Editorial: Argle-bargle bragh

Today's contribution from the editorial board reads like an unprepared radio rant from a hungover Steve Blair. The unnamed editor can't even seem to follow his own thought.

He admits that federal action has helped prop up the housing market and support its recovery, and in the same sentence (and the headline) implies that the recovery is happening "despite" that action, as if it was meant to impede the market. In the same sentence he offers a contrast between "people" and "the regular Joe" with no indication of what he imagines that difference to be. Then he says essentially that he didn't want to talk about housing anyway, returning to what's become an obsession with Yarnell and yesterday's vague demand for federal money to rebuild.

The only clear takeaway is that he doesn't like the President. Now there's a useful contribution.

Editorial: Where's my daddy?

Today the unnamed editor complains that the federal government is not leaping in to assuage the wounded community of Yarnell, vaguely blames the President and Congress, and hopes aloud that Governor Brewer will "get the President's attention" to do something for the "handful of people" who lost everything.

This from the paper that consistently endorses the myth of independence from government and reliance on local charitable resources when we find ourselves in trouble, anything to reduce the editor's tax obligations. His continuous milking of the Yarnell tragedy has devolved to just another flavor of me-ism.

The editor does not say what he'd like "the feds" to do, exactly. Print money and hand it to the Yarnellians? Set up a FEMA camp for people who already have somewhere to stay? Send the FHA to build new homes for them? Free ponies and ice cream? I can't imagine.

The event was clearly a disaster for Yarnell, but its scale does not qualify for federal disaster status and, more to the point, it can't even be called unexpected given the geography of the area and the fire-friendly conditions we regularly experience in the county.

Yet the editor continues to bury his head on the starvation of the Forest Service and state fire resources over the past few years, most importantly the disastrous too-stupid-to-be-used "sequester" plan to reduce government functions and services, as well as the anti-American Republicans in Congress doing all they can to impede government processes and services. In that context the editor illustrates the pennywise pound-foolishness that has become "conservative" dogma.

So the editor asks "Where's my daddy?" and I have to say his fellow "conservatives" have Daddy tied up in the basement. Point the finger at yourself, editor, you keep voting for this kind of result.

Here's what a progressive government would do: accept some responsibility for the failure of fire protection and provide federally secured grants and loans for rebuilding uninsured primary housing, insist on adequate insurance in wildland interfaces going forward, and require insurance carriers to live up to their obligations through transparent, comprehensive coverage. At the state level we can do a lot more to limit society's exposure to fanciful decisions to build homes in areas that are difficult or impossible to secure, and to recognize that this kind of risk is increasing with climate change.

Council endorsements show thin thinking

The history of the Courier editorial board's election picks does not lend itself to much credibility, but today's endorsements are interesting not for what they say about the candidates, but rather how they illuminate the psyches of the editors.

There is a theme to these endorsements, including that of insurgent progressive Jean Wilcox, and that is political experience. The editors say they value experience and institutional memory even over competence or the ability to form a rational thought, as seen in their continuing support for Councilman Steve Blair, who has done more than any single person ever to make a laughingstock of our town, or at least its Council.

Experience does have its limits for the editors, as we see in the snub to Councilman Len Scamardo, the eldest of the candidates and arguably with the most time in the government saddle, in favor of Greg Lazell. But the editors' praise for Lazell still centers on experience, not ideas.  The editors clearly believe that more time on the job produces better results from the office, and readers know I generally agree with that.

Yet the editors have spent miles of editorial ink touting the wonderfulness of legislative and executive term limits, asserting exactly the opposite; that more time in office leads to corruption and less effective governance. They can't have it both ways.

The truth is that experience can lead in either direction, depending on the character of the officeholder, and the purpose of periodic elections is to reevaluate that experience in the context of what the constituency needs now.

What experience has given us over the past several councils is a devotion to small-time thinking and reactionary emotionalism. What Prescott needs is a return to the robust, visionary positivism that is our true heritage.

Mayor Kuykendall has taken pride in being the still center of a stagnant pool, while former Councilwoman Lindsay Bell has been working steadily for positive change here for decades, both in and outside government. The choice there is easy.

Councilman Blair is long past his sell-by date and an embarrassment to all of us for his big mouth and small mind. Any of the candidates is easily a better choice.

I agree with the editors on Ms Wilcox, who stands out both for her government smarts and her vision for the future. Her experience also leads me to expect she has the grit to see it through and stay on mission as the details of office inevitably peck away at her attention.

I'm less impressed with Mr Lazzell's public statements, which in aggregate seem to reflect the sort of overcautious uncommitment that has so consistently got us nowhere (and which the Courier editors call "realistic"). So far I see in him a younger version of Mr Scamardo.

Ellie Laumark's positions and bearing are more attractive, though I'm concerned about her buy-in on the idea that group recovery homes are an important problem, and while she expresses little understanding of our water issues, she seems to get the picture better than Mr Lazzell.

Alan Dubiel has made a personal mission of close attention to City issues and governance for years, and while I'm sure he'll agree he's not the greatest public speaker, I'm confident that he is dedicated to detailed understanding of the ins and outs of every issue he would confront on Council and is not committed to any ideology. He also knows more about our water issues than anyone on Council now. I think it should be Alan's turn at bat this time.

In any case, this election presents us with an opportunity to repudiate the know-nothing reactionism of our recent past and elect a new majority to Council that wants to move Prescott forward. The sooner the better, I say.

What's the point of the "Xtian nation" meme?

I've been musing on Dave McNabb's letter published yesterday, in which he gives yet another go at the idea that the Founders intended this to be a "Christian country" by demonstrating his own ignorance about what the label might have meant to them in their own context. I don't need to debate that canard for anyone reading this, but there's an angle to it that's generally not talked about openly, and that is what's really wrong with the idea.

Start with the root question — Why is it important for certain Xtian extremists to win this argument? We don't see letters to the editor defending other extended tenets of faith, like ritual cannibalism, stoning adulterers or magical spirits, so this is not just another one. This is really about creating a religious identity for our country, meaning both that we are this and we are not that.

That leads to what they hope to accomplish if they win the argument. Say some future Congress and Supreme Court not too different from what we have right now were to conspire to alter the Constitution to say, in effect, 'the United States is a Christian nation.' Clearly the extremists want this to happen, so presumably to them it represents positive change. What would it mean, and what specific changes does it lead to?

Better bloggers than I have frequently offered the irresistible parallel to the nations in which secularism or despotism have given way to extremist Islamic states, so I needn't belabor the point, because our brand of religious extremist cannot see himself as part of that Christian tradition. The papal states of old won't do, because these people believe that Martin Luther's revolution purged the faith of its corruption and left it clean and good. Can I get an uh-huh.

I'm sure many would be surprised to learn the extent to which the democracies of Europe were built on explicit statements of faith, and so are a whole lot more Xtian in that sense than we can ever be. Similarly, smiling old corporate Japan and most of the the Asian tigers base their governance on the divine lineage of their monarchs (though nobody much cares). And leave us not forget old Blighty, with its brand-new heir to the throne of its own Xtian sect.

So there's a spectrum of realities between dour old Iran and happy Thailand in what constitutes a "religious state." How would Americans express this idea specifically?

Cotton Mather, the kind of founding father a religious extremist can heart.

I suppose the most relevant examples come from our own pre-revolutionary history, when many of the colonies were explicitly religious states. These were built and operated by people who were too annoying or too extreme to make it in Europe, and thought it would be great to isolate themselves from human society so they could better express their dogma. Here I go straight to Jim Jones in Guyana, but I'm a bit of a cynic in this area.

So while the rest of the nation was expressing its true nature by carving a life out of nothing in a drunken haze, these superstitious crackpot communities tried to enforce gad's law in ways much like those of the Colorado City cult — iron thought control under threat of being cast into what was then a non-metaphorical wilderness, dictatorship under self-appointed spiritual elites in a permanent state of emergency, and the exclusion of anything or anyone that might contaminate the purity of the community or threaten the established order.

This is the world people like Dave would take us back to, but with a high-tech post-industrial infrastructure and surveillance culture that literally runs on fear-based propaganda already. They don't think thngs through far enough to consciously understand what they're advocating, of course, but read what they're saying in public and it's always there in the subtext.

Here's the deal, Dave: the founders said no, no state religion, ever, and no matter what their personal beliefs, they saw this as essential to ensuring our freedom. I'm good with that.

Williams: Shapes in fog

Today Buz raises the bar for incoherence on the Courier op-ed page, trying to turn what should have been a couple of Facebook likes into a piece long enough to justify the paycheck. It may net the paycheck, but it just doesn't work as opinion. Waste of time.

Page One: Where advertising becomes news

Today's front page prominently features the very worst reflexes of the commercial news business in a shameless and embarrassing promotion of the consumer stampede called the "back-to-school season."

     Here's how it works. Start with a reasonable news-style question: What are people buying for their kids for school? You have to ignore the true value of the question, because there really is no useful information for a parent in knowing what another parent is spending on. So rather than serve your customer, the reader, you serve your client, the advertiser. Prominently feature the stores and the products. Quote children who are too young to have any awareness of what they're asking for. Treat the awfulness of the products as if it's cute and harmless. Push the idea that spending for these useless and awful things is necessary to the child's development. Then cash the checks.
     This stuff is not news, it is not useful, in fact it is asinine and counterproductive for the reader. The editors should be ashamed.

The climate "debate" again

I don't need to waste space here on the absurdly thin gruel that passes for content of the Courier's weekend "point-counterpoint" on climate change. What I will focus on is the editorial choices that created it.
     Whether humans are causing catastrophically rapid change in our climate is a question that can only be answered by good science. Assuming the editors are not complete idiots, they know this. Yet to present the data on this question, which is vital to every human and every living thing on the planet, the editors choose Dennis Duvall and Glenn Helm.
     Neither of these worthy men claims any qualification to opine on climate science. I don't know more about Mr Helm, but Mr Duvall is locally famous as a peace activist who takes it to the limit, and for that he has a reputation among the local non-hippies as a nut. Neither argument includes any new idea, or new angle, or even readable prose. Neither addresses the argument of the other, as usual. Both are bumpy rides on personal hobbyhorses.
     The resulting pair of rants amount to a discussion of the issue based on a little media coverage, personal issues, and, from the uncommitted reader's standpoint, a lot of dubious faith. From your imagined seat behind the editor's desk, why in the world would you waste most of your Sunday op-ed page on nonsense no more informative than a Three Stooges short?
     I'm not one to easily ascribe malice where incompetence will do, but the level of incompetence required to achieve this level of quackery strains imagination. It has to be intentional, I'm afraid, and the intent is ugly.
     To get to this I can only infer that the editors mean to undercut the credibility of the question itself, saying in essence that the people talking about climate change are idiots and thinking about the issue is a waste of time. This goes far beyond editorial bias to something far darker and more subversive.
      Don't fall for it.

Editorial: Quit starving the schools

Is the editor correct that the Legislature should follow state law and provide inflation adjustments on school funding? Yes. Could he say it in a way that's simple and direct enough for the legislators to understand? One would think so. So why doesn't he? Why, whenever he's compelled to criticize Republicans, does he resort to this mealy-mouthed we'll-see crap?

Williams: Whining is the New Manly

Buz achieves a new low for trivial bunkum on the opinion page, it must be noted with the full support of the Courier editors, in his white-knight defense of Sarah Palin, set up as the innocent damsel of the "conservative" movement, against the dragon of the Angry Left in the person of mean old Bill Maher.
     In the first graf we get the gist, and we have to wonder how Buz imagines that he can predict the actions of people he doesn't know working in institutions whose missions he doesn't understand. From there you just know the path will have to be a bit crookedy.
     Buz is outraged that Maher would say mean things about Palin on a comedy show that's primarily about making fun of Republicans. He extends his mock chivalry further to other women and black "conservatives."
     With this he seems to mean to lance progressives for the hypocrisy of demanding equal treatment of people and then treating them equally as targets of scorn.
     There's no funnier moment in the piece than where he attempts to instruct on "the logical fallacy known as 'poisoning the well,'" as if Buz has ever paid the slightest attention to logic.
     As I stand back a bit and take the big picture of what Buz is saying, consciously and unconsciously, I'm struck by the white-male paternalism that motivates him to place Palin, Bachmann, Cain and Thomas behind his mighty white shield (for in Buz's world, women and nonwhite men are weak, second-class humans). His understanding of why they have become jokes ends at his own frame on them as "conservative" and nonwhite or female. Anything they've done to elicit public criticism is of course immaterial.

   

Buz imagines how Palin might abuse Maher's nose in person, but I find it funnier to imagine how Palin might react to Buz telling her she needs his protection.
     Since we're talking hypocrisy, I have to wonder where Buz was when his teammates were gleefully photoshopping the President as a bone-through-the-nose Hollywood witch doctor, or insulting Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton for years in the crudest terms, or slut-shaming Sandra Fluke.
     Here's a clue, Buz: If you hope to hold the high moral ground, drive the snakes from your own nest first.

Editorial: Prescott is not Detroit. Duh.

I'm sure many Courier readers are relieved to read that Prescott isn't like Detroit, so we shouldn't worry about falling into bankruptcy. Similarly, Prescott isn't like Neptune, so we shouldn't worry about how to calculate tides with 14 moons or how to breathe methane.
     It's truly comical to see how the editor's thinking is led and framed by teevee headlines. The idea that the experience of Detroit is in any way parallel to that of Prescott is beyond ridiculous. Detroit at its peak was well over forty times larger than Prescott. It is an international trade port, built for the export of timber, mineral and agricultural resources and expanding on broad-based industrial infrastructure and large-scale manufacturing. It anchors an industrial region spreading into four states and southern Ontario. No, it's not like Prescott.

This ...

      Where Detroit drives Michigan's economy, Prescott is subject to Arizona's whims. The industry that built Prescott is long gone, and today it depends on money earned elsewhere, spent by retirees, tourists and entrepreneurs. To operate the City depends heavily on state-controlled revenue sharing and sales taxes. Our prosperity (for yes, our town is a prosperous one) relies on the desires of people elsewhere to live here, or at least wander through and gawk.
     The editor fails to note the one instructive commonality that might have made his point — that Prescott, like Detroit did, has become complacent and backward-looking, failing to understand the implications of change or undertake a coherent vision for adapting to it.

... is not this.

      The editor's assertion that Prescott is doing well because "Arizona governments understand the balancing act of budgets" would be funny enough without his example of pawning our state buildings, as stupid a budgeting move as I have ever seen. His headline hints at proactivity, but he delivers nothing to support the idea, and anyone watching the legislative process over the past decade has to admit quite the opposite, that we have allowed reactivity and magical thinking to dominate.
     We can expect our retired population to grow in the short term, but we can also expect it to begin shrinking again within a couple of decades. Our population growth is in conflict with the quality of life that supports it. Our water input is gradually diminishing against that growth. Our industrial base is very thin, and our infrastructure for 21st-century industry is entirely lacking. These are soluble problems, but solving them will take higher-caliber thinking and longer-term goals.
     Vision is what voters should be looking for in its Council candidates as the election approaches. It's time for us to stop reacting, usually badly, to change and start embracing and leading it.

Editorial: The upside of the surveillance state

Pity the poor Courier editor. Ed Snowden forced him to think about the increasing electronic surveillance of Americans since the Patriot Act, but now he can't quite decide whether Snowden is a traitor or whether all this e-snooping is a good thing, crippling him with so much confusion that he's forced to write an editorial.
     The only opinion I can detect in the piece is this: "there may be a bright side to Americans drawing away from this obsession that every detail of every minute of life just has to be posted, ...," which I translate as, "it's a good thing they're watching us, as maybe we won't say so much in public," a rather odd position for any member of the fourth estate to take.
     But it clearly illustrates the frog-on-simmer thinking that has held sway in this country for over a decade, where the populace greets each new insult with an oh-well at its inevitability, much as the editor shrugs though his column today, complacent with the idea that whatever the NSA spooks are doing, they're not after him, so all's well.
     Noodging I-told-you-sos from those of us who warned about the creeping surveillance state years ago do no real good. What we need now is to use the Snowden incident to raise the question, what kind of country do you want to live in? I can't imagine anyone answering sincerely that we like being electronically strip-searched daily, cowering and sniveling in fear of phantom threats, while fat corporations rob us blind. Yet that's what the editor seems to be embracing.

Note to editor: as you apparently missed it, here's the first rule of writing anything: have something to say.

Did he really say that?

Sen McCain seems to be saying that the AZ Legislature should review our "stand your ground" law. I'll bet that'll be very popular among our high priests of crazy down there.

A formidable reporter

RIP Helen Thomas

Local candidate forums

The paper lists the schedule here for panel talks and meets with the Prescott Council candidates. Go, be better informed, ask better questions if you can, then vote. A few hundred votes can make a huge difference in this election. It's important.

Editorial: Drunk on kool-aid again

The editor thinks it's silly to be fighting over whether people should be required to show proof of citizenship to vote. To him and his fans it seems like a no-brainer, so he appropriately offers up a no-brain approach and no-brain solutions.

   He shows the depth of his naivete about voter suppression in the third graf, writing that because slow progress has been made in the courts and legislatures and it's now against the law to discriminate, "These biases, of course, have disappeared with time."
   What strikes me about this piece is that you have to buy into four separate cracked premises to even get to this argument. You have to believe that non-citizens want to vote, that there is enough voter fraud going on by non-citizens to make a difference, that demanding ID from every voter would be effective in preventing fraud, and that there is negligible cost to citizens in requiring proof of citizenship.
   Extreme bunker mentalities really do believe that hordes from beyond the borders want to subvert our electoral process using illegal voting, and even that they are having some success with it. But the argument for motivation is preposterous on its face, and the evidence of actual fraud utterly nonexistent. With no problem to solve, the approach to solving it is a waste of energy, but if someone were motivated to cast an illegal vote, fake documents are easily produced and acquired. Finally, there really is cost to every voter, ranging from annoying bureaucratic procedures to full disenfranchisement, and we have the results to prove it, varying from heartbreaking individual stories of voters who have been prevented from registering and voting to statistical anomalies in voter turnout and electorate makeup where these laws are in effect. I've seen for myself unjust disenfranchisement and discouragement as a poll worker right here in Prescott, and in doing my lawful job I've had a direct hand in it.
   The editor has literally no idea what he's talking about, and appears to have no interest in learning.
   I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not motivated by conscious racism or political hegemony. He could easily be seeing the trumped-up BS on his teevee and soaking in the idea that if people seem to be worried about a thing, it must be worrisome. But that's not why it's an issue.
   The concern-trolling about voter fraud in the media and on the political stage came as a direct result and hard on the heels of the invented "immigration crisis," positing immense cost to society of inimical aliens bent on the subversion of the American way of life and stealing us blind (presumably by leaving the country by the millions). None of that is true either.
   As I've written before here and elsewhere, this issue is invented entirely to scare Americans into voting against their own interests, by appealing to their completely unjustified, parochial fears of The Other. It's the Southern Strategy all over again, and its authors are the same crew that Nixon used to win the South in '68.
   It's not working as well this time around, though, because voters born after the struggle for black civil rights are generally far less afraid and more likely to identify with those who are being hurt. That's why the darksiders have to continually up the ante with increasingly unhinged, reality-divorced rhetoric.
   This editorial carries a reasonable tone, but it is based entirely in the frightened, helpless flailing of the slow death of white supremacy and a crass and cynical political elite willing to do literally anything to extend its power. For them the editor is just a tool, and doing a good job at it.

Williams: 'War on coal' hurts Heritage Foundation funders

Today Buz Williams, the regular Courier columnist with no writing or intellectual credentials who chooses to misspell his own nickname, rails against the President for an unreasonable "war" against the coal industry at the expense of the poor and middle classes. He has a point, if you're willing to ignore every good reason to move away from our dirtiest fuel and you're unable to comprehend basic economics.
   First, the idea of moving the country to cleaner energy resources did not originate with the President, nor would he likely have much interest in the political fight over it if not for the solid majority of Americans who recognize that the preferred fuel of the 19th century is hurting us in the 21st. Long before anyone but a few scientists knew anything about climate change, we recognized that coal emissions are the primary source of ill health and broad economic impairment due to air pollution.
   Remember the unbreathable air in LA in the '60s? (I'm sure Buz does.) Remember acid rain eating up concrete all over the Northeast? The automotive component was significant, but that was primarily coal. When Congress in the '70s began addressing those issues, we heard the same "war on coal" arguments and the same predictions of doom, from the same people. The sky didn't fall for the industry then, and much as we might prefer, it won't fall due to the President's current initiative, which I hasten to add is far from even passing its first legislative or bureaucratic hurdles, let alone having real effect.
   Buz's research for the piece is rooted entirely in the Heritage Foundation, an organization funded primarily and generously by the coal and oil industries, which anyone reading this likely already knows. But I'm perfectly willing to posit that yes, as we move away from burning coal for electricity, there will be fewer people employed in the industry, his core emotional point.
   Here's where basic economics come into the picture. As those people leave coal, employment demand is ramping up in cleaner industries. Nowhere is this clearer than in the awful fracking fad, which is drawing people directly from oil drilling to gas drilling. Somehow Buz misses that reducing energy from coal doesn't mean less energy, it means more of other kinds in younger industries that will employ more people than coal has.
   Cleaning up the mess from coal will displace workers, yes, but in aggregate it will put them into better jobs. The only people who will feel pain from this inevitable change are those who continue to bet their extensive riches on dirty fuels, like the funders of Heritage.
   I suppose I don't really need to remark on the childish petulance Buz expresses at the end of the piece, but in a way it opens a window on the emotional basis for the resistance to the kind of change that we must embrace for our economic and even species survival. The thing is, as we do embrace it, we'll find that we'll be happier and more prosperous. But I doubt that Buz and his ilk will ever be able to see it.

Editorial: McCain saves the day

Honestly, sometimes the editor's ability to turn real life into Bizarro World takes my breath away.

Here "saving the day" means preserving the ability of Senate Republicans to permanently obstruct any kind of legislative progress without doing a lick of work. He gives McCain credit for high diplomacy for standing in front of his criminal gang and saying, "OK, we'll let you get a couple of small things done if you don't shoot us all in the head."

News you won't find in the Courier, episode 117

We can look forward to similar savings here if our Legislature gets out of the way.

NYT:  Health Plan Cost for New Yorkers Set to Fall 50%

Trippy bug

Be glad it's not some cute puppy.

Editorial: Surprise! The whiter guy wins!

The editor's headline sets the properly comic tone, perhaps unintended, for his unsurprising expression of confidence in the law as the guy who killed the unarmed teen walks. This caps off the Trial of the Summer, an annual media event designed to keep viewers engaged with their teevees during the rerun/baseball season.

I have to think that he meant to put a comma in the head, i.e. "Legal system worked, as always," setting up his confident, ain't-we-the-greatest-country-in-the-world column. But he left it out, and for those of us with enough hashmarks to recall exactly how the legal system has historically worked for black folk in this country, it speaks more truth than the editor knows.

There's another angle to it, though, another blind irony, in that the law certainly worked as the Florida legislature intended when it passed its ALEC-dictated "stand your ground" law. They designed it to make it very hard to convict anyone who uses a gun to "defend" anything, anywhere, anytime from anyone they consider a threat. The person at the wrong end of the gun doesn't have to actually be a threat, of course. Now it's all so much simpler than the traditional lynching party.

Everyone seems to agree that both parties did stupid things, granted. But only one died, and only one had the tool for killing, and that is enough to put the killer in jail long-term in most of the developed world. Not in Florida, though, where juries must receive explicit instructions that if the guy with the gun is afraid, it's okay for him to kill.

True to form, the editor doesn't even think through the elements of the story as he writes them. Like the rest of white America, he's only looking for comfort. Justice? Not so much.

I'm sure it would utterly surprise him to learn that in most similar cases under similar laws where the person with the gun was black, the legal system still "works as always."