue-moon New Year's Eve since 1990. I know, it should be a full moon, but with the weather we're likely to be having, half a moon is better than no moon at all.

Here's something just a little geeky to read about blue moons and moon lore.

Editorial: We should learn from Leon Noe

Yet again. By now you probably know what the chair means. If not, see this. Or this, this, this, or especially this, which says it all.

Judge admonishes feuding neighbors

So today Linda turns in what could have been the complete piece containing what ran just yesterday.

Are the editors budgeting these stories at random or what? It really looks like scribbling unfinished, poorly thought-out stuff straight into the paper willy-nilly.

I just want readers to notice one thing about what's at issue here: one side in the dispute is not commenting, the other is courting media attention and getting it.

Problems plague City Council election

Cindy follows the standard negative media narrative we had during the fall, but to me our local election was the most interesting in a very long time, and the hitches in the gitalong only pointed up that more people were more engaged, understanding that more is at stake, than ever. This is a good thing. I just wish they hadn't run that goofy photo of Tammy Linn again.

Shout-out to out-of-towners

I just want to say hi to the regular Courierwatch readers outside our local area. Yo Page, Phoenix, Tempe, San Francisco, Dallas, Minneapolis and Stuart FL! Drop me a comment and let me know what brings you to this tiny corner of the blogosphere.

"It's a good day to die."

The Courier ran a story on the judge's release of documents in the James Ray sweat-lodge case, so I figured it would be interested in what's in those documents. So far, nothing.

The AP has some fascinating bits in a story today datelined Prescott. WaPo has it, and I saw others yesterday. Why doesn't the Courier?

Update, midnight: The story shows up for Wednesday, a few grafs longer than the WaPo version, with stuff added from the affadavits, which are fascinating.

Editorial: Benefit denials may help budget

Let's do a little parsing, just for fun. The unnamed Courier editor:

"The federal government's continuing refusal to do anything about illegal immigration ..."

The editor apparently misses how much money and effort our government really does spend on border control and immigration enforcement. It's huge, of course, but the editor calls it "nothing." This indicates a certain cavalier attitude toward the truth.

"The American people are fed up with the problem and are not going to wait forever for the federal government to act,"

... meaning that a small group of people having a nice greasy breakfast with the editor are fed up and will do nothing but complain about it, giving the Republicans an issue to run candidates on. They won't do anything about it because a) they can't, as they showed when they were in power, b) it would interfere with the very large corporate interests that pull the strings on the right, and c) complaining rather than doing what they say they want gives them a continuing campaign issue, where attempting it would immediately prove their incompetence and short-sightedness.

"In 2004 Arizona voters approved an initiative to deny state benefits to illegal immigrants, but Attorney General Terry Goddard interpreted the law narrowly to apply to only a few categories of benefits."

Of course, implies the editor, the state's most senior law-enforcement official could not possibly have made the correct interpretation, as one might infer from the lack of a countervailing court judgment. He's a Democrat, after all. Instead,

"the Arizona Legislature expanded the list of government benefits illegals may not receive,"

rather than demand that Goddard do as they told him to do, because they're really kindly people who wouldn't want to offend.

"The latest legislation also requires that people applying for benefits must provide at least one form of identification, including a birth certificate or passport, and sign an affidavit saying their documents are authentic."

We can be confident that this will be so scary to holders of false IDs that they'll turn themselves in.

"That quickly raised hackles with Democratic legislators who rely heavily on Hispanic voters"

... since the jackboots will only be checking the papers of Hispanics, right? No, the law says the bureaucrats have to check everyone's papers, which might bother legislators who care about such things. Republicans apparently don't.

"... and the Arizona League of Cities and Towns filed an unsuccessful suit challenging the constitutionality of the benefit restrictions."

Everyone knows that the League is just a bunch of namby-pamby immigrant-huggers. Mesa, for example.

"800 people seeking benefits have not been able to prove their lawful presence in the country."

or perhaps just couldn't find or buy their papers. How many people applied for benefits in that time, editor, just to put things in perspective?

"... the state should not be handing out money to non-citizens here illegally."

And it doesn't, since AG Goddard has been enforcing the ban on the narrow class of welfare programs that are the only ones that "hand out money." The editor fails to understand that "public benefit" is a really broad and vague category, and includes many things we take for granted. Municipalities fairly want to know how much hassle and expense they have to put out and how many of their citizens they have to piss off to keep a few people from getting such benefits, even where the evidence is slim to none that there's any significant loss related to illegals.

"The declining economy and the employer sanctions law clearly have pushed illegal immigrants off to other states."

The illegals are moving on because there aren't enough jobs here, and that by far has been the most effective factor in reducing immigration both legal and otherwise -- economic disaster. That should tell us all something very important.

How much of the state's money would the editor spend to support this Republican political theatre? I gotta wonder.

Sheriff's K9 unit nabs 2 men and 7 pounds of cocaine

Over the past week or so I've been hearing about how the state wants to remove convicted illegals from our prisons and send them back to their home countries before they've finished their sentences.

So that's in the back of my mind as I read this story, of two drug mules caught on the way to parts unknown with a few pounds of coke under the back seat.

There's no indication that these guys are illegal immigrants, that's not the issue. Rather, they're apparently from New Mexico and Colorado, and in all likelihood they fully intended to get back there with their booty. Yavapai County just happens to be on the way.

But they were caught here and if convicted they will serve their sentences here. At our expense. Even though we can be pretty confident that they would have done nothing in Arizona more obnoxious than speeding.

We're generally happy to dump the expense of Mexican perps back on Mexico. Would it not be similarly just to dump New Mexican perps back on New Mexico, for example? The logic ought to hold.

I'd like to see more followup coverage on these guys -- whether they're convicted, whether there are outstanding charges elsewhere, where and for how long they're incarcerated, when they get out, and where they go afterward. Follow the story and we all learn more about how our justice system works and what this sort of bust costs us.

Update, Wednesday: Must be something in the air, I just heard on the radio about a move toward forcing prisoners to pay for their incarceration. Debtor's prison, here we come!

Victim of the court system?

Whoopsie!

Looks like the editors thought they had few inches of human-interest in this story of a guy getting arrested on a littering charge that had already been dismissed. Pretty funny.

So Linda ran with that, but the story as published neglects to give any other perspective of what is clearly a rancorous neighborhood feud. The story encourages the reader to judge on the basis of nothing but this guy's story.

So readers are doing exactly that, as seen in the comments. They're judging the protagonist, the deputies, the judge, the unnamed neighbors, the postal system, the town of D-H, and society at large, charging anything that strikes their imaginations. All on the basis of reporting that would embarrass a first-year journo student.

The reader might reasonably ask how this story came to the Courier in the first place. Given what it covers, we can reasonably infer it was a phone call from Mr Waters or his attorney. Didn't that raise a red flag at the editor's desk? I gather not.

New Arizona law rekindles immigrant benefit debate

Here's yet another example of how people get to hyperventilating over an issue and consequently can't think straight when certain words come up. Today's words are "illegal immigration."

Senator Russell Pearce used his impressive grasp of the holes in the legislative process to get some language passed through on a budget bill that really shouldn't have been there. This happens a lot, and you don't have to be a partisan of the specific issue to understand that the way the Legislature does this sort of thing is just wrong.

The League of Cities and Towns hear about it and discover that they're suddenly on the hook for a whole lot of new personnel and material costs to enforce Mr Pearce's vague language. They pipe up and say "Hold on, what's the deal here?"

Mr Pearce calls them "open-border anarchists who refuse to protect the taxpayer," which illustrates what intellectual level he's working on.

The commenters on the story weigh in with their views about how simple the world is if only everyone would listen to them.

The people freaking out about illegals are utterly blind to the inevitably complex consequences of what they propose. To them it's all perfectly simple, but where the rubber meets the road, our municipalities have to figure out in irritating detail what to enforce, how to enforce it, how to pay for that enforcement and what to do with the people they stop.

Legislators always understand what they mean to write into law, but rarely do they have the communication and systems-thinking skills to understand the real effects of what they write. Would you rather have your representatives calling people names and fighting lawsuits, or asking them about their concerns and working to craft a better legal solution to the problem? I know how I vote on that.

Editorial: Public will judge Arpaio, Polk, et al

Writing the editorial -- the considered opinion of the paper as a community entity -- is about taking a stand. Not every day is a big-news day, so frequently the daily editorial column carries lighter fare, but when the editors choose to address a controversial public-policy issue, the reader fairly expects to learn what the editors, who deal with public policy every day and so are supposedly up on the details, consider to be the better course. Journos generally love to do this, because it's the most direct form of participation in the news that the profession offers.

So when I see an editorial on a hot issue and read something as smarmy and mealy-mouthed as this, my red flags go up and the BS collision siren goes off.

Notice, dear reader, how the unnamed Courier editor uses subtle equivocation and characterization to undercut the case against Arpaio and Thomas. Putting Arpaio and Polk in the same "et al." headline, as if they're all the same. Reducing the arguments to "vitriol flying thither and yon." Describing the public demonstration of the attorneys rather than their documented concerns. The unschooled reader would naturally conclude from this that the issue is some sort of angry food fight among a bunch of lawyers and doesn't matter.

No, dear editor, Attorney Polk's letter is clearly not "vitriol" in any way. Her accusations are serious and measured, not angry or gratuitous. The "200 lawyers on the lawn" are actually over 350 attorneys in public and private practice, including other municipal and county attorneys, calling out Thomas and Arpaio for abuse of their offices. This is serious stuff, but the Courier editor handles it like a barroom argument over an umpire call.

Why, one might wonder. I have a guess. Taking a clear stand in favor of Arpaio and Thomas would win a few points among people who don't read much, but ultimately come a cropper when the two principles take their inevitable fall -- the evidence is overwhelming. Taking a stand in favor of the majority of the legal profession and Ms Polk puts the paper on the side of lawyers, whom they love to hate, and against the sliver of the extreme right that the editors identify with most strongly. And this last group, we can all attest, holds grudges when its members fail to measure up to this week's standard of crazy.

Letter: Fann outsources jobs for WV road project

Greg Harkleroad writes to let readers know that only a third of the subcontractors on the Williamson Valley Road project will be local. If I were the Courier city editor I would put some resources into looking into this question, both for this project and other public projects. People want to know about this, in terms of jobs for themselves and their kids, and in terms of how much of their tax contributions stay in the area regenerating the economy.

A commenter on the story makes the point that the law requires us to take the low bid, regardless of local economic impact or benefit. This is mostly true, I'm sure, but that system cannot change unless voters understand how the system works and demand change. This is (or should be) the core purpose of our news media -- providing the factual basis for understanding the state of our society and making choices about it.

Update, Tuesday: Check out Mike Fann's reply in the comments.

Pushback from the legal profession

AzBlueMeanie of the excellent Blog for Arizona posts a nice map of the high-powered artillery coming to bear on Sheriff Joe and Andrew Thomas, and recaps the issues and the tactics that the Republic characterizes as "using the law to pursue political enemies." Our County Attorney is in the thick of a much bigger push by an appalled profession to get control of these guys.

Buddy Ross shares this photo from Lamington National Park in Oz.

Editorial: Senate scruples sell briskly lately

The unnamed Courier editor again betrays his confusion of reality and fantasy -- the little "anecdote" he opens with as "popular legend" is of course a distortion of a famous exchange in the Jack Englehard novel Indecent Proposal, which became a hit film with Robert Redford in '93.

I absolutely agree with the editor that the rules of the Senate need sweeping reform to eliminate the sort of venal tyranny we both see in the actions he describes.

The editor would have a whole lot more credibility on the issue, however, if he could claim any consistency in criticizing this behavior by Republicans. But we know what that's about. Even a stopped clock, as they say.

I notice that Ben didn't have much time to write this week, so he built this by recycling chunks that aren't about Republicans from the newish post on his pseudoblog, which rehashes the same lame message from months of these sporadic columns. Just once I'd like to see Ben invite an actual Congressperson to respond to his ignorant foolishness.

Op-ed page on autopilot

I notice that someone on the online op-ed page is apparently asleep -- no less than five pieces are posted twice as I write this, one under two different headlines. Yeesh.

Update, 2:30pm: The duplicates are gone, along with the comments posted to them.

The annual canned spam

We're now deep in end-of-year-roundup season, where most of the paper's space is devoted to enervating canned features to allow the staff time off. It makes reading the paper in search of news pretty well pointless for probably another week or so.

For the reader who hasn't shut down her frontal lobe for the duration, I have a few recommendations:

The Boston Globe has a succinct comparison of the differences that the House and Senate will have to resolve in their health-care bills.

The Guardian furnishes a first-person account of who killed the Copenhagen initiative -- maybe not who you'd expect.

A little obscure history on a serious, well-financed plot to install a fascist government in this country by military coup in 1933.

Enjoy!