Please

Statewide media are reporting results of a new poll of Republicans showing Donald Trump in the lead for the presidential nomination. Please. Hold the primary now.

Wiederaenders: Where has our patriotism gone?

The Courier city editor notes that "not every home or business that flies a flag lowered it to half-staff" this week in response to the Chattanooga mass shooting, laments the fading of the flag-fervor following the WTC attacks, and projects in that a lack of patriotism in this country.

Tim waxes nostalgic for the days of tattered flags on cars, and by extension the fear-addled response to terrorism that spurred us into two disastrous and stupid wars and bankrupted this country. For Tim it was a time of fellow-feeling, and he happily hums the old tune, never mind why it was such a long way to Tipperary.

But I think the flag-fetish thing matters, not because some of us are less attentive to its rules and customs, rather because many Americans see it as a measure of political loyalty, a concept so often confused (often deliberately) with patriotism. Like every authoritarian movement in history, the American far right wraps itself in the flag and uses it as a brand logo. It upholds the flag as a shining symbol even as it tramples the values and principles the flag was meant to represent.

Given its rampant abuse in the service of political division, is it any wonder that for many of us the Stars and Stripes carries nearly as much baggage as the Stars and Bars?

A national flag should be an expression of shared values, not political division, symbolizing what makes us feel good about ourselves. Like this.

Kirkpatrick runs, the knives come out

CD1 Rep Ann Kirkpatrick, having no doubt accepted that someone has to do it, today put her hand up to go against John McCain for the US Senate next year, taking on what is sure to be a costly, bloody, soul-sucking and likely losing fight. That's a pretty good news story. I am saddened and more than a little peeved to have to point out that it's not the one the Courier is choosing to run this evening.

The headline reads "House Democrat Kirkpatrick to challenge McCain for Senate." It's not "House Democrat Kirkpatrick to challenge Senate Republican McCain for Senate," of course, that would be balanced yet awful. It's not "Kirkpatrick to challenge McCain for Senate," which would do just fine. The editors made the choice of using "House Democrat" as the descriptor, which emphasizes that she is less well-known and of lower status than McCain. They're true enough, but the words are unnecessary to a headline in this area, and all editors are trained try to keep headlines as succinct as possible to save inches for the advertisers.

She shoulda bit him.

The lead picture, on a story about a three-term Representative announcing a campaign, is from the end of a debate in Tuscon during the last campaign, showing her shaking hands with former AZ House Speaker Andy Tobin, whom she defeated. Tobin is in the dominant position in the photo, to the left, taller than Kirkpatrick, who is smiling and postured a bit submissively. Consider that the AP has literally thousands of photos of Kirkpatrick, including her official portrait, any of which the Courier could have drawn upon for this story.

Nearly half the story is about the Republican lawsuit against the last redistricting and confident prognostication by Republicans that Kirkpatrick is running because she expects that her House seat will become untenable when they win it.

The story contains two quotes from Kirkpatrick. There are three from Tobin, including a thought not in quotes attributed to him. There are three from McCain and people working for him, including the final-thought story closer.

As descriptors Kirkpatrick gets "won narrowly," "targeted" and "part of the problem in Washington," where McCain gets "most influential," "formidable" and "vigorous."

All these were editorial decisions, and if they were unconscious it's worse. This is a hack attack of the lowest sort, unworthy of any news organization and embarrassing to the profession I must share with the perpetrators in the Courier editorial suite. Shame.

Dead and buried: news that matters

While Buz Williams bloviates about the leftist media elite, the Courier and most other media outlets are largely burying a story affecting the lives of a million Arizonans, half of them kids. From Cronkite News Service via The Arizona Capitol Times:

Cuts to food stamp benefits hit more than 1 million Arizonans Friday

That's tomorrow. How many people in our area will be affected? How many kids will be going to school hungry? How much money will it suck out of the tills of our local grocers? How will this additional stress spread through families and the rest of the community? We'll likely never know the answers to these questions, because they just aren't as important to our local editors as, say, baseball games.

Update, Friday: Some numbers. If this isn't repaired within the year, the AZ economy will be out about 109 million clams. And no, you're not paying less taxes to balance that. 

Must-read: Why competent opposition matters

Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic, tees off on an example from the Obamacare "debate" showing how overstretching the truth leads to dismissive backlash that can further obscure important policy considerations. If you care at all about how media decisions affect your thinking, you have to check this out:
What a Small Moment in the Obamacare Debate Says About Ideological Media

Those pesky apostrophes

I've written before that proofreading at the Courier has improved markedly over the years I've been writing this blog, but that's the sort of territory easily lost to inattention. I'm sure most of my readers would bug out quickly if faced with a daily litany of proof complaints, so I generally let them pass. But when the headlines display ignorance of the basics. I have to say something, even though I know most of my readers can see it as well as I can.

Today the problem is painfully wrong apostrophes on the op-ed page, one buried in Tom Cantlon's column — "It's more like a couple who own an apartment complex and one wants to add to it to increase it's revenue, ...." — but the other really glaring in the editorial headline — "State can't shun it's fiscal burden."

Last I knew you can't pass the ninth grade without the ability to distinguish between the contraction "it's" and the possessive "its." You definitely can't land a paycheck as an entry-level proofreader. Seeing this get by a suite of pro newspaper editors is just embarrassing to the profession.

Boilerplate: Why does it matter? Inattention to details like this indicates disregard for clarity of communication, sloppiness of thought, and low regard for readers, editors and the publication itself, all alarming qualities in people we depend on to inform us about the conditions, needs and actions of our community.

Update, 8:30pm: Someone corrected the headline fail in the online edition, but not the one in Tom's column. This is an improvement over the policy not so long ago of not bothering at all.

Editorial: A frameup for NAU

The unnamed editor today seizes on an apparently insensitive move by a real-estate developer to slam NAU, ulterior motive in hand.

Citing this AP story, he lashes out at the university and its president, John Haeger, for supporting the elimination of a piece of a crummy trailer park to build more substantial student housing. Except neither the editor nor AP made the phone call to ask for the school's position on the matter.

Instead we get a quote from a salesman for the developer asserting that NAU is "excited" about the new buildings. I expect if he'd mined the data set a tiny bit more deeply he'd have also found out that the developer is hoping to make money on the deal from NAU students, that NAU will not own any of it, and the salesman thinks the project is new and improved. Note that the developer takes no heat here, only the school.

The editor flashes his motivation in referencing the "loss" of his favorite baseball team's "traditional" spring training program from NAU to Glendale. We've recently seen another example of the importance of this topic to the editor.

That's pretty lame, but to go after John Haeger, one of the brightest lights and sweetest people in public service in our state, for the actions of a real-estate shark is just low.

Letter: Treat Obamacare just like Prohibition

Phillip Thiele attempts to rile up a supposed silent majority of Americans to oppose the inevitability of better access to health insurance for all by comparing it with Prohibition. Okay, you've had your chuckle, now consider the unintended wisdom here.

Prohibition was an idealistic campaign by social conservatives, not least women who had endured untold abuse, depradation and ruin at the hands of generations of drunks, rammed through legislatures that clearly understood that it couldn't work, but to vote against it risked being labeled as not 'clean' enough to hold office. The new women's vote in particular put legislators in fear of replacement by wild-eyed zealots that would be at home in today's Tea Party. Ultimately it failed, and was rather quickly repealed, as the predictable consequences were tearing society apart.

The proper parallel is the health-care 'system' we have endured up to now. Running against the successful examples of every other developed nation for half a century, we plowed forward on ignorant idealism about the sanctity of the market (and, for the real power brokers, the sanctity of immense profits), enduring predictable consequences that have been tearing our society apart for far longer than the tenure of Prohibition.

Where Mr Theile and his ilk, adamantly blinkered to the real effects of their ideology, projects a campaign by political idealists, in reality the ACA and the long, slow march toward responsible, practical health-care solutions are not parallel to the institution of Prohibition, but rather its repeal.

We still have the wild-eyed zealots in the wings, of course, and that's what's driven the House of Representatives to vote several dozen times for repeal of the ACA, to shut down the government for two weeks now in an attempt to extort a repeal, and to threaten the entire world economy with destruction of faith in the credit of the United States. (If that's not "getting down to business," Mr Theile, what is?)

In an admittedly flawed and patchwork way, the proponents of better access to health coverage are trying to correct a history of bad decisions. It probably won't work as well as we need, but it will be substantially better than we've been doing. The ship was on the rocks. Only a fool pours on more steam for that.

Drive-by editorial: Pay attention to abused kids, for a second

The unnamed editor draws another write-it-and-forget-it column from the passing fancy of the teevee news, describing the abuse, neglect and murder of children as "a singular facet of a complex societal ill that goes unchecked, ... What a sad commentary on life in modern-day America."

The really sad commentary is that a newspaper editor has so little grounding in social history that he thinks this is a "modern" phenomenon," so little understanding of our social systems that he imagines it's worse now, and such thin interest in the issue that it only comes to mind because a sports star is involved.

At last, a glimmer of integrity

LA Times Letters Editor Paul Thornton, on October 5, explains why the paper did not publish letters arguing that Congress is exempting itself from Obamacare:

“Why? Simply put, this objection to the president’s healthcare law is based on a falsehood, and letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed.”

This quote is making the rounds because it's an unusual, perhaps unique, statement of policy against printing lies. There's movement afoot to encourage the country's other papers of record to adopt it, something that most readers of any political stripe ought to be able to support. It would be a very positive choice for the Courier as well, assuming the editors could pay more than lip service to it.

Doing this right would mean actually knowing or discovering what's true and what's not, caring about knowing, and going beyond the obvious in fact-checking not only the LTEs but the news stories and opinion columns. Anticipating the complaint that this would require more work than the paper can afford, I have to say that confidence in the veracity of what's on the page is the only reason anyone reads a newspaper, and should be the primary responsibility and professional goal for every editor.

Update, Tuesday: Need an example? It doesn't get better than this. Today the editors publish a letter exactly like the one mentioned above, based entirely on that specific witless myth. I guess I've been told.

Editorial: Playing the blame game

Catching up a bit, I have to weigh in on yesterday's editorial in which the unnamed editor asserts cagily that all of Congress and the President are getting the blame for the current show (or no-show) in Washington. More to the point, I'll have some actual Republicans weigh in, via Tom Beaumont and AP:

From county chairmen to national party luminaries, veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington.
     "It's time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process," former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu argues, faulting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and tea party Republicans in the House as much as President Barack Obama for taking an uncompromising stance.
     Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is just as pointed, saying this about the tea party-fueled refusal to support spending measures that include money for Obama's health care law: "It never had a chance."
     The anger emanating from Republicans like Sununu and Barbour comes just three years after the GOP embraced the insurgent political group and rode its wave of new energy to return to power in the House.
     Now, they're lashing out with polls showing Republicans bearing most of the blame for the federal shutdown, which entered its 11th day Friday. In some places, they're laying the groundwork to take action against the tea party in the 2014 congressional elections.
    The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall's elections.

It's long past time to pretend that "they both do it" is a useful or informative position to take. This one is all on the Rs, with pretty much everyone publicly agreeing on the point save the teabaggers and the Courier editor.

Stand Your Ground = License to Kill Anyone

A Columbia SC judge has ruled with the defense, agreeing that "All that matters is that Mr. Scott felt his life was in jeopardy," in the killing of an innocent bystander to a situation in which there is no evidence of any real threat and the shooter didn't know at whom or what he was shooting.

We happen to be touristing in Sahcalaina this week, and the incident reminds me that this could happen to anyone in the several states that have instituted laws of the 'Stand Your Ground' sort, including Arizona. The prosecution reasonably offered, "If this law were to be applied the way (Scott) wants to apply it, he could shoot a 4-year-old playing in her front yard and still be immune from prosecution.” Or me or you, dear reader.

This reckless legislation relieves the gun-wielder of the responsibility to handle the weapon with respect for others. In defense of the gad-given right to wave deadly weapons we often hear about how well trained and responsible gun-huggers are supposed to be, and now we legally allow them to act with deadly force on whatever fear or fantasy happens to be passing through their brains, with no legal accountability. Does this really make any sense to you?

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/10/09/5291031/stand-your-ground-sc-judge-grants.html#storylink=cpy

Editorial: Obamacare could shift public favor, duh

In which the unnamed editor realizes that the growing public support for the ACA and its success in practice could alter the political power map. He's only a couple of years behind the curve there, so give him a little (relative) credit.

But he goes on to opine, based on Republican gerrymandering, that "38 percent of the entire House (has) virtually no concern about losing a general election." It's true that those safe seats will likely remain Republican, but that doesn't mean incumbents are necessarily safe.

I read an interesting piece on Crooks and Liars this morning about this very topic, which posits a convincing thesis that less-crazy House Republicans are participating in the Suicide Caucus largely because their seats are so "safe" they are more threatened from the right than the left. This makes the government shutdown more about the conflict within the Republican Party than the standard left-right model the media, including the Courier, love to shovel out.

More news you won't see in the Courier

Sometimes it's even worse than we thought possible. From AP via The Arizona Capitol Times (sub req):

Arizona’s decision to withhold welfare checks because of the federal government shutdown appears to make it the only state to cut off funding for the very poor because of the budget crisis, according to policy experts. 

The state stopped payments averaging $207 a week to 5,200 families eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families after Tuesday’s government shutdown. TANF provides cash assistance and other support to low-income children and their parents. 

The Arizona Republic reports the decision came despite assurances from federal officials that states would be reimbursed for any payments they made for the federal program. It also comes as the state sits on a $450 million rainy day fund.

Update, Tuesday: Surprise, it turns up in today's editorial. (I'm on vacation and a little behind.) The Gov has decided to order a small release of funds to cover TANF for a couple of weeks, which the Courier editor describes as a "soft spot for the poor." Yeah, right: a soft spot for her own reputation, more like. But I'll take it.

Editorial: What's really important

The unnamed Courier editor today joins the right-wing media's told-ya-so bandwagon in blaming the President for glitches on the opening day of enrollment in the state-run health-care exchanges, blaming both houses of Congress for the embarrassing stupidity and intransigence of a few Republicans in the House, and then gets to what really bothers him: that he might miss a baseball game on teevee.

The Republicans who designed the Affordable Care Act demanded that the states have the option to run their own exchanges, preserving the illusion of local control with the practical reality of greater insurance-company influence, so it should be no surprise that your mileage may vary by state. What the editor glosses over is that the "software glitches" consist primarily of more people trying to sign up than the systems can handle. I suppose you might blame the President for promoting the system well enough that it attracts customers, but that's a success, not a fail.

Blaming Congress-writ-large for the shutdown didn't work in '95 and it's not working now, because it's very widely and accurately reported that if House leadership were to allow a vote on a clean spending bill, without empty ideological posturing about the ACA, etc., it would pass without fuss and the shutdown would be over. This is a small group (around 30 of 435) of Rs taking government services hostage over an argument they cannot win, in fact one they lost years ago.

If Dems share any blame for the shutdown, it's in their unwillingness to exert emergency powers and fund the government anyway, because that would appear to be illegal and certainly trigger a court fight (while poor families still got their food stamps and the Canyon continued to fuel the NorAz economy). I admit doubt that the Rs would be so gentle were the roles reversed.

If the editor were more self-aware I might take his pivot to lamenting the local loss of baseball games on cable teevee as satire, but, erm, no. He really does think he's writing about something important there. That sort of sums up the management style of the whole operation, dunnit?

Climate change and market forces

The new IPCC report is unequivocal about the causes and dangers of climate change, and points optimistically to practical solutions. Governments worldwide are paying attention, but here in Bizarro Land, where we hold the strongest cards in the game, we still can't work up much interest, mostly because we've made a survival imperative into a political game. Nick Stern in The Financial Times, no bastion of progressive anti-business whackos:

Some politicians will still seek to deny the science and downplay the risks. Many of them have vested financial interests in protecting the status quo, or ideological beliefs that mean they cannot acknowledge the logic of correcting market failures that have created climate change in order to strengthen the role of markets in discovering opportunities and allocating resources. Although they are small in number, they still have the power to create confusion and slow action.

(Emphasis mine.) What we need more than anything here is a new angle for thinking about this problem in a way that speaks about pocketbooks. This is a pretty good example, imho.

Editorial: The banality of mass murder

Another mass shooting in America. Ho-hum. Another routine defense of our bizarre addiction to deadly weapons. Ho-hum. Nothing to see here, move along. These are not the droids you're looking for.

And today we have yet another Courier opinion piece trotting out the same tired old nags that pass for argument about the role of guns in our society, so listless and reflexive that I'm sure the editors have long since stopped bothering to think about them, just as their readers have ceased interest in reading them. Really? Is this all you've got, editor?

The bulk of the piece amounts to criticism of the shoot-from-the-hip segment of the media that got the description of the weapon wrong in the Navy Yard shootings. After that it's the same old argument against "blaming the weapon."

I don't think I've ever heard anyone blame a weapon for a shooting. I only hear that rhetoric from the gun lovers, an infantile non-argument to deflect all ideas for doing anything serious about reducing the numbers of bullets in the bodies of Americans by action on the bullet-supply side.

Good science and common sense agree that fewer weapons leads to fewer shootings. That's not because the weapons are discharging themselves. The argument most of us on the sensible side of the spectrum are usually too polite to make is that needing a weapon is reasonable cause for concern about a person's mental state. "Gun-crazy" isn't a metaphor.

It's right there in the editor's closing: "law-abiding citizens should be allowed to have weapons for use or protection." Leave aside that the true believers will be jumping on his ass for tolerating "allowed" when their right to deadly weapons is ordained by Gad, and look at "for use or protection." What use? To drill messy holes of specific size in wood? And "protection" from what? If one really feels threatened by crime, that should be motivation to move somewhere safer or work with one's neighbors to make the community safer. More likely you need to work on your own head. When you feel that your only choice is to take up a weapon and start watching for people to use it on, you've become the enemy you fear. The mass killers are mentally unhinged, yes, but they develop in the context of a society that is itself unhinged, and their acts are starkly extreme symptoms of a pervasive pathology.

Sensible, responsible thinking about guns by gun fans is over in this society, and we can no longer afford to pretend that Americans have generally healthy attitudes toward them. We can't treat this unhealthy dependence without reducing access to the object of the addiction.

Cantlon: So what is this about?

Tom hammers home the obvious point that keeping Mexican tourists away is stupid and particularly counterproductive where you've set a city policy of reliance on tourism. The headline declares that the proposal to expand the border zone "is NOT about illegal entry." What Tom diplomatically leaves out is what the objections of our local pols are really about, and that's racist anxiety.

As I've written many times, the whole "immigration issue" is nothing more than a political strategy to win the votes of frightened and generally older white people, a 21st-century take on the Southern Strategy that turned the Republican Party away from the slow-and-steady, pro-business policies of the first half of the last century to the fire-breathing anti-everything nutbar tournament we see today. At its core is reaction to the civil rights movement and the fear of  The Other, which has extended lately from black folk to anyone who is not white, Protestant, male, over 40 and Republican. (And now you have to be the right kind of Republican, too.)

Until we as a community face up to the poorly disguised racism that passes for policy decisions among our elected leaders and politically involved citizens and start calling it what it is, we cannot hope to see progress in the quality of life here. Prescott and Arizona in general will languish as an intellectual laughingstock, the Alabama of the West, and descend ever further into kookery and ultimately dangerous insularism.

Did you hear the one about Leith, ND, the tiny village where neo-Nazis are trying to stack the population in hopes of creating a new Aryan homeland? The residents uniformly stood up and said no. Our elected officials think that's what they're doing, fighting off the invading brown horde. Rather, we as voters should be standing up, vocally and resolutely, against the idiotic, racist self-destruction in our midst.

AZ's Private-Prison Deals

More news you won't see in the Courier: A new study from ThePublicInterest.org looked into the contracts and costs of private prisons nationwide, in particular deals that include guarantees by the states to pay for unfilled beds, with findings that ought to make even the most dedicated corporate patsy blush. From the summary:

— 65 percent of the private prison contracts ITPI received and analyzed included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a “low-crime tax”). These quotas and low-crime taxes put taxpayers on the hook for guaranteeing profits for private prison corporations.

— Occupancy guarantee clauses in private prison contracts range between 80% and 100%, with 90% as the most frequent occupancy guarantee requirement. 

— Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia are locked in contracts with the highest occupancy guarantee requirements, with all quotas requiring between 95% and 100% occupancy.

— Three Arizona for-profit prison contracts have a staggering 100% quota, even though a 2012 analysis from Tucson Citizen shows that the company’s per-day charge for each prisoner has increased an average of 13.9% over the life of the contracts.

Here's another case of egregious corporate bait-and-switch, selling the idea on promises of healthy competition and reduced cost, then padding out the contracts and privatizing profits while socializing the costs. This isn't a business, it's a racket. The really embarrassing part is where we elect people who claim to be sharp about business and they negotiate deals like this. It has to be either rank stupidity or collusion in robbing the taxpayers blind.

Williams: Buying the packaging

Buz signals the absurdity of today's column with a lead sentence that would be right at home in The Onion: "Some have criticized our Constitution as obsolete and racist, claiming it was written over two centuries ago by white slaveholders." I don't expect that he really doesn't know these are facts, rather that he just doesn't have the communication skills to understand what he's writing. But this goof clearly illustrates how confused many Americans are by right-wing propaganda.

Sorting through the chaff, his main point is his assertion that "conservatives" are victims of a government and a wider culture that does not value the freedoms afforded in the Constitution. He sees himself, in tricorn hat and wrapped in a flag, pitted against the Evil Ones who would send him into the gulag for defending his gad-given principles.

Never mind that all three examples of contemporary abuses he cites were built and run by his own team.

He can't see this because he puts all his attention on the packaging, trusting that what's inside is just as attractive. This "god and country" bait-and-switch has enthralled, used, ruined, maimed and murdered sincere, blinkered patriots like Buz by the thousand and their selected victims by the million for centuries. It may be the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Nixon used it. Joe McCarthy used it. The Klan still uses it. And of course it's the primary extremist-Republican tactic today.

Rather than using the flag-as-robe test to define a patriot, Buz would do well to set the bar a little higher. A patriot who respects and embraces the core principles of this country vigorously defends the right of every citizen to vote freely and be treated equally under the law, rather than hide behind invented problems to conceal unhinged prejudices and fears. If you really care about the threat of the surveillance state, declare that you want it demolished along with the fear-mongering security state you cheered for in 2002, since they're part and parcel. If you really revere the flag, bear in mind that it's a symbol for a people, and not just the ones who look, act and think like you do.

If you care about extremist ideology, look to yourself first, it's right there under the feel-good trappings you love to love, Buz. And if you want to understand something you're reading, try taking your hand off the paranoid-victim throttle and pay attention. You're making a fool of yourself otherwise.