Tucson Weekly: The Skinny (January 14

Skinny THEIR EXPENSE AT YOUR EXPENSE: Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano has struck her first blow for the political class by decreeing that the recent referendum granting pay raises to members of the state Legislature is unconstitutional. Well, part of it is. Not the part that gives them more money, but the part that restricts their per diem expenses.
No one seemed disturbed when Napolitano proclaimed this new entitlement. All those who wail about the end of democracy whenever an elected legislature alters any ballot proposition passed by the voters seem to have no problem when the same amendment power is exercised by one elected lawyer without the benefit of a court decision.
And it's amusing watching a whole clot of otherwise conservative Republican legislators cheer Napolitano on. Whatever happened to their standard complaints about usurpation of power by the AG? Yeah, right.
Some, like Rep. Dan Schottel, even whined that they wouldn't be able to make the payments on their second homes in Phoenix without adequate expenses. Jesus, why are the taxpayers supposed to buy each of these supposedly "underpaid" representatives a second house?
How about we house all those bastards in barracks and treat them like draftee grunts until the various wars they've all proclaimed--crime, drugs, poverty, whatever--have been won? And how about another ballot prop that prohibits the AG from unilaterally throwing out ballot propositions and requires the AG's office to take the case directly--and immediately--to the Arizona Supreme Court?
Is there enough out-of-state special interest money to fund that one?
Y2K BUGGED: Is The Arizona Daily Star Y2K compliant? Last Saturday, January 9, the morning daily's financial section (page 6B) included a table on treasury bills. Bid, ask and yield figures were given for the 12 months beginning in January 1999 and ending in January of...yep, 1900.
HAM-HANDED: Newly elected Superior Court Clerk Patti Noland is having real difficulty reconstructing just exactly how her long-serving predecessor, Jim Corbett, put the office in the red over a million bucks last year. What's become a standard procedure in the Pima County Superior Court system--which is never reported anywhere in the local media--is part of the answer: Pork.
Noland has at least four full-time employees, conveniently dropped into merit system positions by Corbett on his way out the door, whose duties are so nebulous that nobody really knows what they do.
And Corbett wasn't the only patronage dispenser--outgoing Presiding Judge Mike Brown reeked of bacon fat and ham rinds much of the time himself.
Hopefully, his successor, Gordon Alley, will help Noland restore some credibility to the bloated court budget.
MUSH MOUTH: The only thing more painful than a politician's decision is the whiny rationalization. Everyone in the Tucson Unified School District--students, parents, teachers, taxpayers--were forced to submit to such torture when the TUSD Board held a suspiciously hasty meeting to approve the long-delayed labor agreement with teachers. Second-term Board Member James Noel Christ delivered a five-minute blubber as warm and soggy as a big bowl of cereal that had sat on the table for half a day.
In the dark Board chambers, Christ, an English teacher at Sunnyside High School, began this way: "Yeah, this is uh, this is a very difficult issue. It, uh, is especially difficult for me. Uh. Let me, let me explain why that is. Six years ago, meeting with, uh, a labor group here who was interviewing me in my first candidacy for the Board, the TUSD Governing Board ..." The supposed point was that Christ had both committed to back his fellow teachers and to uphold any arbitrator's decision.
Christ managed to stumble onto the pages of the afternoon rag, the Tucson Citizen, complaining that the Board screwed up the negotiations with the Tucson Education Association. Let us remind everyone that Christ was too weak and incapable of moving the Board last spring, last summer or last fall to act responsibly. He just sits and complains.
Meanwhile, Mary Belle McCorkle, eager to take the reins from Christ's buddy and Board President Joel Tracy Ireland, got right to the point while explaining her vote. She chewed on TEA leadership for its constantly shifting tactics and demands. And she very clearly told the district's negotiating bozos that their necks are on the line if this agreement fails.
SCREEN TEST: Last week, the morning daily reported that a "major journalism study" showed our local television stations came in second place in a survey of seven cities.
Two stations (KVOA-TV, Channel 4, and KGUN-TV, Channel 9) earned B-minuses and one (KOLD-TV, Channel 13) got a C-plus--which, while it would have been good enough for us while we were in school, isn't exactly Dean's List material.
The grades, handed out by a Washington, D.C.-based outfit called the Project for Excellence in Journalism, were based on the number of topics and sources, as well as the amount of "investigative reporting"--which is odd, given that the only thing we ever see the TV stations "investigating" is the weather.
Perhaps he-said/she-said journalism is the best we can hope for from TV stations--just point the camera, record what the source says, and put it on the air, without bothering to find out who's telling the truth. But the real problem with a report like this is simple: The East Coast folks conducting the survey don't know what's going on in our community, so they can't really rate the stations on their relevance--which seems to be sinking all the time.
As A.J. Flick pointed out a few days later in the afternoon paper, the percentage of viewers watching TV news continues to drop, although the numbers for The Simpsons nearly doubled. That's not surprising to us--the way politics work in this town, we feel like we're living in Springfield with Homer more and more often.
Here's a novel idea for picking up viewers and performing a public service: Trim back the weather, sports and accident reports and tell us something about local government. And maybe, at election time, try telling us who's running for office more than a week before we go to the polls.
Oddly, Flick's Citizen story mentioned that the numbers for November 10 seemed low for an election day. Maybe that's because election day was November 3.
CHOMP, CHOMP: The mainstream press recently fell all over itself complimenting the Tucson Police Department on its handling of the drunk-driving arrest of Lt. Bill Plummer. But, as usual, there was more to the story.
According to Pima County Sheriff's Department reports, TPD brass did not turn over the investigation to the Sheriff's Department until after TPD officers had done a field sobriety test and a horizontal gaze nystagmus test on Plummer, and after Plummer had been given breath tests with results of .078 and .075. And all this apparently occurred only after they realized he was a TPD officer.
Our sources say this upset Plummer, who thought he was being "field released" after his breath results were below the limit--a reasonable assumption on anyone's part.
Hey, Bill, if TPD were a real beast instead of a merely bureaucratic creature, it would probably eat its young.

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