Editorial: What does future hold for fairgrounds?

Today the unnamed Courier editor uses the editorial space to give us a vague and lazy retrospective of years of failure at the Fairgrounds and advocate:

Nothing.

No solutions, no ideas, not much beyond a limp interest in the outcome. Great, editor, so you know all this stuff. Who has good ideas? What do we do about this mess? When can we expect real change? Where is the money gonna come from? And above all, why should we care, either about the fairgrounds as a facility for -- what exactly? -- or the editorial column while you're so ignominiously wasting it?

(Personally, I think we ought to turn the whole thing over to the Tea Party crowd. They're a great fit for the conditions out there -- constant hot wind blowing up chaff, with monster trucks.)

This use of the editorial box for personal windbaggery has just got to stop. It clearly indicates an impacted, self-referencing culture in the Courier editorial offices that readers can smell on every page. If you want your staff to step up and readers to rely on you, editor, you're gonna have to take your own responsibilities more seriously. Get someone in the room with you who's not afraid to tell you that your column isn't up to pro standards, listen to them and do the work.

Wish I'd written this

Gene Weingarten in WaPo:

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

Read the rest.

Tip: Trouble at the Elks

I got some inside skinny today on a conflict between staff and management at the Elks Theatre over just the issues I've been warning about for years. I'll be looking for a news story in tonight's Courier deadline dump.

Tim bobs and weaves on comments

Here's a good example of my experience in asking for reasonable treatment of Courier readers:

Q: * I'm still waiting to hear why you do not post all comments submitted on articles. I've talked to many people who have submitted comments only to never have them appear. I would think that a newspaper would believe in Freedom of Speech...

A: Editor Tim Wiederaenders answered: We try to post all comments that do not violate our Terms of Use agreement for the site. The Use of Service states, "If you use the Service ... you agree to abide by and be bound by the following:

1. You may not post, upload, or transmit any material or links to material that is libelous, defamatory, false, misleading, obscene, indecent, lewd, pornographic, violent, abusive, threatening, harassing, discriminatory, racist, vulgar, invasive of another’s privacy, illegal, constitutes hate speech, or harms minors in any way. You may not post content that degrades others on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual preference, disability or other classification. Epithets and other language intended to intimidate or to incite violence will not be tolerated. Debate, but don’t attack. The Daily Courier encourages vibrant discussions and welcomes active debate in its discussion forums. But personal attacks are not tolerated, and are a direct violation of these Terms of Use."

To include as many comments as possible, we try to edit out the offending parts, but some comments are beyond help. We try to e-mail the people who post such comments, but their e-mail addresses are not always valid. If you have further questions about this, please call me at 928-445-3333, ext. 1095. Thank you.

Well, Tim, my personal, direct experience has included comments that are at least as compliant as others you routinely post being edited arbitrarily and simply disappearing without notice and without any attempt to contact me by Courier staff. I have read similar complaints by many other reliable commenters. Your response to this question is blatant hooey to anyone who's been doing this more than a couple of weeks, and I guarantee nobody's buying it any more than I am.

I maintain this blog as a safe place to speak for myself and for other readers. I recommend that commenters compose comments offline and keep copies for reference, including the day and time you upload them to the Courier. If your comment goes missing or is edited unfairly, I'm happy to host it here (subject to my own comments policy, at left) and call the editors on their behavior.

What would help build credibility on this issue is if the Courier appended the comments policy with a statement promising fair dealing, direct notification for the user and explanations of edits (seeking permission) and deletions, and editorial-side compliance with the policy banning personal attack, including user-on-user attacks. Everything's being handled far too capriciously as it stands.

PS, Sunday: A questioner asks about online content vs print.

"A: The printed Courier will always contain more by it's very nature."

There's no diverting the blame for this one, the Q&A section is clearly marked as written by the Courier editors. Pardon my geekiness, but an editor who doesn't know the difference between the possessive and the contraction, or who can't see it in his/her own copy, should be interning, not editing.

Editorial: Measures should stand on their own

Today the unnamed Courier editor condemns Congress for using longstanding standard procedures in an attempt to push through legislation that's favored by clear majorities of Americans.

The practice of using must-pass bills to carry other legislation goes back decades, and is a common tactic, made more so since the Republicans decided to start filibustering everything. I didn't see the editor complaining when the Rs have used it, but suddenly it's an issue for him. Why?

Could it be that he's more concerned that these bits of popular legislation might actually pass into law, fulfilling the promise of majority rule? Heaven forfend!

We'd all be better served if the editor would man up and just say that he wants to enforce exceptions on civil rights for homosexuals, reduce available manpower for the armed forces, and punish children for the sins of their parents and prevent them from becoming fully productive in the only country they know. These crocodile tears over Senate rules aren't fooling anyone.

For the record I would agree absolutely with the editor about eliminating bill riders if he would also accept the abolition of the other legislative rules that senselessly impede progress, like filibusters, imperial chairmanships and secret holds. Our state legislature is similarly bound by rules that ensure dictatorial powers for majority leadership. If voters in general knew the whole megillah on the nonsense that goes on as a result of ridiculous rules, there would be torches and pitchforks.

But bitching about a rule that just happens to not favor your minority argument at this particular juncture is childish, editor.

Editorial: Recession is over, but stress is not

If you haven't heard the recession is over, you probably don't read economic news and probably aren't real clear on what "recession" actually means. Most people think it's a synonym for "hard times." This widespread misunderstanding is the entire basis for a whole lot of snarky punditry as well as this editorial. It would help to try to educate on this, assuming the editor understands it himself.

At left is a graph from Japan's "lost decade," which many smart economists see as an example of what we're likely to experience here. This is not your ordinary recession. More on recession types here. Note that the recession is "over" when the numbers turn up again (1993), not when they return to positive territory (still hasn't happened). It's really pretty simple.

As far as the editorial goes, who can disagree that we don't accomplish much by "arguing and blaming each other"? But that's not the editor's real aim. See, once we're coming out of active crisis mode, people naturally start looking around for the factors that caused the crisis, hoping to learn and do better next time.

The editor's "arguing and blaming" is code for what most people see as reasonable research and learning from mistakes. That would be bad for the editor, who's been an unabashed cheerleader for the massive policy mistakes that brought us to this pass: deregulation, profit first, converting personal savings and mortgages to gambling stakes on Wall Street, "free trade" that outsources jobs, crippling public education, defunding government services, ridiculous reductions in taxes on the rich and large corporations, and not least by any means, terrible warmongering.

These errors in judgment and failures of sense will keep us in the economic doldrums for another eight or ten years, if the history of previous structural downturns is a useful guide, and at war with the millions of enemies we've created for generations. But the editor would prefer that we forget about them, not quibble about who was right and who was wrong, just face the future shoulder-to-shoulder and keep digging.

It is vitally important as we approach the midterm election that voters stay engaged and ask serious questions about why we're here and how the candidates intend to apply themselves to rebuilding our economic base, employment and retirement security. Dumping our experience down the memory hole will only ensure a continuing status quo that's bad for everyone but ideological peacocks and the very rich.

Editorial: It's lion territory: what do you do?

The unnamed Courier editor tries to educate the reader about what to do in the vanishingly small chance of a personal encounter with a cougar. Fine, but it should have contained authoritative quotes rather than bald personal assertions, and it should have been a sidebar to the Friday story, not an editorial three days later.

What this shows is a lack of ideas for editorials within the Courier's famed "editorial board," which I'm daily more convinced is actually a piece of wood on which the editor makes sandwiches.

Amster: Brewer brings only embarrassment

Randall's back after a hiatus of a few months, and going after the slo-mo train wreck that is our Accidental Governor. While I'm happy to agree with him that electing Ms Brewer to the job for four more years would be a very bad move, we're not gonna get any other result if we're loose with the truth.

Randall writes, "During Brewer's tenure, Arizona has moved to the bottom of the charts in education, health care, and economic vitality." Blaming her for any of this is simply unfair. Our Legislature has been working hard to spiral us in on all these measures for many years, and if anything we were headed for even worse until Brewer intervened with her own budget late in the session this year. (I won't give her credit for the budget, though, that's her staff, and it was still truly awful.) The Legislature would have slashed education funding further by an order of magnitude and sold off most of our parks and public buildings to boot. The economy is a macro problem that the Legislature aggravated by its failure to address our idiotic revenue structure. Blame Brewer for failure of ideas and failure of leadership, but not for the failures of others.

You can blame her for signing 1070 (which Gov Napolitano vetoed several times), but not for making Arizona a national embarrassment over it. That was a big team effort, including Sen Russell Pearce (currently a favorite for Senate President, be afraid), Sheriff Joe Arpaio, nutbars like Chris Simcox, the Corrections Corporation of America and many others. Brewer was essentially the bystander who gets to answer the media questions. Blame her for failure to stop it, don't give her credit for driving it.

What really ropes me off is Randall bending over backward to blame Dems in a misguided attempt at "balance" (or did the editors stick this in?): "Janet Napolitano didn't exactly leave us in an enviable financial position, nor has she been proactive in managing the border situation that has so many people up in arms." We would certainly have been far better off if Gov Napolitano had been able to get her own policies implemented by Legislatures full of hostile and idea-free Rs, but blaming her for their policies is wrong. As for the border, as I recall it she did everything legally within her power to increase border security and bring federal attention to the issue here. That Rs are willing to pursue illegal means does not make them better at it. "Brewer's gubernatorial opponent, Terry Goddard, has likewise been mostly missing in action during his tenure as Attorney General." By what measure, Randall? As I recall Mr Goddard has done more than any other state official to reduce cross-border traffic in guns, drugs and cash, and crime in our state is down substantially since he took office, due to several factors including the quality of our law enforcement efforts and policies -- set by Mr Goddard and Ms Napolitano before him..

Even in calling Brewer out, Randall has trouble getting it right. He writes that she "capitulated to extremists" over immigration and ethnic studes, but "capitulated" implies resistance. No, she was a partisan there from the get-go. "Cooperated" would be more descriptive, in the sense that she arranged the cookies while the principals wrote the bills.

Yes, Brewer is a disaster in the past and in our future if we don't wake up and get moving. But her critics have all the good ammo in the world and no need to resort to the sort of mischaracterizations and misdirections so emblematic of the right. If the left can't write clear, honest critiques, why should anyone trust us more than them?

Here's that opening statement again, just in case you missed it:

Country music legend inducted into Hall of Fame

The Greater Arizona Country-Western/Swing Music Association (an obscure org with a dormant Myspace page, the website is dead) inducts Ray Gardner into its Hall of Fame, but Bruce didn't get around to asking the association why they chose him, and gives no credits for Mr Gardner other than the Prescott Playboys, a truly awful local band (sorry, guys). Instead we get some sketchy biographical notes and a misspelling of Willcox. Sure, it's cool that an old guy is still playing music, but that's not enough for a news story, guys.

Better to run down Rob Carey, who recently parked his cornet under the bed after a seven-decade career, and ask him about all the truly great music he's been in on.

Casserly: Another flying-monkey takedown!

I was planning to simply ignore JJ's patthetic partisan rant today, but the extensive fact-checking and cogent rebuttals in the comments make this piece worth reading. This is exactly the sort of reader response that makes best use of the online model for newspapers -- instant accountability, clear and insightful responses from different, authoritative angles that help readers sort the wheat from the chaff. I hope JJ is reading them and reconsidering the joys of a quiet retirement. Big props to the commenters, you made my day.

Missing the point

In today's editorial the unnamed Courier editor lends support to the City Council's decision to hire a consultancy as expert witness in legal action over the Demerse St improvement debacle. The editor misses the crux of the issue completely and simultaneously from two angles.

The argument between the City and the contractor hinges on whether the City specified the job properly in the bid process. The contractor says it found a million clams' worth of surprises under the street. The City responds that the contractor should have known about that before it committed to a price.

I don't know what was in the City spec for the RFP, but we can be pretty sure it was more detailed than "tear up this street from here to here, put in curbs and drainage, and pave it." Lots of commenters seem to think it was the bidders' responsibility to do underground surveys before bidding, but I have a feeling that getting useful information that way would likely cost a lot of time and money you can't get back, and here's a detailed City spec showing utility lines and at least a certain amount of geology. From my own experience, I know that opening up old work always brings surprises and overages that are hard to predict, and I imagine a company that does this for a living probably knows that too. So there's certain to be a lot more to the argument than the editor's dismissive, "To dig here and think you won't run into rock is naïve." It's really more a question of how wrong the City spec was about that rock.

The other aspect of this, and the one that sets people's hair on fire, is hearing that the City will be blowing another wad of cash the size of a house on an outside consultant. The editor agrees with the Council that the consultant will bring valuable information to the table for the City. But that's not what people are against. They and I believe that the City, being far and away the largest construction contractor in the City, should have this expertise in-house working for us every day, and it's outrageous that when we need someone who actually knows something about an issue so clearly part of a normal business day, no one working in City Hall can be trusted to carry the ball.

As I say all the time, at the end of the day voters care less about how much they pay in taxes than how much value they get in return. On this issue, the problem is that it looks like we're paying through the nose for a City legal department staffed with chumps and second-raters who are unequipped to handle a simple, predictable job. This will never win trust among taxpayers.

Graphs help

Editorial: GOP's gain offset by credibility loss

The commenters aren't seeing the forest for the trees here. This is the first example in my recollection of the unnamed Courier editor acknowledging and disavowing a Republican dirty trick. This is progress, people.

What the papers, including the Courier, all seem to have missed is that Steve May's recruiting fake Greens in LD17 might have helped him personally, but it could easily be part of the larger plan for knocking Harry Mitchell out of CD5 -- Tempe is the primary population center of both, Mitchell is considered vulnerable in November, and there's a lot at stake nationally. A lone Green on that ticket could draw out a few idealistic Green-only voters to dilute the whole Dem ticket. Notice that May quickly jumped lightly off the bus as if he were expecting it. If I were a reporter down there I'd be sniffing around for trails to the RNCC on this imbroglio. Not saying that there's any evidence (yet) that any national players were in on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if this traces back to Karl Rove and that crowd. It's their style.

PS, editors: Better brush up on further/farther.

Where's Randall?

I notice that Dr Amster hasn't turned in a column since June. Is this the end of the token local liberal on the op-ed page, or what? Anyone know?

Rare bird: An outside column worth reading

Tina Dupuy gets it spot-on in a widely carried column also available on HuffPo.

Editorial: High reward, low risk in Chino Valley

The headline is correct as far as it goes. It's far easier and smarter to build public transit system with a municipality than try to graft one on after the need becomes acute.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but Chino Valley is probably the least likely municipality in the area to make a success of public transit, because its large-lot platting and intermittent commercial strip spreads its population and businesses much more thinly.

The likely best result will be an infrequent short-bus schedule specialized for group-home seniors and maybe a few hospital workers, leaving out kids and general riders. There just won't be the money to support a system that residents more than a block away from 89 can practically use. That's not my idea of success. (And I can only imagine how quickly the calls will rise to scrap it all when the first bus gets involved in a collision on 89.)

This is the problem for mass transit everywhere in this country: underbuilding the system with lowball schedules and few destination options inevitably leads to underuse and hasty accusations of failure. Doing it right takes real vision and massive commitment, qualities I fear Americans at large and Arizonans in particular no longer value.

Chino Valley police making shift to hand-held e-Citations

A couple of points in this story should have merited followup questions.

"... citation information is ... stored in a central data base with Brazos, the company making the device's computer program ...." These are public records and must be handled securely and economically. Why is a private company doing this, and how much does it cost?

"... the money to pay for the devices will not come from the General Fund but rather a special improvement budget, much like a capital improvement item, bringing a return in revenue for the Town." How much money does the Town expect as a "return in revenue," and how does the Town assure residents that the new technology won't be used as a cash cow rather than enforcement tool? The Chino Valley PD has long carried a reputation for excessive enforcement. Will this get worse, or better?

Districts let teachers decide if they will air Obama's 2nd back-to-school speech Tuesday

Correction, Paula: the president's speech last year didn't cause controversy, at best it triggered controversy. Better writing would be "The president's first back-to-school speech in 2009, which encouraged students to study hard and stay in school, was the target of criticism by political opponents throughout the country, as well as locally."

The story infers that the "controversy" anticipating the speech was justified, when in reality it turned out to be idiotic once everyone heard what the President had to say. By writing it this way, the editors feed the sort of ridiculous flames we see in the comments.

Graphs help

Ezra Klein:

"From December 2007 to July 2009 – the last year of the Bush second term and the first six months of the Obama presidency, before his policies could affect the economy – private sector employment crashed from 115,574,000 jobs to 107,778,000 jobs. Employment continued to fall, however, for the next six months, reaching a low of 107,107,000 jobs in December of 2009. So, out of 8,467,000 private sector jobs lost in this dismal cycle, 7,796,000 of those jobs or 92 percent were lost on the Republicans’ watch or under the sway of their policies. Some 671,000 additional jobs were lost as the stimulus and other moves by the administration kicked in, but 630,000 jobs then came back in the following six months. The tally, to date: Mr. Obama can be held accountable for the net loss of 41,000 jobs (671,000 – 630,000), while the Republicans should be held responsible for the net losses of 7,796,000 jobs."

This should make you nervous

Kansas City Star:

J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi who recently began conducting heavily armed desert patrols in search of “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County, told The Kansas City Star that he was working on a proposal seeking state approval for his group, the U.S. Border Guard.
“I’m putting together a package and presenting it to the Arizona Legislature and saying, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and make the border rangers official, or completely reactivate the Arizona Rangers and we’ll work together,’” he said.
The Arizona Rangers were created in 1901 to protect the territory from outlaws and rustlers. The group was re-established in 1957.
But watchdog groups say Ready’s patrol illustrates why states should not sanction defense forces.
“We know that the neo-Nazis carry guns, but here’s an example of neo-Nazis with guns trying to position themselves to become an instrument of state policy,” said Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
...
Ready, a neo-Nazi, says his border guard includes heavily armed militias that search for “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County.
“We have fully automatic weapons — legally registered — grenade launchers, night vision, body armor,” he said. “We’re definitely going out there fully armed and equipped. When you’re going up against people with AK-47s and grenade launchers, you don’t want to go out there with a slingshot.”

Betcha we don't see anything about it in the Courier.