In October, Tucson City Council candidates Nina Trasoff and Karin Uhlich promised voters a change. They swore that if elected, they would implement a series of immediate reforms designed to, in their view, improve the quality of life for the average voter in Tucson.

At the top of their list of goals was their forceful and clear demand that Tucson's $14-a-month garbage tax be repealed. The issue was one of many that Trasoff and Uhlich used to attack incumbent council members Fred Ronstadt and Kathleen Dunbar, both of whom had voted to pass an extension of the fee in 2004. [Read article]

Last week, a group of "open-air" preachers came to the UA Mall to proselytize to anyone who would listen. Carrying signs that claimed Muslims, homosexuals and baby-killing women would go to hell, they spouted fundamentalist Christian rhetoric and erroneously quoted the Bible. Quite a large crowd formed each day for the men, but people gathered not with the intention of learning how to save themselves but to laugh at and argue with the preachers. [Read article]

In November, the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Phoenix, released a telling case study of the rise of one of the nation's premier public universities, the University of Michigan.

In the 1980s, the university found itself in much the same position as the UA does today. With state funding rapidly shrinking, the school struggled to find the revenue it needed to grow into an internationally renowned research institution. As our university prepares for a historic changing of the guard, it should bear in mind the policies that transformed Michigan into one of the top schools in the nation and increased its general revenues from $1.8 billion in 1991 to $4 billion in 2001. [Read article]

Targeted scholarships 'absolutely flawed'

Discrimination: n., a) the act, practice or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually; b) prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action or treatment. A "targeted scholarship" is a politically correct term for money given to a student to pay for college expenses not because of superior academic, athletic or humanitarian achievement but because of the extremely minor variations in bone structure and melanocyte concentrations collectively known as race. There is no way to explain the need for a scholarship based on race without reverting, in a savagely ironic fashion, to the broad, overly general and totally unjustifiable statements that characterize racism. [Read article]