Thank you to the community
The Cave Creek Museum hosted a Spur Cross Ranch Reunion on Friday, February 28. The reunion was a big success and we would like to thank the following merchants for their contribution of wonderful food: The Buffalo Chip Saloon, Cartwright's, Popcorn Galor, Tonto Bar & Grill and Venues. Thanks also to the committee and the volunteers who helped make this event happen. It was an evening to reminisce and celebrate what one small community did to preserve over 2,000 acres of unspoiled desert. Thank you to all who attended.
Evelyn Johnson, Executive Director
Sue Mueller, Board President
Cave Creek Museum
Spur Cross
The agreement to preserve Spur Cross was signed in 2000, following many years of community-wide effort to protect its 2,200 acres of Sonoran desert from development.
That was 14 years ago. My, how time flies.
Recently about 150 “Friends of Spur Cross” gathered in reunion at the Cave Creek Museum, the very place that houses the community’s history. Many of them were attired in the famed “Puma Save Spur Cross” tee-shirt. Each person had a story to tell, a memory to be shared. But all stories eventually led to a common theme: the collective effort of a people to save a desert.
More than a land preservation effort, Spur Cross was a signature moment in Cave Creek’s history: a community of people defined what they wanted their community to be. Spur Cross didn’t make the spirit to volunteer fashionable; it made it essential to the style of life Cave Creek people live by. Volunteerism is prevalent in the community; be it between neighbors, or among our many non-profit organizations, or coming from our organizations that put on community events, the spirit to volunteer is the easy-to-spot dynamic.
Spur Cross may have spawned the volunteer ethic. But the ethic didn’t end once Spur Cross was saved. Volunteerism is woven into the idea of community life in the same way wilderness is the integral reality of Spur Cross. It is too simplistic to say Spur Cross inspired us all. More apropos would be to admit Spur Cross enhanced all our lives.
Fourteen years later, Spur Cross continues to enhance a community.
Mayor Vincent Francia
Cave Creek
Spoof Space, February 19 in Sonoran News
Great column, and as for listening to Krauthammer, I couldn't agree with you more. What an extraordinarily intelligent man! ...
RM Joslyn
Email
Dominoes
The violence in Ukraine and Venezuela should come as a wake up call for America. This is further evidence of the collapse in world order. (Let's not forget the monetary chaos in Greece, Spain and Italy.) The Arab Spring brought the fall of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and others, all for the same reasons; they want what we have and are giving up. For sixty-plus years Americans have enjoyed unprecedented individual freedom and national prosperity. Both are ebbing away.
Our national troubles come not from adverse circumstances, but how we react to them.
Dependence on foreign oil and the fall of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains flooding the marketplace with low cost labor were game changers. Our reaction was denial of their effect. These events brought soaring energy prices and off-loaded American jobs.
Thomas Sowell said, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." How right he is. Thanks to our present crop of politicians we are well along the path to self destruction; in this instance finance and politics are everything, to correct one we must win the other.
Regaining (saving) our National Power cannot, this time, be a bi-partisan effort, but requires a reversal of current policy or risk becoming one of the dominoes.
Randy Edwards
Cave Creek
Dear Dr. Burdick
I was in dismay after learning that the resurfaced track at Cactus Shadows was not going to be open to the public as advertised when money was being raised for projects at the high school. The AZCentral website site reported on October 17, that the resurfaced track would be open for public use when school was not in session or not being used for special events.
This past President's Day I went to the track only to find it locked up. I had talked previously to Dr. Friesen about use of the track and was told as long as it was for personal use, not being used for special events and school was not in session it could be used. I contacted him again and he said the policy had changed and to contact Mike Ziwicki. I have, but not received an updated policy.
I hopped the fence, to use the track as did another gentlemen, and saw no damage to the track afterwards. In the past I was told that it was locked due to vandalism. Well if I, at 57 years old, can hop the fence I am sure locking the gates is going to be of no use. As a matter of fact, I have seen the local fire department hop the fence to work out on the track. So unless this is meant to keep out the super senior citizens of Sun City I don't believe this is a valid defense.
I liken this to going in to buy a car you see in the paper and all of a sudden this car is gone but they will sell you something else. If the “new policy” had been published before the track was resurfaced I might have understood but probably not. There is more damage done to that track by workers driving their trucks, not the golf cart, on the track surface to get ice at the snack bar for their personal ice chest than running on it for years. I have witnessed this more than once. I sincerely hope a policy can be worked out that allows the public use of the track as promised.
Chuck Grooms
Email
Now here's a challenge
Given your political slant I doubt you will print this but I figure it’s worth a try.
What our “why do we pay them?” legislature had done was to create a cure for which there is no disease. Since no one seems to be able to come up with a single instance that necessitated this bill, why not keep going. Here’s my first suggestion. Make it illegal to house a Boeing 747 in one’s garage. Or you could make it against the law to feed empty tin cans to the giraffes at our zoo. These guys apparently have nothing better to do.
What seems to be lost is that the bill doesn’t mention the word “gay” or the letters LGBT, which means it would have allowed for much wider discrimination. If the Catholic owner of a store heard someone, standing on line, mention that they had made a contribution to Planned Parenthood, they could be refused service. If a Jehovah’s Witness learned that a potential customer had a son, whose life was saved because of a blood transfusion, they may not be able to order anything. If the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise discovered that the store next to his/hers was going to be open on Sunday, they would be within their rights to not offer their menu to their owner, or even employees – on Saturday (wouldn’t it be ironic of one of those really hungry people were a Republican member of our State Legislature).
I challenge your readers to provide the name/number of two bills or propositions that have been in the news, in any of the other 49 states over the last decade. I’ll even give them a head start – Prop 8 in California. But, both amazingly and sadly, people in those 49 have become quite knowledgeable about SB 1070, SB 1062, and our initial vote vis a vis Martin Luther King Day.
Finally, what is beyond troubling are those who said that they voted for the bill because they didn’t quite understand the language. If this were the tax code (77,000 pages, and growing almost every day), or the Affordable Care Act (2,000 pages) that might be understandable. But SB 1062 is less than two pages long. It contains 646 words but, if you subtract the superfluous stuff, along with the unnecessary “legalese” it’s less than 400. In fact, it’s shorter than this letter, and I’ll bet that none of your readers will have a problem figuring out what I’m saying. So, it appears that if we referred to some of those in the State Senate and House as mental midgets, we would be offering far too much praise.
We are headed to the point where our motto will become “Arizona – The State that Offends Almost Everyone.”
Oh yes, one other viewpoint. A commentator stated that if Arizona had Seattle’s weather, we would be looked at as a toxic nuclear waste dump.
Philip Barnett
Scottsdale
"Homosexual Civil Rights" is an oxymoron
What happened to religious liberty and a church or business reserved right to "refuse service to anyone." Businesses that refuse service to homoelectives, even on religious grounds, are being sued successfully in some states for door-closing amounts of money by homoelectives that, by definition, do not qualify for minority class protection from discrimination; as homosexual sex is non-compulsory in that one can choose to abstain from sexual relations just as one can choose what kind of sex to engage in and with whom or what within the law (children should never be an option although pedophilia is next on the ACLU list for sexual orientation normalization).
On a recent trip to Houston, my wife used a hotel restaurant women's restroom. She was shocked to see a urinal in there. The way things are going, I imagine a business owner will soon be sued for not plumbing a urinal in the ladies room! The LGBT (Love Gone Bad Today) think Transgenders and Transsexuals are wildcards from Transyltopsyturvia that legitimize their cause with even more confusion. Transgenders and Transsexuals are just homoelectives that have taken their homosexuality to the next level of perversion (sinful inequality).
"Homosexual Civil Rights" is an oxymoron. It is morally wrong to give legal rights or discrimination protection to those that choose to practice homosexual sex for a multitude of reasons that are consistent with the Constitution of the United States of America and the preservation of it, and in turn, our country. Like a drivers license, a marriage license is a privilege, not a right under the 14th Amendment. Some restrictions apply in all states such as age, blood health and type compatibility, relative consanguinity, number of spouses and gender of prospective spouses and their mental competency. As recently as 1986, homosexuality was regarded as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.
For all are subject to the Law of the Harvest; reaping what is sewn, and homosexuals sew their seed in stony ground. California farmers and ranchers know what I'm talking about. Abraham Lincoln warned us that: "As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." Before supporting legal rights or discrimination protection for homoelectives, one should ask him or herself two questions: Was I better off before homosexuals became "gay" and prideful?; and: Can I afford another year of gay pride?
I think everyone should have an em-blazoned “Love Gone Bad Today” t-shirt in their closet where homoelectives should be.
Sincerely,
Michael W. Jarvis
Salt Lake City, Utah
In response to Mr. Romano
You published an editorial by Robert Romano, titled "What the Heck Do We Need a Federal Communications Commission for?" Obviously, he's ignorant of what the FCC actually does during a year's time. Here, for example, are just a few of the things that agency has done in the last year:
(May 2013) ... penalized Taylor Oilfield Manufacturing $126,000 because it illegally installed cell phone jammers (purchased from China) that not only stopped employees from making or receiving calls but which were also strong enough to jam phones off the company's premises and were capable of blocking emergency 911 calls.
(May 2013) ... penalized Sorensen Communications $15 million for its improper use of the federal disability fund.
(June 2013) ... issued over a thousand new low-power community radio licenses to nonprofit
organizations and community groups.
(July 2013) ... strengthened the standards for phone providers that offer third-party services to assist people with speech disabilities.
(July 2013) ... approved the overhaul of the E-Rate program to provide schools and libraries with up-to-date telecommunications service and equipment, the most important being high-speed Internet connections.
(Oct 2013) ... fined five cellular service providers $14.4 million for violating the rules of the Lifeline phone subsidy program;
(Oct 2013) ... created a rule that established a national network to replace a patchwork of systems that were used by about 60,000 public safety agencies, thus providing better coordination among first responders and allowing for video and other rich data types to be transmitted.
(Oct 2013) ... forced phone companies to complete calls to rural numbers instead of just dropping them.
(Oct 2013) ... mandated that cell phone customers must express written consent before they're able to receive any telemarketing calls or SMS messages.
(Nov. 2013) ... awarded $31.6 million to the Puerto Rico Telephone Company to service 100,000 people, as well as $1 million to bring broadband Internet to 1,217 homes and businesses in Hawaii and another $174,000 to 316 sites in Alaska.
(Dec 2013) ... blocked AT&T's attempt to increase – by 15 to 25 percent -- the rate by which it bills other telecoms to use its access lines.
It may not be the bells and whistles that Mr. Romano prefers, but those are some answers to his question, "What the heck do we need a federal communications commission for?" You can be sure that none of that would get done if it were left up to the media moguls to do it.
Howard Lauther
Cincinnati, Ohio
Your American duty
We The People have been providentially provided lawful recourse to address the criminal conduct of persons themselves entrusted to dispense justice. In the Supreme Court case United States v. Williams, 112 S.Ct. 1735, 504 U.S. 36, 118 L.Ed.2d 352 (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, confirmed that the American Grand Jury is neither part of the judicial, executive nor legislative branches of government, but instead belongs to the people. It is in effect a fourth branch of government “governed” and administered by and on behalf of the American people, and its authority emanates from the Bill of Rights.
Thus we have the unbridled right to empanel our own grand juries and present “True Bills” of indictment to a court, which is then required to commence a criminal proceeding. Our Founding Fathers presciently thereby created a “buffer” the people may rely upon for justice, when public officials, including judges, criminally violate the law.
To see an informative video and join as a Jurist visit http://NationalLibertyAlliance.org.
Clare Reading
Apache Junction
Vegetarian diet
This week’s Time Magazine cites several reasons for vegetarians living longer. The article was prompted by a report in American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine that a vegetarian diet lowers blood pressure, a key factor in risk of heart failure and stroke.
The Mayo Clinic notes that vegetarians are at lower risk for developing diabetes, another factor in heart disease. Indeed, an Oxford University study of 45,000 adults in last year’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that vegetarians were 32 percent less likely to suffer from heart disease.
Moreover, researchers at California’s Loma Linda University, examining records of 70,000 patients, concluded last year that a vegetarian diet protects against colorectal and other types of cancer.
It’s no wonder that a 2012 Harvard University study of 120,000 people concluded that meat consumption raises the risk of total, heart, and cancer mortality. A more recent six year study of 70,000 patients at Loma Linda found that vegetarians have a 12 percent lower risk of death.
The good news: each of us can find our own fountain of youth by adopting a meat and dairy-free diet. An internet search on "vegan recipes" or "live vegan" provides ample resources.
Sincerely,
Carl Devlin
Cave Creek
Bad news for Arizona Democrats
As you cover Congressman Pastor’s retirement and the horserace to replace him, consider the impact this will have on other races in the state (Barber, Sinema, Kirkpatrick):
“With what promises to be a spectacle of a primary, the liberal dollars in Arizona have another more appealing place to go than the state’s three vulnerable Democrats, who need every dollar they can get to survive the weight of ObamaCare and an unpopular president in November.”
Daniel Scarpinato
NRCC
