Arizona's Own Espresso Pundit

Roberts' Rules

Republic columnist Laurie Roberts has done a great job bird dogging the fallout from the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce's illegal foray into the 2008 Scottsdale City Council campaigns.

You may recall the chamber's now-infamous Campaign That Wasn't a Campaign. It was August 2008 and the chamber had just launched a TV ad and mailed a four-page color brochure to Scottsdale households, highlighting the four candidates its executive committee had endorsed: then-Mayor Mary Manross, then-Councilwoman Betty Drake, Councilman Ron McCullagh and then-challenger Suzanne Klapp.

The column is excellent and I would encourage you to read the whole thing.   I will, however, correct one point.  Roberts provides this overly generous assessment of the Chamber's situation...

It was, of course, perfectly acceptable for the chamber executives to endorse whomever they chose and to pull out all the stops to get their favored four elected and take control of the seven-member City Council. This, as long as they disclosed who was supplying the cash for the campaign ads.

Actually, the issue is much more than disclosure.  The Chamber is a tax exempt corporation and even after the Citizen's United case, the Chamber would not be allowed to advocate on behalf of candidates.  Additionally, some of the contributors are presumed to be corporations--corporate contributions were illegal in 2008.  And some of the individuals who contributed may have donated in excess of individual campaign limits.  However, we can't know the details of these other violations...because the Chamber refuses to disclose what companies or individuals made the donations and in what amounts.

So no, it was not "perfectly acceptable" for the Chamber to "pull out all the stops to get their favored four elected."   It was illegal for the Chamber to advocate on behalf of candidates.  The issue is much larger than disclosure. 

We will see how it plays out, but a fundamental rule in Public Relations as well as politics is that information that is destined to come out eventually, should be disclosed immediately.  Otherwise, there will be dozens more articles about the Chamber refusing to release the information...followed by subpoenas...and then fines. 

The Chamber's steadfast refusal to come clean, apologize for screwing up, dismiss those who were responsible and promise not to do it again, means that this cloud will hang over the Chamber for years to come. 

Where Do I send the Bill?

Last week, I pointed out the amateur and desperate nature of Jim Ward's hit piece on David Schweikert.  If you haven't read that post, scroll down, and read what I said and then check out the new version.  (Click to enlarge)

This piece is better and I thought I would take the time to point out some of the improvements.

The first thing to notice is that Ward has abandoned the false claim that the Wall Street Journal and Fox News called him "an anti-establishment outsider."  He still uses that phrase, but he no longer uses the mocked up Wall Street Journal and Fox News logo. 

Next, he's still using that same great picture of Schweikert, but at least he has a better picture of himself.   Well, that's a start. 

He's also rewritten the headings so that he is the "Yes" candidate.  The last piece had "No" under Ward's name and the voters were going to get the impression that they were to vote NO on Ward.  

Ward has also downplayed the John Shadegg endorsement.  Now it's safely tucked away at the bottom--high enough not to tick off Shadegg, but low enough so that people aren't wondering why the "anti-establishment" guy is being endorsed by the, well...establishment guy.

Ward still makes the false claim that Schweikert is a "20-year Career Politician" but at least he no longer lists years (all 7 of them) that make the statement such an obvious lie. 

This is a much better effort.  Some of the obvious lies have been removed; the connections to Shadegg have been downplayed; the photograph is better and he has shifted the piece so that he is the "yes" candidate.

So ward is left with a piece that at its core is still a 500-word effort to paint Schweikert as a big spending career politician--using statistics that (as I pointed out in the prior post) are bogus on their face.  

What does Schweikert do to respond?  The sucker play would be to debate the piece and talk about how he is not a big spender, not a career politician and how he can beat Mitchell.  But why let your opponent pick the battle field?  Besides, no one who reads Ward's hit piece is going to believe it.  It's too full of weasel words and funny "facts"--and anyone who sees the two pieces side-by-side will see the changes and realize how bogus the first piece was.  It's also possible that the mainstream media guys will point out that Ward has dropped the Wall Street Journal Claim.

To respond, Schweikert will simply print and mail copies of the documents that show how Ward moved to Arizona from San Francisco in late 2008, hired a campaign consultant in January of 2009, registered to vote in February of 2009 and announced for Congress later that year.

If there's anything voters can't stand, it's district shopping.  And when a guy from San Francisco moves to Arizona and hires a campaign consultant before the boxes are unpacked and even before he registers to vote...well, that's a egregious case of district shopping.

My guess is that District 5 voters would even support a guy like Mitchell over the San Fransisco Newby. 

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble.

I've been following the situation in Greece and seen the comparisons with the United States and I've been disappointed that the analysis always focuses on the annual deficit.  Sure, Greece and Spain spend more of their GDP than the US does, but that analysis seems to ignore the massive entitlement meltdown that the US is destined to endure.  The federal government's Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security obligations now total about $107 Trillion, and that's not factored in to the fiscal equation. 

Of course, there's an obvious solution.  Just take the present value of all the obligations and the present value of all the future revenues and then compare them.  That's what the Financial Times has done for both Greece and the US and the result is really sobering.   (Long excerpt below)

This is classic bubble behavior--we all know that the US Government is never going to be able to pay off these obligations, but the collapse could be years away, and until then, the US still seems like the safest place to put money...until it isn't.  At that point, the money rushes out very quickly and the bubble collapses.  So we are in the middle of a US based sovereign debt bubble that is being kept inflated by the the willingness of foreign governments--mainly China--to park their money in our currency until they have a better option.  They understand that there are really only three possible outcomes...inflation, the collapse of the dollar or outright default.  But at the moment, those outcomes look to be far off, so they stand ready to pull their money out of the US while they continue to work to find a safe alternative. 

As in all bubbles, we can't tell the timing or the triggering event, but something is going to cause a major panic.  It may be next week, or it may not be for 20 years, but at some point, investors are going to react to the knowledge that these obligation are going to come due.

Here's the article.

Fortunately, theory suggests a label-free measure of fiscal status: the fiscal gap, or the present value difference between all future expenditures and receipts. The Greek fiscal gap is staggering. Calculations developed with my colleagues at Freiberg University put it at 11.5 per cent of the value of Greece’s future GDP. And this huge figure already incorporates Greece’s recently legislated fiscal policy retrenchment. But the US figure, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s just-released projections, is even larger: 12.2 per cent.

Clearly, Greece is in terrible fiscal shape. To get its books in order it would have to pull in its belt each year by another 11.5 per cent of GDP. This provides new meaning to the word draconian. But the US is in much worse shape, because the CBO’s projections that reveal the 12.2 per cent fiscal gap already assume a 7.2 per cent of GDP belt-tightening by 2020.

But the assumptions underlying this 7.2 per cent adjustment are highly speculative, including a substantial rise in the share of taxpayers facing the Alternative Minimum Tax, once called the “millionaires tax” for targeting only the rich. The CBO also assumes that real wage growth will push all workers into much higher tax brackets, and that Congress will slash discretionary spending as well as greatly limit growth in Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Each supposition runs counter to recent experience.

Wishing won’t fix America’s fiscal mess. The US is one foot away from a deep and permanent economic grave. It is far past time to do meaningful long-term fiscal planning, level with the public, and implement radical reforms that permanently put America’s fiscal house in order.

Yet Another Failed "Reform" Measure.... Or Nadine Basha's Very Very Bad Day

In 2006, Nadine Basha and her fellow travelers put an initiative on the ballot to raise the tax on cigarettes by 80 cents a pack and to create a a committee that would spend the money instead of putting it in the general fund to be spent by the legislature. 

The scheme is obviously Unconstitutional--the state's Constitution defines legislative powers and doesn't allow a private group to collect tax revenue and spend the funds as it sees fit.  But let's set the legality aside for a moment and focus on practicality.  How did the plan work?  The answer is badly...

It turns out that if you collect $400 million in tax revenue and give it to a private group to spend it as they see fit...they are going to bog down and leave much of it unspent and much of what they do manage to spend will be sent to organizations that...(surprise) are represented on the committee.

The Republic's Pat Kosan has interesting coverage here.

Among the many criticisms lawmakers have about First Things First, three seem to rise to the top: They say that the agency is sitting on too much unused money, that it is rife with conflicts of interest and that the grants have not been fairly distributed, with half the money going to only a few organizations.

I find the irony to be quite sweet.  The intelligentsia love to portray the legislature as being filled with knuckle draggers, so they created a Committee of enlightened souls to bypass legislature...and it bogged down in confusion and financial conflicts of interest. 

The program has other problems as well.  The "First things First" program may be unconstitutional and ineffective, but at least it's Regressive.   Cigarette taxes fall disproportionately on the poor, but the services that are funded by First things First are provided primary to the middle class.  I know that seems strange, but the poor already qualify for these types of services, so the incremental tax came from poor people and the incremental services went to middle class people. 

(When liberals complain that Arizona's tax system is regressive, remind them that it's regressive because of high sales and "sin" taxes.  Then ask them if they supported First things First, or Mayor Gordon's sales tax on food.)

Legislators are tired of the games and put Prop 302 on the ballot in an effort to fold the "First things First" money into the state's general fund.  Naturally, supporters are unhappy with the prospect of having to defend their failed program and they are even more unhappy with the wording that the Legislative Committee used to describe the program. 

You see "First things First" isn't actually the name of the initiative, it was the slogan on the campaign signs.  The real name of the program is the"Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Program." And when the Legislature put the repeal on the ballot, they used the official name--just like it was on the ballot in 2006.  Supporters cried foul and want the ballot to talk about "First Things First."

But the Judge isn't buying it. 

Oberbillig said the wording crafted by a committee of lawmakers is "sufficiently neutral, non-argumentative, accurate and impartial as to not be misleading.'' And that, he said, is all the law requires.

So what's next?  Well, despite their bankruptcy, I'm sure the Bashas will manage to cough up a few hundred thousand dollars to run a campaign to try to save their unconstitutional, ineffective and regressive program.  After all, the Bashas are liberal icons for the lifetime of Charitable giving that they have provided to the community...contributions that will be offset a hundred fold by the defaulted debts that they leave with their vendors.

I recognize that times are hard, so if you are a political consultant and you want to try to rescue Nadine Basha's failed "First Things First" program, I won't fault you--but make sure you get paid up front. 

The Hail Mary Falls Short

I live in CD 5 and I received two pieces of mail yesterday that told me everything I need to know about who is winning the race to replace Harry Mitchell.  The Schweikert mailer was about Schweikert and the Jim Ward piece was about...Schweikert. 

Jim Ward must have a poll that indicates he can't catch David Schweikert without going negative. 

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not against a good hit piece--in fact, I've written quite a few of them--but writing a good hit piece isn't that easy--and when they go bad, they are very bad.  Ward's piece is bad.

A bad hit piece is like watching a child who thinks he has learned to cuss.  He has the words right, but it's so obvious that he doesn't understand what he's saying that instead of being shocked, everyone laughs.

Ward's hit piece is actually good for a lot of laughs and when I read it, I thought, "my gosh, this could be a clinic on how to write a bad hit piece..."   Hmm, that's actually not a bad idea.  So here's a copy of the Ward hit piece and below it are my notes and suggestions--and a bit of well deserved mocking. (here's the original version.)

1.  The theme of the piece is that Jim Ward is an outsider and that Schweikert is a career politician.  Then lead quote is from...an incumbent Congressman.  Dude, that's awesome.  I like John Shadegg, but he's been in Congress for 16 years.  So Ward is telling me that he's an outsider by showing me that he's been endorsed Arizona's longest-serving Republican Congressman?  Dude, pick a theme.

2.  This is a GREAT picture of Schweikert.  I should know, I took it.  I could give you some technical details of why it's a great picture--I used actual film because it's better for four-color process and has a richer tone.  I shot it at F2 in order to flatten the depth of field and make Schweikert stand out against the background--but that's not the point. The point is that if you only look at this hit piece for 30-seconds, you can't tell who it hits.  Seriously.  The picture of Schweikert is actually better than the picture of Ward.  Most voters look at a piece while walking from the mail box to the trash can and a significant number of voters  who don't take the time to actually read this piece will think that Schweikert wins the comparison.  (Here's where Ward got the picture.)

But the piece isn't confusing just because the Schwiekert picture is better than the Ward picture, which brings me to point 3.

3.  All the "NO" labels are under Ward.  This is a classic mistake.  Voters read mail and want to know who to vote FOR...sure, you are telling them who to vote against, but they don't understand that.  So the piece actually reads like a "No on Ward" piece.  The most logical reading of the first title for example "NO on Ward because he's a career politician."

4.  Hit piece writers are often tempted to just make stuff up because it's hard for the target to rebut, but in the age of blogs, people actually go back to the "sources" that the candidate cites.  Here, Ward continues his claim that the Wall Street Journal and Fox News "called him an anti-establishment outsider..."  This claim is simply untrue.  Read here for a complete debunking.

5.  Fuzzy Math.  Look, if you are going to use actual Math in a hit piece, it has to add up.  But more importantly, this bullet mentions that Schweikert ran against Harry Mitchell in 2008.  So what was Jim Ward doing in 2008?  Living in San Francisco.  That's right.  Schweikert was living in CD 5 and running against Mitchell with Obama at the top of the ticket and Ward was living near Nancy Pelosi's district.  Ward moved to Arizona to run for Congress and if you check out the documents, it looks like he hired his political consultant before he even registered to vote.  So he should probably avoid references to what Schweikert was doing in 2008.

6. After you have set the stage by lying about yourself, you are now ready to lie about your opponent.  But, again, you can't make stuff up that's OBVIOUSLY not true, or the readers will catch it.  So these bullets list Schweikert's (rather impressive) resume and then claim he's a "20-Year Career Politician."  The problem is that the list only includes 7 years of elected office.

7.  Watch for passive voice.  "Residential and commercial property taxes increased on his watch."  Does this say that Schweikert raised taxes?  Nope.  In fact, Schweikert was the TREASURER during this period and had no authority to increase or decrease taxes.  He simply collected the money.  Nice try though.

8.  Parallel Structure.  I circled this set of points because they are the only ones that are right.  Read the first word of each bullet...Repeal, Replace, Create.  That's excellent.  They are all verbs and have a great flow.  Now read the rest of the bullets...the rest of them are like the bottom set "Opposes, Will Reduce, Supports."  This may seem like a minor point, but it confuses the reader and muddles the message.  That's critical when a piece gets less than a minute of reading time.

9.  Look for pure fabrication.  Ward cites the spending increases from 1991 to 1995. Huh?  Schwiekert and I served together in the Legislature in the early 1990s when Symington was Governor.  With the exception of the current meltdown, the last period of fiscal austerity was from 1991 to 1995.  Schweikert was in House leadership during that period and was instrumental in keeping spending down.  So don't cite the most conservative period in the last 25 years as an example of big spending.

I also like the next bullet in this section "increased Maricopa County budget..."  Again, Schweikert was TREASURER he didn't vote on budgets. 

10.  Any lie that is worth saying is worth repeating--see point 4.

So why the panic?  Why did Ward decide to go negative with such an amateur, hastily contrived piece--three factors:  sobering poll numbers, limited cash on hand and high burn rate.

Sobering Poll Numbers. 

I don't have a copy of the poll, but the results of Ward's internal polling are obvious.  You don't see the other candidates mentioned in this piece and we are no longer seeing positive pieces about Ward.  When an candidate targets one member of the field with a negative piece, it means that the target has a comfortable lead and the clock is ticking.

Limited Cash on Hand

The Republic reported that Schweikert's cash on hand is $434,000, while Ward comes in at $284,000 (contrast that to the millions he promised to spend when he moved here).

However, the numbers are actually even worse for Ward.  Contributors often give more than the Primary Limit and that money has to be earmarked for the General Election, or returned if the candidate loses the primary.  If you subtract out Ward's earmarked money, his cash on hand drops to about $190,000 while Schweikert's cash is still above $400,000.

Burn Rate

Cash only counts if it touches voters instead of going to consultants.  Ward spent $220,000 last quarter and has nothing to show for it but a few mailers and a lot of consulting fees.  Those consultants are going to want to be paid in the second quarter too, so if you subtract a $50,000 a month burn rate from the $191,000 in cash available for the primary you get...enough money to do one hit piece and a few feel good mailers.

So that was his shot.  The Hail Mary play comes short.  The crowd goes wild. Game over.  
 

So THAT'S What they have been doing...

When Governor Napolitano left the state, she took a bunch of her staffers with her.  I thought that was rather strange because as Governor, of course, she had plenty of spots for advisers who were simply politically savvy, however, none of them had an experience with Homeland Security.  What were they going to do in Washington? 

Well now we know.

For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.

Wow, Nixon would be proud.  

If you are from Arizona, most of these names will be familiar.

According to the e-mails, the senior review staffers in Napolitano's inner circle included: Noah Kroloff, Napolitano's chief of staff; John Sandweg, the general counsel chief of staff; Sean Smith, a department spokesman; Amy Shlossman, deputy chief of staff; Leezie Kim, a senior department lawyer; Brian DeVallance, senior counsel; Jan Lesher, chief of staff for operations; and Mary Ellen Brown, Napolitano's deputy director for scheduling.

People ask me if Napolitano was so heavy-handed and gaffe prone when she was Governor of Arizona and respond that she was indeed heavy-handed (verging on corrupt) and gaffe prone, but the local media were so enamored of her that they never covered it. 

 

Watch the Whole Thing...

I don't usually watch TV, but I was stuck in the Sacramento airport on Tuesday so like most of you, I saw this clip of Shirley Sherrod's "racist" comments over and over.  The clip was devastating and created a national firestorm and she was quickly fired.  I read on the blogs later that the clip had been taken out of context and that she was being offered her job back.  Now I've seen the whole clip and I realize how out of context it really was. 

If you saw the first clip and haven't seen the full story, I would urge you to start at about 16 minutes into this clip and listen to her tell the full story.  The bottom line is that her experience with this farmer was the turning point when she realized that her job wasn't just about helping black people, it was about helping poor people and while she was tempted to do the minimum for this white farmer, she realized that he had no other place to turn and she did everything in her power to ensure that he got the help he deserved.  That was her personal turning point, the point at which she realized that the struggle was not black verses white, it was a struggle to help poor people of all races.

Maybe that's How they Spell it In Washington...

Did you catch the latest hit piece from the McCain camp?  It seems that some "Arizonians" voted against Hayworth in 2006.   Well, the "ians" ending is pretty common--just ask some "Californians" or "Floridians." But spelling "Arizonan" with an "i" is about as bad as pronouncing "rodeo" the same way as the Beverly Hills folks do when they talk about "Rodeo Drive."

I guess that adding an "i" to the ending of Arizonan is an easy mistake to make...if you don't live here.

Academic Fraud At UA

Last November I pointed out the local connection to the Climategate emails.  University of Arizona professor Malcolm Hughes was one of five recipients of the now infamous “Hide the Decline” email.  In that post, I raised the question of Academic Fraud.

I'm sure that Malcolm Hughes and his friends are a true believers and would be shocked that people will look at these thousands of emails and conclude that he has been part of a massive research fraud. But even the most charitable reading of "using Mike's trick" to "hide the decline" shows that Hughes and his associates are engaging in politics instead of research--and with the amount of money that they have received from the federal government, their deceptions seem to surpass mere politics and PR and have moved into outright fraud.

The emails spawned a handful of investigations and the most recent report  takes a hard look at the “hide the decline” email; the conclusion is devastating.  Here's finding number 37 on page 62 of the report.

37. In relation to “hide the decline” we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in two regards. It did not make clear that in one case the data post 1960 was excluded, and it was not explicit on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, but that the reason for doing so should have been described.

The report concludes that the figure ultimately placed in the report was “misleading.”  Take a few moments and ponder that conclusion.  We know that Hughes received an email in which one of his fellow researches said (privately he thought) that he was going to use a “trick” to “hide” something.  Then the figure on which he used the “trick” became quite famous, in fact “iconic”.  It’s not like the figure was buried in some footnote and Hughes could have said “golly, I wonder what happened to that graph in which Phil said he was going to use Mike’s Nature Trick to hide the decline.” 

Then after the emails were released and the figure was analyzed, the investigators concluded that the figure was indeed misleading.  Not “confusing” but “misleading.”

Phil Jones and the other scientists have maintained that there are two meanings of  “trick”.  Sure, those of us who aren’t scientists looks at a “trick” as something that, you know, tricks people.  Jones maintains that this trick is like using the quadratic formula, it’s a technique for solving a problem.  OK, that argument had some merit---until the report concluded that the figure generated by this trick was misleading, that the trick was not disclosed, that the figure was so widely used (in its misleading format) that it became “iconic” and that Hughes and his friends never bothered to correct the misperception raised by the misleading figure.

For his part, Hughes seemed to know from the beginning that the trick and resulting figure were fraudulent.  When Arizona Daily Star Reporter Tony Davis asked Hughes about the email, Hughes' response wa that HE hadn't used the trick, it was Phil Jones who used the trick.

That's academic fraud folks.  Intentionally manipulating data to produce a misleading figure, and then sitting back to watch that figure gain "iconic" status...while you rake in awards and grants for being on the leading edge of your field...is a classic definition of fraud.   And when Phil Jones sent Hughes an email saying that he was going to use the trick, and then Hughes saw that Jones had indeed used the trick to create a misleading figure and then that figure went on to become "iconic" in the climate debate, Hughes had a responsibility to report the fraud. But he didn't speak up.  He remained silent and watch the grants pour in...

On December 9th of 2009, I wrote:

It’s looking more and more like Hughes has been part of an extensive fraud.  Did he commit fraud?  He certainly doesn’t seem to think so.  But it looks to me like he’s an accomplice. 

So now that the issue has been studied by an international--and indeed friendly--tribunal and the conclusion demonstrates that Regents Professor Malcolm Hughes was indeed an accomplice to fraud, what is the University of Arizona going to do about it?

Spin Cycle...

This morning's Republic has an interesting Venn Diagram that shows the breakdown of people living in the US.  I thought this was an interesting conclusion.

"...Only about 23% to 26% of Hispanics in Arizona are undocumented immigrants."

Only?  Like one fourth is a small number?  After all, it equates to 500,000 people who are here illegally...you know, a number equivalent to the entire population of Tucson.

So if half of those 500,000 are children and it costs $10,000 per year to educate a child who lives in a non-english speaking home then the state is "only" spending $2,500,000,000 PER YEAR educating them. 

But folks who follow this issue understand that the $2.5 billion number is actually way too low.  That's because kids who are born to illegal aliens are considered citizens, so educating them is a cost of illegal immigration, but those numbers don't show up in the total.

So the next time the Republic presents a chart, maybe they should leave the editorial commentary out of it.