Robb on Goddard: "A transforming leader"
The Republic’s Robert Robb gets sentimental about Terry Goddard, who didn’t do well in the gubernatorial election last week:
If Goddard had played it safe as mayor, he undoubtedly would have been elected governor in 1990.
Goddard, however, forcefully advocated for a series of failed tax-increase proposals: to build a downtown baseball stadium, to transform and restore the Salt River throughout the county, and to establish a county-wide transit system.
In much of this, he was just premature. A downtown baseball stadium was eventually built. A county-wide transit tax was approved. Piecemeal improvements of the Salt River are occurring. In the case of the transit system and Salt River improvements, what Goddard advocated in the 1980s was actually much better than what county residents ultimately got.
Also on the ballot in 1990 was a sales tax increase for education, which Goddard also supported. It and he were initially quite popular. As the campaign progressed, both rapidly lost altitude.
The record enabled Fife Symington to develop a narrative of Goddard as a tax-hiker. Voters ultimately rejected both the education tax and Goddard.
11:06 AM
Which page of the Arizona Republic do you read?
Today, you could read page one, which contains the start of an in-depth Associated Press debunking on so-called Climategate. The story begins:
LONDON – E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by the Associated Press.
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions.
Emphasis added. AP says five reporters read all 1000-plus emails, totaling about one million words.
Anyway, that was on the front page. (Satisfied, Expresso Pundit?)
Now, since the Republic is a full-service operation, you could also read Robert Robb, on the paper’s ed page, who has been enraged about the Climategate emails for weeks. For example:
[L]eading climate scientists conspired to hide uncertainty in the data, prevent others from checking their work and suppress conflicting judgments.
Even before these revelations, there were reasons to be circumspect about what was known about the effect of industrialization on global climate. There is, first of all, the hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mathematical equations in a computer model that fully duplicate the interactions within the earth’s atmosphere.
All three sentences are problematic.
(The last is the current denier talking point: “It’s all too complex to know for sure.” It’s also rhetorical gibberish: “The hubris of believing that human beings can concoct a series of mechanical devices that could fly a human being across long distances.”)
Anyway, today, Robb is back on the case again, this time muttering ominously about how the emails are a nail in the coffin of academic peer review.
There’s no reference to the AP story, just as in the past he’s never acknowledged similar assertions by most knowledgeable observers.
All of this is to get back to one of PHXated’s little hobby horses, namely the poor editing at the Arizona Republic. In a state like Arizona, of course there’s going to be an energetic little right-wing columnist who nibbles on the national blogs and regurgitates them for the less sophisticated folks on the home front. That’s Robert Robb.
That’s fine. But why doesn’t an editor push Robb a little? This sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen at the Republic much, so here’s a few sentences any busy op-ed editor at the Republic is welcome to cut and paste into an email to Robb:
Hey, Rob: Did you see the AP story we ran Sunday? 1800 words, pretty in-depth. You been banging on the emails as “deeply disturbing.” AP says not so much. Since you’ve been out front on this you need to address it one way or the other so readers don’t think you’re dodging it.
7:00 AM