Arizona still basically just a shitty place

Brett, do you propose that the state of Arizona should own all of the real estate within its borders? If not, I am perplexed about why you think the state of Arizona should own the Grand Canyon strictly on the basis that it is located within state borders.

Yeah, the "but the federal government owns a third of our land" argument might carry a little more weight if they were doing anything with the other two thirds.

I believe it's even worse than that. If the attack ads are to be believed, Jeff Flake wants to lease the land in the upper canyon to uranium miners.

Not that that precludes Grand Canyonland, just that it would be sub-titled "Radiation Poisoning and Lingering Cancer Risk included in the Price of Admission!!"

Why limit it to the upper canyon? And let's not forget, if they poison they water they get the "bonus" of affecting people outside the state.

But all that is secondary to selling landfill space. I mean, most of the time when you get a big crack in something, you fix it. The Grand Canyon is a problem that has gone unfixed long enough. Time to fill that sucker in.

It costs 2-3 million a year (from the last reports I could find) to run the Canyon. I don't think Arizona is doing this because they feel the state should bear the cost burden of the park, and instead wish to monetize it in some way.

It's a national park. I didn't think those were particularly controversial things.

But anyways, the vote isn't about the Grand Canyon. It's about the land right next to it that contains Uranium and the Feds aren't allowing to be mined because it would probably damage the National Park. Arizona doesn't want the Canyon or it's money pit nature. They want to take the land from the Feds and monetize it. Amusingly in the past this was done by buying the land from the feds (which is why most of the western half of the country is still Federal Land: the states didn't want to bother paying to maintain all that empty land so they never bought it from the Feds) Arizona can't buy this particular strip of land that they want, so they're trying to somehow claim they're allowed to just take it from the current owners.

Oh, you don't, do you? Well, let me tell you about ANOTHER group that had the word "National" in their name.... THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY.

Game, set, Brett.

It says Party right in the name! I want to go to there!

Some dippy-ass Arizonan wanting to charge people admission and claiming mineral rights all up the canyon was precisely (largely) what led to it being made a National Park in the first place. Come on, Arizona, you fought this fight and you lost to Teddy Roosevelt. Don't embarrass yourselves.

Stop dressing this up as a states' rights issue. What this is, is an attempt by mining interests to get control of the land into the hands of their local government cronies. The end result for Arizona will be lots and lots of debt as they are saddled with the cost of managing all the land that isn't worth leasing out to mining companies with sweetheart deals that don't serve the interests of state residents.

Yeah, but Teddy Roosevelt had, like, thirty goddamned dicks.

OK you have all convinced me, the feds should just own everything. We cant allow a state to have anything because they just might possibly not manage it as well as the perfect federal governmetn.

MAYBE THE FEDS SHOULD MANAGE YOUR KEYBOARD.

That's the worst summary of an argument since Anne Boleyn told Henry VIII that he was only thinking about cutting her head off because he had a tiny penis.

Guys, I bet he's not really convinced.

Brett, I'm damn near the only person who has attempted to give you the benefit of the doubt as not a ridiculous troll, but after yet another refusal to answer my legitimate question, I'm done. You're a troll.

Pretty much. This has nothing to do with 'should the fed own shit'. The Fed DOES own it, and the states can and have purchased land back from the Feds. In this case the Feds aren't selling the piece of land Arizona wants because they're concerned about damage to a national park.

The correct summary is: should states be able to end run around the National Park Service in order to secure short term monetary gains at long term cost to our parks. There's actually an honest debate in there! There's no honest debate in "Should the Federal Government be allowed to own land"

When I saw you pull that same bullshit line about a month ago in another thread, I was new to the forums and still wondering why all the hate here for you.
But you doing it again here, made me agree, you're really not worth the effort and get to be my first "Ban List" resident.

Oh man, brettmcd hates it when people announce who they're blocking.

"Questioning how things work" is perfectly acceptable, but when your "question" is based on false premises, it results in nonsense. Garbage in, garbage out, y'know? In this case, you framed the issue in terms of the merits of the federal government "owning state land." But the land in question has never been state land. It entered the public domain when the federal government acquired the land (as a result of the Mexican War) before Arizona was even a territory, much less a state, and was not included in the land allocated to Arizona in its enabling statute.

If you want to engage in a productive discussion, have at it, but mischaracterizing my posts isn't the path to acheving that result.

Doesn't Charles' thread about community-wide ignore lists make a bit more sense, now?

We have a community-wide ignore list already. You can find it by clicking the "leper colony" button up top.

Not really. 1) That's what moderators are for and 2) shunning always turns into a pretty despicable form of bullying in any community. You can usually find that first troll or two that everyone agrees on (but who toes the line carefully enough to dodge banning), sure, but after that it gets to a shitty place really quickly.

Since brettmcd will probably ignore your post or skim it and post a response that has nothing to do with what you wrote, I've highlighted key takeaway points for him to refute specifically.

Of course, what's most likely is he'll play the umbrage card for being called out on his modus operandi and then avoid addressing any of the issues in your post, and then he'll take a later post out of context and reply to that with some nonsense as his way back into the thread.

And so the world turns.

No, that remains an awful idea.

http://www.nps.gov/grca/parkmgmt/statistics.htm

http://www.nps.gov/grca/parkmgmt/upload/2012grcaProfile.pdf

I'm finding this report a bit hard to read since they don't actually have any totals anywhere. But from the looks of it, the Feds hand them about 24M/year to run the place, and the rest is generated locally? So the numbers I found were off by a large order. I'm still pretty sure Arizona doesn't actually want the Grand Canyon as much as they want the mining rights next to it.

Whenever Brett does this sort of thing in a thread just read it as "ok I am wrong". That is what it usually amounts to, in as many words

This is the state that sold its own capitol building just two years ago and now wants to buy it back, effectively wasting more than $24M of their taxpayer's money on what amounts to be the worst thought out $81M 2-year loan in history. As an American who values the natural wonders of this country, I do not want those idiots touching this one.

Az could build a chain link fence around the federal land and at the choke points require that citizenship be proven by documentation. "Hmmm...you look furrin." They could patrol the fence with armed citizen militias on ATVs. May be they could get federal funding to build it. Use Homeland Security dollars. I'm gonna run for Gov-AZ :)

Arizona needs to be entirely federally managed.

ARISE THREAD BECAUSE SERIOUSLY ARIZONA CANNOT DIAF FAST ENOUGH

Bill Title: Constitutional oath; high school graduation
Status: 2013-01-23 - Referred to House FFR Committee
http://legiscan.com/AZ/text/HB2467

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona:
Section 1. Title 15, chapter 7, article 1, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended by adding section 15-701.03, to read:

15-701.03. Graduation requirement; constitutional oath

Beginning in the 2013‑2014 school year, In addition to fulfilling the course of study and assessment requirements prescribed in this chapter, before a pupil is allowed to graduate from a public high school in this state, the principal or head teacher of the school shall verify in writing that the pupil has recited the following oath:

I, _________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

Forcing you to lie about your allegiance to a God you don't believe in will make you a better person. Duh.

Someone really needs to buy a dictionary and look up the word 'duress'.

What if the student isn't a US citizen?

Or would prefer to take an affirmation instead of swear an oath.... which is apparently good enough for the POTUS even! Admittedly he was apparently pretty bad at being POTUS.

I'm with Agent Schism , you shouldn't make any change to education that clearly illustrates your lack thereof.

Obviously this improves our education system, by getting rid of godless heathens and brown people. If they're not enrolled, we don't have to spend money on them.

What is even the point of that? I don't know if that technically counts as coercion but there's no way that an oath that is forced upon someone, and upon which some desired outcome is arbitrarily contingent, is legally binding. Not that that oath seems to actually mean anything in a legal sense anyway.

Arizona is almost as ridiculous as Florida! I had no idea.