Bipartisanship

"I feel sorry for certain Republicans I know who are not rabid right-wingers, but I’m not sorry in the least for those who stay silent."

Too busy to blog, but here's the October column.

No One Is Oppressed

Here's my latest TW column. People didn't like the headline, but guess what. It captured their attention, which is what headlines are for.

That Helsinking Feeling

I don't think it's about the usual kompromat. Honestly, I don't think the president has the embarrassment gene that would make him fear exposure of that kind. I believe it's about money. I think Trump is a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia. And I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I admire Jonathan Chait for building a believable case. Russia is playing the long game against an American public with an attention span of about 140 characters.

More on That Extreme Liberal Stuff

It's been a while. Here's my TW column for July.

The Democratic View

Extremism in the Defense of Liberty

By Kathy Zahler

I thought this column would be all about the winner of the Democratic primary in the 23^rd Congressional District, but that’s what I get for planning ahead. As I write, we are at something of a standstill, with Max Della Pia ahead by a tiny margin over Tracy Mitrano, with 32.4% and 32.3% of the vote, respectively. We face an unusual situation wherein a federal race will be determined by absentee ballots.

So, all of you who thought: Why should I bother?—here’s your answer. Because New York State does not have a system of tie-breaking such as ranked voting or runoffs, elections even at the Congressional level can come down to a handful of votes!

Tom Reed’s campaign manager, who fancies himself a master of dirty tricks, declared in print that it was unsurprising that “with a field of Extreme Ithaca Liberal options to choose from,” the Democrats couldn’t pick just one. This despite the fact that Max is from Owego and Tracy from Penn Yan. (Poor Eddie from Jamestown got tarred with the same brush earlier.) It’s sad that the opposition doesn’t know its own district well enough to differentiate one town from another, but it is unsurprising that Reed, who emulates Trump in most things, prefers a meaningless trope to substantive discourse.

I’m alarmed to be quoting the right-wing Barry Goldwater in my column title, but his statement is surprisingly apt for our times. It was written by speechwriter Karl Hess for Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention. Goldwater’s concern had to do with the perceived Communist threat, but his words are worth recalling: “…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

I would suggest to Congressman Reed and his campaign that resistance to their ideas is not extreme, but rather right, fair, and moral. If he wants to see more moderation from our candidates, he may have to wait a while.

Goldwater’s successor in Congress was John McCain. Both were conservatives who fought against heavy-handed government. Goldwater, like McCain today, would probably be revolted by the current executive overreach.

There was a time after Watergate when it seemed that the executive branch had lost power and that checks and balances might truly be working. That era ended definitively with the Age of Trump. Today, Congress has rolled on its back and put its feet in the air, allowing the executive branch to tickle its tummy on its way out the door to wreak havoc.  

Our Founders created a system by which no one branch of government was supposed to have that kind of power, because they understood that such power could lead to tyranny. But the majority in our current Congress seems happy with the current trajectory, and why shouldn’t they be? They managed to hold up an appointment on the Supreme Court to ensure that the current administration could appoint one new right-wing justice—and with the departure of Kennedy, now two. That has led this session to court-approved gerrymandering and union-busting, which in turn damages Democratic odds and funding, which in turn gives certain Republicans potential lifelong seats in the House and Senate. Why shouldn’t they lie back and roll over? Their course is set. They don’t even need to work in order to win.

Congressman Reed is right up there with the rollover Republicans. According to Five Thirty Eight, he has a 96.3 percent score voting in line with the president’s positions. Based on the 23^rd Congressional District’s winning margin for Trump in 2016, Five Thirty Eight would predict Reed to vote with Trump only 87.5 percent of the time. So Reed is +8.8 for Trump, rolling back bank regulations, supporting the Farm Bill that decimated SNAP, reauthorizing warrantless spying, delaying implementation of ozone standards, increasing penalties for certain undocumented immigrants, penalizing states with sanctuary laws, and so on, and so on.

So it matters who’s in Congress. The system cannot work without a healthy tension among its branches.

Our nation was founded 242 years ago this month on Enlightenment principles of democracy, liberty, equality, justice, and humanity. At different points in our existence, we have moved away from or closer to those goals. Our current administration is racing away from them at a terrifying clip.

Although the number of 2018 primary votes in the 23^rd District was twice those cast in 2012, they still represent under one-fifth of registered voters. Nearly every nation in the world where elections take place has better turnout than we do. Our Founders would be appalled.   

Primaries are the closest we come to direct democracy. If you are troubled by our overreaching executive, do-nothing Congress, and backward-leaning Court, and you did not vote, look in the mirror. You are the problem.

Extreme Ithaca Liberal BS

Our Congressman avoids our county as much as possible, knowing that the center of the county is majority Democratic, and that he has few fans here. Nevertheless, his insistence that all of his enemies and rivals are "extreme Ithaca liberals" is just obnoxious. Here is my response. I sent it to western papers, but so far, only our local paper has bothered to print it. There's a surprise. 

No More Nice Guys

A young DC reporter I know was trolled hideously for 24+ hours after posting his displeasure at Michelle Wolf's remarks at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Other journalists and talking heads are walking away from the comedian's most pointed lines.

I'm not a fan of that kind of Don Rickles/Kathy Griffin humor; I avoid roasts and dislike that uncomfortable feeling of not being willing to look around at the person in the room being skewered. It feels bad.

But stop. If you think we can counter Trumpism with hearts and flowers, you are clinically insane. If you believe we should turn the other cheek to people who are trying to destroy America, I no longer want to know you.

The #WHCD is supposed to celebrate the First Amendment, yet its president and many of its members seem to think that free speech means speech that is polite, deferential, and limited. They give evil doers screen time in exchange for ratings and dollars. They encourage the drawing of false equivalencies by using "balanced" panels. They are entirely complicit in the septic mess we're in, even as they tut tut about Congress's lack of courage.

You hired a known bad girl comic with an attitude and threw her under the bus when she did what you expected her to do. You dressed up and drank champagne in celebration of a principle you clearly don't support. Look in the mirror and give me a break with your faux indignation.   

Shadowing Trump, Channeling Nixon

If you're on social media and even slightly into politics in New York's 23rd Congressional District, you are no doubt being hounded by "Extreme Ithaca Liberal" posts by the Tom Reed Campaign. Reed used this to good effect back in 2014 when he ran against Martha Robertson. It did not matter to him, his campaign, or his Republican voters that Robertson was not from Ithaca but rather from sprawling, rural Dryden. Same county, very different vibe.

Not one to let a winning strategy die, Reed is currently using the same phrase to label candidates from Penn Yan, Jamestown, and Owego as well as the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination who actually live in Ithaca. The Peter Max lettering on his web page is meant to remind us of the evil '60s and is particularly reminiscent of Jim Trelease's 1968 posters of Nixon's rivals that year.

In 1968, Tom Reed wasn't even born. So why is he channeling Nixon's fearmongering campaign of 50 years ago? It seems especially off-putting from a founding member of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of U.S. Representatives who purport to work toward bipartisan solutions. If you believe in bipartisanship, how can you trash your own district's Democrats? If you are "fighting for jobs," how can you disdain the one county in your district where jobs are being created? 

Reed is nothing if not contradictory, however. Despite positioning himself early on as a moderate, Reed was one of the first NYS House Republicans to endorse Trump and even served on his troubled transition team. Despite professing to stand for New York, Reed supported a tax plan that will increase taxes for many New Yorkers as they lose their state and local deductions.

Donald Trump borrowed from Nixon's playbook to win in 2016, and Tom Reed is scuttling hard after both of them. Focusing on fear is a successful way to swing a progressive era backward. You don't even have to posit a real threat. Just mention "hippies" and let the voters' imaginations run wild. If Trump can draw false equivalencies between Nazis and anti-Nazi protesters, Reed can pretend that all Democrats have extreme views, and that no matter where they live, they come from Ithaca. The only danger of such oversimplification is that it starts from the assumption that your electorate is stupid.

It is possible to disagree with Tom Reed on the Second Amendment and not be extreme. It is possible to be a Democrat and be a former military officer. It is possible to be from Western New York and espouse progressive views. We are able to hold all these things in our heads at once. If Congressman Reed respected the people of his district, he'd credit them with the brains to see through his Extreme Ithaca Liberal hogwash. Unfortunately for us all, and for any hope of thoughtful debate, he doesn't.

The Short Legacy of Brown

When Linda Brown died at age 76 last week, it marked 64 years since her central role in her dad's case against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In the three decades that followed the Brown decision, schools in the U.S. became increasingly integrated, achieving a high in 1988, when 45 percent of African-American students attended majority-white schools.

Then came the '90s, and the courts' quiet but rapid reversal of that progress. Oklahoma City was allowed to revert to neighborhood schools (a quiet name for segregated schools). The Supreme Court set a goal of local control (a quiet name for the racial divide). By the beginning of the 21st century, schools were described as "resegregating" by a project at Harvard, and in a 2007 Seattle and Louisville case that I noted at the time, the Supreme Court narrowly found that schools could not assign students to schools on the basis of race. School integration was effectively killed, 53 years after Brown. Today it is estimated that school segregation is equivalent to what it was in 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed.

When I was a kid, there were a couple of things that seemed to guarantee a sort of equity across households in America. One was Brown and the guarantee of a sound, basic education in our public schools. The other was the half-hour evening newscast on the big three TV channels, which gave everyone who watched the same general view of the world.

What are our sources of equity today? Fast food, Facebook, and TV sports?

Required Reading

These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

There is very little in this analysis with which I disagree. Not economic hardship. White backlash.

OMG

I know, I haven't had anything to say in a long while. Although so much has happened, everyone else has said so much that there doesn't seem room to opine. We are living at an adrenaline level that can't be good for anyone; thus, the worst flu season in years. I'm going to posit that a lot of this Ohmygodding is unwarranted, because as bad as things are, it's not like it's a shock.

Omg, Trump!  Sorry, but this is like Ohmygodding over that teenage boyfriend who told you up front he wasn't looking for something serious. Donald J. Trump has told you who he was since he played the short-fingered vulgarian playboy and wrote The Art of the Deal. He has been that same guy for at least 35 years.  "Controversy, in short, sells," he told you.  "A little hyperbole never hurts." "I play to people's fantasies." "Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition."

Omg, the Republicans in Congress!  When were they last NOT craven? Certainly not since before Newt Gingrich, and before him, you have to go back another 40 years to find a Republican Speaker. Did you think Paul Ryan would be a good guy? The guy who said, "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence"? That guy?

Omg, the Trump voters!  Are you surprised that a hate-filled message works in America? The America of the Klan, the Know-Nothings, the John Birch Society, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Executive Order 9066, the White League, Joe McCarthy, and the Patriot Act? Are you really surprised that Americans would cast a vote out of fear and racism? The Americans who elected Millard Fillmore, James Polk, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Jackson, and FDR?

Omg, the Russians!  Look, the Russians were better than we were at the satellite launching thing, too, for a while. They have been masters of disinformation since Stalin. If you want a good analogy in the US, try Fox News. On the other hand, if you want to see some serious election interference, study the history of the CIA in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, the Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Brazil, or Chile. I'm not saying such interference isn't serious. I'm just saying it's unsurprising. 

Omg, Facebook!  What did you really imagine was happening when you responded to online quizzes or compared your face to a famous artwork? Did you notice how the minute you ordered shoes from Payless, ads for shoes started popping up on your Facebook feed? Now, why would that be true?

Omg, the Democrats!  Well, it's painful to say, but while we're busy arguing over the use and meaning of the word progressive, the world is going down the tubes. But really, did you expect the Democrats to save you? Which Democrats? The Democrats of Nancy Pelosi or Claire McCaskill? The Democrats of Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris? Do you want to follow Democrats who are over 70 or Democrats who are under 45? The Democrats who ousted Franken or the ones who welcomed Jones? I would love to believe that we can rally and fight as one, but I have seen no evidence of it thus far. We're pretty good at fighting among ourselves, though. I guess that's easier.

Being in a constant state of angst is exhausting. Waking up each morning to some new horrific or stupid or humiliating or potentially life-threatening event is debilitating. Maybe we can take a few deep breaths and count at least some of what's happening as the inevitable culmination of a lot of bad decisions, unheeded signs, and blithe miscalculations. Take a little responsibility. Don't assume that our current situation was and continues to be someone else's fault. Change the things you can. Reach out to the people most likely to be harmed. Fix some stuff. March. Read history. Support the vulnerable. Vote. Educate. Don't panic. Repeat.     

So Many Crooks So Little Time

Nixon was a crook, but on such a tiny scale. If the month of February taught us anything, it was that it's all about the money. Did Manafort and Kushner promise people jobs in return for loans? If they got the quo without coughing up the quid, is it still a crime? The hustling, the shady deals, the adrenaline expended in running just paces ahead of bankruptcy or arrest. It's a wonder anyone in the White House ever got a top secret clearance when it's clear any of them is easily purchased.

Has It Come to This

I've been going to Central New York School Board Association legislative forums for a lot of years now. Sometimes we've had five legislators. Sometimes we've had two. They hear a brief presentation on the local districts' state funding for the year, based on the governor's budget, and we send them into the world to come up with a better plan. It's pretty formulaic but not at all contentious.

Last night we had the 2018 version at TST BOCES. I know that Senator Helming attended one at Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES, which is closer to her home base. But it sure looked as though no Republican wanted to bother coming to Ithaca. Only Assemblywoman Lifton showed up. Not Fred Akshar (Candor senator), not Chris Friend (Candor assembly), not Jim Seward (Dryden/Groton/Lansing), not Tom O'Mara (Ithaca/Newfield).

If we only talk to "our people," we're not really doing "our job." 

Tinfoil Hat

Just wondering. If you reject the whole Russian-interference story because you don't believe you or anyone else was affected by Russian trolling and social media bots in 2016, why is the language you're using to reject the story picked up from current Russian trolling and social media bots? P.S. Dislike of Putin and the corrupt oligarchs who keep him in power is not xenophobia.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.

Things are bad when I'm quoting Nietzsche. Truly, I'm not a fan. But it's an apt quote for something that's bemused me this week.

Our local NY Progressives plan to endorse a candidate for Congress in the NY 23rd. In fact, two of the chapters have already endorsed, so only one is left, and that one is requesting statements from the candidates despite warning them that 2/3 of the vote may go against them unless someone in this chapter can re-convince the other chapters of their righteousness.

These are (some of) the same people who railed against the Democratic Party—rightly, I thought—in the 2016 primaries for having a thumb too heavily on the scales. There was a lot of conversation about the unfairness of the primary system and of the endorsement system and of straw polling, and I, who have always disliked straw polling and consider endorsements simply a power play on the part of parties, agreed with a lot of what was said. Endorsements are about power. Some people think that's a good thing and the job and purpose of parties, and they are probably right, too. But complainers, and I've been one in the past, are also correct that all of this in-house cogitation is a giant step away from democracy, especially the part of democracy that pretends to support "one person, one vote."

It turns out that the NY Progs realized quite soon in their growth that a way to be relevant in the process was to endorse the candidate they found most appealing. Whether that was to narrow the field or to pump up their own status or to excite their membership, I don't know—it may have been all three. But the message I hear is, "When it's our thumb, it's okay."

How rapidly we become the thing we hate when we gain a modicum of power! You can see it sometimes with labor unions, whose organization over time often reflects corporate structure, and you can see it in small agencies that purport to hate lobbyists until suddenly they grow big enough to lobby for themselves. 

Why does it seem impossible to create something new that, once it achieves influence, actually approaches the problems it fights in a new way? Why does battling monsters have to lead to monstrous behavior? (Okay, endorsing candidates may not qualify as monstrous, but you know what I mean.)

After #MeToo became a thing, Paul wanted me to write a short story in which women gained governmental and corporate power and over time became just as bad as men ever were. I'm not doing it, first because it's not a new idea, but mostly because it makes me so damn sad.

So Done

It was always about race.

If you supported Donald Trump because of his immigration policies, you are a racist.

If you supported Donald Trump despite his immigration policies, you are a racist.

If you're in the West Wing, Congress, or the Trump family and aren't calling the President out today, you are a racist.

If you made excuses about the economy and the forgotten Americans, you may not be a racist, but you're living in a fantasy world. If you don't believe 30 percent of Americans are racist, try asking someone who's not white.

It was always about race. Gender, too, but mostly race.

Just because you don't want to live in that kind of America doesn't mean you don't.

Dream Hoarders

I said I would read it, and I finally did. This slim little book by Brit-turned-US-citizen and Brookings scholar Richard Reeves puts a fine focal lens on our complicity in the class system we all claim to despise. It is a reminder that when we blame the 1 percent for everything, we are just hiding from the fact that it's really the top 20 percent who reap the benefits of our current system.

Reeves opens with a benefit we've taken advantage of in this household: 529 plans. When Obama tried to remove the tax benefits from those plans and use that money to fund a fairer system of tax credits, he found that the very people who put him in office were the ones who hated that idea most. So he pulled the plug before the new, rather progressive idea got off the ground.

Reeves repeatedly reminds the reader that class is fluid. The top 20 percent (roughly households above $115K in income) varies from year to year. But for every person coming up, someone has to go down, and that's the problem. We all want to conserve what we have, often using the excuse of protecting our children. A local example from NYS might be the fact that we cannot come up with a formula for funding our schools, because in order to make things fair, we would have to take something off the top of the districts that offer Mandarin and Prelaw classes to fund districts that can barely afford special ed—and no one, even in the most liberal enclaves of Westchester, is willing to do that!

The upper middle class, or top 20 percent, is rapidly pulling away from the bottom 80 percent. Their children are advantaged from birth, and their status is passed down, thus belying our belief that America is a meritocracy. Rather than focusing on money itself, Reeves names a handful of current trends that serve to keep us separate and unequal. He refers to these trends as "opportunity hoarding." They include exclusionary zoning, legacy college admissions, and unpaid internships, all of which this upper middle class family has taken advantage of over the years. He finds, and I believe him, that the thought of getting rid of any or all of these three advantages makes upper middle class people crazy, no matter what their political leanings might be. Yet all three are designed to ensure that families don't fall out of their comfortable 20 percentdom by allowing other families to move up and displace them.

Because he's a Brookings guy, Reeves doesn't just drop guilt on us without offering policy solutions. His goals are both to reduce opportunity hoarding and also to increase equality. The latter could be achieved, he believes, through the reduction of unintended pregnancies through better contraception (US contraception is antiquated compared to the rest of the developed world's); increasing home visiting to improve parenting (it's a universal event in Britain and unheard of here for the most part, but it has effects as good or better than pre-K education); revising the way we pay teachers so that good teachers are assigned to poorer districts; and funding college fairly (he thinks free college is a terrible idea but champions income-contingent loans, vocational programs, apprenticeships, and cutting tax subsidies to wealthy universities). Interestingly, several of his ideas showed up in HRC's campaign proposals. It would have been fascinating, had she won, to see whether she could battle through the backlash from the people who supported her to get some of these reforms rammed through.

When it comes to exclusionary zoning, Reeves doesn't want to plop high-rises in semirural communities but favors the "missing middle" of townhouses and duplexes that blend into surrounding two-story homes and create mixed neighborhoods and school districts. (We have a couple of examples of duplexes toward this end of Ellis Hollow, but I have no idea if they're affordable. I know that every townhouse that goes up in the county is fought against tooth and nail by someone.) He points out that if Oxford and Cambridge can end legacy admissions, so can Harvard and Yale. And he wants to regulate the oversight of internships so that minimum wage and fair labor laws are enforced and students who are not easily subsidized by their parents may take advantage of those jobs.

There's lots more related to inequitable tax treatment, etc., and there are lots of lovely Brookings graphs showing income and inequality, but the brunt of his argument is as described here. Most of the people complaining loudest about income inequality in America are people who contribute to it. Until we face our privilege and vow to give something up, absolutely nothing will change. Sobering and worth remembering.

 

This.

Not a Fad, a Fancy, or a Year.

Please, let's not call it The Year of the Woman. Here's why.