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.

Editorial: Voters must do their part to meet ID requirements

This comment on today's editorial hits it on the head (from "justa thought"):

"'Does the Arizona law prevent voter fraud? Certainly, even though voter fraud is not widespread'
     "Does the Arizona law prevent dinosaur attacks? Certainly, even though dinosaur attacks are not widespread
      "The law has 1 purpose and 1 purpose only and that is to lower the turn-out of likely non-republican voters"

Not widespread.

    What needs highlighting here most is the sly use of the accepted lie that voter fraud is any kind of real problem. Voter fraud is a bogus issue, used to leverage laws to suppress disadvantaged groups of citizens from voting. The editor ought to know this.
    This week a federal court threw out the Texas version of this nonsense, for exactly that reason, as the editor points out. The US Senate is investigating Arizona's version now, though Governor Brewer has refused to testify in favor of it because the committee is run by a Democrat, and it won't be surprising if it does not survive court challenge as well, deservedly so.
    I was there as a poll worker for several election cycles after the voter ID requirement came on, and I saw its effects, consisting entirely of confusing and frustrating perfectly legitimate voters. Imagine having to tell a sweet old lady in a walker, who cast her first vote for Roosevelt, that she had to make a third trip back to her apartment to find the right papers to prove she could vote again in the same precinct she'd been using since the '80s. Those of us working the polls, R, D and other, uniformly hated this insult to the body politic. Many people didn't come back, and we could only speculate on how many didn't show up at all because of the additional burden.
    If we accept that voter fraud is a real problem on whatever scale, we're led to accept voter suppression as a necessary evil. In this case we don't have to accept the lie or the evil. We should also keep an eye out for this political tactic, which really is widespread, and firmly reject those who would employ it against our rights as citizens.