AzBlueMeanie of the excellent Blog for Arizona posts a nice map of the high-powered artillery coming to bear on Sheriff Joe and Andrew Thomas, and recaps the issues and the tactics that the Republic characterizes as "using the law to pursue political enemies." Our County Attorney is in the thick of a much bigger push by an appalled profession to get control of these guys.
The unnamed Courier editor again betrays his confusion of reality and fantasy -- the little "anecdote" he opens with as "popular legend" is of course a distortion of a famous exchange in the Jack Englehard novel Indecent Proposal, which became a hit film with Robert Redford in '93.
I absolutely agree with the editor that the rules of the Senate need sweeping reform to eliminate the sort of venal tyranny we both see in the actions he describes.
The editor would have a whole lot more credibility on the issue, however, if he could claim any consistency in criticizing this behavior by Republicans. But we know what that's about. Even a stopped clock, as they say.
I notice that Ben didn't have much time to write this week, so he built this by recycling chunks that aren't about Republicans from the newish post on his pseudoblog, which rehashes the same lame message from months of these sporadic columns. Just once I'd like to see Ben invite an actual Congressperson to respond to his ignorant foolishness.
I notice that someone on the online op-ed page is apparently asleep -- no less than five pieces are posted twice as I write this, one under two different headlines. Yeesh.
Update, 2:30pm: The duplicates are gone, along with the comments posted to them.
We're now deep in end-of-year-roundup season, where most of the paper's space is devoted to enervating canned features to allow the staff time off. It makes reading the paper in search of news pretty well pointless for probably another week or so.
For the reader who hasn't shut down her frontal lobe for the duration, I have a few recommendations:
The Boston Globe has a succinct comparison of the differences that the House and Senate will have to resolve in their health-care bills.
The Guardian furnishes a first-person account of who killed the Copenhagen initiative -- maybe not who you'd expect.
A little obscure history on a serious, well-financed plot to install a fascist government in this country by military coup in 1933.
Enjoy!
Our County Attorney has her say in the paper after the editors took a stab at hamstringing her yesterday. This piece quotes most of what the Republic published, edited a bit for the local audience. Did Ms Polk submit this at the same time as the Republic piece? Did the editors mess with it to make it appear that she submitted it in response to the Courier coverage? Given past experience, it's not unlikely. I also notice that someone neglected to post the byline.
No matter, Ms Polk comes through loud and clear that Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa Attorney Thomas are far off the reservation and intent on worse. Joe's rabid fans will demand that she back up her opinion with facts, something she may not legally do. It's clear to me that she's gone about as far as she can with it.
Again, Sheila Polk is a stand-up girl and solid public servant. This will not please the power-brokers in her party, but I've never noticed that she cared much about that. Remember, she didn't have to do this, and there's no gain for her in it.
Update, Sunday: I see the byline eventually showed up.
The unnamed Courier editor is all for the Accidental Governor's new plan to simply take the illegals out of our jails and give them to the Feds for deportation. What he doesn't ask is how we failed to think of this before.
So I took a look. The Daily Sun and other actual news outlets report that, surprise, this is nothing new. We've been doing it since 2005, azzamannerperfack, and
About 200 criminal immigrants are released early from prison in Arizona each month and turned over to federal authorities. Eighty percent of those are immediately deported to Mexico, while the rest are sent to federal detention centers, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Under a previously approved program Brewer now wants implemented, about 1,300 prisoners would be turned over to ICE in the coming 18 months, saving the state about $5.7 million.
I have to say it, as a news story this feature on someone's penchant for accumulating kitschy dust-collectors is an embarrassment. Perhaps the editors are nursing a case of Peanuts envy.
Among the many boring year-end roundups crowding the media, perhaps the most interesting to news junkies is the annual Top 25 Censored Stories, by Project Censored. Check it out, I promise you'll learn something really intriguing.
Steve takes his column from the prison controversy to the 50,000-foot level, and offers a better idea for how to use that land. I gotta wonder whether Brad Fain is listening, but Steve gets a cookie.
The Courier headline writer tries to soften the impact of Sheila Polk's amazing opinion in the Republic. If you haven't, go read it. It takes my breath away to see something like this coming from our stalwart county attorney, and it adds a lot of lustre to her already sterling reputation as a serious and dedicated public servant.
Linda Stein's story is solid, covering the issue and giving the other side maybe a little too much space to respond, and then going for a neutral view as well. All good. The headline, by pulling "mixed reactions" out of someone's butt, is clearly meant to confuse the picture. Bad editor, no cookie for you.
I'll also bet that Ms Polk's letter came to the Courier offices as well, and is languishing on a spike somewhere. Space considerations, I'm sure.
The unnamed Courier editor comes out clearly, if limply, in favor of widening WVR, and by extension in favor of housing and commercial growth in upper Williamson Valley. It may be that he's only really thinking in terms of his own convenience in maneuvering his oversized pickup, but let's consider for a second the wider implications, so to speak
The City has made it clear that it has no interest in more annexations in the valley. So new homes up there will be on county land, exempt from the state water regime. Williamson Valley is a smaller but significant watershed for the Big Chino aquifer, and exempt wells are a significant factor in whether we can achieve safe water yield.
Closer in, the road serves an area of mini-ranches: horses (and horse-trailers), wildlife, pedestrians without sidewalks, tractors and school buses clog a road that winds through trees, dales and homes. Farther out it's straighter and easier to navigate, but in town there's a reason it's slow.
Widening the road will cut back hillsides, level out dips and hills, clear back trees, cut into properties and put the homes even closer to the road. There's no question that it will permanently change the character of the area, complicate people's lives, reduce quality of life and squash a lot more coyotes, skunks, deer, cats and dogs.
What's the upside? Smoother, faster traffic flow to places that haven't been built yet. If that's your idea of a good investment of public funds, you're welcome to it.
I'm sure a lot of readers are scratching their heads over this. E&P has been the primary trade journal of newspaper editors for a hundred years, and that's why it seems important enough to the editors to place on the op-ed page. Ordinary readers probably know nothing about it, of course, and could care less, so it was more than a little self-indulgent for the editors to do this.
But for those who are curious, check out the Wikipedia entry as a start. It's another casualty of corporate media dominance, and a sad loss to my profession. I hope they can pull something together and keep going.
The prison story broke in the Courier on Dec 17, a scant five days ago, so Councilwoman Lasker's column appears well ahead of the paper's usual two- to three-week publishing schedule for this sort of thing -- which only illustrates that they can get things printed in a more timely fashion when they want to.
I'm not taking a position yet on whether it's a good idea for PV to get into the prison business. I have to say that the idea of public officials panting after this sort of "growth business" is repellent, extending PV's history of rash, tasteless action for its own sake (the zombie civic center, the untenable public debt, the invented downtown, the tickytacky developments, the arena, the traffic cameras, ack). Having for-profit corporations operate such facilities is just wrong-headed as well, for a multitude of reasons. But if the project is necessary (debatable) and this is a good place for it, "not in my back yard" just isn't a good argument against it. And while I live in Prescott, I consider PV my back yard as well. The entire area has a stake in this decision, and PV officials should acknowledge that.
Ms Lasker plays the part of the smart shopper, but with no experience or homework to inform what she's seeing, she's a babe in the woods for a sales job, as we can infer from her comments here. The one thing a corporation will always do better than government is sales.
What concerns me most is the likelihood that a prison-town mentality will develop around it, a mindset that treats people as things. If we're to have a prison here, let's consider how we can do it better for everyone, the workers, the community and the incarcerated. Let's have some new ideas on facility and systems design to create a place where the people coming out are more likely to be better for the experience, and the community is as well.
The unnamed Courier editor doesn't go far into the details of how he arrives at his numbers, but he concludes that the artificial grass will cost more over the long run and that this will be a good thing considering the water savings. This is a counterintuitive result in context, so I'm inclined to trust it, and the editor gets a cookie for choosing substantial water savings over a small margin of public money.
This goes a long way to clearing up the confusion that Ken Hedler left in the wake of his Nov 27 story on the deal, which implies the actual cost will be lower overall.
Never mind that we're spending public money of this order on sports, that's just stupid and it should be a subject for public debate. But at least they're planning to do it somewhat less stupidly. Now let's keep an eye on the contract fulfillment and see whether the numbers pan out.
An anonymous commenter writes:
"The Courier wrote an article several days ago claiming that a car crashed into the nonprofit People Who Care building at the Prescott United Methodist Church, seriously injuring one of their employees. It turns out they had the wrong agency and the accident actually occurred at Caring Presence, another senior care agency in the area. Despite a call from People Who Care correcting their mistake, the paper never printed a correction."
Lightning bolts, river deltas and dust bunnies! Welcome to the world of fractal dimensions.
Sometimes I despair that the unnamed Courier editor is even capable of seeing past I-me-mine. Today's editorial notes that people are conserving energy (a good thing), and that APS wants higher rates (a normal thing), and jumps to another logic-free connection.
Perhaps someone should explain to the editor that people are conserving energy because they need to save money. If energy were cheaper, we'd have less conservation.
Meanwhile the fuels that APS uses are increasingly expensive and supplies are inevitably diminishing. The grid system we all rely on for electric power is technologically Stone Age and under-maintained, raising both fixed and labor costs. Shareholders demand profits, so managers must demand prices. That's just how it is. Reducing electricity use does not reduce generation -- the potential across the wires is always the same. So the only way to reduce costs in response to conservation is to reduce capacity, by taking generators offline. We're a long way from that kind of savings, and it'll probably never happen to any significant degree. What actually happens is that most of what we don't use here is used somewhere else. The rest is simply wasted as unused potential.
I have to say that higher energy prices -- prices that more faithfully reflect the true costs of the stupid system we have -- are good for us in that they force us to conserve and allow sensible alternatives to compete. Any sane projection for the future includes far higher prices for fossil fuels. Let's get used to it, and make lemonade.
Here's another case of failing to ask the most basic question. Cindy's CYMPO story covers the players on one side of the issue at length. But where is the quote from ADOT on why the river crossing is still on their maps? One phone call.
Notice anything missing from this story? It's the fans, the people the Fains have been counting on to make this unlikely venture work. Ken apparently asks questions of no one but those who are working to sell the idea. Consequently the reader can't trust anything in the article as fact.
Speaking as someone who's done a lot of shows, big and small, I've said from the beginning that the arena would quickly devolve to white-elephant status. Six thousand seats is just too big for people in this area, even including optimistic hopes of visitors, to reliably support. I grew up in an area where minor-league hockey is relatively popular and familiar, and I've seen how counting on that usually leads to bankruptcy. Trying to sell music in a barn like this one is iffy at best, and most ticket-buyers wind up hating it. The optimistic (for developers) population projections that sold Global Entertainment on the area are proving wildly wrong. It won't be long, I expect, before Global cuts its losses and pulls out, leaving PV with the question of what to do with the building. Maybe there's an opportunity here.
Maybe Ken's second half will include the other side of the story. I'll keep an eye out.
Update, Tuesday: Never happened. I'm so surprised.
