Posted inPhoenix

Apparently the road to perdition won’t be widened

I shed no tears if the TIME initiative doesn’t make the November ballot in Arizona. This misbegotten transportation measure, backed by Gov. Janet Napolitano and the "business leaders" somehow couldn’t competently amass enough legitimate signatures on petitions to make it through the secretary of state’s office.

The measure promised $42.6 billion in transportation "improvements" over the next 30 years, paid for by a one-cent hike in the sales tax. It’s difficult to find specifics; I could find no Web site by the supposedly "powerful" coalition backing TIME (Transportation & Infrastructure Moving AZ’s Economy). In newspaper articles, the measure promised rail service between Phoenix and Tucson, but apparently only 18 percent of the monies to be raised would have gone to rail and transit.

In other words, this would have been more roads and freeways to empower sprawl.

The "tell" about TIME came earlier this year, when Napolitano was accused of making a secret deal with the (genuinely) powerful Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, agreeing not to tax development in exchange for the association’s "support" of the measure. More sprawl, and paid for disproportionately by lower-income Arizonans.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Case closed — they want to believe

Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has been trying to push back against the media meme that the FBI has solved the anthrax case with the suicide of scientist Bruce Ivins. The government released its heavily redacted evidence today. It’s unclear whether it will answer questions raised by one of the few skeptical stories to appear, in the New York Times. Or the AP report of the high-pressure tactics the Feds used on Ivins and his family.

Let’s put this into context. We now know that the Bush administration fabricated intelligence to capitalize on the national trauma of 9/11 and to gain a pretext for war with Iraq. Even more evidence comes from a new book by Ron Suskind, who has been spot-on in reporting the inside intrigues of this White House. The head of Iraqi intelligence was working for the CIA and reported that Saddam had no WMDs. He was paid $5 million of your tax dollars to disappear before the invasion. Later, the CIA was pressured by the White House to fabricate a memo from the Iraqi spook saying that 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta had trained in Iraq (he hadn’t) and that Saddam was buying yellow-cake uranium in Niger (he wasn’t).

The Bush administration, with its unprecedented secrecy, power grabs, torture and rendition, had created a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, notably about 9/11. Unfortunately, as facts keep emerging it’s clear that the skeptics aren’t all kooks. Skepticism should be mainstream. Do you believe we know all the facts behind 9/11? And why did the administration oppose creating an independent commission to study the attacks — then carefully steer it and ignore it?

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Posted inUncategorized

Oil prices falling — will IQs follow?

Gasoline at $5, $6, $10 a gallon over the next two years would have been a severe mercy for the United States. It would have forced changes that will eventually be essential: more transit and rail passenger service, a return to our core cities, an urgency to raise fuel economy standards and develop alternatives. At last suburban and exurban living would be properly priced and costly, and the enterprise to retrofit savable suburbia to transit could begin. Foot-dragging on reducing greenhouse gases would have been similarly eliminated.

I don’t think it will go down that way. Oil prices have been dropping in recent days, as I long predicted they would. The decline is because the nation that uses a quarter of the world’s petroleum is seen heading into a nasty recession, which will cut world demand. So prices will drop, and soon we can expect some to start saying the worst is over and we can get back to driving SUVs and other self-destructive behavior.

(I think of a story in today’s Arizona Republic about Lake Powell "recovering," and the ‘Zonies thinking "happy days are here again!" even though their water crisis is unabated — although a State Secret).

Yet the fundamentals haven’t changed. World oil production has either reached peak or will do so in a few years. That means half of this one-time resource will have been extracted and burned off — and it was the easy half, the cheap half. So the remainder will be more costly, and getting it will be more geopolitically destabilizing. So oil will fall a little, then rise more the next time; retreat a bit again and resume its upward climb. The major oil companies and oil exporting nations (which control most of the oil) know this. Most Americans still don’t.

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Posted inPolitics: National

A referendum on conservatism and ‘conservatism’

Part of me wants to nap until election day — and I’m a political junkie. The campaign coverage has descended to such a level of distraction and foolishness, especially in the electronic media, that it’s difficult to bear. Unfortunately, most people will be sufficiently indoctrinated by this sideshow, and I give you President-elect McCain. Where he is the truly risky choice, the media must have Obama in that box. Where the election should be a referendum on the now incontestable consequences of the Republican policies McCain will continue, it will be a referendum on Obama. I give you: President-elect McCain.

And he’s the "conservative." Yet he is no impostor. He is the same kind of "conservative" that has run the country for years.

This perhaps is the biggest irony in the room. A quarter century of "conservative" rule — including Bill Clinton and the Gingrich Congress — have given us a larger government, huge deficits, a crippling debt, debased culture, overseas adventures and imperial presidential power (We’re Americans: we torture) that would make Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater cringe. It is even counter to the ideas of Ronald Reagan as a political thinker (and, yes, he was a formidable one). By way of context, Ike, Nixon and George H.W. Bush were right-of-center pragmatists, not conservatives.

The heirs of Buckley bravely carry water for today’s "conservatives," but Buckley couldn’t have died a happy man, to see where his counter-revolution led (he became a vocal critic of the Iraq adventure). Burke and Russell Kirk are spinning so fast in their graves as to provide new data to particle physicists.

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Posted inUncategorized

Leggy, blonde coed hooker wrecks world trade talks

Years ago, when I was a reporter in San Diego, we had a contest: Who can bore readers with the fewest words in the lede (the winner, at three words: "Otay Water District," as in, "Otay Water District directors voted Tuesday to…" — the reader would have moved on to the hockey scores after only three words).

Nowadays the winner is "world trade talks." A funny thing, that, considering how much globalization has revolutionized American lives, for good and ill, while most Americans haven’t been paying attention. So prop open your eyeballs as I note that world trade talks collapsed yesterday.

I suspect something more fundamental changed. The failure of the Doha Round of talks may well mean the end of the trade paradigm that has prevailed since the end of World War II. This is the biggest news story that will get the least attention.

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Meanwhile, in book news
Posted inUncategorized

Meanwhile, in book news

My new mystery, The Pain Nurse, is set for spring publication from the Poisoned Pen Press. This is a break from the David Mapstone series set in Arizona. The Pain…
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Posted inPolitics: National

McCain’s national security cred and TR — more media lies

The corporate media, particularly the electronic division, keeps repeating certain shorthand, whether it’s true or not. One example, on display almost daily, is that "John McCain’s the maverick." I’ve gone to great lengths on this blog to disprove that notion. McCain is a fairly conventional "conservative" who once or twice bucked his party when it didn’t really matter. You can check his voting record. This is no secret.

McCain’s utter hostility to helping the state he claims to represent deal with the problems of rapid urbanization and funding the illegal alien surge that was so profitable to Republican businessmen shows how he will govern domestically. Likewise his "straight shooter integrity" image is shattered by the facts, from the Keating Five onward. (Check the McCain File to your right for more).

Now two more "givens" are in the teleprompter scrips. First is the idea that McCain is a national security expert, ready to be commander in chief on "day one" — Sen. Clinton helpfully said it herself. The second is that McCain is a "Theodore Roosevelt Republican."

There’s just one problem: Neither is true.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it already over for Obama, IV?

Obama’s win in the Democratic primary showed him to potentially be one of the most gifted politicians in American history. Yes, he gives a good speech — something that is underrated, particularly after the embarrassingly inarticulate George W. Bush. If we’re to have any chance to address the historic challenges facing the country, we’re going to need an inspiring leader at the bully pulpit.

But he also ran a great ground game, outflanking Hillary’s admittedly badly run operation, and showed he could push back effectively against Rovian tactics. After the disaster of conservative government on display everywhere and every indication this should be a Democratic year, why can’t I come out an admit I was wrong about Obama?

I hope I can. Unfortunately, he has several things going against him, which may prove insurmountable. Remember, Michelle said, "this is it, one campaign and no more," or words to that effect. If Nancy  Reagan had said the same thing in 1976, no book would be called "The Age of Reagan," however gifted that orator and politician was.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Stack: Super Loss; McCain greenwash; kid gloves for polygamists; Karen’s no crackpot; peak oil

The funniest story in the stack is an item reporting that Glendale did not even recoup what it spent as host "city" for the Super Bowl.  For years ahead of the spectacle, Phoenix media reported what an economic boon it would be. This is a classic example about how critical thinking is neither taught nor valued in today’s newsrooms (gee, why do we keep losing readers?).

A basic analysis of the hype would have shown that the promised economic benefits would be modest. It happened during high season, so resorts and hotels would already be booked. Indeed, considering the NFL demands blocks of rooms at a discount, the hotel industry probably made less money than it would have otherwise. Sales of souvenirs? Most of the profit goes back to the NFL. Restaurants would have similarly been packed anyway. And so on.

It’s not that the Super Bowl doesn’t bring benefits, in terms of exposure and the gathering of big deal makers. Too bad it took place in an amorphous place without an identity and a stadium in a cotton field on the metro fringe, in a place with little economy besides the great — now shuttered — housing factory. But the media shouldn’t have bought into the economic hype. Alas, the pressure is always extreme to "say something positive." Unfortunately, many reporters today would never even have applied the basic bullshit detector that was once a standard-issue item in their craft.

Read on for more of the Stack.

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Posted inPhoenix

Recalling Phil Gordon, and a corridor of lost opportunities

Some of the right-wing thugs that have the loudest voices in Arizona want to recall Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for being too soft on illegal immigration. Gordon doesn’t have anything to worry about, even with the ridiculously small numbers needed to get an initiative started.

If anything, Gordon’s cautious temporizing over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s war on the poor — before criticizing it before a Hispanic audience — should earn a recall effort from the 34 percent of Phoenicians who are Hispanic and mostly American citizens (and those are 2000 numbers). But of course one reason the thugs rule is the populations that outnumber them, whether moderate Anglos or Mexican-American citizens, lack their lunatic zeal and often don’t even vote.

As anyone who has been paying attention knows, the illegal immigration problem is because 1) Arizona is a border state; 2) has a low-end economy  dependent on low-wage illegal immigrant labor, and 3) is doing nothing to really address the issue. Gordon, however, is in the spotlight, in his second term as mayor, and it’s fair to ask a question of substance.

Has Phil Gordon failed as Phoenix mayor?

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The stack: Tempered, lost Camelback, the med school joke

Peggy Noonan, always a formidable writer and sometimes a formidable thinker, makes this point about a Barack Obama weakness:

His youth, his relative untriedness, the fact that he has not suffered,
been seasoned, been beat about the head by life and left struggling
back, as happens to most adults by a certain time. This is what I hear
from older people, who vote in great numbers. They are not hostile to
his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.

I’m not sure I buy the second part. Many white Americans won’t vote for a black man. It’s that simple. Her first point is well-made, and frankly is a problem for most at the top echelons of American society now that meritocracy is dead. A Harry Truman couldn’t become president now. And the days are largely gone when a son of the elite, such as Jack Kennedy, served in combat alongside his fellow citizens of all walks.

Which brings us to John McCain. Noonan says slyly he should promise to be a one-term president. "For many in the middle it would be a twofer," she writes. "You get a good man, for
only four years, and Mr. Obama gets to grow and deepen. He’ll be better
older." This is her partisan side clouding judgment. McCain is seasoned and has suffered. But to what end? To promise a continuation of the disastrous policies of his callow successor, and the general ideological tilt by the elite untested theorists on the right? To burnish a temper that is legendary and unsettling? I’ve been beaten around the head by life enough to be not merely skeptical, but scared of this man.

There’s more in the stack. Read on.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The real elite and what they don’t want discussed

ABC deserves every hit it has taken for the "debate" that focused on swift-boating Barack Obama, including a question fed to former Clinton intimate George Stephanopoulos by right-wing thug Sean Hannity. A couple of other points deserve our attention — indeed, they are the real story.

First, most television "news" stopped being journalism years ago. This has been aggravated by the elimination of the fairness doctrine and deregulation that allowed consolidation in the media. Now the owners of the public airwaves have no requirement to support the public trust by providing balanced news. They have a powerful interest in supporting the corporate tilt of Washington, which even manifests itself in Charlie Gibson’s flat-wrong assertions about the capital gains tax. Talk about elitists. The corporate electronic media are part of the elite (Charlie wants his tax breaks and completely understands man-of-the-people McCain with his eight houses and millions).

With silliness such as the taped "questions" by "average" uninformed (God help us) voters, such as the poor woman who asked about the flag pin, it’s obvious this elite has an agenda. They have chosen sides. Note McCain never gets questioned about his genuinely questionable ties. They want us stupid. The public schools have been destroyed. Even the conservative Economist says meritocracy is dead in America. Endless hours of television and cheap electronic distractions add to the mindness suckling at the Matrix. Just to be sure, we have "debates" such as the one in Philadelphia.

What on earth might we realize if we didn’t have our minds on flag pins and Obama’s pastor?

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