Today’s Top 10 news stories I’m digging from the Arizona Daily Star, the Arizona Republic and the USA Today:

1. Leap in U.S. debt hits taxpayers with 12% more red ink – USA Today Bottom line: The government took on $6.8 trillion in new obligations in 2008, pushing the total owed to a record $63.8 trillion.

Put on a coat before reading this story, ’cause it will chill you to the bone.

2. Many small businesses lose their credit - USA Today When credit lines are reduced — or outright severed in this case — businesses could have problems such as buying needed supplies or equipment. Nearly 60% of small-business owners said they’ve used a credit card as a financing tool in the last 12 months, according to a NSBA survey released this month.

One of the pillars of the economy is credit. Ironically, abuse of credit is what got us into this mess but it is its proper use that is going to get us out. These microloans to small businesses are vital to keeping the economy from continuing to fall and for the long slog out of the hole. If the federal stimulus had been used to prop up economic engines like this rather than being doled out to state and local governments, the climb out would have been faster and less painful.

3. It’s bad timing for Bank of America to be puttin’ up a Ritz – USA Today “It’s again about the whole idea of excess and not spending money wisely,” says Hebert of the i2i consulting firm. “Somebody in those mahogany-coated rooms should have said, ‘Come on guys.’ ”

I wish I was fabulously wealthy so I could be as clueless as bankers and Wall Street financiers. Isn’t ignorance supposed to be bliss?

4. Microsoft announces big Bing theory – USA Today Bing will lead to faster, better organized and more relevant results, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. The service, which is available to a few test users now, will be widely released by Wednesday.

Will the maker of the most prevalent but least useful computer operating system finally “get” the Internet? I doubt it.

5. Publicity push to tout Brewer budget plan; Dem budget plan bridges gap between GOP, Brewer- Arizona Republic As the minority party at the Statehouse, the Democrats are trying to chart a middle course between the deep cuts of the Republicans’ budget plan for fiscal 2010 and the 1-cent-per-dollar sales-tax hike that they believe Gov. Jan Brewer is promoting.

Wednesday is June 3. There will be 27 days left in the fiscal year before the next fiscal year’s budget has to be passed. And we get a detailed budget from the governor and the Democrats only now? What the hell have they been doing the past four months? And with a month to go, the majority Republicans still don’t have a budget? We don’t pay these guys very much, but I’m beginning to think we pay them too much. PASS A BUDGET!

6. An old tradition for tough times: Money sharing – Arizona Republic The popular monetary practice based on rotating credit is deeply rooted in Mexican culture but little known to outsiders. In a cundina, participants – typically about 10 family members, friends, neighbors or colleagues – contribute a set amount of money each week. Those contributions are pooled, and each week, a different participant takes home the entire pot.

Interesting idea. Better trust your partners, though.

7. Homeowners fall behind at highest rate since ’72 – USA Today; Delinquent mortgages, foreclosures up in Ariz. – Arizona Republic Foreclosures were started on an additional 2.52 percent of Arizona mortgages, bringing to 5.56 percent the proportion of Arizona loans in foreclosure during the quarter. Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada accounted for 46 percent of all foreclosures started last quarter.

Whatever happened to TARP buying up all those “toxic assets” and the foreclosure stability plan (Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan)? I guess the Autoworker’s Union has to get paid off first by saving a mostly dead auto behemoth. Oh, that’s right, Michigan and Ohio are swing voter states and Arizona, California and Nevada are not.

8. ‘UFO’ spotted in Southeast Valley no longer unidentified – Arizona Republic “It was some kind of electronic device,” airport spokesman Brian Sexton said of the plastic object whose owner was identified as Space Data Corp., a Chandler firm whose products have logged 250,000 hours of flying time over the United States.

When will people finally get that there are no extraterrestrials? Once you learn the science behind the speed of light, the relationship between mass and energy (E=mc2) and the distances of the galaxy and the universe you quickly realize that if not impossible, interstellar travel is extremely impracticable.

Two City Council members express confidence in the downtown revitalization project

The $100 million Mercado District is the type of revitalization project that will generate social and economic opportunities for residents of the West Side.

City Manager Mike Hein’s recent decision to delay work on a signature Rio Nuevo project, a reconstructed Mission San Agustín, sparked consternation among City Council members. Here are two views – from Councilwoman Regina Romero, who represents the Ward 1 site for that project and others, and from Councilwoman Nina Trasoff, who has been overseeing planning for downtown improvements as chairwoman of the council’s Rio Nuevo subcommittee.

REGINA ROMERO: City unwavering in support of $1B in West Side revitalization

NINA TRASOFF: Delays frustrating, but project starting to yield concrete results

The federal Freedom of Information Act is the trend-setting law. It was recently updated, and new legislation has been introduced to keep it working as intended - for the people.

“Press releases tell us when federal agencies do something right, but the Freedom of Information Act lets us know when they do not.” Patrick Leahy, U.S. senator, 1996

Hundreds of thousands of tax dollars have been wasted lately by public officials stubbornly thinking it’s their government, not yours.

The money has gone to pay lawyers, judges, bureaucrats and elected officials wrangling over release of information.

It’s appropriate to make note of such dissemblings on the eve of Sunshine Week, which begins Sunday in celebration of opening government by casting light on its workings.

In many instances, those workings are reflected in the paperwork maintained by government officials and agencies.

Your access is assured under federal, state and local laws, all designed to assume openness rather than secrecy.

The federal Freedom of Information Act is the trend-setting law. It was recently updated, and new legislation has been introduced to keep it working as intended – for the people.

It’s needed because elected officials and other public servants often assume they can operate in secret. It costs a lot of money to get them to act – if not believe – otherwise.

Newspapers often take the lead in seeking to let the sun shine in on government activities that officials would just as soon keep in the dark.

Here are recent examples:

• The Tucson Citizen spent nearly $30,000 on legal fees in the last eight months seeking records from the Pima County Attorney’s Office and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Add in tens of thousands that the county attorney and Arpaio spent fighting over this in court. There probably also are thousands more in court costs.

It likely exceeds $100,000, most of it taxpayer money, over a stack of paperwork that revealed nothing more, and nothing less, than the farouche nature of a politician, Arpaio, and his equally ornery lawyer, Dennis I. Wilenchik.

The County Attorney’s Office wanted to release the paperwork it was holding in the case. Arpaio and his lawyer were not OK with it, and there’s the rub.

A judge ordered that the records be released and that Arpaio must reimburse the Citizen $25,241 in legal fees. Arpaio filed notice of appeal this week, meaning taxpayers will shell out even more for this farce.

• The Citizen, The Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star have spent thousands in the last several months to pry open state Child Protective Services records in several child-abuse deaths in Tucson.

Much of what the records revealed were performance shortcomings by CPS rather than confidential information about children.

Rep. Jonathan Paton, R-Tucson, an advocate for opening CPS records, said the newspapers’ actions clearly pushed CPS toward improvements.

• The Citizen sought, with some success, the administrative paperwork behind Lute Olson’s leave of absence.

We didn’t go to court, because after University of Arizona officials fretted, fumed and flouted over our requests, they produced a big stack of documents. Key aspects were excluded or blacked out.

We learned enough via the paperwork and interviews to tell how the basketball coach’s leave was handled relative to the law and campus policy.

These are but a few examples of how your rights are protected in regard to knowing what’s going on in government.

It’s good, then, to pause for celebration of Sunshine Week as recognition of the efforts on many fronts to keep it our government and not theirs.

Reach Michael A. Chihak at 573-4646 or mchihak@tucsoncitizen.com

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TO LEARN MORE More on Sunshine Week

If Rudy Giuliani were to win the 2008 Republican nomination, it would be a remarkable change of course within the Grand Old Party.

Twice divorced, not a regular churchgoer, and a believer in abortion rights and gay rights, Giuliani would seem anathema to the religious conservatives who have been an important part of the Republican coalition for the past 20-plus years.

But Giuliani is holding his own among self-described regular churchgoers and evangelicals, according to recent polls.

And so he continues to confound pundits and send religious right leaders into huddles to strategize about what to do if he is nominated.

Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose Mormon faith remains an undertow to his campaign, will give two of the most important speeches of the campaign so far to a “values voters” summit in Washington this week arranged by the Family Research Council and other top evangelical and religious conservative groups.

Both Romney and Giuliani gave glimpses of their message Tuesday before the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Giuliani did not mention abortion or gay marriage, but he was introduced as a man with “moral clarity,” and he built much of a rambling speech around fighting “Islamic terrorists” as the great challenge of these times.

Giuliani also said that Republicans need “a coast-to-coast candidate” who could compete with the Democrats in all 50 states.

Later, Romney was asked by Las Vegas pediatrician Leroy Bernstein why so many Americans – nearly 30 percent in some polls – say they would be unlikely to vote for a Mormon candidate.

Romney responded that Mormons, evangelicals and Jews shared fundamental values: “We believe in God. . . . We believe that liberty is a gift of God. Those principles will be part of the values which I bring to the White House if I am fortunate enough to become your president, and they are not faith-specific. They are part of a faith-values system that all Americans ascribe to.”

A Gallup Poll released in early October showed that Romney was viewed nearly as negatively as he was positively by many regular churchgoing Protestants, significantly worse than other GOP contenders and worse than Democrats Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Focus on the Family’s James Dobson has said he could not support Giuliani, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson or Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. But other evangelical leaders appear open to continued courtships.

“Of all the candidates, Mayor Giuliani is the most problematic from the standpoint of values-motivated voters, no question about that,” said Gary Bauer, who has organized private meetings between GOP candidates and religious conservative leaders.

He said Giuliani has to do much more “reaching out, in making clear what he will be willing to do as president on the things they care about.”

Some Christian conservatives, Bauer said, may not yet know that Giuliani favors abortion rights.

“The other possibility, though, is that some of these voters think that defending Western civilization is a moral issue, too, and they are weighing that in the balance,” Bauer said.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said it’s a stretch to think that Giuliani will appeal to social conservatives and that a “simple ABC song of ‘Anybody But Clinton’ is not enough to motivate and attract social conservatives, especially younger social conservatives.”

In a breakfast with reporters organized by The Christian Science Monitor, Perkins was more receptive to Romney, who has been criticized for converting to anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage positions to appeal to religious voters.

“That is what we do: We try to change people’s hearts and minds. And when they do, I for one welcome them with open arms,” said Perkins, a Southern Baptist.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. Get more behind-the-scenes reports, context and analysis about politicians and the political process in Raasch’s Furthermore blog.

Question: Do you allow your children to watch television on school nights?

Yes. 66%

No. 14%

It depends. 20%

Total votes: 111. Poll results are not scientific. Total may not equal 100 percent because of rounding.

Potter Stewart’s most remembered comment as a U.S. Supreme Court justice came in an obscenity case in 1964.

In an opinion about whether a movie was obscene or pornographic, Stewart said he found it darn near impossible to define pornography. Then he added:

“But I know it when I see it.”

With that, he may have unwittingly put his finger on a dilemma in the law and in society: defining social and moral acceptability so it pleases everyone. Or, as the Supreme Court later ruled, so it squares with community standards.

Such a situation faced editors at the Tucson Citizen this week in deciding which picture to run with a story on the 25th anniversary of the cable television network MTV.

The picture we ran, of singers Madonna and Britney Spears kissing onstage during the annual MTV Music Awards in 2003, raised objections from some readers.

They said it was indecent, “trashy” and didn’t belong in the newspaper. In other words, they knew it when they saw it.

Before that and before it was printed, use of the photo raised quite a discussion among Citizen editors. That discussion was renewed after the photo was published Tuesday.

As a prelude to sharing with you aspects of the newsroom discussions about the photo, I must tell you my initial reaction to its publication was negative.

I thought we were wrong to have run it, and I thought it should not have been the main story on our Nation/World news section front page.

I, too, knew it when I saw it.

Frankly, I changed my mind after listening to what a group of editors had to say about it.

Part of my change came from the fact that a lot of thought went into it and that the ensuing discussion helped give us a better grounding for deciding what we publish and what we leave out.

News Editor Bruce Johnston told me how the decision came about.

“Why MTV on the Nation/World front?” Johnston said, repeating my question. “It’s a significant anniversary for something that has become a cultural and social phenomenon.

“The discussion Monday over the photos drew in at least five people, including myself. . . . it was pretty evident that the photo most saying MTV was the 2003 kiss between Britney and Madonna.

“If MTV can now be considered a cultural icon, then this is perhaps its most iconic photo.”

Said Senior Editor/News Jennifer Boice, who was not involved in the discussions or decision, “I knew when I saw the photo we would get calls. Its blatant sexuality was something that I knew would offend some readers.”

But, Boice pointed out, Citizen Entertainment Editor Rogelio Olivas told her he has run this same photo at least three times in the Thursday Calendar Plus section.

So Citizen readers have been exposed to it, though not in such a prominent place as the front page of the Nation/World section.

Boice compared this with another social icon, going back a half-century.

“Elvis’ shimmy shake was found as offensive back in the ’50s because of its explicit sexuality,” she said.

She compared it to the Spears-Madonna kiss in that each was part of a set of social mores colliding head-on with an era of expanded sexuality.

Johnston was key to the decision, so he gets the last word, at least for now.

“Speaking personally now, I don’t find anything objectionable in the photo,” he said, as I reminded myself that he is a mature man in his 50s, with two grown children and more than three decades of newspaper experience. “I object much more to photos of bloodshed, destruction and man’s inhumanity to man.

“What I see, and perhaps readers don’t see, is that storytelling photos often are objectionable in some way to some portion of our readership.

“Summing up, if we edit for the many to appease the few, then I don’t think we’ve done our job well.”

Michael A. Chihak can be reached at mchihak@tucsoncitizen.com or 573-4646.

P otter Stewart’s most remem- bered comment as a U.S. Supreme Court justice came in an obscenity case in 1964.

In an opinion about whether a movie was obscene or pornographic, Stewart said he found it darn near impossible to define pornography. Then he added:

“But I know it when I see it.”

With that, he may have unwittingly put his finger on a dilemma in the law and in society: defining social and moral acceptability so it pleases everyone. Or, as the Supreme Court later ruled, so it squares with community standards.

Such a situation faced editors at the Tucson Citizen this week in deciding which picture to run with a story on the 25th anniversary of the cable television network MTV.

The picture we ran, of singers Madonna and Britney Spears kissing onstage during the annual MTV Music Awards in 2003, raised objections from some readers.

They said it was indecent, “trashy” and didn’t belong in the newspaper. In other words, they knew it when they saw it.

Before that and before it was printed, use of the photo raised quite a discussion among Citizen editors. That discussion was renewed after the photo was published Tuesday.

As a prelude to sharing with you aspects of the newsroom discussions about the photo, I must tell you my initial reaction to its publication was negative.

I thought we were wrong to have run it, and I thought it should not have been the main story on our Nation/World news section front page.

I, too, knew it when I saw it.

Frankly, I changed my mind after listening to what a group of editors had to say about it.

Part of my change came from the fact that a lot of thought went into it and that the ensuing discussion helped give us a better grounding for deciding what we publish and what we leave out.

News Editor Bruce Johnston told me how the decision came about.

“Why MTV on the Nation/World front?” Johnston said, repeating my question. “It’s a significant anniversary for something that has become a cultural and social phenomenon.

“The discussion Monday over the photos drew in at least five people, including myself. . . . it was pretty evident that the photo most saying MTV was the 2003 kiss between Britney and Madonna.

“If MTV can now be considered a cultural icon, then this is perhaps its most iconic photo.”

Said Senior Editor/News Jennifer Boice, who was not involved in the discussions or decision, “I knew when I saw the photo we would get calls. Its blatant sexuality was something that I knew would offend some readers.”

But, Boice pointed out, Citizen Entertainment Editor Rogelio Olivas told her he has run this same photo at least three times in the Thursday Calendar Plus section.

So Citizen readers have been exposed to it, though not in such a prominent place as the front page of the Nation/World section.

Boice compared this with another social icon, going back a half-century.

“Elvis’ shimmy shake was found as offensive back in the ’50s because of its explicit sexuality,” she said.

She compared it to the Spears-Madonna kiss in that each was part of a set of social mores colliding head-on with an era of expanded sexuality.

Johnston was key to the decision, so he gets the last word, at least for now.

“Speaking personally now, I don’t find anything objectionable in the photo,” he said, as I reminded myself that he is a mature man in his 50s, with two grown children and more than three decades of newspaper experience. “I object much more to photos of bloodshed, destruction and man’s inhumanity to man.

“What I see, and perhaps readers don’t see, is that storytelling photos often are objectionable in some way to some portion of our readership.

“Summing up, if we edit for the many to appease the few, then I don’t think we’ve done our job well.”

Michael A. Chihak can be reached at mchihak@tucsoncitizen.com or 573-4646.

Seems I’ve come full circle. I recently retired from the University of Arizona, where I began my activist career.

As a student activist, one of the first major victories of the Chicano Movement in which I was involved was establishing a Mexican-American studies program at UA in 1969.

In 1970, in an essay on the Chicano Movement for a political science course, I wrote:

“We are involved in a historical moment of our evolution as a people. I firmly believe that in 20-30 years, a new generation of Chicanos and Chicanas will study El Movimiento – in the Chicano Studies classes we are creating even as I write this – and have cause to be proud of their parents’ generation.”

Thus, it is fitting that my last UA position was teaching Chicano history for the Mexican American Studies and Research Center.

Since I have some time on my hands, I’m thinking of writing my political memoirs. There’s lots to say, some of which I’ve touched on in previous columns:

I am of the Chicano Generation. We grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, when American society viewed Americans of Mexican descent as foreigners and there was a concerted campaign by society, particularly the schools, to make us feel inferior and treat us as interlopers in our own land.

We had two choices. We could acquiesce and shuffle through life, hat in hand, picking up society’s crumbs. Or we could resist and assert our humanity. We resisted.

In coalition with barrio activists and some Mexican-American professionals, we fundamentally changed the educational, political, cultural and social landscape of Tucson and Arizona.

People of Mexican descent are today routinely elected to office, at all levels. Teachers, counselors and administrators of Mexican heritage abound in our school systems, as well as in universities and colleges.

Today, we count our college and university enrollments in multiples of thousands rather than tens.

Barrio streets are paved and have sidewalks and streetlights. There are neighborhood centers and parks in our barrios. Hiring practices were opened in the public and private sectors. Instead of rejecting Spanish-speakers, employers seek out bilingual applicants.

And, our children are not beaten for speaking Spanish.

The Chicano Generation achieved these things and others directly – or we created the atmosphere in which they could occur.

But our generation’s greatest contribution was that we instilled a deep and irrevocable sense of pride in our community, especially in our youth. We beat back the Mexican haters.

Indeed, Tucson and Arizona are improved versions of their old selves due to the Chicano Movement.

But history is cyclical, and the Mexican haters have resurfaced. We again find ourselves having to prove our legitimacy in our own country – for Proposition 200 and its ugly cousins target people on the basis of looks, surname and accent.

I look forward to detailing all this in readable form. If any of you have reminiscences, documents, photos, news articles, etc., that can help me, please contact me. I’d appreciate it. c/s

Political historian Salomón R. Baldenegro is a lifelong Tucsonan and longtime civil-rights activist. The “c/s” at the end of his column is a Chicano barrio term that stands for con safos, which denotes closure, along the lines of “that’s all I got to say.” Contact him at 884-0070 or SalomonRB@msn.com.

There are practical and constitutional problems with filters: They are ineffective and they filter the First Amendment.

Adhering to the First Amendment protections of the Constitution can often be a challenge – especially when it comes to protecting free speech that is unpopular or distasteful.

But picking and choosing which free speech to protect is like cutting a deal with the devil: Once the line is crossed, it becomes impossible to maintain purity.

When someone determines that some segment of free speech is unworthy of protection, the First Amendment has been despoiled.

And that is the problem faced by members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, who recently became policymakers for the Tucson-Pima Public Library system. Before July 1, libraries were overseen by the City Council.

Almost immediately upon taking over the libraries, supervisors were faced with the conundrum of what to do about limiting Internet access on library computers.

The matter came to a head when a local television station broadcast a story that showed men sitting at library computers and looking at pictures of naked women.

What outraged the citizenry was the possibility that children wandering behind the men could see what were clearly offensive images.

There were calls to install electronic filters on library computers so access to certain Web sites that were deemed offensive by someone could be blocked – a position advocated by Supervisor Ray Carroll.

We’re with Carroll on the distastefulness of these Web sites, but not on the issue of how to block them in public libraries. There are practical and constitutional problems with filters.

Filters can easily be bypassed by people with some computer expertise. And like filters designed to keep spam out of e-mail boxes, Internet filters can be ineffective. Some sex-related Web sites can slip through, while legitimate sites – such as medical information on breast cancer – can be wrongly blocked.

More troubling are the constitutional concerns. Who decides what will be blocked? Just sex-related sites? Other people are offended by different topics.

What about sites where guns are sold? Tobacco company Web sites? Some may be offended by the Republican Party site and others by Democrat-related sites. Should everything that could be offensive to anyone be blocked?

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that adults have a First Amendment right to access material that is not illegal. That draws the line against child pornography. But if it’s legal, adults can choose whether to filter it out, the high court decided.

That’s the correct approach. The supervisors did the right thing last week when they decided against filters and in favor of privacy screens around computers so passers-by won’t see what’s on the screens – whether it’s naked women or personal financial data.

This is not the end of the matter. A committee has been appointed to come up with a permanent solution.

Nothing will please everyone. But if Pima County decides who can access what on public computers, it will start down a slippery constitutional slope leading to serious questions about individual rights.

Ben Ellis Jr., who died this month, was still trimming trees at age 81 - something he did for more than a half century as a local landscaper.

Ben Ellis Jr. is the kind of person whose death usually isn’t noted in a newspaper obituary.

He lived, he worked hard for many, many years, and he died on July 11 at age 87.

But ever so often, a person who simply did a job and did it well deserves his story told.

I met Mr. Ellis and wrote about him seven years ago, when he was celebrating 50 years of being in business in Tucson. He impressed me then and I wanted people to see the man I got to know.

When Mr. Ellis arrived in Tucson nearly 50 years ago, he was weak from pneumonia, drained by a lifetime of asthma and exhausted by the five-day bus ride from Cleveland.

Two days later, he mowed the lawn and trimmed hedges for a local doctor – and was busy from then on.

He had a variety of businesses, including one doing landscaping and selling fertilizer, but essentially he’s been doing yardwork here since that first Saturday morning in October 1949.

“When I got here, you could hold Tucson in your hand,” he told me in a 1999 interview. “I like to say that then Tucson was a wren bird’s nest. Now it’s an eagle’s nest.”

He augmented the income from yardwork by tackling various odd jobs around town – often two or three at a time.

He picked cotton in Marana for a farmer named John Anderson. While 300 pounds of picked cotton were a good total for him when he worked in Mississippi, in Arizona, with the dry air and his suddenly clear lungs, Ben picked 1,100 pounds of cotton in a day. He weighed 129 pounds but was carrying sacks weighing 160 pounds.

“I’m the kind of person (who’s) determined to beat everybody – and most the time I did, whatever it was,” he said, calmly stating a fact, not boasting.

During his early years in Tucson, besides doing yardwork and picking cotton, he was a ranch foreman, washed cars, sold fertilizer, did landscaping and was a night watchman.

Even when he landed a full-time job at Desert Sanatorium, which later became Tucson Medical Center, Ben did just about any job that came along, often substituting work for sleep.

He quit his “day” job at TMC in 1957, when his business, Ben’s Landscaping, began landing lucrative and time-consuming jobs. For years, Ben’s Landscaping worked for home builders such as PAT Homes, Beauty Built Homes and Chastain Builders Inc.

Ben still remembered his first landscaping job, which was to dig four holes 7 feet deep and 7 feet wide.

“I didn’t know too much about caliche – then,” he said with the understatement of someone who had attacked with pick and shovel the desert’s unforgiving layer of concrete-hard calcium carbonate.

Ben, with the help of friends, put in the lawns for Catalina and Rincon high schools. He also put in the landscaping for several local churches.

At its peak in 1972, Ben’s landscaping and yard maintenance business employed 42.

A fire in ’82 wiped out some of his business, and Ben, who was approaching 65, decided to scale back to strictly landscape maintenance .

Over the years, he developed a core of customers as faithful to him as he was to them.

Ben “is as honest as the day is long,” John Neis told me seven years ago.

Neis recollected one of his first encounters with Ben: “About 23 or 24 years ago, he came out and cleaned up the whole place for what I thought was a reasonable price. I asked if he did regular yard maintenance, he said he did. He quoted me a price that was unbelievably low. Four months later, there was a tap on my door. ‘John,’ Ben said, ‘this is too much. I can’t take that amount of money.’ He cut the price in half, and it stayed that price for 23 years.”

I talked with Mr. Ellis right before he turned 81 – and, even at that age, he didn’t plan to stop.

“I’m determined to not quit, to work as long as I can as long as I’ve got my health.”

And he did. He was on the job until June 8, after which his health prevented him from overseeing his crew.

His motto in life was simple: “Get it the way I did – work for it.”

A memorial service for Mr. Ellis will be held from 6-8 p.m. Sunday at Mount Sinai Baptist Church, 1724 W. San Marcos Blvd, and the funeral is at 10:30 a.m. Monday both at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, 210 E. Lester St.

Jennifer Boice is senior editor for news at the Tucson Citizen and has worked at the paper in a variety of jobs for 23 years.

Brevity is a quality that good writers and editors strive for, especially in the limited space afforded by the confines of a newspaper.

But sometimes the drive for brevity can cause problems.

A series of efforts by Tucson Citizen journalists to be brief this week left something to be desired in one news story.

The Tuesday story was about a University of Arizona teacher’s resignation after revelation of her insulting, mean-spirited and hate-laced messages on a politically conservative blogger’s Web site.

The postings of Deborah Frisch, until last week an instructor in the UA Department of Psychology, caused widespread outrage from readers and users of the blog and from the blog manager.

Our story on the issue caused more outrage after the blog manager and his supporters said we slanted our story in favor of Frisch and didn’t tell the whole story.

Critics were wrong on one count – that our story was intentionally slanted – and right on the other – that we didn’t tell the whole story – said Citizen Senior Editor/News Jennifer Boice after reviewing the circumstances behind the story.

“It’s important to note that (the reporter) had three different points of view in this story,” Boice said to me in a report.

She is correct. We quoted Frisch, the blog manager and Frisch’s boss. Telling all sides or attempting to tell all sides is a basic tenet of news reporting.

As for how we told those sides, there is an issue.

Editors decided that the story would not run on Page 1, and under our format, that put a strict limit on the amount of space available for it.

Thus the reporter had to tell a complex story in a brief way – too brief, as it turns out.

And that means we weren’t able to capture the appropriate tone for the story.

Then, in the editing process, a quotation from the blog manager was shortened and other facts were cut to make the story fit. These moves contributed to the problem of not being able to tell the story fully.

This was a “he said, she said” story of a different kind. A reading of the text online reveals that Frisch’s comments, in my opinion, were inappropriately rabid and, as I earlier described them, insulting, mean-spirited and hate-laced.

Our story should have described them that way. Instead, we “labeled them as political discourse, and it was far from your typical political discourse,” Boice said.

The key components of the blog exchange were what critics called threats by Frisch against the blog manager’s child.

To repeat the comments and responses would serve only to inflame the situation anew. So we won’t, at the risk of leaving some of you wondering.

Suffice it to say that our efforts at brevity, driven by editors’ decisions about where the story would run and how much space to allot for it, led to incompleteness in telling the story.

We take reporting the news seriously, aiming to accurately reflect not only the facts, but the tone of an issue in the news.

We fell short in this case.

Reach Michael A. Chihak at 573-4646 or mchihak@tucsoncitizen.com.

Mona

She moved in with me on the maybe second- or third-worst day of my life.

It was a week after Thanksgiving, and I had just cooked my first full-race turkey dinner for the kids, and the memory of it they’re going to take to the grave is we ate it off a thirdhand card table covered with stains you wouldn’t want identified.

Besides which, their mother had just divorced me and Christmas was coming, which they were going to spend with her since they spent Thanksgiving with me. Over that slimy card table.

I was still puddling-up over the recent disclosure that my mom and dad made up that whole thing about Santa Claus, and now that: Christmas all alone in a home that looks like a room at the YMCA.

So I was sitting in a pack rat-infested chair that used to belong to my ex-wife’s golf-playing grandfather – I despise golf – watching Hallmark Christmas commercials on the tube, when my kids came boiling through the back door like a pair of terrorists hollering “Yo, Dad,” and carrying this cardboard box.

“Merry Christmas,” one of them said, and the other dumped the box in my lap. The contents of the box was about a double handful of white fur ball that began clawing its way up my belly and my chest, neck and face, and licked me all over the eyes, nose and ears.

Which is odd, really, when you get to know Mona, because she really never was a licker. Not after that first introductory bath she gave me.

That’ll be 15 years ago this Christmas, and I’ve never had a better present before or since – or will in the Christmases left to me.

I named her after an old dog Jones had that was named by an old girlfriend Jones had. I liked all three of them, and the name especially. Mona was alleged to be a yellow Labrador retriever, but the pet store obviously took advantage of my kids’ innocence and unloaded some kind of coyote mongrel on them. Mona turned out to be the best dog that ever lived.

She lived until last Saturday.

Adjusted for inflation, my puppy was 102 years old. In the 14 years and eight months of the Julian calendar, the two of us shared a bed and a life, she was more than man’s best friend: She was my savior.

She met me at the top of the hill when I drove home late at night. She raced around the living room with her butt skimming the floor and a grin all over her face when I came home from Montana. But mostly she listened to me, being the only other soul in the house for most of 13 years.

That will save a man, 9 out of 10. I only wish I could have done as much for Mona.

One Saturday two years ago, she just fell over. Jones gingerly lifted her, and she trotted away like nothing had happened. But it had. We took her to the vet and learned she had bone spurs pinching her spinal cord. The vet gave her steroids to reduce the inflammation, and aside from an appetite like a moray eel, everything was held in check.

But we knew she was circling the drain. Nobody gets out of here alive. We just kept on going to the barn to pitch hay to Zeb, Mort and Pauline, and Mona kept trotting down and back with us.

Last Wednesday, she hobbled halfway to the barn in the morning and headed back to the house. In the evening, she made it all the way there and back.

Thursday, she couldn’t walk.

Friday, she couldn’t stand.

Saturday, we drove Mona back to the vet in Nogales. There, Mona died, and we drove her home.

We laid her under the sycamore across the creek, where my whole family expects to rejoin her.

I have a picture seared into my memory of Mona’s face, just before we laid her blanket over her and began to fill the grave. I go out in the moonlight and see the sycamore and the stones piled over the grave, and it breaks my heart to picture her face and think of her lying under the weight of that dirt and rock.

My mom said when Dad died that she’d think of him – how he hated to catch a chill and how cold it must be in his coffin, 6 feet down, and December all around.

It’s summer and the earth is warm, but I can’t help thinking how Mona hated to be held still.

Reach Jeff Smith at (520) 455-5667 or jssmith@starband.net.

Letter to the editor writer John Purdy asked recently: “What possible reason do you have for putting a columnist on the front page?”

Purdy followed with the statement: “Bias belongs on the editorial page.”

He was referring, of course, to the regular presence of our metro columnists and other columnists on Page 1, a practice we began 10 months ago.

Here’s the key rationale:

It distinguishes us from other media, most especially that other daily newspaper.

Lots of media and information sources are competing for your eyes and ears – print, broadcast and cable TV, the Internet and magazines. Giving you something unique, in the unique voices of our columnists, helps create the distinction we need to attract your attention.

The idea is not new.

Newspapers and other media have traditionally included prominent display of individual opinion. Note the “bias” or opinion injected into many cable television news and information programs, for example.

Newspaper front pages have been vehicles for opinion for centuries. In fact, that was their main purpose in colonial days and around the time of the American Revolution.

The idea of news told objectively – whatever that means – is relatively new in newspapering, started after World War I and refined after World War II.

We’ve simply renewed the tradition to distinguish ourselves in a market crowded with two daily newspapers and many other information choices.

Why, the Arizona Citizen, as this newspaper was called at its founding Oct. 15, 1870, included on its very first front page several “stories.” One called the chief of a rival newspaper a “recreant editor,” another described a political group as “the bogus Democratic Committee of Tucson” and a third referred to another political group as “hot-headed members of the Brady faction.”

So from that tradition and others, we present on Page 1 regular doses of opinion from veteran reporters Anne T. Denogean and C.T. Revere. Into the mix we have added Mark Kimble, Jeff Smith, Corky Simpson, Gabriela Rico and others.

The exception is Billie Stanton, who has asked – based on her own ethic and tradition – that her column not appear on Page 1.

We have honored that.

Meanwhile, the idea of front-page commentary in the Citizen has evolved to include what we call “citizen voices.”

About once a week, we have run on Page 1 a collection of community comments taken from our Web site, where people can opine about stories we have published.

It’s a way of giving voice to the community, similar to the way the Internet has given it to bloggers, Rush Limbaugh has given it to his “dittoheads” and CNN and Fox News have given it to their popular commentators.

It’s what freedom of speech and the press are about in our great democratic cacophony.

Reach Michael A. Chihak at 573-4646 or mchihak@tucsoncitizen.com.

‘The flag represents the country as a whole and all the men and women that have sacrificed their lives for our country.’ - DAVID SULLIVAN, 55

In preparation for the Fourth of July, Tucson Citizen photographer Francisco Medina recently spent several days traveling around Tucson with an American flag. He asked people to tell him what the flag means to them and to hold the flag in any way they wished.

‘It stands for the history and pride of America. Also the people that have fought for America.’ - JIM SULLIVAN, 11

‘I am still proud to be an American and this flag stands for our freedom.’ - BENJAMIN TSOSIE, 56

‘I feel honor and joy as I hold the flag. It allows us to live here in this country.’ - MARIA
BONILLAS, 72

‘The flag means freedom.’ - SAUL RODRIGUEZ, 23

‘I’m a citizen and it stands for my freedom and all the little things in our community, like all the help we get from our community. It also allows us the
freedom to hold our rallies.’ - DIANA TORRES, 42

It was 30 years ago this summer that water rates in Tucson were huge news. How times have changed.

In the summer of 1976, the Tucson City Council instituted a system of “lift charges” to cover the cost of pumping water to higher elevations. Water bills went up an average of 33 percent, though some residents saw far larger increases.

The resulting political outcry led to a 1977 recall election and the replacement of four council members.

This week water rates were again on the City Council agenda. And although council members gave preliminary approval to a series of rate increases, the plan drew scant public opposition.

That is indicative of several things: Tucson Water has done a far better job of keeping its customers informed, and Tucsonans have come to realize that our water rates are reasonable and that water is a precious, costly and scarce commodity.

Tucson Water’s average monthly bill is now about $19, not counting sewer, trash and other fees. That’s far below the national average of $27, according to the American Water Works Association.

On Tuesday, the council gave preliminary approval to a 4.6 percent rate increase in August. The plan also calls for 5 percent rate increases in each of the next four years.

A public hearing and final vote will come in July.

The rate increases are well-reasoned. Money is needed so Tucson Water can expand its underground storage facility in Avra Valley. That would allow the city to start taking its entire allocation of Central Arizona Project water by 2009.

Should the federal government declare a water emergency on the Colorado River, Tucson could lose its full allocation of water if it is not using the entire amount at the time.

The rate increases are reasonable and will help ensure that Tucson has the ability to quickly take its full CAP allotment. That is essential.