Coyote Blog

"Arizona Republic gave an unqualified endorsement of school choice today"

From Adam Shaeffer at Cato.  The AZ Republic editorial is here.  It is really rare to see a local paper break with the established monopoly education interests.  However, before we get too excited, I will observe that the Arizona school choice plan discussed falls pretty short of full school choice, but it is a step in the right direction.

I have written a number of articles about the ridiculous subsidies paid to cotton growers in Arizona.  The AZ Republic has a semi-nostalgic look at the decline of cotton farming in the Valley, mainly due to the pressure of urban growth.  I say:  Good!  How have we tolerated a situation like this so long:

This year, Arizona farmers planted 215,000 acres of cotton, a 66
percent drop from the 633,000 acres in production in 1981, said Rick
Lavis, vice president of the Arizona Cotton Growers Association.

"I wish we could grow more and the prices were better," Lavis said.

Cotton averages 55 cents per pound, up from five years ago, Lavis said. But it costs 75 cents a pound to produce, he said.

"Doesn't sound very profitable, does it?" Lavis asked. "If the trend
lines tell us anything, it probably is continuing to be a diminishing
commodity because of urbanization and price. If you're not making back
the 72 cents to 75 cents a pound that it costs to produce it, cotton
growers may say, 'Gee, I need to grow something else.' "

A variety of federal subsidies, including guaranteed payments, price
supports and below-market loan rates, keep cotton profitable for
Arizona farmers, Lavis said. When cotton prices rise, subsidies
decline, he said.

You mean at some point when prices are 20 cents under the cost of production, farmers might eventually consider planting something else?  Duh.  Farmers, generally rational sorts, would have made this decision long ago if it weren't for the enormous federal subsidies mentioned in the last paragraph that keep cotton profitable.  And this underestimates the total subsidy, since farmers in Arizona (as well as Southern California) use millions of gallons of subsidized water, ofter priced below cost, usually priced below what we other citizens pay, and always priced below what a true market clearing price would be (which explains why Lake Powell is drying up).

In this post I list information on cotton subsidies -- over $100 million in Arizona just for cotton in 2003, and 2006 appears to be a worse year.  And notice the top three subsidy recipients are all Indian Tribes with very, very profitable casino operations.  These are not struggling family farms.  Most every one of these farmers on the top subsidy list are in cities (Goodyear & Queen Creek for example) that are right at the wavefront of Phoenix expansion and so probably sit on a fortune in real estate.  I am sure they are happy to have the USDA pay them a half million dollars a year so they can cover the carrying cost of their land until they find the right developer to buy it for millions.

Tonight, it appears that AZ voters will pass Prop 202 to raise recreation use fees in Arizona.  Oh, you say that's not what Prop 202 was for?  It was minimum wage?  That's right.  Prop 202 raises the minimum wage in AZ by 31%. 

I have written about the minimum wage many times.  For a variety of reasons, many seasonal recreation workers in AZ, and in fact in the US, are retired folks who work for minimum wage and a camp site to take care of a facility.  They love the job, and do great work, while filling seasonal jobs that younger folks trying to raise a family can't really take on.  When you take all wage related costs -- wages, payroll taxes, unemployment insurances, workers comp, liability insurance, etc. -- wages drive about 2/3 of recreation costs.  That means that a 31% increase in wages equates to a 20% increase in recreation use fees for camping, boating, day use, etc.

What, you say?  That's not what we meant!  We consumers aren't supposed to pay this extra, you business guys are!  Well, my profit margin is about 5% of revenues, which is a pathetically low number for a service business.  Basically, I do this for fun -- I could probably make a better return investing in government bonds.  So, to avoid bankruptcy, wage increases get passed right through to use fees.  And since the law requires that the minimum wage be increased every year, it means that use fees will have to go up every year (for comparison, we have been able to hold many use fees flat for 3-4 years at a time, despite fuel and other costs).

Sorry.  My employees were happy to work for $5.15 an hour.  They did not ask for a raise.  In fact, I have a waiting list of people who want jobs at $5.15.  It was the voters of Arizona who decided that my employees could no longer legally accept this amount for their labor.  And, unfortunately, it is the voters of Arizona who will have to pay for this raise my employees did not even ask for.

One of the good things about living in AZ is that it is the home of several of the unfortunately dwindling number of Republicans who consistently cast votes for lower taxes and smaller government. 

Recently Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who I have given props to in a number of columns on this blog, sponsored a series of 19 bills aimed at cleaning up the appropriations process and making it harder for Congress to slip earmarks through the appropriations process, at least without having gone explicitly on the record as having done so. 

The Club for Growth has a scorecard of how each Congressman voted on these bills.  In each case, a 'YES' vote is a vote against pork and a vote to clean up the Congressional appropriations process. 

My Congressman, John Shadegg, who is another reliable small government low tax voter, came through with 19 of 19 'Yes' votes.  Way to go Congressman!

But its dry heat.

As a public service, Arizona is taking onto itself all the worldwide effects of global warming, thereby saving polar bears in Greenland and archipelago-living indigenous peoples.  Once it gets over about 108 you don't really notice the difference anyway.  Picture taken at 4:50PM MST today in the inappropriately-named (at least for today) Paradise Valley, AZ.  For all those who want to compare this to hell, I would remind you that the core of Dante's hell was frozen and cold, not hot.  Dante knew what he was talking about.  It may be hot but there is nothing to shovel off my driveway.

By the way, when people laugh at Arizona for not observing Daylight Savings Time, this is why we don't.  At nearly 5:00, we are hitting our peak temperature.  If we observed DST, we would not be hitting this peak until 6:00.  Temperatures here will cool over the next two hours by 20 degrees  (its already fallen nearly 3 degrees in the 20 minutes since I took the picture, and the sun is not down yet).  With this fast temperature drop typical of the desert combined with evening shade, it will be nice enough to be outside, eating or relaxing or watching a little league game by 7:00.  If I had my druthers, I would observe reverse daylight time, going back rather than forward an hour in the spring.  More observations on DST from myself and Virginia Postrel here.

Quite a while back, I suggested that a better use for HOV lanes would be to charge money for their use, thereby creating a new revenue stream to increase future freeway capacity and beginning to experiment with peak pricing.

Several years ago, I sent in a proposal to the Arizona
Dept. of Transportation for their new HOV lanes in the Phoenix area,
though I never got a response back.  I suggested that HOV lanes
probably did not really increase carpooling, since they probably just
shifted vehicles that would have already been carrying 2+ people into
the faster lane.  Why should I get this artificial subsidy of a
dedicated lane when I am driving my kid to a soccer game but not when I
am driving myself to do productive work?  Either way, the lane is not
changing my behavior.

Anyway, I suggested that instead, AZ DOT should create a
number of special passes for exclusive use of the HOV lane.  The number
of passes should be set as the largest number that could be issued
while keeping the HOV lane moving at the speed limit at rush hour.
Maybe 5000?  Anyway, they would have the stats to set the number, and
it could be adjusted over time.  I proposed that they then auction off
these passes in a dutch auction once a year.  I posited that the
clearing price might be as high as $1000, thus raising $5,000,000 a
year that could be used for other transportation projects.

I suggested that $1000 as the clearing price might be low.  For some workers and businesses, 20 saves minutes a day might be worth thousands of dollars a year.  Some wealthy people would buy it just because they can, or as a status symbol.  I observed that many people were buying hybrids in Washington DC solely so they could use the HOV lane, putting a price of at least $5000 (based on the hybrid's price premium over similar non-hybrids) on HOV lane use.  In this example, I posited an annual pass, rather than a toll, solely because we have not toll roads here and no infrastructure at all to support tolls and a customer based unused to paying them.

Apparently, Lynn Kiesling, the DC/Northern Virginia area may soon experiment with exactly this concept, charging a congestion-variable price for HOV lane use while giving a discount to carpools.  Apparently the idea already is in use in SoCal.

In a remarkable example of an anti-business hit-piece called "Fueling Contempt" on the front page of the AZ Republic, the Republic leads with this line:

Reaction to major oil producers' staggering profits ranges from rage at
the pumps to calls for profits to be reinvested in exploration,
alternative-energy research or simply returned somehow to the public.

The article is mainly focused on the profit announcement at Exxon-Mobil, so I will use their numbers to put "staggering" into context.  E-M announced profits of $9.9 billion on sales of $101 billion.  For those who cannot divide, that is a profit margin of 9.9% of sales.  Since when is a profit margin at a cyclical peak of 9.9% considered "staggering"?  Microsoft makes 30%, in good times and bad, with a fraction of the investment or risk X-M takes.  From this chart, you can see the average for all industry is about 8%, with the oil industry generally below this number in all but cyclical peak quarters and banks, pharma, software, semiconductors, financials, household products and many others all consistently over 10%.  Procter and Gamble makes a margin of nearly 13% of sales selling toothpaste and detergent but we are going to begrudge oil companies 7.6% on average and 10% in their best quarters?

The article does absolutely nothing to put the profits in their proper context, though I was able to do it in one paragraph.  This is the only context the article offers:

The oil companies assert that their profits are no larger than other
businesses and that they just look big because it is a big business.

Exxon Chairman Lee R. Raymond said in a statement that the company
"acted responsibly" in its pricing and said its fourth-quarter profits
would come nowhere close to the $9.9 billion in the third quarter.

That doesn't necessarily wash with Adrienne Valdez of Phoenix.

"I can't afford to buy socks because I am paying twice what I used to
for gas," she said. "It's not right that they should be making billions
at our expense."

In Phoenix, gas prices soared to $3.14 after Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf Coast. The average Valley price per gallon, which has been falling
in recent weeks, was $2.72 Thursday, according to AAA Arizona.

Bruce Trushinsky, owner of the former Moon Valley Exxon station at 1901
W. Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, called Exxon Mobil's $9.9 billion
quarterly profit "disgusting."

He became so upset at the $7.6 billion profit posted by the company in
the second quarter that he canceled a longtime branding agreement.

"I ripped down all the Exxon signs and threw them in the garbage,"

he said. Now, after 30 years, Moon Valley Exxon is Carmel Automotive
and Fuel. Trushinsky said the high wholesale prices charged by Exxon
were devastating to his business and that the last straw was when the
company canceled its dealer-incentive program.

"They cut us off, then they announced their (second-quarter) profit increased $2 billion."

This is populist crap, and is the reason the MSM cannot be taken
seriously when they say that they are neutral reporters.  They are not
reporting, they are cheerleading an anti-oil company bigotry that has
existed for decades.  I think that the E-M management should be embarrassed to make such a small return in their best quarter.  Shareholders should take management to the woodshed for investing and risking so much in a cyclical business and making so little.  For gods sakes, they make a lower margin than Jif peanut butter earns.  Is anyone suggesting that we impose a windfall profits tax on Charmin?

I find the title of the article "Fueling Contempt" interesting - I am not sure if it was meant to refer to high oil company profits or if it was just a statement of intent for the article.

UPDATE:

Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for
inflation, in gasoline tax revenues"”more than twice the amount of domestic
profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period

This is just gasoline taxes - it does not include income tax payments, property tax payments, and oil lease royalty payments.

Apparently, some of our local politicians in the Phoenix area are upset about payday loan companies.  According the an AP report in the AZ Republic:

The stores cater to customers who live paycheck to paycheck who need
quick access to a few hundred dollars for rent, car repairs or just to
make ends meet. Banks traditionally don't make those type of small,
short-term loans.

So these stores provide loans to people no one else will touch.  And customers use their services of their own free will.  So what is the problem?  Well, not surprisingly, the rates on these loans are high, and the default terms tend to be drastic.  "Activists" think that people are making the wrong decision using these services, and, to be fair, I would certainly advise anyone who asked to try to find another alternative.  But what do my preferences matter?  Its easy for me to say in my middle-upper class hubris that such services don't make sense, but I have a steady job and ready access to bank loans.  In a free society, both I and those activists are free to convince people to not use these services, but its wrong to artificially limit people's choices out of some elitist sense that we can make decisions for other people better than they can for themselves.

Besides, lets think about the alternative.  These folks are not going to get bank loans -- in fact many customers may be illegal aliens who are, post 9/11, effectively barred from the banking system.  The only other alternative before these payday loan companies were loan sharks, whose interest is even higher and whose penalty for non-payment even more dire. This reminds me of the people who decry Nike "sweatshop" jobs in poor countries.  "Activists" similarly decry these jobs as if the alternative is $25 an hour office work, when in fact the alternative is actually grinding subsistence agricultural work for half the pay.  You may not like the payday loan companies, but they are replacing a much worse system.

But the really funny thing about this article is their proposed solution to the problem of rates for these payday loan services being too high.  Their solution?  Limit competition!  (emphasis added)

Arizona now has more than 600 payday loan stores - with 165 in the [Phoenix suburb] Mesa area alone - and some residents are upset about it.

"People are sick of it in west Mesa," said Dave Richins, a neighborhood
activist and executive director of the West Mesa Community Development
Corporation.

Richins and other critics claim the stores exploit customers with high interest rates.

[Phoenix suburb] Peoria blocks the shops from opening within 1,000 feet of a competing
store. Phoenix and Tucson are looking to that city's restrictions as a
model for new rules in their communities, with action possible by early
next year.

Gee, I bet that will help keep rates down -- make sure there are no competitors nearby!  Lets make sure it is as hard as possible to compare rates, particularly since the customer base is one that can't afford the gas, or doesn't even have a car, to drive all over town shopping.  I wonder why no one is suggesting the same thing for gas stations to keep gas prices down, lol.

President Bush's call for Katrina spending to be offset by budget cuts has spurred a blogosphere effort to identify local pork urge Congress to cut the pork.  I am 98% behind this effort (the missing 2% being that the effort is spurred by a desire to spend the money somewhere else, rather than sending it back to taxpayers where it belongs).  Glenn Reynolds post that got the ball rolling is here.  His followup posts are here and here.  I will note the irony that I recently compared Don Young (of Alaska bridge to nowhere fame) to Huey Long (of multiple bridges to nowhere fame), given that we are looking to cut Don Young's pork to help Huey Long's old stomping ground.

Edward at Zonitics has already identified one of the most visible chunks of AZ pork, that is our earmarks in the recent highway bill.  These include nearly five million for a couple of pedestrian bridges, plus hundreds of millions for a rail system to run empty trains to compete with our empty buses.  Why does the rest of the country need to pay for Phoenix's growth?  Heck, we just took the money the feds saved us on this junk and spent it subsidizing a stadium for the Cardinals, for god's sakes.   I will note that of the mere 8 people who voted against the highway bill, 2 were from Arizona, including my 3rd district Congressman John Shadegg and libertarian Jeff Flake.  Flake, consistent with his libertarian principles (or in retribution for them?) represents the only district in the country without an earmark in the highway bill.

So, to push the ball forward, I will add another bit of Arizona pork.  I wanted to include some items form the energy bill, but I can't find a state by state impact.  But I can find, thanks to the environmental working group, a nice summary of farm subsidies to Arizona.  Here is a summary for the most recent year they have data:

And here is the same data but cut by recipient, with just the top 20 included:

I don't know all these folks, but I can say that all of the first three have extremely profitable casinos they operate.

I am writing my letter now to the my Congressman and Senators, and will post a copy as an update when I am done.  The ubiquitous NZ Bear has a data base he is building of pork identified.

Technorati tag:  porkbusters.

I am always amazed at our government, which piously goes after business after business for "unfair" business practices, but never seems to apply the same rules to itself.  My latest example:

Today, I was (finally) granted a liquor license for our store and PWC rental business at Lake Havasu, AZ.  Since the approval process takes so long, I am ready at this point to be happy almost no matter what terms I get the license on.  Unfortunately, the state has rigid dates for licenses - they all expire June 30 of each year.  Since it is June 6 (hey, happy D-Day!) I get a license that runs from Jan 1 to June 30, and so have to renew almost immediately.  But here is the really good part:  They will not pro rate the license cost to June 6.  In other words, I have to pay the full $1000+ for the whole 6 month period, even though I am using only a few weeks.  Sleazy.  I wrote more about the whole liquor license process here. 

PS-  many will suggest that I just wait and go pay on July 1 for my license.  Well, they thought of that too.  There are rules on the application process such that it has to be completed in a fixed number of days.  If I don't buy the license by June 18, the whole 120-day application process starts over again.

Yesterday, Flagstaff, AZ became the latest community to vote on limits to "big box" stores.  When Wal-mart wanted to create a larger store that offered groceries, a group of local citizens didn't like the idea.  Not satisfied with exercising their individual right not to shop there, they got their city government to craft an ordinance to stop Wal-mart from expanding.  Wal-mart supporters gathered signatures and forced the ordinance to clear the voters as Proposition 100.   Via Arizona Watch, the ordinance would:

1. Prevent retail establishments larger than 125,000 square feet
2. Require retail establishments larger than 75,000 square feet to restrict the
   sale of non-taxable grocery items to less than 8% of their floor space
3. Require retail establishments larger than 75,000 square feet to be subject
   to economic impact studies
4. Require a conditional use permit (and the associated community input and
   hearings) for establishments larger than 75,000 square feet

Like all zoning, the ordinance was an attempt of citizens to control the use of someone else's property without having to actually buy the property.  Fortunately, the measure failed, though narrowly.  I will say that to some extent, I have trouble defending Wal-mart.  Wal-mart often takes advantage of statist actions to grow, including accepting loads of local government incentives and even eminent domain to grow.   To some extent, getting nailed by a local government is just getting hoist on its own petard, but I will defend them anyway because I could be next.

Supporters of the ban rallied under the "new urbanism" concept:

Meanwhile, the New
Urbanism concept -- a community design that mixes residential and
businesses districts to decrease the need to drive to outlying areas --
may face some challenges.

"What this
means is we're going to have to make some alternatives to the New
Urbanism vision," said Councilmember Kara Kelty. "We understand that we
have to maximize land usage. We need to continue that effort, but we
can't do that without the public."

Basically New Urbanism supporters would rather have a bunch of expensive and limited choice (but cute!) boutiques for you to shop at rather than whatever store you would prefer to shop at.  Rather than leaving this decision up to consumers, we-know-better-than-you planners in government take this upon themselves.  Reason had a nice article on New Urbanism.  Cato critiqued the smart growth folks here.

But, don't be fooled that this is just about land use.  This reaction article from the Arizona Daily Sun has some priceless quotes (note that these are from people the reporter found shopping in Wal-mart!):

"I voted 'Yes.' I'm really
disappointed because this town has enough Wal-Marts, and I don't know
where they're going to find land space for huge stores, with that kind
of square feet. We're running out of room for people to live here. I
wonder how happy they'll be if the Super Wal-Mart was built on McMillan
Mesa, that's private land. I don't know where they're going to put one."

First, if they can't find the land, then there won't be a problem, will there?  And god forbid someone builds a Wal-mart on private land. Should we use eminent domain instead?  I must admit that to some extent I sympathize with the residents of Flagstaff.  Like Boulder or Vail, it is a small town in a beautiful mountain setting.  And, like Boulder and Vail, the wealthy of nearby large cities (Phoenix) have descended on it, buying second homes like crazy.  The result has been increased traffic and prices, offset by a white-hot economy, increases in wealth for long-time residents via existing home prices, and huge boost to the tax base that is much larger than the cost of serving the new part-year residents.  The locals are trying to figure out how to keep the capital gains in their homes, keep the extra jobs, and keep the extra taxes without actually having any new people in town, and its not really working for them.

"My first reaction was
'Boo' when they announced it. They announced it over the loudspeaker. I
heard some cheers, and I heard some claps. The one thing I hate is the
thought of creating minimum-wage, part-time jobs that do not pay their
employees' benefits. They're just going to exploit more college
students, like they do here. I do shop here for lack of a better place
to shop."

Whoa, this doesn't sound much like land use, but it sure is heard as a rationale a lot for anti-Walmart zoning.  Look, if Wal-mart is paying too little, then no one will take the jobs.  Since these are net new jobs, they likely will go to people not now currently working.  How does that hurt anyone?  By the way, you gotta love the "exploit more college students" swipe.  Since when are college students owed more than minimum wage?  I worked for minimum wage in college, and I seem to be OK.  Also, how can many college students want anything other than part-time work?  And, most hilariously, I don't know any [mostly young, healthy] college student that gives a rip about benefits (by which I presume they mean medical).  Very few college students have or need health coverage separate from their parents or school programs anyway. I wrote a lot more about Wal-mart and wages here.

By the way, this man's commitment to principals is hilarious.  When quoted, he was shopping at Wal-mart.  This person can't even be bothered with the one strong individual free-will non-coercion option open to him:  Don't shop there.  When quoted, he was at that very moment benefiting in the form of lower prices for whatever was in his cart from these supposedly horrible labor practices.  Jeez, talk about knee-jerk statism.  If half of the shoppers in that store voted for this limit Wal-mart ordinance, then get them together and boycott the damn place and you'll probably shut it down, and you could leave the government and property rights violations out of it.

Now, let us all get out our violins for this guy who voted for the limits:

"I feel like a hypocrite
because I do shop at Wal-Mart. If we let them build a Super Wal-Mart,
what happens to this current store? Are we going to have a big empty
space there? If they move it to the other side of town, I won't go over
there. This is convenient for me.

OK, so this man voted to use government force and coercion to wipe out the property rights of other private individuals because... he was afraid new stores might be less convenient?  Look folks, this is why we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights, and why the founders did not create an unlimited democracy.  51% of the people are not supposed to vote away the rights of the other 49%.  We protect rights like speech against such tyranny of the majority.  At some point, unfortunately, we stopped protecting property rights.  This is the result - your property rights effectively subsumed to people who are worried about driving too far to the store.

I will end on this one:

"I think it stinks. I
voted 'Yes' for the proposition. I definitely didn't like the tactics
(Wal-Mart) used. I wish people didn't go and shop there. I really
thought it was going to get beat. We voted down fluoride, so why not
vote down Super Wal-Mart? That's the kind of town we are. This town has
that kind of progressive attitude. I'm just disgusted with the whole
corporation -- Wal-Mart. I think it's wrong."

I have written a number of times:  Do not be fooled by the term "progressive".  Progressives, despite the name, hate bottom-up, non-controlled-from-the-top change.  More than that, they hate the decisions you make with your own property.  They believe that they can make much better decisions for your property than you can.  The next time you support the "progressives" in stripping some third party of their property rights, remember that you might be next.  Remember the progressive slogan:  "All Your Base Are Belong to Us".

Its good that unlike us poor, mistake-prone bloggers, the major media outlets have multiple layers of editing.  Otherwise, they might make mistakes even worse than putting Tbilisi, Georgia near Atlanta, as did our "worldly" local paper, the AZ Republic.  (Hat tip:  WSJ Best of the Web$)

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? 

This headline today on the front page of the AZ Republic (our crappy local paper with the worst sports section of any major paper):

79º vs. 0º WE WIN

You never have to shovel sunshine off the walk

It's sunny. It's January. And it's almost 80 degrees outside.

In official meteorological terms, what we're experiencing is "a strong area of high pressure aloft."

In simpler terms, it's "this is why we live here" weather, which on Tuesday produced a Chamber of Commerce high of 79 degrees. That's just 1 degree shy of the record for the date but a full dozen degrees above normal.

Hello to Arizona Watch, which seems to focus on politics and news here in AZ.  Anyone with links all over their site to Cato, Eugene Volokh, Virginia Postrel, and Assymetrical Information can't be all bad!