Rogue Columnist

Trump and the GOP

It's rich that star columnist George "Chickenlips" Will has left the Republican Party because of the likely nomination of Donald Trump. He told the Federalist Society on Friday that he would change his registration to unaffiliated because the party that would have such a standard-bearer "is not my party." In a later interview, he said, "Make sure he loses. Grit (your) teeth for four years and win the White House."

I usually decline to extend [the real-estate developer's] brand by calling him by name, but here I am making an exception for clarity and economy of writing.

Beyond the unseemliness of a working journalist being registered as anything but an independent, Will's statement and even its forum tell us much — but not as he intended.

Columnists such as Will and the vast right-wing infrastructure that includes the Federalist Society (its specialty is the law and courts) have spent decades creating this moment. Decades of seeding the politics of racial antipathy through the Southern Strategy. Decades of teaching Americans to hate their government and be misinformed about its essential place in our society, history, and economy. Decades of creating devils (Hillary!) — and, yes, the left is capable of this, but doesn't have the reach of right-wing media. Decades of pushing policies that defunded schools, ruined our infrastructure, destroyed the middle class. All this was funded by a dark conspiracy of billionaires intent on repealing everything from the New Deal through the Nixon administration.

And this was mere prelude to the actions of the Republican Party in the Obama years. Even before Barack Obama was sworn in, we saw the frightening Nuremberg-lite rallies ginned up by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Things got so bad that an embarrassed John McCain was forced to contradict an old bat who kept saying Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Palin led the party's final exodus from knowledge ("elitism!"), history, common sense. George Will didn't disown any of this; none of it offended his bow-tied Tory sensibility.

Then seven-and-a-half years of scorched-earth policy, where the GOP Congress regularly held the nation's economy and government hostage, even threatening default. Even minor appointments by the president were held up for years. The GOP-controlled House voted at least 60 times to repeal Obamacare, offering no alternative for uninsured Americans. Mr. Obama faced the unprecedented situation where his nominee to the Supreme Court could not even get a hearing. The party bigs and their puppetmasters helped fund the creation of the Tea Party — giving voice to an eager cohort of angry whites — ensuring a GOP so extreme that today Ronald Reagan couldn't win a Republican school-board primary. Not a peep from George Will. He was out to the ballgame.

It's a dry heat

Somebody on Facebook posted a T-shirt that said, "If you can't handle Phoenix at 122 degrees, you don't deserve Phoenix at 78 degrees." OK, then. Nothing to see here, move along.

When you're forced to rip off majestic cataclysm Detroit's mordant humor ("Detroit: Where the weak are killed and eaten"), you have issues as a city. The biggest one, climate change, is getting the least attention.

As day after day was hitting record high temperatures and at least four hikers were killed by the heat in Arizona, and untold numbers needing rescue that endangered the lives of first responders (been there, done that, and no, the view doesn't offer comfort when you're lugging some tenderfoot down a mountainside in a Stokes basket), when the heat was so severe it prompted an airliner to turn back because of fears of its tires blowing out on the broiling runway at Sky Harbor, with a possible serial killer on the loose in Maryvale... Amid all this, Phoenix received an unexpected gift.

It came in the form of a New York Times story headlined, "Phoenix focuses on rebuilding its downtown, wooing Silicon Valley."

Here was a godsend that none of the usual it's a dry heat, you don't have to shovel sunshine, I hike Camelback on the hottest days (moron), championship golf local-yokel booster Pravda propaganda could never match. The Newspaper of Record gave us a (if one didn't look too closely) glowing vote of confidence. What climate change? We're gonna be a tech hotspot!

No, tax cuts don't help Arizona

My policy is to never make sport of a person's religion, however fanciful I may find it. So to the extent that Arizona's Republican leaders and their mouthpieces believe, as an article of faith, that tax cuts have made the state economy stronger...as Pope Francis would say, who am I to judge?

Now, if we're going to move beyond religion to facts, the story is different. The Arizona Republic reported that two decades of tax cuts will cost the state's general fund $4 billion this year. This comes from economists at ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business, hardly a hotbed of socialism or "you hate Arizona!"

This is a useful departure point to a deeper examination. Have tax cuts been good for Arizona's economy? Have they been good for Arizona?

In general, the most authoritative study yet, published late last year by William Gale, Kim Rueben, and Aaron Krupkin at the Tax Policy Center, found no connection between cutting top income-tax rates and state growth.

The three researchers hone in on Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's "real life experiment" in supply side economics for the Milken Institute. The Brownback cuts, enacted four years ago, have been a template for other Republican governors. But they have been a disaster and Kansas' economy is suffering. These GOP cuts also typically result in regressive sales taxes that fall heaviest on the working poor, widening inequality.

Now let's look at Arizona specifically:

Light rail to Union Station

"Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads."

The South Central line is one of the most promising additions to the Phoenix light-rail system (WBIYB). City Council has approved a plan to fast-track the five-mile extension to Baseline Road by 2023. But a crucial piece of the project isn't on the table, and as far as I know nobody is discussing it.

This line needs a slight rerouting: It needs to jog over the Third Avenue on Washington, then run south to Lincoln Street before moving back to Central for the journey south. This would provide two big benefits, one immediate and the other long term.

By shifting west, it would pick up large numbers of riders at the government centers of the city and county. But the big enchilada is that the line would pass just to the east of Union Station, which was Phoenix's intercity passenger rail depot until the 1990s.

Light rail might need a tunnel under the current Union Pacific line, but it would be worth it. The payoff would be connecting light rail with a reborn Union Station as the hub for a region-wide commuter train system as well as the return of Amtrak to Tucson and Los Angeles.

If Phoenix fails to do this, it will be a blunder to be regretted for decades to come.

Rogue changes

I've had a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that I'm not as fast as I used to be. Part of it is me, and part the deluge from our hyper-connected society. The bottom line is that I will be writing less often. Once a week will be the norm, occasionally twice, especially if the news demands it.

My day job at the Seattle Times requires four or five columns per week. Then there's the "constituent service" of responding to readers and dealing with the stunningly large number of "pitches" from flacks. I'm a regular on Seattle's NPR station, KUOW. Staying informed requires an enormous amount of research.

Then there are the novels. I have started a new Mapstone Mystery — and I can't make serious progress on it with the current workload. All of these are paying gigs and I was very careless in choosing my parents. So I have to bring money in the door.

Arizona's Continuing Crisis will be updated every Wednesday and I will do the other In-Depth Reports as I can. And the site has plenty to read, especially if your jones is Phoenix history. Also, the Front Page is freshly posted with some of the best journalism every day. But the columns will likely come only weekly. Thanks for your understanding and for continuing to read Rogue. And spread the word — plenty of former fans of my Republic columns don't realize I still write on Arizona.

Is perpetual war inevitable?

In an otherwise interesting essay entitled, "The Price of Perpetual War," we find this perplexing paragraph:

The United States did not choose this era of perpetual war. It is the price of living in a world where, for the first time, terrorist groups and malevolent individuals can reach the United States and wreak havoc from virtually any corner of the world. That threat was literally brought home by al Qaeda on 9/11 and reinforced all too recently by the terror attacks in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino.

Does anyone believe this is so? Alas, millions of Americans. But to make a quick list...

...We chose to give a blank check to Saudi Arabia to run one of the world's most repressive regimes while spreading extremist war-on-the-infidels Islam throughout the Middle East and beyond. One doesn't have to subscribe to conspiracy theories to acknowledge that Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens. And what has our kowtowing to the kingdom given us? The House of Saud's oil, to fuel our "non-negotiable" (and already heavily subsidized) car-based sprawl lifestyle. Most oil needs to stay in the ground if we are to avoid destroying the planet even more — and between "making different arrangements" and domestic oil, we don't need OPEC anymore. ...

...We chose an even closer connection to Israel, Riyadh's quiet ally, whether this was in America's national interest or not. And with the oppressive and increasingly extremist regime of Benjamin Netanyahu is it increasingly not. Indeed, increasing Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and injustices against the Palestinian people committed by Israel blow back on the United States, which has long ago lost its credibility as an honest broker in the Middle East. It has inflamed Islamic and Arabic anger against us. And for what? To please the powerful donors of AIPAC and older Jewish voters in the swing state of Florida?...