Rogue Columnist

Rough justice

Mark today. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released what my grandmother would have called the "Katy bar the door" report on climate change. It is the product of the sober work by hundreds of actual climate scientists. Read it for yourself. Please.

And mark the day you knew, without doubt. Climate change is real, human-made, happening now with growing costs — and the worst is yet to come. Especially if we do nothing.

Someday historians will note the curious contrasts of our time. So much of the public square is dominated by scolds with their calculators, talking about what we can't afford, how the cost side of the ledger must be the deciding factor in any debate.

Yet these are the same people who block any attempt to show the astronomic costs of doing nothing to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

Those historians will shake their heads at our myths about "makers and takers," "bootsrappers" vs. "welfare queens" and the widespread belief that government was an impediment to the efficient, justified workings of "the free market."

Train dreams

True high-speed rail: A train running from Paris to Brussels at 186 miles per hour.

The news stories said that ADOT was seeking our input on its study of passenger rail between Phoenix and Tucson. It isn't seeking my input for reasons that will become apparent, but here goes anyway.

It was always a joke renaming this entity the Arizona Department of Transportation. It was and remains in spirit the Arizona Highway Department, committed to building highways. The glory days were under state engineer William Price (1963-1977), when Arizona could boast some of the finest highways in America, before population growth and underfunding overwhelmed the agency.

Also under Price, the Highway Department began its swerve from serving the public interest to private interests and it's never looked back. You can see an early indication in the odd, seemingly illogical, westward shift the Black Canyon Freeway makes between Northern and Dunlap in Phoenix. This mission became gospel with the metro Phoenix freeway system, most of which was built to benefit private land owners whose worthless desert was suddenly highly profitable because a freeway was coming. The damage done to the city by the ensuing sprawl was catastrophic and is probably irreversible.

Downtown podcast

Edward Jensen was kind enough to interview me on the history of downtown Phoenix and the issues facing it. Listen to the Downtown Phoenix Podcast here.

If you want a deeper dive, try the Phoenix 101 columns, "What Killed Downtown." Understanding this history is important for future progress.

 

 

 

Keep out the vote

It is fitting that a federal judge chose this week to uphold the power of Arizona and Kansas to require proof of citizenship in order to vote.

This was the week in 1965 when 25,000 marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. reached Montgomery from Selma, Ala., a landmark in the long, bloody struggle for equal voting rights.

Who says the clock can't be turned back?

My favorite quote came from Arizona Attorney General Tom Horney: “This decision is an important victory against the Obama administration because it ensures that only U.S. citizens, and not illegals, vote in Arizona elections.”

Ah! Now I understand! The reason a bunch of ignorant, nihilistic Krackpots have taken over state government in Arizona is because illegal immigrants have been voting them in. Now, thanks to this George W. Bush-appointed judge in Wichita, perhaps sanity can return to the capitol in Phoenix.

Fergit, hell!

It was reported earlier this week that independents have surpassed Republicans as the largest voting bloc in Arizona. Independents are only slightly ahead of GOP registration. The bad news is that only 29 percent of the state's registered voters are Democrats. In 1992, Democrats made up 42.5 percent of voters.

More bad news would come in the unasked questions. How many of these "independents" trend to the right when they vote? And how many are low-information voters who will also naturally vote for "conservatives," if they vote at all? Nationally, the "independent" label has been well exposed as misleading. I hate to sun on the parade, but Arizona is a red state not a purple one.

I mention this in the context of the wider political story of 2014: The Democrats are running scared, running away from President Obama and Obamacare. The political press is all but in agreement that the Republicans will take control of the Senate in the fall election.

As an editor of mine used to say, Why is that?

When push comes to shove

The first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter arrived at Luke Air Force Base this week, which will be the primary training base for the new airplane.

The memory of Frank Luke deserves better. But it is also appropriate that the quintessence of the Military Industrial Complex's rackets should be operating alongside the top guns of the Real Estate Industrial Complex's hustles.

If you're new to the F-35 Lightning II, the program was intended to produce an affordable, durable, next-generation stealth fighter that could be manufactured in mass numbers to replace all of today's fighters. Not only that, but it would be used by all the jet-based services, including the Marines who demanded a short take-off and vertical landing version.

It was intended to be widely sold to U.S. allies. And this backbone of the future Air Force, Marine and naval tactical aviation was touted as a wonder: Not only with stealth capabilities, but a highly advanced "combat suite" for the pilot, including a helmet providing 360-degree "situational awareness" and relaying this to other F-35s and controllers.

Instead, it has become a disaster of trillion-dollar proportions. Only Lockheed Martin is happy.

The fix was in

If I really wanted to grow Rogue's readership, this post would be something like "Ten Reasons Do(w)nton Abbey Sucks" (1. All the white guys look alike, can't tell a footman from a nobleman...). But no, we'll stick with the serious stuff in the antique essay form.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Dennis Wagner wrote a fine piece of public-service journalism last week. It shows what the Arizona Republic would be capable of doing if its corporate masters at Gannett would allow it to commit more journalism and do less fad chasing.

It turns out that the FBI gave federal prosecutors all they needed to bring serious criminal charges against the High Sheriff for Life of Maricopa County, the ambitious right-wing county attorney, Andrew Peyton Thomas, and their top stooges.

The three-year investigation of abuse of power produced "found probable cause to recommend felony counts of obstructing criminal investigations of prosecutions, theft by threats, tampering with witnesses, perjury and theft by extortion."

Instead, the feds shut down the three-year investigation in August 2012.

Let me pause to note that this story didn't come from "crowdsourcing," "citizen journalists" or video and slide shows. It came from good, street-smart, shoe-leather investigative journalism, including the newspaper using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain all records of the investigation.

Ukraine and us

Godwin's Law posits that the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the greater the risk of an analogy to Hitler and the Nazis. It didn't take long with Ukraine*. Thus, conservatives have compared Vladimir Putin's grab for the Crimea to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland on the eve of World War II. That makes President Obama a Chamberlain appeaser. Even Hillary Clinton reportedly brought up Hitler.

Putin is not a Hitler. Obama is not a Chamberlain. This is not Munich revisited — oh, how many foreign policy disasters have we made in order to forestall a "second Munich." This is ignorance mixed with bad taste considering how the Russians suffered under Hitler.

The first thing to remember is that only Americans forget history, and history lays heavy on Ukraine.

'Picking on Arizona'

Let's close out the SB 1062 saga with a look at the meme, "Why is everybody picking on Arizona?"

1. While it is true that similar anti-gay Jim Crow laws have been introduced in at least nine other states, only Arizona passed it through both houses of the Legislature. It would have become law if not for the veto, under great pressure, by Gov. Jan Brewer.

2. Context matters. Arizona has already gained national infamy from such things as the anti-immigrant Jim Crow SB 1070, the ongoing misdeeds of the High Sheriff of Maricopa County, his highly publicized immigrant "sweeps" and horrendous jail conditions, Brewer wagging her finger in the face of the president of the United States with her mouth open in a hectoring pose, the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and ongoing gun liberalization, including guns in bars.

3. Phoenix is the nation's sixth most populous city, Maricopa County the fourth most populous county and the Phoenix metro area the 13th largest metropolitan statistical area. This is not rural Oklahoma. It has bureaus of influential news organizations, including the New York Times. So Arizona's Krackpot schemes will be noticed.