Rachel Maddow kicks J.D. Hayworth's ass

The MSNBC host had Hayworth on yesterday evening. PHXated, who is rooting for Hayworth to knock that chucklehead John McCain out in August, was disappointed in his stalking horse’s performance.

Full video is below.

The conversation had two main parts. In the first, Maddow asked Hayworth about his well-established ties to the crook Jack Abramoff.

Hayworth let the conversation descend into a debate as to whether he was the first-, third- or ninth-largest recipient of Abramoff money.

In the second part, she asks him about his contention that the highest court in Massachusetts had “defined marriage as, simply, quote, the establishment of intimacy.”

Hayworth used this assertion to make the argument that legalizing gay marriage could allow people to marry horses.

Maddow read from the decision, demonstrating plainly that the court, “simply,” had done no such thing. Hayworth,looking like a not-very-bright tree sloth caught in a pair of car headlights, could say only, “You and I have a disagreement.”

More after the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The only solace Hayworth fans can take is that Hayworth is being crazy like a fox. He is, after all, running in the Arizona republican primary, looking for votes from a group of people for whom factual accuracy, logic, common decency, tolerance, and intellectual coherence are of relative and fungible interest. We’re hoping that Hayworth may yet demonstrate he is their man.

Is Gilbert really banning Bible study in private homes? No.

A number of right-wing blogs are all excited about the city of Gilbert’s supposedly having told a small church group it wasn’t allowed to meet in private homes. Sonoran Alliance posting here, World News Daily posting here.

Says WND:

The city of Gilbert, Ariz., has ordered a group of seven adults to stop gathering for Bible studies in a private home because such meetings are forbidden by the city’s zoning codes.

The issue was brought to a head when city officials wrote a letter to a pastor and his wife informing them they had 10 days to quit having the meetings in their private home.

The issue hasn’t hit the Republic or the EVT yet. It’s going to be interesting to watch how the papers handle what could become a case study in how knuckle-headed stuff like this is handled by the press.

Read this ABC-15 news story on the issue, for example, and you see the story is really about something different:

The Oasis of Truth Church was holding services at a home near Riggs and Chandler Heights roads up until November.

A city code enforcement officer noticed signs in the neighborhood directing people to the services. He sent them a letter saying the church was in violation of the Land Development Code.

In other words, the people weren’t “gathering for Bible studies in a private home.” It was a church advertising, and holding, church services in a private home.

There’re obvious reasons why that’s not allowed.

Dumb Arizonan of the week!

Honors go to state Rep. Debbie Lesko, who just had a bill get out of the key state committee. The bill would essentially evaporate the state’s Corporation Commission’s renewable energy goals by the simple expedient of classifying nuclear and hydroelecric power as renewable.

Besides being dumb, bad policy, bad for the environment, and bad for the country’s future, the idea is .. bad for the state’s economy:

A legislative proposal that passed a House committee on Tuesday could quash a solar panel manufacturer’s plans to open a plant in Goodyear.

Officials with Suntech Power Holdings said passage of House Bill 2701 would force the company to reconsider the plant, which is set to open with about 75 employees in September.

“Passage of this bill will force us to reconsider our decision to put a factory in Arizona, moving those jobs and the accompanying tax base to another state,” said Steve Chadima, vice president of external affairs for Suntech.

J.D. Hayworth still talking about Obama's birth certificate

Here he is getting grilled by Campbell Brown last night. The stuff about the birth certificate starts at 5:50.

Hayworth first says that the media are the only people bringing the matter up—and then turns around and says he’s getting emails from constituents about it.

Under Brown’s increasingly incredulous questioning, he then starts talking about … identity theft. And then starts babbling about “a so-called stimulus that led to incredible unemployment.”

And refuses, several times, to answer her direct question as to whether he thinks Obama is an American citizen.

Speed camera nuttiness in the Republic

Many parts of the Arizona Republic are competently written and edited. Other times… you feel like a bunch of drunk lemurs are randomly throwing paragraphs together and putting them into the paper.

Today’s story on speed cameras begins:

New DPS chief criticizes speed cameras

The Department of Public Safety’s newly appointed director this week joined a growing chorus of powerful voices speaking out against the state’s photo-enforcement system.

In interviews this week, Robert Halliday said that the system should be restructured if it’s not scrapped.

You could be forgiven for reading that and thinking … Halliday is opposed to speed cameras.

He doesn’t seem to be.

Halliday’s actual quotes are sort of nonsensical at first, but a few grafs down it’s clear he’s trying to tip-toe through the overheated politicization of the cameras. (The yahoo vote in Arizona think it’s their right to barrel down the 51 in their SUVs at whatever speed they want.)

The "restructuring?

To Halliday, who had a 35-year career with DPS before retiring in 2008, restructuring would include reassessing where units are placed and installing some penalty to keep drivers from ignoring photo-enforcement notices when they arrive in the mail.

“This program costs a lot of money to put into place. You have a lot of revenue that is not being captured,” he said.

That doesn’t sound like a guy who is joining a growing chorus against the cameras.

The story then veers into an anti-camera talking point—that Janet Napolitano claimed they would bring in $90 milllion a year. In fact, they bring in $27 million, but it’s still $27 million in free money, right? That’s not an argument against the cameras in any case.

And as Halliday was explaining, the real issue is that the soft-on-crime anti-camera brigade in the legislature drew up the law in a way to make it easy for scofflaws to outmanuever the cameras.

The story today says that only 30 percent of the fines are being paid. Hmmm … what is 30 percent of $90 million?

Finally, the story buries the lede:

A vote could turn out to be photo enforcement’s saving grace, Halliday said, something that came as a surprise to the new DPS director as he made rounds at the Legislature this week. Halliday thought the public had lost confidence in the program, a notion some lawmakers tried to dispel.

“People are telling me that a good portion of the population believes in photo enforcement and wants to have it,” he said. “I’m being told . . . it’s kind of a 50-50 thing.”

That’s an impression you don’t get from the rabid anti-camera coverage.

To complete the story’s clumsy handing of the issue, it ends with Halliday trying to appease the anti-camera nuts:

On his return [from a trip to California], Halliday said, he saw three California troopers between his fishing spot and the Arizona border. Between the Arizona border and the Valley he saw five fixed and mobile photo-enforcement units, and no DPS officers.

“My preference is to have more patrolmen on the ground,” he said. “I would much rather have people stopping and talking to people.”

But that of course is the point: Arizona is out of money and can’t afford more patrolmen. The speed cameras control speeds and generate money for the state. And even if the state had more money, the patrolmen who are out should be spending their time doing more than passing out speeding tickets.

And in any case the entire discussion is moot because the state is in such dire financial straits that in just about any other urisdiction outside of the deep south it would be inthinkable for legislators even to conpemplate removing a 427 million-a-year income stream when they are facing bankruptcy.

PHXations—Wednesday, February 3

The Tucson Weekly is looking for a writer to contribute to its film coverage. They need someone to write a full-length review every other week, and contribute film-capsule reviews as well. “Ideally, the reviewer would be in Tucson, and as for pay, that depends on the experience of the reviewer.” says Editor Jimmy Boegel.

Apply through mailbag@tucsonweekly.com.

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Students at the Cronkite School have formed a Hispanics journalists club, a chapter of the NAHJ. Details on a new blog here.

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Sarah Palin’s coming back to Arizona a couple of times in the next few months. In March to do a fundraiser for John McCain, and then in May for a group called Center for Arizona Policy, which is led by creepy anti-sex crusader Cathi Herrod, who’s obsessed with abortion and gays fucking.

The Espresso Pundit, who is a good barometer of the far right’s wishfulness, if not reality per se, says:

Frankly this takes some of the wind out of McCain’s sails. There are plenty people who want to see Palin but don’t want to write a check to McCain…and a CAP check is deductible. It will be interesting to compare the turnout at the two events.

Neither he nor the PBJ story on Palin answers an obvious question about Palin’s CAP appearance: Whether she’s getting her typical $100,000 speaker’s fee.

Chandler state senator introduces bill to put the Ten Commandments on the State capitol

Per the Arizona Republic:

Sen. Russell Pearce of Mesa introduced Senate Bill 1213 that would require a copy of the religious document to be placed on the front entrance of the original 1898 state Capitol building by Jan. 1, 2011. Three other lawmakers have signed onto the bill, which was referred to the Senate Government Institutions Committee. No hearing has been set.

It's terrible how we've taken religion out of our public lives!

The Arizona Republic, front page this a.m.:

Kurt Warner took a victory lap and a shower. Then he grabbed his Bible and tried to make sense of it all.

“Whew,” the Cardinals quarterback said. “Anybody else tired?”

Arizona Republic, sports section, front page this a.m.:

Cardinals cornerback Michael Adams, scorched and penalized all day, waited until the final play to, well, finally make a play.
[…]
“God came through,” said Adams, who drew four penalties. “He may not come when I want Him, but He was right on time.”

Emphases added.

Which page of the Arizona Republic do you read?

Today, you could read page one, which contains the start of an in-depth Associated Press debunking on so-called Climategate. The story begins:

LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by the Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.

Emphasis added. AP says five reporters read all 1000-plus emails, totaling about one million words.

Anyway, that was on the front page. (Satisfied, Expresso Pundit?)

Now, since the Republic is a full-service operation, you could also read Robert Robb, on the paper’s ed page, who has been enraged about the Climategate emails for weeks. For example:

[L]eading climate scientists conspired to hide uncertainty in the data, prevent others from checking their work and suppress conflicting judgments.

Even before these revelations, there were reasons to be circumspect about what was known about the effect of industrialization on global climate. There is, first of all, the hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mathematical equations in a computer model that fully duplicate the interactions within the earth’s atmosphere.

All three sentences are problematic.

(The last is the current denier talking point: “It’s all too complex to know for sure.” It’s also rhetorical gibberish: “The hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mechanical devices that could fly a human being across long distances.”)

Anyway, today, Robb is back on the case again, this time muttering ominously about how the emails are a nail in the coffin of academic peer review.

There’s no reference to the AP story, just as in the past he’s never acknowledged similar assertions by most knowledgeable observers.

All of this is to get back to one of PHXated’s little hobby horses, namely the poor editing at the Arizona Republic. In a state like Arizona, of course there’s going to be an energetic little right-wing columnist who nibbles on the national blogs and regurgitates them for the less sophisticated folks on the home front. That’s Robert Robb.

That’s fine. But why doesn’t an editor push Robb a little? This sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen at the Republic much, so here’s a few sentences any busy op-ed editor at the Republic is welcome to cut and paste into an email to Robb:

Hey, Rob: Did you see the AP story we ran Sunday? 1800 words, pretty in-depth. You been banging on the emails as “deeply disturbing.” AP says not so much. Since you’ve been out front on this you need to address it one way or the other so readers don’t think you’re dodging it.

Hate graffiti found at Anthem high school

From the Republic:

When Boulder Creek High School staff went to work last week, they found the sides of the school buildings, sidewalks and windows covered with graffiti. The high school is at 40404 N. Gavilan Peak Parkway in Anthem.

The campus property had been vandalized with hate speech, terms and symbols, said Lauren Sheahan, Boulder Creek High School principal. The principal declined to elaborate on the hate messages. “Students were sent to different parts of the campus because we didn’t want them to walk past the messages,” Sheahan said.

It’s bogus for the principal not to say what sort of hate messages there were, and worse for the paper not to have found out on its own. If you’re black, Latino, gay or whatever and living in Anthem, you’d like to know whether you’re being targeted or not.

Did Joe Biden meet with Arpaio today?

The Republic says he did:

County audit slams Arpaio

You remember the sheriff’s half-million-dollar bus. The county instituted a purchasing freeze last year, but the sheriff’s office, taking money out of its jail fund, bought it anyway.

It’s one of the many infantile points of contention between Arpaio and the county. Supervisors have kept the bus in a garage since they found out about the purchase in May.

Now an audit (which probably cost the county money to perform) shows the obvious: That Arpaio violated county guidellines when he bought it.

The EVT:

“There is no evidence that the bus was acquired for the best price, or that procurement controls meant to protect and account for public funds were followed,” the audit states.

Republic story here.

On a related note, PHXated was talking to some courts people recently and heard some anecdotal but plausible stories about the effects of Arpaio’s deliberate slowdown of his office’s work in transferring prisoners to the court system.

Arapio has a certain genius in smelling what ways he can essentially not do his job that don’t elicit public outrage or opposition.

According to the people I spoke to, the sheriff’s office brings prisoners to the court only two days a week, which makes scheduling difficult. Even with those limitations, prisoners frequently aren’t where they are supposed to be, creating cascading waves of delays. (The process also costs defendants, or the state, money, as lawyers sit around on the clock doing nothing.)

In fact, this happened at the case I was watching.

One lawyer said he’d seen judges deliberately let people out on bond who otherwise would not be when the likelihood of a non-appearance by a defendant could have hampered progress on a particular case or hearing.

Can Phoenix make a "Creative Class" appeal?

Two local activists co-wrote an op-ed piece in the Republic on Sunday about one aspect of what Phoenix needs to do to move into the 21st century. That aspect is generally referred to as the Creative Class theory, though the authors don’t use the term.

A Canadian professor named Richard Florida in a series of books on the subject analyzes the relationship between economic development (particularly in high technology) and socioeconomic factors like education levels, social tolerance (particularly toward gays), and cultural accouterments.

The idea has been percolating around for nearly a decade and is a staple of discussions about modern city planning. (PHXated was on a panel at Phoenix Design Week recently that discussed how it related to Phoenix.)

In their essay, for example, Myra H. Millinger and Steve Betts cite this statistic:

In a Forbes survey of approximately 1,000 corporate executives, a strong and vibrant creative community was among the top-five determinants of location decisions for 74 percent of respondents. Only 24 percent ranked metro Phoenix as having that cultural vibrancy.

Even if the executives might have been overstating the issue’s importance, the fact that they felt compelled to do so is an indication of the analysis’s influence these days. The pair’s punch line, emphasized by me, is correspondingly devastating for the fifth-largest city in the country.

And remember that, in Creative Class terms, we’re not concerned about all corporate execs; we’re talking about a highly specialized (and desirable) slice of them: The ones at modern technology- and knowledge-related companies cities like Phoenix are now competing to attract. And you can bet the numbers for that slice would be much worse for Phoenix.

Anyway, most sane people will agree with what the pair say. I found two interesting things in their piece.

The first is they felt compelled to mince their words, and that’s not going to help anyone going forward. Here’s what they have to say about Arizona’s reputation:

This is of concern to every sector here competing for talent and industry. Add to this the recent unflattering images of Arizona transmitted virally across the globe, the misperceptions of who we are, and a lack of awareness of what makes us unique, and our world positioning will continue to falter.

Phoenix’s trouble is not about “misperceptions.” It’s about correct perceptions. This is the home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a national poster boy for hostility to immigrants and arguably the most potent symbol of brutal police power in the U.S. since the Civil Rights Era. The Mormon church, one of the most powerful organizations in the state, has put itself in the forefront of the anti-gay marriage campaigns here and nationally, notably in California’s bitter Prop. 8 battle last year—right under the noses of the nation’s high-tech industries.

In other words, on a good day by most Creative Class measures, Arizona would come in right above the Deep South; those two additional issues put the state near the bottom nationally for such an appeal.

So let’s be honest. Arizona doesn’t have to overcome misperceptions; it has to overcome reality.

Now, the second interesting thing about the essay is that the writers tacitly understand these problems. In response, their idea is to stress what they call an oasis:

This effort, under the umbrella of the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative, has identified a compelling focus and distinctive themes that define this region’s strengths as the “Opportunity Oasis”—a place where meritocracy reigns and where open-space thinking, urban pioneering and a lush desert oasis present to the world a profile that is at once distinctive and of enormous appeal.

That’s a good description of what downtown might be like in a few years; intellectually, however, the small but vibrant Creative Class Phoenix does boast now will have to reconcile an oasis like that with the tragedy and intolerance around it.

It’s not impossible; Atlanta, for example, has managed to position itself as the capital of the south and correspondingly created an oasis for enlightened whites, blacks, gays and creative people. Even so, it’s not really a Creative Class mecca nor a particular high-tech destination.

I haven’t thought this out, but I’m intrigued by a variant of this, which I call the Enclave Gambit.

Can Phoenix create a city-within-a-city—corporeally set downtown, but with symbolic residents throughout the area—that tries to live, and create, and interact amongst themselves, set apart from a lot of the hate talk, intolerance, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and backwardness that otherwise characterizes most of the state?

Now, it’s a tough sell in Creative Class terms: “Trent Frank, John Kyl and John Shadegg hardly ever go downtown” isn’t something to base an economic development plan on.

But: One thing Phoenix doesn’t have as yet is a focused community dedicated to change—and for now, the Enclave Gambit might be the best way to form one.

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p.s.: You can download the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative here.

Mayor Gordon floats the idea of a temporary sales tax

So reports the Republic. The mayor calls it a “emergency economic surcharge.”

The city is facing another huge budget gap—approaching $100 million, after the council already cut more than $250 million this year.

A good part of the story is given over to Republican officials nattering on against the idea of raising taxes.

No one says the what to me is the most salient aspect of the plan—that sales taxes are the most regressive type of levy, one that places a disproportionate burden on the poor and working class.

The coverage was similarly incomplete when the governor proposed her sales-tax plan during the state’s budget crisis this summer.

This is why sales taxes are unfair:

The poor and working class spend most of their income each year. Rent comes first, of course, and then after that, by definition, the vast majority of their money is spent on necessities—food, clothes for the kids, etc.

I say “by definition” because if you’re not spending what money you have on necessities, then you have discretionary income. Which means you’re probably middle class. Even if you exempt some necessities, the fact remains that poorer people spend all their money each year.

Every percentage increase in the sales tax creates a corresponding percentage decrease in the living standards of a poor or working-class family.

A one-percent tax on food is one percent less food for your family. And with an 8 percent sales tax already in effect in Phoenix, that’s a huge piece of a working family’s income.

Again, by definition, your higher-income families spend money on a lot of other things, things you wouldn’t call necessities. They save and invest relatively large percentages as well.

And let’s remember that the state’s fat cats have been doing swell the last few years, surfing a wave of real estate money and parading around in their tubby SUVs. (They also got an enormous slate of tax cuts from the Bush administration earlier this decade, a gift that keeps on giving, year after year*.)

Now, you don’t have to agree with this contention, though it is based on facts, is a widely accepted analysis of taxation, and contains a strong moral component.

But shouldn’t it be part of the debate? Couldn’t the Republic at least have mentioned it?

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• From the NYT:

Those cuts will have saved individuals, and cost the government, $2.34 trillion, according to calculations the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute, made for The New York Times. The Bush and Obama administrations have called the center’s past calculations reliable. Interest on the money borrowed to finance those tax cuts equals a month worth of income taxes paid to the government by individuals.

Emphasis added. In other words, almost a tenth of the money you pay the U.S. government each year goes to pay off merely the interest of the Bush tax cuts to rich folks.

Chandler firefighters refuse H1N1 shots

From the EVT:

About three-quarters of Chandler firefighters eligible to receive doses from an early batch of the H1N1 flu vaccine have refused it, according to fire department officials.
[…]
Only about 50 Chandler firefighters volunteered Wednesday and Thursday to receive a nasal mist containing a weakened form of the virus, said Donna Pierce, a Chandler Fire Department captain who traveled around to several city fire stations to administer the vaccine.

Many of those who volunteered for the vaccine said it was because they have young children to whom they didn’t want to spread a possible infection.

“The other two-thirds are like, ’Nope, we don’t want it,’” Pierce said.

Those who declined the vaccination generally said it was because the vaccine was new and untested, she said.

Emphases added. What’s going on here seems obvious: A virus as pungent as the H1N1 has already swept though Chandler firehouses—a Glenn Beck-fueled ignorance virus. I’m as supportive of our local protective-service departments as the next guy, but it does not increase one’s confidence in the mental acuity prevailing in those precincts to hear that this sort of know-nothingism is in the air.

Well, it’s not like the firefighters are living and working in close proximity that could turn a typical station into a petri dish if the virus did get loose, ending up costing the city a lot of money and leaving its residents less safe.

Oh, wait …

John Kyl's female trouble

Jon Stewart on Halliburton

Jennifer Johnson, a former Republic staffer who now works for the state Democratic party, goes after John Kyl in the paper’s op-ed page today, focusing on a few recent comments and votes that aren’t going to endear him to his female constituents.

Again, Johnson’s working for the Democratic party, but it’s hard to argue with her points:

First, he landed in the hot seat by dismissing Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s call for basic maternity care to be included in insurance plans. “I don’t need maternity care,” he stated during Senate debate.

An editorial in Tuesday’s Republic defended Kyl. He was “debating in the public’s interest” to keep costs down, the editorial stated. But Kyl, and The Republic, missed the point: Women are angry, not just because of Kyl’s remark, but because their senator claims he is fighting to keep costs down.

Down for whom? Maternity care costs women dearly. And women can be denied coverage because of so-called “pre-existing conditions” such as a C-section or a previous pregnancy.

And then there’s Al Franken’s mischievous Halliburton rape amendment:

Last week, Kyl voted “no” on an amendment that would block defense contracts with companies that prevent employees from suing over sexual assault. In other words, Kyl voted to protect the interests of corporations over the rights of sexual-assault victims.

The amendment had been proposed to prevent situations like that of Jamie Leigh Jones, a former contractor for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq who said she was drugged and brutally raped by a group of fellow contractors. Despite solid medical evidence, Jones was blocked from pressing charges in court because her defense contract prevented it.

Johnson, politely, doesn’t mention that the woman was also was held captive in a crate when she tried to report the gang rape.

Kyl voted on the side of the military contractor.

The Halliburton case, incidentally, caught the attention of the Daily Show last night:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Mormon leader says the LDS is being persecuted as blacks in the Civil Rights Era were

… according to this AP story on AZCentral.com:

The anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern Blacks during the civil-rights movement, a high-ranking Mormon said Tuesday.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks referred to gay marriage as an “alleged civil right” in an address at Brigham Young University-Idaho that church officials described as a significant commentary on current threats to religious freedom.

Oaks suggested that atheists and others are seeking to intimidate people of faith and silence their voices

I think there’s a flaw in his argument, but I can’t think of what it is …

… Oh, I just figured it out. The difference is that, in the 1960s, the blacks were the one being persecuted, and Bull Connor and his ilk were the ones doing the persecuting.

Today, gays are the ones being persecuted, and the Mormons are actively working to repress them, specifically by funding attacks on gay marriage across the country.

Arizona has the nation's 16th highest poverty rate ...

… Legislators respond by allowing guns to be taken into bars, and trying to restrict the ability of women to have abortions. From the PBJ:

In Arizona, the poverty rate was 14.1 percent, the 16th highest level in the U.S.
[…]
Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas and Kentucky led the nation in poverty levels, ranging from 20.7 percent to 17.2 percent. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii and New Jersey experienced the lowest levels, ranging from 7.3 percent to 8.5 percent.

Add this to the number of societal indicators that see Arizona have more in common with the Deep South than with states that actually drive the country’s economy and social progress.

While the new gun laws, aside from the danger of more shootings, are political sops to gun fetishists, the abortion restrictions can create real harm: They are designed to terrorize young girls in need and beyond that further deplete the state’s finances as the inevitable court battles ensue.

But in both cases, we see legislators continuing the debilitating scab-scratching of the culture wars rather than working on issues to make life better for their most vulnerable charges. The most sobering statistic in the Biz Journal story: 20 percent of the state’s kids are living in poverty.

Dept. of Dumb Arizonans: Rep. Ray Barnes

PHXated is just getting to this, a speech delivered by Ray Barnes, a state representative from Phoenix, during a debate on school funding at the capitol. Video below.

The best part comes 30 seconds in, when Barnes, running down a litany of what he feels are excessive bureaucratic positions in the schools, ends with this laugh line:

“And unless we have a bisexual teacher somewhere, there’s probably a principal of the girls’ restrooms and a principal of the boys’ restrooms!”

The synaptic misfire that produces the conflation of sexual orientation, gender and, uh, public bathrooms is probably something Barnes should seek professional help with.

Kyrsten Sinema is the only person in the chamber with the presence of mind to call him on it.

I don’t like to comment on folks’ public appearance, but Barnes might seek some fashion advice as well. Is that how elected representatives dress here—like they’re on their way to the early-bird special at Olive Garden?

Don't let Marcia Powell die in vain

Perhaps the worst aspect of the controversy surrounding the death of Marcia Powell, the state prison inmate who died after being left out in 107-degree heat, is that it impedes an important Arizona Department of Corrections investigation into exactly how long people can survive in the outdoor holding cells.

According to the Republic this a.m., the state will now limit use of the cells to two hours. But, after months of Sturm und Drang about Powell’s death from rabble-rousers at the New Times and elsewhere—and with only a few more weeks of 100-degree-plus heat in front of us—one can worry whether department officials will be cowed into abandoning this crucial work until next spring.

Powell was left in a chain-link outdoor cell without a roof and apparently without water. She was mortally injured in less than four hours! The state now knows the life-expectancy of a mentally disturbed middle-aged prostitute in the cells.

We also have some immensely valuable data about the process. Powell’s skin blistered, and her internal body temperature reached 108 degrees. The value of this research is uniformly left unmentioned in the coverage of Powell’s death.

Now, on paper at least, the department can still house inmates in the cells for two hours, and with 103 on the forecast for this weekend, it might get some valuable data. If the prisoners survive, with luck the department may be able to squeeze in some testing in the three-hour range, assuming temperatures hold a bit more before the definitive arrival of fall.

Chances of further tests in the 3.5-hour area seem remote at this point. Hopes that the department could do comprehensive testing of the survivability rates of non-mentally disturbed people, the obese, diabetics, the elderly, and juvenile offenders now seem a pipe dream.

But even one or two more rounds of testing seem a best-case scenario. Right now, prisoner’s rights advocates are clamoring; officials are playing the blame game and disciplining corrections officers; and some radicals are even calling for criminal punishment.

In this climate, there’s a good chance that dedicated workers, fearing a witch hunt, will abandon their research.

PHXated hopes the department will focus on its mission, and continue to make use of the holding cells. Otherwise, Marcia Powell can truly be said to have died in vain.

Another legal salvo from Andrew Thomas against county supervisors

The Arizona Republic says he’s indicting Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox on separate charges:

A grand jury indicted Wilcox on allegations that include perjury, forgery and conflict of interest related to votes she made as a supervisor to fund the Hispanic non-profit group Chicanos Por La Causa, Thomas said.

Stapley’s counts include fraud, theft, perjury and forgery largely related to the use of funds Stapley received in his effort to become president of the National Association of Counties. Stapley also obtained mortgage loans under false pretenses, Thomas said.
[…]
Thomas said the counts were based on Wilcox obtaining five different loans through Prestamos, the lending arm of Chicanos Por La Causa, and continuing to approve funds for the organization in her role as supervisor without filing any type of conflict notice.

Farther down, the paper notes:

The indictments from a Maricopa County grand jury are the latest allegations Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio have leveled against county elected officials and administrators, many of which have been dismissed. Despite the history of Thomas and Arpaio’s allegations against other county officials petering out as they work through the justice system, the sheriff maintained confidence in his investigations.

“Let’s wait to see what the criminal justice system does before you start criticizing my investigations,” Arpaio said.

When a gunman is "one of the family"

Imagine you’re a black or a Hispanic guy and you’d pinned your girlfriend down inside a car outside your house by pointing a gun at her.

After the SWAT boys came and evacauated the neighborhood, do you think you’d hear one of the officers on the scene say he cared about your welfare, that you were all part of the family?

I don’t think so.

But when a Phoenix firefighter did that yesterday, this is what he got:

Fire Capt. Hugh Chase said the situation was a somber moment for everyone because they were dealing with a well respected fire fighter with more than 20 years of service.

“We’re a tight-knit family … and we care about his welfare,” Chase said.

A somber moment! It wasn’t “somber for everyone.” It was terrifying for one person: The woman he was pointing the gun at.

Oh, yeah: And also for the neighbors who had to be evacuated, and also for the members of the SWAT team who were possibly putting themselves in range of a nut with a rifle.

Neither the Republic nor the local Fox station vouchsafed the creep’s name, which strikes me as odd. I don’t care if you are a firefighter; you sacrifice a little personal privacy when you stick a gun out the window and your girlfriend thinks you’re going to shoot her.

Speaking of which, here’s the most ominous note of all in the Republic story:

Sgt. Andy Hill, police spokesman, said the man and woman are boyfriend and girlfriend, and they are approaching the situation as a domestic issue.

This may just be a slip-up on the reporter’s part, but it’s not a domestic issue; it’s a domestic violence issue. Now the woman and her boyfriend know that, in a future situation in which she fears getting shot, the people coming to help her may consider her assailant “one of the family.”

p.s. Note this, from a KPHO report:

The suspect is a Phoenix firefighter who has been with the department for 20 years. Coworkers say he’s a well respected member of their firefighter family. But friends of his girlfriend’s sons said he has a history of drug use and abuse.

If true, it’s a welcome bit of information, but if it’s not, the assertion strikes me as possibly libelous. A “friend of the girlfriend’s sons” may or may not have first-hand knowledge, and there’s no indication in the story the reporter tried to corroborate it.

Temples of bigotry

PHXated is lucky enough to own a house in northeast Phoenix. As homeowners know, there’s a lot of worries and anxieties that go along, and an owner can be forgiven for a neurosis or two. (Or three.)

But: What if I said it really bothered me that … Mormons owned houses. That Mormons’ owning houses affects my ownership of my house?

What if I said that Mormons shouldn’t be allowed to own houses?

Well, you’d say I was batshit crazy.

That whether a Mormon owned a house didn’t affect my homeownership a bit.

That I was being intolerant, a little bit crazy, and, frankly, something of a bigot.

We were thinking along these lines while reading some recent local news stories about how the Mormon Church wants some zoning variances to build two new temples in the area, one in Gilbert and one waaay up at 51st Avenue and Pinnacle Peak Road.

The Mormons were in the news last year because of the enormous financial support the church gave to two state ballot measures involving gay marriage. The church was on the anti side, both here in Arizona and in California. It’s been reported that the church spent literally millions of dollars to make sure the anti-gay marriage side won.

The church was successful in both cases, fairly narrowly in California. You could make the argument the church’s money tipped the balance.

We don’t have to point out to you the analogy we were making above. Just as it would be intolerant for us to try to deny a Mormon the right to buy a house, it’s intolerant for Mormons to try to stop gay people from marrying.

Whether a Mormon owns a house doesn’t affect me one whit, just as a couple of gays or lesbians getting hitched doesn’t affect Mormon couples one whit. That’s why it’s crazy, in both cases, to get one’s panties in a knot about it.

And finally, to go on a political campaign to deny other folks the right to buy a house—why, that’s bigoted.

And so is spending millions to dollars to make life more difficult for people who want to love and care for each other under the protection of the law.

A lot of the coverage of this issue, it seems to us, is just a little too polite.

Right now, the Mormons aren’t just building a couple of new temples, which is their right to do. They want the city in both cases to give them zoning variances. In Gilbert, they want to build to a height twice as high as is currently allowed.

In both cases, the cities should not give the Mormons any special rights to build that the current zoning doesn’t allow.

Let them built what they wish, under the laws in effect—but nothing more.

Why should the intolerant get special treatment from government?

Now, here’s the final point I want to make. What if I did get a movement going to deny Mormons the right to own houses. What if I played on people’s prejudices—and got a ban passed?

Then let’s let 100 years go by. A more tolerant age might dawn, and a movement might rise to ease those awful rules against Mormon house ownership.

Some however, would resist the change. They would demonize Mormon house ownership. It’s always been that way, they’d say. Mormons just can’t own houses.

Just because … that’s the way we’ve always done it.

How would Mormons feel? Probably a lot like the way gays and lesbians who want to get married today do.

They’d feel, in a phrase, like victims of a pointless and cruelly destructive prejudice that has no basis in reason or morality.

One thing Arizona is good at: Teen pregnancy!

The new issue of the journal Reproductive Health has a study of the relationship between religious activity and teen pregnancy, according to this story on Live Science.com.

I found the story through this NT blog, which I think presents the issue slightly wrong. The journal is studying states that have the most conservative religious beliefs and those with the highest teen pregnancy rates. Arizona isn’t in the top ten in the former, but ranks no less than fifth in the latter.

I guess it means that, while Arizona is one of the more moderate of the crazily religious states, it makes up for it by going the extra mile and having a much higher teen pregnancy rate than you’d expect.

The study made this damning conclusion:

[T]he results showed more abortions among teenagers in the less religious states, which would skew the findings since fewer teens in these states would have births. But even after accounting for the abortions, the study team still found a state’s level of religiosity could predict their teen birth rate. The higher the religiosity, the higher was the teen birth rate on average.

p.s. This just in! Also from James King at New Times: Arizona leads the nation in student loan defaults.

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'The Daily Show' visits Phoenix

Jason Jones explores the economics of selling off the Capitol building:

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The mystery of David Ramirez

Phoenix’s top PR guy, David Ramirez, who’d been with the city for ten years after a prior life as an Arizona Republic reporter, is suddenly out, at least temporarily, according to this Scott Wong blog post on AZCentral.com:

The city of Phoenix’s chief spokesman, David J. Ramirez, has been removed from his role as acting public information director and placed on administrative leave, city officials confirmed today.

PHX 11 Station Manager Deborah Sedillo Dugan became the new interim director of the Public Information Office effective 5 p.m. Friday, according to an e-mail from Deputy City Manager David Krietor to department employees and the City Council.

Sedillo Dugan declined to explain why Ramirez was placed on paid leave, nor did she know how long he would be gone.

Whatever happens to Ramirez will work itself out in time, but PHXated would like to point out that at least two people aren’t doing him any favors.

The first is city manager Frank Fairbanks, who is quoted by Wong referring to unnamed “allegations” against Ramirez. This isn’t fair. If the city is going to allege that someone did something, it should say what it is.

If it isn’t, which is of course the correct thing to do, it should shut up.

But the second person not doing Ramirez any favors is … Ramirez himself, who said this:

“In my career, I have never touched anyone inappropriately. I don’t have any blemish on my evaluations in 13 years. I’ve never had a formal or informal complaint given to me about my professional conduct,” Ramirez said. “My exemplary record working for the city speaks for itself.”

Now we know what the allegations are—right?

Well maybe not. According to this post on the New Times site, Ramirez says “his quote shouldn’t be understood to imply that he’s touched someone inappropriately”:

He simply meant to tell Wong that he’s not being accused of touching, striking or doing anything like that to someone, he says.

“I just said I couldn’t talk about any aspect of the investigation,” he says. “I wanted to convey to him that I’ve always been professional.”

With all respect to the difficulties Ramirez is going through, his grasp of how to handle a potential personal scandal is, given his professional position, more than somewhat ironically under-developed.

p.s. The NT story also says this:

Ramirez says he let Wong know the quote was sort of out of context. He says Wong revised the azcentral.com blog post, but we saw no difference.

If what Ramirez says is true, the site is doing him a disservice by leaving the original blog post up. If it isn’t, Wong should explain the original context of the quote. Finally, there doesn’t seem to be an “official” story on the site yet.

Local twitterer says he wants to shoot President Obama

The Feathered Bastard has the story:

Lemons says the guy’s real name seem to be Eric L. Arteaga. who he says is a Scottsdale musician.

The speeder in the monkey mask

The AP picks up on the story and goes into it in relative depth; it’s on the NYT site, though I didn’t see it in the paper.

The Republic says the guy with the mask, Dave VonTesmar, drives 30 miles to Sky Harbor Airport for work. Here’s a guy who wants his big north Phoenix house (which means he’s on the road an hour or more spewing car exhaust into the air, creating a problem the government has to deal with) and wants to drive on the roads the state builds for him to do so, but doesn’t want to follow the posted rules. And he calls it “a peaceful act of resistance.”

It’s actually “a douchey act of hypocrisy.”

If he doesn’t like the rules on the 51, he can take surface streets.

VanTesmar also calls the radar essentially a tax on speeders, which I think is a mot rather than an argument. (What is jail but a “tax on murderers”?) Why do so many Arizonans throw around all those defiant American tropes, but don’t follow basic rules in their own lives?

And calls the act “resistance,” to boot. Really, Dave? “Resistance”? Like, against apartheid?

Finally, what the state should be doing is cracking down on the other douchey folks who have their license plates covered with plastic to make the numbers hard to read. It’s in everybody’s interest to have cars readily identifiable.

By the way, the AP story called the guy VonTesmar; the Republic’s been calling him “Vontesmar.” I’m going with the AP.

The anti-Semitic demonstration in Tempe no one's talking about

Update:

The Jewish News reports on the small but mean anti-Semitic demonstration organized by Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church outside Tempe’s Temple Emanuel last Friday:

In the end, reported [Rabbi Andrew] Straus, there were three protesters, each of whom carried four signs. They stood across the street from the temple, on the west side of Rural Road. Emanuel is located at 5801 S. Rural Road.

“There were about five cops out there,” Straus added. “And we had a full house.”

The paper has an editorial, too:

In the end, the WBC “attack” only served to strengthen the Temple Emanuel community, which responded admirably – which is to say hardly at all – to the demonstrators’ spiteful provocation. The final score for the Sept. 4 encounter: Civil discourse 1, Westboro Baptist Church 0.

Original post:

PHXated spoke today with an elderly congregant of Temple Emanuel in Tempe about a protest she saw at the synagogue last Friday. This is what she said:

When I got there there was a lot of police and maybe six or seven fellows with signs. The signs said “Kill the Jews,” “Jews Eat Children,” that sort of thing.

The police assured everyone they’d be gone in a half an hour, that they didn’t intend violence—They just wanted to to make their views known.

The rabbi knew this was going to occur. I didn’t get it because I don’t use the computer, but he emailed many members saying that they should please come to temple because we don’t want to look like we are intimidated.

It was a Friday night service and it was packed! They had to bring in extra chairs, because people responded to this rabbi’s request that there be no intimidating scare tactics.

The woman continued, speaking haltingly:

When I saw the signs, I wanted to go home right away. I have to walk with a walker; there’s no way I can run.

But I spoke with the rabbi and his wife and I said I would come and it wouldn’t look nice to disappear. I couldn’t bring myself to go when so many others had the strength to stay.

After the service, the police and the signs were gone.

She said the incident has cast a shadow over Rosh Hashanah, much on her mind this year; after a difficult year, healthwise, she had been invited by the temple to open the ark on the pulpit the day of the holiday later this month.

It’s when people promise to forgive our enemies, we promise to be helpful and turn their lives around. If you’re an artist, you teach other artists, you share and communicate.

It worries me a bit because there is a pastor in Tempe, spouting that he wants Obama dead. He doesn’t want to kill him, he just wants him to die of brain cancer or something like that. I’m sure the security people know all about that.

What they also have to know is that it foments other violence, it mushrooms.

Here again her voice grew halting.

I can’t imagine protesters carrying signs that say “Kill the Jews,” “Jews Kill Children,” who aren’t violent people.

And that’s the story.

The Tempe pastor she spoke about is Stephen Anderson, of Faithful Word Baptist Church; one of his congregants is Christopher Broughton, the guy now infamous for toting around an AK-47 near President Obama’s recent VFW speech in Phoenix. Details on him here.

I couldn’t find any mention in the press about the incident. PHXated is getting in touch with the temple’s rabbi and the Tempe police for comment.

Update: The protesters weren’t locals. The temple’s rabbi, Andrew Straus, said that the temple was warned of the coming protest last Wednesday by the ADL, which had been following the activities of a fringe religioso outfit calling itself the Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas.

Here’s something on the group from the ADL’s web site:

While WBC members have protested at Jewish institutions over the years, such institutions were not a major focus for the group until April 2009. Since then, WBC has targeted dozens of Jewish institutions around the country, from Israeli consulates to synagogues to Jewish community centers, distributing anti-Semitic fliers to announce planned protests at these sites. WBC has also been sending volumes (in some cases dozens over the course of a week) of faxes and emails with anti-Semitic and anti-gay messages to various Jewish institutions and individuals.

A Tempe police spokesperson said personnel were on the scene just to make sure nothing untoward happened. “We wanted to have some officers available if anything should arise and fortunately nothing did,” he said.

I asked Rabbi Straus if the protest worried him. “The Westboro Church per se doesn’t worry me.” he said. “What worries me is a rising tide of intolerance. We can’t even have a civil discourse any more.”

He, too, mentioned Stephen Anderson. “There’s a rising tide of hate in our community,” he went on. "I spoke about this in service a couple of weeks ago. The language around the health-care debate has become filled with hate. There’s a subtext of encouraging violence.

“You think it’s only words. But ask Yitzhak Rabin. It’s was only words his oppenents were using.”

The incident wasn’t the only recent hate incident in town recent. A black Fountain Hills couple had Nazi and KKK imagery painted on their cars last week. Details here.

More on the hate crime in Fountain Hills

Turns out the ugly racial incident in Fountain Hills—in which some black residents had their cars vandalized with racial and sexual insults—is part of a series.

The Arizona Republic story on the issue is a bit unclear about what exactly has happened in the town. The resident, Michele Jabar, is quoted saying there have been “several” racial incidents. We then read:

Jaber was referring to a prior incident in Fountain Hills in which vandals sprayed more than a dozen cars with swastikas and graffiti of male genitalia.

Note the word “incident.” But then comes this news, a graf or two later, emphasis added:

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies are investigating several cases as possible hate crimes, including an incident in which someone wrote the word “Jew” on another car in Fountain Hills, law-enforcement officials said.

The town is having a meeting to support the Jabars, but she, for one, is saying she might leave town:

Jaber plans to attend tonight’s service. She hopes residents will rally together to champion more racial and cultural tolerance in the community.

“I just wanted people to know that you can wash off the cars, but you can’t wash off the hate,” Jaber said. “Hate starts at home.”

The story doesn’t mention another anti-Semitic incident that occurred in Tempe on Friday night—a demonstration outside a synagogue. (“The anti-Semitic demonstration in Tempe no one’s talking about.”) The protesters, who according to an eyewitness held signs saying “Kill the Jews,” however, were from out of town.

Hate crime in Fountain Hills

From the Republic:

Three years ago, Michele Jaber left Burbank, Calif., for Fountain Hills with a better future for her children in mind.

On Sunday, as Jaber, who is Black, and her husband, Mike, hoped for a quiet barbecue with friends from California, they instead found a swastika, “KKK” and sexual images painted on the windows of two vehicles.

“I was completely shocked and saddened for my friends to come all this way and see this,” Jaber said.

The vandals wrote on the passenger’s side window of the Jabers’ Ford Bronco. A Cadillac Escalade rented by Classietta Foreman, who traveled with others from California, also was tagged as it sat near the curb.

It’s the second local incident of the sort, the story said. Jaber is quoted in the story saying that sheriff deputies said the vandals might have been “children in the area with too much time on their hands.”

AZFamily.com has video here.

Update: Abc15.com’s Tim Vetscher has this bigger-picture story:

PHOENIX — Experts who track hate crimes say the number of instances nationally and here in Arizona is on the rise.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, 19 hate groups currently call Arizona home, including 12 right here in the Valley.

One of the most high profile hate crimes here in the Valley happened on February 26th, 2004.

On that day, investigators say two alleged white supremacists from Illinois sent a letter bomb to Don Logan, then Director of Scottsdale’s Office of Diversity.
[…]
According to the SPLC, the Aryan Nation and the KKK are just two of the hate groups, currently calling Arizona home.