Corky Simpson and Jeff Smith

Once upon a town there was a time when folks around there had a pretty good idea what was up.

The town was Tucson and the time was the tail end of the 19th century through the better part of the 20th. Better indeed.

The folks knew up from sideways because – if they bestirred themselves to waddle onto the front lawn – they could pick up a hometown newspaper where they could read all about it.

The Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star had decidedly differing views. A grammar school dropout could tell which was which three grafs into their editorial pages – but they shared a fundamentalist approach to reporting those events:

You let the participants do the talking and the paper do the typing. The editorial page chewed the fat. News-side eschewed it.

The trick to maintaining incivility was for one paper to break a different story, or a different angle, when they could leave the competition looking asleep at the wheel.

What nobody did fiddle with was the facts, because then as now a small hometown like Tucson could tell when local coverage flunked the smell test.

You might run a story datelined Afghanistan and it might have a scent of barnyard here or there and you might get away with it, but a hometown paper better have the hometown news fair and square.

I am of the educated opinion, however, that even in these perilous times for print, an honest hometown paper that remembers its roots, and has the publisher to protect them, will survive.

The Citizen came first, in the last trimester of the 19th century, when all it had to fight was Apaches and politicians. Then the Arizona Daily Star hit the streets and the battle was joined.

As a mercenary whose checks have been signed by the publishers of both, from 1968 until the curtain came down on 2007, I’m here to tell you it was the kind of ride that keeps otherwise intelligent professionals working like short-handled hoers for money that would make a school teacher weep.

But we had the pride of knowing we were keeping the people up to date and armed with facts when the high and mighty were armed with sophistry.

My first encounter with hometown journalism was as an 8-year-old pal of Donald Thornton, son of Vic, managing editor of the Star. On weekends Donald and I would wander into the old Star/Citizen building on Stone Avenue and listen to the editors argue about whether Art Luppino was the best tailback in the country or just a fast frog in a slow pond. (For the record, Art was the greatest running back ever. You can read it spelled out in my scrapbook, in raw umber.)

In those days the Star was owned by the Ellinwoods and Matthews. The Citizen belonged to the Smalls. Those days were the ’50s. By the ’60s the feds had targeted Tucson newspapers in an antitrust action, which we were spared when the Failing Newspapers Act allowed the papers to keep publishing, leaving the housekeeping to a third party we still know as Tucson Newspapers Inc.

And they all lived happily ever after. Until the owners of the Star tried to sell but found no takers except a small-time outfit named Brush-Moore. So the Citizen’s owners, Bill and Bill Small, father and son, bought the Star, with the pledge to keep out of its internal affairs and find a decent buyer. Which it appeared it had – Pulitzer sounds like a decent newspaper name – until the wife of a Pulitzer made it a matter, for me at least, of quit or get fired.

Upon which my own purely personal opinion of selling a hometown newspaper to out-of-town interests experienced an epiphany. It blows.

So I began my career at the stupid end of a shovel.

A white knight rode to my rescue, in the person of William A. Small the younger. (Let me share this apology across the void to Bill: Scouts’ honor, Boss, when I referred to you as Bill Small the Lesser, it was an allusion to Homer’s Iliad, in which he identified Ajax the Lesser, thus to distinguish him as his father’s son. Not by any means to disparage you, or Ajax.)

Because in November 1976 I went to work for a hometown newspaper at the zenith of its powers. And circulation. The Citizen made money and spent money. It spent money to make money: I read somewhere that’s how smart money does it.

The Citizen reporting crew in the ’70s was three or four times its current staff, and its daily circulation was a similar bulge.

A veritable Ku Klux Klan of factors conspired to drive what was once a rabbit warren of glad-hearted hustle – curiosity inspiring phone calls, calls inspiring car keys, keys taking reporters all over Arizona, northern Mexico, to hell and gone and back again, in time to fill out our expense vouchers and then home for the weekend and gone again next Monday.

Bill Small did not bitch about the money spent to cover the on-beat and off-beat: He did the math and read the English, which sang of profitability.

There was money to be made in a hometown paper – the kind that made readers laugh and cuss and look forward to the next edition.

For Small it bought a newspaper sufficiently profitable that when he decided to spend his days pursuing the muse instead of news, his Citizen caught the eye of the biggest newspaper chain on the planet, the Gannett Co., of all the factors conspiring to stamp out hometown newspapers, the Mother Factor.

So after two blissful years working for an enlightened, penny- and pound-wise publisher, I thought, “Poop.”

And I was right. If Gannett allows this to see print it will be the most liberal editorial decision I have seen in three decades under the aegis of the people who brought us USA TODAY . . . and converted every hometown newspaper it could buy into one of its clones.

Old newspapermen joke that a good reporter could cover the Second Coming of Christ in 13 column inches. But a good feature writer could create a novella, and a good newspaper would dummy the room to run it.

My brother Dave wrote a feature on a kid from Mesa who walked into a beauty parlor, made five women lie face-down on the floor and then calmly shot each in the back of the head. The story ran roughly the length of a Louis L’Amour novel. It jumped from Page One of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition all the way to the back, and then jumped from the back to the front again, turned around and ran until it ran out.

The Times got one of the best days of street sales in its history. The kid got life in Florence, and my brother got a VW vanload of Best of Whatever awards. Including one with my former publisher’s last name.

It was the kind of story Gannett never would even consider, not if every woman the kid murdered were every subscriber’s mother, daughter, sister or aunt; if the kid were every reader’s adopted son, and the town were home to the chief executive officer of Gannett. Maybe that’s a good thing, a savvy decision, but it is not the sort of policy that endears it to the antiquarian species that reads its paper on the porcelain pedestal of a morning.

Gannett ran an ad campaign for the Citizen a few years ago featuring a chorus of elevator-tenors chiming “. . . the Citizen is Tucson.” I had my doubts then, and as Gannett smothers Tucson’s oldest, once-hometown paper, like some bothersome bed-ridden uncle, I don’t think the Citizen is Tucson anymore.

Gannett sent one of its aparatchiki to announce the execution to the crew, lest they hear it first from the Star. There were people there – friends of mine, guys who have fired me three, maybe four times – who’ve put in 40 years or better at that newspaper. And this suit from east of the Potomac lacks the decency even to thank them for their toil and tears.

He was here to announce a successful hit, by an assassin with a long string of successful hits. These are propitious times for killers looking to end newspapers they’ve bled white.

Hit men don’t fly across a continent to thank the family and friends of the departed; they come to put the stink-eye on anybody who looks like he might make trouble.

The emissary just didn’t get enough stink on everybody. Pray that you live long enough to see the hometown newspaper make its inevitable comeback.

Mark, Billie have the last word

Jeff Smith is only mostly dead. Much like his muse . . .

Corky Simpson and Jeff Smith

The parade’s gone by. No more trumpets. No more drums. No hoofbeats, no streamers.

And the hush of the street is overwhelming.

The death of a newspaper is very much the end of a living, breathing soul. And there’s never been one quite as unique as the Tucson Citizen.

Years from now when you tell young people what the Citizen was like, remember this: It had a heartbeat.

It was the harvest, the milling and the preparation of ideas by people of character, most of whom were characters. They gave the paper its heart, its spirit and its blemishes.

Some had swagger, and over the years many had stagger.

We’ve been peopled by saints and sinners, wise men and flim-flammers and in the old days, a few fall-down drunks who always got up in time to put the old gal to bed.

We’ve had Daniel Boone characters who talked like Jed Clampett and wrote like Stephen Vincent Benet.

We’ve had stutterers who sounded like Mortimer Snerd but had a mind like Carl Sagan.

And there were the legends.

Ted Craig was a gifted editor and writer, but his real talent was the telling of tall tales. Well, that and sizing down human monuments to arrogance.

Ted was a fine athlete, though he didn’t exactly look the part. He was an outstanding golfer because he hit the ball so straight, no matter what club he used.

He also played a good game of tennis and was known to pack the most potent “grapefruit juice” ever tasted in his Thermos bottle.

Phil Hamilton was an Okie. I mean, he dripped Okie. He lived in my part of town and gave me a ride one day after I’d left my old Ford with Bill the mechanic at Palo Verde Automotive out on East 22nd Street.

“Cain’t have a body out in this heat, footback a’ walkin,’ ” Hamilton drawled.

Phil did everything. Reported, edited, wrote a column, covered politics, read copy, wrote headlines. And he was superb.

Bob Campbell was one of the funniest men who ever lived. Our liaison with the back shop when we actually had a back shop, Bob occasionally came to work late – and always had a story to tell to start off the day.

Such as the time, around Halloween, when Campbell announced he knew exactly how many people had come to his house to trick or treat – even though Bob wasn’t at home.

“I went to the bank and got 20 shiny new silver dollars,” he said, “and I spread them out on a card table in my front yard. When I got home, every one of them was gone, so I know conclusively, that there were 20 trick-or-treaters.”

Stu Robertson was a copy editor who occasionally nodded off late in the day. One afternoon he had a cigarette between two fingers and he had that hand on his forehead as he drifted into dreamland – and set his hair on fire.

Micheline Keating wrote the most beautiful movie reviews you’ve ever read. Somebody told me “Mike” had been a friend of the famous writer-poet Dorothy Parker, known for her wit and wisecracks.

John Jennings may not have been the best storyteller on the old Citizen staff, but he could imitate storytellers in such a way that he outdid their talent. Just recently we laid our beloved “J.J.” to rest.

There were so many characters. Such as the guy on the copy desk way back when, who came to the Citizen out of rehab and who thought he was Humphrey Bogart. Had the lisp, the voice and the mannerisms. Unfortunately, he didn’t have Lauren Bacall.

For nearly 140 years the Citizen brought you news from around the community, the state, nation and world. Through war and peace, famine and times of plenty. From the frontier of territorial days through statehood.

Not just anyone can do this job and do it right. Not even trained journalists. Especially trained journalists!

It takes newspaper people, some of whose personal flaws over the years somehow enabled them to create professional refinement.

The awards, the prizes, the hardware from corporate honchos were just trinkets. The Citizen’s real honor was a decoration of the heart – hardworking professionals doing their best to give Tucson its best news coverage and presentation.

Now the little paper at Park and Irvington has been given its summons to join the innumerable once-upon-a-time caravan.

When you remember the time this city had two newspapers competing – and making each other better – don’t think of this one as the loser.

The loser is the community. Tucson has lost an essential voice, living, breathing, ink-stained history recorded by the finest, most competent and dedicated ding-a-lings on Earth.

Things happened, news broke and time passed away. So, now, has the Tucson Citizen.

The parade’s gone by.

And now, final words from Corky and Jeff

Our heart beat as one with the Old Pueblo’s

Corky Simpson is a retired sportswriter who graced our pages regularly from Labor Day 1974 to Dec. 22, 2006.

A 2004 photo taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shows a female American soldier holding a dog leash fastened around a naked prisoner's neck.

If there was one incident that led to the decline in support for the Iraq war at home and abroad, it was the 2004 publication of pictures of U.S. soldiers taunting and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Those photos, broadcast endlessly into homes around the globe, depicted grinning American soldiers – male and female – next to naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in piles on the floor.

Others showed snarling dogs intimidating prisoners. And perhaps the most infamous revealed a female soldier leading a naked prisoner by a dog collar around his neck.

The soldiers who engaged in this rogue, illegal conduct were tried, convicted and went to prison. But the damage they did can never be fully expiated.

Now, a freedom of information filing by the American Civil Liberties Union threatens to open this old wound.

The ACLU filed suit in 2003 to obtain the release of all photos related to military detention, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found in its favor last September. The Bush administration sought to reverse the ruling, but the Obama administration said in April it would not fight the release of the photos.

Then, President Obama reversed course this week, instructing the Justice Department to challenge the release in court on the grounds of national security.

President Obama now says that the publication of these photos “would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”

He added that the most direct consequence of releasing them “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.”

He did not come to this conclusion without help – namely from Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; and Gen. David McKiernan, outgoing American commander in Afghanistan, who pushed Defense Secretary Robert Gates to urge the administration to fight the release of the photos.

Better late than never. Obama’s reversal comes after weeks of controversy over his Justice Department’s decision to release Bush administration memos giving legal justifications for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on enemy combatants.

While the two actions strike some left-wing critics as contradictory, in fact they demonstrate the fine line Obama is trying to walk on Bush-era decisions.

On the one hand, Obama seems eager to punish Bush political appointees for aggressively prosecuting the war on terror.

On the other hand, he’s nervous about doing anything that might provoke more violence against American troops, especially if it might redound to the detriment of his own reputation and that of his administration.

If Obama acquiesces in the release of the photos and terrorist acts against American soldiers or civilians abroad follow, he knows he’ll be blamed.

But the Obama decision also reflects the larger shift on the left from blaming soldiers for their involvement in a sometimes unpopular war to trying to show some respect for military personnel while still attacking the political leaders who sent them to war.

Although Obama is not old enough to remember the Vietnam War personally, he’s nonetheless learned some of the lessons from that era.

Vietnam War protesters spat on American soldiers, literally and figuratively. Many burned the American flag, urged the victory of the communist guerrillas and ignored the torture of American prisoners of war in North Vietnam.

Some, such as Obama friend and political ally William Ayers, went further, engaging in grotesque acts of violence against military installations in the U.S. and later against the police.

The American people overwhelmingly rejected the excesses of these protesters, electing Richard M. Nixon twice.

With some exceptions – notably Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who accused American troops of committing atrocities in Haditha before investigations and courts martial cleared them; and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who accused American troops of terrorizing Iraqi children – most Democrats have tried to sound supportive of American soldiers.

I’d like to think this support is sincere, that they appreciate the sacrifice of the men and women who serve this country so the rest of us can be safe.

But even if President Obama’s decision not to release the photos was simply a cold, political calculation, we should be glad he made it.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Barclays Capital declared the recession ended in April. But we are still a long way from recovery. With $5,000 you can either go to a Yankees game or you can buy a controlling interest in General Motors and watch a big loss either way.

President Obama decided to block release of the photos of terror-detainee abuse. They show detainees naked with their hands up in the air. Nobody bought the Bush administration’s story that they were putting on a prison production of “Oh, Calcutta!”

Colin Powell suggested that Republicans stop listening to Rush Limbaugh because he warps the party. The general is understandably bitter. He was in charge of peace efforts and diplomacy in the Bush administration, and all he got out of it was carpal tunnel syndrome from playing solitaire on his office computer for four years.

Somali pirates retreated to the African shores when the annual monsoons arrived, making the sea too rough for pirate boats to chase tankers. It caused environmentalists to tear their hair out. They can’t figure out why the climate is saving the oil industry.

Jimmy Carter (right) told the U.S. Senate that energy independence is as important today as it was 30 years ago when he was president. He’s so right. We were relying on imported cocaine for our energy needs in the Carter era and it’s no different today.

The White House announced President Obama will go to Normandy and speak on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He’s seen pictures of the landing. He wants to go to France to apologize personally for America littering their beaches.

The Kremlin said President Obama will visit Russia in July. The nations’ leaders are going to have a long talk about political prisoners. The Russians are refusing to do business with the United States until Obama releases the auto executives.

Sarah Palin was asked to join the GOP’s national listening tour. The party had no choice but to invite her. Mitt Romney could wear a short skirt and a tank top to these rallies, and nobody would pay a nickel to see him.

The Titanic Memorial Cruise is set to sail from England for New York three years from now, on the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated voyage. The luxury liner Balmoral will retrace the route of the Titanic. For anyone who didn’t see the bottom of the ocean during the financial crisis, this is your chance.

President Obama blocked prisoner abuse pictures after consulting his generals. Wise move. They felt it would inflame Arab opinion against U.S. troops across the Middle East, as opposed to the toga party they throw for us every night now.

The Social Security Administration said it mailed stimulus checks last month to 10,000 deceased Americans. The government sent $250 to each of 10,000 dead people. In Chicago, that’s what’s known as “get out the vote” money.

Argus Hamilton is host comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. E-mail: argus@argushamilton.com

Parents and other citizens are often frustrated by certain policies in public schools.

Arizona, for example, for several years has required students to pass Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards in order to receive a high school diploma.

An exception, called “augmentation,” allows students who fail the test to get a diploma, provided their grades are good and they take remedial courses in math, English or both.

The problem has been that students, parents and even teachers have not always known about this important exception or how students can take advantage of it. Confusion results.

The Center on Education Policy, an independent Washington, D.C., advocacy and research organization, studied policies for at-risk students and English-language learners in Arizona during the 2006-07 school year.

Researchers conducted 364 interviews with students, teachers, administrators and parents at five high schools in southern Arizona.

Three Arizona policies in particular were the focus: AIMS and augmentation, the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment and the written. individualized compensatory plan (a learning plan for English-language learners who have been classified as “fluent” in English but are not making progress).

Serious problems were found with understanding and implementing all three policies.

In addition to the confusion about the augmentation policy, many teachers believed English-language learners passing AZELLA were not necessarily ready for mainstream classrooms, let alone passing high school exit exams.

Once students pass AZELLA, in principle, they are not qualified to receive any language service; AZELLA becomes a legitimate excuse to deprive students of desperately needed services.

Under such circumstances, it is natural that some schools create their own rules of classification and manage to subsidize programs without funding from the state.

Legal arguments, such as Flores v. Arizona, should not be surprising, because the state’s identification, classification and funding system is simply not working for students, teachers and schools.

Another problem area is Arizona’s written individualized compensatory plan. Teachers are to specify learning goals for struggling students to help with their academic progress.

This is a really good idea when a couple of students in each class need such service. But when a school has to write individual plans for more than 700 students, as in some of the schools reported in the study, this well-intended policy turns out to be unrealistic.

This program was abandoned by some schools because they did not have sufficient staff, resources or knowledge to put it into practice.

Policy design is not just theory; this individualized plan program is an object lesson in how idealistic design can contribute to impractical implementation.

The lesson from our work in Arizona couldn’t be clearer: State policies may not only fail in achieving their goals, but also may bring unexpected consequences to students and schools.

CEP’s report captures this reality during 2006-07 and describes a wide range of reactions among teachers and school staff.

We hope, for the students, parents, teachers and other citizens of Arizona, the situation has improved.

But the broader lesson is that the state government and local school boards should make sure their policies make sense when implemented together and don’t conflict with one another.

They should also be sure that teachers and local administrators have the capacity to carry out those policies.

Otherwise, there will be confusion in the public and frustration in the schools.

Arizona is not alone in having school policies that do not fit well together and in requiring policies when there is little or no capability to carry them out.

But not being alone should not be an excuse. Policymakers must make sense out of what we ask our schools to do.

Jack Jennings is president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. Ying Zhang is a CEP research associate.

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More online

To read the full report, Conflicts Between State Policy and School Practice: Learning from Arizona’s Experience with High School Exam Policies, go http://www.cep-dc.org and look under High School Exit Exams.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaks to a meeting of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank Monday. Referring to the federal stimulus, Bernanke said, "You have to take away the punchbowl, as someone once said, in order to avoid the inflation risk."

The federal government has committed trillions of dollars to domestic bailouts and propping up the recessionary economy, much of it borrowed, much created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.

How much longer can all this go on? That’s the pressing question facing policymakers, and one without a clear answer.

At some point, “You have to take away the punchbowl, as someone once said, in order to avoid the inflation risk,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, paraphrasing William McChesney Martin Jr., who served as Fed chairman in the 1950s and ’60s under five presidents.

But change course too soon, and it could nip a fragile recovery in the bud. Wait too long, and runaway inflation and gargantuan federal debt could be the sequel to the worst downturn since the 1930s.

While nobody thinks the current combination of near-zero interest rates, bank and auto bailouts and trillion-dollar annual deficits is a sustainable economic model, knowing just when to take away the punchbowl is the problem.

For now, the Bernanke Fed is still filling the punchbowl. And President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are doing the same with government spending.

One reason the Fed has been so aggressive in slashing rates and taking unconventional recession-fighting steps is because “we are trying to avoid another form of price instability, which is deflation,” Bernanke told a Fed financial conference in Jekyll Island, Ga., earlier this week.

The risk of deflation – a widespread and prolonged decline in retail prices, wages and real estate and other asset values – is “receding, but it certainly needs not to be ignored,” Bernanke said.

Despite some recent glimmers of hope, evidence is mixed on whether things are getting better or still worse. Disappointing reports Wednesday on falling retail sales and a jump in foreclosures fueled continuing uncertainties and helped push stocks down.

“You’ve got to take the stimulus off at some point. I don’t think that point is this year,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York. He said Wednesday’s economic reports point to a continuing recession, despite some recent signs of encouragement.

Government and most private economists expect the recession, which began in December 2007, to end later this year, although they expect high levels of joblessness to continue beyond.

In the meantime, recent developments are complicating efforts to tame the deficit once the recession does end:

• White House budget officials said this week that the deficit would widen to a record $1.8 trillion this year, $89 billion more than their estimate in February. They blamed the recession.

• With nearly 80 million baby boomers nearing retirement, the government reported that Medicare and Social Security will face insolvency sooner than previously projected because of the recession – for Medicare in 2017 and for Social Security in 2037.

• A potential $90 billion shortfall opened up in paying for Obama’s health care proposal. The gap comes from congressional reluctance to go along with his proposal to help pay for the plan by limiting high-income families’ charitable-giving and other tax deductions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the health care bill will be on the House floor before the August recess.

• The administration asked Congress on Tuesday to add $100 billion in new U.S. contributions to the International Monetary Fund as part of a war-spending bill.

Obama proposed just $17 billion in new spending cuts last week, representing savings of less than one-half of 1 percent in his $3.4 trillion budget. Republicans scoffed and even some top Democrats criticized him for targeting popular programs in recessionary times.

By some accounts, the sum of all the U.S. grants, loans, guarantees and new money created electronically by the Fed since the financial crisis began totals some $11 trillion – roughly equal to the country’s national debt.

That sum does include loan guarantees that might not be needed, money that hasn’t been spent, various revolving accounts and U.S. investments in bad mortgages and other toxic, hard-to-value securities that could someday return money to taxpayers. Still, staggering amounts are involved.

“We are creating a government debt bubble that we’re going to have to deal with in a massive way,” suggested Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the senior Republican on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

History shows the dangers of calling the end of economic downturns too soon.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt made this mistake in 1936 when, believing the Depression largely over, he sought to pare back public spending and to balance the federal budget. It torpedoed a fragile recovery and pushed the economy back under water in 1937.

Japanese leaders made a similar mistake in the 1990s when they prematurely – and temporarily – withdrew government stimulus spending, helping to prolong Japan’s recession to one that lasted a full decade.

At the White House, presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed suggestions by some analysts, including Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist for brokerage Charles Schwab, that the recession may have already ended.

“I can report nobody has intoned that message” at daily White House economic briefings, Gibbs said. “There’s much work to be done.”

Veteran budget analyst Stanley Collender said increases in public spending are an important fiscal tool and that “a bigger deficit is justified in the current economic environment.”

Furthermore, Collender added, if Obama doesn’t push his agenda for more health care, energy and education spending now, when will he?

“He’s got a 60-percent-plus approval rating. And Democrats are willing to work with him. He should go for it now. He’s never going to get a better chance,” Collender said.

Tom Raum covers politics and the economy for The Associated Press.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is among the British cabinet ministers whose questionable expense vouchers were published.

LONDON – There are titled people in Britain and then there are people who consider themselves entitled.

The current scandal here is that the entitled are not the growing number receiving benefits from government, but the many members of Parliament whose highly questionable expenses are jaw dropping, even to the most cynical observer.

In a series of front-page stories last week in The Daily Telegraph, expense vouchers of majority Labour Party members – including Prime Minister Gordon Brown and several Cabinet ministers – were published.

The newspaper paid an unidentified source for the information, which was due to be released free this summer.

Ordinarily, one might expect those who have been identified as milking the taxpayers for dubious personal expenses to express shame, or at least embarrassment. But instead, the members are unrepentant and fighting back.

Given the nature of the expensed items, it is doubtful they will persuade the British public, which continues to struggle financially.

Barbara Follett, the minister of culture, creative industries and tourism, claimed £25,000 in expenses for security because she doesn’t feel safe living in the Soho district.

Her husband is Ken Follett, a best-selling novelist and multimillionaire. It apparently didn’t occur to her to ask him to pay for her security detail, or move from a neighborhood she regards as unsafe to one in which she feels more secure.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas expensed women’s clothing and toiletries, including tampons and diapers. Parliamentary rules allow expenses only for items that are “exclusively” for the MP’s use.

Unless the married Woolas is holding something back, it will be difficult for him to explain how tampons are for his personal use.

Members are allowed expenses for second homes. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, however, switched his second-home designation four times in four years, claiming the second-home benefit each time.

Darling recently proposed to increase the income tax to 50 percent. Perhaps he needs the money to help underwrite his expenses.

Margaret Moran, a parliamentarian from Luton South, expensed £22,500 of taxpayer money, just days after she switched her second-home designation, to repair dry rot at her and her husband’s seaside home – 200 miles from her constituency.

Dry rot seems to be a useful metaphor for the condition of Parliament.

As if the outrageous expense claims were not enough, what the Telegraph calls “begging letters” from parliamentarians whose expenses were rejected expose the grip the entitlement mentality has on many politicians.

One Labour MP appealed a ruling against him this way: “From a natural justice perspective, I feel a justifiable exception would be the fairest manner to deal with the current situation.” He wanted a £3,100 reimbursement for a 40-inch Sony TV.

Here’s another: “I object to your decision not to reimburse me for the costs of purchasing a baby’s cot for use in my London home. . . . Perhaps you might write to me explaining where my son should sleep next time he visits me in London?”

And another: “I would be very grateful if (the expenses) could be paid in the last round of the year on Friday. Otherwise, I might be in line for a divorce!”

Like relatives who overstay their welcome – consuming food and drink and soiling your home – at holiday time, politicians in Britain and America come to believe they are entitled to other people’s money simply because they win an election.

When the relatives leave, the owners usually give the place a good cleaning. That’s what Parliament (and Congress) needs to do.

The Labour Party might have handed the Conservatives a powerful issue if the latter had not also been feeding at the public trough. The Telegraph is following up its stories on Labour with similar reports on the Conservatives.

In addition to the second-home reimbursements, one Conservative, Cheryl Gillan, the shadow Welsh secretary, claimed an expense for dog food. (She at least promised to reimburse the government.)

David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader and potential prime minister, (he leads in the polls) apparently escaped embarrassment as his claims have been called “relatively straightforward” by the Telegraph. This might allow him to take on the role of reformer in the coming election campaign.

Conservatives should bring real change to a system that allowed one Labour member to expense the cleaning of his swimming pool. That might be defensible if the member could walk on water.

Cal Thomas is an author and broadcast commentator. E-mail: calthomas@tribune.com

BOB DAVIS

In these hard times, there are some new and exciting ways to do good for a cause, for yourself and for the community.

Some call it the new face of philanthropy, and it expands the notion of giving from just writing a check to giving of your own talents and becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

Gifts from billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates may make the headlines, but those gifts remain less than 1 percent of all giving to nonprofits. In fact the biggest gifts are falling off sharply while people such as you and I are stepping up.

Along the way, our gifts can pay off for us in important ways, such as strengthening community bonds and letting us learn something new.

As someone who has given substantially for four decades, I can offer my own road map for helping in the “Help Wanted” era. Here goes:

First off, where might you give? Consider joining a “giving circle,” an idea that is the newest thing in national philanthropy.

Tucson offers many options, from the University of Arizona Galileo Circle in the sciences to the Rebounders at the athletics program. You might choose a circle that helps a cause you believe in, where you have personal contacts.

Giving circles promote smart, systematic giving and also let you be appreciated where it counts. In my case, I began to help out the UA in small ways as soon as I could afford to. I joined the President’s Club when I was just a $30,000-a-year employee. Now my spark is finding opportunities to promote research to keep the United States competitive.

With a target in mind, consider these three categories of philanthropy:

• Giving your talents.

• Giving your wealth.

• Giving your time and ideas.

By talents, I mean the areas in which you have real expertise. You may be an accountant, an attorney, a designer or in real estate. Imagine doing something “pro bono,” which means for the public good.

As a commercial real estate expert, I’ve helped UA by doing real estate studies, negotiating, collecting market data, setting the value of property or building.

Giving your wealth has an extra benefit. It lets you do more as you offset each gift with a tax deduction, so a gift of $10,000 is actually an out-of-pocket cost of $7,200 or even less, depending on your tax bracket.

Again, check out those giving circles, such as the UA sport interest groups with delightful names such as the Dugout Club and the Lungbusters. They make it fun to contribute.

The third kind of gift – your time – sometimes is overlooked. You can volunteer to be on a committee and help improve an organization. In my case, I started volunteering to help UA athletics but became hooked on research after I met Joaquin Ruiz, the superdean of the Faculty of Science.

These days, I donate my skills in real estate to find facilities for biotech research and have learned to understand biochemistry and lunar and space sciences.

Not so long ago, a woman in Seattle named Patsy Bullitt Collins followed a multifaceted formula for philanthropy. At first, she gave of her time and ideas to civic causes, and then, living very plainly, she quietly gave away more than $100 million in a family fortune she had inherited.

She was asked if she was trying to give back to society. She replied, “I don’t give back. I give forward.”

That’s it exactly. Find something in Tucson that energizes you enough to give, either on your own or in concert with others, to its future.

Bob Davis is senior vice president of Grubb & Ellis Co.

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For information on University of Arizona sport interest groups, go here.

Misinformation serves as placebo rather than actually curing our health care system

The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing Tuesday on overhauling the heath care system. Among those testifying was Steven Wojcik (left), vice president of public policy for National Business Group Health.

The country is about to have a very frustrating debate over health care, characterized more by misdirection than an honest discussion of the alternatives.

A good illustration was provided by the Monday confab at the White House, in which health care executives committed to reduce expenditures by $2 trillion over the next decade.

Or did they?

President Obama, in his remarks, said that they did: “They are pledging to cut the rate of growth of national health care spending by 1.5 percentage points each year – an amount that’s equal to over $2 trillion.”

The actual letter signed by the executives, however, says something importantly different:

“We will do our part to achieve your administration’s goal of decreasing by 1.5 percentage points the annual health care spending growth rate – saving $2 trillion or more.”

“Our part” is much different, and far more ambiguous, than “we will do the whole thing.”

This is best seen as collusion by the health care industry and the Obama administration to misdirect the American people.

In the first place, what health care expenditures will be over the next 10 years is unknowable. So, the “pledge” is written on water.

More importantly, the commitment was made by trade associations that don’t actually deliver health care. What happens on the ground with health care costs is unaffected by press events held by politicians and lobbyists.

Most important, what happens on the ground already provides incentives for true economies. There are serious distortions in the health care marketplace, but market share can still be gained by reducing costs and prices.

The real significance of the press event wasn’t the phony pledge of cost savings. The event signaled the political capitulation of the health care industry. They will now accept whatever role in the health care system the politicians assign them.

The more substantive event that happened that day was the release of an “options” paper for health care reform by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley.

But, again, “options” is a misnomer. This paper doesn’t really spell out fundamentally different approaches. Instead, the choices are all a variation on a single theme: a government-managed system of private health insurance.

Existing plans would be grandfathered in. But all future health insurance would have to be purchased through a government exchange.

The government would decide the benefit options insurers could offer, and insurers would have to offer all options. Pricing would be strictly circumscribed. Medical underwriting would be prohibited.

The fight over whether there would be a “public option,” a health plan actually administered by the government, is misplaced. If government controls the benefits and pricing of private plans, politicians and bureaucrats are in charge irrespective of whether there is a formal public plan.

The political need for action is driven by the uncertainty over coverage in the American system. The gaps in coverage are hugely worrisome even for those who currently have good insurance.

This uncertainty, however, is easily eliminated at no cost to the taxpayers. There already is a national health care plan, Medicaid for the low income. Universal access could be provided simply by allowing any legal resident to buy into Medicaid at the government’s cost.

The system as a whole, however, makes no sense. Obtaining health insurance through your employer is an artifact of World War II wage and price controls.

Some Republicans want to eliminate this dependence and stimulate a market for individual health insurance. That makes more sense, but the public is unlikely to be comfortable with such a radical restructuring without a government backstop, such as the ability to buy into Medicaid.

This debate will be sad and frustrating.

And the end result will probably be neither fish nor fowl – a system that provides neither the certainty and security of a European-style national health care system, nor the choice and freedom of a vigorous individual health insurance market.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com

Debate goes beyond dissection to how pets were treated when alive

It is certainly an unusual Tucson business – one that sells vacuum-packed dead cats: $44 for one or 10 for $415.

The company, which doesn’t kill the cats but buys them from shelters where the felines were euthanized, supplies the animals to be dissected by medical students.

And although the business tries to keep a low profile, a recent report by a national animal rights group criticized its operations and has led to death threats against the firm’s president.

The company is Delta Biological, which is based in Tucson and operates out of a couple of unsigned buildings in an industrial area on Tucson’s South Side.

Peter Reinthal, president of the company, said Delta does everything possible to ensure the dead cats it buys were treated and euthanized humanely.

But a new report “Dying to Learn” by the American Anti-Vivisection Society on the use of live and dead dogs and cats in classrooms, says that because Delta buys dead cats from Mexican pounds, it can’t be sure how they were treated or killed.

It wouldn’t be necessary to bring dead cats in from Mexico if the Pima Animal Care Center would sell the cats it euthanizes instead of burying them, says Reinthal.

He won’t say how many dead cats his company sells, but says the 6,000 stray and unwanted ones that Pima County euthanized last year would more than supply the company’s annual needs.

“They would rather have them go into the landfill than use them for educational purposes,” Reinthal said.

It’s not a very pleasant debate and it’s based almost entirely on emotion. The cats already are dead, so why not use them to teach medical students?

The Anti-Vivisection Society says there are alternatives to using live and dead dogs and cats for teaching – alternatives used by almost half of the nation’s medical schools.

And Delta’s “practice of obtaining cats from Mexico for sale in the United States is questionable,” according to the Dying to Learn report.

American animal shelters hold stray cats longer before euthanizing them than shelters in Mexico, said Laura Ducceschi, director of Animalearn, the educational division of the Anti-Vivisection Society.

And Mexican euthanasia methods are often “a lot more inhumane,” she said.

Ducceschi said she has “significant concerns” about Delta’s operations, adding, “The average student doesn’t really know they are dissecting a cat that may have been treated inhumanely in Mexico.”

Not so, responds Reinthal. All of the dead cats sold by Delta “are obtained legally and euthanized under guidelines of the American Veterinary Council,” he said. “We make sure our sources are 100 percent legal and ethical.”

But the issue is far larger than how the cats were cared for and how they were euthanized.

“They have a definite biased slant,” Reinthal said of the Anti-Vivisection Society. “They are out to promote their political agenda.”

Ducceschi doesn’t disagree, saying her group is opposed to “trading animal cadavers for profit.”

In addition to cats, Delta sells dead pigeons, fish, grasshoppers, mink, rabbits, rats and fetal pigs as well as various invertebrates such as jellyfish and sponges.

Reinthal says he doesn’t want to get involved in the political discussion about whether dissecting such creatures is necessary to properly train students.

“I’m not pro-dissection or anti-dissection,” he said, adding that students should have the option of not taking part in dissections.

But because the issue is so politically charged, Delta doesn’t advertise its location. Its plain white building has only a small “Office” sign on the door. In a compound enclosed by a fence topped with barbed wire, there are scores of drums of chemicals. A keypad is required to enter.

After Delta was identified in the Dying to Learn report, Reinthal received a half-dozen e-mailed threats. One, filled with obscenities, threatened to “cut you open and see what you look like and peel your skin off. . . . I wish I could send people to kill you hurting animals is wrong.”

Reinthal turned the threats over to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, but it’s not clear if anything will be done.

When I first heard about Delta’s business, I was shocked. I hesitate to kill bugs and I carry spiders outside, so selling dead cats seemed disgusting.

But is it less disgusting to throw those dead cats in a landfill when a medical student may be able to learn something from it?

I wish there was an easy answer.

Mark Kimble appears at 6:30 p.m. Fridays on the Roundtable segment of “Arizona Illustrated” on KUAT-TV, Channel 6. He may be reached by e-mail at mkimble@tucsoncitizen.com or by calling 573-4662.

The New York Yankees were reported to be embarrassed about the empty $2,000-per-seat section. It’s been a rude awakening. When the tickets were priced last year, the Yankees had no idea the New Yorkers who could afford them were running Ponzi schemes from laptop computers in their home offices.

The President slashed Chrysler’s ad budget in half. This is his area of expertise. Barack Obama told the automaker it didn’t need $100 million in advertising if the company can just run a few negative ads in Iowa and get Chris Matthews on its side.

President Obama will address the Arab world from Egypt in two weeks. He thinks coexisting with the Muslim world depends on communication. In case he’s wrong, he will speak from behind bulletproof glass and hire local kids to start his car.

The White House released photos of Air Force One flying low over New York City. Cell phone videos showed people running through the streets in panic. The Air Force One flyover project has been renamed the President’s Project on Physical Fitness.

Roger Clemens (right) hired a publicist to battle steroid charges. Athletes have a new angle for public sympathy. Doctors say steroids will shorten your life by 30 years, but the players say they are just doing their part to keep Social Security solvent.

Argus Hamilton is the host comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. E-mail: argus@argushamilton.com

Board members and administrators of Tucson Unified School District have made a valuable discovery: When you ask for ideas on how to save money, people can be very creative.

And there is another lesson: One size definitely does not fit all. What is best for one school is not right for another – and the only way to know that is to ask people closest to the students.

Faced with the likelihood of having to make massive budget cuts, TUSD Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen tried something very different. Instead of working with the TUSD board and her top aides to make the cuts, Fagen turned the responsibility over to individual schools.

Site councils – consisting of parents, teachers, principals and staff – were asked to propose ways of dealing with cuts of 10 percent and 18 percent. Because the Legislature is dawdling on adopting a state budget, it is not yet known how deep the education cuts will be.

There is no easy way to deal with the “smaller” cuts of “only” 10 percent. But the site councils came up with a range of ideas that show those working closest to the schools have a deep understanding of what can be eliminated if worst comes to worst.

Two schools that now share a principal with two other schools, decided they didn’t need a principal at all. The site councils at Holladay Intermediate Magnet and Richey Elementary schools decided the best way for them to cut costs was to let lower-paid assistant principals be in charge.

Other schools had other priorities. Alice Vail Middle School opted to make deep cuts to its supply budget. Counselors, librarians and monitors were endangered at all schools – yet some schools felt it was important to keep them and others did not.

Many high schools said they would do away with campus monitors and funding for fine arts.

Some cuts are troubling, such as the possible elimination of arts classes. But as long as site councils are representative of all parents and the cuts don’t eliminate programs required by the state, individual schools should be given as much latitude as possible to best meet the needs of their students.

This marks the first time that site councils have been able to make budget decisions for their own schools. And even though most of the decisions will be grim, those choices are better made by the people in the trenches, not by administrators at 1010 E. 10th St.

We hope legislators will come to their collective senses and find ways to mitigate the cuts to schools. Education must be in the top echelon of state spending responsibilities – and that can happen if lawmakers are willing to get as creative as the site councils did.

Fagen took a risk in turning such critical budget decisions over to site councils. But her confidence in those parents and teachers has been rewarded with laudable creativity.

Harvest Plus, a research organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fortify crops for developing nations, is focusing on using conventional breeding techniques rather than genetic engineering.

A multivitamin for the world’s poor could be found in a cup of corn meal.

Scientists in Spain have engineered African lines of white corn to provide high levels of beta carotene, a key source of vitamin A, a nutrient critical to protecting eyesight.

The grain, which has an orange tint because of the beta-carotene, also contains significant levels of vitamin C and folate.

Less than a cup of the corn could provide the recommended daily intake of vitamin A, scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said the achievement “opens the way for the development of nutritionally complete” grains.

The corn joins versions of rice and other crops that scientists are trying to breed to alleviate malnutrition in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some 250 million preschool children are deficient in vitamin A, and as many as 500,000 kids go blind each year for lack of the nutrient, according to the World Health Organization.

The Rockefeller Foundation is pushing ahead with an effort to produce large amounts of a vitamin A-enriched rice, known as Golden Rice. At World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue symposium last fall, the foundation’s president, Judith Rodin, said the rice could “save almost 3 million children’s lives, while nourishing as many as 300 million more.”

Like the corn, the rice came from genetic engineering, which involves adding genes to the plant from other species to give the crop new traits.

“We have so many millions of people around the world who have diets that are less than ideal,” said Greg Jaffe, a specialist in agricultural biotechnology with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group in Washington. “We should be using all the tools available to try to improve those diets.

Biotech seed companies such as Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred are focusing their research on crop traits that will be in demand in developed nations, such as soybeans with oils that are better for the heart and corn that is drought tolerant.

Harvest Plus, a research organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fortify crops for developing nations, is focusing instead on using conventional breeding techniques rather than genetic engineering.

The group is developing fortified varieties of several crops, including corn, beans, millet, wheat rice and cassava, through conventional crops.

But biotech crops have met resistance in many regions, including Africa, where the fortified versions are targeted.

The first vitamin A-enhanced corn variety is targeted for release in Zambia in 2011 and 2012. Other crops will be fortified with iron and zinc.

Conventional breeding may take longer than genetic engineering, but ultimately the new crop may be available sooner, said Yassir Islam, a spokesman for Harvest Plus, an outgrowth of a network of research centers, called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

So far in the greenhouse trials, yields of the biotech corn are equivalent to those in conventional varieties, one of the researchers, Paul Christou, wrote in an e-mail. The research has been funded through the Spanish government and a European Union program.

The scientists have been experimenting on white corn because that’s the favored type in their target areas of Africa. But they don’t believe hungry people will turn down the grain if it’s orange.

“Our intended target population is not well-fed people in industrialized countries, rather starving people in Africa, South America and Asia!” Christou wrote.

Philip Brasher is a reporter for The Des Moines Register. E-mail: pbrasher@dmreg.com

Brandon J. Piekarsky of Shenandoah Heights, arrives at the Schuylkill County Courthouse for his trial in this April 27 file photo taken in Pottsville, Pa. An all-white jury acquitted Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak of all serious charges against them stemming from the fatal beating last summer of an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

When her fiance and the father of her two children was beaten to death last year in Shenandoah, Pa., Crystal Dillman predicted that justice would not prevail.

“I think they might get off,” Dillman told The New York Times last August in reference to the four teenagers charged in the beating of Luis Ramirez, “because Luis was an illegal Mexican and these are ‘all-American boys’ on the football team who get good grades, or whatever they’re saying about them. They’ll find some way to let them go.”

It seems they did. In most parts of the country, the cowardly and hateful act of beating someone to death – while shouting racial slurs, according to witnesses – would be called by its proper name: murder.

Curiously though, in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, an all-white jury came up with another name for it: simple assault.

That’s what 19-year-old Derrick Donchak and 17-year-old Brandon Piekarsky were convicted of recently after jurors threw out more-serious charges of ethnic intimidation and third-degree murder in the beating death of the 25-year-old Ramirez, who had lived in Shenandoah for about a year.

This verdict makes no sense to me. When I read the comments of jury foreman Eric Macklin, it seems the jury didn’t do much thinking or processing of evidence.

According to Macklin, jurors were too busy indulging their prejudice and perhaps looking for a way to spare the teenagers long prison sentences.

“I believe strongly that some of the people on the jury were racist,” Macklin told reporters after the verdict. “I believe some of the people on the jury had their minds made up before the first day of the trial.”

One of the jurors, Josh Silfies, took exception to that.

“It was really not as cut and dry as a couple of white kids beat up a Mexican and killed him,” Silfies told reporters. “It’s not like that. I sat there for a week and heard the testimony and heard the evidence, and I had a lot of doubt that these boys were heinous.”

A lot of what happens in the court system is all about empathy. The jury might have found it easier to relate to the teenagers sitting at the defendants’ table than to an illegal immigrant from Mexico lying in the morgue.

The prosecutors didn’t have to prove that the teenagers were heinous, only that they committed a heinous act.

The facts spoke for themselves, unless you buy the yarn spun by defense attorneys that this was simply a “fight” that ended badly. That tends to happen when the fight is four against one.

Should we comb through the thousands of lynchings of African-Americans in the South and Hispanics in Texas and reclassify them as fights? What about the countless acts of anti-gay hate crimes that occur each year? Are those also properly thought of as scuffles that got out of hand?

As of now, it’s unclear what’s going to happen to Piekarsky and Donchak. Their sentencing on the assault conviction is scheduled for June 17.

Another teenager, Colin Walsh, faces up to eight years in prison as part of a federal plea agreement, the details of which were sealed. A fourth was charged as a juvenile; those proceedings are also sealed.

Don’t miss the irony amid this tragedy. According to media reports, Mexican immigrants such as Ramirez are going to Shenandoah to take jobs on farms and in factories.

This is precisely the kind of work that, a generation or two ago, would have gone to young people looking for jobs after high school graduation. Now, these have become, so we’re told in the immigration debate, “jobs Americans won’t do.”

And teenagers are left with too much time on their hands and too little compassion for those who work hard.

The verdict has sparked outrage around the country. Some blame the anti-Latino poison-infecting talk radio and cable television.

Boston radio talk show host Jay Severin was recently suspended for calling Mexican immigrants “primitives” and “leeches” along with other inflammatory comments.

Meanwhile, more than 25,000 people signed an online petition demanding that the Justice Department bring federal charges against Piekarsky and Donchak.

According to a Justice Department spokesman, the civil rights division is currently reviewing the case.

If there is evidence of a civil rights violation, the Obama administration should absolutely bring indictments. After all, a nation’s greatness is determined not only by what it provides but also by what it won’t allow.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan spelled out what most economists won't say: "Illegal immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy."

Democrats are in a tough spot on immigration reform. Actually, make that a number of tough spots.

For one thing, they’re caught between pandering to Latino constituents who want them to strike a deal that legalizes millions of illegal immigrants and catering to organized labor, which adamantly opposes the one element of reform Republicans say must be part of the deal: guest workers.

For another, now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they’ve run out of excuses as to why they’re doing nothing.

But at the same time, they’d rather not do anything because as long as there is a stalemate, they can use the issue against Republicans.

After all, there are two ways to get ahead in politics: Make yourself look good or make your opponent look bad.

The immigration debate – and the xenophobic language that some Republicans have carelessly infused into it – helps Democrats look good to their Latino constituents.

But the spell is wearing off now that Latinos are beginning to wonder why Democrats can’t deliver immigration reform even when they have power. Answer: Because not all of them want to deliver.

It’s hard to know in which camp falls Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who recently called a hearing of a Senate subcommittee to explore the feasibility of achieving – or even discussing – immigration reform in the midst of an economic recession.

One of the high points was the testimony of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who spelled out what most economists won’t say: “Illegal immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy.”

Meanwhile, labor claims the bad economy makes it unfeasible to bring in hundreds of thousands of new workers for jobs that Americans should be doing.

But that argument is disingenuous. The unions were just as opposed to guest workers when the economy was good.

That’s because one thing that hasn’t changed is that organized labor still sees itself as being in the protection business – protecting its members from the competition represented by foreign workers.

Democrats favor a reform package that would legalize the undocumented while making a cursory pass at border enforcement. But the package would leave out any mention of guest workers.

Yet ditching guest workers is an effective way to ensure that not a single Republican, in either the House or the Senate, will sign on to the final product. In fact, two of the most forceful champions for immigration forces in the GOP – Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl – already have made clear that they won’t support any compromise that doesn’t include a temporary worker program.

That spells doom for the immigration reform movement because Democratic leaders are going to need at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate – and could use more in the House – to offset the all-but-certain defections of Blue Dogs who won’t go along with what they consider amnesty for illegal immigrants.

So now it’s time for the advocates of comprehensive immigration reform to think strategically, stop playing politics and concentrate on getting results.

They need to rustle up as much support as possible from Republicans and keep guest workers in the mix if it helps them do so.

They need to look for a middle-of-the-road approach that gives the undocumented a chance to legalize their status but stresses the concept of accountability by requiring those who travel that road to acknowledge that they did wrong and attempt to make amends.

The reformers now need to show they hear the concerns on the other side and stop challenging the motives of those who disagree with them.

Not least of all, the reformers need to take advantage of a powerful yet underutilized weapon: personal empathy.

Many Americans have members of their family tree who arrived on these shores only to experience mistreatment or marginalization because they threatened those already here, either by taking jobs or changing the culture.

And it is those Americans who are just waiting to be converted to the cause of immigration reform, provided their concerns are addressed.

As the party in power, it is up to Democrats to begin the conversion. But first, they have to start the conversation.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune. E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com