Editorial: So now you're sick of campaigns

As the Arizona Republican presidential primary approaches, the unnamed Courier editor is getting tired of all the political campaigning, and proposes taking a few moves from the UK system, including limits on campaign expenditures by parties, a ban on purchasing broadcast time, and shorter campaign seasons.

    With this he demonstrates utter cluelessness about the differences between the US and UK political systems, which is not all that surprising given the limits and Amerika-centricity of our education system and media. More to the point, he seems to have missed  the entire debate over campaign finance reform of the past couple of decades and the crushing blow to our democratic institutions that was the Citizens United decision by our sadly misguided SCOTUS.
    The editor's innocent fantasy of getting political attack ads out of his football games on teevee is literally impossible now without an amendment to the Constitution revoking corporate personhood and the direct equivalence of money and speech.
    Sure, we can wax romantic all we like about candidates taking the high road, but we might also hope that the guy with the butter knife might win against the guy with the tank. If you want a fair fight, editor, you'll have to start advocating stronger medicine for our failing system, and quick.
   You can join the campaign to amend the Constitution here or here. If that doesn't interest you, you're blowing smoke, so enjoy the mudfights.

Sincere, innocent bungling will hamper public-art policy

I've been watching the developing story of a public-art policy for Prescott, and as usual our town is a few years late to the gate, so the insane events at Granite Creek Park and Miller Valley School have sparked a reactionary process that will inevitably be about preventing controversy. Artists will be perfectly right to look on this with doubt if not suspicion.
    Unfortunately the City exacerbated the problem with its first move, in which it handed the hot potato to Elizabeth Ruffner and the Prescott Area Arts and Humanities Council with practically no public process.
    I served three years on the PAAHC board of directors and I believe the organization has the potential to be useful to artists and contribute to the community in important ways. But its modern incarnation has yet to find a clear mission or clear benefit for membership, making it a small, self-selected interest group, plagued with the inevitable weaknesses of such groups.
    This is not to say that PAAHC is incapable of doing the job. Rather, Council should have spent some time hearing public input on who should take on the responsibility and establishing credibility both for the process and the decision-makers. Score another hamhanded, amateur move for Council.
     Now PAAHC has to step up and establish its credibility with the public on its own. From what I've seen, it has selected a committee of officers and members, again without public process or deliberation, and set to. Score another hamhanded, amateur move for PAAHC.
     Elizabeth Ruffner's status as spokesperson for the arts community is entirely informal, based on her decades of work on behalf of the arts in Prescott as well as her status as matriarch of one of Prescott's old cowboy families. I do not doubt her sincerity or her political clout, but her political style favors the good-ol'-boy network and keeping things controlled and inside, which will lead inevitably to doubt among outsiders about any decision the group makes. Her organizational and leadership skills have been formed entirely in small-town Prescott, and her history over the past twenty years or so demonstrates her limitations in this area.
    Cindy Gresser is also a sweetie-pie and will bring a lot of positive energy to the project. But like Ms Ruffner, she's a fan, not a professional, thrust into a position of responsibility at Smoki Museum by circumstances rather than merit or training. The political situation at the museum has been in disarray for years, with Ms Gresser continually at the center of the storm. This does not inspire public confidence, whatever the facts are behind it.
   The best thing PAAHC could do at this point is rethink its strategy and start over. The obvious political heat around this issue requires a wide-open process that puts respected arts professionals in the key positions, publicly referencing established, successful precedents in other cities and inviting both professional and public input in open sessions that have been carefully and widely promoted. No one in Prescott should have the slightest reason to believe that they could not have participated if they'd just got up off the couch, or bitch about it afterward.
   PAAHC has a few extra-smart people already working on the committee (you know who you are), and I hope they'll be able to persuade the good-ol'-boy network to loosen up on this and stand back for the good of the project.
   Getting this one right could finally boost PAAHC up to organizational credibility. Getting it wrong, as it seems to be going now, will doom both the policy and the organization.

La Grande Vitesse by Alexander Calder, commissioned in 1967 as the centerpiece of the new government complex in Grand Rapids, MI, my home town. It was instantly accepted as the city's logo, a tradition that continues today. Public art matters, and can have huge impact if we let it.

Update, Saturday: Note the comment below by Charlene Craig, which is right on point and adds a lot to the discussion. On reflection, I'm concerned that the process will go beyond preventing controversy to the active exclusion of whole categories of human thought, issues and even people. Bear in mind that the manufactured controversy over the Miller Valley School mural was about excluding people of color as "not representative of Prescott." We could easily see the process pandering to the culture warriors and ensuring that the policy requires public art to be pretty, dull and non-threatening to right-wing sensibilities. I'd have to wonder whether the Vietnam memorial on the square would pass muster in the current political climate.

Editorial: Hang 'em high

One of the inherent weaknesses of conservatism is the inability to stop doing something when it doesn't work. The conservative's response instead is to do more of it.
   So it is with the unnamed editor and today's editorial, stumping for Rep Eddie Farnsworth's HB2373, which would increase minimum sentencing for certain repeat felons and maximum sentences for others in cases first- and second-degree murder.

Tell me how this improves anything.

   The editor agrees with Rep Farnsworth that judges, juries and parole boards cannot be trusted to fulfill their responsibilities to evaluate the character and actions of individuals in assigning and enforcing sentences. He prefers that we legislate sentences instead, removing the human element and therefore, he thinks, the possibility that scary criminals get out of prison to scare again. On some people he wants to throw away the key.
   What he's also apparently willing to throw away is our justice system, or more precisely the parts of it that focus on anything other than penalties. In the editor's world, all we'd need are cops to develop evidence, laws that describe the penalties, and prison guards to warehouse the transgressors.
    I certainly understand the reflex to punish those who break society's rules. It'd be nice if punishment worked. But it doesn't, particularly for the sort of person the editor imagines as "the worst of the worst." True sociopaths are mentally ill, and incarceration with other bad actors only exacerbates that illness, increasing the risk to society. Less enlightened societies simply kill them (or sometimes elevate them to dictator status). If we hope to reduce the risk of violence by people with mental challenges like this, we really need to focus a lot more on treatment.
   What the editor's conservative blinders won't admit is that non-sociopaths will be swept up in this hang-'em-high net, and mandatory sentencing takes a bad act and turns it into a career, again increasing the risk and cost to society.
   Violent crime has been decreasing steadily for decades, and will continue to do so, not because of incarceration but in spite of it, due to inevitable demographic changes. Aren't we better off trusting our judicial professionals and our juries to do their jobs? I expect the editor would certainly feel that way if he found himself in the dock.

Doing my job for me

Thanks to commenter "Silly Editorial" for the response to today's editorial, in which the editor buys the Republican propaganda move wholesale:

Do you not get that the point of this was to deny government employees a cost of living raise? I agree that Congress' performance has been terrible, but 595 people making $174,000 per year is probably the smallest impact of this vote. The real impact is on millions of federal employees, and is totally unrelated to their performance, other than the fact that they are being scapegoated for people's dissatisfaction with American politics.

Couldn'ta said it better.

Cantlon: Occupy redistricting!

In today's column Tom rightly calls foul on the efforts of Speaker Andy Tobin and Senate President Steve Pierce to subvert the will of the voters and get around the independent redistricting process. There is far too little reporting on this in the press and it really deserves much more extensive public attention.
    I spotted an interesting piece in The Atlantic today that I think adds a very significant but underappreciated point. Republicans are inspired to resist the redistricting changes because they see increasing political clout for minorities and Democrats, and from that they infer a biased process. Nate Berg reports that demographic changes over the past decade are turning the entire mountain West more Hispanic, more urban and therefore more purple. Any fair redistricting effort will naturally reflect these changes.
    If you need some sort of good news to get you through the day, you may appreciate the back half of Tom's column, but it's unrelated to his main point and feels like filler to me.

Tree, meet forest

In today's opinion headline the unnamed Courier editor exhorts us all to "Hang up, or a law will tell you to," but as his thesis he seems to have cast a handful of random thoughts into the air and printed them as they fell.
   He is of course referring to today's public irritant du jour, the cellphone, and the threat that our clown-car Legislature may pass one of various flavors of law against using one while driving. He cites statistics, then says the statistics don't matter. He recognizes that there are all sorts of distractions that can cause driving hazards, then refocuses on cellphones as somehow exceptional, without an argument to support the idea. Overall he seems to berate the reader to be responsible to prevent a new "restriction on our freedoms," one of which is presumably the freedom to talk on the phone while driving.
   As usual, it's not seeing the forest for the trees. From the perspective of everyone outside that car, it's not the cellphone that's the problem, it's the driver's distraction. Neither the bills' sponsors nor the editor apparently understand that we already have a law in place providing a substantial penalty for distracted driving. There's simply no point making more. This is another case of lawmakers (and the editor) jumping up and down over their pet peeves and skipping their homework.
   This kind of reactionism isn't new or unusual, of course. What's instructive here is that in exercising his knee reflex, the editor demonstrates the helpless simplicity of shouting at traffic. The irresponsible minority will never hear a message like this, addressed to another minority, antiques like me who still read newspaper op-ed pages. People distract themselves while driving because they don't take driving seriously. For this minority, it takes direct acquaintance with serious danger and physical consequences to provide the wake-up call, not laws and not op-eds.

Editorial: Moral obligations outweigh logistics

CVFD: Should we stay or should we go?

In discussing the awful story of a rural house burning down while the nearest fire department refused to respond because the homeowners hadn't paid for the service, the unnamed editor seems to say that "moral obligations," as he puts it in his headline, should stand above the few bucks involved, and that's good. But he says it in such a mealy-mouthed way that the editorial seems to have a foot on either side of the fence.
   This situation has come up several times since I've lived in Prescott, it always makes the non-responding organization look bad, and nothing changes, because it's accepted that the homeowners didn't pay, therefore they accepted the risk of losing their homes. Fire resources have to be reserved for those who pay.
   But consider this: CVFD is saying that it could have responded if the homeowner had paid, so the only real logistical difference between a saved house and cinder pile is a few bucks in the district's bank account.
   The editor's sadly muffled point is that if you have the ability to help, you have the responsibility to help. That makes a lot of sense to me. Either the fire crews can or cannot reach the scene and be effective, and if they can, their own organizational mission should require that they try. People get this instinctively. When larger-scale catastrophes occur, fire crews will transport out of state to help. It makes no sense that they can't respond to a fire at this house when they can to one a quarter mile farther down the same road.
   The core problem that the editor seems afraid to touch is the subscription system, which favors those who are more able to pay. This really needs to go, and rural communities have to start thinking in more inclusive terms than who's willing to put up twenty bucks a month. The system as it stands clearly does not work.

Update, Monday:  The CVFD chief responds in this Sunday story, but the focus remains entirely on the finances and resources and off the mission. The comments add some pertinent details, such as how close the house was to the district line.

The wagging-finger story

The now-famous pic of Governor Brewer wagging her finger in the President's face is clearly overhyped on both sides of the political spectrum and another case of the media leaping on events that reinforce the preferred narrative, whether or not the facts support it. But when there are actual lies involved, we have to pay attention.
   Paul Davenport's AP story, carried in today's print edition on 9A, repeats Brewer's assertion that Obama "walked away" from her while she was in the middle of a sentence. The White House responded to this with dismissal, but no apparent denial. Not widely reported is the account of Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, who was there and says that it didn't happen that way at all.

Out to lunch for the weekend

Remarkably incoherent even for the Courier, today's editorial had my head spinning trying to parse the unnamed editor's carnival-ride argument, in which he attempts to paint the President as a socialist for -- get this -- deporting illegals.
   He starts out with standard right-wing magical thinking, identifying "to close or control the border" as an "easy answer." He then advocates a "contrarian approach" that he never gets around to describing.
   Then he goes right off the rails, claiming without citation, "according to the Associated Press, President Barack Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Yup, he's saying that over two terms Bush the Younger followed a "socialistic" approach, and then Obama took it further.
   He explains with this whipsaw head-spinner: "Socialists like to control the workforce and the freedom to roam, so aggressive immigration policies come naturally."
   So it appears that the editor accidentally flipped the channel away from Fox News for a second and has discovered that the Obama administration has been deporting far more illegals than the Bushites, for all their yammering about the Brown Peril, ever got around to. The only way he can explain this to himself is to confuse socialism with authoritarianism.
   But then the crafty socialists switched strategies again, and it must be to win back those illegal voters, who were presumably thinking of supporting Newt. Ultimately the editor seems to like the change, but blames the Prez for playing politics with the issue.
   Here in the reality-based world, what happened is that the Obama administration came into office and immediately began working on practical policy to address the widespread fear the Republicans whipped up over nothing -- in other words, responding to a popular complaint with practical action. It focused on apprehending and deporting criminal aliens, reporting record numbers and putting the Bushites to shame. Regular non-criminal illegals were not a target in the federal plan, that was Arpaio, Babeu and their ilk. There's no new policy, only a restatement of what's already working and a PR connection with the Utah Compact, which has been gaining traction here as well. This is the part that the editor suddenly likes, because some Republicans have given him permission to like it.
   The editorial demonstrates in excruciating detail how a dedicated right-wing mind has to contort itself to approve of any action by a perceived adversary -- cramming square pegs into round holes, scrambling the timeline and finding any possible way to see it as objectionable.

And no, I can guarantee that the AP never said "Obama's fourth year in office will be the 12th consecutive year that Americans have lived under a socialistic, Big Government answer to immigration." Some wacko pundit sold as part of the AP suite may have said something like that, but ascribing it to a news source is completely wrong and a vile distortion.

Editorial: Anti-piracy bills

The unnamed editor gets it right, more or less, but about two weeks late. When we're talking about public policy in the making, you have to inform people while it's still possible for them to have a say in it. Reactive editorializing is useless here.

Wiederaenders: A little harmless brown-nosing

In his weekly "whatever" column, Courier editor Tim Wiederaenders can't help but leak some foamy effusion over getting a personal audience with our LD1 legislators, with an extra lick or two at the boots of Speaker Tobin for his "heck of a memory and ... his eye on the ball." The commenters are doing a good job identifying the sort of ball Mr Tobin has been eyeing, and all I need add is a Congressional desk in Washington.

Lest we forget

   While I understand the optics of getting us out from under the awful deal our Legislature (including the three Tim is praising here) made to pawn our state buildings -- and not incidentally eliminate it as an election issue -- I agree that we could be spending the money on higher priorities right now. (Thanks to the impressive negotiating powers of the Leg, the buyback will cost exactly the same at any point in the coming nine years or so.)
   But where Tim writes, "Said another way, instead of burning the mortgage on three state buildings this year, it would be better to, oh, provide healthcare for however many thousands of people through AHCCCS," I'm confident that he's going a lot further than Mr Tobin ever will. Andy's spending priority will be on more tax breaks for business, leaving health care for the working poor somewhere around dead last.

Must read: Obama's long game

Andrew Sullivan has a piece in Newsweek giving the view from 50,000 feet of Obama's first term and the great deal he's accomplished despite unrelenting vilification from the right and unrealistic expectations on the left. The election will keep us deep in the weeds for the coming ten months, so this is a good opportunity to take a breath and reassess: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

Editorial: Scared of the dark

Today the unnamed Courier editor hops up and down about the idea of cuts to the military. Apparently he missed how much we've spent and how little we've gained in warmaking over the past, oh, I dunno, six decades or so.
   We've all grown up as citizens of the American Empire, so it's no surprise that the editor is enthralled by the myths that have sustained it for so long. It's disappointing, however, that someone we depend on to understand public policy issues is so poorly educated in them.
   In our warmaking policy, the concept of "threat to national security" is defined so broadly that it can be stretched to justify military intervention in any economic dispute or ordinary criminal behavior. The underlying purpose of this is not security for Americans, but rather securing profits for warmaking corporations and votes for warmongering politicians. It is also a license for allies to spend their money on building social and business infrastructure instead of defense, thereby eating our lunch for us in business and quality of life, or worse, maintaining policies of aggression against their neighbors and even their own people.
   If we were to redefine "threat to national security" to sensible limits, such as "imminent military threat to the physical security of US persons or the territorial integrity of the US or treaty allies," we could obviously reduce our military commitments by 80% or more.
   This will not happen, as most Americans have bought into the editor's idea that we are under constant existential threat by dark forces everywhere, and our military policy is insane as a result. But what we learned in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that it never had anything like the capabilities or aggressive motivations that our government ascribed to it for so many years, ought to give everyone pause.
   We have a ridiculously big military not because there's any real threat, but rather because we are collectively frightened of our own shadow. It's time to grow up and get over it.

No-news Wednesday

I've been hearing lots of news of online content providers going dark on Wednesday, and I realized I'm an occasional provider as well, so I should get with the program. So Courierwatch will be offline on Wednesday as well, in solidarity. (I know, big whup.)
   The issue is the Stop Online Piracy Act and the new legal tools it would provide for censoring online content, as well as its scattershot, blame-the-messenger approach. Regular readers know I'm no fan of the Wild West online atmosphere so beloved of fourteen-year-olds, nor of taking intellectual works willy-nilly without paying for them, which is the baby in this bathwater. But Congress does not have this right, and protests are having some effect in forcing the bad guys to climb down. Again. (Hint: they won't ever quit.)

Update, 5pm Wednesday: Wow, I had no idea my readers are so influential! Support for SOPA crumbled in Congress today. Power to the people, man.


  Editorial: Stop Blaming Public Ed Big cookie for the unnamed Courier editor today as he lambastes the Legislature and parsimonious voters for defunding education and complaining about the results.
   This editorial shows progress in style as well as substance, moving past the forced folksiness of late to a more direct and real voice.
   He slips a bit where he tries a little too hard to distribute blame equally -- the schools don't decide how many days of instruction to provide, that's the Leg again.
   But the sentiment is correct. We can't go on with this regressive minstrel show. Education is far too serious an issue to play political games over. I might hope our legislators take this to heart, but let's say I have reason for doubt.

Must read: Half-Truths About the American Dream

Bob Lord has a fascinating think piece on Blog for Arizona about the millions of Americans who are left out of the conversation on economic justice even by the Left, and why it's important to expand our values beyond mere opportunity.

Worth your time: Half Truths About the American Dream

Everyone should know: Romney Owns Rush, et al.

Wouldn't it be weird if national opinion leaders owed their livings to a national political candidate?

Check it out: Bain Capital Owns Clear Channel (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Etc.)

Instructive historical example: William Randolph Hearst

You could see it another way as well -- if Romney's depending on Rush et al. for income, Rush owns Romney. Given Romney's demonstrated willingness to bow to idols of the far right that he clearly doesn't believe in, this may be the more salient angle.

Bill's back

Bill Moyers is returning to teevee tonight in most markets, and I expect a lot of us in the blue spectrum are looking forward to his committed, intelligent discussion and discourse on issues vital to our society. You'll be able to view the new show, Bill Moyers & Company, online starting tonight. Bookmark billmoyers.com.

Editorial: Showboats for Jesus

Who says Jews can't play football?

Regular readers know that I don't do sports and don't give a rat's behind about them, but the editorial today is but one example of how sports stories leak out into the adult media, so I've been aware of the sports idol of the week and his onfield antics.
   The unnamed editor deserves the rolling eyes he's getting today for his feigned puzzlement with religious showboatry. You'd have to be much thicker than I know the editor to be  to not get what's going on out there.
   The editor's supposedly parallel examples prove that Tim Tebow is an exception even as he asserts that his onfield prostrations are somehow normal. Greenberg and Koufax chose not to play -- stayed off the field -- humbly following the rules of their religion. In clear contrast, Muhammad Ali boasted of his religion as an expression of pride, and that's exactly what this silly quarterback is doing. You can't stand on a field with millions watching and pretend you're not playing to the crowd.
   The silliness of casting oneself as a warrior for gad while playing a child's game of mock combat is beyond laughable, and in a sane society might be properly diagnosed as a call for psychological help.
   But beyond the obvious pridefulness that somehow the editor doesn't get, these are expressions designed to include fellow devotees and exclude infidels, to separate the believer from nonbelievers. They are clear acts of culture war that break with our common traditions of sportsmanship and public decorum, which till now always cast such things as errors of taste at best. That's why they get attention, from the rabble and from the editor. This evangelical is in effect daring anyone to call him on his self-absorption, so he can bask in the glory of imagined persecution.
   The reader would be wise to bear in mind that commercial sports competitions are no more real than any other entertainment, and the characters you see are actors on stages, whether they're walking footlights or astroturf, scripted and directed. The play is metaphorical, the messages often subtle, and if you only look at the surface, you've wasted the price of your ticket.

Shocked, shocked!

The prurient finger-wagging going on over the Marines who were dumb enough to get caught wagging their extra fingers over some dead opponents (or victims) is pushing my ack-meter to the limit.

   Anyone involved in war on the ground knows firsthand that this is not aberrant behavior, it's common and always has been. How could it be otherwise? We train kids to be brutes, to kill, to hate whatever enemy is convenient today, yet we can't stand to see the brutal results. From the media to the pious government and military officials to Joe Six-Pack at the business end of his glass teat, it's hypocrisy of the highest order.
   What these kids are being pilloried for isn't what they did, but rather letting the folks back home find out about it in all its graphic ignominy. I'm sure this sort of behavior is no secret to the Afghans and Iraqis we've been routinely brutalizing for a decade.
   If we really hope to ensure that this doesn't happen anymore, our only choice is to get out of the war business, folks.

Editorial: Whaddaya expect?

The unnamed editor fuzzily reacts to recent examples of large corporations having to back down on boneheaded, tone-deaf attempts to wring a few more pennies out of their customers. Like the rest of the media, he misses the forest for the trees.

If you haven't seen "Network," do. Right away.

   I'm gratified to be able to note an unusual agreement with frequent commenter Tom Steele (who I know to be much more personable over coffee than in his writing), who gets an important piece of the truth when he writes, "it seems the link between top management and the real world has broken down." This is a lot of it, in a nutshell.
   The people who inhabit the top echelons of large corporations do not live in the same world that we do. The wealth that they take for granted does not allow ten bucks a month to matter, or even register as real. So when a bean-counter comes to the boss with a proposal to boost profits by .01% (and the value of their stockholdings by 2% = a couple million clams) by adding an insignificant fee, why not? Who would care?
   We 99%ers have historically accepted this sort of monetary paper cut without complaint. Have you thought about the fee breakdown on your phone bill or water bill lately? And whole industries have been able to successfully institute fees that most of us see as outrageous simply by acting as cartels. The airline fuel surcharges and baggage fees leap to mind. The top corporate dogs have been given every reason to think they can probably get away with this stuff.
   But it's not that corporate leadership is any further out of touch now than at any time in the past few decades. What's changed is that regular, normal people are finally reaching the limits of what they'll take without complaint. They've had enough, and they're not gonna take any more.
   Events like this encourage me to hope that the Occupy movement has moved from the streets into the popular consciousness. If we can now move beyond the I-me-my concerns of the individual purse to concern about how our society actually works, we'll be making real progress.