Arizaon Daily Stat the largest newspaper in the state gives Kamala Harris endorsement

President: The Arizona Daily Star endorses Kamala Harris.There has never been a clearer choice than the one voters have in this year’s 2024, Presidential election.

Editor’s note:  The Star’s endorsements are coming late in the cycle this year, for a host of reasons, but the bottom line is we still believe in a community newspaper’s role in endorsing candidates for election and we were determined to fill that role.

As executive editor of the Arizona Daily Star, I produce the Opinion pages daily. For that daily task, I frequently confer with the Daily Star’s volunteer Editorial Advisory Board. The board was absolutely invaluable in helping the Star reach its endorsement decisions.

That is not to say the endorsements that follow represent unanimity of thought on the advisory board. They do not. The board was chosen partly for a spectrum of viewpoints, so I certainly didn’t expect these calls to be unanimous. Instead, the endorsements represent the best consensus possible of the advisory board’s views as well as my own, and as the author of these endorsements, I accept responsibility for them. But I cannot thank the advisory board members enough for their assistance and well-thought perspectives.

I am also grateful to the readers who consistently provide a thought-provoking range of views in our Guest Opinions and Letters to the Editor. As I read all of them every day before they are published, our readers themselves can be credited with having significant influence on endorsements.

I should add here that the endorsement is entirely separated from the work of our newsroom. Our reporters and news editors have no involvement in this process. — David McCumber, Executive Editor

This time around, Donald Trump is not an unknown quantity, as he was in 2016. His four-year term in office, the chaotic insurrection and ugly transfer of power at its end, and his behavior over the four years following his presidency are all available for American citizens to evaluate.

We cannot excuse or normalize January 6. The very fact that Trump now describes what happened as a “day of love” and its violent perpetrators “hostages” should be disqualifying. There are so many things that Trump has said and done that are disqualifying, from mismanaging a pandemic to blowing up the deficit by $8 trillion with tax cuts for billionaires to fomenting the insurrection in the first place.

His border outrage feels fake; his disdain for all immigrants and those from “shithole countries” feels real.

His stated intentions would cripple the economy — enormous tariffs, mass deportations, more tax cuts for the rich — yet somehow he’s been frequently evaluated as “better for the economy” than a centrist, consensus-seeking former prosecutor, attorney general, U.S. senator and sitting vice president with a degree in economics.

Indeed, of all the disinformation peddled by MAGAs in this cycle, the persistent jabber that Kamala Harris is mentally deficient — parroted by Trump himself — is the most vile, racist, sexist lie of all.

Harris’ campaign with vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has made a compelling case for the creation of middle-class opportunity, the revitalization of small business, the reining-in of runaway housing and healthcare expenses, and the pursuit of clean-energy solutions to climate change. All deserve to be near the top of any President’s to-do list.

By contrast, Trump has painted a false, dark picture of America under siege by “others.” His constant mendacity and virulent nativism gives his campaign a harsh and cynical cast — fully supported by vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance. Even more concerning, Trump has displayed an autocratic bent that should concern everyone with interest in the preservation of the American republic.

The choice is not close or difficult. The stakes are as high as they get. The Arizona Daily Star urges its readers to vote for Kamala Harris for President.

U.S. Senate: the Arizona Daily Star endorses
Ruben Gallego.The truth and Kari Lake continue to be estranged.

The Republican former newscaster is an enthusiastic part of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party — and like its leader, former President Donald Trump, she still refuses to acknowledge that he lost his presidential reelection race in 2020 — or that she was defeated in her bid for the Arizona governorship in 2022.

Also like Trump, many of her public pronouncements are rated “false” by fact-checkers.

Republican Senators are flat out wrong to prey on Social Security and Medicare

#VoteBlueToProtectSocialSecurity

For the second time this year, a key Senate Republican has suggested that Social Security and Medicare should be taken off the automatic-funding process that ensures people who have paid into the systems get what is coming to them, and instead be tossed up for regular congressional re-approval. They seem not to have considered the deep dysfunction that prevents most legislation from passing today — thanks mostly to their own party. Worse, maybe they have considered it.

When conservatives talk about “entitlements,” they (falsely) act as if it’s charity. In fact, both programs, despite their problems, are crucial to millions of older Americans who have paid into them throughout their working lives and, thus, are entitled to.

Social Security has long been the quintessential third rail of politics — touch it, and you’re dead. It is among the most popular programs not just in government today, but in the history of government. It deserves its popularity. When Franklin Roosevelt ushered it in during the 1930s (over intense Republican opposition), the goal was to end the then-common specter of poverty that awaited most Americans in old age. Social Security has worked spectacularly. Unlike most government programs, it is largely self-funded, by future retirees. Medicare, which came along in the 1960s, to address retiree medical care, operates under a similar process.

Keeping the programs adequately funded as Americans live longer is a challenge, but a far more manageable one than America would face if those benefits were withdrawn or significantly reduced. That’s why politicians never launch frontal attacks against either program. But Republicans — who, as a party, have never quite made peace with these successful experiments in quasi-socialism — are always offering privatization schemes and other so-called “reforms” that would ultimately undermine the benefits.

(Right Wing!) Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, early this year suggested sunsetting “all federal legislation” after five years, reasoning that “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Critics immediately pointed out that would, by definition, include Social Security and Medicare.

In a recent interview, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, took it further. Johnson complained that those who qualify for Social Security and Medicare — because they paid into the programs, remember — “just get it no matter what the cost.” 

Incredibly, Right Wing Johnson said both programs should face annual reauthorization in Congress to get their funding. 😡

Social Security Matters: Set a goal, make a plan and save

But, because of GOP intransigence, these Republicans like Johnson and Scott, somewhat regularly threaten to shut down the entire federal government rather than approve routine raises to the debt ceiling. The notion of subjecting seniors to annual floor debate over whether their monthly Social Security checks and Medicare benefits will continue is nothing less than horrifying. That some Senate Republicans would repeatedly threaten to destabilize these bedrock programs should give pause to anyone who thinks the GOP should take back control of Congress this year.

Vote Blue in 2022!

Give me your tired and your poor...Statue of Liberty history review essay

Essay echo by Michael Schaller published in the Arizona Daily Star and posted on Tuscon.com

MaineWriter- Schaller's timely essay puts a modern spotlight on the beauty of the Statue of Liberty and on the meaningful words in the poem by Emma Lazarus. Sometimes, we tend to take such meaningful history for granted. Therefore, in a convoluted way, the current immigration debate has renewed interest and support for the "Miss Liberty" statue and its important symbol of hope for the American Dream.

Mother of Exiles: The tangled history of the Statue of Liberty

Recently, CNN’s Jim Acosta got into a verbal spat with White House aide Stephen Miller. Acosta accused the Trump administration of violating the spirit embodied by the final lines of the poem The New Colossus (see below) written by Emma Lazarus and inscribed on a tablet at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Miller countered that the statue originally had nothing to do with immigration and that the poem was added decades later.

Surprisingly, both men were correct. Initially, e statue had nothing to do with immigration ... and then it had everything to do with it.

In the late 1860s, French sculptor Frederick August Bartholdi designed a massive lighthouse statue of a robed Egyptian woman – perhaps a belly dancer – holding a torch to be situated at the northern end of the just completed, French-built, Suez Canal.

When Egyptian officials rejected the idea, Bartholdi and several friends re-conceived the project in the form of “Lady Liberty” based on a Roman goddess, with broken shackles at her feet symbolizing the abolition of American slavery.

The Statue of Liberty was created as a gift to enhance Franco-American friendship

Making the statue a gift to be located in New York harbor would, they hoped, enhance Franco-American friendship. The project’s boosters included Ferdinand de Lesseps, French diplomat and developer of the Suez Canal, who sought U.S. support for a scheme to build a canal across Panama. (Unfortunately for de Lesseps, he eventually got his wish. The French project proved a fiasco.)

In the early 1870s, Bartholdi sculpted the statue’s head and torch-bearing arm. To attract additional funding, he exhibited the pieces in Europe and in the United States. The disembodied arm appeared in New York’s Madison Square from 1876-82, but generated only modest public interest. The New York and federal governments donated a vacant harbor island for the project but refused to pay for the massive stone pedestal the gifted statue would rest upon.

Charity fundraisers, such as one in 1883 to which amateur poet Emma Lazarus contributed her sonnet, The New Colossus (she called the statue “Mother of Exiles”) also came up short. Satirists suggested financing the pedestal by selling advertising space on the statue to liquor and cigarette companies.

Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer promoted an early version of a “go fund me” campaign that by 1885 raised enough cash through small donations to construct the pedestal. The hollow copper statue, supported by an armature designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Tower fame, reached New York in 1886 and took its place atop the pedestal. Because its torch and harbor location technically made it an aid to navigation, the U.S. Lighthouse Service managed the site, which became part of the National Park system in 1933.

Although Lady Liberty gained the most notoriety, the French government financed several quarter-size versions it sent around the world as symbols of imperial glory and power. One arrived in Hanoi in the newly conquered colony of French Indochina. Vietnamese nationalists destroyed it in 1945 amidst their struggle to gain independence.

The arrivals included single men, families and many unaccompanied minors. Between 1886 and the early 1920s, Lady Liberty’s uplifted torch provided the first glimpse of the United States shared among the more than 20 million immigrants sailing to the processing center on Ellis Island.

Massive waves of Eastern and Southern European immigrants began arriving in New York around the same time as the statue. Pushed out by clashing nationalisms, economic dislocation from global trade, and religious persecution, millions of Italians, Poles, Slavs and Eastern European Jews sought refuge in the United States.

For them and their descendants, the statue embodied America’s welcome.Before Lazarus’ sonnet became associated with the statue, another writer, Thomas Baily Aldrich, also invoked Lady Liberty as a potent symbol. His 1895 screed, Unguarded Gates, invoked the statue as a guardian against foreign assault. Aldrich wrote “wide open and unguarded stand our gates / and through them press a wild motley throng / Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / ... bringing with them unknown gods and rites ... accents of malice alien to our air / ... O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?”

In 1903, perhaps to counter Aldrich, friends of Lazarus (she
died young, in 1887), placed a bronze tablet with the words of her poem within the statue’s pedestal. But as the 20th century unfolded, Aldrich’s alarms found growing acceptance.

Restrictive measures had begun with Chinese exclusion, then with barriers to Japanese migration, followed by literacy tests. World War I halted most trans-Atlantic migration between 1914 and 1918.

Immigration opponents like the prominent writer and eugenicist Madison Grant used the hiatus to warn in his 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” that “Nordic” America faced “invasion” by racially inferior criminals, revolutionaries and degenerates. Adolf Hitler later called Grant’s work his “bible.” After peace brought a renewed exodus from Eastern and Southern Europe, Congress enacted rigid quotas in 1921 and 1924 that effectively blocked immigration from anywhere outside northwestern Europe.

With only small changes, these “paper walls” remained in place until 1965. Then, as a Great Society reform, Congress enacted a new immigration law that abolished most ethnic and racial quotas. Signing the bill as he stood before the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson re-kindled the promise embodied in Lazarus’* words:

Give me your tired, and your poor
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest tossed, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Michael Schaller is Regents’ Professor emeritus of history at the University of Arizona. He has written several books on U.S. history.

*Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist. She wrote the sonnet The New Colossus in 1883, which includes "lines of world-wide welcome". Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, installed in 1903.  The last stanza of the sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The last stanza was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women". Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867); Admetus, and other Poems (1871); Alide: an Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia, 1874); Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881); Poems, 2 vols. ; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.

America needs immigrants - workforce, field work, hospitality, care giving

An aging population will need immigrant caregivers

Frank Pierson Special to the Arizona Daily Star

"...this wouldn’t be the first time that immigrant workers responded to a national need. Consider mining, construction, field work, hospitality (including Donald Trump’s properties), landscaping, entrepreneurial startups and information technology

Aging American as in Arizona face major shortage of in-home caregivers."

Anybody with a family member suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, dementia or another long-term debilitation can attest to the problem. Help is hard to find and it is very, very expensive.

When my father experienced an eight-year descent into what a neurologist diagnosed as “advanced Lewy body disease,” then fell, broke his hip and required 24-hour care for the rest of his years, my family learned a lot about care giving.

Finding care givers became a never-ending challenge that got progressively harder over the years.

Crucial home-care workers, in Arizona, and everywhere, — including personal-care aides and home health aides — assist the elderly and physically disabled in their homes.

One in 4 caregivers are immigrants. They are the key linkage of the care giving issue to border and immigration policy.

Professor Dowell Myers, in his book “Immigrants and Boomers,” makes that connection explicit. Myers says that rapidly graying white America will require caregivers in unprecedented numbers, with immigrants the logical (and perhaps only) population capable of meeting the generational need.

In this regard, he says, “Demographics is destiny.”

Of course this wouldn’t be the first time that immigrant workers responded to a national need. Consider mining, construction, field work, hospitality (including President Trump’s properties), landscaping, entrepreneurial startups and information technology.

I thought of Myers’ book while watching a live stream of Steve Bannon and two politicians, Kris Kobach and Tom Tancredo (both losers in recent elections), trying to stoke the immigration-related fears of a mostly elderly white audience assembled in the Quail Creek Country Club (part of a Robson community in Sahuarita). 

The purpose of the event was to raise money for a privately funded wall between the USA and Mexico. Pleas were made to the audience for dollars to build a tiny wall section on private land allegedly made available for that purpose.

During the course of the event, no one jumped up to ask Mr. Bannon or his associates questions about the pressing need for an immigrant care giving workforce.

No one cited the demographics of desperation that will certainly impact a substantial number of those present and thousands more in Robson developments like it throughout Arizona.

No one took a moment to ponder the life circumstances of the triple amputee vet who served as Bannon’s poster child on the panel.

Steve Bannon offered the Quail Creek crowd a bevy of oft-debunked fictions to justify his pleas for private wall money.

Dowell Myers advances real numbers to justify a fresh approach to immigration policy. In calling for a new social contract Myers writes that the needs of elderly white people (and others) for care giving and much younger immigrants for meaningful work match up well.

Myers offers prospects for a cross generational negotiation built on mutual self interests.

Hopefully Bannon’s (and Trump’s) aging acolytes will wake up to the potential of a win-win politics while they and the nation as a whole still stand to benefit. The same could be said of politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Columnist Frank C. Pierson Jr. worked as a citizen organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation around the United States for 40 years until his retirement in 2014. 

He was the founding lead organizer of the Pima County Interfaith Council beginning in 1990. He lives in Oracle.

Two letters about the Trump shutdown - echo opinions from Arizona

I went directly to the newspaper where the immigration debate is seen by residents on both sides of the US border with Mexico.  

Two letter opinions published in the Arizona Daily Star, in Tucson immediately leaped off of the Tucson.com opinion page. In fact, there were even more letters, but I picked these two posted below. 

One from a citizen named Regula Case and the second is an opinion published by James E. Cook, the executive director for the Western National Parks Association, who described how the Trump Shutdown impacted on Arizona's National Parks. 

In my opinion, when I look at this rendering of what stupid Trump wants his useless $5.7 Billion dollar border wall to look like, I picture the horrific image of the first innocent immigrant who will undoubtedly be impaled by the spikes while desperately trying to enter the US.

The January 24 editorial from the Chicago Tribune (wrongly) decried the "petty" fight over the wall. But the reason for it has been simple: Trump wants his $5.7 billion solely so that he can crow to his base in 2020, "PROMISES KEPT." Never mind that $5.7 billion would pay but a small fraction of any "big, beautiful" wall. (In tantrum form!) He'll demand more (with what or who as hostage next time?). The Democrats are right to see that his insistence serves only his personal political ambitions, nothing more. Petty indeed. From Regula Case, Midtown Arizona

Impact of the shutdown opinion published in the Arizona Tucson Star.

While the government shutdown may have been abstract to many, it had real and devastating consequences for national parks and the people who care for them. Our beloved local and regional parks, such as Saguaro National Park and Tumacácori National Historical Park, are highly vulnerable without the full staff of professional rangers to protect them.

National parks protect our nation’s culture, wildlife, history and natural beauty, and we need to protect them in return. During this government shutdown, it is estimated the national parks are losing roughly $400,000 per day in vital income used to support programs and badly needed improvements to infrastructure.

We know the parks are sustaining damage that could take years to reverse. In some cases, the damage may be irreparable.

For many people, the shutdown disrupted a great American experience that only national parks can provide. 

We turn to national parks to experience spectacular wilderness. Families plan once-in-a-lifetime trips to learn about our history, schools use the parks to extend and enhance the classroom, and kids have “aha!” moments that last a lifetime.

It is not only the parks that suffered. Dedicated public servants, who care deeply about the resources of these beautiful public lands, work tirelessly to protect the parks and the people who visit them. Not only have they been unable to do their jobs, they don’t know when they will next be paid or the extent of damage they will find once they get back to work.

Gateway communities suffer when people cancel their trips to national parks, impacting hotels, restaurants, tour operators and other service providers.

Nonprofit National Park Service partner organizations such as the Western National Parks Association suffer, too. Headquartered in Tucson, WNPA supports 71 national parks across the West. WNPA employs 50 people in Southern Arizona alone and more than 150 people across the 12 states where it operates.

Many WNPA employees are locked out of their work sites and will be subject to furloughs due to the economic impact it is having on our organization.

Close to $600,000 in gross revenue was lost and the amount grew, which directly impacted the amount of aid given to partner-parks this year. This negatively affects our ability to fulfill our mission and support educational programs and research in parks.

National parks will need our support more than ever once the shutdown ends, and every one of us can help mitigate the damage done to them. Visit the parks, volunteer your time, and become a member of and donate to organizations like WNPA.

National parks tell America’s story. It is our responsibility to ensure these remarkable and treasured lands are preserved for everyone, for all time.

As of Saturday January 26, 2019, the US government is again open for business but it should never have been closed, in the first place, and it must never happen again.  #stoptheTrumpshutdown