Boss Tweed’s bill to do away with the civil service merit selection system in committee today
The bishop needs an American history lesson
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
E. J. Montini in his column today has a quote he attributes to the Most Rev. Thomas J. Olmsted, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. Bishop is confusing hospital with church :
"These revisions to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate do not respect the religious liberty and moral convictions of all stakeholders in the health coverage transaction. Religious freedom is given to us by God, not conceded to us by the State."
Really? This is a derivative of the Divine Right of Kings theory, which asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people. (Hence the Bishop believes he is exempt from having to comply with the "earthly authority" of state and federal laws to which he objects on religious and moral grounds).
The American Revolution was fought in direct opposition to the despotism of the Divine Right of Kings theory. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence expressly states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …"
The "consent of the governed" is synonymous with a political theory wherein a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when derived from the people or society over which that political power is exercised.
In America, those rights are derived from our Constitution, not a Divine Right:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Religious liberty is secured by the First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
The reason for securing religious liberty in the Constitution was to prevent the sectarian religious wars that had raged in Europe for centuries from occurring in America. It appears that some would have us come full circle.
Pimps for Private Prisons and Profit: Taxpayers are getting ripped off
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
It looks like our shadow governor, Chuck Coughlin and his lobbyist firm HighGround, Inc. that pimps for private prisons in Arizona, has needlessly been costing Arizona taxpayers millions of dollars steered into profits for his private prison clients.
Taxpayers have the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its prison privatization model legislation to thank for being ripped off, as well as complicit Arizona legislators.
Here is the Arizona Prison Report | American Friends Service Committee.
The Arizona Republic today continues the 'Republic's special report: The Price of Prisons with this report Arizona private prisons slammed by report:
Arizona's private prisons are not cost-effective for taxpayers and are more difficult to monitor than state prisons, according to a new report by a prison watchdog group that is calling for a moratorium on any new private prisons in the state.
The report examined the five prisons that have contracts to house Arizona prisoners and six private prisons that house federal detainees or inmates from other states, including California and Hawaii.
Based on public-information requests and other data, the report by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that works on criminal-justice reform, concluded that:
Arizona paid $10 million more for private prison beds between 2008 and 2010 than it would have for equivalent state beds.
Arizona's pending plan to contract for another 2,000 private-prison beds would cost taxpayers at least $38.7 million a year, at least $6 million a year more than incarcerating those inmates in state prisons. Plans to add 500 more maximum-security beds in state prisons would add almost $10 million a year to the bill. The report questioned whether those beds are needed, since the state's prison population has declined over the past two years by more than 900 inmates, to 39,854 as of Wednesday.
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Mission San Xavier del Bac
by David Safier
Joan and I took a friend from Portland to see Mission San Xavier del Bac this weekend. It's the first time in a long while I've seen it without scaffolding hanging around it (if I've ever seen it without scaffolding). Absolutely beautiful. I took a pic from my favorite rear view, gray scaled it, then did a little of what I used to do in the darkroom (in the olden days) with Photoshop.
A bit of a poor man's homage to a shot Ansel Adams took in 1968, which you can see below the fold. I noticed Ansel didn't have a large cactus in front of the left gate, a palm tree in front of the dome, or a car parked inside the gate (which meant I couldn't shoot the courtyard). And he took unfair advantage of me by being a great photographer.
