Arizona

A former House page who was sent an instant message by Mark Foley asking him his penis size forwarded it to Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe back in 2001. When the scandal broke, that former page called Kolbe and asked him what he should do. He says Kolbe told him that “it is best that you don’t even bring this up with anybody…. There is no good that can come from it if you actually talk about this. The man has resigned anyway." The House ethics committee found out about it anyway, prompting Kolbe to call the former page and leave a message saying, “it looks like you did some talking." More detail and excerpts from the House ethics committee report at TPM Muckraker. UPDATE (December 9, 2006): Here’s Kolbe’s response.

The good news: Arizona did not elect aspiring theocrat Len Munsil (who was soundly defeated by incumbent Governor Janet Napolitano), got rid of corrupt Congressman J.D. Hayworth (replacing him with former Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell), narrowly voted down an amendment to the state Constitution to ban gay marriage and anything “similar to” it, and voted in favor of greater protections against eminent domain abuse. The bad news: Arizona re-elected Sen. Jon Kyl and Rep. Rick Renzi, approved the creation of a new bureaucracy to continually raise the minimum wage (the main effect of which is to reduce teen employment; it has negligible positive effects for low wage earners, versus something that would genuinely be effective like reducing payroll taxes), passed the worse of the two anti-smoking measures, banned probation for methamphetamine abuse offenses, and passed all of the anti-illegal immigration measures (declaring English the official language, prohibiting illegal immigrants from posting bail or being awarded certain kinds of damages in court, and limiting educational services to illegal immigrants). Teenager Jarrett Maupin (Al Sharpton, Jr.) was elected to the Phoenix Union High School District Board in Ward 2. Maupin, who was a member of the Republican club at Brophy College Prep before switching schools to St. Mary’s and becoming a Democrat and protege of Sharpton, charged that Brophy students demonstrated their racism by referring to “blackboards.” ...

The third woman to die in Iraq, Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, from Flagstaff, Arizona, was reported as having died from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.” A reporter who dug further, Kevin Elston, found that she committed suicide on September 15, 2003, after becoming distraught from working in an interrogation unit known as “the cage.” Peterson, a devout Mormon who was working as an Arabic translator, was upset by the methods of interrogation being used on Iraqi prisoners. After two days in the unit, she refused to participate further, was reassigned, and was sent to suicide prevention training. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques that Peterson objected to, and say that all records of them have been destroyed. ...

Gun rights advocate and “uninvited ombudsman” Alan Korwin has sent out a checklist of his recommendations on the Arizona ballot propositions. I disagree with him on several of the propositions, perhaps most significantly on his recommendation of a yes vote to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage and any legal arrangements that are “similar to” marriage. Here’s his argument for 107: 107 YES Protect marriage amendment. If people want gay unions, polygamy, bestiality or whatever, I say let them, but not under government sanction and funding. I’d like to see us return to “holy matrimony” without any government involvement. Getting married for tax breaks is so wrong.But this argument presumes the effect of 107 is to get the government out of the marriage business, which it isn’t. Rather, 107 has the effect of enshrining existing statutory prohibitions on a form (or multiple forms) of legal contract between consenting adults into the Constitution, and going further to restrict any such arrangement “similar to” marriage. It isn’t pro-liberty, it’s anti-liberty. It isn’t eliminating special privileges, it is adding them to the Arizona Constitution. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that nobody should have tax breaks or special privileges under the law, but it’s not reasonable to say that because such privileges are wrong we should restrict them to a particular set of people. That’s not only unfair, it’s unconstitutional–a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It’s like arguing that the government shouldn’t confer support on religion, so we should vote yes on an amendment that limits government support to the Christian religion, and keep it from supporting Islam or other religions. (No doubt there are many Americans who would, quite wrongly, support such a law.) Now, some advocates of Proposition 107 have argued that there is no violation of the equal protection clause because a gay man has the same right to marry a woman as a heterosexual man does. But this is just like arguing that a prohibition on interracial marriage doesn’t violate the equal protection clause because a black man has the same right to marry a black woman as a white man has to marry a white woman–the description of the right is being crafted to exclude the category of person who is being discriminated against. As Ed Brayton has pointed out on numerous occasions, the arguments for the unconstitutionality of a ban on same-sex marriage are of the same form as the arguments for the unconstitutionality of a ban on miscegenation, just replacing “different race” with “same sex.” If you think that the Supreme Court ruled correctly in Loving v. Virginia, you should also think that Arizona’s Proposition 107 violates the U.S. Constitution for the same reasons. See also my previous post on the Protect Marriage Arizona amendment. You may also find David Friedman’s economic analysis of marriage arrangements to be of interest. UPDATE (October 21, 2006): Just to make it clear, THeath has enumerated some specific examples of what opponents of gay marriage are actually endorsing (there are several more if you follow the link)–these aren’t hypotheticals, these are real people: There was the friend I wrote about recently who was turned away from from the emergency room, where his partner had been taken after suddenly collapsing at work, and told he could not be given any information because he was not next of kin. He had to leave the hospital and retrieve their legal documents before he could gain admittance to see his partner when a married spouse would have been waved through without question. My friend was luckier than Bill Flanigan. When his partner Robert Daniel was hospitalized in Baltimore, the couple had their legal documents with them, including durable power of attorney and documentation that they were registered as domestic partners in California. But those documents were ignored by hospital staff and Flanigan was kept from seeing his partner until Daniel’s mother and sister arrived and by then Daniel was unconscious, with his eyes taped shut and hooked to a breathing tube; something Daniel had not wanted. Even having a will didn’t help Sam Beaumont when his partner of 23 years, Earl, died. Oklahoma requires a will to have two witnesses, but Earl didn’t know that and his will leaving everything to Sam had only one. So Earl’s cousins, who disapproved of his relationship and most of whom never spoke to the couple or even came to Earl’s funeral, successfully sued to take away the home and ranch Sam an Earl had shared for 23 years. A married spouse, even in the event of a will lacking enough witnesses, would’ve had the right to automatically inherit at least some of the estate. Further Update (October 22, 2006): Ed Brayton takes apart the Alliance Defense Fund’s white paper on these marriage amendments here. ...

An archivist at the Arizona Historical Foundation, Linda Whitaker, found a 25-min 16mm film canister last fall while preparing an exhibition on World War II Japanese internment camps. The film can was labeled “Poston Color Dupe.” The film turned out to be footage of Arizona’s Poston internment camp, which was located in La Paz county, 12 miles south of Parker. The film had a magnetic strip for sound, but it had deteriorated, so what is left is a color silent film. It has been converted to DVD format and is for sale for $40 from the Arizona Historical Foundation. Poston was one of two sets of Japanese internment camps in Arizona, and was also known as the Colorado River Relocation Center. It was composed of three camps, called Poston I, II, and III, on reservation land of the Colorado Indians. It operated from April 1942 to March 1946, and at its peak housed 18,000 people. The other was the Gila River Relocation Center about 50 miles southeast of Phoenix, which housed 13,000 people at its peak, and operated from May 1942 to February 1946. It was composed of two camps, Butte Camp and Canal Camp, which were built over the objections of the Gila River Indian tribe, on whose land they were built. The Japanese-Americans who were taken from their homes in California and Arizona and forced to live in these prison camps were mostly U.S. citizens (about 2/3). The Poston and Gila River camps were, at the time, the third and fourth largest “cities” in Arizona, after Phoenix and Tucson. The Poston camp was built by Del Webb, best known as a homebuilder of planned communities in the southwest (such as Sun City and Anthem). The discovery of this film serves to remind us how a country can get so caught up in wartime fear that it disregards its own Constitution and tramples the rights of individuals. ...

Recent amendments and proposed amendments to state constitutions like Arizona’s Proposition 107, which “preserves “marriage” as only consisting of the union of one man and one woman, and prohibits creating or recognizing any legal status for unmarried persons that is similar to that of marriage,” have been backed by the Alliance Defense Fund. These constitutional amendments will not just be used to block same-sex marriage (already prohibited by multiple Arizona statutes, as I’ve pointed out here), but to prevent things like domestic partnership benefits to unmarried partners. In response to these claims, the ADF denies it, calling this a “false argument” used to “confuse”: Preying on these and similar fears, advocates of same-sex “marriage” argue that proposed state marriage amendments will undermine the ability of government and even private entities to grant benefits to unmarried people. This false argument is being used to confuse many people… Same-sex “marriage” advocates argue that eliminating domestic partnerships or other counterfeit marital institutions is hateful and mean spirited, because it will undermine benefits granted to unmarried people. Unfortunately, many people (including some so-called “conservative” politicians) have bought into this fallacious argument. ...

State Rep. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa), one of the most vocal opponents of illegal immigration in the Arizona legislature, sent an email out to supporters that contained an article from the National Alliance’s website. The article, titled “Who Rules America? The Alien Grip on Our News and Entertainment Media Must Be Broken,” criticized the media for promotion multiculturalism and racial equality, for depicting “any racially conscious White Person” as a bigot, and for presenting the Holocaust as fact. Pearce says he does not agree with the article, but forwarded it after reading the first few paragraphs, which he agreed with. Once he realized the nature of the article, he sent out an apology to supporters and asked them to delete the original email and not forward it further. The Arizona Republic quotes a Pearce apology, beginning with a quote that sounds like he’s been taking grammar lessons from Yoda: “Ugly the words contained in it really are. … They are not mine and I disavow them completely. Worse still, the website links to a group whose politics are the ugliest imaginable. I am saddened and embarrassed that this went out with my name on it and I am also saddened at the loss of the friend who sent this to me. His heart is dark and I am unable to get him to see that what drives him is ugly and evil at its core."This comes after Pearce has been under fire for his comments in support of a 1954 federal deportation program called “Operation Wetback." Pearce has defended himself by observing that this was, in fact, what the program was called. I don’t know if he prefaced his references to it by pointing out that he recognizes that the name is offensive, but if he did so he shouldn’t have been criticized for the use of the name. His support of the program, however, is certainly subject to criticism. I wonder if Pearce also thinks the Jerome Deportation or Bisbee Deportation (both of 1917) were good ideas–both involved numerous Mexican workers (as well as European immigrants), though they were deported by train to New Mexico at the behest of vigilantes working for the mining companies, with the assistance of the local authorities.

For the first time in the last decade, year-over-year median home prices in the metropolitan Phoenix area have dropped, from $263,000 to $256,900, down from the peak of $267,000 in June 2006. Former housing bull Jay Q. Butler of the Arizona Real Estate Center at ASU says: Even though mortgage interest rates have been declining for the last few months, limited home appreciation and household income continues to raise concern about the ability of some homeowners to maintain their homes. … This may be especially evident for those that have used some of the more creative financing instruments, such as option payment plans and initially low interest rate adjustable mortgages.Florida is seeing growing foreclosures, especially among those with Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) with negative amortization options. There are $200 billion in ARMs resetting their rates in 2006 and another $1 trillion plus will be resetting in 2007, expected to lead to more foreclosures. This will apply further downward pressure on prices, and we should expect to see some of the same here (an increase has already been seen in Maricopa County notices of trustee sales), though I think Arizona has had a lower percentage of ARMs, interest-only, and negative amortization option loans than other parts of the country.

It just keeps getting pushed back farther and farther. Arizona Representative Jim Kolbe (R-District 8) has informed the Washington Post that he knew of inappropriate Foley emails back in 2000, which he confronted Foley about and brought to the attention of clerk of the House Karen Haas. Another source claims those emails were sexually explicit, but Kolbe press secretary Korenna Cline disagreed with that description, saying that the emails had only made the former page who received them uncomfortable. Kolbe, one of three openly gay Congressmen (the other two are Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)), was identified by multiple pages interviewed by the Post as one of the only members of Congress to take interest in them. UPDATE (October 10, 2006): Kolbe now disagrees with his press secretary about some details–he says he didn’t see the emails, didn’t directly confront Foley, and didn’t personally pass on the complaint to the clerk of the House, but simply recommended to the page with the complaint that it be done.

Here’s a nice chart from Yale economist Robert Shiller showing U.S. housing prices back to 1890. What will the regression to the mean look like over the next few years? On Wednesday Moody’s issued a widely-covered report on housing prices with predicted price declines by region. Here are their predictions for Arizona cities: Peak-to-Trough Peak Trough % House Price Decline Year/Quarter Year/Quarter Tucson, AZ -13.4 06:1 08:2 Phoenix, AZ -9.3 06:1 08:2 Prescott, AZ -2.0 06:1 08:2 I think that their predicted 9.3% decline between first quarter of 2006 and second quarter of 2008 for Phoenix is wildly optimistic–it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw that level of decline by the end of this year or first quarter of next year. It depends on whether Phoenix continues to have rapid population growth, which in turn depends on job growth (especially outside of real estate-related jobs, which will be declining).