When is it legitimate to spend public funds? A story in today’s Arizona Daily Star starts out: “The state’s tourism industry has come up with the answer to fighting the boycotts over the new immigration law. Better public relations.” The law in question SB 1070 “Requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town or political subdivision (political subdivision) if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S.”

The image problem is perceived to harm Arizona industries. The Arizona Hotel and Lodging Association is putting up $30,000 for a PR campaign. That’s all well and good. However, the State of Arizona is contributing $250,000 of public funds to the campaign. That is not well and good in my opinion. I do not think public funds should be spent to aid private enterprise (are you reading Mr. President?). That includes building phantom hotels and sports stadiums. The framers of the Arizona Constitution apparently agree. Article IX, Section 7, the so-called gift clause, states plainly: “Neither the state, nor any county, city, town, municipality, or other subdivision of the state shall ever give or loan its credit in the aid of, or make any donation or grant, by subsidy or otherwise, to any individual, association, or corporation ….” Had Pima County obeyed this law we would not now be stuck with the mortgage and maintenance costs of Tucson Electric Park, now that major league baseball has abandoned Tucson due to municipal largesse of other cities.

Another nit to pick. An Op-Ed in the Star this morning, written by the First Amendment Center, urges us to celebrate the First Amendment on our Nation’s birthday, as well we should. However, a sentence in the article gave me pause: “The five freedoms guaranteed there gave Americans the right to speak out against injustice, to report about inequality, to protest and petition, and to draw strength from freedom of faith.”

What’s wrong with that? Maybe is was just a rhetorical error, or lazy thinking, or, more ominously a reflection of philosophy. The problem I have with that statement is the word “gave.” Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” The First Amendment does not “give” us the “five freedoms,” We had those already. The First Amendment prohibits the government from denying us those freedoms. The distinction is a matter of who is the servant and who is the master.

As crude oil washes over Gulf beaches, the federal bureaucracy is denying use of effective tools to mitigate damage. Sitting in Norfolk, Virginia, a converted oil tanker is awaiting permission to go to the gulf to help clean up the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon break.

The ship, called the S.S. A-Whale, a giant oil tanker, was built in South Korea, modified in Portugal, is owned by Taiwanese, and flagged in Liberia. Hence its use is stopped by the Jones Act which has yet to be waived to allow foreign ships to help. This ship has the capacity to gather up 500,000 barrels of oil a day from surface waters. To put that in perspective, the current government authorized fleet has taken 70 days to collect 600,000 barrels of oil.

The ship works as a skimmer gathering oil, separating oil from water, storing the oil, and discharging the residue. Trouble is, the residue contains a little more than the 15 parts per million oil that the EPA permits to be discharged. But rules are rules.

See more on the Gulf and the bureaucracy.

A reader of my recent article Mesquite Trees Provide Food and a Pharmacy, offered some speculative information about the Hohokam uses of Mesquite trees.  

The Hohokam were native people who occupied Arizona from near Flagstaff, south to the Mexican border, during the period approximately 200 B.C. to 1450 A.D. They built an extensive network of canals near what is now Phoenix.

Richard D. Fisher, who apparently is a writer on archaeological subjects, speculates that the Hohokam built their canal network specifically to grow mesquite trees.

“The Hohokam canal system was probably built primarily for the cultivation of a mesquite bosque. It has been long questioned why the Hohokam built such an extensive system on one of the saltiest rivers in North America. Bean and especially corn cultivation is moderately to severely impacted by saline water and salinity. Mesquite is not impacted by levels of salinity found in the Salt River basin. My observation is that the Hohokam’s primary reason was to grow mesquite in the “delta” shaped canal system and mesquite conditioned the soil for corn and beans with nitrogen and shade temperature reduction, and moderated freeze sensitivity in the winter.”

“The Hohokam would have always faced the challenge of soil salinity, yet they farmed the same region for more than a thousand years, indicating that they understood how to deal with soil salinity — through the flushing of soils, leaving certain tracts fallow, alternating crop types planted, and other soil management techniques. Mesquite comprises approximately 50% of the archaeological record as compared to corn and beans.” He also proposes that the so-called “ballcourts” found among Hohokam ruins were in fact fertilizer dehydration basins.

Mr. Fisher provided reference to two webpages to further his thesis: see here and here.