An aerial view shows the Rio Nuevo site between "A" Mountain on the left and downtown Tucson on the right.

It’s May, and we’ve just broken the 100-degree mark in the Old Pueblo.

Our cement- and asphalt-laden streets and sidewalks won’t cool off for at least four months, and in the presumed absence of our once glorious “monsoon,” the riverbanks of the Rillito and Santa Cruz will remain barren and dry throughout the summer.

Upon returning to Tucson five years ago, I came to realize that our beautiful summer storms, known as “chubascos,” had all but disappeared.

In my absence, the blades of developers constantly eroded the desert as the octopus of Tucson grew in all directions: north, south, east and west.

Very little summer rain fell here for the first two years after I returned. “Where are they?” I asked, and the answer seemed to be that the rains were driven away by cement and asphalt, as had happened in the Gomorrah to our north, Phoenix.

In my previous incarnation in Tucson, I had always lived downtown.

As I returned in the midst of the real estate boom of 2004, I was surprised at the high cost of housing in the urban core.

However, I saw little improvement downtown to justify such exorbitant home prices.

Armory Park and “Barrio Historico” were still without even one grocery store; the streets were devoid of people; and businesses on Congress Street were boarded up.

The hopes for downtown redevelopment were being marketed in the form of a vague concept called “Rio Nuevo,” a euphemism, I imagined, for some kind of rebirth that would transform our downtown.

Alas, five years later I realize Rio Nuevo is thus far a dead-end street on the other side of a nonexistent Rainbow Bridge to Nowhere.

As the Santa Cruz is dried up and full of litter, Rio Nuevo would better be called Rio Seco (Dry River).

If we renamed Rio Nuevo to Rio Seco, we would understand that our desert is precious, and that it – and its people – must be protected.

Now buzzwords and concepts such as “sustainability” and “green jobs” are thrown around like wet dish towels in the kitchen of our collective mind, but what do these terms mean?

Sure rainwater harvesting is a good idea, but where is the rain?

Golf courses, resorts and roads continue to flourish while the water table sinks. Yet we call this “progress.”

We build border fences to keep out persons who are referred to as “illegals,” yet we historically have relied on such people to dig our trenches, mortar our bricks, harvest our crops and clean our toilets.

The border of our collective mind, which separates “illegals” from the rest of us, prevents us from seeing the future that could be.

Rather than accepting the reality of Rio Seco, we continue to wallow in the delusion of Rio Nuevo.

Rather than stopping expansive development in its tracks, we maintain that we can sustain life while perpetually bulldozing the desert.

Meanwhile, as state, county and city dollars shrink, our social safety net is vanishing.

Services for our most vulnerable – children, victims of abuse and domestic violence, the elderly, the mentally ill and the homeless – disappear daily as agency after agency must come to grips with reality and lay off workers.

In our desert, social Darwinism has met John Wayne: It is the “survival of the fittest” at the OK Corral.

Presumed “illegals” are told to “Go back to Mexico,” and the un- and underemployed are supposed to “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

By action or inaction, the mantra of our “leaders” in local and state government is: “Government cannot protect you; protect yourself!”

Yet how can we expect the homeless, persons with serious mental illness, survivors/victims of domestic violence, the elderly, children who live below the poverty line, and single mothers struggling to make ends meet in a depressed economy to “make it” without help?

Seemingly, no public funds are available for social programs, but no one is seriously talking about how much money we waste – on the state, county and city levels, on locking up people for relatively low-level crimes.

In the jails and prisons of our collective mind, no one discusses concepts such as “smart policing” and “community corrections.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that police patrols are ineffective in deterring and preventing crime, yet we continue to throw good money after bad.

We do business the way it’s always been done because that is what we are told to do.

There is no creative thinking in public safety land, where jails, prisons and law enforcement are budgetary “sacred cows.”

In the borders of our collective mind, rather than making better use of jail and prison space, we simply assume more is needed.

It is time to take care of people in our midst, to “just say no” to developers, to eliminate “corporate welfare” and to turn off the spigot of endless public dollars designated for nonessential law enforcement services and the unnecessary incarceration of nonviolent offenders.

It is time to create innovative programs that can save taxpayers’ money and serve the needy.

It is time to cut the fat from bloated bureaucracies while stabilizing the humanitarian core of government.

Embrace the concept of Rio Seco, and cast off the delusion of Rio Nuevo!

Michael C. Elsner, Ph.D., teaches sociology and criminology/criminal justice for Northern Arizona University-Tucson and is a principal research specialist with the University of Arizona’s College of Public Health.

Michael C. Elsner

Without steps to curb global warming, plants, animals we need for food, drugs will vanish

This saguaro, standing like a sentinel in silhouette, is among the "iconic, charismatic mega flora" that could be endangered by climate change, says a scientific panel's recent report.

Friday marked the third annual national Endangered Species Day, a day set aside to recognize our nation’s efforts to safeguard our rarest fish, wildlife and plants.

But this year, one fact is clear: Global warming is changing everything we know about protecting wildlife and natural resources.

Luckily, thanks to U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva and other members of Congress, we also have an opportunity to finally tackle global warming and ensure that our wildlife heritage is protected for future generations of Americans.

In our warming world, habitats around the globe are shrinking and being destroyed while plants and wildlife are forced to adapt, migrate – or perish.

While the iconic polar bear gets most of the press, few species are immune, and many are in peril – including Arizona’s trademark saguaro cactus.

A recent report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program warns that due to the warming climate “. . . the probability of loss of iconic, charismatic mega flora such as saguaro cacti and Joshua trees will greatly increase.”

The world-class scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change have summed up the challenge in stark figures:

Without strong, rapid action to address global warming, 20 to 30 percent of the world’s plant and animal species will be at increased risk of extinction.

Stopping extinction is more than the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do. By safeguarding wildlife and natural resources, we keep our communities healthy and sustainable.

We all depend on diverse eco-systems for many life-sustaining services. These “ecosystem services” help produce and maintain clean water and air, and supply a variety of foods and medicines.

In arid Arizona, for example, our water flows in part from the healthy forest ecosystems along the Mogollon Rim and in the White Mountains.

Birds and insects pollinate our crops at no cost – just imagine what it would cost to do this by hand!

Wildlife activity are not only essential for our well-being, but also are an enormous boon to our economy.

According to the newest National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife Associated Recreation, 87.5 million Americans spent more than $122 billion in 2006 on wildlife-related recreation.

This spending supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. In Arizona, for example, it is estimated that hunting and fishing contribute $1.3 billion to the state’s economy each year.

We rely upon nature, and nature relies upon us. But we need to act fast to make sure that we don’t lose our wildlife and the natural resources we all depend upon.

By taking steps to curb our nation’s carbon pollution, we begin the transition to a sustainable green economy by lifting the burden off taxpayers and placing it squarely upon the polluting industries responsible for causing global warming.

But there is more to be done. Comprehensive climate and energy legislation must also include funding and strategies specifically aimed at safeguarding our wildlife and natural resources.

Grijalva has recently introduced a bill, the Climate Change Safeguards for Natural Resources Conservation Act of 2009 (HR 2192), that will help bolster the resilience of natural ecosystems in the face of global warming.

The legislation would create strong, coordinated national and state plans to put the best possible tools and strategies in the hands of state, federal and tribal land managers.

The bill would also boost scientific capacity to ensure that management decisions are informed by the best available science and monitoring.

Of course, it’s vital that Grijalva’s bill be backed with enough funding to do the job right.

Congress should dedicate 5 percent of the total revenues generated by a federal climate program to safeguard wildlife and ecosystems in a warming world.

It’s a small investment to ensure that the world we leave our children is as close as possible to the one that we have been fortunate enough to inherit.

The phrase “extinction is forever” is a potent reminder of what we have to lose and what must be done.

We all rely on nature for survival, so we must strengthen our efforts to address the negative impacts of global warming.

When we reduce pollution that contributes to global warming and invest in ways to safeguard nature and wildlife, we are not only helping nature, we are helping ourselves.

Scotty Johnson, a native Arizonan and Tucson resident, is the senior outreach representative for Defenders of Wildlife – a national conservation organization. For more information about the effects of climate change on wildlife and natural resources, see the Defenders’ new report “Beyond Cutting Emissions” at www.defenders.org.

Scotty Johnson

———

ON THE WEB

Climate Change Safeguards for Natural Resources Conservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 2192): tinyurl.com/qv3wum

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano distinguished herself in Arizona as a topnotch attorney general and as a wise and prudent governor.

So it comes as no surprise that President Obama reportedly is considering Napolitano among his potential nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fellow Arizonan Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice. She was appointed by President Reagan in 1981 and retired in 2005.

O’Connor gained renown for her diligence, integrity and penchant for constructive compromise. She did Arizona proud.

Napolitano would make us proud, too.

While we’re pleased that she now is heading Homeland Security, we believe her lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court would provide an even greater service to our nation.

As the National Rifle Association was en route to Phoenix, the state House showed its support by passing a bill to let Arizonans stash concealed guns in their parked cars.

But while HB 2474 may please some gun owners, it’s an outrage for property owners, employers and businesses, which no longer could prohibit gun storage in vehicles parked in their lots and garages.

In addition to infringing on private property rights, this legislation raises serious safety concerns.

Supporters say the bill, sponsored by Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, would provide convenience for people who may be planning to hunt or shoot before or after work.

Alas, it also would make workplace shootings far more convenient by allowing workers to keep loaded guns stashed just outside in the parking lot – whether the employer likes it or not.

Workplace violence already affects more than 2 million workers in the U.S. each year, accounting for about 20 percent of violent crime, according to a 2008 study commissioned by the ASIS Foundation.

About 500 workplace homicides occur each year, the report found.

The legislation, which has yet to be heard by the Senate, also could imperil homeland security because power plants and military contractors no longer could ban guns in their parking lots.

The bill does provide exemptions for nuclear-generating stations, businesses that run a gated and controlled parking lot, and facilities that search vehicles and passengers as they enter a secure parking facility.

But legislators cannot possibly predetermine what institutions have a legitimate need to bar guns from their parking areas.

We also find little solace in another argument by the bill supporters, that security would be enhanced for people who drive through dangerous neighborhoods.

Those who cannot avoid such dangerous areas and tote guns as a result still shouldn’t have the right to store their loaded gun in a private parking lot if the owner doesn’t want it there.

We agree with Rep. Chad Campbell, a Phoenix Democrat, that property owners should have the right to determine whether to allow guns in their parking lots.

Six other Democrats joined with House Republicans to pass this bill Thursday, just days before the NRA’s 50,000 members descend on Phoenix.

We would like to remind those Democrats, and the Republicans they joined, that in today’s world, national security and personal safety are paramount.

While HB 2474 purports to enhance personal safety, it in fact does just the opposite.

These are factors the Senate would be well-advised to consider before voting on this ill-conceived gun bill.

For those of you looking to this space for perspective on the Citizen’s demise, for those looking for What It All Means – you are looking in the wrong place. ¶ Excuse us, but we’re a little too close to the situation right now.

Do you ask someone how it feels when a relative dies after a long bout with cancer? After all, we knew the end was coming for months.

But here’s a revelation: When death comes, even if it’s not supposed to be a shock . . . it’s still a shock.

So give us six months, or six years. Then we can provide some context.

Let’s stick, then, to the few points we can make with a sufficient degree of conviction:

• If there’s a way to spin the Citizen’s closure into a positive for Tucson, we’d love to hear it. But one doesn’t exist.

It would be bad enough if we were just any company. But a newspaper is the type of high-salary, knowledge industry, “smart” business that any of the city’s TREOish, economic-development types would love to recruit.

Those of us who have explored Tucson’s, uh, challenging employment environment know we won’t be making anywhere near the money we make now. Bottom line for Tucson: More than five dozen well-paying jobs lost.

But a newspaper isn’t just any company. It’s a repository of the city’s collective memory and of our aspirations and hopes.

Healthy journalism equates with a vibrant city. A dead paper is analogous to the city’s libraries closing – a chilling prospect.

• To all those bloggers and “citizen journalists” who, if you believe the Internet, are this close to reinventing the industry, here’s your opportunity.

Now is your chance to cover never-ending board meetings, make Freedom of Information Act requests to dislodge facts from public officials, call sources – you have cultivated sources, right? – and otherwise do what we in our dying industry like to call “reporting.”

To do it right, you’ll have to work eight to 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.

If it sounds like a job, not a hobby, it is. But don’t expect to get paid; apparently, that business model has been discredited.

We’re rooting for you. Public officials need vigilant scrutiny if our dollars are to be wisely spent and public policies are to be sane and progressive. So good luck with that.

• Finally, frankly, this paper’s closing dissolves a colorful, creative cast of characters the likes of whom you’ll never find in one place again. From sweet Mary Bustamante’s long-time devotion to schools to Dan Buckley’s vivid mariachi videos, from Ryn Gargulinski’s bizarre takes of the macabre to Alan Fischer’s scintillating science coverage, from Steve Rivera and Geoff Grammer’s mastery of Wildcats basketball and high school sports, respectively, to Anthony Gimino’s personal peeks at sports personas, we’ve had it all. And you had it, too.

But not now. With the loss of the Tucson Citizen, everybody in Tucson loses. And that’s a fact. Goodbye.

Job always stayed fun because of staff

I can’t complain. It was a good run. There aren’t many people who have the opportunity to do what they truly love and to do it in one place for 34 years.

That’s how my career went at the Tucson Citizen – from Dec. 16, 1974, until May 15, 2009.

Some of you I will miss. Others, not so much.

At the top of the “miss” list are the people I work with. The job has been fun mostly because the people have been fun.

These pages wouldn’t be here without Billie Stanton. She’s to my right today, but in reality, she isn’t to the right of anyone. She’s impassioned and would right every wrong in the world if she had the time.

In the four months since we first were threatened with closure, we’ve know that there are a lot of people who care.

Bishop Gerald Kicanas was one of the first to call and say he was thinking of us. There also have been legislators and former legislators, City Council members and former council members and many others.

But what touched me most were the kind notes from those of you I have never met. Most offered words of support and said how much they will miss us.

Typical was a comment left online yesterday by a reader I know only as rubysky: “I hope the staffers are OK. These are our neighbors and fellow citizens.”

Others had different concerns.

I was slightly hurt when one caller was more concerned about Brenda Starr’s future than mine. How, the reader wondered, would she be able to keep up with the red-haired reporter?

I resisted telling her that Brenda was fictional and I was real and she should be a little more concerned about my future.

Oh, well. Good luck, Brenda.

I also won’t miss those people who have called or e-mailed almost every day over the past four months to point at something in the paper they didn’t like, saying, “This story is why you are closing.”

Some said it’s because we’re too liberal, some say it’s because we run too many conservative Cal Thomas screeds.

One even said we were gonna close because we ran a short story on Martha’s Stewart puppy being accidentally killed in a kennel.

I actually think the reasons were bigger than that, but who knows?

I also won’t miss the guy who called every Feb. 6 to castigate us for not running a front-page story reminding people it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. And what would the second sentence of the story have been?

It’s been fun, this journalism business. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Contact Mark Kimble at mskimble@cox.net.

After more than five years at the Tucson Citizen, I still feel like the new kid on the block.

Some of our core content creators – the “deciders” – have been here three decades or more, and their institutional memory and regional knowledge have served this community very well indeed.

You know that guy to my left here, the Micky Mouse afficionado of “Arizona Illustrated” fame.

Mark Kimble and I have kitty-corner offices behind the newsroom, where we call out questions and quips without leaving our seats.

We’ve entertained and irritated one another repeatedly, but he steadfastly has defended me against the savages, and our teamwork has been a blast.

Kimble has been a good boss. He’s been an even better journalist. He came to the Tucson Citizen 34 years ago, and we all know the Citizen wouldn’t have made it this far without his wit and wisdom.

This Little Afternoon Daily That Could likewise would have derailed long ago if not for two men working in relative obscurity.

Joel Rochon got here 36 years ago, and I’ve long regarded him as the real brains behind this operation. (If only Gannett would have listened!)

Joel is a brilliant and talented artist and designer, an expert with technology, a supplies and budgeting guru, a visionary about the newspaper business and a people person who wisely dispenses free chocolate with encouragement and support.

I love him to pieces.

Paul Schwalbach can put panache on the most pedantic prose. With two big words and a carefully chosen photo or two, he’ll put a full page into focus.

But that’s just the technical stuff. He’s also a highly sophisticated political and social observer and one of the funniest, warmest human beings with whom I’ve had the privilege to work. (Scarecrow, I think I’ll miss you most of all.)

These three astute editors are the unheralded infrastructure of the Tucson Citizen.

Thanks to them, I’ve been free to lambaste violent racists, skewer mean-spirited conservatives, cheer on the No More Deaths crowd, support and honor our veterans, promote the public school system that makes our democratic society possible, push for the election of President Obama and, in general, annoy a whole lot of nattering nabobs of negativism. (Sorry, Spiro.)

This puts the period on my 30-year career. Most of it was spent in Colorado and Florida, but I started at the Arizona Daily Wildcat, so it’s appropriate that it ends in Tucson, too.

I’ve enjoyed making a contribution here, but others have committed their entire professional lives to this paper. I salute them. And to all you faithful readers, thank you.

Send job offers to billiestanton@gmail.com.

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 . . .

‘Placing that illegal immigrant sympathizer as secretary of Homeland Security was scary enough, but the Supreme Court? God help us all!’ – Runnerboy

The story: President Obama’s potential Supreme Court justice choices include Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor-turned-secretary of Homeland Security.

Your take: You must be joking! Most of our online commentators lambaste Napolitano, but a few fans weigh in on her behalf:

• “Will someone please wake me up from this nightmare? I can’t take too much more of this.” – Bubba

• “It doesn’t matter (whom) Obama recommends – it will be a leftist liberal who doesn’t believe in God, who stands for killing babies and will want to change the definition of marriage.” – Powersgrandma

• “I’m afraid, grandma, what is doomed is your evil philosophy of imperialism, racism, homophobia, sexism, oppression and death. Stick a fork in it!” – leftfield

• “This woman couldn’t even govern well, then was promoted to Homeland Security where she is performing even worse . . . and then Obama would consider her for the Supreme Court? When does all this bad judgment end?” – Aztxslady1

• “Judicial system does need Napolitano’s eloquence, poise, judgment, character, perseverance and, definitely, multicultural experience. She’s qualified. I predict she’ll be assigned to wear a judicial judge robe.” – Az Intelligence9377

MOST-VIEWED LOCAL NEWS STORIES

For Thursday, May 14

1 Cavalry soldiers exhumed here to be reburied in Sierra Vista.

2 The Bounce: UA dodges fallout over Floyd’s alleged cash for Mayo.

3 Obama considering Napolitano for Supreme Court.

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.

Several members of the Tucson City Council this week violated the spirit – and possibly the letter – of the state’s Open Meetings Law.

The law was written to ensure that decisions by public bodies are made in public. That didn’t happen when several council members got together ahead of the meeting to reach consensus on controversial budget cuts.

It’s a practice that must not be repeated.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Councilwoman Nina Trasoff said she had met with some colleagues “in twos or in threes” to discuss funding cuts to nonprofit groups and other jurisdictions.

Trasoff said that since four council members had not been together, there never was a quorum so it didn’t violate the state Open Meetings Law.

That’s defining the law too narrowly – and flies in the face of several opinions from the state Attorney General’s Office.

The law says this: “All meetings of any public body shall be public meetings and all persons so desiring shall be permitted to attend and listen to the deliberations and proceedings.”

But that’s just the beginning. Public bodies cannot circumvent the intent of the law by meeting in smaller groups ahead of time to reach consensus. That prohibition extends to the exchange of e-mails among members of a body in an attempt to reach an agreement.

A 1975 opinion by the state Attorney General’s Office said “all discussions, deliberations, considerations or consultations among a majority of the members of a governing body regarding matters which may foreseeably require final action or final decision of the governing body constitute ‘legal action’ and must be conducted in an open meeting.”

The same opinion says that discussions taking place among fewer than a majority of the members “to circumvent the purpose of the Open Meeting Act . . . would constitute a violation.”

That covers almost precisely what Trasoff did with Regina Romero, Karin Uhlich and Shirley Scott.

The discussion involved possible budget cuts so the city could avoid instituting a tax on residential rentals. That tax was the subject of lengthy and heated public hearings that drew hundreds of Tucsonans recently.

Council members should have continued that discussion in public so citizens could hear the entire messy process with all views expressed.

The talk should not have taken place in a series of private conversations and telephone calls, with the resulting consensus presented in public as a neatly packaged fait accompli.

City Council members must be educated not only on the Open Meetings Law, but also on the way it has been interpreted over the years. Public business must be conducted in public.

Construction of a city-county courts complex downtown has been delayed because an old cemetery was on the land.

But Pima County did the right thing by taking the time and spending the money to exhume and store more than 1,800 sets of remains.

Saturday, the remains of 61 U.S. Cavalry soldiers and some of their dependents will be reburied in the Southern Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery in Sierra Vista.

The remains will be escorted from Tucson by scores of motorcyclists from the Veterans of Foreign Wars Patriot Riders.

Burial will come with full military honors at a new cemetery for historic burials near Fort Huachuca.

That’s as it should be. These soldiers from long ago deserve the same honors as current members of our military.

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

‘Prosecute everyone who broke the law. Only then can America be the role model of freedom for all the world to aspire to, like we used to be.’ – Concerned Tucsonan

The story: In a guest opinion, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham wrote that it’s time to move on and halt investigations into the Bush administration’s use of coercive interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

Your take: A split verdict, but generally disagreement with the “it’s over, move on” viewpoint.

leftfield was unambigious: “First we hang Cheney by his toes, then we waterboard him 83 times, then we send him to Swat Valley wrapped in an American flag. Then we move on.”

Priscilla replied: “If so, then we do the same to Pelosi and all her Democrat gang as well as Repubs who approved of waterboarding, who voted yes to the war in Iraq and who, for votes and power, sold this country out.”

ldonyo thought it was a curious position for one of the authors: “McCain advocating torture and holding people without charging them with anything. I guess he didn’t learn a thing in five years as a ‘guest’ of the Hanoi Hilton.”

demospolis is suspicious of everyone in power: “Politicians like John McCain/Obama rule with contempt for the rights/economic justice of common citizens.”

2865 was not bothered by the interrogation techniques: “To win a fight, any fight, you have to be willing to be at least a shade crazier and a shade less ethical than your opponent.”

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2 Obama considering Napolitano for Supreme Court.

3 City OKs deal for $167 million convention center hotel.