Stealth voters

The AZ Capitol Times (sub req)  is reporting that the shift in voter registrations to the "other" columns continues, favoring Republicans against Democrats in some key races this fall. The article leaves independents out of the vote calculus, so its conclusion has a pretty high bogosity ratio, but the chart is interesting:

This clearly shows that the shift to independent status is almost entirely from the Democratic voter rolls, and from it I'd like to speculate that lots of Dems are waking up to the idea that voting in the Republican primary is where the action is. 

If you're registered as a Dem and you'd like to have something to say about who's representing us in our area, it makes a lot of sense to reregister as independent and pull the R ballot in primary. You've got till the end of July. Check into it. 

A license to print money

In a blog post yesterday, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman calls the lie that the US economy is headed for some sort of Greek-style meltdown, based in part on this chart, showing that US bond rates have reached their lowest point since the war:

The logic here relies on the intelligence of the market: if investors were concerned about the US ability to fulfill its debt obligations, bond rates would be trending higher. The opposite is clearly the case. 

There's another important takeaway from this that Krugman doesn't mention. As the cost of borrowing (a bond is essentially a fixed-rate, fixed-term loan from an investor) goes down, investment based on bond capitalization (infrastructure, education, jobs programs, energy retrenchment, etc.) makes more sense economically, as the returns on the investment improve. New lower-rate bonds can also be used to pay off older higher-rate bonds, a standard move that's a lot like refinancing your home, but with much lower associated cost.

Obviously an unusual  flood of new bonds  on the market alters their value overall, but within sensible limits these low values support larger borrowing for economic stimulus. Handled cannily, this can actually reduce projected debt service even as it raises short-term deficits. 

This puts the US in the best position since the 1950s to leverage prosperity from debt, making massive debt-based stimulus more practical than at any time in generations. 

Hear, hear

Senator Kyl eats your brain

In which the retiring Arizona senator characterizes our recovering economy as half-dead and proposes that we should turn it back over to the Republicans, who will finish it off with a bullet to the head.

He starts with the monthly employment report, that is the unexamined bottom-line number of 80,000 jobs gained (like, new jobs for everyone in the quad-city area in a month), characterizing it as  "disappointing." This presumably opposed to the end of the Bush administration, where we started losing twice that many a month.

I get it, if we want to put the zoom back in the economy and make more money for the rich white guys that might trickle down to us peons, we want to see bigger employment numbers, sure.

But let's bust out some figures to get a little clearer idea of what's actually going on.

The number of people employed in the private sector has broken through its level at the beginning of the Obama administration and is steadily clocking upward:

Surprised? I was. That's right, private-sector employment has fully recovered and is gaining strength, with about 3 million people hired the past year.

So why is our unemployment number still high? Take a look at state and local public-sector jobs — cops, firemen, teachers, administrators, builders, maintenance workers, etc:

Check that scale above. Since '09 700,000 people have been pushed out of the public sector and the trend is still downward.

It gets worse. The chart below counts federal employees. (The spike was census hiring.)

That's another 200,000 jobs lost, and trending down again.

So our overall employment problem is clearly in the public sector, where states, municipalities, school districts and federal agencies have been laying off droves of people.

These charts are from a 24-chart presentation on Business Insider that gives a very solid, graphic perspective on these cross-currents in our economy. Worth a look.

Eating our brains since '87.

Now, class, who's responsible for this public-sector collapse in employment and investment? Right, it's the critters in Congress who've demanded their pound of flesh in the form of shrinking government — critters not at all unlike our own Senator Kyl — as well as Republican governors, legislators, county officials and city councillors who have insisted on cutting jobs willy-nilly rather than do anything to shore up revenues and maintain the vital services that public employees provide.

The result is a national malaise and a more or less stagnant situation for Main Street while Wall Street and International Street rake in hyperbolically increasing profits.

It's a zombie economy, maybe, and we're doing something wrong, absolutely. But I think it's listening to ideological zombies like Mr Kyl. Can we please stop now?

Editorial: Quantum effect of lying

In today's column the unnamed editor reviews his fact-check fail in the case of last month's puff piece on William Few, who apparently made some claims about his military record that were untrue. The editor seems unhappy about this, but generally deflects the paper's responsibility for reinforcing the story back on its subject, while refusing to call his lies anything worse than "unacceptable."

Fictionalized personal war stories are somewhat ickier than fish stories, I'll grant. But as the Supreme Court ruled last week, there's nothing illegal about it. That comes as a relief to anyone who's ever padded a resume.

The editor, on the other hand, sees specific harm in the practice. He says, "Misrepresenting one's military service is much more serious, though. In doing so, a person seeks to elevate his or her own perceived value while diminishing that rightfully belonging to someone who really did the work, faced the dangers and accomplished the missions," (emphasis mine).

This is an Evel Knievel  leap in logic, describing a world that contains a fixed amount of respect for military service that can be stolen, borrowed and presumably bought, sold and donated. In this world a lie on one side of an opaque screen magically makes a non-liar on the other side less believable, a sort of quantum credibility effect.

One man's excessive bragging does not affect the perception of someone else's deeds, editor, that's just ridiculous. This is why it's not illegal. When one tells lies to do harm to another, we call it fraud, and it's prosecutable. Finding out that someone lied to you is a bummer, but you can't sue for a bummer, sorry. 

A little more critical thinking is in order here, and some reflection on our culture's recent penchant for elevating soldiers to demigod status. What's next, prosecuting a guy for overstating his minor-league baseball experience?

Cantlon: Another Great Recession is on horizon

I was a little startled to see how my friend Tom, whose style is normally quite carefully measured and his arguments stolid and calm, breaks out in today's column to a new level of alarm and apparent deep anger at the craven gamblers who hold our economy hostage to profit at any cost.

He's been reading Matt Taibbi, who's always inspiring in showing how to combine solid reporting with a strong point of view and emotional clarity. Taibbi takes no prisoners, and is often ahead of the pack in getting to the root of a complex problem.

The house always wins.

But I gather Tom's just reached his boiling point on the greed-is-good culture, which ought to soundly piss off everyone who cares more than a gnat's eyelash about social stability and economic security. It truly amazes me that Americans continue to tolerate the crazy casino that has accumulated on the foundations of what was once a perfectly sensible trade in equities as the basis for capital concentration to accomplish positive objectives. As we've seen over the past few years, everything we care about is at risk every day to the greedy whims of rank sociopaths.

The obvious question that Tom raises is how to go about containing the threat. Miles and miles of ink have been spent discussing how we could monkey around on the fringes and maybe do a little good. A tax on equity trades is one example of trying to rig incentives to make investors act more sensibly. I'm afraid it's too late for this kind of small thinking, though. Already the sociopaths have gathered  too much wealth to themselves to care much about fingernail parings from their profit margins, so this sort of reform would do little more than hurt people and companies who are already investing sensibly to serve real needs.

What makes sense to me is finding a way to legally define and strictly limit purely speculative and short-term investment, for example by requiring hard settlements and transfers, pricing equities according to investment term (like bank CDs, with penalties for early resale accruing to the invested company), and outright bans worldwide on computer-triggered trading. If we can slow the system down, we can hope that traders will think more carefully about what they're doing, and if we rig the system to favor longer-term investment, we'll see better reflection of real values.

Considering that even brief discussion of this area of public policy causes immediate eye-glazing in most people, I have to wonder what, with his call to the streets, Tom is hoping they will write on their protest signs. Perhaps he'll expand on this next week.

Tapped Out

Pop Rocket, July 2012








The annual monsoon is upon us, or it should be. Late immigrants to our area will be forgiven for scoffing at the idea that significant amounts of water fall from the sky this month, as the weather trend has been progressively drier in recent years. June and the anticipation of July always remind me of our dire situation with water and our glacially slow progress in doing anything about it.
     Contrary to appearances, we're not completely paralyzed. I recently spoke with Prescott Valley Water Resources Manager John Munderloh about a pilot project he's working on with the Upper Verde Watershed Protection Coalition (which in documents goes by the mind-numbing acronym UVWPC) to study various engineering schemes to keep rainwater from evaporating and get it into our aquifers instead.
     It's called macro rainwater harvesting, and the plan is to take five half-acre plots donated by Chino Valley, treat them in different ways that promote concentration and penetration of water, and study and compare the results to come up with engineering cost-benefit analyses.
     This small pilot project has been in development for four years and will run for three, maybe five years before it offers conclusions. The five governments involved, including the Yavapai-Prescott Tribe, have put up $130,000 for it. If everything goes well, construction could begin late this summer.
     Obviously no one's planning to bulldoze vast areas of the county and do landforming and soil amendments to catch rain. But on a scale of a few acres here and there in spots most conducive to recharging the aquifers, it could do some good. Says Munderloh, "The days of large single-source water projects may be waning. Those things have already been developed. There's probably not going to be another canal from the Colorado River for us. So we need to look at all the possible solutions. This may not be the panacea, but it may fill in a number of gaps."
     See, it's all about small percentages. Currently only about 2% of rain makes it into groundwater supplies. About the same amount runs off to sprinkle golf courses in Maricopa County. The rest evaporates after it hits the ground or transpires from plants. Encouraging another 1% to sink in could make our area far more sustainable long-term.
     It'll cost us, of course. Munderloh: "We have to let water supplies go by that would be cheap for us to appropriate, but because there's a senior appropriator downstream, we have to let the cheap water go, and we go after the more expensive stuff."
     This really brings home to me how we have to put a much higher priority on securing water resources. Other than some pretty tight individual conservation on a large scale, which no one in officialdom thinks we're ready to even contemplate, no option is easy. (Did I just mention that conservation is easy?)
     The UVWPC is moving ahead with this in a perfectly rational way, carefully looking at options, building consensus and doing long-term studies to get an idea of what sort of initiative will be most effective. On top of the physical challenges, we'll also have to satisfy a recently constituted committee in the state Legislature that nothing we're contemplating will have any effect on the big cities downstream.
     Given the already huge groundwater deficits we run every year to quench the thirst of a population too large for the ecosystem to carry, compounded by a decades-long drought with no end in sight and accelerating climate change promising worse, all this careful incrementalism sets my hair on fire. We're moving slower than grass growing, and there's no grass.
     Rick Shroads, president of Civiltec Engineering and the contractor handling the project, tells me there are other ideas on the table: "We have a menu of pilot projects that we'd like to do, but of course funding is our stumbling block." The coalition picked this project to fit its budget, essentially. The designs that it'll be testing for five years are already working elsewhere in the world, presumably racking up hard results daily. I try to imagine why we're not plugging those numbers into our spreadsheets and moving to the next phase, and all I can think is that Americans simply won't take anything seriously that's not invented here.
     This is not a problem we can put off for decades, and there's no silver bullet. We're already using a lot more water than we have coming in, and every sensible scientific projection shows progressively less coming in for the foreseeable future. All around us, the ghost towns show us what happened when the mines tapped out. Imagine how much more decisively a lack of water will wither our economy.
     We need a very serious concentration of human and monetary resources working this problem with old-school wartime priority if we're to hope to solve it. We're all going to have to kick in, and there's no getting around paying much more for water. (Think I mean "a lot more"? Double it.) That will come sooner or later, and the sooner it comes, the more time we have to build and balance a sustainable system. But bear in mind that anything we do with engineering will still depend on rain, and there will be less of that all the time. Use less. Now use less than that.

Courier confirms god is a fact

Front page top: "'Help from above' saved church camp." Oh, please.

The headline is in half quotes, yes, but the same idea is in the body of the piece without them. Obviously there was no miraculous event in the story. Humans started the fire, humans put it out.

Religionists talk like this all the time, sure, and there's nothing against putting such blather in news stories with attribution and quotes. The offensive sloppiness here comes from the editor's blind spot around religion. Some self-examination and professional review is in order. But to that I'll add an apology to the firefighters for cheapening their work in favor of the sky-pilot myth.

Update, Wednesday: It's fascinating how quickly and uniformly the Xtians rise up, recast criticism of the editor's mistake as an attack on the faith, and bemoan their persecution in the comments. The persecution mythos, inherited from Judaism, is one of the dangerous angles of this particular faith — if you believe someone's out to get you, it justifies all sorts of aggression.

Must read: Chart a la carte

ProPublica has a great interactive illustration identifying the big donors to the superPACs and the relative size of their contributions. And guess what — George Soros (Dr. Evil) doesn't appear on any of them. That ought to make right-wing heads explode.

Sparky's List

I heard this morning that Matt Groening is retiring his groundbreaking cartoon strip Life in Hell, which opened the door for an awful lot of great alt cartoonists and helped define the modern alt paper. In recent years the alts have been steadily evicting their cartoonists, uniformly citing budgetary concerns, and many great strips have bit the dust as a result.

One that hasn't yet is This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow, aka Dan Perkins. Years ago Dan's blog was the first I began reading regularly, and his bitingly satirical strip is a weekly pleasure for me. He works hard at it and is at the top of his game.

Like the rest of the artists in his corner of the industry, his income is falling, but he's not taking it lying down. He's set up a subscription service called Sparky's List, offering advance views of the strips delivered to your inbox weekly along with commentary and extras. Check it out here.

This kind of direct connection between artists and audiences has always been the most attractive potential of cyberspace for me. By leaving out the middlemen — the record companies, publishers, TV empires, movie distributors, etc. — that act as gatekeepers and profit sinks, both artist and audience get a better deal. But we have to get slightly up off the couch.

 (Just to give you an idea of what these artists are struggling to make, when I inquired about running This Modern World in Pop Rocket, Dan offered at $25 per strip. I forwarded that offer to Tim Wiederaenders* in January, and have heard not one word back since. Let's say I don't buy the argument that the toons are too expensive.)

 So if you're a participant rather than a consumer, I hope you'll consider joining Sparky's List, and watch for similar deals from artists of all sorts.

* In case you missed it, Pop Rocket is edited and published by the Courier.

Monkeywrenching: deadline looms

If you're registered as a Democrat and you'd like to have something to say about who represents us in the Legislature and the county building,  as mentioned in this month's Muggs (below) you can reregister as Independent or Other and participate in the Republican primary. But you only have till July 30 to change your registration.

We can do something to fix this.

Pass this idea around your Dem friends. It can take just a few votes to decisively swing some of these crowded primary races.

Linkage:
See just how easy it is to register to vote or change your registration.
Quit worrying about our confusing voter ID law and
request an early ballot.

Update, July 2: I could have sworn the county website said June 30 before, but it turns out I was wrong about the cutoff date, post updated to correct.

Messaging, old school

It's easy to forget that even in the most grave of world emergencies, naysayers will undermine good sense for profit. From the day when workers had hope and unions had real power, here's a fascinating bit of propaganda directed by Chuck Jones of Warner Bros, with lyrics by Broadway great Yip Harburg, for the UAW-CIO in support of the '44 Roosevelt campaign.



I have to think about the intended audience for this short. It wouldn't likely have been theatre audiences, as theatre bills were still controlled exclusively by the studios and I rather doubt this would qualify as a commercial draw. I'm guessing it would have been shown in union halls to build grassroots campaign strength.

Must read: What you know about the crime rate is probably all wrong

From The LA Times Nation section, today: Matt Pearce, "Think you know about crime in the U.S.? Think again"

This is ultimately more about how we perceive crime, and why, than about actual crime rates — and guess what, if you watch TV, you're more likely to have it wrong.

Editorial: Arts good for the soul, and dirt cheap!

Today the unnamed Courier editor gives a nice pat on the head to the arts, saying "Those of us who are financially able need to protect our artisans with our ongoing contributions."

The implication that spending money on art and artistic experiences is some sort of charitable activity indicates that the editor does not understand the very real value that the arts furnish.

Businesses don't install art or hire artists out of the goodness of their hearts, rather because it attracts customers and improves the customer experience.

Artists aren't looking for charity or begging to be heard out of some pitiful need for ego-boosting. As with any other product, what we make and do varies in value according to the needs and wants of the customer. But here the editor seems to be promulgating the blockheaded idea, widespread in our arid cultural landscape, that art has no real value, insidiously, and likely unconsciously, undermining the industry he purports to promote.

The paper could be far more active and powerful in helping to connect readers with the many opportunities to experience and participate in artistic experiences in our area. If the editors were to dedicate half as much ink to the broad range of subjects that constitute "the arts" as they do to the narrow band we call "sports," they could do a great deal to fulfill the sentiment that the editor expresses here, with ensuing benefit to our communities as a whole.

"The arts" are industry, no different in form from any other manufacturing or service industry. Artists of all stripes deserve respect for their skills, training and productivity -- respect in the form of cash payment for their services and products commensurate with their value. That a thriving arts industry improves quality of life for the community as a whole is indisputable, and a factor you can't get from a new mine or private prison. Yet our municipal leaders routinely bend over backward and expend millions of dollars to attract businesses that impair quality of life, while treating artists little better than homeless vagrants and paying no more than lip service for the great value they provide.

Muggs: Lockdown at the Orthodoxy Asylum

Pop Rocket, June 2012

Ken Bennett is not a stupid man. I've spoken professionally with our secretary of state many times over the past decade, and always found him to be a cut above most politicians, forthright, thoughtful, reasonable, practical and positive. For several years it's been pretty well accepted across the political spectrum that he will be Arizona's next governor, promising a step up from the hamhanded Brewer administration.
     With his history of savvy and adroit politics, I expected that Ken would be able to avoid the sort of train wreck that happened in May, when, just as he was coming out as an active candidate for 2014, he found himself in the national spotlight for the first time for hinting that he might leave the President's name off the Arizona ballot this fall. He's since backed away from that, but in retrospect the whole sorry episode can tell us a lot about why and how far the Party of Lincoln has gone off the rails.
     I believe Ken when he says he felt bound by his office to act when constituents demanded that he personally verify the President's birth certificate. It's my impression that he has a Boy Scout's sense of honor and duty about such things. Expecting this of others, he was unprepared when the State of Hawaii responded to his request with several months of a stiff middle finger.
     For its part, Hawaii had long since reached the end of its patience with this farcical issue and washed its hands of it, having verified and released documents ad nauseam to people who simply refuse to accept the facts. Its legislature even passed a bill specifically exempting the bureaucracy from having to waste more resources this way. Our own Governor Brewer had publicly stated that she'd looked into it when she was SoS, was satisfied with the word of Hawaii's governor in '08, and vetoed legislation last year, calling the birther issue a "path to destruction." Any informed observer could reasonably reject the idea that Secretary Bennett didn't know all this, and conclude that he must have been grandstanding for the extreme right.
     A bigger problem for Ken may be his decision to go back on a previous promise and get involved in the Romney campaign. As Secretary of State and our chief elections officer this is clearly a conflict of interest, evoking Ken Blackwell's shenanigans for the '04 Bush II campaign in Ohio. From my own experience with him I expect that our Ken would execute his responsibilities with integrity, but the simple optics of the matter make this a really bad idea.
     We can hope that he will respond to constituents again and correct this error, perhaps before this column hits the street. In getting to the why, the factor that most observers seem to be missing is the overheated echo chamber that the Arizona Republican Party has become.
     Republican majorities have been easy to make in the state lately, so for many years the main events in most of our political races have been the Republican primaries, where candidates have to differentiate themselves on how conservative they can claim to be. Smoking an hallucinogenic blend of helmetless iconoclasm, cowboy machismo, sophomoric libertarianism, intolerant religion and offhand racism, Arizona's Republican voters have moved increasingly toward demagogues, simpletons and religionists to make and administer our laws. The few remaining Democrats have become negligible in legislative debate, leaving the Republicans to identify the real opposition as the somewhat more centrist members of their own party, touching off an inevitable purge that has nearly wiped out those who won't toe the new politically correct line. Rinse and repeat for pure white sheets.
     The result is that within the capitol, the range of what's considered reasonable has shifted far to the right. Ideas that out here in the real world are obviously batty -- an official state firearm, demanding the surrender of federal lands, shackling women during birth, guns everywhere, drowning government in the bathtub -- seem perfectly reasonable down there. When the lunatics are running the asylum, you have to have doubts about your own flashes of sanity. So let's give Mr. Bennett a little benefit of the doubt. I expect he can learn, at least.
     A lot of reasonable Republicans have been purged from power and from the party itself, swelling the ranks of independent voters. This exacerbates the problem, of course, leaving an ever more extreme party core deserving of the satirical comparisons with the Taliban. Don't expect those new independents to vote Democrat, though.
     No, I can only see one way back toward sanity anytime soon, and that's much wider participation in the Republican primaries this August, and not just by independents. I want to encourage, even entreat, rural Democrats to reregister as independents, ask for the Republican primary ballot, do your homework and help try to move the party back toward the sensible center-right. Doing so doesn't make you a Republican or stain your integrity, rather it's a reasonable response to a dire situation for our state. Our economy simply cannot recover health with our legislative priorities so skewed toward nonsense.
     Some will call this monkeywrenching, and yeah, I'll take that. Given the mess he's in, I'll bet Ken Bennett will too.

We get mail: It seems I've touched a nerve with this. Susan Cohen writes in email:

Just because you think you can yell "Fire!" in a theatre doesn't mean you should. (Actually there's a law against doing that.) And there ought to be a law about your irresponsible reporting in the Pop Rocket, June 2012, page 3. Your asking rural Democrats to re-register as Independents and encouraging them to ask for the Republican primary ballot, in your words, "to help try to move the party back toward the sensible center-right," made me see red. You're asking voters to engage in this kind of behavior for your own selfish interest (much like Obama would). BTW, the reason "our economy simply cannot recover" is not because our legislative priorities are skewed; it's because we have illegal aliens tapping into resources causing more than half our State's deficit.

Stay out of our business and worry about your own team, Steve. I'm a precinct committeewoman for the Republican Party, and I pride myself in educating my precinct on the issues and the candidates. Don't do me any favors and keep your pie hole shut on this issue, please. And show some integrity, for Pete's sake.

Editorial: Do what he says, he's got a gun!

I'm sure I'm hearing a dog whistle blowing, but after three readings it's still hard to put a finger on what the unnamed editor is trying to say today. The piece is pretty vague, so it's easy to read in what you want.

If there's a thesis here, it seems to turn on the idea that our individual prosperity depends on confidence in our national craps table, Wall Street. Yet he spends two thirds of the editorial explaining why people are sensibly staying away from the numbers game that so recently brought the world economy down, robbing individual investors blind along the way. He makes a lot of sense up till the old switcheroo:

"Keeping in mind that the stock market is not the economy, but a confidence game itself, restoring trust in the markets will be crucial."

As usual he offers no basis in reality for this article of faith, and I expect that he takes it so for granted that he can't imagine questioning it. But no, the speculative markets have only recently been significant to real economies, and their proper place is minor.

So after establishing this firm footing in the air outside his third-story window, he moves to his proposition: that the result of the presidential election will be the main factor in the health of the markets and therefore economic prosperity for all. The dog whistle whispers, "Make the right choice or we're doomed," and since Wall Street has to like the President to make money, the right choice is supposed to be the Republican, I'm guessing

Briefly glimpsing a path away from the insanity of the past thirty years, the editor retreats into the comforting groundhog den the corporatists have assigned him. Don't rock the boat, he tells us, just give the gangsters what they want and maybe they won't hurt us again.

Editorial: Franking frankers!

The unnamed editor is incensed that our Congressman uses his free mail privilege to send us campaign advertising disguised as constituent service information.
     I totally get it, and I agree that most of the time our public officials either don't know or don't care that they're supposed to be using the mail this way to genuinely inform voters about what they're doing. It's reached the point of absurdity, true enough.
     But let's step back for a sec. The franking privilege is one of the few facilities for members of Congress to communicate directly with constituents. Imagine for a moment a theoretical Congresscritter who, out of a pure sense of duty, truly wants to let me know how he's voting on issues and why, what legislation he's seeing, and that he wants my input. Then factor in the elimination of franking for that purpose. What modes of communication are available?
     Is he supposed to finance mailings, or buy broadcast time, or hire a telephone survey company out of his own pocket? Or is he to rely on the commercial media to spread the word? Few outlets are as compliant as Prescott eNews, for example, in printing an official's news releases verbatim (if you're a member of the right party). Fewer still are interested in carrying the dull details that build a useful picture of a complex issue. And there is no medium that reaches every voter other than the post.
     Shutting off the only useful means of communicating with constituents does not make sense in a democracy (or a republic, for all you selective pedants out there). Doesn't it make a lot more sense to look at the Congresscritter's communications and fully take them in as statements about the character and competence of the person we've sent to work for us? From that standpoint, even the most grossly abused mailing is eminently valuable, imho. And it costs us damn little.

Letter: City's price increases hurt local business

Philip Dixon wrote to let us know that the City's pricejacking of regular public events has cost us another one, this time the Contradance Festival, moved to Cottonwood. Responding to what could be read as skepticism in the comments, Warren Miller specified that the City fee for using the Armory had jumped sevenfold year-on-year, forcing the move.
     What my friend Warren didn't cover is why the City has jacked up use fees, not just at the Armory but at the Elks Theatre, at Watson Lake Park and other public facilities as well.
     During the tenure of Steve Norwood as city manager, the City moved increasingly toward the idea that City services should be individually revenue-neutral to the extent possible. Facilities and services that had traditionally been parts of the large basket of City responsibilities came to be seen as separate business enterprises and evaluated based on their narrow cash-in-cash-out balance sheets.
     Those services that cannot bring in cash — things like police, streets and City bureaucracy — have been arbitrarily exempted from this policy as "essential" services, creating a value distinction that pushes Council to lean more heavily on "nonessential" services to "pay their own way."
     Our once vibrant Parks and Recreation Department has been largely gutted. Now we're hearing rumblings about cutting the Library loose, and it seems that our City leaders will not be satisfied until everything that the voters of Prescott have built for quality of life in the past hundred years is privatized or vanished.
     The core purpose of incorporating a municipality is to create a means for a community to work together to ensure security and improve quality of life for all. Obviously the direct use of these services will vary from person to person (including police, fire and streets, of course), but the value they bring is to the community as a whole, not just in individual enjoyment, but in economic vitality as well. Our elected leaders should be looking at the big picture here, and worrying that we're being pennywise and desperately pound-foolish.
      A government, however local, is not anything like a profitmaking business, and cannot be run in the same way. If as a municipal official you find that your budget is not balancing, you can't just throw services over the side willy-nilly. Every one of those services was approved by the community as necessary enough to institute, and complex webs of dependencies build around them linking individuals, businesses, nonprofits and public agencies. I'm not saying you can't cut, but the first thing you have to do is seek the community's input on the continuing need for the service, whether there is majority support for it and, vitally, for paying for it collectively.
      Our problem statewide is that there's a new religion-like moralism holding that community action through taxation is bad across the board and must be eliminated. That attitude leads inevitably to fragmentation and an everyone-for-hermself attitude, chipping away at the bedrock of community. I don't care what your political perspective, I guarantee you really don't want to live like that.

Editorial: 'Nutty Arizona' goes national again

Lately I haven't felt compelled to write about the Courier editorial column. With a few exceptions, the unnamed editor has generally stuck with the sort of themes that suit a small-town monopoly -- fire danger, food drives, "Whiskey Row will rise again," traffic, etc.
     I guess that made today's the more disappointing, as from the headline I was expecting to see something sensible and unusually straightforward from the editor. But by the end of the first graf he's falling over his own shoelaces:

Now it's the "birther" issue again, and whether President Barack Obama is a legal US citizen who was born in Hawaii and, therefore, qualified to have run for the office in the first place and to seek re-election to another four-year term. Or is his birth place really Kenya, his father's homeland, and a birth certificate to prove otherwise is fraudulent?

     Yes, it's the birther issue again — meaning not that there's a real issue of whether the President was born American, but rather that a bunch of wackos we call birthers are making a ridiculous stink — and no, there is no question about the President's provenance. That's been clearly and publicly established. Even Governor Brewer is firmly distancing herself from this one with her signature elocution: "I talked to the governor, the previous governor of Hawaii, and she validated to me that the certificate was valid. And I put that to a rest."
     The headline fairly describes the issue as nutty, yet below it the editor feigns Pooh-like simplicity and accepts that as long as one nutcase continues to believe a thing, there must be a "fair" debate about it in the press.
     Here's the editor waiting for Superman in his conclusion: "We wait for the right person to come forward and settle the question once and for all." Who's that, editor, the disembodied Hand O' Gad writing in flaming letters in the sky, perhaps?
     It's not Arizona that's being nutty. Is it really so hard to commit to print your duh moment in realizing that the political party you identify with has come completely unhinged, hostage to insane terrorists and succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome?

Transubstantiation, v.2