We saw Bob Roberts again over the weekend, still one of the funniest/scariest satires on the rise of radical corporatism. With its 1992 release the Robbins brothers predicted with alarming accuracy what was coming for this country. I have to wonder whether even they imagined it would go as far as it has today.
With today's editorial I get the feeling that the unnamed Courier editor has been taking some writing lessons from JJ Casserly. He dumps out his terrorism file in more or less random, unexamined statements, and in the end leaves the reader with a contradictory non sequitur.
"We need to be vigilant, of course," he says, supporting the ridiculous notion that amateurs keeping a close eye out for terrorists at Wal-Mart could somehow be useful, "and secure our country the best ways we know how. At the same time," contradicting himself, "we cannot live in constant fear. If [the terrorists] smell that, they win." Did anyone else laugh out loud at this?
Having our former governor on the Wal-Mart PA exhorting us to be suspicious of our neighbors is just the sort of absurdist nightmare that lends cheer to the hearts of fundamentalist manipulators of all stripes, including (especially) our home-grown ones. Making distrust fashionable and looking for the worst in each other erodes our social fabric, dividing us, isolating us and making us easy to stampede in whatever direction they like.
Editor, having you think it's reasonable and prudent to write confused, alarmist crap like this is exactly the sort of win "the terrorists" are looking for.
On today's op-ed page, Michelle Singletary's column (reprinted from WaPo) focuses on what Elizabeth Warren is doing with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans screamed bloody murder that she would be a firebrand radical writing rules guaranteed to take down our entire financial industry. Instead we find that she's doing steady, practical work to make consumers smarter about credit.
Will voters notice that once again the Republicans, through character assassination and lies, tried to sell us a bill of goods to protect the privileges of the industry that recently tanked our whole economy? Some of us will.
Just go read this great letter from David Hackathorn.
In his personal column today, Tim protests that the Catch-22 features are misunderstood. "People assume that it's all about race," but "I don't see the color, folks. To me, it does not matter."
Perhaps if Tim cared about the strong undercurrent of racism in Prescott, he'd understand how he's facilitating it. Is it that you don't see it, Tim, or are you refusing to see it?
To sum up my previous analysis on this, the perps featured by Yavapai Silent Witness fall into two clear categories: offenders who are white and nonviolent, and long-gone old cases who are Hispanic and violent. No violent whites, no non-violent Hispanics.
YSW selects the offenders for this "most wanted" treatment, which implies a set of selection criteria. So far this round the only new "most-wanted" cases on the list are two white kids passing through the state on the highway who happened to get caught with pot and jumped bail. For pretty much any thinking person reading this, these offenses do not rise above the who-cares level. So we can reasonably infer that YSW does not have enough live cases to fill any of the 22 slots they set up for themselves.
With only who-cares and dead cases to choose from, what do they choose? Should we imagine that there are no dead cases of violence by white people? I think not.
As a professional newsman, Tim should have the skills to see this farce for what it is: a biannual funds promotion for the Silent Witness program with racist undertones and, most important, without news value. It's a failed experiment, and the Courier should take the lead in sending it back to the bush leagues.
Update, Friday night: The Saturday edition includes the first Hispanic perp wanted on a recent beef, assault on a cop.
Um, what in the world is this bit of attic-rummaging doing on the front page? What is it doing in the paper at all? Rick Killingsworth was out in PV six years ago, Ken. Is the Courier a personal scrapbook for its employees and their old friends? You could play up the biking angle and put it in the Vitality section, maybe, but it's not news despite the opportunity for Tom Steele to replay his glory days.
Just by the by, I was no fan of Killingsworth as mayor, but I was in on some of the awful stuff that Tony Mortillaro was doing at PV Town Hall, and his firing was well deserved and a long time coming.
I have to say I'm getting awfully tired of the unnamed Courier editor's narcissistic childishness around immigration policy, exemplified in today's editorial.
The question of whether federal law trumps state law was decisively settled 145 years ago. But the kindergarten states'-rights argument in the headline is no more than clumsy agitprop.
If the Supreme Court were hearing a suit challenging the constitutional standing of state sanction of gay marriage in Massachusetts, the editor would be first to write in support of it. This happens to be a challenge to legislation he likes, and so out come the swords.
We have to accept that pretty much whenever the states try anything new, court challenge to establish that the new law works with older and higher law is an inevitable and necessary part of the process. Voters and legislators in the states can't just willy-nilly write any law they happen to like. In this way the courts test new laws to make sure they work in context, with the effect of giving them greater credibility when they pass the test.
Given the progress of the suit so far I expect the Supreme Court will uphold Arizona, but that's not nearly as interesting as watching the editor get his briefs in a bunch over nothing. It exposes an acute lack of understanding of the legal process and an emotional attachment to Arizona's anti-immigrant campaign that only confirms what he derides as "the assumption that Arizona is a racist and discriminatory state."
Arizona is people, editor, and a large number of us are indeed racist, including a majority of your legislature and your governor. That's just obvious fact. The courts are there to prevent the reflexive zeal that you exhibit here from running roughshod over our legal system. Where we fairly don't have the final say on a decision, adults deal with it. Children whine. Which are you?
So for the centennial celebration of our great state, we hear in Cindy's story today about what -- driving the first spikes on a new passenger rail corridor connecting north and south? A statewide push on science and technology education to train engineers and technicians for the switch to 80% renewable energy by 2025? A sustained statewide program to better preserve our parks, wilderness and historical heritage? Nope. We get another traveling trinket fair.
Can our tourism experts really think of nothing better to add value to the occasion than funnel cakes and tee-shirts? Are we really so lacking in imagination and guts that we can't go forward with something that will be remembered in another hundred years?
The street fair is fine as far as it goes, who cares? But fergadsake let's not pass up this opportunity to do something useful and important for the future, show the world and the rest of the state that we're not just a bunch of passive lumps.
Again we have the biannual "Catch-22" feature, and again we have mostly the same old faces from years past. I wrote on this last year and investigated it more extensively in May, and it'll be fun (if you're really hung up for something to do) to watch to see how many of this year's are moldy oldies. Out of the seven mugshots so far, six are repeats from May, and four of those are violent offenders, all of Mexican heritage. Again the Courier reinforces the perception that this qualifies for endlessly repeated coverage.
The only new face is a drug mule passing through on the interstate. Guess we live in a pretty safe place, huh?
Today's edition of Pop Rocket includes the first in what is to be a regular column by yours truly on politics, media and whatever else comes up. It's not widely known that Pop Rocket was recently acquired by Prescott Newspapers Inc., parent of the Daily Courier.
Tena Overacker is still editing, though for some reason they won't allow her the title, and there's no concern about the Courier editors interfering with content. Hope you like it!
I gotta quick question: How can the Justice Department justify prosecuting Julian Assange, who was handed some classified information and published some of it, with no mention of prosecuting The New York Times editors, who were handed the same classified information and published some of it?
I gather our unnamed Courier editor is growing bored with our little town. Maybe the annual battle over the holiday sentiment expressed atop City Hall is no longer enough to float his boat.
Back when he was kept busier scooping up Ben Hansen's road apples, Tim had his Staples button reprogrammed to buzz "Local, local, local," at every opportunity. In today's editorial it appears he's promoted himself to editor of The Washington Post. It's great to have ambition, but best to bear in mind that success requires doing your homework.
Honestly, who in the world cares what The Prescott Daily Courier thinks China should do about North Korea? Maybe Tim heard that China's been hacking the Internet, and imagines some Charlie Chan-like bureaucrat poring over his editorials, searching for foreign-policy direction. Here's a hint, editor: When you're rewriting Krauthammer, anyone interested in the subject is either gonna go read Krauthammer instead or, for those more familiar with Krauthammer's analytical skills, write you off as a right-wing wacko and move on.
Here's the homework you missed. The idea that China still values the North Korean "buffer zone" against the west is a laughable antique. International conflict is no longer prosecuted with infantry and tanks, it's done with economics and information. China would love to have an industrial consumer state like South Korea on an accessible border offering easy profits, and even confirmed that in one of the recently leaked State Department cables.
China has almost as little leverage as the rest of the world does in Pyongyang. Diplomatic and even military principles rely on people pursuing their own best interests. But in a chess game where your opponent is not trying to win, it's impossible to make sense of the board. North Korea has essentially strapped on a suicide vest, and its goals are irrational, self-referencing and sociopathic. China and everyone else in the region are doing all they can to just keep the worst from happening for another day in hopes that the regime will eventually collapse from within without too much collateral damage. No one in the region imagines that this will end as tidily as it did in East Germany, or even Yugoslavia.
The editor warns, "unless something changes dramatically with North Korea, Beijing and Pyongyang can expect a nuclear-armed South Korea and Japan in the near future," as if the Kim regime could be rationally deterred from anything or Beijing would give a rat's butt about a Japanese bomb. This is nonsense. Kim maintains his power based on perceived and invented outside threats, so pointing more missiles at him only exacerbates the situation. South Korea is already armed with American "tactical" nukes. Japan knows better, and is constitutionally prevented from getting involved in nuclear weapons beyond the nudge and wink that allows it to resupply US Navy nuke carriers.
Please, editors, I beg you, get your heads out of the teevee and focus on your community. You can imagine yourselves in Yankee Stadium all you like, but you're still playing sandlot ball, and there's no shame in that.
Wednesday's awfully headlined "Man who used his cashier girlfriend to steal from store sentenced to probation" has attracted a bunch of comments from the girlfriend and the boy's father debating the relative goodness of people who "made a mistake" with the hang-'em-high crowd. It's a laff riot, and I think it bodes where our media may be headed.
Just around the corner, we may start to see perps, witnesses, neighbors and friends on teevee and in the papers, not responding to reporters' questions, but volunteering their points of view unedited and having their conflicts out in public, using their computers, cellphones, whatever.
This would be a new iteration of a phenomenon that's lately been out of style, the "open letter," in which people would use local papers to express themselves. I have copies of open-letter correspondence written by my great-grandfather and great-grandmother as they hashed out the grounds and defense for their impending divorce on the news page of the Kankakee Daily Gazette in 1920. It was ugly.
Like "reality teevee," I'm not sure that direct access to media like this will do much to edify society. But it will be "entertaining," so it will sell advertising.
A couple of things caught my eye in today's edition that lead me to think someone left the controls on autopilot over the holiday weekend.
In the editorial highlighting local charities, the unnamed editor writes, "Two women are renovating, room by room, an old hotel for displaced veterans, which they have named the Downtown Prescott Inn." He's referring of course to what oldtimers remember as the AJ Head Hotel on North Cortez, renamed Downtown Prescott Inn years ago by some new owners who hoped to gentrify it. It resisted. The new people are just reusing the old name and signage. So the sentence is wrong in fact, and anyone who's been in town as long as the editor ought to know that backward and would not refer to the Head, the last historic, working residence hotel in town, as "an old hotel."
Over on the news side, "Elk's raffle under way" glares with an excess apostrophe, as if no one writing or editing the piece knows what the Elks Theatre is or understands basic punctuation. There's another one in the body of the piece ("Elk's building") right among better-punctuated references, so it's not just the hapless headline writer.
Roll your eyes at my pedantry if you like, but editors are supposed above all to be careful readers. These slips aren't small. So did the Courier staff farm out the weekend paper to a pasteup house in India, or what?
There's gonna be a lot of dumb fluff in Thursday's paper. You have my permission to skip it.
Stephen Lemons has a piece in Phoenix New Times on rising hate crime rates in AZ where everywhere else they're going down. Read "Joe Arpaio, Russell Pearce and Jan Brewer's Arizona: Hate Crime Stats Climb."
This op-ed conveys a bittersweet story of the death of Dora Borjon while on a sister-city delegation to Caborca in Sonora, and the town's support in returning her remains to Prescott Valley. I don't normally read the obits, and I missed hers when it was published on Oct 23.
For a media-watcher like me, there's a striking angle to this story. Ms Borjon was part of what cannot be described as anything less than a diplomatic delegation from our city. She died unexpectedly, and there was further news value in the aftermath of her death. This ought to have been a front-page story, not just an obit. Where was the Courier? Where was, at the very least, the followup on the obit? What makes this story unworthy of news coverage?
Congrats to Judge Bob Brutinel, whom I know to be a pretty right guy, for making the Supreme Court cut at last.
Update/correction, Monday: I confirmed over the weekend that, contrary to the previous version of this post, there is no Senate confirmation process for AZ Supreme Court justices. I got wrong information from a trusted source, sorry about that.
After wasting half his column on the 1070-boycott non-story, the unnamed Courier editor turns to the heroic efforts of our state legislators to address our historic lack of government revenue by reducing revenues further.
Building on Saturday's report on the ATRA presentation at the capitol, the editor touts the fabulous new ideas of our two newbie legislators, which, oddly, sound a lot like their old ideas: cut taxes on business.
That supply-side argument has been utterly demolished by facts on the ground since the Reagan debacle, but they can't let it go. After all, isn't it just common sense that less taxation of business will create more jobs? Isn't it just common sense that a mystical supreme being made all the rocks and bushes by hand? Faith springs eternal.
The JLBC, our state accountants, gave a presentation to legislators last week stating unequivocally that recent proposals to further cut taxes on business will be completely counterproductive and should not go forward. Our legislators, thrust into leadership positions without the experience to back them up, are simply discarding the advice of staff experts who've been working on our budgets in many cases for decades.
They admit that these tax-cut proposals are not even supposed to have any effect on the current downturn, phasing them in over years. It's purely an ideological move. Further, the JLBC reports that "Between FY 2007 and FY 2010,
Corporate tax receipts declined from $986 million to $413 million," indicating not only that businesses are paying half the taxes they were three years ago, but their total contribution to an 8.5-billion-clam budget is already very low.
And while it's true that personal-property taxes are much lower relative to business property taxes, shifting the burden from profitable businesses to strapped and fixed-income homeowners is just not gonna fly, so we can count on seeing that piece negotiated away in the legislative process, leaving us with more looming revenue losses.
These guys are fiddling with ideology while the state burns out. The editor ought to be able to see that and call it for what it is.
