The L.A. Dodgers drew a giant crowd to its stadium Mother’s Day. They gave away free female fertility drugs to the first 10,000 moms. As long as they had to clean out Manny Ramirez’s locker, it seemed a shame to throw it away.

President Obama stood up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and told jokes about himself and his family. The press walked out. They will not tolerate anyone telling jokes about Obama. They think it’s racist.

Mexico declared an end to the swine flu epidemic. People already forgot about it. When Americans realized that the Taliban were just an hour’s drive from Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, germ warfare seemed manageable.

Joan Rivers won Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” The final scene was held in the American Museum of Natural History. She and Trump had a big fight at the fossil exhibition about which one was forming a better oil pool.

Pope Benedict (right) made his first visit to Israel guarded by 80,000 officers. He told Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to get along. Next he’s going to settle that Roadrunner-Coyote thing.

The Postal Service raised stamp prices to 44 cents. It also threatened to end Saturday service if business doesn’t pick up. The government just announced that unless everyone buys a GM car, they’re going to sell them for $100,000 and they’ll only have two tires.

Keifer Sutherland faced assault charges and jail after he head-butted a fashion designer in New York. Americans love barfights. It reminds us what baseball players were like before steroid use made them too rich to interact with others.

Manny Ramirez was suspected by endocrinologists to have taken female fertility drugs to restore his testosterone level after cycling off steroids. At least that makes sense. Up till now, the L.A. Dodger’s only maternal instinct was nursing a Corona.

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

Questions linger on detainees who cannot be tried but are too dangerous to release

Mike Morice (center) and other members of World Can't Wait group perform a live waterboarding demonstration outside the Spanish Consulate in Manhattan last month to urge prosecution in Spain of the alleged involvement of Bush administration officials in the torture of terror suspects.

When President Obama declassified and released legal memoranda from the Department of Justice, he opened the door to a drawn-out battle over the Bush administration’s use of coercive interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

We believe that any subsequent attempts to subject those who provided such legal advice to prosecutions are a mistake. They will have a chilling effect on the candor with which future government officials provide their best counsel.

The country must move on from debates about the past, because pressing questions about U.S. detention policy in the war on terror requires us to make difficult choices – and to make them soon.

In January, the president announced via executive order that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay will close within a year. The announcement was easy – but it left unanswered the hardest questions about detainee policy for the future.

How do we prosecute detainees suspected of committing war crimes now that military commissions have been suspended? How should we handle those detainees who cannot be tried, but who are too dangerous to release? Where will we house them?

How should we deal with detainees who, if released, would return to the fight against us? How do we deal with prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where some detainees captured outside Afghanistan are being held?

There are no easy answers. As senators who have struggled with these issues for years, we believe some basic principles can help us find a common path forward.

• First, do not confuse war with common criminality. The majority of detainees held at Guantanamo are not common criminals, but warriors fundamentally committed to the destruction of our way of life.

The appropriate legal foundation upon which detainee policy should be built is the law of war, along with procedures adapted from our military justice system.

• Second, military commissions remain the appropriate trial venue for these individuals. We would strenuously oppose any effort to try enemy combatants in our civilian courts.

By an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which set forth procedures for trying enemy combatants for war crimes.

Our domestic criminal laws – including their treatment of classified information – are ill-suited for the complex national security issues inherent in the trial of enemy combatants. We have great faith in our military justice system – appropriately modified for war crimes trials – and we believe that military judges and lawyers render fair and impartial justice not only for our troops, but for enemy combatants as well.

• Third, preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror. Under the law of war, the idea an enemy combatant has to be tried or released is a false choice. Rather, it is well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.

While there is little doubt that we initially cast the net too broadly in determining who merited enemy combatant status, the Department of Defense estimates nearly 1 in 10 detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to the battlefield.

This includes Said Ali al-Shihri (second in command of al-Qaida in Yemen), and Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, who reportedly now serves as the Taliban’s operational commander in southern Afghanistan.

We cannot let this continue.

A significant group of detainees still in custody at Guantanamo may be too dangerous to release, but they are not suitable for war crimes trials.

In these cases, a system needs to be devised in which a designated national security court, with a uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge, hears the petitions for habeas corpus authorized by the Supreme Court, and an annual interagency review is conducted to determine whether the detainee remains a security threat to the United States.

• Fourth, we must address the detainee situation at Bagram in Afghanistan. An improved system for reviewing the need for further detention of detainees is required at Bagram – but we must not lose sight that Afghanistan is still an active theater of war and we cannot impede the ability of our Armed Forces to fight the enemy.

We are encouraged that the Department of Justice has appealed a ruling by the D.C. district court that extended habeas corpus rights to detainees held on the battlefield in Afghanistan.

In its motion, the Department of Justice argued that allowing the ruling to stand would harm our military’s ability to win the war.

• Finally, Congress must be involved in crafting detainee policy. It is critical for all branches of government to work together to develop solutions to the complex legal problems presented by this war.

We believe that the time has come to focus on these urgent issues, rather than spend the nation’s energy on the debates of the past.

We stand ready to work with President Obama to develop an enemy-combatant detention process that is transparent, provides robust due process consistent with the law of war, involves an independent judiciary, and protects us against a dangerous enemy.

The American people and the international community will see such a system not as an arbitrary exercise of power, but as an intelligent balance of due process and national security.”

John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona. Lindsey Graham is a Republican senator from South Carolina.

Sen. John McCain

Sen. Lindsey Graham

By John McCain, Lindsey Graham

HEATHER ANNE ORDOVER

You remember – or maybe you don’t – when Fort Lowell Road took a strange jog and pretty much became a dirt strip.

When high school kids held bonfire parties at the end of Sunset Road because it was in the middle of nowhere.

When Rosita’s was open and you had to bring your own beer just to sit among buckets catching the monsoon water that trickled into the swamp-cooled, adobe restaurant.

When artist Ted De Grazia was still alive.

When driving up Mount Lemmon or over Gate’s Pass meant you were taking your life into your hands.

This is the Tucson I discovered when I moved here in 1980.

Full disclosure (don’t hate): I’m a fifth-generation Californian. Yep, there are covered wagons checkering my past.

Being a descendant of old-timers, I grew up not so much California Girl as Desert Rat. But Tucson? Tucson is special. There were hidden gems everywhere back then in this natural amphitheater of ours.

One of the worst “you’re not a kid anymore” moments for me was coming home from university to find a gas station on top of Rosita’s.

Losing that restaurant with its charmingly goofy margarine-lid frames around the (spectacular) Rosita in various costumes – all with crocheted lace edging – well, that just did me in.

For a long time, I expected Tucson would go the way of every other ‘burb and become a haven for concrete and asphalt, with no room for the Charming, the Odd or the Other.

In 2006, I moved back to Tucson permanently with my family. We’d been living in Brooklyn until some crazy people tried to drop a building (or two) on the school where I was teaching.

We moved out of the city and lasted a few more years, then decided to head west, near the grandparents and let’s face it – more security than we felt living 10 miles from a nuclear power plant.

While the kids were thrilled to be close to their grandparents, and my husband loved the desert (he tans beautifully; I only burn), I was lonely.

Oh sure, I had my family, who I get along with ridiculously well, but I had grown to adore the quirky little village (minuscule, actually) where we’d lived after escaping Brooklyn. And worse, I thought those rough edges of Tucson were all gone.

I was wrong.

One of the things I enjoyed most in New York was public transit. You can get anywhere easily, cheaply and (nowadays) safely at any time of the day or night.

One of the byproducts of that system is that you meet people you never (ever!) would have talked to otherwise.

I’m a writer and teacher – I loved that. I missed that. In fact, since I work at home, I missed speaking to adults of any kind.

And then slowly, as I found my way around again – got used to Fort Lowell being an actual road, made sense of the River/Dodge/Alvernon Master Plan and dealt with the shock of actual storm drains (rather than roads to canoe down during a monsoon), I learned two things.

First, there are still some amazingly, wonderfully quirky places here in the Old Pueblo. And second, they are populated by spectacularly interesting people who have stories to tell – and are happy to tell them to you.

Heather Anne Ordover contributes to Cast-On with Brenda Dayne, to Weavezine.com and to Spin-Off magazine, and she is the host of the long-running podcast Craftlit: A Podcast for Crafters Who Love Books. She lives, teaches, crafts, blogs and writes in her corner of the Sonoran Desert with her extremely tolerant and supportive husband, two goofball sons, their two playful dogs, and a single, mournful, blue-tongued skink. E-mail: HOrdover@mac.com

Soccer fans wearing protective masks as a precaution against swine flu watch a Mexican soccer league match in Mexico City on Sunday.

Sometime in April, a big uproar over swine flu or H1N1, as it has now become known, spread through the media like wildfire.

The media’s way of informing the public of this flu’s second appearance, however, has been by way of overly sensationalized reports.

Since then, a letter has been sent home from my high school principal, debates of this perceived pandemic have circulated through my classes and on a national scale, schools have been shut down temporarily and many are nervous about the situation.

I am beginning to think the hyped up stories of this flu are getting everyone sick from stress more than the actual flu.

The letter sent home from my school stated precautionary measures to be taken to prevent getting the flu: Wash your hands, cover your nose and mouth and avoid close contact that can spread the virus.

But with so few cases in the United States – and that death has come only to those whose immune systems are weak – it seems unlikely this flu will make it very far.

I also know many friends who, when not feeling well, have decided not to take a trip to the nurse’s office due to the fear of being thought to have swine flu.

My only coherent thought after learning this was “wow.”

And this has not been the first time the media have overplayed a sickness.

Take the mad cow disease, for example. The uproar about this ailment was particularly big.

About 4.4 million cows were slaughtered during the eradication program, yet mad cow proved fatal to fewer than 50 people in the United States.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to the time in each of our lives when we were told the story of Chicken Little.

This was the fable of a chicken that vehemently believed the sky was falling because an acorn had landed on its head.

Through this story, Chicken Little is on an adventure to find the king and tell him about his discovery and fear.

On this adventure, he meets many gullible animals who also begin to believe the sky is falling. The moral presented by this story is: Do not believe everything you are told.

So should we believe everything the media feed us when they have proved on more than one occasion that they have the tendency to create the news rather than just report it?

Or should we take it upon ourselves to gather the facts? The choice is up to you.

Ashlee Maez is a junior at Tucson High Magnet School. E-mail: kailachi@yahoo.com

Lack of leadership is clearly apparent as educational funding gets sidetracked

ANDY MORALES

“We’re looking for a leader, someone walks among us and I hope he hears the call.”

- Neil Young

It’s as mysterious as Rio Nuevo and as elusive as a chupacabra. A responsible and fair state budget is nowhere to be seen, and there seems to be no leadership to get one done.

The conservatives who control our Legislature have taken a position of delay and political cowardice, knowing their budget will not be kind to public education or to poor families.

If you think the $140-per-year rental tax will hurt working-class Tucsonans, then wait till families lose full-day kindergarten.

Lawmakers’ inaction has forced governing boards and superintendents to do the right thing and plan for a shortfall.

How could they not? They are responsible to the taxpayers in their school districts, and they must do what’s right by their employees as stated in law.

They do not have the luxury of stalling to prevent political opposition.

The governing boards have faltered in their responsibility to their teachers in one major area, however.

They attempted to get legislation passed to extend the deadline to issue nonrenewal notices to June 15 instead of April 15 for new teachers. This earlier deadline was put in place to prevent inaction by governing boards – the kind now displayed by the Legislature.

The failure to move that deadline was a small victory for teachers. Many are now without jobs or waiting to be placed in other schools because there is no workable budget in place.

A little known clause gives three years’ recall rights to teachers who are let go due to the economy. That means a district cannot hire someone else for three years until they rehire those let go first if qualified for the jobs advertised – even if they get a job in another school district.

This is another provision in law that might be attacked by conservatives and governing boards.

But there would be fewer suspicious mass layoffs in the private sector, in the name of maintaining high profits, if this clause were in place for them.

Many of my colleagues have asked about the burden school administrators are carrying throughout all of this or, rather, the lack of it.

It’s a tricky question. Bad administrators are an easy target. Some of the grief they are receiving may not be fair. Then again, much of it is.

When districts say their administration has been cut, they are not talking about vice principals, principals or associate superintendents. They are talking about other budget items under “administration.”

Teachers know this. It’s time the public did, too.

If, by a long shot, a principal is let go, then he has immediate recall rights as a continuing teacher unless he gave up those rights in writing, which is highly unlikely.

They have more job security than teachers in good times and bad.

I applaud the decision by Vicki Balentine, superintendent of Amphitheater Public Schools, to take a five-day furlough without pay next year. It was an example of good leadership – the kind we have become accustomed to with her.

I also had the pleasure of exchanging e-mails recently with Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, superintendent of Tucson Unified School District. She is impressive and reachable.

The issue of the importance of administrators over teachers is always a topic superintendents like to stay away from.

The educational pay system tells us a person making as much as four times more than someone else signifies a degree of higher importance – though we all know classroom teachers work much harder.

Let’s face it: A teacher attempting to teach 25 to 30 6-year-olds how to read and write is a more difficult job day in and day out, but you will hardly find an administrator who would agree.

That’s why my exchange with Fagen was refreshing. She spelled out to me that teachers are of higher importance and severely underpaid. She became an administrator because she was frustrated with bad leadership.

But even though teachers are important, she added, leadership matters, too. And it does.

I only wish our legislators heard her call.

Andy Morales was born in Tucson, received a master’s degree in special education from the University of Arizona and has been teaching in Amphitheater for 20 years. E-mail: amoralesmytucson@yahoo.com

L.A. Dodgers superstar Manny Ramirez admitted he took a banned substance but was careful to point out he didn’t take steroids. That’s illegal. If convicted of steroids use, he could get four to eight years as governor of California.

Manny Ramirez admitted taking a female fertility drug that was put on the banned substance list last year. This gave him a range of explanations. No one believed his first story that he and the Octomom got their prescriptions mixed up.

President Obama went to a Virginia hamburger stand for lunch and ordered a burger with Dijon mustard. He got puzzled looks. If you ask the average Virginian in a restaurant for Dijon they give directions to the men’s room.

Lady Liberty’s crown, closed since the World Trade Center attack, will be reopened by the Interior Department. Things have changed since then. When tourists thought they might be hit by a hijacked airliner, they were afraid to go up the Statue of Liberty. But now that they could be hit by Air Force One, it is an honor.

Jeb Bush (right) began giving political interviews, spurring rumors he may run for president. Conservatives were overjoyed on talk radio. Conservatives are like alcoholics in their persistent delusion that with the next Bush, it’s going to be different.

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

Picture, if you will: A 17-year-old girl in a pharmacy the morning after, not a little horrified by her current dilemma.

Whatever transpired the night before – carelessness with a boyfriend, date rape, stranger rape – she now finds herself in a race against time to keep from getting pregnant.

“Plan B, Plan B,” she tells herself, scanning the shelves, remembering that this high-dose birth control can effectively block a pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse (although it’s most effective within 24 hours).

Nearly all major industrialized nations have approved Plan B without restrictions for many years, recognizing its efficacy in preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Now, thanks to Tummino v. Torti, a recent judgment from a U.S. District Court, the day will soon be here when 17-year-olds won’t have to get a time-wasting prescription for this perfectly safe contraceptive, once erroneously tagged as an abortifacient.

Gone are the years of stonewalling and outright lies used by the Bush administration about the drug to turn the FDA from a science-based to faith-based arm of the government.

The Tummino v. Torti judgment exposes many “arbitrary and capricious” acts masquerading as medical due diligence. With pressure from the White House, the FDA had stalled confirmation of Plan B’s over-the-counter status for years citing bogus safety concerns.

One particularly egregious tactic was when the administration claimed the OTC-switch advisory committee lacked a “balance of opinion.”

I guess a cadre of medical and science professionals adept at research and clinical trials was a little too uniform.

Eventually, “Right to Life” ideologues with far less experience were tossed into the mix.

Still, science won out, and in 2003 the FDA’s Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee voted 23-4 in favor of eliminating age restrictions on procurement of Plan B.

That should have been the end of a long, hard fight, right? Wrong. The FDA rejected this advice – the only OTC-switch recommendation it had rejected in 10 years.

By approving the lowering of age restrictions on Plan B, the court simply recognizes that 17-year-olds with the wherewithal to connect a reckless night with preventive measures deserve our support.

What do they not deserve, even if their judgment often falls short? A bunch of political kowtowing dressed up to look like best-practice medicine.

Andrea Sarvady (w2wcolumn@gmail.com) is a writer and educator specializing in counseling and a married mother of three.

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Opposing view

Shaunti Feldhahn: Bad ruling undermines parents

Picture, if you will, that if you repeat a falsehood often enough, people will actually believe it.

Andrea perpetuates the “politics prevented Plan B” myth repeated in loaded news stories. Since when did news reporters stop fact-checking? Silly question, I know.

The 2003 Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee, stacked with leftover Clinton appointees, was the one putting politics over science.

The FDA must be sure a drug is both effective and safe for its proposed usage, and Plan B has never been proved safe for over-the-counter use – especially for minors.

Plan B is the same drug as the regular birth control pill – which requires a prescription – but it’s 25 times stronger.

Since medical reasons, such as avoiding blood clots, require taking the lower-dose pill only under a doctor’s care, Bush officials were right to overturn the advisory committee’s blithe, unprecedented assurance that the turbo version would be fine without one, thank you.

It was the only such case in 10 years because it was the most absurd, unscientific decision in 10 years.

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, testified at that Advisory Committee meeting and explains that “there are activists and advocates for the drug on the committee,” not just the impartial scientists, as Andrea believes.

Today, conservative warnings about Plan B have come to pass, and OTC nations like the United Kingdom. have seen the inevitable consequences: Women taking it 40 times in a row, schools giving it to 11-year-olds like candy, and health officials warning of serious health complications such as infertility.

U.S. District Judge Edward Korman ignored all that, relying on incorrect information instead. (Maybe he’s been reading the news, too.)

“His decision said Plan B would be 89 percent effective and decrease abortions – the same thing advocates originally said to get it OTC,” Wright said.

“Yet even prominent advocates of Plan B and medical journals now say it does not reduce pregnancies and abortions.”

Parents should be furious with a judge undermining their oversight and their girls’ safety based on a myth.

“Teenagers,” Wright said, “still need a parental signature for tanning beds and field trips, but not to get a high-dose hormone drug, with serious side effects.”

That is politics, not best-practice medicine.

Shaunti Feldhahn (scfeldhahn@yahoo.com) is a conservative Christian author and speaker, and married mother of two.

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Opposing view

Andrea Sarvady: Court’s Plan B decision was right

Was a U.S. District Court right to lower age restrictions on Plan B?

Andrea Sarvady: Court’s Plan B decision was right

Shaunti Feldhahn: Bad ruling undermines parents

Republican-turned-Democrat Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill.

When Arlen Specter announced he was quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, who knew he would be joining the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party?

Well, that is apparently what he’s done. While the Pennsylvania senator’s decision late last month to switch parties brought great joy to the ranks of congressional Democrats, some of his actions since then have made a lot of Democrats wonder where his loyalties really lie.

Lieberman is a faux Democrat who lost his party’s nomination in Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic primary. He ran in the general election as an independent and won a third term in the Senate. Lieberman, who remains a registered Democrat and continues to caucus with Senate Democrats, calls himself an “independent-Democrat.”

Last year, Lieberman campaigned for Republican John McCain — and against Democrat Barack Obama — during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“Sen. Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country in the years ahead. But my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record, not in these tough times for America,” Lieberman said during a campaign speech.

Specter was officially welcomed to the Democratic Party’s ranks by President Obama, who promised to support the senator’s 2010 re-election campaign.

It was the prospect of being challenged in the Republican primary by a staunch conservative that pushed Specter, a political moderate, to switch parties.

So how did he respond to Obama’s welcoming embrace? Four days later, Specter tried to put some distance between himself and his new party during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat,” he said sternly to David Gregory, the show’s host. “I did not say that.”

And as if to punctuate those words, Specter quickly began to behave like a disloyal Democrat. He voted against a Democratic budget resolution and helped defeat a White House-backed bill that would permit bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of a homeowner’s mortgage.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Specter told The New York Times that Minnesota’s Supreme Court should “declare Norm Coleman the winner” of the state’s still unresolved 2008 Senate race.

The outcome is expected to be decided this summer by Minnesota’s high court. After a statewide recount, Democrat Al Franken emerged with a 312-vote lead over Republican Coleman, who is appealing that decision.

If the court affirms Franken as the winner, Democrats will have the 60 votes they need to stop Republicans from using filibusters to block legislation. So why would Specter — a newly minted Democrat — want Coleman to prevail?

“In the swirl of moving from one (party) to another, I have to get used to my new teammates,” Specter said.

His retreat came amid a howl of protests from Democratic Party operatives and reports that he had been taken to the woodshed by Obama aides.

What’s certain is that Specter will have to decide very soon if he wants to run for re-election as a loyal Democrat, or as a Lieberman Democrat. Having just shed his Republican cloak, it may be tempting for him to stake out a position of independence within the Democratic Party — but it wouldn’t be wise.

Given the choice between a real Democrat and one who joined the party just to keep his re-election hopes alive, Pennsylvania’s Democrats may bring Specter’s tenure as a Senate Democrat to a screeching halt.

DeWayne Wickham is a Maryland-based columnist who writes for USA TODAY. E-mail: DeWayneWickham@aol.com.

From the political notebook:

• Within the spending lobby, there is no more firmly held belief than that Arizona is an inexcusably low-tax state.

The basis for this belief is a report on state and local tax collections from the Census Bureau.

For 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, Arizona ranked 39th among the states in tax collections per capita. Hence the conclusion that, compared to other states, Arizona is among the bottom dwellers.

Too much was always made of this. Arizona ranks 35th in per capita personal income. So, the proper conclusion all along was that the state taxes roughly proportionate to the body politic’s ability to pay.

As it turns out, even that seriously understates Arizona’s tax load.

The Census Bureau figures aroused the suspicions of the indispensible fiscal sleuths at the Arizona Tax Research Association. So, they started digging into the data’s details.

They found that Arizona’s figures were missing huge sums of money. The state education sales tax revenue wasn’t included. The Maricopa County transportation sales tax was omitted. More than half of Arizona’s vehicle license tax was missing.

In all, ATRA found almost $2 billion in unreported tax collections.

If these missing revenues are included, Arizona’s rank increases to 32nd in per capita tax collections. As a percentage of personal income, or capacity to pay, it rises to 15th highest in the country.

So, rather than being a low-tax state, Arizona actually ranks more toward the middle in terms of nominal tax load, and higher than average based upon ability to pay.

Based upon ATRA’s research, the Census Bureau already has added $1.2 billion to Arizona’s tax collections and is studying the rest of the claims.

ATRA has done a lot of good work over the years. This sleuthing is one of its most valuable contributions.

• As much as public policy debates in Arizona are driven by these kinds of cross-state comparisons, the Legislature should take action to ensure that Arizona’s reported data is accurate.

The local government figures for the Census, for example, were being collected by an ASU professor with limited help. It’s just too big of a job, with too little incentive on the part of the entities with the raw data to cooperate, to do it that way.

Arizona expenditure data in the Census reports are undoubtedly as flawed as its tax collection data. Arizona’s reporting on education expenditures for national studies has also been spotty. Sometimes, the Arizona figures have had to be extrapolated.

To ensure accuracy, the Legislature should assign the job of collecting and reporting this data to the Auditor General’s Office.

And it should make the distribution of state-shared revenues to cities and counties and education assistance to school districts dependent on cooperation with the Auditor General’s efforts.

• The historical importance of Jack Kemp was generally understated in the reporting of his passing last week. Kemp changed the central focus of Republican economic policy.

Prior to Kemp, the Republican central focus was on the need to balance budgets through limiting spending.

Kemp argued that instead the central focus should be on fostering expanded economic opportunity through reductions in marginal tax rates.

Ronald Reagan made Kemp’s idea the principal domestic proposal of his 1980 presidential campaign, enacted it after being elected, and it has been the Republicans’ central economic focus ever since.

Kemp was a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles. He gave a series of lectures there while I was serving as editor of the campus newspaper. So, I was able to follow him around and get to know him a little. His intellectual appetite for information and policy analysis was nearly exhausting.

Kemp practiced a different kind of politics as well. Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove sought Republican victories by highlighting divisions in which more people sided with Republicans than Democrats.

Kemp was frankly bored when talking to Republican and conservative groups, people who agreed with him. His politics was that of an evangelist. He was always trying to make converts.

He passionately believed that expanding private sector opportunity was a better way to help the disadvantaged than government programs. His sincerity and commitment to building better ladders to success for those at the bottom were transparent.

As Republicans consider how to regroup and regain political traction, they would do very well to try to recapture the spirit of Jack Kemp.

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

With high school graduation nearing, many students are deciding where they will go to college in the fall.

This is the time of year when most high school seniors must finalize their decision on which college or university to attend next fall.

Decision Day is a big deal because it involves so many students and their parents. Numbers:

• About 3.33 million seniors will be graduated from a high school.

• About 3 million, including some who were graduated earlier, will enter a college or university this fall.

The oldest of our six chosen (adopted) children, Alexis, 18, is among them. She will be graduated from Cocoa Beach Junior/Senior High School on May 22.

As is the case with most seniors, she made multiple applications for college. She has been accepted by four, in Florida and out of state, and she was wait-listed by one.

Her mother and I each have personal preferences or prejudices about where she should go. But the decision is Alexis’. She and other college applicants really can’t make a serious mistake. Here’s why:

The United States has about 4,352 colleges or universities, two-year or four-year, large and small. Nearly all provide pretty good preparation for the real world.

So, if your daughter or son picks what you think is the wrong one for the wrong reason, don’t sweat it. Chances are she or he probably will do well in her or his place of choice.

When choosing a kindergarten or grade school, parents should make the pick. At junior high or high school level, it should be a joint student-parent decision. When it comes to college, it should be the students’ choice.

After they’re 18, if they’re as wise as you have tried to help them become, they’ll make mostly right decisions.

But if they make what seem wrong ones, that should remind us parents of some of the dumb things we did when we were kids.

Al Neuharth is founder of USA TODAY.

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Feedback

“Some parents insist on making college choices for their children by setting parameters on prestige, academic major, cost and distance from home. Mr. Neuharth is right: Guide carefully, but let students make the final decision.”

- Steven Roy Goodman, co-author, “College Admissions Together: It Takes a Family”

“Ideally, the choice is the student’s. But it’s a minority of schools that would best serve any student when the academic and social pieces are taken into account.”

- Bari Norman, director of Expert Admissions, a college advisory service

The state budget for next year that passed out of the House Appropriations Committee last week illustrates that a nominally balanced budget can be achieved without a tax increase.

Whether that is the best course of action is a very difficult question.

As always, some historical perspective is valuable.

After the last recession, state revenues stabilized in 2003. State general fund spending that year was $6.6 billion.

State spending peaked in 2008, at $10.5 billion, or a 60 percent increase in just five years.

The House budget for next year comes in at $9.3 billion. So, that’s a real decrease of more than 11 percent in two years.

But since 2003, it still represents an increase of 41 percent. That’s more than 5 percent a year.

The proposed budget cuts are not small, and certainly not painless. But the proposed end result hardly amounts to a barbaric return to poor houses and one-room schoolhouses.

Instead, the House budget reduces state spending to around where it would have been if it had grown more prudently during the days of plenty.

On the other hand, state general fund revenues are expected to fall $2 billion short of funding that spending. The House budget makes up for that by using federal stimulus money and stealing money from other accounts.

Given that there is still a $2 billion shortfall even after reducing spending growth to a modest level indicates that profligate spending during the Napolitano era is hardly the exclusive culprit.

Nor would the problem not exist if tax cuts had been eschewed during the days of plenty. If state income and state property tax rates were as they were in 2003, they might produce an additional $600 million in revenue, still leaving a $1.4 billion hole.

Simply put, state revenues have run into a severe cyclical downturn that exceeds everyone’s blame game. The conventional wisdom from all sides of the ideological spectrum is pretty much useless and pointless in confronting this situation.

So, what to do?

The House budget is based upon the point of view that the worst thing to do in the current circumstances would be to increase taxes. There is considerable merit to that position. Raising taxes in an economic downturn is a monumentally bad idea.

The House budget illustrates that avoiding a tax increase is doable.

It steals $265 million from cities and counties, which is monstrously unfair and shouldn’t be done. They have their own budget woes and are handling them much more responsibly than is the state.

The other maneuver getting some gas, using excess school district balances, is completely justified. These are funds that should have been used to reduce property taxes and that the districts cannot legally spend anyway.

The money taken from the cities and counties could be replaced, including by deferring some payments if necessary. So, the state could get through next year OK without increasing taxes or borrowing.

But, given a structural deficit of $2 billion, the very same problem faces the state in 2011, with considerably less federal stimulus money to cover it up.

Gov. Jan Brewer says the Legislature should bite the bullet this year and really fix the problem with a tax increase. She’s being less than candid about how much of a tax increase that would take and for how long. But hers is also a position with considerable merit.

The problem – the imbalance between spending and revenues – isn’t going away, and the House budget doesn’t do much to shrink it.

If the Legislature bit the bullet this year, it would make for a much more stable environment for state government and politics.

There are no rights and wrongs here. There are no responsible vs. irresponsible positions. Ideological conventions don’t get you to an end game.

You kick the state government problem down the road until what you hope is a more propitious time to deal with it. Or you fix state government’s problem at a very bad time for the state’s private sector economy.

I’d kick the problem down the road. But I’m not going to reproach those who reach a different conclusion.

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

England topped a new poll of America’s favorite countries. It had an 80 percent approval rating; Canada was second. France jumped 12 points to a 57 percent approval. The poll just shows if world leaders want American support, they either need to speak English or they are going to have to show us nude photos of their wives.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s marriage broke up over his eye for a teenage blonde. The girl’s mother was a showgirl who worked for Silvio 30 years ago when he left his first wife for a then-stripper who is now his wife. Italy went through a hundred governments in 60 years until they got one that suited them.

Elizabeth Edwards’ new book tells how she felt when the National Enquirer followed husband John Edwards to the Beverly Hilton Hotel to meet his mistress and love child. She learned the same lesson that Hillary Clinton and Princess Diana learned: The best thing about having a famous husband is that it saves you a lot of money on detectives.

Rudy Giuliani (right) denounced the idea of gay marriage when New York’s Senate took up a same-sex marriage bill. He speaks from experience. As a federal prosecutor, Giuliani broke up the Five Families, and then, as a husband, he broke up three more.

President Obama left the door open for prosecution of the Bush administration. He nixed the idea of appointing a Truth Commission in Washington. It would work with the same sense of duty as an Everybody’s Actual Age Commission in Hollywood.

Alex Rodriguez was accused of tipping off pals on opposing baseball teams to the pitch that was coming. He’s had three cheating accusations in three months. Everybody figured he would break Henry Aaron’s record, but nobody ever thought he’d break Bill Clinton’s.

Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded his wife apologize after she denounced him for chasing after young women. It proves there is a God. For a hundred days, comedians have been praying for a funny national leader to reveal himself.

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

Tucson as viewed through the eyes of Tucson Citizen Staff Artist Arnie Bermudez and his alter ego, Carlos the Coyote.

To learn more about Carlos, go to his Myspace page:http://www.myspace.com/carloscoyote

(abermudez@tucsoncitizen.com)

E-mail Arnie Bermudez at: abermudez@tucsoncitizen.com