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The Transportation Security Administration wants airports around the country to use body imaging technology that was tested at Sky Harbor. 

This year, millimeter wave devices will be used in the nation's busiest airports, including Los Angeles, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Ronald Reagan Washington National, New York, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Boston. 

In 2007, Phoenix was a pilot site for both backscatter and millimeter wave technology. They allow security officials to scan passengers for weapons without a physical pat down.    

The backscatter uses a low-intensity X-ray beam that quickly scans a passenger's body. The radiation used is equal to 15 minutes of exposure to natural background radiation, such as sun rays, the agency says.

The millimeter wave machine uses electromagnetic waves to create a picture based on energy reflected from the body, according to the TSA. 

To protect passenger privacy, the images can't be stored, printed or transmitted. If a passenger is scanned, the imaged is seen by a TSA official in a remote location. That official wirelessly communicates with officers who are with the passenger.

Read the TSA press release here.

Banks are shying away from most high-rise condo proposals these days -- even if the pitch comes from an overseas developer.

One Phoenix, a proposed 921-unit project on the northwest corner of Central Avenue and McDowell Road, is having a tough time getting financing, said Yon Minei, VP of planning for AI-BSR LLC.

Instead of breaking ground on the 375-foot complex this year, as the developer had planned, AI-BSR LLC is exploring new mixed-use options for the site, Minei said. The alternatives could include offices, a hotel or apartments. Nothing is final yet, Minei said.

The firm decided to revamp the project instead of waiting for the Valley housing market to recover because that could have delayed construction for five years, he said. 

"Financing isn't available for housing projects right now," he said. In the long run, the economic downturn may make the final project stronger, the vice president said.

It may be that "the current downtown market has made us look at the project in the correct way," he added. 

AI-BSR LLC is a pair of Isreali firms, BSR Group and Africa Israel Investments Ltd., which teamed up to build One Phoenix.

BSR bought the land with Las Vegas-based AmLand Development LLC in 2006 for $26 million, double what the seller paid a year earlier. The six-acre parcel lies near the future Central/McDowell light rail station, a key Central Phoenix intersection.

Easy come, easy go.

Oil prices today  dropped into the $117-a-barrel range, marking a 20-percent decline from the record $147 a barrel that they seemed to hit only yesterday.

A 20-percent decline is somewhat significant because that's usually the threshold investors use to define bear or down markets. Oil rallied a bit at the end of the day, closing above $118, where it now sits 19.5 percent below its peak.

Even more amazing, the stock market is doing about as well, if not a bit better, than oil - depending on which gauge of oil and stock prices you use. With another gain today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average now sits 18.4 percent below its 52-week high of 14,280. A few weeks ago, the Dow was down 25 percent.

Although oil and stock prices don't correlate all that closely over the long haul, their fates likely will be  linked, inversely, over the next few months.

Economists from the Western Blue Chip Economic Forecast are calling for home building to slow in the Western U.S., even more then they predicted it would last month.

The Forecast  calls for home building to slow in all 12 western states this year from 2007's already slow pace.

The good news is Arizona won't see the biggest drop in home building, according to the Forecast. Economists are calling for Montana to see the largest drop off in home building with a 35 percent decline. Next is California with an expected 34.8 percent drop in new home construction.

Even Wyoming, the only Western state to post an increase in permits in 2007, will likely experience a drop of 10.8 percent in 2008.

Pulte Homes, one of the Valley's biggest builders, said it plans to match the $7,500 tax credit being offered to first-time home buyers as part of the national housing stimulus plan.

The home builder is going one step further and offering the deal to all buyers.

The federal incentive is a tax credit that will end up being an interest-free loan for home buyers that has a 15-year term. 

Pulte's website, www.pulte.com, has details on the federal plan. Exact details on its matching plan weren't listed on the site yet.

So here we are, one day until the start of the Olympics. Just 24 hours until we become engrossed in the trials and tribulations of table tennis, enthralled by the finer points of badminton and beach volleyball.

Transported by thrilling displays of speed and strength, of endurance and daring, of grown women in leotards, dancing with Hula Hoops.

And to think that such splendor arrives via cable TV only once every four years.

Fortunately, this is Scottsdale, where there is always a spectacle to be seen. Long after the flame dies out in Beijing, the games around here will continue on.

Here are three of my favorites, now playing in a venue near you:

Hammer throw: To get into this game you must have keen eye-hand coordination and the ability to turn tight circles without getting dizzy. Or you can just be Kevin Osterman. The former city councilman has been busy of late tossing anvils at his archenemy, Jim Lane, who is running for mayor against Osterman's candidate of choice, Mary Manross. Instead of using a hammer, however, Osterman seems to have grabbed a boomerang. Every time he lets it fly, the thing winds up conking him in the head. Still, he keeps throwing whatever he's got in the way of gossip and innuendo. That Lane ran a business into bankruptcy (never mind that he left long before it went belly up); that the state suspended Lane's CPA license (never mind that he let it lapse when he no longer needed it); and most recently, that he's had a slew of traffic offenses including a DUI. (Actually, one speeding ticket. The other cases were some other guy).

Men's gymnastics: This event stars Scottsdale's own Andrew Thomas, the county's top prosecutor and a politician who has proven himself to be most flexible. His use of public funds to promote himself has become the stuff of legend. But he recently outdid himself, spending $11,500 to promote KTAR talk-show host Darrell Ankarlo's new book, Another Man's Sombrero. Unfortunately, Thomas used Another Man's Money to do the promoting. Specifically, ours.

You'll marvel at Thomas' twisting and tucking as he hauls out his chief spotter to explain how it's perfectly OK to use money earmarked for fighting crimes to promote a radio guy's book tour. This, after all, isn't just a radio guy's book tour. Why, it's crime prevention!

“We are pleased to work with KTAR in the fight against drophouses and related criminal activities,” Barnett Lotstein said last week. “We appreciate their efforts to combat illegal immigration and the spread of Latin America-style violence to Maricopa County.”

Give Thomas and company a gold medal for their ability to do back handsprings around the law that supplies them those crime fighting funds. I'm telling you, these people have moves that make Paul Hamm look like a reject from PE class.

10-meter platform diving: For months, the Scottsdale school board has stood on high board, seemingly rooted to the thing, unable to take the plunge and close a couple of schools. Bowing to sliding enrollment, disappearing dollars and half-empty schools, Superintendent John Baracy six months ago came up with a plan to close two schools in 2009. The board rejected it. Members of the community offered suggestions in the spring. The board ignored most of them. Everybody agrees that schools must be shuttered in May or students across the district will suffer. Thus far, however, board members can't even agree on the size of the schools.

Chances they will dive into politically choppy waters and select schools to close before the school board election in November? Nil. Chances they'll jump in January? Not likely. New board, you know. Chances a lot of kids are going to see programs cut as half-empty schools remain open next year in order to appease a minority of parents?

I don't know but I'd say this thing has belly flop written all over it.

(Column published Aug. 7, 2008, Scottsdale Republic)

The letter to Norm Johnson came on AHCCCS stationery, emblazoned with the state agency's catch phrase: “Our first care is your health care.”

The letter was headlined “Important Notice about SSDI-Temporary Medical Coverage Program.” In short, he's been cut off.

In the space of 48 hours in late June, the Legislature introduced and approved and Gov. Janet Napolitano signed a bill that yanked temporary medical coverage from 250 disabled Arizonans.

Arizonans who committed one great sin before they got sick: they worked hard all their lives. A little too hard, as it turns out.

The decision to cut them off, made by the Governor's Office and Democrats with help from a few Republicans, caught GOP Sen. Barbara Leff by surprise. “This affects real people's lives, working people,” she told me this week. “This was their lifeline to get the health care they need until their Medicare payments started.”

Can't be helped, we are told. The budget must be balanced. That's true. But must it really be balanced on the backs of people on oxygen and canes and chemotherapy? Really?

Leff sponsored the bill that created the program two years ago after reading about a Phoenix man named Alan Roth. He, like Johnson, worked all of his life, never realizing where all that industriousness would lead.

In 2004, his employer outsourced his job and his insurance ran out just as he was diagnosed with cancer. No longer able to work, Roth qualified for AHCCCS but the state dropped him once he went on Social Security disability. It seems he worked just a little too hard all those years, earning a disability check that put him $102 a month over the poverty line. And while the feds deemed him unable to work, Congress makes the disabled wait two years before they can get on Medicare.

Leff decided that if Congress couldn't live up to its obligations, the state, at least, could try. The resulting program allowed people like Roth and like Norm Johnson to pay a premium and remain on AHCCCS until Medicare kicks in.

Her bill passed in 2006 with bi-partisan support. As Sen. Carolyn Allen said at the time: “This group of people deserves to have help from this state.”

That was then, in the flush times. Now, our leaders have suspended the $8.5 million program, one meager tug in a painful effort to haul the state's ledger out of its $2 billion hole.

State officials say no part of the state budget was left untouched. “With health-care related programs, there is a tremendous amount we are required by the federal government to do,” Napolitano's spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer explained. “We don't have the option of cutting those. So the way it was described to me was all parties in the room looking at everything that was available, extracting out what we could not cut. This is among the few things that was left.”

Meanwhile, they somehow found $22 million to fund bioscience research. Couldn't possibly suspend that and let the sick people breathe.

People like Norm Johnson. The Safford man is one of 250 disabled Arizonans who had seven days' notice last month that he was being kicked to the health-care curb. Like Roth, he worked all his life before becoming disabled last year with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The bridge to Medicare was a godsend to a man who needs expensive breathing treatments and medicines that make his pain bearable.

In a year, Johnson will be eligible for Medicare. That's a very long time to go without treatment. “One of these days,” he told me, “I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night and just not be able to breathe.”

At any given time, there are 1,300 disabled Arizonans like Johnson, living in that no man's land between AHCCCS and Medicare. People not so different from you and me.

The rich, you see, can take care of themselves and the government takes care of the poor. As for the rest of us, one bad run of bad luck and…

And what?

(Column published Aug. 6, The Arizona Republic.)

I know that times are tough but clearly not every business is going down the tubes. Phoenix police today busted up a major prostitution ring operating out of midtown. Some of the call girls told police they can make up to $2,000 a night, plus another $15,000 in tips.

$15k in tips?   I'd love to know what they were doing to make $15,000 in tips.... no wait a minute, probably better not to know.

Police, prosecutors and city officials held a press conference this afternoon to announce the bust which included 55 arrests. Among those in attendance was Mayor Phil Gordon, who praised the operation as one that will make the city safer.

Me? I think the mayor missed an enormous opportunity. Wasn't it he who recently suggested installing  slot machines at Sky Harbor to boost his ailing budget?

Instead of slots, he should be thinking sluts.  Clearly there's a market opportunity here. If all the participants are willing, consenting adults, why not just legalize the ah, enterprise.  it is, after all, the world's oldest profession and not even Phil is going to be able to stop it.  Besides, the tax on $15,000 a night would be....well, it would be enough to at least keep the city's pools open past  Aug. 1.

It is understandable that the politicians want to stop others from speculating in energy futures. They clearly regard that as their job.

People are upset over $4 gas. The honest thing for a politician to tell them would be: You probably need to get used to it.

Real gas prices have gone up and down over time. But the economic fundamentals are different this time.

The developing world is actually developing. The conditions that lead to economic growth are now widely known, if still very imperfectly practiced.

Meanwhile, much of the world's oil supply lies in places with troubling governance.

That means that world demand for oil is likely to continue to outpace increases in supply.

Gas prices will always fluctuate, but the trend pressure is likely to be upward. Increased domestic production, while desirable for other reasons, is highly unlikely to alter the trend pressure.

American politicians, however, aren't in the habit of talking about unpleasant truths. So, both sides are telling the American people that inexpensive and abundant power is easily available, if the other side would just quit being obstructionist.

Inconveniently, however, all alternatives to current sources of energy happen to be, at this point, even more expensive.

Nevertheless, our politicians see the energy future quite clearly. In fact, the precision of their clairvoyance is actually quite laughable.

John McCain says that when he is president he will set the country on a path to have 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Not 44 or 46. Forty-five is just the right number.

Barack Obama says that if he is president, there will be one million plug-in hybrid cars on the road by 2015. Not 900,000 or 1.1 million, but a million on the dot.

Obama is, of course, the visionary in the race, so his phony prescience is much more expansive. According to Obama, the country will need 60 billion gallons of biofuels by 2030. Ten percent of our electricity will come from renewables by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025.

The central planners of the Soviet Union couldn't get the number, kinds and sizes of shoes their country needed right. The notion that American politicians can divine the precise number of kilowatt hours of electricity the country needs from various sources or the number of cars fueled in particular ways is silly.

No one can know that. It's unknowable.

Instead, it's something markets work out over time in response to price signals.

That adjustment is already underway. In response to higher gas prices, the American people are driving less, buying fewer cars and buying more fuel-efficient cars when they do buy. All without the politicians passing a law or mandate.

There are some useful things the politicians could do about price signals. The cost of carbon-based fuel does not reflect its environmental impact. Politicians could impose a tax so that it does.

That, in fact, illustrates how politicians could use markets rather than substitute their judgments for them.

The United States has lots of coal and electricity produced from coal is cheaper than from other sources. However, the environmental effects have basically shut down new coal-power production.

It would be nice if there were a way to sequester coal carbon emissions. However, it hasn't been invented yet.

Both McCain and Obama propose that the American taxpayer subsidize clean-coal research. A carbon tax, however, would produce government revenue rather than spend it, make alternatives such as wind and solar more cost competitive, and give the coal industry reason to make clean-coal research a much higher priority on its own.

For the most part, politicians set the price of electricity in this country. But rates are set to insulate consumers, particularly residential ones, from the true marginal cost of peak power. This leads to overconsumption of electricity and disadvantages alternative sources for peak power production.

If the politicians would do their minor part in getting the price signals right, markets would take care of the rest. There's no need to spend billions of taxpayer money on the energy futures speculations of our political class.

So, the politicians need to enact a carbon tax, price electricity at its marginal cost, and get out of the way.

If they would also then shut up, it would be doubly beneficial.

(column for 4.6.08)

Democrats are fuming over John McCain using Paris Hilton in an ad suggesting that Barack Obama isn't up to the job as president.

But it was Democrats who first used Hilton to make a political point. In 2006, they widely denounced Republican efforts to repeal the inheritance tax, deriding it as the Paris Hilton Tax Relief Act.

So, Democrats apparently think Hilton an apposite symbol of unearned wealth but not unearned acclaim.

During the regular season, walk-through practices the day before games are closed to the media. Not much happens, but you can get an idea of depth charts and personnel groupings.

Because it's training camp, we were allowed to watch Wednesday morning's workout. Here's my depth chart based on the practice. This is based on how guys will play tomorrow against the Saints.

Offense

Receiver -- Larry Fitzgerald, Jerheme Urban

Receiver -- Steve Breaston, Jamaica Rector

Left tackle -- Mike Gandy, Kelly Butler

Left guard -- Reggie Wells, Elton Brown

Center -- Lyle Sendlein, Pat Ross

Right guard -- Deuce Lutui, Brandon Keith

Right tackle -- Levi Brown, Elliot Vallejo

Tight end -- Leonard Pope, Ben Patrick (hard to tell which one was starting because the Cards were in a two-tight formation.

QB -- Matt Leinart, Kurt Warner

RB -- Edgerrin James, J.J. Arrington

FB -- Terrell Smith, Tim Castille 

Defense

LE -- Darnell Dockett, Calais Campbell

NT -- Bryan Robinson, Alan Branch

RE -- Antonio Smith, Keilen Dykes

SOLB -- Chike Okeafor, Clark Haggans

WOLB -- Bertrand Berry, Travis LaBoy

ILB -- Gerald Hayes, David Holloway

ILB -- Karlos Dansby, Matt Stewart

LCB -- Rod Hood, Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie

RCB -- Eric Green, Ralph Brown

SS -- Adrian Wilson, Aaron Francisco

FS -- Antrel Rolle, Matt Ware

'Guard Carlton Medder, a rookie free agent from Florida, suffered a fracture near his left elbow in practice Monday afternoon and is going to be out at least a month, coach Ken Whisenhunt said today.

Medder was locked up with defensive lineman Kenny Iwebema when his arm was bent awkwardly. Medder was listed as the backup at left guard to Reggie Wells. His injury means the coaching staff will move Brandon Keith from right tackle to guard, Whisenhunt said. Moving a young player like Keith isn't ideal, Whisenhunt said, but it's a necessity at this point.

It's the third injury the Cardinals have suffered on the offensive line. Center Al Johnson is out for a few weeks after undergoing knee surgery last week, and backup center/guard Scott Peters is out for the year after suffering a severe knee injury last week.

'Whisenhunt didn't give many hints today about he's going to divide playing time for Thursday's game. He did say that free safety Antrel Rolle would get a chance to return punts this preseason, and that coaches were very interested to see how receiver Steve Breaston performs in replacing starter Anquan Boldin.