Coyote Blog

I thought the city of Washington DC had declared a "Crime emergency" because there was too much crime.  Apparently not, since they have created a whole new class of criminals:  16-year-olds who are ... shudder ... out and about after 10PM.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that the city had to
set the new 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger because of
"irresponsible" parents who don't control their children.

"You shouldn't need a curfew if you've got parents who are
responsible," Ramsey said on Washington Post Radio. "But unfortunately
we've got some parents here that are totally irresponsible. Their idea
of raising a kid is throwing a kid out of the house and letting them
straggle back in at 2 o' clock in the morning."

Hat tip to Reason's Hit and Run, which had this comment:

It's not that city officials want to play parent to every kid in the district. It's just that, gosh, turns out law enforcement professionals are better parents.

I hate to think what ideas this will give our local stormtrooper Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff with the largest PR budget in the nation. 

Props by the way to Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose longstanding reporting on Sheriff Joe is reminiscent of the tough, confrontational local reporting of old.  Of course, there's no room for that in the milquetoast pander-to-the-local-pols reality of big-city newspapers today, so Dougherty is relegated to the local alternative paper (which may not be fair -- I don't know Mr. Dougherty -- he may prefer to be where he is).   Sheriff Joe is popular here in Phoenix, so the Arizona Republic (the big paper here) panders to him rather than risk confronting a popular figure.  The fact that one of Sheriff Joe's family helps run the Arizona Republic's editorial page may also have something to do with it.

Frequent readers of this site know that I hold an extreme position on immigration:  I advocate free and open immigration of anyone who wants to come.  I made the case for open immigration here.

So it is not surprising that I am opposed to recent efforts by our Arizona Governor and state legislature to crack down on undocumented immigrants, an effort by the way that feels more like populist pandering than deeply held belief.

But what really befuddles me about our Governor's efforts is the message she seems to be sending.  Take these two positions together:

1. Last November, Governor Napolitano opposed the passage of Proposition 200, which was aimed at denying state services to illegal immigrants.  And, after its passage in November 2004, she did everything she could to drag her feet on its enforcement
2. Today, Governor Napolitano is supporting a state-wide crackdown on hiring of illegal immigrants, with a proposal for substantially increased fines and penalties for businesses that hire an undocumented worker.

Taking these two positions together, our governor's position appears to be that she supports immigrants being able to freeload off of taxpayer-funded services and transfer payments, but opposes immigrants being able to work and be productive.  Maybe we can post a big sign down on the border:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning... for government handouts, but please tell your productive workers to stay home.

Update:  The Arizona Republic, though I may bash it from time to time, has been pretty fair to me in publishing my letters to the editor.  The post above was published in their print edition on January 21, and online here (though I thought my title was much better!)

The Arizona Republic noted today:

In a historic move, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission voted
Thursday to oust state Rep. David Burnell Smith from office for
overspending his public campaign limits by more than $6,000.

The 5-0 vote marks the first time in the United States that a
legislator has been ordered to forfeit his office for violating a
publicly financed election system.

I don't know anything about Mr. Smith, so I don't know if I would agree with any of his politics or not -- I suspect though that he and I would not see eye to eye on a number of issues.  This case nevertheless leaves me with mixed feelings.

On one side, Mr. Smith signed on to the clean elections program (he doesn't have to) and accepted public funding, and thereby accepted spending limits.  He was obviously sloppy (as a minimum) in his accounting, or at worst flaunted the restrictions.

However, on the opposite side, I hate this type of campaign law. I don't like any restrictions on spending, which equate to limitations on first amendment speech rights.  I don't even like voluntary programs like this, because they use public money - read that as MY money - to finance candidates and viewpoints that I don't necessarily agree with.  In these voluntary programs, candidates are effectively being offered a publicly funded bribe to waive their first amendment rights, as argued in this suit.  I don't like seeing this next step in the arms race to limit political speech.  The ability of an unelected commision of busybodies and nitpickers to actually invalidate free elections and toss out elected officials merely because they used $6000 too much free speech is scary.  Would anyone in their right mind wish to grant this power to the FEC?

By the way, the language in the Republic article is funny, and shows their bias in this.  Note this line, emphasis added:

The commission's vote comes after three months of scrutiny in what has
been billed as the biggest test for Arizona's popular but controversial
system of taxpayer-funded political campaigns.

Here is a hint: whenever a reporter calls a program "popular", it means that it is a program that the reporter or the paper's editorial staff supports.  It does not mean that they have polling data backing up this claim.  Don't believe me?  Then note this line from the same article:

Some commissioners admitted they were reluctant to attempt to overturn
the wishes of voters in a legislative district but said it was more
important to uphold the wishes of the state's voters, who narrowly
approved the Clean Elections initiative in 1998.

Ahh, so this "popular" program was only "narrowly approved".  In fact, I looked it up.  Smith won his election by a far larger margin of victory than did the Clean Elections initiative.  Should the AZ Republic be calling him the "popular" legislator? 

Its been a frustrating day dealing with the Arizona Republic.  The day began pretty exciting as they had a beautiful article in the style section today featuring the handbags my wife creates.

Our first disappointment was the fact that the paper forgot to include my wife's web site in the article, giving readers no contact information in the article if they are interested in the purses.  Then we found that the link to her article in the style section of the Republic online was wrong, and only produced an error.  Now, mistakes like this happen - I actually messed up a link to my wife's web site in this article, but I quickly fixed it when an alert reader noticed.  So I emailed the webmaster at the Republic, and, several hours later, I got an email saying something like "here is the correct link".  But the link online is still broken!  In the time they sent me the email with the correct link, they could have just fixed the link online.  Six hours later, it still is not fixed.  This strikes me as classic dead-tree journalism, thinking in terms of making corrections days or weeks later rather than in real time.

UPDATE:  Yea!  Link fixed.  Wonder if my sending them this blog post helped or if they were doing it anyway.

I have written a number of times about how I hate public funding of sports stadiums for billionaires.  But, via the Arizona Republic, this is perhaps worse:

Mired in debt, the Insight Bowl is considering leaving downtown Phoenix's Bank One Ballpark unless the postseason college football game receives a public subsidy.

Great - using tax money to fund random college bowl games.  And where does the money go - most of the money does to the participant teams and their conferences which this year are Notre Dame and Oregon State.  Why does Arizona need to subsidize the State of Oregon's athletic programs.  And Notre Dame?  They have one of the largest endowments in the country.  Neither of these teams have any connection to Phoenix or Arizona.

OK, I am being purposefully naive.  The money may go directly to the teams, but the purpose of the subsidy is to get those teams' fans to come to Arizona on the week between Christmas and New Years and buy hotel rooms.  In fact, it is an indirect subsidy of the lodging industry.

Why does the lodging industry have so much power in Phoenix?  People come here anyway, because it is warm - our climate is the best advertising.  And during the week between Christmas and New Years all the hotels are probably full anyway - certainly their rates are the highest of the year, as I have found when family have come to town that week.  And don't even get me started on tax money for this.

If the lodging industry values this stuff, let them pay for it via one of their trade groups.  The city of Phoenix does not advertise my business.  In fact, it does not advertise most of the businesses in town.  Why is lodging the exception?

Good news for our business (I run a campground management company), the AP reports via our Arizona Republic that RV sales continue to surge, despite high gas prices.

RV sales are definitely riding the front end of the demographic wave, as new retirees look for more flexibility and mobility in their retirement years.   RV businesses are also benefiting from a post 9/11 reluctance to travel overseas or vacation at high-profile resorts or cities that might be targets.  I wrote on some of these trends in my post "the New American Nomads".