Everyone interested in the development of Downtown is excited about the possibility of a streetcar              line that will lure restaurants and businesses to Downtown; also tourists, partying students, and folks from the Foothills.

The motto “build it and they will come” rings bell-like in every ear.

Now here’s a strange and wonderful thing…the lure is actually working. New restaurants and apartments are popping up all along the partially completed trolley tracks. Student housing with its own beer hall promises to provide merrymakers who will lend life and vitality to what has been, for longer than we care to mention, a nighttime atmosphere as lively as an undiscovered tomb.

And all without a real trolley.

Our virtual trolley is like the atom bomb, you don’t actually have to build one…the threat that you might is enough. Cheaper and more efficient, too.

Tucson’s virtual trolley project has achieved some useful goals. Underground water and sewer mains have been improved; development goals have been realized; jobs have been provided to workers who supervise the progress not being made on time up at  factory that has never made a streetcar before.

Eventually, and long before any trollies are running on them, the tracks will be finished and the streets and sidewalks easy to stroll along without construction barriers.

Tucsonans love their virtual streetcars. The idea of a streetcar line that someday other people will use… leaving them traffic-free streets and ample parking to enjoy is thrilling.

Sometime in 2014 virtual is scheduled to become real. Unless the weekends are free you’ll always be able to get a seat.

It turns out thatGovernor Brewer might be okay with that, according to a story in Friday’s Star. The expansion of Medicaid, which would add 300,000 people to the Arizona Healthcare Cost Containment System, is being held hostage by a small group of ‘right to life’ legislators.

“No funds for Planned Parenthood or we’ll sink Medicaid expansion.”

Planned Parenthood is a primary source of family and health services of all sorts to women (and men) who might otherwise go without. The result is healthier, happier, families.

Clearly these services are so wicked  that some of our legislators are willing to sacrifice health service to 300,000 of their fellow Arizonans to make sure they are not funded. It’s a lose-lose situation.

The “Lifers” are so concerned about the unborn that they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens.

Good Grief.

At least according to Arizona’s Republican legislators and Governor Jan Brewer.

It works this way: If you have guns you can no longer provide a loving home for and sell them to a cooperating law enforcement agency that agency must re-assign them to a good home. What cannot happen (Oh, the horror!) is that they be destroyed.

Nothing, if not consistent, this is the extension of the conservative position on another right to life issue.Will NRA legislators now introduce legislation to make it illegal for a gun owner to destroy his own gun?

Good Grief!