A Sighting of the Rare and Elusive Boltgirl

It's the annual family confab in Tucson, which has left my calendar a bloody mess when viewed from a distance--gotta switch from red ink to a more soothing blue--and my blog neglected in the corner, sniffling. What can I fling at you as I sprint by the computer between rounds of cards, grilling, and backyard birdwatching fueled by high-quality merlot and shiraz?

Meat! Meaty meaty meat meat. I have been a vegetarian off and on for the past twenty years or so, but right now am definitely peaking in the meat quadrant of the graph. Costco sells lovely slabs of top round that grill to tender perfection, which you might not expect from something with "round" in the title, but damn. Damn. I like to cover one slab with a rub of equal parts brown sugar, black pepper, hot ground roasted red chili, and garlic powder, with a half part of kosher salt and let it think about it for a few hours before hitting the grill, and then do the other with simple salt and pepper. And then some lovely thick rounds of onion around the edges until they caramelize. Nom. The grill is getting a workout this week.

Economy! I'm sorry, but at this point I am utterly confused. US auto execs are getting fired by the White House on the same day banking execs are invited over for tea? Meanwhile, my friends and I are coordinating those Costco runs for days when Tucson is not being invaded by family members who gleefully pick up the tab. Recommended bargain of the week: giant clamshell pack of Cherubs grape tomatoes, $4.49. That gives you a week's worth of salads, pastas, omelettes, and lovely snacks. A little olive oil, some basil, salt, and pepper, and bam smacky, you're eating like the king of your very own tomato patch.

Gardening! I suck at it. I know people who very successfully grow tomatoes and peppers and thus avoid that portion of Costco, but I am not one of them. High and subsequently dashed hopes in the past have included tomatoes, jalapenos, anaheim chiles, squash, red bell peppers, lettuce, and snow peas. This season I stuck to herbs and have managed to keep sage and mint alive; the cilantro, to my great chagrin, collapsed and died within three days. Oh, wait--I have had marginal success with potatoes, and am currently sitting on a harvest store of four yukon golds ranging in size from small grape to golf ball with a thyroid problem.

Basketball! My brackets are dead in both men's and women's, although I still have the Heels alive for the men's championship and UConn for the well, duh category in the women's. And the Irish rolled over and died in the NIT semis. That is all.

Arizona! Our esteemed Governor Jan Brewer (R-Harpytown) appointed the illustrious and beloved-by-Shakesville Mr. Benjamin H. Grumbles as head of the state Department of Environmental Quality, which is something akin to appointing a hyena as head of kitten welfare. Grumbles is a Bush EPA hack whose major accomplishment at the EPA was being concerned about pharmaceuticals in groundwater. Well, he was actually only concerned about nitroglycerin, and then only because it's an explosive. Anti-depressants and anti-inflammatories are apparently okay because--let's be honest here--they're making you feel better, aren't they?

Baseball! Pima County wants to build another stadium in hopes that maybe they can lure like three teams back from Glendale to Save Spring Training in Tucson, which will only cost about $137 million in a state that is shuttering state parks and firing teachers as fast as it can in order to fill exactly two sandbags that can be stacked up in front of the 75-foot tsunami that is the current $3 BILLION budget deficit. But it is important to soak people with an increased sales tax so that they can build a stadium that may or may not be used for an entire month every year if the teams decide to relocate to the cotton fields of Marana before bolting to the next sweet deal being offered by a municipality someplace else. Arizona: 49th in education, 2nd in teen pregancy rates, numero uno in short-sighted stupidity.

More to come! Later!

In Which Jan Brewer Does Something That Does Not Piss Us Off

Newsflash! Arizona's harpy-in-chief, new Governor Jan Brewer, is showing signs that she may just possibly have a brain that occasionally functions independently of the Arizona State Legislature's Republican caucus. Faced with an umpteen kazillion dollar deficit, Brewer addressed the legislature yesterday and told them they're going to have to consider a temporary tax hike to make up about a billion dollars of Arizona's looming shortfall. Her Republican colleagues responded in a disappointing, if utterly predictable, manner.

Brewer, a former state lawmaker, said it's the Legislature's job to work out the details of both the tax plan and the $1 billion in cuts. And they have no plans to let her idea move ahead.

"She proposes, we dispose. That's how it works," said Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria.

I suppose that's how it works when "it" means "ideological obstructionism at all costs," but right now, Arizona really really needs "it" to mean "rational legislative responses to our impending financial meltdown." And as much as I loathe Brewer's uber-conservative position on social issues, I have to give her credit for recognizing exactly how shitty the situation is and that clinging to a false Reaganesque mantra of taxcuttaxcuttaxcut will do exactly jack and squat to fix anything:

"I think we have some denial on the right that they are not, nor do they want, to accept the fact that we are in a financial crisis and that they are going to have to step up and make some tough decisions," Brewer said. "Sometimes one feels that they can just cut and cut and cut. Well, I think we know we have to do some cutting. But that's not going to solve the problem."

Of course, she's offered no details on what form a tax hike might take, and is still looking for an additional billion dollars in spending cuts--and a temporary exemption from state laws requiring funding in targeted areas. About the only tax increase Republicans might support is a jump in the sales tax, which will be opposed by Democratic legislators because it disproportionately impacts poor people. As discussed last week, the corporate property tax could be reinstated, but the Republicans will block that from happening. Maybe the only consolation here is that Brewer will get a taste of what life was like for Janet Napolitano when she had to deal with a hostile legislature day in and day out. Will there be a material consolation for Arizona? Stay tuned.

The Crux of the Problem

There's my way of looking at the world--which I suspect many of you share--and there's the Rushophile way of looking at the world. Guess which perspective is represented by this letter to the editor in this morning's Daily Star:

I applaud Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl for taking a stand against President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package. This bill is simply the beginning of Obama's plan to "socialize" this country even more than it already is.

Universal health care, a cap and trade energy system and a college education for everyone are a few of his pet projects that will finally put this country in the same nanny-state league as the European Union.

Does this country really want more government intervention into our lives?

Quelle horreur! Healthcare for everyone! College educations for everyone! Breathing air that's not saturated with sulfur dioxide! These are the hallmarks of stinking commie Europe this Tucson retiree is most afraid of? It's the equivalent of despising puppies because they occasionally crap on your antique Persian rug and defending your aversion with the ironclad argument that puppies are cute and smell good and give you unconditional love. In a word, you come off as a nutter.

I have yet to hear the average guy on the street who's railing against socialism give a cogent explanation of (1) what socialism is, (2) the degree to which Obama's policies coincide with that definition, and (3) how what Republicans deride as "socialism" is any more socialistic than existing US institutions and policies such as, oh, Social Security, public schools, the FDIC, and Big 3 bailouts. If you want free-market capitalism and social libertarianism completely unfettered by governmental regulation or financial backing, well, let me introduce you to a lovely little burg called Mogadishu. I'd prefer to be in one of your horrific nanny states where people have access to doctors and teachers even if they don't have the biggest pile of money or the most guns.

Welcome to the Ehrlenmeyer Flask

*cracking knuckles*

Well, well, well, this morning's paper brought the news that post-Janet Napolitano Arizona is rapidly being converted into a lab for experimental Total Republican Policy Immersion, and I'm not sure whether we're rats or fruit flies in this scenario. The state is already looking at a budget shortfall of $2.4 billion in the next fiscal year, so the next logical step after gutting education and human services--"logical" here meaning "prescribed under conservative fiscal dogma"--is to... cut taxes! Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee voted Monday to permanently repeal the state property tax rather than allowing it to return this year after a scheduled three-year hiatus.

And lawmakers sent out clear signals that repealing the property tax may just be the beginning of Republican efforts to cut taxes, particularly on businesses.

Committee members began debating — but did not vote on — another bill from Rep. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, who chairs the committee. The bill would cut corporate income taxes, reduce property taxes companies pay on equipment and slash the taxes paid on capital gains.

The reasoning is as expected; Arizona's existing property tax structure is on the ouch side, hitting businesses at twice the rate of domestic property taxes and rolling equipment in excess of $65K into the assessed valuation, and so discourages businesses from moving here. And the Republican reaction is equally expected; rather than modifying the structure, they want to eliminate the property tax outright and cut the corporate income tax rate in order to lure more companies here. And this will result in an immediate $250 million shortfall for the state this year.

It's a tossup. The equipment tax is a strong disincentive for more lucrative manufacturing operations. More companies opening up shop here means more jobs. Across-the-board property tax elimination, corporate rate cuts, and a proposed whopping 57 percent reduction of corporate capital gains taxes means less revenue for the state. And our new solidly Republican state government has already shown that less revenue means zero support for education and social services beyond the stuff that's federally mandated, because they cannot for the life of them recognize any connection between the quality of public education and the quality of the jobs that will be available to graduates of the system.

The revenue loss would mean less money for education, [Tucson High teacher Elizabeth Slaine] said. And Arizona's economy won't improve unless there are people qualified to be in business.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, scoffed at that contention.

"Education does not create jobs," he said. "Entrepreneurs and businesses create jobs."

Good luck building your business with people who can't read or do basic math well enough to fill out your purchase orders, Andy. I'm not sure where the entrepreneurs you're counting on will be coming from, unless you're assuming they'll all have to be lured in from out-of-state with your massive tax breaks. Hell, while you're at it, why not simply convert Arizona to a mainland offshore island economy, where no uncomfortable questions are asked of corporate masters and a permanent underclass is being readied as we speak?

John McCain is a Fucking Tool

Remember the John McCain we had during the campaign? The one who scoffed at Barack Obama's ability to get anything done in Washington because only he, St. John Bipartisan McCain, had an established record of putting partisan politics aside and reaching across the aisle for the greater good of the country? Yeah, that guy? He doesn't exist any more.

But this week, with President Barack Obama in the White House and McCain back in Congress, the Arizona senator has played a prominent and uncompromising role in rallying Republican opposition to the Democratic majority and its stimulus plan.

McCain's actions in the stimulus debate make for a very different leadership profile than he touted during the presidential campaign. His push for tax cuts as well as spending cuts, and his slashing, partisan rhetoric, are a far cry from his role a few years ago in leading a bipartisan coalition that sought compromise on how the Senate handles judicial nominations.

The Senate debate on the stimulus plan is only a few days old, but McCain's already demonstrating a distressing readiness to engage in campaign-style obfuscation to score political points at the expense of that greater good.

"This bill has become nothing more than a massive spending bill," he has said. "To portray it as stimulus flies in the face of reality."

Does McCain understand what stimulus is? It is an injection of cash into the economy, and providing federal and state agencies with funding to spend on projects that have to be contracted out to private companies that will then be able to, you know, pay their employees to do the work is a far surer syringe than yet another round of tax cuts that will ensure the wealthiest Americans have even more cash to sock away in untouchable offshore accounts. So yes, it is a massive spending bill. But it will spread the wealth to a far greater segment of the population and result in concrete, material results that benefit society as a whole than the same amount of money handed out in the form of tax cuts. And ain't nothin' wrong with that.

Let Rachel break it down for you.

Friday Again? That Was Quick

The week screamed by and I barely noticed. Some items pinging my radar today:

In the Whole Lotta Good, Little Bitta Crap department we have Obama capping a week of signing SCHIP and capping bailed-out-executive compensation at $500K (sniff, sob) by reversing course on federally-funded faith-based organizations and deciding they can go ahead and keep discriminating in hiring after all.

Obama clearly singled out the policy during a July campaign speech, declaring that "if you get a federal grant, you can't use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can't discriminate against them — or against the people you hire—on the basis of their religion."

But once he won the election, religious conservatives began lobbying Obama and his transition team on the issue.

Thursday's announcement surprised and pleased religious conservatives, who had a strong ally in Bush and had been pressing the new Democratic president to revoke his earlier promise.

While this may not be as bad as it looks on the surface--a review process has been put in place to "ensure that federal programs and practices involving grants or contracts to faith-based organizations are consistent with law," allowing specific grants to be evaluated for legality in hiring--the glossy picture doesn't show the details of what was probably intended to be a compromise but has come back looking like capitulation. Capitulation to conservatives, again, for no apparent gain other than the ability to cite specific examples of attempted cooperation and accomodation of decidedly non-liberal viewpoints, while giving a tacit imprimatur to religious discrimination and using federal funds for just a little bit of proselytizing on the side.

In other capitulation news, I think I'm capitulating on trying to understand the machinations at work as the Senate holds the stimulus bill up by its ankles and shakes it in hopes that something good falls out of its pockets. It came in at $880B, climbed to $920B, moderate Republicans tried to trim it to $650B, and now it's settled at about $800B. And still no one is sure what needs to be in it and what needs to be out. I sure as hell don't know.

Some items on the cutting board included $99 million in technology upgrades for the State Department's National Cyber Security Initiative, $200 million for benefits for Filipino veterans, $55 million for the Historic Preservation Fund, and $122 million for the Coast Guard to purchase new or renovated polar icebreakers.

But senators also debated whether to keep in the bill numerous big-ticket items that their colleagues had fought for. About $14 billion in Pell grant funding appeared to have survived, but some senators were targeting at least $10 billion in other education programs. Billions of dollars in energy efficiency incentives and state aid also were under review by the centrist group.

Could the problem be that the scope of the stimulus package is simply too far-reaching and hopelessly broad? We are in a state of panic and everyone agrees that somebody has to do something right now about it, but one of the first rules of surviving a disaster is to compartmentalize. We need economic triage, and what's coming out of the House and Senate at the moment is the equivalent of the guests in a ballroom that's caught fire running around screaming with their hands in the air trying to put out all the fires and collect all the fur coats and save the champagne and finish the quickie in behind the stairs and hey how about we strip that old wallpaper while we're in here instead of assessing, planning, and executing a series of small tasks in order.

Don't get me wrong; I love Filipino veterans as much as the next guy, and appreciate the need for polar icebreakers--although if the Coast Guard can just wait a few months, all the polar ice should be gone anyway--but I don't know that their funding belongs in this bill. The on-fire ballroom absolutely needs some ADA-compliant toilets and low-energy compact fluorescent lighting, but the plumbers and electricians should really wait to get in there until the fire is out or there might not be enough money left over to pay the firemen, and then no ballroom left to upgrade. Can we not have a series of stimulus bills that are graded to address the most pressing needs first?

That, of course, would require a majority of senators to agree on those most pressing needs, and prospects for that are grim.

Monday Recession Blues

Hot on the heels of Homer's succinct summation of Arizona's new all-Republican state government on, well, the state of Arizona, we learn this morning that a Tucson city councilman has proposed a one-year waiver of impact fees for developers in an attempt to jumpstart the construction industry in the area.

The money that would be given up is funding that would pay for infrastructure and services around the new commercial and residential developments.

[Rodney] Glassman's proposal has broad support from the development and construction sectors. In fact, Glassman said he crafted it after meeting with several commercial and residential developers.

In fact? I'm sure he did. Glassman claims that allowing developers to forego impact fees would foster more urban infill development and curtail sprawl into the few outlying areas that remain untouched by the housing boom of the early '00s. Considering that the impact fees were instituted in the first place to rein in that sprawl, wherein developers were allowed to cram as many crackerjack houses onto lots as they could without being liable for the resulting exponential increase in demand for high-volume roads, utilities, public safety, and schools, this argument sounds just a wee bit counterintuitive to me.

Also confusing my limited brainpower this morning is the continuing connection of a metropolitan area's economic health to new housing starts. I understand that guys in construction need to build houses in order to get paid, but has anyone noticed how many houses in fairly new developments are standing vacant? Or vacant and unfinished? Or how many houses in established neighborhoods are for sale? Who exactly is supposed to buy and live in all the new houses Councilman Glassman is hoping to help build? It's not a big Habitat for Humanity project he has in mind.

It's a similar boggling argument to the one made by Representative Don Manzullo (R-IL) on Rachel Maddow Thursday night, in which he insisted that a better use of stimulus money than infrastructure improvements would be subsidizing new car loans so that American auto manufacturers would get the new orders they need to stay in business.

You take a $5000 voucher, you go to your Chrysler dealer or dealer of your choice, you buy the car, you knock 25 percent off that car, then you could buy a nice Jeep Patriot for less than $300 a month!

Well, okay. Buying that nice Jeep Patriot with government help still means I'm out, what, $299 a month, and that I've helped keep a couple hundred Illinois GM workers on the job for an additional couple of months before the company folds. The end result is that they're still out of work sooner rather than later and I'm stuck with a shiny new SUV I can't afford to make the payments on or keep in gas. Take the cash for those umpteen million $5000 vouchers you want to hand out and pour it into rail upgrades and bridge repair and updating the electric grid, and while it still may be only a few thousand workers here and there whose jobs are being preserved--likely none of them in the auto industry--in return for those continuing individual paychecks and individual boosts in buying power we get something concrete to show for it. We get infrastructure improvements that ultimately benefit everyone. But the Republicans somehow think it's socialism when government money is used for public works rather than for individual conspicuous consumption.

Pulling back to Tucson, now, the question remains of who benefits from impact fee suspensions besides Pulte Homes and Diamond Ventures when the rest of us are stuck with the bill for the new roads, sewers, and gas lines that will be run to the new houses. And what, exactly, is supposed to make infill more attractive than blade 'n' grade when the cost to the builder is all the same.

Target Cheerfully Faces Our Economic Reality

Target: your outfitter for the new Depression!

And That Was Quick

Look what an awesome leaderly leader John McCain is! All he has to do is suspend his campaign and threaten a return to Warshington to sort out this mess, and voila, mess sorted out. Just like Chuck Norris!

Can I assume this means the debate's still on for tomorrow night? And that the VP debate is continuing as scheduled?

Somewhere in Alaska, Sarah Palin hops up and down, fists clenched, muttering dammitdammitDAMMIT between gritting teeth, before getting back to the cram session.

Personal Economics

Three-forty-three was my personal tipping point, the tick mark that shifted my thinking from wow, these high prices suck to Jesus Tapdancing Christ, how the fuck am I going to stay solvent? It had been a halcyon three or four months there. I had finally wrestled the personal debt to a manageable size and place*, finding myself at the end of the pay period with double and sometimes even triple digits--if barely--in the checking account. The ability to breathe easily rather than holding it and paddling furiously toward payday was in itself an extravangance I hadn't had since my first year out of college, when I had a tiny, cheap studio over a bakery and no expenses beyond my next beer.

So in the face of eternally mounting repairs and the continuing failure of the MPG fairy to both materialize and sprinkle magic more-than-20-miles-per-gallon dust on the engine, it was finally time to replace the beloved truck with something that sips at gasoline and only occasionally puts in a polite request for some new oil. To do that at all, I had to borrow a down payment. And to have any hope of keeping the new buggy, I will have to make major slashes in discretionary spending. Which I suppose is why it's called "discretionary" rather than "willy-nilly."

Gas in Tucson has plummeted to a dizzying $3.35 since I made the decision to buy, but it will certainly fly back up to and well past that price point in the next month or so. Meanwhile, everything else that requires gasoline to be delivered continues to climb in tandem with fuel prices. The paper last week carried the story of increasingly desperate people unloading their possessions on eBay and Craigslist so they can buy gas and groceries, including a woman who sold her grandmother's tea kettle for $6. Six dollars. Family heirlooms are being let go for less than two gallons of gas. For a jug of milk that will be gone a day later. And then what?

$3.43 pushed me over the line from hmmm to worried. The line for many, many more people was a hell of a lot lower than that. As more and more of us start making choices we couldn't have imagined ten years ago, or even a year ago--keep that doctor's appointment for a nagging injury, or save for a fillup? throw money you don't have at repairs on the beater or throw even more at something new that gets better mileage, playing the odds that the savings on gas will balance the monthly payment before the next unforeseen disaster wipes out the bank account?--we get the tiniest glimpse of how bad things can be, how bad they have been for so many for so long. And we think about how much worse they are likely to get, and it's fucking scary.

*not including the $800 I still owe the girlfriend for the faux-wood floor. Hi, honey!

National Day of Arrrrgh

The economic chickens haven't quite come home to roost yet, but they're clucking ominously in the distance, so I'm too depressed to crank out an original entry this morning. I see it's the National Day of Prayer, though. Take it away, PZ.

I can scarcely believe my country is officially pandering to such willful stupidity — elevating evangelical kooks to positions of prestige, trumpeting the virtues of sectarian religion, and actually crediting the successes of America to the fact that a subset of deluded, demented fools sit on their asses and beg an invisible man to protect us and help us kill people in foreign countries. What a waste, and what an encouragement of further waste.

On that note, anyone have any opinions about the Toyota Matrix? Anybody want to buy a loved-almost-to-death Toyota pickup with 210,000 miles and five times that many memories on it? The MPG sucks too hard for me to justify keeping it much longer. And since the grief that stirs in my heart is unbearable, I just can't wait to find out what it will feel like when old age catches up with my dog as well.