Rogue Columnist

What now?

America didn't commit national suicide in the presidential election. Rogue readers are well aware of my frustrations with President Obama. But there was no choice but to support him against a crazy Republican Party. Wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney may have been the most dangerous candidate fielded by a major party in modern American history. Never before would we have had to wait until after the election to find out what he really stood for, besides his own ambition. He couldn't even be forthcoming about his faith, the most important thing in his life. The refusal to release tax returns was only the tip of a Titanic-sinking iceberg. What was clear: He had spent recent years wooing the Tea Party extremists, theocrats, Randians, racists and homophobes. And unlike with Reagan, they would bring their "revolution" to "take their country back," and with Paul Ryan and others had a very specific agenda. As I say, it would have been suicide.

Now we will see if the president can finally steel himself to the battles that face us. The "fiscal cliff" will be an early marker. He was elected by people who want to see tax rates on the rich revert to Clinton-era levels, if not higher. They do not want to see the safety net further shredded to fix the dreaded deficit — not when we've been spending about a trillion a year on all the facets of the national security state and big companies pay no taxes even as they ship jobs overseas. If Obama caves to a "compromise" framed by the right, this will be another four years of weakness and slow erosion of the commons, the middle class, and American competitiveness.

Watch also to see whom he names as Treasury Secretary to replace Tim Geithner. If he chooses the odious Erskine Bowles, he of the sell-out Bowles-Simpson Commission, we will see more power flow to the oligarchs. Bowles is a corporate shill and member in good standing of the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party, which has been panting to "reform entitlements." Translation: Betray Social Security and Medicare for the middle class. Also, watch out for Peter Orszag, former Obama budget director and now at, natch, Citigroup.

Note to readers: I will leave up the Campaign 2012 link under In Depth Reports for the rest of the week and then retire it. So get the URLs of your favorites now. It still should live on via the link in the Elections open thread below.

Election open thread

As we head into Election Day, I call your attention to Rogue's Campaign 2012 one-stop shop with some of the best articles on the presidential race. It's tempting to say this is the most consequential election of recent years, but so was 2000, 2004 and 2008. I'll check in as I can, semi-live-blogging, while also trying to finish up a novel.

I leave the comments fields to you.

UPDATE 10:30 a.m. 11/5: My Seattle Times blog post on businessmen as presidents. The record isn't what you might think.

11 a.m. 11/5: The Kookocracy is busy with election stealing in Arizona, with Flake robocalls telling Democrats to vote at the wrong polling locations. Meanwhile, a right-wing Arizona group sent $11 million in secretive "dark money" to meddle in California politics. It's a creepy story.

 9:30 a.m. 11/6: Atlas Shrugged vs. the Fire Next Time.

Read on for more. I'll be live-blogging starting at 6 p.m. Pacific Time

Storm warnings

Days ahead of the general election, the New York Times tells me that the "Ohio working class may offer key to Obama's re-election." According to a poll, "nearly half of all white voters without college degrees here say the economy is improving, and most give Mr. Obama some credit." In "post racial America," the president's overall white support is in the thirties nationally. Having spent nearly nine years in Ohio, let me try to drill something home. Guys like wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney bought, stripped, ripped and bankrupted your hometown headquarters companies in leveraged deals. They closed your factories, busted your unions and sent jobs to China. They drove down your wages to redistribute incomes ever upward. They fired you. They looted the wealth that it took Ohioans more than a century to build. Not blacks. Not Barack Hussein Obama. Guys like Romney — and in some cases Romney and Bain Capital specifically. I understand your trauma and bitterness. But get a clue.

• • •

Arizona is even more deranged. So not much to say. Change won't happen as long as turnout is low and voting dominated by the old Anglos and the LDS. Over cocktails in Phoenix a few days ago, some genuinely smart people assured me that Arizona was changing: Moderate Anglos would shake off their apathy and Hispanics would change the state's politics. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, the odious "Nickle-Bag Joe" Arpaio will win, despite a challenge from Paul Penzone who would restore competence and decency to the Sheriff's Office. Richard Carmona might pull it out for the Senate; if not, Jeff Flake will be even less helpful to the state than Jon Kyl. The overarching political problem remains an ineffective Democratic Party. And, as with the nation, a progressive movement that can't match the narrative of the right.

 

The Goldwater Library

A few quick observations on the $30 million Barry and Peggy Goldwater Library and Archives to be built in downtown Mesa. For the city of Phoenix, it is embarrassing, ahisorical, wounding and revealing.

Embarrassing because, according to the Arizona Republic, the library trustees wanted to put the institution in downtown Phoenix and city officials dropped the ball.

Ahistorical because Barry Goldwater was born in central Phoenix, attended Kenilworth School (as did I), managed his family department store downtown and was a Phoenix City Councilman who, among other things, backed construction of the Civic Center that is still home of the Phoenix Art Museum and Phoenix Theater.

The price of admiralty

The Nimitz-class carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and strike group.

Exactly sixty-eight years ago, American warships obliterated the remaining combat fleets of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the greatest sea battle in history. It was the last stand of the battleship and the first use of kamikaze, a foreshadowing of asymmetrical warfare to come. In the aftermath, the United States Navy has ruled the oceans, and helped ensure Pax America, with a dominance only exceeded by the Royal Navy in the century of Pax Britannica after Trafalgar.

Maintaining this is not a matter of mere numbers, however, as President Obama hinted at in his devastating bayonets-and-horses rejoinder to wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney. Building more ships will further the corporate welfare for the defense contractors and has personally enriched Romney's top naval adviser. Beyond this, the strategy is murky — particularly considering the cuts the nation is expected to endure while also further spending on the military.

For the record, the Navy had 285 active ships last year. Contrary to Romney's claim that, "our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917," the Navy was even smaller under George W. Bush. And numbers of ships are meaningless era to era. A modern Arleigh Burke class destroyer is far more lethal than a World War II battleship. A single Nimitz-class carrier strike group is more potent than all the fleets assembled at Leyte. Total firepower controlled by U.S. fleets is overwhelming. Obama made the point without going too deep into the weeds. (I hope; never underestimate the ignorance of the average voter and the coveted GOP demographic of white males and size issues).

President Romney? Part II

Much has changed since I wrote the first post on this topic. The biggest being that wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney may well be the next president. Between the hard-core right, the duhs-and-ignos, and the whites who hate that black man in the White House more than anything, it could well happen. And don't forget the huge post-Citizens United money and vote suppression favoring the GOP. Disappointment in the incumbent is substantive — but enough to turn the country over to this man and this bunch? Possibly.

I want to attempt to get beyond the horse race or debate analysis to contemplate a Romney presidency. So, a few thoughts:

The man is frighteningly opaque. We've been conditioned to believe "all politicians lie." Maybe so. But I can't think of a presidential candidate in my lifetime who has held so many different and conflicting positions. Not evolving or changing one's mind when the facts change, but cynical shape-shifting to close the deal. Anything to win. Even if this doesn't reveal a dangerous sociopath, we must ask: Who is this man? The hard right doesn't care; it has given him a pass to play "Moderate Mitt" just to defeat Obama. But does "Moderate Mitt" really exist? Or was that merely the calculus of a man who won one term as governor in blue Massachusetts ("my state" as he always says in debates, creepily avoiding saying the state's name). Is it the lazy fantasy of the mainstream media that also had a misplaced crush on the "maverick," wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III.

Tear-down city

It's an outrage that two of the very few remaining buildings of the Deuce, the Madison and St. James hotels, are being torn down to make a surface parking lot. Phoenix sure doesn't have enough surface parking lots. Apparently a "compromise" with the Phoenix Suns, which owns the property downtown, will "preserve" a fragment of one building. That's almost more pathetic and insulting than blading the whole thing. These commercial buildings from the early 20th century only make sense as part of a whole, i.e. a walkable block of these human-scaled, useful and historic structures, a "smile full of teeth," as it were, right up to the sidewalk. In isolation, they lose these winning features. A few pieces of rubble in a surface parking lot...is that a joke?

Team owner Robert Sarver must be sitting in his San Diego palace savoring getting some of his own back, after not being able to demolish the Sun Mercantile to build a W Hotel. According to my sources, Sarver was presented with a stunning architectural option that would have twirled the hotel tower well above the roof of the historic structure. He shot it down in favor of something more conventional and dull and destructive. Which never happened anyway. It's amazing the Sun Mercantile survives, and a credit to preservationists. Does anyone think Sarver, had be owned the Suns at the time, would have pushed for a downtown arena as Jerry Colangelo did? Just as I'm sure Ken Kendrick and pals wish Chase Field was on the rez near north Scottsdale. Seattle's looking for an NBA team. Don't assume anything with "stewards" like this.

I realize this post is coming very soon after a meditation, sparked by the fight over the Wright house, on all that Phoenix has lost. And yet the losses just keep coming. A century-old store in Higley was no match for the sacred widening of the holy wide "streets" which are the width of major highways. But the downtown calamity especially stands out.

Town hall of fools

UPDATED

One of the treasures of my home in exile is Town Hall Seattle, a setting that consistently holds intelligent and searching events featuring top authors, artists, scientists and other intellectuals. The audience is always smart, never boorish or full of thugs and trolls. The vital issues of the day are on the menu, the setting a restored majestic church downtown. That such a place not only exists outside of New York but is highly popular is almost enough to give one hope. But this is a very blue city that consistently ranks at or near the top in the nation for literacy.

A very different town hall will take place Tuesday night: The second presidential debate. As the New York Times reports, the format "is designed to be a little less stiff — a free-flowing question-and-answer session between the candidates and a studio audience." Get it: Studio audience. Not only is this "debate" actually highly scripted, it is intended to mimic the great god of Moronistan, the television. Please, let us trivialize what should the solemn obligation of learning real issues and acting as real citizens. Far better Donahue/Oprah/The View with pretend issues and a premium on treating Americans as stupid children. Wasn't it the first such "town hall debate" in 1992 when George H.W. Bush checked his watch? I felt his pain.

In the Obama/Romney version, we will see 80 participants "culled by Gallup...from a sample of uncommitted voters." Right there is what cops and crime-writers call "a tell." Uncommitted? Seriously? How could anyone be uncommitted or undecided in this election. Only people who are imbeciles. People who should not vote. I hearken back to Gore Vidal's famous line about 50 percent of Americans don't vote and 50 percent don't read a daily newspaper — and he hoped it was the same 50 percent. Today the number of actual readers is far lower. But we will have Messrs. Romney and Obama pandering to the duhs and the ignos, consumers not citizens.

Carmona vs. Flake

The concise answer to the Arizona U.S. Senate contest is this: "The Mormons vote. The Mexicans don't." If that pattern repeats, along with the typically disgraceful low turnout, then Republican Jeffrey Lane Flake will win. The Flake momentum will only grow if President Obama continues his self-immolation against wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney.

That's a shame on so many fronts. Jon Kyl, who is retiring after being in the Senate since 1995, has been a disaster for both Arizona and the country. Along with wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and Flake himself, Kyl set the template for a delegation that is almost exclusively concerned with furthering an extremist right-wing agenda while doing nothing for the state they nominally claim to represent. The consequences of the former include being willing to wreck the country (further) just to defeat President Obama. The consequences of the latter are particularly insidious for Arizona's worsening predicament.

For most of its history, Arizona's congressional delegation, particularly its senators, were expected to serve the interests of the state in Washington, not be national showboats. This is why, for example, millions of Phoenicians can turn on the water tap and never worry whether water will come out. This happened because Sen. Carl Hayden in particular but the entire delegation for generations championed the Central Arizona Project. Every member, Democrat and Republican, was determined that Arizona not only get its "fair share" of federal money, but more than that.

Backs against the wall

Remember when progressives were told not to worry, that President Obama was playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers. Unfortunately checker-players ended up winning most of the matches. And then there was Obama as "zen master." No Drama Obama. And he was peacefully stoic as the Republican right captured nearly every agenda and framed nearly every debate. We are left with one last chestnut: That the president is at his best when his back is against the wall.

Based on the results of the respected Pew poll, we're about to find out if this is the case. Calling the poll findings "devastating, just devastating," Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast wrote:

I've never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week - throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement? And after Romney's convincing Etch-A-Sketch, convincing because Obama was incapable of exposing it, Romney is now the centrist candidate, even as he is running to head up the most radical party in the modern era.

Phoenix 101: Lost

The main waiting room of New York's Pennsylvania Station, shortly before it was demolished in 1963.

The effort to save the David and Gladys Wright House has become a cause célèbre, or as much of one that can find traction in the sprawling, just-rolled-in-from-Minnesota "civic" climate of metro Phoenix. A Facebook page has been set up. The New York Times flew in architecture critic Michael Kimmelman to write an appreciation of this Frank Lloyd Wright work, including such details omitted by the local media as the demolition company (!) being the one who realized the treasure they had been engaged to rip down and going to the city. The odds of success are long. Perhaps if this were the Joe Arpaio House and it was being torn down to create a day labor center for illegal immigrants. Otherwise, only the Resistance and minority of Resistance-minded citizens have a clue.

The modern preservation movement in America is often traced to the 1963 destruction of Pennsylvania Station, the classically-inspired masterwork of McKim, Mead and White in New York City. It was replaced by a brutalist Madison Square Garden with the railroad station in rat-passages underneath. New York has never gotten over this loss, nor should it. But it ensured that thousands of buildings nationwide were saved, including Grand Central Terminal. This never happened in Phoenix, yet it's not because we wanted for something grand like Pennsylvania Station to be destroyed by barbarians.

The Japanese Flower Gardens was one of our Pennsylvania Stations, a breathtaking Eden at the foot of the South Mountains. The gardens ran for miles along the legendary and evocatively named Baseline Road and offered staggering views of the city — and for anyone, not just the toffs. Lost. Replaced by miles of schlock subdivisions, faux stucco apartments, fast-food boxes and huge expanses of asphalt. Nothing was learned from this colossal act of vandalism. Not one change came to land-use regulations or an attempt at farmland preservation.

The conversation

Several weeks ago, ASU President Michael Crow spoke before the Chandler Chamber of Commerce. His comments, as reported by the Arizona Republic, are instructive:

Let me start with something that’s really been on my mind the last few months. People say to me, “What is the economic development challenge of Arizona? It’s really kind of strange. It really isn’t what people think it is. The economic development challenge for Arizona, in my view, is our inability to express the creativity, the adaptability, the successful way of doing business, the free-enterprise spirit and the things that go on here. It’s our inability to project positively.

Crow goes on to list a number of "positives," including that "there are very few communities with the assets Chandler has been able to amass. It is unbelievable! But you would think none of this is true." And, "If you took nothing but the newspaper and the political rhetoric spoken now, you would think the United States is a failure. You would think Arizona is a backwater, cornpone hangout....If we do not work on projecting the image of what this place is, we are fools. Fools!" Crow is no fool, and this could easily be dismissed as just saying something nice for the chamber types, but it was also picked up as a rallying cry in an editorial.

Who are the Whigs?

Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative writes a thoughtful article asking, "Is the GOP still a national party?" He points out the increasing popular vote dominance of Democrats in presidential elections, contrasting this with the GOP landslides of earlier years. Yet the map that goes with it is arresting: County by county, this is a very red nation (admittedly this was from 2004; the Obama "high tide" results are shown, I believe by congressional district, above). But, with a few exceptions such as Phoenix and metros in Texas, the biggest population lives in blue counties. "Republicans," he writes, "are actually closer than Democrats to being the real 47 percent party. (Though it’s more accurate to say the GOP is the 48-49 percent party and the Democrats are the 49-50 percent party.)"

McCarthy points to the dichotomy: GOP ideological purity, discipline and grassroots strength have given it big advantages over Democrats in state legislatures and Congress. But that same base, and the need for Republican presidential candidates to please it, becomes a liability every four years. McCarthy is a conservative in the Russell Kirk mold and is rightly concerned about what passes for conservatism today.

The long knives are already out in the campaign of wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney and one reads about the bloodbath to come in the GOP if Romney goes down. (It ain't over!). But bloodbath to where? The Eisenhower, Ford, Nixon and even Reagan and Bush I Republicans have been read out of the party as RINOS. All militant passion resides with the extreme reactionaries that, when most Americans really grasp what they're about, further marginalize the party.

Nullification redux

As every schoolchild once learned, at least before standardized testing, South Carolina precipitated the nullification crisis in 1832 by passing a law that said it could, essentially, pick and choose which federal laws would apply within the state. The immediate complaint was the tariff, but of course the deeper issues were slavery and state rights. And, as the child once learned, Old Hickory forced the South Carolina firebrands to back down, preserving the union.

What is less discussed is Andrew Jackson's situational approach to the rule of law. Indian Removal, one of the few national issues about which the Old Hero was specific and passionate, broke numerous solemn treaties and enacted theft and ethnic cleansing against the Five Civilized Tribes. When the Supreme Court finally found in favor of the Cherokee Nation, Jackson simply ignored it. Georgia and other Southern states wanted that improved and cultivated Indian land for plantations and the spread of slavery. Jackson was a slaveholder himself. He was also happy to allow South Carolina and other Southern states to ignore federal law when it furthered white supremacy. What he wouldn't countenance was secession, and hence the object lesson on nullification (and the tariff was modified anyway).

Which brings us to 21st century Arizona, the Crazy State. Prop. 120 asks voters to approve the following: "The State of Arizona declares its sovereign and exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within its boundaries..." Exceptions are made for Indian reservations and federal land that had been "ceded" in a way, I suppose, Arizona decided was Constitutional. I am not making this up.

Phoenix 101: Blue highways

Van Buren Street east of 24th Street in the 1950s. Across the street is the State Hospital.

Between the glory days of the railroads and the completion of the Interstates, most visitors and newcomers to Phoenix arrived on the United States Highway System. Not for us the legendary muse Route 66 or the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental improved road that became U.S. 1, 40 and 50. When the system was created in 1925 to standardize the many named highways that existed, Phoenix probably had a population of 35,000. It was isolated and difficult to reach, with formidable mountains to the east and north and forbidding desert to the west. Phoenix's coveted agricultural produce was shipped by refrigerated railcars. What Phoenix did eventually gain were U.S. 60, 70 and 80, along with U.S. 89.

U.S. 60 evolved from the many "auto trails" and plans for highways in the early 20th century, including the Atlantic and Pacific Highway. U.S. 70 joined it on the east at Globe. U.S. 80, which gained its own folklore history elsewhere in the country, came east from San Diego to also join U.S. 60 in Phoenix. In addition, U.S. 89 came north to Phoenix from Tucson. And all four U.S. highways converged on Van Buren Street, which for decades was the gateway to the city and lined with "auto courts" and motels, all set off with neon signs to lure weary travelers. The Sierra Estrellas Web site offers a detailed history of the many motels and Douglas Towne wrote an interesting meditation on Van Buren for Modern Phoenix. Another aspect of U.S. 60: It was the demarcation for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. All living and farming south of U.S. 60 were interned, including those on Baseline Road.

With Van Buren being the repository of so much local highway history, two other gateways risk being forgotten: Grand Avenue and Buckeye Road. The WPA-built rail underpass on 17th Avenue south of the capitol shows the route where U.S. 80 separated from Van Buren, turned south and then west on Buckeye, which was also lined with small motels. Grand, the only diagonal in the young city's street grid, was another neon-lit boulevard carrying U.S. 60 to Los Angeles via Wickenburg and U.S. 89 to Prescott up terrifying Yarnell Hill.

Stealing distance

UPDATED (2)

President Obama got a bounce. Wealthy Republican financier Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney got none. Key swing states are slipping his reach. Many in the progressive blogosphere are a bit too confident for my comfort 50 days out. The richest men and most powerful industries in America are not prepared to see their hundreds of millions of dollars contributed to Romney and Citizens United-enabled GOP super PACs flushed down the toilet. Voter suppression efforts are in full gear, especially critical in Ohio.

No question the Romney campaign is in such disarray that, as Politico reports, the long knives are already out. The Republican Convention ended in calamity, from Chris Christie's Tony Soprano 2016 acceptance speech to Clint Eastwood's performance art with an empty chair — and little memorable about the nominee. Then last week, Mitt's "Lehman moment" on Libya, that moment, as with McCain in 2008, when the man shows himself profoundly unqualified for the presidency.

And why would he be? He's not "Mr. Fix-It" the businessman. He's Mr. Break-It, the kind of finance capitalist that has spent decades weakening the nation by looting the productive wealth it took a century to create. He was a failed one-term governor of a mid-sized state. If Mr. Obama lacked executive experience, he at least has a first-rate temperament, to use Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous assessment of FDR. Unlike Roosevelt, he also has a first-rate intellect, although my discontents with the president are well known.

Burn out?

A couple of posts ago (Dekookification), commenter Gaylord wrote:

I only read this for amusement. One of these days, Mr. Talton, I surmise you will burn out on covering Phoenix and AZ because it's too far gone and you have moved on in so many ways. I have done this: moved to L.A. after having lived in PHX for 18 years. It's such a downer to think about what the city and state could have become, if only there had been more enlightened leadership or at least those that would listen to and heed wise people such as yourself. All we can do now is shake our heads, be glad we are no longer living there, and remember how much destruction the Republicans wreak when they're given the upper hand.

It's a fair question or perhaps prediction. Soleri, whose sparkling, intelligent comments I always looked forward to, has withdrawn. On the other hand, I wonder if Gaylord really just reads for amusement. In my experience, once Phoenix gets under somebody's skin, it's a lifelong condition.

SB 1070 deconstructed

I received an email from a friend, or perhaps a lost friend, over my most recent post. I urge you to read it in full because it represents a viewpoint widely held by suburban Anglos. Here it is:

Jon: check your facts. Russell  Pearce was the sponsor of SB 1070. Most of the text for SB 1070 was written by Kris Kobach, a law professor and important figurehead with the Federation of American Immigration Reform.  Russell Pearce was not voted out of office by the Mormons. He was voted out of office by the Hispanics who know he sponsored SB 1070. SB 1070 was written after James Krentz, a rancher in southern Arizona was killed on his own ranch by illegals.

All of the Arizonans I know are not against immigration. They are against illegal immigration. Big difference. As you know I grew up in South America, specifically Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. I did not come back to the States until I was a teenager and I can report first hand that immigration laws in all of the other countries I have been in are very tough compared to the U.S.

Dekookification etc.

I'm glad to see my former Arizona Republic colleague Laurie Roberts carrying on a little of my work by calling for dekookification this election. Her job should be safe as long as she doesn't go after the three great enablers of the Kookocracy: 1) The Real Estate Industrial Complex, 2) The individuals with means and major institutions (you know who you are) — the fellow travelers — that don't want to rock the boat, and 3) The Mormons.

Let me be clear about No. 3. We can thank Salt Lake City, not dekookification, for the defeat of Russell Pearce. This symbol of Arizona extremism had become an embarrassment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His words and policies went against church teachings. So he was finally forced to walk the plank. Don't be fooled: This was a Mormon takedown, not a triumph of moderation or St. Janet's "Sensible Center." And I say, good. The LDS has a long, constructive (even bipartisan) history in Arizona. Mesa Mayor Scott Smith carries on that ethic. Still, the church has followed the GOP into ever more extreme territory and remains an enabler of the Kookocracy, especially because of its superior organizational strength in a state that has lost offsetting centers of power and is marked by civic apathy. Stating this does not make one anti-Mormon.

As for Pearce, the evil that men do lives after them (and he will no doubt be back). SB 1070, the Jim Crow, voter-suppression, keep-'em-in-their-place, anti-immigrant measure, dripping with equal measures of hate and hypocrisy, is law. It and the climate it spawned have made Arizona an international symbol of intolerance, racism, cruelty and ignorance. Mission accomplished.

Charlotte

The first thing Americans, and especially the national media, need to know about the location of the Democratic National Convention is that it is being held in Charlotte, N.C., not Charleston, S.C. In historic and genteel Charleston, as Fritz Hollings said, there are two kinds of people: The ones who don't wear shoes, and the ones who look at you like you don't wear shoes. Nor are Monticello and the University of Virginia located in Charlotte. Those are in and near Charlottesville. Such is the confusion that has long maddened local chamber of commerce bots. Charlotte is banks and NASCAR and churches. Lots and lots of churches. Billy Graham was born here. It's not in the mountains, like Asheville, or near the ocean, like Wilmington, but on the flat, boring Piedmont in between.

I come by my Charlotte knowledge having served as executive business editor of the Charlotte Observer, from 1996 through 2000, in its Knight-Ridder glory days, and have visited many times since. When I reluctantly left big-city Cincinnati for the job in Charlotte, I thought I had landed in Hooterville with a skyline, specifically one gigantic tower, the NationsBank Corporate Center, and a tiny little office core beside it. In the years since, downtown Charlotte has grown substantially and can boast an impressive, if totally modernistic, skyline.

The main reason is the banks, and specifically two bankers. But more about them later.

'Hard truths'

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likes it hard. As in, "to lead as my mother insisted I live, not by avoiding truths, especially the hard ones, but by facing up to them and being the better for it." Also in his 2016 acceptance speech in Tampa on Tuesday night, he said, "With $5 trillion in debt added over the last four years, we have no other option but to make the hard choices, cut federal spending and fundamentally reduce the size of government." A few lines later, there it was again: "Hard choices..." When he finally got around to mentioning the nominee of the Party That Wrecked America, wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney, he promised, "Mitt Romney will tell us the hard truths we need to hear..."

Really? In a contest already remarkable for Republican deceit, including the outright lie that President Obama loosened welfare work requirements, this is the bunch that is not only going to tell us the truth, but "hard truths"? And remember, the Romney camp has put us on notice that "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Apparently the "hard truths" will also be heavily camouflaged in the racist dog whistles to the old, white party base. Did you know that the president is a Negro? Not even an American. Even Bill Clinton didn't face this from the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.

Mayor Stanton's report card

Eight months after assuming office, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton is still enjoying a honeymoon. That means he's making the honeymoon last. So much for critics who thought he was just a pretty face. The contrast with Phil Gordon, his poignantly snakebit predecessor, is striking. Stanton can routinely speak in complete sentences and articulate coherent thoughts. Becoming the 52nd mayor of Phoenix hasn't caused Stanton to shelve his appealing nature. People who talk to me about the mayor use words such as "smart," "easy going," "open" and "welcomes new ideas." He remembers people's names and what they've been working on. His human touch and emotional intelligence are genuine, not the surface happy talk of a politician.

I was concerned about the "biosciences" bone tossed to Desert Ridge when so much needs to be done for the real biosciences campus downtown, the one site that could be a real game-changer for Phoenix. But my sources involved in downtown, light rail and sustainability aren't worried, so good on Stanton. Another concern was Stanton taking the lead among mayors on backing military spending, when Phoenix needs a spokesman on so many more compelling and productive issues. But this seems to be part of his effort to make regional cooperation a priority (good luck with that).

Stepping back, probably the best way to see Stanton so far is that he's doing a good job of getting his feet under him in a race that's already moving fast and carrying huge stakes.

Conventional Republicans

As the Republicans prepare for their national convention, a tropical storm with the ironic name of Isaac might visit a biblical comeuppance on the party of theocracy. Now wouldn't that be "spaycial," as they say in the South. Wouldn't that be in-ter-est-ing. The Grand Old Party couldn't have picked a more appropriate place to gather, Tampa, a "city" that makes Phoenix look like Paris by comparison, a poster child for Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere, and a deep-red suburban bastion of ignorant and retrograde Republicanism. Back in the day, a convention would have defeated wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney on the first ballot, and then the old hands would have gathered in a smoke-filled room to choose a better candidate.

Tom Friedman opines that "America today desperately needs a serious, thoughtful, credible 21st-century 'conservative' opposition to President Obama, and we don’t have that, even though the voices are out there." Deconstructing Friedman is always a fun party game, but let me be brief. The sentence presumes that Mr. Obama is a liberal. And this is based on, what? Even Obamacare is a massive giveaway to big business, specifically the insurance companies and for-profit health oligarchy. The banksters got away with it. Wars go on. The national security state is bigger. Civil liberties more at risk. Tell me something liberal in the president's record. He's about as liberal as Jerry Ford. And the "voices are out there." Really? Tom Coburn? The world ain't the only thing that's flat.

The compelling question looms larger than Friedman's clueless search for the mythical center: Why is this election even close?

New life for Luke?

Much celebration has accompanied the announcement that Luke Air Force Base will be the training base for the new F-35 Lightning II fighter. If I read the news story correctly, the claims include 1,000 "permanent direct and indirect jobs," and the program will "bolster" the base's economic impact of $2.2 billion (from 2005). Winning the F-35 gives Luke a future as F-16 pilot training winds down over the next 11 years. Republic editorialists strained to tell how about how this West Valley "coup" was good for the East Valley. Mesa Mayor Scott Smith wrote how this enhances the region's dream of being an aerospace hub. On the other side of town, it seemed necessary to celebrate the benefits for Little League and dry cleaners.

As usual, it's left to Homey to sun on the parade.

Despite all the professed love for Luke, the Real Estate Industrial Complex has been encroaching for years on a base that was once separated by many miles from the urban area. The difficult route that pilots must fly, especially when armed for exercises on the Goldwater range, and the danger to nearby subdivisions is one of the many unexplored local stories. As for the new house-owners who find out just how loud a fighter jet is...suckers. By the mid-2000s, land brokers were feverishly assembling parcels even closer to Luke for new tract houses and some very powerful land-owners were, er, tepid in their support of continued Air Force operations. This was a quiet but fierce clash that went on even as the Pentagon wondered whether it was safe and economical to continue such a large training base so close to residential development.

Let's help the Times

A few years ago, when it seemed that Phoenix had become the nation's fifth most-populous city, the New York Times decided to post a reporter to this unknown land somewhere on the other side of Jersey. Recently, the job has been handed off to Fernanda Santos. Lately, the Newspaper of Record has uncovered that it's hotter than hell in the un-air-conditioned atrium of the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse (a plan which I remain convinced starchitect Richard Meier just pulled off the shelf from his student days, although others say he was enamored by the misters at a restaurant at Arizona Center). Santos has also revealed for the Times' influential readership the tortilla factory at the Ranch Market on Roosevelt at 16th Street.

Then came the topper: A story this week on the excessive heat that never mentioned the worsening urban heat island because of the loss of agriculture and sprawl, much less climate change and its dire potential consequences for a big city where, to paraphrase Ed Abbey, one should not be. The conclusion of this bastion of sophisticated journalism: It's very hot in Phoenix in August.

To be fair, Santos was said to looking for a house in the historic districts, according to sources who wished to remain anonymous because they wished to remain anonymous, as the Times might put it. Good for her. She has done some (reactive) lifting on the Badged Ego's legal troubles and immigration. And one never knows the misguidance being given by editors. But Phoenix desperately needs all the real enterprise journalism it can get, however much it discomfits the local-yokels. Let's help out the Old Gray Lady.

Debt reefer madness

When did we become a nation of deranged accountants? These United States face many critical tests, from the perilous (climate change) and exceptional (the lesser depression and the destruction of the rule of law by the plutocrats) to the merely important (rising inequality and declining opportunity). But look around and listen. What is the Most Important Issue? Federal fiscal policy. The federal debt! The federal deficit! Oh, Jerusalem!

Americans who would otherwise have difficulty balancing their checkbooks live in terror of this menace. The Very Serious People (hat-tip to Paul Krugman) in government and media have made it the true north to which every other national need must bend. It has been a gift to demagogues on the right. But your neighbor and granny are lying awake over what is actually a bunch of macroeconomic hypotheticals they do not even understand. But, but, we're deeply in debt, facing bankruptcy — look at Greece! — families have to tighten their belts, so the government should, too, and if this isn't fixed now, we'll, we'll.. (head explodes). I suppose the consequences are of the operatic kind of payback facing a high-school kid who takes just one toke of pot in the 1936 classic Reefer Madness.

It would be laughable if the damage looming from attempts to "fix" or exploit the fiscal situation was not so real.

The party's over

America can accomplish a great deal when the most reactionary states pick up their marbles and leave Washington. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Pacific Railroad Act, which authorized government bonds and land grants to build the transcontinental railroad. The legislation had languished until the Southern states seceded. Then it sailed through the Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862. Other major pieces of the new party's agenda that never would have passed the filibuster of Southern Democratic senators also became law: Land-grant colleges and the Homestead Act. All three would prove decisive in the nation's development.

It's also worth noting that in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which broke the back of de jure segregation, 80 percent of Republicans voted for the legislation, a higher percentage than among Democrats. The Democratic majority included a solid segregationist Southern bloc, including most powerful committee chairmen and the wily Sen. Richard Russell. As Robert Caro majestically narrates in The Passage of Power, Lyndon Johnson knew how to "get" people — and as the new president, he got essential GOP support by relentlessly reminding foot-dragging Republican lawmakers that they were "the Party of Lincoln."

In the same year, Barry Goldwater won his party's presidential nomination. His opposition to federal civil-rights legislation ensured support in the South (before his assassination, President Kennedy's polling was showing him losing the South in a Kennedy-Goldwater matchup). But, still, there were Nelson Rockefeller, Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott and George Romney, liberal Republicans all. Richard Nixon funded the Great Society, established the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed far-reaching improvement to health-care coverage. Ronald Reagan, demigod of today's Republicans, was more often pragmatic than ideological in his governing. And we don't even have to get into Poppy Bush.

Corrupt or stupid?

I don't mean to be harsh, but what is it with Arizona's climate-change denial? Sure, it's not as bad as North Carolina, which is trying to outlaw using climate science to estimate the rise in sea level. But Arizona is the focus of this blog, the home state I love (no matter what you believe) and fight for, even if it must be at a distance. Aside from the Republic's indispensable Shaun McKinnon, I am unaware of any public figures who are discussing a subject they should be screaming from the rooftops: The clear and present danger that climate change specifically presents to Arizona.

Of course, the Kooks (I coined the term, you're welcome) will be deniers. But consider the congressional primary race among Democrats Kyrsten Sinema, Andrei Cherny and David Schapira. I'm not sure the survivor from this circular firing squad will prevail in a new district that includes Chandler and Mesa. But one would think, especially given the talent and brains of the two candidates I know (Cherny and Sinema), that this could be a time for truth telling. Yet — and forgive me if I missed it — I can't find a mention of it on their campaign Web sites, much less in the "send money" push emails from Cherny and chirpy-happy-everything's-great-in-Arizona tweets from Sinema.

Issues in the closet

This is the most important presidential and congressional election in my lifetime. The trouble is, none of the major candidates is talking about the big issues. Or is it just me? President Obama and wealthy Republican challenger Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney are outdoing each other to please the Israel lobby. There's a fierce debate over alleged ill-treatment of the super-wealthy. Romney promises to increase defense spending; Obama cut it a little, maybe. What will get the economy going again: tax cuts and other Bush redux policies, or, as Obama seems to be saying, merely not electing the other guy. The gaffe watch is on high, of course. Are these the big issues upon which the fate of the republic hangs? The political press complains that it's a boring election. No wonder. The real issues, the serious matters screaming for intelligent responses, are kept hidden away:

1. Climate change. Despite a consensus among the scientists that actually specialize in this field that climate change is real, human caused, getting worse faster than anticipated and will produce far greater cost and harm than good, we're doing next to nothing about it. Try to write about it, as I did last Sunday in the Seattle Times, and you'll be marked on reactionary Web sites to be deluged with emails, all with the same wording and alleged research that climate change is a hoax, or at best unproven. The goal is to intimidate and confuse. I don't give a damn. I'll write about it every chance I get. But our leaders won't tell us the truth, won't campaign on policies that would address it and at least prevent the worse outcome. No issue is more important.

2. The (real) economy. Mass unemployment, stagnant wages, historic inequality, slow or no growth, the end of meritocracy. These things should be unthinkable in America, but neither candidate and few members of Congress will really lay out the policies to address them. The Romney solution, tax cuts and more deregulation, is a big reason why we're in this mess. We need a major stimulus focused entirely on creating jobs, especially by building large-scale 21st century infrastructure (not "roads and bridges"). And with interest rates and Treasury yields so low, there's never been a better time to borrow. Then we need to raise taxes, go after tax shelters and tax gambling in the capital markets that doesn't create productive enterprises and good jobs. Forget beating up China over currency manipulation; we need to play China's game in trade.

Phoenix 101: Annexation

Annexation was intended to save Phoenix. It may end up killing it.

The roots of growing fast by annexing land go back to the 1940s. Phoenix had grown from its original half-square-mile to 9.6 square miles in 1940, with a population of 65,414. It was surrounded by agriculture and well separated from small farm towns such as Glendale, Tempe and Mesa. But even before the old city commission was swept away by the "reformist" Charter Government Movement, leaders looked east and worried. They knew the Salt River Valley would grow, especially once World War II ended. But they saw how cities in the Midwest and east (St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, etc.) had become surrounded by incorporated suburbs that were already sucking away people and tax dollars. They, and all their successors, were determined not to repeat that mistake.

In addition, the abundant, mostly flat land of the Valley had numerous unincorporated settlements. Also, the War Department had decentralized training bases and war plants in the early 1940s — sites that could become future towns and urban nodes. Virtually none was within the city limits. Ironically, considering the worry about white flight, most of the barrios and African-American neighborhoods were also in unincorporated areas south and southeast of downtown. Early annexation was small and piecemeal, often fought in court and the Legislature by land owners. One big battle was over absorbing the Phoenix Country Club and its surrounding neighborhoods into the city. On the pro side was a department store executive and aspiring politician named Barry Goldwater, soon to be a city councilman. Still, by 1950, when Phoenix claimed 106,818 residents, it had grown to around 17 square miles. This is the compact old city about which I often reflect.

Building nihilism

I produced a Seattle Times blog post on the "You didn't build that" manufactured controversy. The comments are as instructive as anything I wrote. We're going to see a summer and fall of silliness before the elections. But beneath many of the trivialities are profound truths — such as the refusal of wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney to release his tax returns, as his father did when he ran for presidency. And this seeming kerfuffle.

The Republicans and "independents" (who really lean Republican) are embracing a philosophy that can only be described as nihilism. As I pointed out in my post, only in a nation that became wealthy and safe thanks to the delicate balance between government and the private sector could we even have the luxury of this discussion.

It's easy to think that, once in power, the Republicans will continue their own brand of big government: Heavy subsidies for arms merchants and polluters and all members of the oligarchy that have gained control of our politics. The government will grow just as it did under Reagan and both Bushes.

Holding out for a hero

The New York Times on Sunday noted that Joe Arpaio's Arizona didn't become that way without some who fought back in public. It singled out Latino organizer Salvador Reza; Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox; community organizer Lydia Guzman; videographer Dennis Gilman; state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema; ACLU Director Dan Pochoda; Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and New Times reporter Stephen Lemons among others. If Arpaio finally goes down in the Department of Justice civil-rights lawsuit, they can hold their heads high.

Can you imagine what Attorney General Robert Kennedy would have done to Arpaio had he gone after his brother the president with a bogus quest over his birth certificate? Bobby wasn't called mean and ruthless for nothing. Or what LBJ or Nixon would have done? Arpaio would have been given the biggest IRS proctology exam in the history of the world, seen all his federal aid cut off, and been relentlessly hounded by federal prosecutors and FBI agents. President Obama, cool and contemplative, has a corporate lawyer as his Attorney General. So my hopes are muted.

The Resistence desperately needs heroes. Unfortunately, those listed by the Times either had no power or, in the case of Gordon, were severely constrained by both events and his own second-term swoon. The reality is that good intentions divorced from power get us nowhere. Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived his convictions against the Nazis, but the only reason we are able to celebrate his martyrdom today is the brute power used by the Allies to defeat them. When Lyndon Johnson suddenly became president, he was urged to back off on civil rights, so as not to use his political capital on a seeming lost cause. This master of the use of power, in Robert Caro's telling, replied, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" And a hero, with titanic, heroic flaws, emerged.

Strange awaiting

Surely I'm not the only one who feels as if we're in a spooky interlude, an intermission between bad and, perhaps not worse, but much of the same bad for a very long time. Or, something... A zone of circumstance lying somewhere between an asteroid strike and the widespread sense of peace and prosperity, however misplaced, of the 1990s.

Consider that wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney stands a very good chance of becoming president. Despite all the damage that should have been done by the ongoing revelations of his destructive work at Bain Capital, duplicity about his tenure at same, and refusal to release his tax returns — a potential chief executive with accounts in the Caymans and a Swiss bank account — despite all this, he barely trails in the popular vote and cannot be counted out in the Electoral College. How can this be? Is it simply because Obama has lost so much of the white vote? That the right has so rewritten the narrative of the past 12 years that millions don't actually know what the hell happened?

If you thought they were The Party That Wrecked America the first time around, just wait for the first Citizens United presidential election.

Mayberry RIP

Main Street, Durant, Okla., down on its luck.

The tributes to the late Andy Griffith have been lavish. Did anybody compare his Sheriff Taylor to Joe Arpaio? I'm sure they did. Then there was Mayberry, the fictional setting of The Andy Griffith Show. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote, "Mayberry was real, too — as real as the desire sometimes to escape the tyranny of What Is. It sat just outside of time, at a crossroads of nostalgia and need. There was a dirt path in the woods near town that led to a fishing hole. Sheriff Andy used to go there often with his little boy, to the whistling of a bucolic tune lifting above the North Carolina pines."

As I was preparing this column Monday, I noticed one big difference between today's reality and Mayberry: The Internet, or lack thereof. My connections were down most of the day, so no new Rogue post (much of Arizona rejoices). My jobs require me to me unusually wired, but the "tubes" of the 'Net — developed initially with federal money — are the big change in our lives. We didn't get moon colonies or manned exploration of Mars and beyond, but we got PCs, Macs and the Internet. It makes for an interesting thought experiment: Your work and personal life in even 1980 vs. today. Back then people wrote letters, typed on typewriters, filed in filing cabinets (and many more clerical workers were needed), and got their messages on those pink "While You Were Out" slips. Now I've got a Mac and an iPad for almost all of that.

One of the most ubiquitous comments about Mayberry (based on Griffith's real hometown of Mount Airy, N.C.) was the lack of African-Americans in a Southern town. That was actually possible. I lived in such a place for a few years, Durant, Oklahoma, in the "Little Dixie" southeastern region of the state. Durant had been a "Sundown Town." Blacks could work as domestics or laborers during the day, but they had to clear out to other towns at night. Old-timers told of signs at the city limits that said, "Darkie," or the N-word, "don't let the sun go down on your back."

Growthgasm!

The SanTan Village shopping center in Gilbert. 

The big news back home is that Gilbert is now among the top 100 U.S. cities in population. When I worked as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, I would term these highly-played announcements as "growthgasms," an old Arizona obsession in focusing on merely adding people. A closer look at the data show that, in the metro Phoenix depression, they are faking it. Gilbert grew by 1.7 percent in the first year after the 2010 Census. That compared with 90 percent from 2000 to 2010. Any way you slice it, population growth has slowed dramatically in a place that values it above all else.

People are moving much less today because of the bad economy. But the Austin suburb of Round Rock clocked 4.8 percent in the same year and Austin itself grew by 3.8 percent. Denver increased 3.3 percent. Phoenix, which was kicked back a notch to the nation's sixth-largest city added less than 24,000 people, keeping it 67,000 behind No. 5 Philadelphia. Houston, No. 4, added nearly 46,000 residents. Yes, Phoenix was 7th in the top ten in adding raw population, but the numbers were nothing like those seen every year in the 1990s and 2000s, and by percent are below anything seen since the early 1950s and the advent of widespread air conditioning.

Gilbert is technically a "town," allowing it a runaround from many of the responsibilities of cities in the eyes of the state government. And for those who live there, I suppose it's very pleasant: New housing built around large garages in "master planned communities," more than 81 percent white, affluent, heavily Mormon, a fakey little "Old Town," well-financed schools, endless motoring, right-wing politics, chain restaurants, a sham "downtown" (all private property) at the SanTan Village shopping center and relatively low crime. The endless walls facing even modest thoroughfares are telling.

The fourth branch of government

You might be tempted to pass on a story in Sunday's Arizona Republic with the process-y headline, "Case Asks Who Must Pay Taxes for Utility." Don't.

Ably reported by Ryan Randazzo, the article lays out a controversy in Sun Lakes. The small company that provides water for the "active living retirement community" wants a rate increase of about $6 a month from residents, the first such hike since 1994. Sounds reasonable. But it wants more: "About 40 percent of the increase would pay the utility owners' income taxes." The Residential Utility Consumer Office contends that the water company's "shareholders might have other business interests that lose money, and if they combine the tax credits of those operations with the tax liability from the water utility, they might not pay taxes at all, even though the customers would be paying a 'phantom tax.' 'When this happens, this is essentially free money for the shareholders paid by the ratepayers who receive no benefit from these payments,' RUCO wrote in a brief for the case."

This is about more than Sun Lakes. My sympathy is limited for people who want to buy houses in a leapfrogged, 98-percent white development with streets named after Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana, profaning our desert. But the case is a rare window into how power and influence work in the state. Power, especially, at what insiders call "the fourth branch of government," the Arizona Corporation Commission.

Heat wave

Hot enough for you, America? According to the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, more than 2,000 high temperature records were reached or broken over the past week. For June, 3,200 record highs were broken.  Places where I once lived sound unrecognizable: Days of 105 degrees in Denver, 4,000 feet higher than Phoenix and a place I remember for its enchanting cool-off in the summer twilight; records broken in Charlotte, where a temp of 104 is accompanied by nearly tropical and suffocating humidity — even in the old days, the Southern heat was miserable, but this? — and of course the August-like oven in June for Phoenix. Violent storms sweep the east and devastating wildfires tear across the West. Welcome to the new normal?

Only a fool would not recognize that climate change is coming on faster and worse than expected, and that it won't be a phenomenon that only affects poor people in the Third World. We are, to be sure, a nation of fools that is more interested in the implosion of TomKat than the implosion of the planet because of human activity. There are the usual excuses: The weather's always changing! Even if it is true, nothing can be done locally (statewide, regionally, nationally) because it is a global problem. Taking action would cost jobs. Here's my in-depth analysis that climate change is a hoax or not a big deal, even though I am not a climate scientist. Wait...Did Anderson Cooper just come out as gay? Look over here at the bright, shiny object, Moronistan.

The people in charge understand that climate change is no hoax. Even Exxon Mobil, which spent heavily to fund denier "science," admits the planet is warming. The new excuse now is that the change will be manageable, people will adapt. The plutocrats adapt by having summer houses in places such as the San Juan Islands. Can't we all just bootstrap ourselves into this brave new world?

Phoenix 101: Desert towns

Dorothea Lange photographed Eloy during the Great Depression.

Before interstate highways, ubiquitous McDonald's and sprawl, there was that unique creature of the American Southwest: The small desert town. It was not like Bisbee, Globe or Prescott, growing rich from mining or ranching, or Flagstaff with its sawmills, cool weather and available water. They were not like Phoenix, sitting in one of the great fertile river valleys of the world. These were precarious footholds of human effort to conquer, or at least exist, in a deeply hostile wilderness. I think of places such as Casa Grande, Gila Bend, Eloy and Kingman. Wickenburg almost fit the description, but it benefited from mining, then dude ranches and proximity to fast-growing Phoenix on the main highway to Los Angeles.

Nineteenth century Arizona was a badlands in which only the most visionary dreamer, swindler or madman could see much potential beyond the mining country and the old Spanish outpost of Tucson. Going west from Tucson to California was only for the toughest or most deranged immigrant. A few tribes such as the Mojave knew how to live in this parched, poor land of eerie basins, rugged bare mountains and, in the south, the fickle Gila River. The European-Americans did not, even as they disparaged the natives as "digger Indians" and sometimes set out across the alien terrain. One famous example was the Oatman party in 1851, traveling from well to well, until an encounter with (it's speculated) Yavapais 80 miles east of Yuma went wrong and most of the party were killed; young Olive was abducted, traded to another tribe and eventually returned to the whites, living out her life with tribal tattoos on her face. This was the world into which the desert town was planted.

One dreaming pragmatist was Jefferson Davis, who as Secretary of War encouraged surveys of a southern route for a future transcontinental railroad and pushed for the Gadsden Purchase (otherwise, Mexico would begin just south of Phoenix). It was the railroad that gave these Arizona desert towns their initial life. Sometimes they had water; other times it had be brought in by rail, but the steam locomotives of the Southern Pacific Railroad subsisted on a string of water towers along its route (the same was true of Kingman on the Santa Fe). One is still standing at Red Rock north of Tucson. From the water towers came towns. A few even survived.

Supremes SB1070 open thread

Here's my quick take on the Supreme Court's ruling on SB 1070 today: First, the law was never primarily aimed at stopping illegal immigration. Without illegal immigrants, Arizona's economy would collapse, and it would have done so by orders of magnitude had the '00s "boom" continued. The intent was to 1) Mobilize the aging Anglo right-wing base. 2) Push Latinos deeper into the shadows and reinforce their standing as second-class citizens/non-citizens. 3) Aid in voter suppression through its intimidation, wide net and climate of fear and Anglo supremacy.

The result: Mission accomplished. It really doesn't matter what the Supreme Court withheld or struck down. To use but one example, Terry Goddard, the best qualified candidate for governor in the state's history, lost to Jan Brewer. With this, any hope that the state's trajectory into madness could even be checked was lost. Nationally, the "papers, please" (and they don't say "please) has been a boon for the right.

Secondly, the great Hispanic backlash/political sea change that the East Coast media keep predicting ain't gonna happen. At least not for a generation or more. It's not happening in Texas. It's sure not going to happen in Arizona. "Mexicans don't vote." Hispanic turnout is miserably low. So the Supreme Court ruling is irrelevant, especially compared with this Montana case.

What do you think?

Dog days in Arizona

If all I knew was, as Will Rogers said, what I read in the papers, I'd be pretty depressed. This is ironic considering in Arizona their mission is to most of the time be the cheerleaders for the Everything's Fine! propaganda ministry.

Still, the sheer magnitude of the occasional story or a little bit of guerrilla journalism to slip out the truth happens. One example was an article by the Republic's excellent Gary Nelson on a recent meeting of the Maricopa Association of Governments. It was supposed to be a rah-rah-blah-blah lie-fest for the Sun Corridor, an insane brew of more sprawl and wishful thinking. But Bill Harris, the head of Science Foundation Arizona, warned that the state was headed for a Third World future without better leadership and education. This doesn't differ from what I've been writing for years or Mary Jo Waits' warning that Arizona was on track to be the "Appalachia of the 21st century," but it brought an absurd, tremulously defensive response from one of Gov. Brewer's stooges. This is how we know Harris was telling the truth.

Then, another article by Shaun McKinnon, who somehow survives to do fine reporting on the reality of climate change and Arizona. This one detailed how wildfires are bringing Arizona's majestic forests closer to collapse. "Fire has burned through one-quarter of the state's ponderosa-pine and mixed-conifer forests just in the past decade, leaving a blackened mosaic across 1 million acres. In all, nearly 4 million acres of Arizona's forests, grasslands and deserts -- an area slightly larger than Connecticut -- have burned since 2002." The only thing more upsetting about this is the utter lack of leadership to address it — let's have a Sun Corridor!

Thunder

Water taxis in Bricktown, Oklahoma City's reclaimed warehouse district.

Seattle readers can, and should, stop here and read other posts.

The Oklahoma City Thunder is in the NBA Finals. I think of 1976 and the Suns and Gar Heard's Shot Heard Round the World. Even though the league has been much degraded since then, pro sports will never get sweeter for a city than this moment. Enjoy, whatever the outcome. The Thunder — the former Seattle Supersonics, moved away by a new owner in a civic wound that refuses to heal — are also the capstone of downtown Oklahoma City's remarkable comeback from the grave. This in an even redder state than Arizona.

By the late 1980s, the state's oil industry was in a depression and downtown Oklahoma City was suffering all the familiar ills of urban America: Major corporations had decamped for the suburbs or a big office row in the northwest part of the city or been shattered by the economy, and shopping had gone out to malls. As Steve Lackmeyer of the Daily Oklahoman writes, "Oklahoma City's corporate base was dying. City Hall struggled to keep up with a record number of boarded-up homes. College professors were instructing students to seek opportunities out of state." Consolidation among railroads and changes in their business had left a vast area of warehouses just east of downtown empty. The old titan/stewards were dead or dying. Even worse, a misconceived "revival" effort involving famed and overrated architect I.M. Pei had only gotten about as far as tearing down many irreplaceable historic buildings, leaving blocks and blocks of nothing. I remember this desolate downtown from when I was teaching at a college in the southeastern part of the state and later working for a newspaper in Lawton.

Like a Phoenix?

All the boosters' stories and all the boosters' flacks can't get our mythical bird out of the ashes. Five years after the biggest collapse since the Hohokam unpleasantness, Phoenix still has the character of a fallen souffle. Perhaps that's for the best without a better plan, because the worst thing that could happen is a return to mass sprawl building. The most striking feature — and tell me if I'm missing something — is the lack of anything big happening. I don't mean nonsense such as "Buckeye will have 400,000 people!" I mean nothing is seriously moving ahead to follow on the genuine pre-crash achievements: ASU Downtown, light rail (WBIYB), the expanded and attractive convention center, the beginnings of the downtown biosciences campus and, disappointing though it is, CityScape.

Instead, Mayor Stanton is off on a misguided quest to "save" the state's defense jobs. Mesa at least is running light-rail 3 miles into downtown, but otherwise real advancement on LRT, much less commuter or intercity rail, is so slow as to be meaningless. The Gaylord "resort" collapsed in exurban Mesa — good. Glendale is in hock forever to save the Coyotes hockey team/development-con-gone-bad — good (never thought I'd find myself on the same side as the "Goldwater" Institute). Scottsdale is still rich (except for those long stretches of empty car lots on McDowell) — but who cares? The west side is getting its far loop freeway — bad news. Is this it, other than to hope for another real-estate boom?

Progress faces substantial challenges, some new, some old. The congressional delegation, Ed Pastor excepted, won't do a damned thing to bring home federal money to build a quality economy. The Legislature is anti-city, anti-science, anti-education and opposed to any real economic development besides the "What is that Smell?" state Commerce Authority. Suburbs keep cannibalizing business from the city and each other. There's no focus on the biosciences campus, the one real area of promise, and the big hospitals are happy to torpedo it. The new "takings" law puts further handcuffs on urban solutions. The city lacks a serious economic-development strategy for the city. Government revenues were vaporized. And there's the weight of so much empty land, so much inefficient sprawl, a huge underclass, the massive catch-up necessary but impossible to fund. Kook politics has cost the state dearly.

The new hard times

By now you know the news that Americans' wealth dropped nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. This is nearly all a function of the housing collapse, combined with the fact that the wages of average people have been stagnant or dropping for 30 years. And the data, being median wealth, probably understate the real damage. For all this, there's a very good chance that 50.1 percent of the voters will return the Party That Wrecked America to the White House, the last check on a federal government taken over by the extreme right. So if most of us are poorer now, just wait.

We're lectured that too many people have been living beyond their means, leeching off the public dole, racking up unsustainable debt. This is never you and me, mind you. It's someone else, but there are a lot of them and something drastic has got to give. David Brooks is one of the chief public scolds who also laments a loss of morality and dignity, even if he has spent his career supporting the jungle capitalism that has brought us low. Another is Thomas Friedman, prophet of world flatness. The government has spent decades giving and now it's going to have to spend the future taking back (but never from his pet projects, of course).

With Rep. Paul Ryan, lionized for his seriousness, we have federal budgets that put this wish into legislation. Never mind that they don't fix the deficit or debt, they do cut programs to the poor and lower middle-class. Social Security? Privatize it. Medicare? Give people vouchers worth a couple of thousand dollars (good for a low-end trip to the emergency room, if that). Military spending is "off the table," as are subsidies to big GOP donors such as the fossil fuels industry. So I hope you get a sense of this future barring a major course correction.

Military Keynesianism

Sometimes it's the (kind of) little things. The Hotel Palomar is open at CityScape. It's a boutique hotel run by Kimpton, which manages some wonderful places around the country, such as the Monoco in Denver, the Triton in San Francisco and the Alexis right down the street from me in Seattle. Many of the others, where I've had the pleasure of staying, are in restored historic buildings. The Palomar looks like a jail or the spawn of the ugly new county courts building. Meanwhile, the art deco headquarters of the old Valley National Bank sits vacant — it's even closer to the convention center — and the treasure of the Westward Ho is low-income housing. Across the street from CityScape? The historic Luhrs buildings look empty. The question just keeps coming back: Why can't Phoenix get its act together?

Check your defensiveness at the door, because I'm just winding up.

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton has assumed a leadership role in an effort by the U.S. Conference of Mayors to blunt or stop defense spending cuts. He apparently traveled to Washington, meeting with wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, nominally a U.S. senator representing Arizona, to discuss this issue. McCain did nothing to help secure funding for light rail (WBIYB), commuter rail, Amtrak, research, education or anything else that congressional members do for their states in such socialist havens as, say, Texas. But war? No problem, Greg. Come right in. This is a big thing.

Phoenix 101: San Diego

I never went to San Diego as a child. Nobody I knew did. Up into the 1970s, Phoenix's orientation was Los Angeles, and even that required a long drive across implacable desert. Part of this was due to geography. The Southern Pacific Railroad turned slightly northwest after crossing the Colorado River at Yuma and headed to LA. San Diego, although founded in 1769 and enjoying one of the finest natural harbors in the world, was initially bypassed by the railroads because of the imposing mountains and canyons to its east.

At the turn of the 20th century, sugar baron John Spreckels financed a railroad to connect the city with the SP at El Centro. It was one of the most difficult lines to engineer and build, including passage through Carrizo Gorge. Eventually, Spreckles was forced to sell the San Diego & Arizona to the SP, but the line never made much money. The Santa Fe Railway built south to the city from Los Angeles.

In high school, we took a couple of choir trips to San Diego. It was pleasant and sleepy, even though it was slightly more populous than Phoenix. Fast forward into the 1980s, and San Diego in the summer had become Phoenix West, with many thousands of Arizonans vacationing there, mobbing the place and not making friends. Advances in automobile technology and Interstate 8 had caused the big shift. By that time, I was living in San Diego and one of the first things I learned was not to tell anyone where I was from. One of my friends who knew the truth would derisively call me "Zonie Boy" when she wanted to get under my skin.

All fall down

We're at a very dangerous moment. The May unemployment report showed only 69,000 jobs created, all part-time, and only half of what's needed just to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force. The eurozone is headed for collapse and much of Europe is in recession. China, expected to lead world recovery, is slowing, as is India. We may never have escaped the Great Recession, but if we did we're on the edge of another downturn. Put another way: The Great Depression went on for more than a decade and had recessions embedded in it, like tornadoes in a hurricane.

Faced with this, the institutions and practices that were built up carefully to mitigate just such an event are either gone — Glass-Steagall — or in a free-fall of legitimacy. The European Union. A peaceful, strong Germany. A global system of free trade. An economy where the pursuit of profit, monopoly and plutocracy is offset by checks and balances that serve the common good. The paralyzed and compromised Federal Reserve. The "fixed" and hamstrung-by-extremists Congress. And, I am sorry to rub salt in your hopes, President Obama. Economic conditions are not as bad as they were in the Depression. Yet. Leadership is worse, at least among American politicians. Hardly any will even tell us the truth about our actual circumstances.

History offers a valuable "fund," as George F. Kennan put it, upon which we can draw to understand our present circumstances and perhaps plot prudent responses.

'Ich bin ein Kook'

One must wonder what Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's main constituency thinks about her junket to SOCIALIST Europe, to Germany and to France, whose new president is nominally a SOCIALIST. One must wonder what the Germans and French think of Brewer, the head of an American state that continues to up the bar not just on craziness (See Bennett, Ken) but violent craziness. Gun deaths in Arizona now exceed automobile fatalities. The extremism was loud enough to call for a New York Times essay from Timothy Egan: "We interrupt reality to bring you Arizona..."

According to the newspapers, Brewer's trade mission "includes leaders of the Arizona Commerce Authority and Arizona Office of Tourism." Just who these mammals are — as in, name names — is unclear. (The Republic's Yvonne Wingett Sanchez got at least a partial list of the entourage, but the governor's office declined to give the budget). The purpose of the trip is also murky. Stories mention that the EU imported $770 million in Arizona products in 2011. Germany is the state's sixth-largest trade partner, France No. 10. These are meaningless numbers because Arizona exports are distorted by the huge footprint of Intel semiconductors and, to a lesser degree, Boeing and Raytheon defense products. Arizona is not a conscious player in the export world.

As for tourism — forget it. Germans who want American sun go to Miami. Unless the state could lure or underwrite direct flights to Germany and France, it will never be a big player in this field.

Memorial Day

The origin of Memorial Day was the commemoration of Union deaths after the Civil War, a conflict that cost between 618,000 and 700,000 lives in a nation with a population of less than 32 million. The South had its Confederate Memorial Day, still marked in some states of the old CSA. As this warrior republic, crusader nation has racked up more wars, Memorial Day has added these deaths to the holiday.

Newspapers will again run photos of small flags planted in front of the tooth-like marble gravestones of the war dead. But if ever there was an argument for a "sunset provision" to holidays, Memorial Day is it. Even the deaths of ordinary civilians are observed. Commercialized, trivialized and a venue for cheap patriotism, Memorial Day has been drained of its somber meaning. For most Americans, it is just another day off, another long weekend, the start of summer.

The disconnect is worse than ever. We've been through a decade of war and everybody "supports the troops." But our wars are fought by a professional military whose values are, in both good and dangerous ways, cut off from the mainstream of the country. The ideal of the citizen soldier is gone. This way went Rome.

Upping the crazy stakes

Your humble columnist at this "comparatively low-traffic site" is back from a week in Phoenix. I must admit 60 degrees in Seattle is more pleasant than the 108 degrees when I flew out of Sky Harbor — including that big, twisty scream-inducing bump on the 737 as we tried to climb out of the heat.

I spent most of my time in tolerant, diverse central Phoenix. But outside that bubble, the forces of Peak Crazy kept trying to extract ever more madness. Secretary of State Ken Bennett kept Arizona as a national laughing stock (at least among the "liberal elites," read sane people) by pledging to make Hawaii come clean about the president's birth certificate. The Washington Post, read by people who make decisions about deploying capital and quality assets, thought Arizona's witlessness worthy of an editorial. Hawaii, a state for those of you who were home-schooled in the East Valley, turned the tables and is forcing Bennett to prove his bona fides to even ask. The mockery of Arizona's No. 2 elected official continues. But this did not prevent Sheriff Arpaio — who should be in jail — from sending a "threats unit" deputy to investigate in the Aloha State — something to please the "Valley" blue-hairs who vote. Where is Steve McGarrett when we need him? Bennett's antics are more than an embarrassment, more than pandering. He is the official who will preside over the elections. The secretary of state should not be a partisan office (but Jan Brewer used it just that way in 2004, also chairing the Bush re-election campaign in Arizona).

The "information center" has run off the majority of its best, most experienced journalists. One still there is Dennis Wagner, who reported what should be a national blockbuster on Sunday about the Pinal County Sheriff's Office stockpiling surplus military equipment and selling it off to private parties. This is no Babeu boo-boo, but a story that raises troubling questions about how the Military Industrial Complex is infiltrating law enforcement, with the added and sadly typical Arizona corruption thrown in.