From the many references to missing comments, it appears that something has changed in a big way over the past few days, and whoever is editing the comments has no clue what they're doing. Perhaps the senior editors don't know what this person is doing either. In any case it's pissing a lot of people off unnecessarily. Someone needs to reread the rules, straighten up and fly right.
The unnamed Courier editor supports Pearce and Adams in rigging the redistricting commission. The question is whether he's being fooled by the rhetoric or he's trying to fool his readers. Here's most of the real story.
I'm hopeful that it's essentially a non-issue because we can trust that the courts won't stand for this naked power play. The editor should know all this stuff, including the personalities of the players.
Randall is justifiably frustrated with the state's prospects for educational and budgetary sanity, and it comes through in his writing bigtime, bordering on despondency. Who can blame him? It's gonna be ugly.
TUSD deserves applause for putting up a fight for its kids, but the Ethnic Studies program is going down. New EdSupe John Huppenthal has been as clear about that as his predecessor, and despite the oft-heard Republican love for local control, local control that in any way serves the needs of brown students is off the table for this and the next few years. Times are tough for the scapegoats. There will be worse.
One quibble, Randall: Since the US didn't exist until the founders invented it, by definition none of their parents could have been citizens before that point. They defined citizenship on the basis of maleness, European heritage and owned property, of course. I get the feeling our Legislature would like to return to those halcyon days.
Joanna quotes our local legislators on their views about the budget, and they are united in the narrow and unimaginative. Rep Tobin dismisses the Brookings/Morrison report as "biased," which evokes the image of a ninth-grader challenging Einstein on physics.
The contrasting opinions are missing of course, as I predicted in my current column in Pop Rocket. You can go there to find out what the Dems would do if they weren't chained up in the basement.
Regular readers know that I've been writing for many years on the danger of reckless, over-the-top rhetoric and the online anonymity that helps foster it. The sudden mainstream-media focus on it in the wake of the politically motivated shootings in Tucson will naturally divide itself into the usual tedious arguments, with the extreme right protesting defensively (with some justification) that the gunman was individually responsible, and the rest of us recognizing that the climate of hateful rhetoric has an intuitive connection with the weather of the broken mind with a gun.
Where we all bear responsibility is in allowing our communities to become so reflexively divided along arbitrary political lines dictated by emotionally charged micro-issues.
It was bad enough when things were going well for us. With the economic downturn we see exposed the American tradition of finding someone else to blame for our troubles. The rhetoric grows yet more heated, the nutbars more empowered by it, and the violent few move closer to action on their twisted fantasies. Denying the reality of this mechanism is nothing but attempted self-deception. In an environment of pervasive propaganda, no one can claim to be unaffected by it, and the more emotional it is, the greater the effect.
No one wants official censorship, least of all any of us who work in media. But we have to do something as a society to turn this tide and ramp down the rhetoric into the adult range. The founders of our nation knew it would be a bold and risky experiment to rely on the people to self-govern, but that's what we most need now. Have we had enough of this nonsense yet, or will we need another civil war to shake us into requiring civility of one another?
Earlier today I added a couple of comments on the AP story about the assault on Rep Giffords and the crowd. Two of them apparently didn't make the Courier's mysterious cut.They went like this:
"Perhaps we would better spend our energy asking why it took so long for sheriff's deputies and medical help to arrive."
"I notice that AP has altered the passage I mentioned previously."
In today's defense of the City's bungling of the New Year storm, the unnamed Courier editor glosses over some salient points that commenters and others are making. Sure, lots of people are making ignorant complaints. But there's wheat among the chaff.
"Road crews worked hard to cinder and plow the ice and snow," says the editor, but residents all over town agree that the plows came much later than usual if at all, and the cinders rarely appeared before Sunday. Timely and sufficient application of cinders alone would have vastly improved safety on the streets and promoted ice melt even under sub-freezing conditions during the day. Today, a week after the snow fell, there still aren't enough cinders on most streets to make a difference. This is in clear contrast to previous practice in similar weather events. People reasonably want to know why.
We've heard all kinds of big talk about focusing on public-safety "needs" over silly "wants" from Mr Lamerson and other Council members and staff. Here we had a clear public-safety need that was poorly addressed, and nothing but lame excuses and promises from official sources.
Someone at City Hall is failing to answer the pertinent questions. With this piece the editor is abetting that failure. If the Council were dominated by Democrats, you can bet that the editor would be far more demanding.
Given the Courier's history of head-in-the-sand responses to budget challenges, I'm a little surprised to see this piece by AP's Paul Davenport on the new Brookings/ASU Morrison report on how we got where we are. A commenter kindly provided a link to the original report, which it seems to me puts a lot more blame on reckless tax-cutting than untoward spending than DAvenport would have us believe. From the introduction (emphasis mine):
Arizona is now struggling with two related but distinct fiscal disasters. Recognized is the portion of the state’s budget crisis that has resulted from the sudden collapse of annual revenues after the real estate crash and economic downturn. This crisis has hit hard but will ease as the economy recovers.
Less understood is the depth of the state’s massive structural imbalance, which has arisen thanks in large part to policy choices made during the go-go years of the state’s recent past but which will not soon relent. During the growth years, legislative and executive leaders acted as if the state could maintain a basic level of service provision even as it implemented tax cuts that permanently reduced the state’s revenue base.
Now, the illusion has been shattered and the state’s yearly labors to close its fiscal year budget gaps are about to get harder. With one-time fixes, gimmicks, and fund sweeps exhausted, budget cuts from this point forward could—if handled crudely—prove devastating and difficult to recover from. Serious discussions among state leaders have included opting out of Medicaid, cutting a K-12 system often cited before the recession for receiving the lowest per-pupil funding in the nation, and significantly reducing funding for the state’s university system. At the same time, if managed well (that is, with a balanced approach and a sense of strategy and rigor) the crisis might actually prompt innovation instead of just pain.
But what is certain, at any rate, is that the current fiscal crisis will continue to have lasting and damaging ramifications unless the state takes prompt, sober steps to address it. To this end, this short introduction to the state’s cyclical and structural deficit problems provides two groups of suggestions to the state as it prepares to attack its problems.
First, the state needs to improve the quality of its fiscal policymaking by moving to broaden, balance, and diversify its revenue bases while looking to the long-haul balance of taxing and spending. Implicit in this push must be a recognition that action has to occur on both the revenue and reduction side of the equation. Spending cuts alone are not going to put Arizona on a stable fiscal path.
And second, the state needs to improve the information sharing and budgeting processes through which fiscal problems are identified, analyzed, and addressed. As part of this, the state needs to put in place the sort of strategic plan that furnishes a long-term vision of state success against which budgetary and other sorts of performance can be measured against clear goals and mileposts.
In sum, the choices that need to be made by Arizonans are difficult and will require of leaders substantial self-discipline. Success at this work is imperative as the first order of business for Arizona as the state prepares to embark on its second century.
The unnamed Courier editor warns the new Legislature that " Arizonans will be watching very closely," but he's not clear about what he'll be watching for, exactly. Even the most clever measures to spur job growth won't see results within the next two years. It's hard to parse out what he means in the non-sentence "Private prisons," but I'll be charitable and take it to mean no more of them. Allowing the sales-tax extension to sunset on schedule will save the editor a few pennies, but without comprehensive revenue reform it will only increase the pain. Playing nice in Washington after the tantrums of the past few years is worth a try, but to what end, editor? Tell us what you support.
He asserts, "the challenges are largely the same as they were last year and the year before that." Really? Sure, we still have a no-growth economy, a collapsed housing market, record unemployment and a dunderheaded tax structure. But this term adds the complications of Republican supermajorities in both state houses composed mostly of complete newbies who feel empowered to pursue every silly idea that springs from Sarah Palin's mouth. No, editor, this year we can expect it'll be much worse.
The results will be a confused and ineffectual budget process, grandstanding galore, endless lawsuits to fix the many mistakes, and two more years of Arizona being the butt of every third political joke.
Joanna interviewed the hapless manager who'll be taking the fall for the City's poor response to the snow, but where are the quotes from Council and the city manager? The line employees can tell us what they're doing, but only the elected officials can tell us whether they're satisfied with the results. Why isn't the Courier stepping up to demand answers to the hard questions?
On today's page 7, under a prominent "News" slug, we find a piece by AP's Larry Margasak about how the Rs in Congress plan to waste the coming two years grandstanding to beat the President, and how great that will be.
This is obviously political opinion, not news. I also notice that the editor placed a pointer to it on page one, boosting its prominence.
Cheerleading for obstructionism and political gamesmanship is no way to start off the new year, editors. Nor is misleading your readers. Could we please have a resolution in the editorial offices to try harder to act like journalism professionals?
Questions, indeed, and the editor gets around to them right at the end, after a tedious "Days Past" digression. Apparently he was researching the weather in 1967 rather than putting those questions to our city officials.
An event like the weekend's winter storm brings the whole town together and requires official response. So far there's nothing in the Courier. I for one would much prefer reading the answers than wasting time on the editor's idle wonderings.
Last I heard there was still a working newsroom at the Courier -- would it be asking too much to gather some news?
I can imagine it's not easy to get official comment over the holiday weekend, but Doug doesn't even indicate that he tried in his story today. My experience has been similar to that of many commenters on Paula's we're-totally-prepared story from Thursday -- thickly iced streets suited only to six-wheel offroad vehicles, rare sightings of response equipment, and I've yet to see a single cinder anywhere. Courier reporters ought to be asking pointed questions of City staff and elected officials.
Tomorrow everyone goes back to work. If the streets aren't in better shape by morning, it'll be a nightmare.
We learn today that the rumors have been true, Kit Atwell is retiring, and Kelly Soldwedel is replacing her at the top of the masthead. It will be fascinating to see whether this makes any difference in the paper.
On a newspaper, the publisher is the cheese. She makes the big business decisions on behalf of the financial interests who pocket the dividends. She's the strategist for the future and crisis manager for the present. The editors create the product, but the publisher tells them what sort of product it has to be.
From the announcement in the paper it's clear Ms Soldwedel didn't reach this position by climbing the experience ladder. She's all of seven and a half years out of college, and made general manager in four. The paper seems proud that she's only running the company because her progenitors did. I hope she's got enough pride in herself to overcome her elevation-as-inheritance. The paper needs it.
Any attentive reader can see pretty quickly that the Courier desperately needs new blood and real-world experience to blow the cobwebs out of its congested, incestuous culture and make the changes necessary to survive and thrive in a radically changing media environment. Our community needs a vibrant, engaged and muscular Courier.
I challenge Ms Soldwedel to seek out and learn from her more worldly peers, eschew flabby tradition, embrace community service first, kick out the dead wood and push the paper bodily into the 21st century. There is no other hope for its future.
Or maybe today's chuckle: Officials tackle underage drinking issue with pizza box fliers
In which the unnamed Courier editor encourages the sort of gnatlike attention span that's killing the newspaper business and driving our jolly old American empire ever deeper into ruin.
He tells us to forget the Gulf oil spill, as sensible remembering could only lead to recrimination and perhaps better regulation of the industry most responsible for global pollution and climate change.
Forget Afghanistan -- it's clear he already has -- for it's just too difficult to understand, and sensible remembering could only lead to the conclusion that the insane revenge-seeking that led us there was a huge mistake we must correct as quickly as possible. (As long as we require our military to be there, editor, forgetting is morally repugnant.)
Forget our ravaged economy, for closer scrutiny might reveal the moral bankruptcy of the financial corporations that own and operate the editor's favored political party. While you're at it, forget the legislative gridlock and fascist rhetoric his party has forced on us ever more avidly for thirty years.
Instead, dear reader, cling to the myths of empire -- our great strength as a people (belied by the fear and denial we collectively express at the slightest difficulty), our international generosity with our wealth (as much smaller and less rich countries show us up every time and we scream at each other over pennies in foreign assistance), our "grit"* (though we can't find a way clear to even start transitioning our economy off dirty, dwindling, foreign-controlled and evermore expensive energy sources).
Be glad that nothing worse happened, like the exposure of official fraud and neglect of infrastructure that was the result of Hurricane Katrina (as our infrastructure falls further into neglect), or the egregious failures of foreign policy and intelligence that led to the killing or injury of over 10,000 innocents nine-odd years ago (as we tread farther down that same stupid path every day. Oh yeah, and how many innocent Afghans and Iraqis have we murdered in that time?).
It's delightfully easy to stay positive when you refuse to face your problems. Don't worry, be happy.
Me, I think I'd rather try to learn from history and avoid repeating it. Call me a cockeyed optimist.
*: Clearly the editor, in the grand tradition of Courier editorialists, has been keeping up on his cowboy movies.
If you're looking for a rocking party to ring in the new year, Big Daddy D and the Dynamites will be at Murphy's tonight, 8:30-12:30. It'll be a ton 'o fun if you're there!
Nothing notable in the Courier, and we're staying in today. If you have to go into work, stay safe!
Noon: Great comment on the racism retrospective today and Councilman Blair's radio remarks in response. "Really Sad":
Until this AM, I was willing to give Blair a pass under the theory that any right wing politician appearing on a right wing station runs a higher risk of a mishap than most. His temporary removal from KYCA was arguably wrong, and the way people went after his family bread business was not right either.
After listening to his show this AM on KYCA however, the conclusion one sadly must reach is the good Councilman still does not get it. Like Nixon on Watergate and Clinton on Lewinsky, Mr. Blair has yet to accept that perhaps his remarks last Spring were the cause of his problems, not the few liberals in town or his political adversaries. Instead of feeling chastened by the damage his unchecked remarks brought to the image of Prescott across the planet, his attitude echos that of Nixon in his day with the same peculiar mixture of maudlin victimhood mixed with an arrogant mocking of those who disagree with his unfortunate comments.
The thing that both fascinates and repels about listening to Blair uncut, is the man's utter authenticity. He is truly the face of Prescott and truly represents eloquently the electorate that voted for him.
