When I come across some new music that I love, it's a little bit of both nirvana and torture at the same time.

I can't get enough. I want to play the new stuff over and over and over again until I'm almost, but not quite sick of it. That's what's going on right now with Hold Steady, this band from Brooklyn. Their new album, Stay Positive, is set on repeat in the house and in the car and in my head.

I missed the recent show at the Rialto, and now I'm pissed. I've been paying extra attention to the songs "Sequestered in Memphis," "Slapped Actress" and "Stay Positive." 

Sometimes I tend to look at things too often through a mystical POV--that everything happens for a reason or can have some power to change things up again when we can't. I remember feeling that way after Sept. 11 when certain movies or music came out--they were like blessings.

Same here with Hold Steady. McCain is waving that tired old GOP treason flag. An considering the rest of the crap that's happening and not happening ... I've been thinking that this band Hold Steady could be just what we need right now to get us through November. 

After that, I hope I find something else.

In this week's Skinny--out Thursday, Aug. 21--we mention Chris Chandler and his son Riley, a classmate of Jose Rincon's when they attended St. Michael's last year. Rincon died in March after being hit on his bike by a car allegedly driven by Glenda Rumsey. At the age of 14, Jose was taken from his mother and father, and his two sisters, obviously too early--he had an incredible life of promise ahead of him.

The Chandler's have put up three of the four ghost bike memorials at the intersection of Broadway and Vozack, where Jose was hit, along with his friend Oscar Perez, who survived. Jose was spending the night at Oscar's house, and the boys were riding their bikes along the road when a car came up from behind them.

That was it. The Rincon family’s life was changed forever, and Oscar's, as well as Riley's and all their classmates.

On Sunday, Aug. 17, Chris and Riley, along with Oscar, put up a fourth bike--again in a block of cement so it could stand on its own and be hard to steal or vandalize. But time will tell; we wrote that it seems someone out there really pays attention to the media--both the morning daily and the Tucson Weekly--on the status of Jose's ghost bike.

The first bike, put up by Ari Shapiro in May, was taken. The second and third bikes, put up by the Chandlers, have both been taken. Now the fourth bike is up. I guess we'll see what happens.

The Chandlers wanted to put one up again to tell the coward taking the bikes that they aren't going to forget about Jose--but they aren't sure if they are up for putting up a fifth or more if this continues.

When I talked to tucsonbikelawyer.com's Erik Ryberg yesterday, he said it would be good to remind folks that BICAS (call them at 628-7950) has collected bikes just for people like the Chandlers who want to put up ghost bikes in memory of someone who died while riding their bike on Tucson's streets.

The bicycling community has always struck me as one that cares and I can't imagine they are alone. I can't imagine that Tucson is ready to forget about Jose Rincon.

In the Aug. 14 Tucson Weekly, John Brakey wrote a letter to the editor in which he discussed the allegations of vote-flipping in the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election. We asked him for some documentation before running the letter, and he provided it.

Here is a PDF of said documentation.

Who knew that when former Tucson Citizen staffer Ann-Eve Pedersen started Tucson Unified School Supporters—in what would become a successful effort to challenge the Tucson Unified School District’s school-closure plan—that it would inevitably bring her brother-in-law Paul Eckerstrom back to political life?

Eckerstrom, a former Pima County Democratic Party chairman, is often credited with getting the party’s act together earlier this decade. He’d planned on running against County Attorney Barbara LaWall in the Democratic primary this year, but Eckerstrom had a change of heart, as The Skinny reported back in January.

How lucky for TUSS and Pedersen.

Eckerstrom was introduced by Pedersen at a TUSS meeting on Sunday, Aug. 17, as the campaign chair for the latest TUSS effort: supporting Proposition 403, an override bond package that will ask voters in November to increase their property taxes to get more funds into TUSD.

The last time TUSD asked voters to approve an override was in 2004—and that proposition failed. Back then, however, TUSD didn’t have Pedersen and TUSS.

At the Aug. 17 meeting, before introducing her brother-in-law, Pedersen explained that the new override package will provide almost $27 million in additional funding to TUSD every year for the next seven years. The increase in property taxes, according to TUSS e-mails, will cost average homeowners, with a home assessed at $151,000, about $120 a year in property taxes.

Pedersen gave everyone the Prop 403 pitch: It would allow TUSD to keep class sizes down for K-2 students and middle school math students; expand Opening Minds Through the Arts (OMA) to all TUSD schools; and recruit hard-to-fill positions, like math and science teachers, as well as special-education teachers and staff.

“I want her to succeed,” Pedersen said, referring to TUSD’s new superintendent, Dr. Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, who replaced Pfeuffer in July. “I don’t think she can do it without our support. I don’t want to be (in front of the school board) every year to fight over the scraps.”

Celania-Fagen gave her own presentation at the meeting, but quickly left before the TUSS prop-campaign kickoff. (By law, TUSD and its staff cannot campaign for the override.) Celania-Fagen began with a multimedia presentation that showed teachers in cinema, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to Dead Poet’s Society.

It’s the same presentation that she’s been showing to teachers throughout the district, and the buzz is that it’s earning Celania-Fagen standing ovations. She is using it to tout her vision for TUSD and the possibility of creating schools that have different specialties to compete against charter schools—and as an alternative to closing schools.

TUSS is saying the override could also help prevent the school-closures mess from returning. And most likely, Pedersen and Eckerstrom figure that if the teachers like Celania-Fagen and her presentation so much, so will voters.

The final pitch was all about donations: TUSS has $23,000 in the bank, and needs $177,000 more to get to its $200,000 goal.

More layoffs are coming to the Tucson Citizen. This memo was sent to Citizen staffers:

Citizen employees,

As all of you are aware, our national and local economy has been struggling for the better part of two years. The housing market crisis has spread to many other businesses causing a continued negative impact on our revenues. Newspapers are caught in a double bind: economic downturn and advertising revenue being siphoned off into other mediums.

In light of these difficult business conditions, the U.S. Community Publishing division of Gannett, to which we belong, has asked each of its newspaper sites to reduce expenses by reducing the number of people we employ. Each site was given a target based on its financial performance.

As we determine how best to achieve our target, we will ensure that the reductions are consistent with our strategic objectives.

For the Community Publishing division as a whole, the payroll reduction amount translates to roughly 1,000 fewer positions, requiring about 600 people to be laid off. That’s a reduction of about 3 percent.

At TNI and the Citizen, our target is about 30 positions – about 2 percent of the combined workforce. At TNI, about half of the reductions will need to come from layoffs. At the Citizen, the staff reductions will come primarily through layoffs.

Upon our review and followed by approval from the Community Publishing division, individuals being laid off will be notified by the end of August. A severance package of a minimum of two weeks pay plus one week of pay for each year of service (52 week maximum) will be provided and medical benefits will continue throughout the severance period. Other benefits that may be available will be discussed on an individual basis.

While we prefer to avoid further staff reductions, we must be realistic and understand that if revenues continue to decline, payroll reductions may be

evaluated again in the future.

I believe that what we create here with the newspaper and Web site will continue to be relevant and reliable sources of information. Nearly two-thirds of all adults in Pima County read one of the two newspapers and/or look at the Web sites every week.

While these steps we are taking are painful, I hope we can all emerge from this economic downturn stronger.

Jennifer Boice

Interim Editor

State trust land reform isn't going to happen this year.

This just in from Jan Brewer:

PHOENIX -- Secretary of State Jan Brewer today officially disqualified Proposition 103, the "Conserving Arizona's Water and Land Initiative" as the measure lacked the minimum number of signatures to qualify for the November General Election ballot. The proponents for the Initiative had initially turned in 369,708 petition signatures of which 158,883 were deemed invalid after the verification and processing of petitions by the Secretary of State's office and county recorders.

On July 28th, the Secretary of State had reported that the Conserving Water and Land Initiative had 336,405 signatures still eligible (after removing 33,303 signatures), the remaining signatures still needed to be checked by the county recorders. A random sample of 5 percent of signatures was then processed by the county recorders to verify voter registration and petition signatures. That process ultimately removed another 125,580 signatures as being invalid.

"It seems very clear to me this year that the unfortunate practice of paying circulators by the signature seems to directly correlate to the significant amount of bad signatures being collected," stated Sec. of State Brewer. "As I have called for in the past, the Legislature should look closely at this problem and at the problem of privately funded voter registration drives that aren't properly getting people registered," added Sec. Brewer, "In the end both of these problems are negatively affecting this years' petition process as being among the largest failure rates in the history of our state."

Under the Arizona Revised Statutes in § 19-121, the Secretary of State removes ineligible signatures and invalid petition sheets, and then the county recorders further verify voter registrations. After concluding the entire verification process on Proposition 203, the Secretary of State determined that the Conserving Water and Land petitions final total of 210,825 valid signatures failed to meet the 230,047 minimum signature requirements for a constitutional amendment.

"The verifying process of checking millions of petition signatures is something my office takes very seriously in compliance with the Arizona Revised Statutes," stated Sec. Brewer.

To date, six ballot measures have been qualified to be on the November ballot. Three measure have been disqualified. Two other citizen initiatives are still being verified by the county recorders.

UPDATE: Pat Graham, the chairman, of the Our Land, Our Schools Committee (the peeps behind this initiative, have this to say:

"While we are obviously disappointed by the Secretary of State’s decision to disqualify Proposition 103, the Our Land, Our Schools initiative, we are confident that after our initial review of the disqualified voter signatures, we will be able to have this measure restored to its place on the November 2008 general election ballot."

"The good news about the Secretary of State’s decision is that now, we can vigorously pursue the remedies to ensure that voters have the opportunity to be heard on this important issue affecting many future generations of Arizonans."

In other words: They're getting lawyered up.

The new issue is online and ready for your perusal. Feel free to comment on its contents here! And enjoy the online Ask a Mexican!

This just in from the Secretary of State's Office:

Secretary of State Jan Brewer today officially disqualified Proposition 203, the "Transportation and Infrastructure Moving AZ's Economy" (TIME) Initiative as the measure lacked the minimum number of signatures to qualify for the November General Election ballot. The proponents for the TIME Initiative had initially turned in 260,698 petition signatures of which 122,247 were deemed invalid after the verification and processing of petitions by the Secretary of State's office and county recorders.

On July 24, the Secretary of State had reported that TIME had 238,874 signatures still eligible (after removing 21,824 signatures), (and) the remaining signatures still needed to be checked by the county recorders.

Random samples of 5 percent of signatures are then processed by the county recorders to verify voter registration and petition signatures.

That process ultimately removed another 100,423 signatures as being invalid.

"I am very surprised that a ballot measure ended up with over 42 percent of its signatures being invalid," stated Secretary of State Brewer, "that is among the largest overall invalid rates that I can recall ever seeing from a citizens initiative drive."

Under the Arizona Revised Statutes in 19-121, the Secretary of State removes ineligible signatures and invalid petition sheets, and then the county recorders further verify voter registrations. After concluding the entire verification process on Proposition 203, the Secretary of State determined that the TIME petition final total of 138,451 valid signatures failed to meet the 153,365 minimum signature requirements for a statutory amendment.

"The verifying process of checking millions of petition signatures is something my office took very seriously in compliance with the Arizona Revised Statutes," stated Sec. Brewer. Brewer added, "In the end it seems to me we've seen too many problems and abuses with the gathering of petitions, and perhaps this is now a lesson that it's time to reform the overall petition gathering system as I had proposed over the last few years."

Secretary Brewer had offered several legislative fixes to the petition gathering system in recent years, including one to ban payment to circulators by the signature. "Paying circulators by the signature invites fraud and too often leads to unnecessary errors," said Sec.

Brewer, "it remains to be seen what the reasons were for the high rate of invalid signatures in this matter."

To date, six ballot measures have been qualified to be on the November ballot. Two measure have been disqualified. Three other citizen initiatives are still being verified by the county recorders.

While biking around, I tend to pay attention to the buildings, the people and the murals on the sides of the buildings more than I do zooming in my car.

I started taking pictures. Here's the first--this great building in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood. Anyone out there know its history? 

There are several ways to look at this whole John Edwards affair and the media frenzy that has joined it. Of course, when I first heard the rumors that he'd had an affair, it was a month ago when a tabloid was toting the story and trying to get a comment from Edwards, saying that they had photos.

Because a tabloid was involved, I questioned whether it was true, but still wondered in the back of my mind. I think we've all become accustomed to the idea that a high-powered, good-looking man is going to get around a bit, especially those running for president or already in office. 

When I heard that Edwards finally admitted it was true (after weeks of denying the affair and watching his former staffers defend him), I also thought, "Why can't guys like these just keep their zippers up? What is it with power and the penis?"

And I wondered about Paul Tsongas--yes, little ol' Paul Tsongas. Remember him? I can't imagine the guy getting it on during his campaign. Sure, Tsongas didn't have the nice-nice hair, like Clinton and Edwards, and he had that little face and stature. He was a not a presidential hottie. Perhaps that's my own bias. 

Now, I'm thinking about reality. What if Edwards' wife knew about this affair all along? What if it really wasn't an affair, and this woman was simply part of a polyamorous relationship that was honest and well-intentioned? But in this society, that just doesn't fly right, and that's why someone like Elizabeth Edwards has to issue a statement that says, "I knew, he told me, I was hurt and we worked through it." If she issued a statement that said, "John and I are in love and committed to each other and our children, but we also have relationships outside our marriage that are meaningful and important, etc," that would be a different story, and we wouldn't be sitting around blaming power and the penis, or Edwards' wonderful hair. That would be a powerful story that would make these women married to these men far more interesting than being labeled a victim. 

And that would mean we wouldn't have to listen to shock-and-awe media stories about a candidate's life gone wrong with power and his penis. Or we would have to change the way we look at possible presidential candidate--and vote for more people like Paul Tsongas.