Editorial: Playing the blame game

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

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

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

Stand Your Ground = License to Kill Anyone

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

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

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

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

Editorial: Obamacare could shift public favor, duh

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

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

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

More news you won't see in the Courier

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial: What's really important

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

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

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

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

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

Climate change and market forces

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

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

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

Editorial: The banality of mass murder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cantlon: So what is this about?

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

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

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

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

AZ's Private-Prison Deals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Williams: Buying the packaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

ToT: Polk on pot, again

On many important measures I think County Attorney Sheila Polk has been doing a difficult job well, and it's clear she's respected in the legal community statewide. By all accounts she is not angling for higher office, and her employees seem to like her. So when I see from her yet another redundant and ignorantly polemical diatribe against cannabis, it makes me a little sad.

It's not just a plant anymore.

A smart lawyer like Ms Polk knows how to build a cogent argument. You find solid facts, you reference them, you argue from strength. You firmly avoid anything in your argument that's even slightly dubious, because it would impeach your better evidence. That's exactly what these anti-herb rants are doing to Ms Polk's credibility, which might be considered impeccable save for  this recurring evidence that she can't think straight about at least one subject.

Up to the point where her term of choice switched from "dependence" to  "addiction" she might have skated. Americans clearly do have a dependency problem. But the object of dependence is not its cause, and any specific dependence can fall on the range from mildly annoying to self-destructive, whether it's cannabis, or chocolate, or god, or an abusive spouse, basketball or Big Macs. Can substance or religious or social dependence impact life outcomes? Perhaps, but it's the person doing the depending, not the thing, and dependence is more often a symptom than a cause.

"Addiction" as it's normally used means something quite different, a physiological attachment to a chemical. No one has ever shown that cannabis can have this effect, and no one is or has ever been "addicted to pot."

Even Ms Polk's math here is glaringly weak: "A loss of eight IQ points is titanic, dropping a person of average intelligence into the lowest third of the intelligence range." In IQ-test terms, 100 is average, making a range of 200. The "lowest third" is therefore under 67, not 92.

If you hope to persuade, particularly when you're a professional persuader, how can you let this sort of thing through? Reading this piece, no teenager of average intelligence or above will respond in any way other than outright dismissal of both the argument and the office.

Ms Polk has apparently missed the many studies showing that legalization does not increase cannabis consumption, so the primary point of the piece, to persuade Arizonans against legalization, is built on obvious illogic.

Then the astute reader has to step back and look at what Ms Polk is not talking about. She's quite lawyerly in saying "marijuana dependence in this country is twice as prevalent as any other illicit psychoactive drug." What that leaves out, of course, is the vastly more prevalent dependency and addiction to non-illicit, non-psychoactive drugs — caffeine, nicotine, alcohol and pharmaceuticals. The social problems directly related to alcohol in particular are so much greater than those of cannabis, even if you were to accept Ms Polk's assertions here, that they don't even chart on the same scale. Where is the Attorney's polemic on that?

The problem we really need to address is prisons bursting with harmless pot users, a massive waste of public resources and human potential.

The editors did allow her to slip in a true problem in the first graf, though: "... the number of adults struggling with addition is much higher." I see that every day in the checkout line, and I think Ms Polk should get on it, it's a real scourge.

Update, Sunday: Sen. McCain admits to no heartburn over legalization.

Letter: Peeple cain't spel.

I have a certain sympathy for concern about poor use of language in the public sphere — preventing it for my clients is my profession, after all — so I understand the frustration underlying today's LTE from Kevin Rawls. Unfortunately it's so badly proofed that it becomes self-satire.

I won't bore you with all the details, but just want to confirm that since there's only one 'd' in 'advertising,' there remains only one in its abbreviation. "Add" is a verb related to math.

I have little doubt that the editor who placed this letter saw at least some of the errors in it, and probably smirked at the irony. But was there any thought about bouncing it back to the writer with a suggestion that he might not want to publish it in that form? A little kindness would have been appropriate in this case, I think.

Previously in this space I have criticized editorial interference in reader expression, both in the LTEs and online comments. It's not the place of editors to arbitrarily change what does not belong to the paper. But it's not right to publish someone's letter as a joke on them, either.

Debate: Misfire

Sunday's paper brings us yet another pair of "debate" columns that are about as informative and credible as a monster-truck pull. Don't bother, they're a complete waste of time.

But if you want to talk about the "stand-your-ground"/fire-at-will phenomenon, I'd encourage a hard look at some of the results.

Dead: Julius Jacobs

Dead: Danny Clyburn Jr

Mark Hoekstra, Texas A&M: "Our study finds that, that homicides go up by 7 to 9 percent in states that pass the laws, relative to states that didn't pass the laws over the same time period ... we find no evidence of any deterrence effect over that same time period."

Dead: Brandon Baker

The Wall Street Journal: "Overall, the figures show the sharpest increase in justifiable homicides occurred after 2005, when Florida and 16 other states passed the laws. While the overall homicide rates in those states stayed relatively flat, the average number of justifiable cases per year increased by more than 50% in the decade’s latter half, the data show. In Texas and Georgia, such cases nearly doubled and in Florida, they nearly tripled."

Maimed: Randall White

Maimed: Billy Kuch

John Roman, Urban Institute: "SYG laws change how often shootings are ruled to be justified and that they are associated with racial disparities in justifiable homicide rulings.

Incarcerated: Marissa Alexander

Dead: Robert Many Horses

Who do you want to be, Arizona?

Editorial: More muddle on Yucca Mountain

The unnamed editor's flip use of "fallout" in the headline is a sure sign that his editorial on the issue of nuclear waste disposal will be weakly drawn and poorly informed. What new readers may find surprising here is that he ultimately has nothing to say in the space.

This is a big problem in the industry overall. Journalists typically have minimal science or technology background to help them evaluate the stories they're called upon to cover, and the results are often lame to just wrong. The best are diligent about sourcing and quoting. Most just go along as if they know enough, the way they do with political issues.

It's true that Americans are going to have to find a way to deal with the nuclear waste we're already making and nuclear power as a bridge to a more sustainable regime. Mentally boiling that down to "Yucca Mountain, yes or no" is ridiculous.

Perhaps the editor hasn't bothered to look into the history of this plan. It came from the federal level, imposed on Nevadans almost arbitrarily and apparently because Easterners think that Nevada is nothing but wasteland anyway. The people of Nevada have stood up consistently and in great numbers to oppose it, which is why the feds suspended the whole process. The editor calls these obstacles "too high," meaning to me that the opinions of the people most affected shouldn't matter. I'll have to ask him what he'd write if it were Granite Mountain instead.

The nuclear industry brought suit to force the issue, and a judge agreed that once the application is in, the government must go through with the evaluation. This does not mean the government will find that the plan is safe enough to go forward. Most observers believe that it was poorly conceived to start and the long-term environmental and economic costs make it unfeasible. So suspending the application has been the thrifty choice. Why waste resources on a bad plan that won't ever happen?

Large concentrations of high-energy materials are inherently dangerous, so applying our habitual industrial-efficiency model to nuclear waste is just bad policy. We need a smarter solution, one yet to be proposed. The industry will only come up with that if it's forced out of its comfort zone.

At points in the piece the editor seems to agree with most of this, at others he doesn't, for example calling Yucca Mountain a "secure location." His general confusion is evident in the writing, as in this classic stumble across the keyboard: "Arizonans have never been too keen on the thought of truckloads of radioactive waste being trucked along out interstates on their way to Nevada."

The obvious lack of any conviction on the issue means to me that there's another intended message, which I find in "all of this highlights the dysfunctional state of civilian nuclear policy," and "As happy as Reid may be with the issue's paralysis, we as Americans should be distressed." He's probably been supping at the Fox News trough again, and just enjoys grasping the cudgel of a stupid Republican idea to batter Democrats about the head. Pity he can't hit anything with it. 

Finally, what the heck does a small-town paper think it's doing by even attempting to opine on this issue? We're in the middle of a "local-local-local" election, we have wildfires in every direction and more to come, we're not creating enough jobs to sustain our economy, our legislature is consumed with buffoonery — hasn't the editor enough to think about that really matters here?

Editorial: Just don't get caught at it

Today the unnamed editor chides public servants for exposing their brain-junk in social media. "You ought to know better than to toss offensive language and photos into cyberspace where it will remain forever," he writes, wagging a finger, and admonishes them to "Behave responsibly with high-tech devices." As if self-indulgent use of Twitter is the problem.

He tips his hand by first mentioning disgraced ex-Rep and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, who so famously leaked pics of his real junk, while skipping over exactly the same behavior by Pinal Sheriff and local congressional candidate Paul Babeau. With that I knew the editorial was going to be some sort of attempt at applying a strategic figleaf.

The editor's Facebook friend

But he did get to LD6 Rep Bob Thorpe, who launched himself into the national spotlight with a series of bonehead racist tweets last week. Thorpe's previous Western Newspapers mention was a fawning hagiography in the Verde Independent. The editor listed his "missteps," but couldn't bring himself to criticize the thinking behind them. Rather, Thorpe gets the blame only for exposing himself in public.

So we're left to conclude that the editor doesn't care what he thinks, only that he got caught at it.

If the editor thought like a newsman, he would be thanking his lucky stars that a politician would be demonstrating so clearly and so voluntarily the motivations behind his public-policy decisions. This is exactly the sort of factor that voters most need to know about the people offering to represent their interests in the statehouse and in Washington. But rather than express any concern that the Representative may not be acting in a manner worthy of his position or in the best interests of his constituents, the editor only tells him to button up his fly, a guy helping a guy out. This identifies the editor as a willing crony, exactly the opposite of the public-interest watchdog that is the most important responsibility of a free press.

This is what we're seeing with the Courier's endorsements of Prescott Council candidates as well, of course. Councilman Blair has a long history as a flasher of ugliness, and Mayor Kuykendall recently joined the fray in a Courier interview by accusing a grieving firefighter widow of greed while minimizing her as a "neat little lady." But they didn't rate mention in this editorial. That might be a little too close to home for the editor.

At least Thorpe will have to answer to his constituents for his "missteps" next year. It's a pity the editor doesn't face the same kind of accountability.

Cantlon: Vote, dammit.

If you're registered in Prescott you've probably received your ballot for the first round of the Council election. In today's column Tom sketches out the salient issues and candidate list with entirely too much equanimity. One thing he doesn't mention is that this ballot represents the highest-impact vote on the regular cycle.

Historically the first-round vote attracts the smallest proportion of eligible voters in the smallest constituency that isn't a micro-division (like school boards, fire districts, etc.). If you want bang for your buck in a vote, this is the one you can't miss. Ten or twenty votes can make a crucial difference here, and this time there is a very real potential for fundamentally changing the majority position of Council. You don't want to miss this one, spread the word.

News You Won't Find in the Courier, part 499: The next redistricting fight

Roll Call reports that AZ Republicans are organizing to rig the 2020 redistricting process in their favor. This is important, check it out.

If Dems could be half this organized and focused, we'd see some remarkable progress in this state.

Editorial: Helpful suggestions for (and from) people who aren't paying attention

I have to wonder whether the unnamed editor's obviously heavy teevee habit is eroding his attention span.

In today's column he proposes to "defrost debate" in Congress on immigration reform with the institution of "a national E-Verify system" of the sort that is "already in place here in Arizona." It's with some pain that I'm forced to confirm what you and every sixth-grader already know, that E-verify began and continues as a national system, with over 1,400 employers signing up for it every week, says the DHS website.

This bang-your-forehead-on-the-desk level of stupid isn't just an outrider in this piece, I'm afraid. The editor's characterization of the obviously-can't-ever-work border fence as a "good idea" is just as dumb as his subtext assumption that appealing to Latino voters is the only motivation for reform in Congress. What takes the cake is his characterization of the debate as "deport them all" versus "admit as many immigrants as possible," showing conclusively that when he turns to the teevee for news, he's got Fox on speed-dial.

The greatest disservice to his readers, however, is in completely missing why immigration reform is stalled in the House: extremist Republicans are working constantly to deny the administration anything it wants in terms of legislation. In point of simple fact the current outline of reform is built entirely of Republican ideas, as the editor should know, but Republicans won't vote for them if they think the President might support them in some way. There are no negotiable solutions, as the editor so hopefully suggests, as long as one side continues to play a purely political power game and refuses to negotiate.

Lately the editor is starting to make Buz Williams' columns look well researched. Ack.

Daddy hates me, mommy!

Today's edition brings us news that, as expected from the beginning, FEMA action in Yarnell will not be forthcoming, along with some unbelievably high bloviation from the unnamed editor, Governer Brewer, Rep. Tobin and even Sen Pierce, saying in plain terms that it's because the federal government dislikes Arizona. What bunk.

This flows of course from the local rhetoric of the past few years around Arizona's pointless and idiotic suits challenging federal authority, and the inference that the decisions around them have been emotional rather than legal, presumably because the decision-making has been emotional at Arizona's end.

Oddly enough, even the professional Obama-haters of the national right-wing media have passed on the FEMA story, at least as of this writing.

It's not hard to see why. FEMA spokesman Dan Watson: "FEMA, by law, cannot duplicate benefits provided by insurance companies or other federal agencies. In this case ... it was determined that the damage to uninsured private residents from this event was not beyond the response and recovery capabilities of the state/local governments, and voluntary agencies." the agency refers Arizona to additional federal resources are available, such as SBA and HUD loans. These are checkable facts, and there has been no refutation of them.

I'm as sympathetic as anyone to the plight of a fixed-income homeowner who's lost everything. Perhaps some really had to make the choice between food and homeowner's insurance. But they also made the choice to live in fire country without insurance, and as I've written before, this result was always a strong possibility.

It is clearly true that the county and the state have the resources to cope with what's happened, and we will. So the idea that FEMA is withholding needed aid is just wrong.

Notice what's missing from the story, both in the Courier and the Republic: no quote from a congressional representative, no senator, no Yarnell homeowner, no county official. It seems to me that any news organization worth its salt would have made those calls to confirm the claim of need. This is how the business slants coverage when editors desire it.

The editor, Governor and our state representatives are instead using the Yarnell homeowners as a political stick for beating up on the President, an opportunistic, cynical and ultimately futile effort that will no doubt backfire among their own base voters.

Arizonans have their faults, but neediness isn't one of them. I'm sure the irony of the Governor whining for federal aid after spending her entire tenure railing against federal interference is not lost on most Republicans. I don't expect it will turn them into Democrats, but it could easily result in credible primary challenges from the intelligent wing of the party. And yeah, Yarnell will heal.

Cantlon: Resisting the new normal

My friend Tom operates his own independent small business, as I do, so for me there's a certain disconnect in his column today, in which he highlights the challenges for workers presented with our general economic shift away from long-term employment.

With his reference to "our grandparents" Tom recognizes that the employment regime that Americans came to take for granted as our birthright (the "American Dream") was an ephemeral phenomenon. It evolved from the guild-like practices of the 19th century, in which workers chose or inherited a skill and basically stuck with it to the end, with the infusion of roaring profits here based on Europe's unfortunate self-immolation in the 20th. Corporations went big and then bigger, chewing through what looked like endless resources for endless profits. Workers demanded a piece of that pie, and employers could afford it, bringing in health and till-you're-dead retirement benefits. We had a generation or so of this following WW2. It began to break up in the '70s, and wages have stagnated in real terms ever since. Employment security and benefit standards have been in steady decline for half a century. So the halcyon days that Tom references were clearly an economic anomaly not likely to return anytime soon.

As in the rapidly changing 19th century, today's situation isn't good for people with low or outdated skills. But also like then, today's yet more rapid roil of change favors adaptability and embracing the new.

As the unimaginably fast climate change we're experiencing makes it impossible for many species to adapt, rapid economic change leaves many people less able to cope. This is a problem of education and training, obviously, but I see it more as a problem of expectations of the sort Tom leans into today.

The desperate straits of cities like Detroit and even large corporations like GM are rooted in those expectations too. How could anyone expect enough continuing profit to support open-ended pensions and benefits for an open-ended number of workers? Human dignity demands that the company reward the worker who took care of it, but it's clear now that the system we chose failed to account for important variables, like shifting industrial structure and worker longevity.

This doesn't mean that we have to return to squalid exploitation of workers, or what I call the Republican utopia. I think rather that we need to abandon the child-parent model of our relationship with our earning lives, grow up and accept more individual responsibility as entrepreneurs.

Every small retailer or service provider knows intimately that their businesses depend on their own work ethic, ability to ride out adverse times, and the broad uncertainties of the marketplace. My own business could dry up in any given five minutes, and I've accepted that risk from the beginning, placing more value on the freedom that this uncertain life affords me and faith in my own ability to adapt to whatever comes. But there's another less obvious angle.

My business has been generally reliable for over 25 years because of the mutual respect I share with my clients for our relationships. This is how things are done in Japan, and why I have no interest in selling my services to American companies.

Beyond training Americans for greater workplace flexibility and adaptability, which I think is vitally important to our industrial future, we have to bring the values of community to bear in a world where you're no longer a worker, you're a supplier, whether of goods, skills, labor or time, and the only job security is in the loyalty that you build with your customers. Remember loyalty?

For employers, or rather labor customers, the incipient shortage left by boomers leaving the labor force (and remaining active as consumers) means maintaining workplace cultures and conditions that respect the people involved and build those relationships. The concerns that go further in sharing the benefits and profits will do better and be more sustainable through the inevitable ups and downs of a more steady-state economy. I can't see us putting up with the currently ridiculous labor/owner income differential, it will eventually collapse as it did in the late 19th century and again in the 1930s. We have another opportunity ahead to learn from our mistakes and take measures to do better, by recognizing that the business does better long-term where everyone involved does better from it.

But if we continue to pine for a Mad Men-style top-down economic world, which was always a bit overstated and is now no longer even possible, it will distract all of us from the opportunities the new world presents. Don't expect to be able to lay back and get fat, it'll probably never be like that again. In truth there was never any real job security — that was luck — and everything is and always will be temporary. We'll have to learn to see that as a good thing.

There is certainly an important role for economic policy to play in helping build what Peter Vogel calls "entrepreneurial ecosystems" to support this kind of business culture. Check it out.