We just had a fabulous interview with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight. She also gave a great talk at the TED conference in '08. Check it out. Then listen to Healthy Medicine at 1pm this Saturday and Sunday on KJZA/KJZP, 89.5 and 90.1FM.
Paula plays dutiful steno for the Governor as she stumps for the sales-tax initiative. The enormous pushback from the right, as seen in in the comments, would be amusing if it weren't so blockheaded and ill-informed. The fur is flying as everyone throws their favorite myths into the fray.
Myth 1: The tax won't really be temporary, they'll just keep it going. I've seen the legislation and its ironclad sunset provision, and in order to extend it the Legislature would have to write a new bill and either vote for it themselves, which they are obviously too frightened to even attempt, or get us to vote for it again.
Myth 2: The Republicans want more taxes to support unnecessary programs -- they can cut a lot more. The cognitive disconnect that allows people to maintain this idea without heads exploding amazes me. Our entire state government has been underfunded for decades as Republicans exploited every chance to reduce taxes and ignored every opportunity to restructure the revenue system on a more reliable and sustainable basis. Beyond programmatic efficiencies like reducing education paperwork, there really isn't anything significant left in the budget to cut that won't severely hurt vital programs or cause significant cost increases elsewhere.
Myth 3: Money is being spent on "government" that should be spent on education. Take a look at any pie chart of the Arizona budget: education and health care are already the vast majority of it, and administration is a sliver.
Myth 4: The schools are already well funded, they're just incompetent. There's no public school in America with sufficient resources to provide sufficient education to prepare students for real life and citizenship in the 21st century, and Arizona is consistently near the bottom of the rankings on both the funding and result scales. Yes, we could be spending what we spend more efficiently by demanding less of our education professionals in terms of paperwork and such, but we'd still be way behind the curve in giving kids the educational opportunities they need and we need them to have.
Myth 5: A temporary sales tax is the best way to bridge this temporary problem in the economy. No, more sales tax is probably the least smart way to fix a problem caused in greatest part by overreliance on sales taxes for revenue. It's just the easiest to get through the Legislature. Sales taxes are regressive in that they fall most heavily on those less able to pay, and they tend to dry up at exactly the point where recessive economic cycles increase the need for state services, as we have just experienced so famously.
The Republicans have taken our state economy for a long joyride, trashed it and left it in the farmer's field. They're culpable, but we're the adults who have to deal with the mess. Further, if we don't pass Prop 100 and tax ourselves more, the hammer falls harder on our kids and teachers -- that's built into the budget already. There is no alternative mechanism ready to fix that barring a magic and completely unforeseen infusion from the federal level through the Governor's office. We really don't have much choice about the sales tax -- we have to call the tow truck, pick the heap up and get it fixed. But as voters we do have the opportunity to fire the people who have been making the wrong decisions that led us here, and install those who understand the problem and will apply a better vision for our future.
The unnamed Courier editor agrees that APS needs to slow down and that power lines don't necessarily warrant unchallenged right-of-way on Prescott streets. He even risked the 'p' word in urging utilities to "adopt more progressive policies about neighbors' coexistence with trees," at which point I about fell off my chair. But again I reached the end of the column disappointed that the editor can't seem to get beyond the surface of the issue.
The problem is far larger than one poorly planned power line vs one old Ponderosa pine. It's far larger than the widely reported gratuitous and radical destruction of trees by APS as well.
The situation that made the news came about because the rules changed a couple of times on how far lines must be spaced away from trees, and rather than provide a longer-term solution and move the lines, APS (with the City's blessing) has chosen instead to mow down trees that have been perfectly OK for many decades. The editor seems to have missed that dynamic entirely.
But that's still not the whole picture. Look around. We normally see right past it, but if you open your eyes a little wider you may notice that the view in most Prescott neighborhoods is dominated by electrical lines and raw poles. We've come to accept it as normal, but it's nasty to look at and, given weather and all sorts of moving hazards, unsafe and unreliable. Its only virtue is that it's relatively cheap. Should that be the primary value in this transaction?
APS is a monopoly provider sanctioned by the state for our area. We have no choice about that. In return for this captive market, it's both legally and ethically right to demand that the company serve our community values as well as it does its shareholders.
The hundred-year legacy of overhead power and communication lines is not a cherished tradition, it's always been an eyesore and safety hazard. A forward-thinking community that cares about quality of life will find ways to gradually move that creaky old infrastructure underground as roads, sidewalks and alleyways are repaired and replaced. Conserving our trees is an important part of a bigger picture, the sort of vision for our community that our elected leaders and City staff should bear in the front of their minds at all times.
My introduction to the word biz included extensive training in typography, the arcane and underappreciated art that makes printed text both beautiful and easier to read. Despite what you see increasingly on the web, that art is even more important online, where readers are often reluctant to read from the screen.
So it's with some frustration that I've seen the style change on dcourier.com from paragraph separations to no separations and no indents. It's been bad enough that the Courier editors generally insist on splitting what should be paragraphs up into individual sentences. By removing any indication of the head of the line, they've made a mess of the page, and as a result I'm sure many readers tire and give up. That's bad for public information and it's bad in terms of eyes on pages and the revenues they bring into the paper.
This change happened a little while ago, and I've been holding off commenting on it in hopes that it was a transitory glitch someone was working to fix.
I expect it came about porting stories to the site from the paper edition, where the typography software automatically indents body text, and no one has bothered to set up a short conversion routine to simply double the end-of-line character. That's just one of many ways to skin this cat, it's easy and will cost nothing. Since the editors apparently don't care, can someone in IT just handle it? Your readers won't necessarily understand well enough to thank you, but they will get to the end of the story a lot more often and the Courier may then be able to afford to keep paying you.
Update, April 27: Perhaps this did the trick.
The unnamed Courier editor gets it right today in calling the City Council (specifically, Messrs. Lamerson, Blair and Hanna, who forced the issue) on its secret meeting about "vagrancy," which is code for brown and homeless people.
If there's any way to legally justify invoking executive session for this topic under Open Meetings law, Council has an obligation to provide that publicly, and I expect the Courier to follow up and demand that public documentation. Short of that, some pertinent questions to the Attorney General's office are in order.
You've earned a cookie on this one, editor, now follow through and show Council that you mean it.
Jon Stewart spots the strategy in the senator's scrapping his "maverick" brand.
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Today's editorial by the unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger is too dull to matter, but as I was slogging through it I happened to notice the stock-image photo that the editor chose for it on the website, illustrating a handshake. It would also be too cliche to mention, but the details of the image struck me: the hands of two older white men in identical suits.
Despite the editor's applause for the women selected for honors in the article, the Courier's image of "leadership" remains, probably unconsciously, firmly wrapped in the company-man stereotypes of the 1950s.
In his pseudoblog, Richard complains that "ever-swelling waves of political correctness threaten to erode the very foundation of the family unit." He doesn't mention the slowly building wave of equal protection nationwide for non-heterosexuals, but his dog whistle is good and loud, just to let us know that unashamed, blockheaded bigotry is not dead in Courierworld.
What's amusing is the photo he put on as an illustration, apparently shot by himself, showing a pair of happy newlyweds. Not all that long ago that white Marine and his brown bride could have been jailed in Arizona for that photo. The state instituted anti-miscegenation laws in 1865 and did not repeal them till 1962.
I imagine Richard's father in the role of Courier columnist in 1960, opining mightily that an "ever-swelling wave of disgusting racial impropriety threatens to erode the very foundation of the family unit." Ack.
Whenever you read some variation on "political correctness," dear reader, bear in mind that it can be fairly translated as "positive change that frightens the writer." What we've learned over and over again is that the fears that seem so important to one generation are often laughable to the next.
I have no idea what the headline is supposed to mean, but Randall's column yesterday really gets to the meat of most of our big social problems. I've long advocated the idea that corporatism is the mostly hidden third force that distorts our social systems and politics beyond reason, and that corporations use our progressive-vs-conservative mental model to deceive us into giving them pretty much everything they want from us. It's a really important point, and we almost never hear it in our mainstream media, which despite all the screaming are neither conservative nor progressive, but firmly corporatist.
I appreciate that Randall used the health-care bill (which you can reference via the sidebar link at left) as his main example. Universal health care is something progressives have been fighting for since the '40s, and so conservative readers might expect Randall to favor anything that seems to move in that direction. One of the most effective ways of convincing people is to drive the snakes from your own nest first. The commenters don't seem to get the point at all, but that's par for this course, I'm afraid. What pains me is that conservatives so rarely seem to notice that corporations are equally inimical to their interests. Until we can see that we all share the pain of this cancer at the heart of our society, we'll never begin to address it.
I broadly agree with Randall here, but I'm not quite so cynical that the issue will end by simply enriching corporations again. They don't always win all the marbles, as our relatively shallow but firm national commitment to environmental protection is showing. Sometimes they're even teachable. New laws make small changes in a large, dynamic system, and more changes always follow. We have choices about where this first step will lead. If we can maintain clear vision and some hardheaded optimism, we can go far.
In today's rambling, apparently unedited editorial, it's difficult to tease out what the unnamed Courier editor is trying to say. He details the costs to school districts of the retraction of recently instituted funding for all-day K, and how they're allowing parents to make up the shortfall to keep the program going. (He doesn't mention that in relying on this sort of thing in cutting the budget, the Legislature has simply pushed the costs back onto taxpayers by other means than direct taxation.)
After pointing out the standards that kids are expected to meet for entering the first primary grade, he concludes that "the question we should be asking" is "are we putting too much pressure on them? Is childhood over way too soon?" and I have to wonder what planet the editor is inhabiting. Does he really think that all the kids growing up unsocialized and prepared only to be perpetual teenagers aren't getting enough of childhood? Yikes. Our entire society seems dedicated to never getting past adolescence, and it's getting worse, not better.
The idea that education is somehow separate from childhood is ridiculous. Education is the raw essence of childhood -- it's the whole point. Yes, there are a lot of important experiences that our factory-style education model does not usually provide for children, but that's not to say we couldn't be doing a lot better with it. That takes imagination, vision, dedicated professionals and the sort of serious funding that most "conservatives" won't countenance.
What would the editor prefer to early childhood education -- more TV? More baby-warehouse daycare with hordes of other kids? Or is the core idea, once again, forcing mothers out of the workplace and into barefoot-and-pregnant mode, where so many "conservatives" think they truly belong?
What's going on with Mars, and an exciting, inspiring mission that's ready to go. At 18 minutes this one's a little longer than usual, but way worth it.
Tim fires off an angry column about a frustrating experience on the phone, only to have commenters point out that he just failed to follow clear instructions.
The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger was hard at work again yesterday rewriting Tuesday's story on the closure of the local state water-agency office. As opinion the overstuffed chair offers little more than "that's life" and that no one will care very much, and since growth has ground to a near-halt, the water problem is on hold anyway.
Perhaps if the editor were in the chair while this was going on he'd have remembered that we were declared in violation of regulations against groundwater mining over ten years ago, and plenty more still-thirsty people are here now. The lull in growth we're experiencing is an opportunity to regroup, reassess our situation and create a new, more sustainable vision for our area without the pressure of thousands more homes going up and millions more dollars skewing the picture. So it's arguably more important that ADWR maintain a presence here now, to keep tabs on what's happening more directly and to be a trustworthy resource for local policymakers.
The editor's history of advocacy for unsustainable growth and disregard for environmental concerns belies his unconcern about the loss of our state water watchdogs -- this really makes him happy.
Notice also that the the lull isn't stopping the pipeline builders: Big Chino bills move through committees
The unnamed Courier editor is mystified as to why the Obama administration might be willing to allow oil drilling off the East Coast and north of Alaska.
"Why the sudden change? We're going broke and supporting countries that harbor terrorists otherwise," he writes, giving himself a pat on the back for a pat answer. It's almost unsporting to point out that no, what the administration has done, even if it results in lots of new oil platforms dotting the continental shelves, will not begin to reduce oil importation or significantly change the country's economic prospects. There simply isn't enough oil there to make much difference, and getting the things built and producing takes many years. The arguments against it during the Bush administration still make the same amount of sense.
From what I've seen, the President is looking at two factors. In practical terms, well-run environmentally safe operations could be producing much higher-priced oil 15 or 20 years from now, when supplies are clearly dwindling worldwide and we'll still be shifting to sustainable energy sources. I suspect that despite the vast areas tagged for potential leasing, very few locations will both have useful oil in the ground and be suitable for extraction given environmental factors, so let's not get all twisted up in rosy (or nightmarish) scenarios just yet. I'll have a lot more trust in this administration to put rules in place to ensure that the southeast coast doesn't wind up looking like Alaska after the Valdiz than I would the Bush administration, which would have happily converted the Washington Monument into a derrick if it thought there were two barrels of oil under it somewhere.
The second and far more important factor is taking the issue away from the "drill, baby, drill" Republicans. With this move the President has effectively eliminated the criticism that he's only interested in solar panels on hippie domes as an energy policy. The Southeast can hope for thousands of jobs in building and operating rigs someday (not incidentally helping rebuild New Orleans as well), plus perhaps more environmental survey, assessment and monitoring jobs, building up a more useful and needed industry. It will also embarrass the financial Morlocks when they get what they've been saying they wanted all these years but won't actually take the financial risk and follow through. There's not enough oil there, see. The same goes for those Republican-run coastal states when the rich Republican folks in the beachfront condos start standing up for their right to a clear horizon and clean sand.
This will bring in better results for Democrats at the midterms, and could pull enough Dem votes together on energy to push through some more serious reforms quickly.
As for the editor's confidence that "Republicans surely will back Obama," I'm afraid he's in for disappointment on that score. The Reps have chosen a strategy -- no -- and they will be sticking with it at least until they take another drubbing in November. The current crop has neither the ideas nor the imagination to do otherwise.
This is the kind of total BS that our Senator is dishing out (video from Mar 13).
The necessary questions:
Does he really know so little about what he's talking about -- he's supposed to be an expert in this area -- or is he just flat-out lying?
How could either of these scenarios possibly do anything but disqualify him from yet another six-year term representing us in the Senate?
Why the heck was he doing a town hall in New Hampshire?
I'll try not to make too much of the unnamed Courier editor's headline fail here, although it's really hard to resist something so Freudian-slippish as "war on health goes on" from so dutiful a soldier in that cause. I'll even skip lightly over his reuse of the photo from yesterday that makes Speaker Pelosi look so bad. What we need to talk about, once again, is content and propaganda.
The editor tries to make it look like he's rising to the 50,000-foot level and standing above the grisly fray. What's he's really doing is reinforcing myths and unreasonable doubts to make political points.
The "unanswered questions" the editor alludes to are in the main well answered, but the reactionaries won't hear it. (This is not unlike to the inability among a small minority to accept that the president was born in the US.) He asserts that few in Congress have read the bill, which may be technically true, but the implication is that few "if any" understand it, which is certainly not true, and further that the language just dropped out of the sky from somewhere, rather than evolved in the fire of intense negotiation. And yes, there will be unintended consequences, but that's true of every piece of legislation ever passed. The editor's dark foreboding is just theatre, and you'll notice that he doesn't even try to back it up with a single fact.
The parliamentary "hurdles" the editor mentions were apparently only important to Fox News commentators, as the bill is expected to breeze through the Senate this week. The constitutional challenges being mounted by a small minority of state AGs ("aspiring governors," as I saw it put so well this morning) are political theatre as well, though given our Bush-packed Supreme Court, a few nuts might try with not unreasonable hope to get slavery declared constitutional again.
He waves the red flag of abortion, always good for a roar from a certain small constituency. That straw man has been knocked down so many times it should be in the same bin with the birther conspiracy.
"Polls showed a majority of Americans opposing the bill right up until Sunday night's vote," intones the editor. He was accurate about that until today, sort of, but not in support of his argument that the Dems are risking electoral losses for it, since the same polls he was reading found that 52% of respondents either supported the bill or favored something more liberal. Even that's moot today, as new polls are coming out showing even higher favorables, vindicating several pundits I heard weeks ago predicting that once the thing was in the bag, the majority would embrace it.
Finally, evoking the tea-party wingnuts protesting the bill as some sort of decisive political force while ignoring the many more who publicly gave thanks for its passage is just silly. The editor is looking for what he wants to see in the world, and seeing it. He's either trying to fool you, or fooling himself. This is absolutely not the sort of person that you want running any news outlet.
Joanna takes a stab at laying out what's in the bill, doing what a reporter should be doing. Then the editors come in and turn it into a political debate piece by running a sidebar with comments from McCain and Kirkpatrick.
They won't let it go, it all has to be about politics. This keeps voters confused and stirred up emotionally so they can't think with any clarity about what's actually happening. The photos are more than twice the size of the sidebar, top of page one: so what's the message?
Yesterday we saw several particularly scary comments from a guy signing himself "1 of we the people" and identifying with the tea-party cult, expressing that "only white men are responsible enough" to carry guns and make public policy decisions, etc. The editor came in this morning and trimmed out the worst of it, but we still have part of his rant about the military being "out to get us" to justify violence.
This sort of paranoia is the inevitable result of whipping up fear over nothing and using it for political gain. Readers have to bear in mind that as we chuckle over the juvenile political antics of the Courier editors, there are serious consequences for allowing our media to jump off into extremism. "1 of we the people" is among a tiny number of sick individuals who eat this stuff up, and as they move deeper into it, eventually one of them goes over the line and starts hurting people.
As it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and our only defense against it is prevention. A big part of that is moderating our public discourse and acting like responsible adults.
Update, Tuesday: Like I said.
Isn't it precious how the Courier editors found ways to undermine the news of the passage of health-care legislation?
The photo of Speaker Pelosi gaping in laughter is pretty bad, but this piece is a particularly egregious abuse of a news page in service to propaganda. Carried as news, it's nothing but political opinion, and obviously belongs on the op-ed page.
This is childish, guys, and your adult readers are generally capable of understanding it as such. Please make an attempt to grow up. You've got at least three more years of Democratic administration to suffer through. If you whine and tantrum like this over everything, why should anyone, left, right or center, trust anything in your paper?
