Muggs: Mixed Bag o' Props

Pop Rocket, October 2012









With the primaries behind us and the relentless national campaign ahead, it's time to take a look at the initiatives on the ballot, which will likely be lost in the noise. It's a mixed bag this year.

Prop 114: Stupid

The backers of this proposition hope to employ the serious business of a constitutional amendment to address an entirely mythical problem.
     The design is to prevent criminals from winning civil damages from their victims if they are injured "while attempting to engage in, engaging in or fleeing after having engaged in or attempted to engage in conduct that is classified as a felony offense."
     My gosh, I hear you cry, we certainly don't want felons suing us for victimizing us! Of course we don't. The thing is, even if a felon had the subtle sense of irony to consider a such a suit, no judge or jury would award such damages and no lawyer would take the case. It just doesn't happen.     As an example of how absurd the whole trip is, in his official statement of support for the amendment, former Mesa state Senator Russell Pearce, the only sitting Senate president in US history to lose a recall vote, writes: "Here is one true story — a burglar fell through a kitchen skylight of a home, landing on a knife that was left on the counter. The burglar impaled himself on the knife, and then sued the homeowner for an 'unsafe condition'; the court awarding him damages for his injuries." It's an crazy scenario, taken nearly verbatim and exclusively from the Jim Carrey comedy Liar, Liar. When a Capitol Times reporter called Pearce on this, the Senator replied, "I was told it was accurate," illustrating why even longtime supporters have abandoned him as utterly clueless. His scare-tactic proposition gets the same grade.

Update, post election: It passed.

Prop 115: Evil

You won't find the phrase in the text of the proposition, but this one is about the judicial merit-selection system that Arizona has used since 1974.
     Currently we employ a bipartisan commission of lawyers and non-lawyers to vet and submit nominees for judgeships above the local level. The initiative would eliminate that, giving the Governor and Legislature essentially total control of the nomination process. It would bring back the political patronage, cronyism and corruption that led to creation of the system we use now, which by all credible accounts is working just fine.
     This is evil because it wraps corruption in the cloak of "reform," trying to fool you into voting against your own interests.

Update: Failed

Prop 116: OK

This one would increase the exemption from property tax on business and industrial equipment from about $68,000 to "full cash value," meaning all of it. It's called the Small Business Job Creation Act, and while it seems to me that its real effect on employment will be close to nil and the "small businesses" taking the deduction will be pretty big, Republicans and Democrats agree that its effect on state revenue will be small, and it will help encourage existing businesses and attract new business from out of state.

Update: Failed

Prop 117: Bait and switch

Every pol running for reelection wants to be able to say that he or she is doing something to reduce your taxes. The Legislature set up this proposition as a campaign booster — but not an actual tax-reducer.
     It would amend the Constitution to put a cap on annual increases in the assessed value of property to 5%, where there's no limit now. This sounds great, especially to fixed-income homeowners who watched their assessments rise like Charlton Heston's jell-o flood during the boom years.
     Keeping tax increases to reasonable levels is a fine idea, but this measure won't do it because it caps assessed value, not taxes on the property. Counties set their tax rates to pull in enough revenue to support their budgets. There would be no cap on how much revenue the state draws in property taxes overall. Assessed values are only used to determine who gets to share how much of the load, and properties rising more quickly in value are more sheltered, so, counterintuitively, this amendment would shift relatively more tax burden to lower-value properties as the county makes up the difference in rates. The taxpayer who votes for this hoping to reduce his taxes could easily find his bill going up faster afterward.

Update: Passed

Props 118, 119: Good

These are both technical issues related to the administration of state lands, to which no one apparently objects. It's odd to see Governor Brewer and the Sierra Club both in support, so I don't think we're likely to go wrong here.
     Briefly, Prop 118 would allow a ten-year change in the formula used for distributing profits from the state land trust to increase the flow of funds to the schools. Had it been in place in 2010, says State Land Commissioner Maria Baier, our education system would have received $48 million rather than nothing from the fund that year.
     Prop 119 would change the system to allow land swaps to maintain or improve the value of state trust lands. If you've ever looked at a public-lands map of the state, you've seen the checkerboard created by alternating public and private land sections. This amendment would allow the state to consolidate high-value public areas and trade out lower-value land for development.

Update: 118 Failed, 119 Passed

Prop 120: Evil and stupid

This is silly grandstanding by the group of people who can't read well enough to understand the Tenth Amendment and wrongly deduce that the federal government is essentially illegitimate inside the borders. With a few exceptions Prop 120 declares "sovereignty" over all lands in the state and turns them over to the tender care of the Legislature. It's a little over the top to imagine that our pols might decide to allow condo developments inside the Grand Canyon, but from my reading of this constitutional amendment, there'd be nothing to stop them — except, of course, the very real and well established powers of the federal government, which would squash this amendment like a bug.
     Dream on, Tenthers, the world does not work in the way you imagine it should.

Update: Failed

Prop 121: Maybe

Finally we get to a couple of propositions that are worth the ink to debate.
     Prop 121 is a fairly radical proposal to change our state electoral system. It would eliminate all partisan primary elections for state offices in favor of a qualified open primary, putting every candidate on the same ballot. The top two vote-winners in the primary would go on to the general election, regardless of party. The logic here is that it would dilute the influence of extreme voters in the primaries, which has been clearly giving us increasingly extreme candidates in the generals.
     California just started using this system, and so far the results have been mixed. It will take a few cycles for candidates and party organizations to figure out how it works. More candidates in the field make the results less reliable, for example, so third parties stand to lose as much as gain, and parties will have to be more focused in choosing candidates to support.
     We know that by several measures our system isn't working as it is. Is this the solution? Give it a think.

Update: Failed

Prop 204: Maybe not

The proposition you'll hear most about in the campaign is about taxes, specifically reviving the 1% state sales tax after it expires next year. It's a very heavy and detailed document that attempts to lock the revenue in a series of boxes that the Legislature can't touch, thereby preventing the wholesale ripoff we've seen in the past three years and providing badly needed funds directly to our education system.     Can the boxes stay locked, in either the short or long term? That's hard to call, but I can say from reading it that the people behind this have gone to great length to try.
     The bigger question for me is the ripple effects through the economy of a permanent, arbitrary sales tax. Sales taxes are always harder on those with less money, including small businesses that depend on retail sales. Municipalities rely on setting local sales taxes as well, and that 1% lump substantially reduces their room to maneuver.
     The real problem here is that our Legislature has lacked either the wit or the stones to build a sensible, sustainable revenue system for the state. Taxation by initiative is acceptable as a stopgap measure when the capitol is as dysfunctional as it's been lately, but ultimately we need a better long-term solution.
     That said, no one gets a second chance to be eight years old, and for kids in school now there's no time to wait for a new crop of pols to appear. It's a tough question.

Update: Failed

Muggs: Guns Do Kill People

Pop Rocket, September 2012









Bear with an old-car guy for a minute.
     In the decades around the turn of the 19th century, automobiles were a fascinating but mostly frivolous luxury, toys for the rich, simply because there was no real need for them. Cities and towns were compact because people walked or used horses to move themselves and their goods. Greater distances and heavier loads were handled by railroads. The system was complete, and it worked.
Industrialists got busy, the world spun a few times, and by the end of the 1920s automobiles were essential to commerce and middle-class life. Affordable personal cars created new possibilities, roads were built and smoothed, people were getting out of the crowded, dirty cities and living farther from their workplaces. Suburbs sprang up, social classes separated further, and once nearly unimaginable long-distance travel for pleasure became commonplace.
     Reel forward to today, and there can be no question that the availability of automotive technology has radically transformed our world. Owning a car is essential to identity and social status for most of us, and it obviously changes how we think about the world and act in it.
We embrace the benefits of that technology and try not to think about its costs, amounting to between 30,000 and 43,000 dead and a quarter of a trillion dollars in economic impact every year in this country alone. But does it mean anything useful to say, "cars don't build suburbs, people do"?     
     In the aftermath of the Aurora mass shooting I read a fascinating piece in The Atlantic by Evan Selinger, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, introducing me to the little-known field of the philosophy of technology. Leading thinkers in the field agree on the basic premise that a person with a given technology in hand is different from one without, in terms of how we view the world, what the elements we perceive mean and which matter more, and the choices we make.
This rings true for me, like a bell, and brings a fresh point of view to the public debate over personal firearms, one that I think essential to clarifying the basis for how we act as a society.
      Like most old saws labeled "common sense," the cliche "guns don't kill people ..." is ridiculously simplistic. Yes, the human pulls the trigger, but how we understand that act has to change if we recognize that, to some degree, holding a weapon changes us, gives us a range of different choices, and significantly alters our perceptions of ourselves and others. Who can deny the feeling of power that comes over us when gripping a handgun for the first time?
       Selinger writes, "To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. ... there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence."
       It may be that this has been a more or less constant factor in the history of our relationship with firearms. But neither the technology nor our society has stood still. The weapons have grown steadily more powerful, dangerous and accessible, while at the same time our social fabric has deteriorated, leaving most people relatively isolated from larger communities and other kinds of people, infantilized in their focus on self, suckling a steady stream of media sensationalism encouraging distrust and fear. From this is born the cult of the gun, showing just how sick our societal relationship with firearms has become.
      Leaving aside our occasional fascination with mass killings like that in Aurora, Americans generally avoid thinking about cost. Each year something on the order of 100,000 Americans are killed or injured by firearms. Yet most people seem confident that the benefits of access to this technology outweigh the costs. The main benefit seems to be that a gun helps alleviate fear, usually unjustified, which has to feed back into changing the gun-wielder.
        It's a cliché to say that the men who wrote our Bill of Rights could not have imagined an AK-47, but it's also true that they had no concept of how guns change people and ultimately the society they inhabit. Anyone with better than a gnat's brain can see that the situation is out of control. Our sensible 18th-century safeguard against invasion has grown into an unrecognizable and self-destructive social pathology.
      Sensible people everywhere in this country are beginning to rethink their individual relationships with guns. I think it's high time we as a nation start to grow up about this issue, face the massive and insidious cost of the mythology we've built around it, and dig into making changes to head off an even more threatening future.

Must read: We really are all egalitarians

In another fascinating piece in The Atlantic, researchers report on a large, broad group study designed to uncover how Americans really feel about income distribution, with surprising results:

Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)

Muggs: Back to Primary School

Pop Rocket, August 2012









The horror is upon us, and on August 28 some of the voters in our area will choose who represents us all in the state Legislature and the county Board of Supervisors.
    If you're a registered Democrat, Green or Libertarian, you'll be sitting this particular election out, sad to say. Your parties have either failed to come up with any candidate at all, or are stuck deep in the rough. If you want to do better than that, you'll have to start showing up at some meetings and doing spadework for next time.
    Sure, there's another election in a few months, and that has its own charms, but the local races are all about the Republican primary. The November poll only ratifies the decisions made this month for the offices I'm talking about. So for now I'm addressing you Republicans and independents, since you are our only real hope for improving the political landscape.
    You've been switching the channel away from the political ads, maybe you grumble about the signs cluttering up the streets, and you've probably been dodging chats with politics geeks like me, but let's say you're not one of the hopeless cynics intoning with moral superiority about the uselessness of voting and, not incidentally, making things worse.
    Assuming you've kept the county up to date on your address, pretty soon you'll get a sample ballot in the mail. If you're registered as unaffiliated or independent, you'll get three or four, and you get to pick one to vote.
     You're probably a working stiff with a family or other overcommitments, so you won't have time to sit in on one of the rare candidate forums or show up for a meet-and-greet. If you have any sense at all you're not listening to talk/hate radio, so you won't likely hear local political advertising. Maybe you glanced at the brief profiles in the paper on your way to the funnies, or if you've been paying unusual attention you remember one or two things that one of the more experienced candidates did in the past. There's a small chance that a candidate has actually shown up at your door, asking for a signature on a petition and hoping for the chance to make a case to you, which you more than likely declined without hesitation. But if you're living an average life you're unlikely to have any useful information about the candidates beyond the names on the yard signs.
    The ghastly reality is that an awful lot of people are casting ballots based on no more than that.
    But let's say you're ready to put down the cheese puffs, whip into your Super Voter suit and rush out to save the world for democracy and The American Way.
    Just do us all a favor and try to avoid choosing candidates who are no better prepared than you are.
    Political issues are complex, so candidates offering promises and simple answers should provoke immediate suspicion. Usually this sort of talk comes from people with the least experience. Those who know the ropes are much slower to give an opinion, and that only after careful study of the details.
    As illustrated by our hopelessly deadlocked Congress, the public-policy process requires cooperation and compromise. We're not elevating monarchs here to wield power by fiat, we're choosing volunteers to go into harshly lit rooms for low pay to work out solutions that no one's completely happy with. That demands the ability to check the ego at the door, really hear and respect the ideas of others, and work cooperatively to find the best and most practical solution.
    Experience with the political process matters. There's a huge learning curve going into any office for the first time, and much as you dislike the idea of "career politicians," someone who's been around the block a few times is far more likely to be able to make good things happen.
    Most important, policy is always about the future. We usually wind up reacting to the current crisis because some previous officeholder failed to think about what was coming, or (worse) was working to take us back to some mythically wonderful past. Above a clear-eyed understanding of the problems we face, a good candidate offers a positive vision for the kind of community he or she wants to help build in the years ahead.
    "But but but," you cry, "none of them is good enough!" You know what? You're right. But no one's been good enough since 1776, and the old machine is still ticking over.
    If you're waiting for Superman, give it up. We govern ourselves, and that means putting ordinary people in place to do extraordinary things. That starts with you, Ordinary Voter, doing what has become the extraordinary work of figuring out whom to elect. Your decision matters to me and everyone else here. Get to it.

Must read: How I Ended My Lifelong Love Affair With Guns

Again from The Atlantic, Chauncey Hollingsworth describes the evolution of his thinking about guns and how changes in social attitudes are increasing the risk of our endemic gun culture. I think this line of thinking is essential to the gun-violence debate, and not much considered in the media.

Editorial: Screw the voters

Today the unnamed editor sticks up for Secretary of State Ken Bennett in trying to kick the sales-tax initiative off the ballot. After clearly stating his opposition to the measure, he declares adherence to the fine points of procedure more important than the will of the voters.

If this stickling for the letter of the law were his real motivation, why does he feel compelled to go on about how he doesn't like the idea of a new sales-tax extension? To me this screams of an argument rigged to reach a preset conclusion.

Along the way, the editor mischaracterizes the proposed tax as "only an extension of a current tax." In point of fact the new proposal is better designed to focus the funds on education and keep them out of the hands of the Legislature, which has misappropriated them over the past three years.

He also holds back some important information in saying that Bennett "believes that the group's submitted paperwork does not match the verbiage on the circulated petitions." The backstory is that the group did indeed file two versions with the SoS's office, one in hard copy and a slightly longer one in electronic form that it wound up using for its petitions. Bennett's staff never looked at the version on CD to make sure the two versions were reconciled, and rather than do the sensible thing and paste the CD version into the website, they accepted the paper version as the only one and retyped the hard copy. This doesn't sound like smart management to me.

For the record, I won't support another sales-tax extension either. I think our retailers and less-well-off consumers have taken it in the shorts for the Legislature's incompetence long enough.

But liking or disliking the tax is beside the point. More than 290,000 voters signed petitions asking for the vote, and the mistake by Mr Bennett's office in putting the wrong version on his website cannot invalidate the intentions of the voters who signed on to the actual petition language.

If we truly care about the the headline's "integrity of the process," we have to go with the voters, not the legal dodge that best suits the outcome we want, and the court agrees.  If we hope to live up to our ideals and encourage more people to participate in public life, our electoral and initiative processes have to be inclusive. We have to do our best to give ideas and people a chance to prove themselves whenever we can. Using niggly procedures and arbitrary obstacles to keep people out only confirms the idea that the game is rigged.

Must read: The Geography of Gun Violence

Writing in The Atlantic, Richard Florida presents some illuminating facts about gun violence in this country . Hint: the most common ideas in the culture are myths, and mythic thinking is a factor.  

The "Overtaxed Middle Class" myth

The head of Harvard's Economics Department, Greg Mankiw, crunches some numbers and finds, surprisingly, that middle-class Americans are now receiving slightly more from the government than they pay in. The blog post is non-technical and a good, brief primer on the tax/transfer balance.

News You Won't See in the Courier: McCain Admits Palin Better Candidate than Romney

Old Grumpy McNasty puts his foot in it again. I know, no one gets the irony.

Stealth voters

The AZ Capitol Times (sub req)  is reporting that the shift in voter registrations to the "other" columns continues, favoring Republicans against Democrats in some key races this fall. The article leaves independents out of the vote calculus, so its conclusion has a pretty high bogosity ratio, but the chart is interesting:

This clearly shows that the shift to independent status is almost entirely from the Democratic voter rolls, and from it I'd like to speculate that lots of Dems are waking up to the idea that voting in the Republican primary is where the action is. 

If you're registered as a Dem and you'd like to have something to say about who's representing us in our area, it makes a lot of sense to reregister as independent and pull the R ballot in primary. You've got till the end of July. Check into it. 

A license to print money

In a blog post yesterday, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman calls the lie that the US economy is headed for some sort of Greek-style meltdown, based in part on this chart, showing that US bond rates have reached their lowest point since the war:

The logic here relies on the intelligence of the market: if investors were concerned about the US ability to fulfill its debt obligations, bond rates would be trending higher. The opposite is clearly the case. 

There's another important takeaway from this that Krugman doesn't mention. As the cost of borrowing (a bond is essentially a fixed-rate, fixed-term loan from an investor) goes down, investment based on bond capitalization (infrastructure, education, jobs programs, energy retrenchment, etc.) makes more sense economically, as the returns on the investment improve. New lower-rate bonds can also be used to pay off older higher-rate bonds, a standard move that's a lot like refinancing your home, but with much lower associated cost.

Obviously an unusual  flood of new bonds  on the market alters their value overall, but within sensible limits these low values support larger borrowing for economic stimulus. Handled cannily, this can actually reduce projected debt service even as it raises short-term deficits. 

This puts the US in the best position since the 1950s to leverage prosperity from debt, making massive debt-based stimulus more practical than at any time in generations. 

Hear, hear

Senator Kyl eats your brain

In which the retiring Arizona senator characterizes our recovering economy as half-dead and proposes that we should turn it back over to the Republicans, who will finish it off with a bullet to the head.

He starts with the monthly employment report, that is the unexamined bottom-line number of 80,000 jobs gained (like, new jobs for everyone in the quad-city area in a month), characterizing it as  "disappointing." This presumably opposed to the end of the Bush administration, where we started losing twice that many a month.

I get it, if we want to put the zoom back in the economy and make more money for the rich white guys that might trickle down to us peons, we want to see bigger employment numbers, sure.

But let's bust out some figures to get a little clearer idea of what's actually going on.

The number of people employed in the private sector has broken through its level at the beginning of the Obama administration and is steadily clocking upward:

Surprised? I was. That's right, private-sector employment has fully recovered and is gaining strength, with about 3 million people hired the past year.

So why is our unemployment number still high? Take a look at state and local public-sector jobs — cops, firemen, teachers, administrators, builders, maintenance workers, etc:

Check that scale above. Since '09 700,000 people have been pushed out of the public sector and the trend is still downward.

It gets worse. The chart below counts federal employees. (The spike was census hiring.)

That's another 200,000 jobs lost, and trending down again.

So our overall employment problem is clearly in the public sector, where states, municipalities, school districts and federal agencies have been laying off droves of people.

These charts are from a 24-chart presentation on Business Insider that gives a very solid, graphic perspective on these cross-currents in our economy. Worth a look.

Eating our brains since '87.

Now, class, who's responsible for this public-sector collapse in employment and investment? Right, it's the critters in Congress who've demanded their pound of flesh in the form of shrinking government — critters not at all unlike our own Senator Kyl — as well as Republican governors, legislators, county officials and city councillors who have insisted on cutting jobs willy-nilly rather than do anything to shore up revenues and maintain the vital services that public employees provide.

The result is a national malaise and a more or less stagnant situation for Main Street while Wall Street and International Street rake in hyperbolically increasing profits.

It's a zombie economy, maybe, and we're doing something wrong, absolutely. But I think it's listening to ideological zombies like Mr Kyl. Can we please stop now?

Editorial: Quantum effect of lying

In today's column the unnamed editor reviews his fact-check fail in the case of last month's puff piece on William Few, who apparently made some claims about his military record that were untrue. The editor seems unhappy about this, but generally deflects the paper's responsibility for reinforcing the story back on its subject, while refusing to call his lies anything worse than "unacceptable."

Fictionalized personal war stories are somewhat ickier than fish stories, I'll grant. But as the Supreme Court ruled last week, there's nothing illegal about it. That comes as a relief to anyone who's ever padded a resume.

The editor, on the other hand, sees specific harm in the practice. He says, "Misrepresenting one's military service is much more serious, though. In doing so, a person seeks to elevate his or her own perceived value while diminishing that rightfully belonging to someone who really did the work, faced the dangers and accomplished the missions," (emphasis mine).

This is an Evel Knievel  leap in logic, describing a world that contains a fixed amount of respect for military service that can be stolen, borrowed and presumably bought, sold and donated. In this world a lie on one side of an opaque screen magically makes a non-liar on the other side less believable, a sort of quantum credibility effect.

One man's excessive bragging does not affect the perception of someone else's deeds, editor, that's just ridiculous. This is why it's not illegal. When one tells lies to do harm to another, we call it fraud, and it's prosecutable. Finding out that someone lied to you is a bummer, but you can't sue for a bummer, sorry. 

A little more critical thinking is in order here, and some reflection on our culture's recent penchant for elevating soldiers to demigod status. What's next, prosecuting a guy for overstating his minor-league baseball experience?

Cantlon: Another Great Recession is on horizon

I was a little startled to see how my friend Tom, whose style is normally quite carefully measured and his arguments stolid and calm, breaks out in today's column to a new level of alarm and apparent deep anger at the craven gamblers who hold our economy hostage to profit at any cost.

He's been reading Matt Taibbi, who's always inspiring in showing how to combine solid reporting with a strong point of view and emotional clarity. Taibbi takes no prisoners, and is often ahead of the pack in getting to the root of a complex problem.

The house always wins.

But I gather Tom's just reached his boiling point on the greed-is-good culture, which ought to soundly piss off everyone who cares more than a gnat's eyelash about social stability and economic security. It truly amazes me that Americans continue to tolerate the crazy casino that has accumulated on the foundations of what was once a perfectly sensible trade in equities as the basis for capital concentration to accomplish positive objectives. As we've seen over the past few years, everything we care about is at risk every day to the greedy whims of rank sociopaths.

The obvious question that Tom raises is how to go about containing the threat. Miles and miles of ink have been spent discussing how we could monkey around on the fringes and maybe do a little good. A tax on equity trades is one example of trying to rig incentives to make investors act more sensibly. I'm afraid it's too late for this kind of small thinking, though. Already the sociopaths have gathered  too much wealth to themselves to care much about fingernail parings from their profit margins, so this sort of reform would do little more than hurt people and companies who are already investing sensibly to serve real needs.

What makes sense to me is finding a way to legally define and strictly limit purely speculative and short-term investment, for example by requiring hard settlements and transfers, pricing equities according to investment term (like bank CDs, with penalties for early resale accruing to the invested company), and outright bans worldwide on computer-triggered trading. If we can slow the system down, we can hope that traders will think more carefully about what they're doing, and if we rig the system to favor longer-term investment, we'll see better reflection of real values.

Considering that even brief discussion of this area of public policy causes immediate eye-glazing in most people, I have to wonder what, with his call to the streets, Tom is hoping they will write on their protest signs. Perhaps he'll expand on this next week.

Tapped Out

Pop Rocket, July 2012








The annual monsoon is upon us, or it should be. Late immigrants to our area will be forgiven for scoffing at the idea that significant amounts of water fall from the sky this month, as the weather trend has been progressively drier in recent years. June and the anticipation of July always remind me of our dire situation with water and our glacially slow progress in doing anything about it.
     Contrary to appearances, we're not completely paralyzed. I recently spoke with Prescott Valley Water Resources Manager John Munderloh about a pilot project he's working on with the Upper Verde Watershed Protection Coalition (which in documents goes by the mind-numbing acronym UVWPC) to study various engineering schemes to keep rainwater from evaporating and get it into our aquifers instead.
     It's called macro rainwater harvesting, and the plan is to take five half-acre plots donated by Chino Valley, treat them in different ways that promote concentration and penetration of water, and study and compare the results to come up with engineering cost-benefit analyses.
     This small pilot project has been in development for four years and will run for three, maybe five years before it offers conclusions. The five governments involved, including the Yavapai-Prescott Tribe, have put up $130,000 for it. If everything goes well, construction could begin late this summer.
     Obviously no one's planning to bulldoze vast areas of the county and do landforming and soil amendments to catch rain. But on a scale of a few acres here and there in spots most conducive to recharging the aquifers, it could do some good. Says Munderloh, "The days of large single-source water projects may be waning. Those things have already been developed. There's probably not going to be another canal from the Colorado River for us. So we need to look at all the possible solutions. This may not be the panacea, but it may fill in a number of gaps."
     See, it's all about small percentages. Currently only about 2% of rain makes it into groundwater supplies. About the same amount runs off to sprinkle golf courses in Maricopa County. The rest evaporates after it hits the ground or transpires from plants. Encouraging another 1% to sink in could make our area far more sustainable long-term.
     It'll cost us, of course. Munderloh: "We have to let water supplies go by that would be cheap for us to appropriate, but because there's a senior appropriator downstream, we have to let the cheap water go, and we go after the more expensive stuff."
     This really brings home to me how we have to put a much higher priority on securing water resources. Other than some pretty tight individual conservation on a large scale, which no one in officialdom thinks we're ready to even contemplate, no option is easy. (Did I just mention that conservation is easy?)
     The UVWPC is moving ahead with this in a perfectly rational way, carefully looking at options, building consensus and doing long-term studies to get an idea of what sort of initiative will be most effective. On top of the physical challenges, we'll also have to satisfy a recently constituted committee in the state Legislature that nothing we're contemplating will have any effect on the big cities downstream.
     Given the already huge groundwater deficits we run every year to quench the thirst of a population too large for the ecosystem to carry, compounded by a decades-long drought with no end in sight and accelerating climate change promising worse, all this careful incrementalism sets my hair on fire. We're moving slower than grass growing, and there's no grass.
     Rick Shroads, president of Civiltec Engineering and the contractor handling the project, tells me there are other ideas on the table: "We have a menu of pilot projects that we'd like to do, but of course funding is our stumbling block." The coalition picked this project to fit its budget, essentially. The designs that it'll be testing for five years are already working elsewhere in the world, presumably racking up hard results daily. I try to imagine why we're not plugging those numbers into our spreadsheets and moving to the next phase, and all I can think is that Americans simply won't take anything seriously that's not invented here.
     This is not a problem we can put off for decades, and there's no silver bullet. We're already using a lot more water than we have coming in, and every sensible scientific projection shows progressively less coming in for the foreseeable future. All around us, the ghost towns show us what happened when the mines tapped out. Imagine how much more decisively a lack of water will wither our economy.
     We need a very serious concentration of human and monetary resources working this problem with old-school wartime priority if we're to hope to solve it. We're all going to have to kick in, and there's no getting around paying much more for water. (Think I mean "a lot more"? Double it.) That will come sooner or later, and the sooner it comes, the more time we have to build and balance a sustainable system. But bear in mind that anything we do with engineering will still depend on rain, and there will be less of that all the time. Use less. Now use less than that.

Courier confirms god is a fact

Front page top: "'Help from above' saved church camp." Oh, please.

The headline is in half quotes, yes, but the same idea is in the body of the piece without them. Obviously there was no miraculous event in the story. Humans started the fire, humans put it out.

Religionists talk like this all the time, sure, and there's nothing against putting such blather in news stories with attribution and quotes. The offensive sloppiness here comes from the editor's blind spot around religion. Some self-examination and professional review is in order. But to that I'll add an apology to the firefighters for cheapening their work in favor of the sky-pilot myth.

Update, Wednesday: It's fascinating how quickly and uniformly the Xtians rise up, recast criticism of the editor's mistake as an attack on the faith, and bemoan their persecution in the comments. The persecution mythos, inherited from Judaism, is one of the dangerous angles of this particular faith — if you believe someone's out to get you, it justifies all sorts of aggression.

Must read: Chart a la carte

ProPublica has a great interactive illustration identifying the big donors to the superPACs and the relative size of their contributions. And guess what — George Soros (Dr. Evil) doesn't appear on any of them. That ought to make right-wing heads explode.

Sparky's List

I heard this morning that Matt Groening is retiring his groundbreaking cartoon strip Life in Hell, which opened the door for an awful lot of great alt cartoonists and helped define the modern alt paper. In recent years the alts have been steadily evicting their cartoonists, uniformly citing budgetary concerns, and many great strips have bit the dust as a result.

One that hasn't yet is This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, aka Dan Perkins. Years ago Dan's blog was the first I began reading regularly, and his bitingly satirical strip is a weekly pleasure for me. He works hard at it and is at the top of his game.

Like the rest of the artists in his corner of the industry, his income is falling, but he's not taking it lying down. He's set up a subscription service called Sparky's List, offering advance views of the strips delivered to your inbox weekly along with commentary and extras. Check it out here.

This kind of direct connection between artists and audiences has always been the most attractive potential of cyberspace for me. By leaving out the middlemen — the record companies, publishers, TV empires, movie distributors, etc. — that act as gatekeepers and profit sinks, both artist and audience get a better deal. But we have to get slightly up off the couch.

 (Just to give you an idea of what these artists are struggling to make, when I inquired about running This Modern World in Pop Rocket, Dan offered at $25 per strip. I forwarded that offer to Tim Wiederaenders* in January, and have heard not one word back since. Let's say I don't buy the argument that the toons are too expensive.)

 So if you're a participant rather than a consumer, I hope you'll consider joining Sparky's List, and watch for similar deals from artists of all sorts.

* In case you missed it, Pop Rocket is edited and published by the Courier.

Monkeywrenching: deadline looms

If you're registered as a Democrat and you'd like to have something to say about who represents us in the Legislature and the county building,  as mentioned in this month's Muggs (below) you can reregister as Independent or Other and participate in the Republican primary. But you only have till July 30 to change your registration.

We can do something to fix this.

Pass this idea around your Dem friends. It can take just a few votes to decisively swing some of these crowded primary races.

Linkage:
See just how easy it is to register to vote or change your registration.
Quit worrying about our confusing voter ID law and
request an early ballot.

Update, July 2: I could have sworn the county website said June 30 before, but it turns out I was wrong about the cutoff date, post updated to correct.

Messaging, old school

It's easy to forget that even in the most grave of world emergencies, naysayers will undermine good sense for profit. From the day when workers had hope and unions had real power, here's a fascinating bit of propaganda directed by Chuck Jones of Warner Bros, with lyrics by Broadway great Yip Harburg, for the UAW-CIO in support of the '44 Roosevelt campaign.



I have to think about the intended audience for this short. It wouldn't likely have been theatre audiences, as theatre bills were still controlled exclusively by the studios and I rather doubt this would qualify as a commercial draw. I'm guessing it would have been shown in union halls to build grassroots campaign strength.

Must read: What you know about the crime rate is probably all wrong

From The LA Times Nation section, today: Matt Pearce, "Think you know about crime in the U.S.? Think again"

This is ultimately more about how we perceive crime, and why, than about actual crime rates — and guess what, if you watch TV, you're more likely to have it wrong.

Editorial: Arts good for the soul, and dirt cheap!

Today the unnamed Courier editor gives a nice pat on the head to the arts, saying "Those of us who are financially able need to protect our artisans with our ongoing contributions."

The implication that spending money on art and artistic experiences is some sort of charitable activity indicates that the editor does not understand the very real value that the arts furnish.

Businesses don't install art or hire artists out of the goodness of their hearts, rather because it attracts customers and improves the customer experience.

Artists aren't looking for charity or begging to be heard out of some pitiful need for ego-boosting. As with any other product, what we make and do varies in value according to the needs and wants of the customer. But here the editor seems to be promulgating the blockheaded idea, widespread in our arid cultural landscape, that art has no real value, insidiously, and likely unconsciously, undermining the industry he purports to promote.

The paper could be far more active and powerful in helping to connect readers with the many opportunities to experience and participate in artistic experiences in our area. If the editors were to dedicate half as much ink to the broad range of subjects that constitute "the arts" as they do to the narrow band we call "sports," they could do a great deal to fulfill the sentiment that the editor expresses here, with ensuing benefit to our communities as a whole.

"The arts" are industry, no different in form from any other manufacturing or service industry. Artists of all stripes deserve respect for their skills, training and productivity -- respect in the form of cash payment for their services and products commensurate with their value. That a thriving arts industry improves quality of life for the community as a whole is indisputable, and a factor you can't get from a new mine or private prison. Yet our municipal leaders routinely bend over backward and expend millions of dollars to attract businesses that impair quality of life, while treating artists little better than homeless vagrants and paying no more than lip service for the great value they provide.

Muggs: Lockdown at the Orthodoxy Asylum

Pop Rocket, June 2012

Ken Bennett is not a stupid man. I've spoken professionally with our secretary of state many times over the past decade, and always found him to be a cut above most politicians, forthright, thoughtful, reasonable, practical and positive. For several years it's been pretty well accepted across the political spectrum that he will be Arizona's next governor, promising a step up from the hamhanded Brewer administration.
     With his history of savvy and adroit politics, I expected that Ken would be able to avoid the sort of train wreck that happened in May, when, just as he was coming out as an active candidate for 2014, he found himself in the national spotlight for the first time for hinting that he might leave the President's name off the Arizona ballot this fall. He's since backed away from that, but in retrospect the whole sorry episode can tell us a lot about why and how far the Party of Lincoln has gone off the rails.
     I believe Ken when he says he felt bound by his office to act when constituents demanded that he personally verify the President's birth certificate. It's my impression that he has a Boy Scout's sense of honor and duty about such things. Expecting this of others, he was unprepared when the State of Hawaii responded to his request with several months of a stiff middle finger.
     For its part, Hawaii had long since reached the end of its patience with this farcical issue and washed its hands of it, having verified and released documents ad nauseam to people who simply refuse to accept the facts. Its legislature even passed a bill specifically exempting the bureaucracy from having to waste more resources this way. Our own Governor Brewer had publicly stated that she'd looked into it when she was SoS, was satisfied with the word of Hawaii's governor in '08, and vetoed legislation last year, calling the birther issue a "path to destruction." Any informed observer could reasonably reject the idea that Secretary Bennett didn't know all this, and conclude that he must have been grandstanding for the extreme right.
     A bigger problem for Ken may be his decision to go back on a previous promise and get involved in the Romney campaign. As Secretary of State and our chief elections officer this is clearly a conflict of interest, evoking Ken Blackwell's shenanigans for the '04 Bush II campaign in Ohio. From my own experience with him I expect that our Ken would execute his responsibilities with integrity, but the simple optics of the matter make this a really bad idea.
     We can hope that he will respond to constituents again and correct this error, perhaps before this column hits the street. In getting to the why, the factor that most observers seem to be missing is the overheated echo chamber that the Arizona Republican Party has become.
     Republican majorities have been easy to make in the state lately, so for many years the main events in most of our political races have been the Republican primaries, where candidates have to differentiate themselves on how conservative they can claim to be. Smoking an hallucinogenic blend of helmetless iconoclasm, cowboy machismo, sophomoric libertarianism, intolerant religion and offhand racism, Arizona's Republican voters have moved increasingly toward demagogues, simpletons and religionists to make and administer our laws. The few remaining Democrats have become negligible in legislative debate, leaving the Republicans to identify the real opposition as the somewhat more centrist members of their own party, touching off an inevitable purge that has nearly wiped out those who won't toe the new politically correct line. Rinse and repeat for pure white sheets.
     The result is that within the capitol, the range of what's considered reasonable has shifted far to the right. Ideas that out here in the real world are obviously batty -- an official state firearm, demanding the surrender of federal lands, shackling women during birth, guns everywhere, drowning government in the bathtub -- seem perfectly reasonable down there. When the lunatics are running the asylum, you have to have doubts about your own flashes of sanity. So let's give Mr. Bennett a little benefit of the doubt. I expect he can learn, at least.
     A lot of reasonable Republicans have been purged from power and from the party itself, swelling the ranks of independent voters. This exacerbates the problem, of course, leaving an ever more extreme party core deserving of the satirical comparisons with the Taliban. Don't expect those new independents to vote Democrat, though.
     No, I can only see one way back toward sanity anytime soon, and that's much wider participation in the Republican primaries this August, and not just by independents. I want to encourage, even entreat, rural Democrats to reregister as independents, ask for the Republican primary ballot, do your homework and help try to move the party back toward the sensible center-right. Doing so doesn't make you a Republican or stain your integrity, rather it's a reasonable response to a dire situation for our state. Our economy simply cannot recover health with our legislative priorities so skewed toward nonsense.
     Some will call this monkeywrenching, and yeah, I'll take that. Given the mess he's in, I'll bet Ken Bennett will too.

We get mail: It seems I've touched a nerve with this. Susan Cohen writes in email:

Just because you think you can yell "Fire!" in a theatre doesn't mean you should. (Actually there's a law against doing that.) And there ought to be a law about your irresponsible reporting in the Pop Rocket, June 2012, page 3. Your asking rural Democrats to re-register as Independents and encouraging them to ask for the Republican primary ballot, in your words, "to help try to move the party back toward the sensible center-right," made me see red. You're asking voters to engage in this kind of behavior for your own selfish interest (much like Obama would). BTW, the reason "our economy simply cannot recover" is not because our legislative priorities are skewed; it's because we have illegal aliens tapping into resources causing more than half our State's deficit.

Stay out of our business and worry about your own team, Steve. I'm a precinct committeewoman for the Republican Party, and I pride myself in educating my precinct on the issues and the candidates. Don't do me any favors and keep your pie hole shut on this issue, please. And show some integrity, for Pete's sake.

Editorial: Do what he says, he's got a gun!

I'm sure I'm hearing a dog whistle blowing, but after three readings it's still hard to put a finger on what the unnamed editor is trying to say today. The piece is pretty vague, so it's easy to read in what you want.

If there's a thesis here, it seems to turn on the idea that our individual prosperity depends on confidence in our national craps table, Wall Street. Yet he spends two thirds of the editorial explaining why people are sensibly staying away from the numbers game that so recently brought the world economy down, robbing individual investors blind along the way. He makes a lot of sense up till the old switcheroo:

"Keeping in mind that the stock market is not the economy, but a confidence game itself, restoring trust in the markets will be crucial."

As usual he offers no basis in reality for this article of faith, and I expect that he takes it so for granted that he can't imagine questioning it. But no, the speculative markets have only recently been significant to real economies, and their proper place is minor.

So after establishing this firm footing in the air outside his third-story window, he moves to his proposition: that the result of the presidential election will be the main factor in the health of the markets and therefore economic prosperity for all. The dog whistle whispers, "Make the right choice or we're doomed," and since Wall Street has to like the President to make money, the right choice is supposed to be the Republican, I'm guessing

Briefly glimpsing a path away from the insanity of the past thirty years, the editor retreats into the comforting groundhog den the corporatists have assigned him. Don't rock the boat, he tells us, just give the gangsters what they want and maybe they won't hurt us again.

Editorial: Franking frankers!

The unnamed editor is incensed that our Congressman uses his free mail privilege to send us campaign advertising disguised as constituent service information.
     I totally get it, and I agree that most of the time our public officials either don't know or don't care that they're supposed to be using the mail this way to genuinely inform voters about what they're doing. It's reached the point of absurdity, true enough.
     But let's step back for a sec. The franking privilege is one of the few facilities for members of Congress to communicate directly with constituents. Imagine for a moment a theoretical Congresscritter who, out of a pure sense of duty, truly wants to let me know how he's voting on issues and why, what legislation he's seeing, and that he wants my input. Then factor in the elimination of franking for that purpose. What modes of communication are available?
     Is he supposed to finance mailings, or buy broadcast time, or hire a telephone survey company out of his own pocket? Or is he to rely on the commercial media to spread the word? Few outlets are as compliant as Prescott eNews, for example, in printing an official's news releases verbatim (if you're a member of the right party). Fewer still are interested in carrying the dull details that build a useful picture of a complex issue. And there is no medium that reaches every voter other than the post.
     Shutting off the only useful means of communicating with constituents does not make sense in a democracy (or a republic, for all you selective pedants out there). Doesn't it make a lot more sense to look at the Congresscritter's communications and fully take them in as statements about the character and competence of the person we've sent to work for us? From that standpoint, even the most grossly abused mailing is eminently valuable, imho. And it costs us damn little.

Letter: City's price increases hurt local business

Philip Dixon wrote to let us know that the City's pricejacking of regular public events has cost us another one, this time the Contradance Festival, moved to Cottonwood. Responding to what could be read as skepticism in the comments, Warren Miller specified that the City fee for using the Armory had jumped sevenfold year-on-year, forcing the move.
     What my friend Warren didn't cover is why the City has jacked up use fees, not just at the Armory but at the Elks Theatre, at Watson Lake Park and other public facilities as well.
     During the tenure of Steve Norwood as city manager, the City moved increasingly toward the idea that City services should be individually revenue-neutral to the extent possible. Facilities and services that had traditionally been parts of the large basket of City responsibilities came to be seen as separate business enterprises and evaluated based on their narrow cash-in-cash-out balance sheets.
     Those services that cannot bring in cash — things like police, streets and City bureaucracy — have been arbitrarily exempted from this policy as "essential" services, creating a value distinction that pushes Council to lean more heavily on "nonessential" services to "pay their own way."
     Our once vibrant Parks and Recreation Department has been largely gutted. Now we're hearing rumblings about cutting the Library loose, and it seems that our City leaders will not be satisfied until everything that the voters of Prescott have built for quality of life in the past hundred years is privatized or vanished.
     The core purpose of incorporating a municipality is to create a means for a community to work together to ensure security and improve quality of life for all. Obviously the direct use of these services will vary from person to person (including police, fire and streets, of course), but the value they bring is to the community as a whole, not just in individual enjoyment, but in economic vitality as well. Our elected leaders should be looking at the big picture here, and worrying that we're being pennywise and desperately pound-foolish.
      A government, however local, is not anything like a profitmaking business, and cannot be run in the same way. If as a municipal official you find that your budget is not balancing, you can't just throw services over the side willy-nilly. Every one of those services was approved by the community as necessary enough to institute, and complex webs of dependencies build around them linking individuals, businesses, nonprofits and public agencies. I'm not saying you can't cut, but the first thing you have to do is seek the community's input on the continuing need for the service, whether there is majority support for it and, vitally, for paying for it collectively.
      Our problem statewide is that there's a new religion-like moralism holding that community action through taxation is bad across the board and must be eliminated. That attitude leads inevitably to fragmentation and an everyone-for-hermself attitude, chipping away at the bedrock of community. I don't care what your political perspective, I guarantee you really don't want to live like that.

Editorial: 'Nutty Arizona' goes national again

Lately I haven't felt compelled to write about the Courier editorial column. With a few exceptions, the unnamed editor has generally stuck with the sort of themes that suit a small-town monopoly -- fire danger, food drives, "Whiskey Row will rise again," traffic, etc.
     I guess that made today's the more disappointing, as from the headline I was expecting to see something sensible and unusually straightforward from the editor. But by the end of the first graf he's falling over his own shoelaces:

Now it's the "birther" issue again, and whether President Barack Obama is a legal US citizen who was born in Hawaii and, therefore, qualified to have run for the office in the first place and to seek re-election to another four-year term. Or is his birth place really Kenya, his father's homeland, and a birth certificate to prove otherwise is fraudulent?

     Yes, it's the birther issue again — meaning not that there's a real issue of whether the President was born American, but rather that a bunch of wackos we call birthers are making a ridiculous stink — and no, there is no question about the President's provenance. That's been clearly and publicly established. Even Governor Brewer is firmly distancing herself from this one with her signature elocution: "I talked to the governor, the previous governor of Hawaii, and she validated to me that the certificate was valid. And I put that to a rest."
     The headline fairly describes the issue as nutty, yet below it the editor feigns Pooh-like simplicity and accepts that as long as one nutcase continues to believe a thing, there must be a "fair" debate about it in the press.
     Here's the editor waiting for Superman in his conclusion: "We wait for the right person to come forward and settle the question once and for all." Who's that, editor, the disembodied Hand O' Gad writing in flaming letters in the sky, perhaps?
     It's not Arizona that's being nutty. Is it really so hard to commit to print your duh moment in realizing that the political party you identify with has come completely unhinged, hostage to insane terrorists and succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome?

Transubstantiation, v.2

The fire this time

I checked in on the aftermath of what will certainly be known as the Bird Cage Fire (no matter where it started), and grabbed a few pics.

From the top of the parking garage, you can see how the firewalls between the buildings contained the blaze. The added back rooms took smoke damage, but appear intact.

It looked to me that the fire was most interested in the BBQ place and the roof.

Anyone who's been onstage at the Cage will remember that Coke sign. I chatted with the owner's brother, who said that the stuffed birds in the cases were at least mostly hunted and mounted by his great-uncle, and some of them were quite rare. Witnesses said they saw birds floating down the gutter.

TV and other media crews were still working the site this afternoon.

It was a relief to confirm that the building fronts hadn't burned through. Essentially all the structure necessary for a relatively easy rebuild is there. The fire didn't even pop the paint on the fronts.

The owner's brother told me that the old Rex bar and backbar survive, including the mirrors, though they'll clearly need extensive refinishing. Here you can still see bottles up on the wall and stools awaiting customers.

With the street still blocked off and a ladder truck on standby, there were plenty of people on the street to take in the sights.

The crux of the biscuit

Today's letter from Kevin Goss has sparked a remarkably revealing discussion in the comments.
    Goss calls out the paper for regularly carrying the columns of Susan Stamper Brown either despite or because of the misinformation and disinformation she features in them to make her points. He then dismantles a couple of examples in one of the columns using straightforward facts.
    Commenters who have regularly demonstrated suspicion or animosity toward the administration that's been the target of Brown's attacks have piped up to defend Brown's right to lie in public, blasting Goss for asking that the paper stop buying her stuff, calling that "censorship." They seem to completely miss the importance of using lies to sell opinion.
    I'm continually amazed when partisans of any stripe blithely accept and support the use of disinformation in defense of their cause. It's so completely stupid. When you're in a game in which winning depends on reaching hearts and minds, above all you have to be trustworthy. Any kind of lie in your materials, even the little white variety, is guaranteed to turn your targets against you once they find out. And they will, more so now than ever. Ask Bill Clinton or Dan Rather.
    As a corollary to this, the paper that carries the lies, slugged as opinions or not, guarantees the loss of readers who discover them. It's not just stupid, it's bad business. Editorial integrity is all a news organization has to sell, really. From the editor's standpoint, cleaning this crap out of the paper isn't censorship, it's a survival imperative — or it should be.

The missing pic

Nicholas DeMarino's story on the Granite Creek cleanup led with mention of the recyclasaurus, but this obvious photo opportunity somehow escaped the Courier editors, so for all of you who haven't already seen it on Facebook or wherever, here he is, Fill the Recyclasaurus:

Fill was crafted by Royce and Nita Carlson for this event.

Myth of the Middle

Joe Gandelman's column on today's op-ed page bites deep into the standard narrative of Dems on the wacko left, GOPers on the wacko right, and heroic, nonplused  Independents sorting it from the the middle. Small miscalculation, though: we just don't woik like dat.

Ask any honest pollster or social scientist, and you'll learn that in hard fact Americans generally agree on 90% of the values and issues we deal with in real life, and many choose to exempt ourselves from party label for all sorts of reasons. Independents cover the whole spectrum and then some, and don't shift to left or right for a given election. Rather, more or fewer show up from different parts of the spectrum because they feel personally energized enough to exercise their franchise.
     Arizonans have more reason than most to register as Independent or Non-affiliated -- when the Republican primary is the only game in town, you still get to have a say. I register as Independent not because I identify with the mythical center, but rather as a strategic choice. Surprisingly few people can make a difference this way in local elections in particular. I recommend it highly.

Update, Tuesday: George Seaman argues for strategic registration in an LTE today.

Must read: Climate change for Republicans

Meteorologist Paul Douglas writes a regular weather feature for the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis/St Paul, and is a committed Republican. His recent piece for Minnesota Public Radio is instructive both in terms of hope that the right side of the aisle can get it on climate change, and how he delivers the message. Read it here.

Editorial: Federal, state laws keep butting heads

The unnamed Courier editor is confused: While the feds have struck down such laws in other states, why has Arizona's voter-ID law stood for years, yet we continue to have federal lawnforcement threatening to come after our medpot growers and even state employees? In standard conservative fashion, he seeks a simple answer to a complex question, and in so doing shows only surface understanding of pretty much everything he's talking about here.
    First, placing the two laws in the same category because they were both passed by initiative is completely fallacious. The courts look at the content and effects of a given law, not how it was written.
    Using Voter ID as a yardstick for a clean law remains an open question. The legal challenge to it is still in the works at the Ninth Circuit, which took oral arguments on it last June. So we have "the feds" challenging both laws. The contrast doesn't hold up.
    Looking to history, it was action by individual states that finally broke the back of Prohibition. That's what's happening now, albeit more slowly and incrementally, with medical cannabis laws. With this sort of progressive movement, surviving court challenge is partly the point.
    Regressive moves like Voter ID, on the other hand, are political tactics designed to help win elections by playing on voter fears. Those who truly understand the law on both sides of the political spectrum know that these are temporary structures that will eventually fall under legal scrutiny.Arizona's version of Voter ID has not fallen as fast as those in Texas and South Carolina because it is not as draconian, that's all. You have to look at the details.
    The real guffaw moment in the piece is here, though: "State elections officials should be more diligent before initiatives go to the ballot, vetting conflicts with federal law." This seems to be criticizing the medpot initiative, which was very carefully and extensively drawn, and the Secretary of State for allowing it to go forward. Like he had a choice. As established in the Arizona constitution, initiatives written in crayon on the back of a bar napkin in five minutes can become unassailable law with the consent of the voters. "Elections officials" can have no part in writing, editing or "vetting" initiatives, only in determining that they properly jump the legal hoops to get on the ballot.
     This in the context of our state legislators constantly writing and voting for new laws designed only to give the middle finger to clear and established federal law, stuff their own lawyers tell them will never fly.
    It looks like the editor really just wants things to be easy. Easy to do, easy to understand, easy to forget about. That choice isn't on the table, I'm afraid. Democracy is difficult, requiring that we pay attention.

Feeling wonky? Here's your chance

They say to pass it on:

Want to be more informed about the issues in local elections? Maybe you or someone you know might want to run for Prescott city council or serve on a city commission...? Spend a morning learning more about how the city of Prescott really functions. Saturday April 7 - and it's free. (details below and in the attachment.)

This is a NON-PARTISAN effort to help educate Prescott citizens with an emphasis on facts about how our city government is structured, what's the budget authority, etc. This session is not about issues per se.

Please pass this on to Prescottonians who might be interested.

Saturday, April 7th, 2012
9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Prescott College Crossroads Center- 220 Grove Avenue

Come learn about the authority of the Prescott City Government and the power of citizen involvement.

Presented by Elisabeth Ruffner and the Prescott Good Governance Committee

FREE and light refreshments will be provided

Please RSVP to GOODGOVP@GMAIL.COM

Note: There's no additional info in the attachment

Editorial: We seemingly kinda don't like this, maybe.

The headline on today's editorial makes a bold statement. The column itself, however, is so qualified and mealy-mouthed that you can almost see the editor squirming to get out of the assignment.
    The issue is Republican attacks nationally and locally on users of birth-control medications, trying to allow religionists to restrict coverage for employees, invade their privacy and even subject them to dismissal. This is wrong, and the editor could have said that. It appears that the idea that it's wrong was agreed in the editorial committee meeting. But the editorial dances around it.
    Starting at the top -- "Women are seemingly and perhaps unwittingly being shoved into the spotlight this year" -- the confusion is evident. The Courier has a long and storied history of eliminating the passive voice, even at the expense of sense, and here it's the other way around. It obscures the agent doing the thrusting -- the Republican religionists -- leaving a mishmash of adverbs characterizing women, who are obviously neither "seeming" or "unwitting" in the attack on them. But this is what happens when a writer can't bring himself to criticize his political team directly.
    He trips over his own typewriter in trying to say something sensible: "What a woman decides, no matter her convictions, is her business." I have to wonder what kind of mental short-circuit it takes to commit this nonsensical statement to paper and pass it through proofreading.
    Every time the editor reaches a point where the reader might expect a call to action, he fades: "Candidates have a right to their beliefs, as does the electorate in deciding when legislation crosses the line and intrudes upon personal freedoms." ... "You decide whether government has any right to give an employer the right to intrude this deeply into women's privacy."
     Nowhere in the piece does he bring the subtext to the surface and just say it: the Republican attacks on contraceptive users are morally wrong, legally wrong and politically idiotic. I'll give him credit for trying to get over the fence on this one, but he clearly caught something sensitive on the barbed wire and isn't quite disentangled yet.

Waving the red flag

Ken Hedler's coverage of the briefing by ACLU lobbyist Anjeli Abraham is accurate given the amount of space he had to work with, and I like that he made the calls to get reactions from our local party leaders. The quote from Mal Barrett was particularly illuminating, showing that not all Rs share the extremist social agenda currently fascinating the Legislature, and some understand its risks
    It's no surprise that the knives are coming out in the comments, the self-appointed vigilantes against fairness for everyone spouting every wacko idea they ever heard about the ACLU and every cracked argument against support for civil rights.
    For those who missed the briefing, I did an interview with Ms Abraham for The People's Business, in which we talk about what the organization is doing and why, as well as why it's so reviled on the right. It's obvious to me that it's a lot more about the "values" of the reactionary right than the actions of the ACLU. (Airing on Sunday (Mar 18, 2pm) and Saturday (Mar 24, 2pm), listen on 90.1 FM in Prescott, 89.5 in the rest of NorAZ, or the KJZA live stream here.)
    The sad part of this dynamic is that it makes reasonable Republicans hesitant, even afraid, to say anything supportive of the ACLU or its perfectly reasonable legal positions. To that extent it puts Republicans in the position of having to at least neglect and often attack our civil liberties even as they believe they are the primary defenders of the Constitution.

When editors don't edit, vol. 398

So I'm looking at the feel-good story about current former mayors raising money for charity, and I find Rowle Simmons' name misspelled as "Rollie." In both references. Then I notice that the caption on the photo has the names in the wrong order. Eyes roll, forehead meets desktop.
   I'm guessing (charitably) that what's happened here is the fundraisers wrote up a press release without professional help, sent it in with a photo, and the editors dumped it into the paper without looking at it. Someone's in a hurry or just doesn't care, and we wind up reading egregious errors that live up to the paper's reputation for amateurishness. This kind of thing embarrasses the profession, in largest part because it's so easy to fix -- just look at what you're doing. You want to charge for this thing, right?

Update, 11pm: The spelling and caption errors have been corrected online, and my comment pointing them out deleted, without a correction notice.