Zona Politics Eps.14 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

On this week's Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: Meet the new chairs of the local political parties! Pima County Democratic Party Chairwoman Cheryl Cage and Pima County Republican Party Chairman Bill Beard introduce themselves to Tucsonans, unpack Gov. Doug Ducey's State of the State speech, talk about civics, discuss Martha's McSally's votes on immigration this week and much more. Watch it online here or tune into KGUN-9 at 9:30 a.m. Sunday morning.

As The Range teased yesterday, the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the United Kingdom's Beagle, a spacecraft that landed on Mars but was never heard from again.

Daniel Stolte of the UA News Service has details:

On Christmas Day 2003, a kitchen table-size lander descended onto the surface of the red planet on a mission to study the Martian surface and potential clues for life. The probe never called home, and no one knew what happened to it. Until now. The UK-led Beagle 2 Mars Lander, thought lost on Mars since 2003, has been found partially deployed on the surface of the planet, ending the mystery of what happened to the mission more than a decade ago.

Images taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, and initially searched by Michael Croon of Trier, Germany, a former member of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express operations team at the European Space Operations Centre, have identified clear evidence for the lander and convincing evidence for key entry and descent components on the surface of Mars within the expected landing area of Isidis Planitia, an impact basin close to the equator.

This finding shows that the Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, sequence for Beagle 2 worked and the lander did successfully touchdown on Mars on Christmas Day 2003.

"We've been looking for all the past landers with HiRISE, this is the first time we found one that didn't send a signal after it landed," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator of the HiRISE mission and professor in the UA's Lunar and Planetary Lab. "If the landing sequence works correctly, the probe sends a radio signal, and you can use that to pinpoint where it is coming from, even if it broadcasts only very briefly. But in the case of Beagle 2, we didn't get anything. All we had to go by was the target landing area."

What if they gave a high stakes test and nobody came? That's the question being asked by United Opt Out National as well a growing number of parents and educators around the country. The organization's three day Standing Up For Action Conference begins today in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Standing Up For Action is a working session for local and national activists, concerned parents, educators, students and all who have a general interest in equitable and quality public education. Attendees will leave equipped with plans of action to refuse, resist, and disrupt corporate and for-profit education reforms that have destroyed the democratic voice in public education decision making and have forced the implementation of policies damaging to students, educators, and communities.

If enough students opt out of the high stakes tests, test results become meaningless as a way of praising and punishing teachers, administrators and schools for their overall test scores. And that's the main point for people who believe that the yearly tests are a destructive force for American education in general and students in particular.

Opting out of Arizona's high stakes tests is tough, as it is in most states. I've been gathering information about the successes and failures of opt-outers in a number of states and plan to write about them in future posts.

We'll know more tomorrow, but it looks like the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have spotted a British spacecraft that crashed during its attempt to land on Mars in 2003. The Guardian reports:

A British Mars lander that was lost on its way to the red planet more than a decade ago may have been spotted by an orbiting spacecraft.

The Beagle 2 lander was supposed to touch down on Christmas day in 2003, but after it was released from its mothership, Mars Express, the dustbin-lid-sized craft was never heard from again.

But Beagle 2’s final resting place may finally have been discovered. Scientists operating the HiRise camera on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will take part in a press conference this Friday to announce “an update” on the ill-fated mission.

The HiRise camera is the only camera in Mars orbit that can image the surface in high enough detail to spot missing spacecraft. The HiRise team has already found the twin Viking landers which touched down on Mars in the 1970s and photographed Nasa’s Phoenix, Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. They have been actively hunting for Beagle 2 for several years.

“HiRise is the only camera at Mars that can see former spacecraft like Beagle 2. It’s definitely pretty close to its intended landing spot, no matter what. It entered the atmosphere at the right time and place,” said Shane Byrne, a scientist on the HiRise team at the University of Arizona. He said the team has been asked to keep more details of the announcement under wraps.

Do you happen to know the address of someone you hate? Do you happen to hate it when 22-year-olds stumble into surprisingly successful business ownership? Man, have I got the website for you.

Mathew Carpenter started Ship Your Enemies Glitter to anonymously, kinda evilly ruin someone's day in a really sparkly way.  

From the website:

We're going to be pouring a tonne of glitter into an envelope with a folded up piece of paper. You know what's going to happen when that fuckface opens the envelope & pulls out the letter? The craft herpes will be released & will go everywhere.

It's too popular. People hate other people too damn much, and now Carpenter can't keep up with the demand. If you want to punish him for his success, buy his product. 

“Hi guys, I’m the founder of this website,” Carpenter wrote on Product Hunt. “Please stop buying this horrible glitter product — I’m sick of dealing with it. Sincerely, Mat.”

But if you're into sparkles and hate, contact him. Looks like he's lookin' to sell.

ShipYourEnemiesGlitter with 1m visits, 270k social shares, $xx,xxx in sales, tonnes of people wanting to order. 24 hours old. For sale.

— Mathew Carpenter (@matcarpenter) January 14, 2015

Although I may or may not have eaten a donut for breakfast from La Estrella, you still might be on the straight and narrow righteous diet path—following through on those New Year's resolutions. If you are, congrats, but even if you're not, it can't hurt to cut a few calories in your boozing regimen. 

When it comes to drinking, health definitely isn't a prominent concern for most people, despite the fact that the cocktail itself was invented to be medicinal. However, if rich craft beer and decadent cocktails are starting to load you down, consider the gin rickey: a mix of gin, lime juice, and soda water.

In one gin rickey, there are 115 calories, about 1 carbohydrate, and a negligible amount of sugar and sodium. Since it has lime juice, it even has a bit of vitamin C. Plus, compared to light beer, which has about 100 calories but 5 times the carbs, and red wine, which has both more calories and carbs, gin rickeys make a lot of sense.

More importantly, compared to the terrible taste of light beer, the gin rickey is the obvious choice. Lightly tart and very clean, it's good for both summer and winter. You can keep your rickey interesting by switching up the gin you choose, adding new flavors each time.

If you haven't learned by now that gin does not have to taste like a bunch of pine cones (though some people dig juniper-forward gin), try the gin from Farmers, Hendrick's, Juniper Green, or anything from St. George's line-up. Arizona Distilling Co.'s Desert Dry gin also has a killer (and award-winning) botanical blend including cardamom, coriander, lavender, and citrus that is so drinkable it can be enjoyed neat—something even I as a crazy gin lady hesitate to do.

Any bartender in town should be able to pour an ounce and a half of your gin of choice and juice half of a lime over ice and then top it off with soda water, so the drink is appropriate to call out even at a dive bar. You can also easily make this one at home once you've bought a bottle of your favorite gin.

However, if your resolution was to give up drinking, please disregard this post and, um, good luck with that.

I should have caught this myself. When Governor Ducey said 96 percent of Arizona students can't pass the civics test given to new citizens to justify a mandatory civics test for high school students, I should have remembered the discredited Goldwater Institute survey he got his figure from. But it took today's AP article to remind me.

The survey Ducey relied upon was done for the Goldwater Institute and is widely cited by groups promoting civics education.

But Goldwater spokeswoman Starlee Coleman told The Associated Press on Wednesday the institute withdrew the survey results in 2009 after a company that conducted the survey for Goldwater failed to show its basic research met Goldwater's standards. Another survey done for an Oklahoma group showing similar dismal testing results also has been discredited.

The reason I should have remembered is, I wrote a slew of posts about the bogus survey back in 2009 when I was writing on Blog for Arizona. A quick search brought up a dozen of my old posts, including this one, which looked at research into the Strategic Vision LLC, the company Goldwater Institute hired to do the survey: Fooled Gold? Another look at the G.I. Civics Test. 

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight believes Strategic Vision LLC concocts fraudulent surveys on a regular basis. In case you haven't heard of Silver, . . . If you're looking for the smartest guy in the room — more specifically, in any room where statistics are the topic — Ladner and I would be hanging around in dark corners looking confused and Silver would be standing in the spotlight with other stat heads gathered around listening to what he had to say.

At the end of the post is a long list of articles about the bad data from Nate Silver, Politico and Pollster.com.

Ladner, who I referred to in the post, is Matthew Ladner. He used to be G.I.'s education guy before he was snatched up by Jeb Bush to work at his conservative "education reform" group, Foundation for Excellence in Education. (Ladner surfaced recently as a member of Ducey's education transition team.) Ladner was a frequent commenter on my posts back then, and he defended the survey data but said he would look into possible problems. I guess he did, because on the Goldwater Institute's website, instead of the article about the study, Freedom From Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students, there's this:

Questions have been raised about results of a polling survey cited in the material that had been posted on this web page. The material has been removed while the Goldwater Institute reviews the information underlying those results to determine if it complies with the Institute’s research guarantee.

Nicoll Hernández-Polanco is a Guatemalan transgender woman who is currently detained in an all-male Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Florence. In October 2014, she turned herself in to border agents and right away requested asylum after fleeing her native country following years of sexual and physical violence and harassment for being transgender.

From a press release sent by Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa of Mariposas Sin Fronteras and Olga Tomchin of the Transgender Law Center:

In her first month in detention, Nicoll was patted down 6-8 times a day by male guards, who Nicoll reported would grope her breasts and buttocks, make offensive sexual comments and gestures, and sometimes pull her hair. In addition to physically harassing Nicoll, ICE staff routinely verbally abuse her because of her gender identity. Nicoll has informed Tucson-based LGBTQ group Mariposas Sin Fronteras that she has been called slurs including “f***ing gay,” “bitch,” and “the woman with balls” in front of other detainees. Witnesses have heard a female guard refer repeatedly to Nicoll as “it”. Nicoll was recently punished by ICE for standing up for her human dignity by being placed in solitary confinement for "insolence."

Since she's in an all-male detention center—because she was assigned the sex male at birth, she is "legally" she's male—Nicoll is required to be in that facility and thus shower with men. She was sexually assaulted in December, according to the press release, and although an investigation allegedly took place, the results of that investigation are unknown. 

"What Nicoll is facing at the detention center is part of the larger reality of violence that immigrant trans women of color face in our society at large," said Isa Noyola, program manager at the Transgender Law Center. "Our communities are rallying together demanding her release and an end to immigration detention for all transgender women."

The release says that ICE refuses to release Nicoll, because "her past deportations when she was an unaccompanied minor...render her a priority for detention under (President Barack Obama's) recent immigration executive action announcement," the release said.

Transgender Law Center and other LGBTQ/immigrant rights groups have created a petition asking ICE to release Nicoll immediately: http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/portfolio/freenicoll/

ICE is no stranger to allegations of abuse, especially against LGBTQ detainees. The accusations are overflowing and it's gotten to the point where ICE can't hide from them anymore.

From the release:

LGBTQ people and especially transgender women of color are disproportionately excluded from the President’s relief. Additionally, a large coalition of over 115 LGBTQ, immigrant rights, and allied organizations called on the White House last month to immediately release LGBTQ people like Nicoll from immigration detention due to the dangerous conditions they face in detention.

I contacted an ICE spokesperson, and I'm waiting for a response to the allegations.

Local musicians Frederick Huang and Kyle Gutierrez were robbed of about $7,500 of equipment on the night of Dec. 15. Luckily, that's not the end of the story: Texas Justice, Gabriel Sullivan, Billy Sedlmayr, and Shudder Kong will be playing at Club Congress on Friday night to help raise some money so they can recoup some of what they lost that night.

According to a message from Huang on the crowdfunding website Rocket Hub, the following items were stolen from the two men:

Kyle's 1972 Fender Jazz Bass, the one he's had for over a decade, was stolen. His 1966 Fender Duo Sonic was taken. My custom made Jazzmaster, the one I slowly put together over the course of months, was stolen. The jerks also took Kyle's Epiphone Sheraton, brand new Macbook Pro, and wallet, as well as my Danelectro Bass VI and a set of keys (I then had to spend an extra couple hundred dollars re-keying my home and car). Our friend, Dave, had a Peavy guitar at my house that Kyle and I were working on and that was stolen too. All together, we lost about $7500 worth of stuff — that's a conservative estimate. And the insurance company didn't give us any money.

You can support Huang and Gutierrez by donating to that Rocket Hub campaign or you can donate in a much more fun way by going to Club Congress on Friday, Jan. 16. There's a $5 suggested donation and the show starts at 9 p.m. It's a 21 and over event.

Phil Plait at Slate's Bad Astronomy blog highlights a recent photo captured by the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

On Earth, you don’t usually get craters this size; our atmosphere slows and stops smaller rocks from space. The air on Mars is less than 1 percent the thickness of ours at the surface, so smaller rocks get through.

The impactor apparently came in from the west (left). It dug a hole big enough to excavate material under the surface, which appears much darker. You can see the characteristic splatter pattern of chunks thrown out, dripping debris down in long plumes, too. This is pretty amazing; we don’t usually see this so cleanly in new craters!