Hoosiers, Of All People, Should Reject Trump/Pence

Well, tomorrow is the Vice-Presidential debate. Those non-Hoosiers who tune in–almost certainly not the “YUGE” number that viewed the Presidential face-off–will get a chance to see what Indiana citizens have been living with for three-and-a-half years. If the Mike Pence who shows up is the Mike Pence who has embarrassed us in prior media confrontations (George Stephanopolis wasn’t the only one), it will give Hoosier Republicans yet another reason to abandon the Trump/Pence ticket.

It’s worth noting that Pence’s wooden and inadequate public performances are the least of those reasons.

Recently, Pence was asked which Vice-President he would model himself after in the event the Trump-Pence ticket prevailed. His tone-deaf but undoubtedly sincere response was “Dick Cheney.”

As a recent post to DailyKos pointed out,

If Donald Trump wins the election, we know two things with certainty: 1) he’ll implement the most racist, xenophobic, militant immigration policy this nation has possibly ever seen; 2) he won’t have the attention span to preside over any other issues of governance.

That’s where Mike Pence comes in and if you haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been saying, you’re not getting the full picture of how wildly non-empathic, socially conservative, science-less, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ and downright scary a “Trump” administration would be.

Now, DailyKos has a lefty perspective, but it is very hard to argue with any of the quoted language.

Those of us who have watched Pence “govern” during what would pretty clearly have been  his single term in the Statehouse have noted his oh-so-“Christian” passions: his determination to de-fund Planned Parenthood (despite the fact that such action would leave thousands of poor women with no healthcare); his seething hostility to the gay community (that one would have been hard to miss); his campaign to fund religious schools with tax dollars taken from the public schools.

His antagonism to science, denial of climate change (and evolution, for that matter), and efforts to have Indiana avoid compliance with environmental rules, have been fairly high-profile.

And since he joined the Trump Train, we’ve learned how sensitive he is to racial issues. (Irony alert.) Asked in an interview about the string of police shootings of unarmed black men, Pence responded

“Trump and I believe there’s been far too much talk about institutional bias and racism within law enforcement”

Translation: Because if we don’t talk about it, people like us who encourage it won’t have to answer these uncomfortable questions.

During the 3 plus years he’s been in office, Hoosiers of both parties have come to recognize the Governor as an ideologue uninterested in the nitty-gritty of public administration, a man whose purpose in running for public office has been essentially theocratic–to use whatever power he can muster to impose his personal religious views on citizens who don’t share them.

During the Presidential campaign, it has become clear that Trump has even less interest than Pence in actually doing the day-to-day work of governing, if he even recognizes what that work entails. When Donald Junior approached John Kasich about the Vice-Presidency, several media outlets reported that the offer came with a promise that, if Kasich accepted, he would be given broad authority over the Executive Branch–essentially, he could run the show while The Donald preened for cameras and indulged his self-importance.

Kasich–being both honorable and in possession of his senses–said no thanks.

Pence–being neither–evidently accepted the bargain.

Enjoy the debate.

Comments

If We Just Kill Off My Age Cohort, Things Will Improve….

For the past several weeks, this blog has mostly been sharing depressing observations. Since it’s Sunday (a day for uplift, or at the very least some time off), I thought I’d post a more hopeful story before returning to what threatens to become the “regular programming”at least until November 8th.

In a post memorably titled “Our Lady of Perpetual Misogyny,” Juanita Jean related a story of fundamentalist sexism and its unexpectedly heartwarming conclusion.

Two girls at Foothills Academy, a high school in Scottsdale, Arizona, made the boys’ soccer team. When the school was scheduled to play Our Lady of Sorrows (how appropriate!), a Phoenix parochial school, they were informed that Our Lady’s all-boy soccer team would not even come on the field if the girls were to play. They would rather forfeit. (God says girls have cooties…)

Presumably, they’d get those cooties–or be barred from heaven–if they so much as kicked a soccer ball in a game where females participated. The Foothills coach left it up to the team to decide whether to play without the girls, or to forfeit.

Each player on his team voted. Every player voted to accept the forfeit. Especially noted are the players who are being looked at for college soccer scholarships and whose stats will be affected by each game not played. “I don’t give a damn about my stats, the girls are my team mates.”

The league will be updating their rosters with schools willing to play girls.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: once my age cohort is gone, things will improve. As stories like this confirm, the younger generation gives reason for optimism.

The undergraduate and graduate students I teach are by orders of magnitude more inclusive, less bigoted and more focused upon building community than the cranky old men and women of my generation.

If we can manage not to destroy the world–or elect Donald Trump (pretty much the same thing)– before we hand it over to them, things will definitely improve.

Comments

Immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, Jews..

So who do you hate? Who do you consider to be “lesser,” unworthy to be included in that tribe we call Americans?

Whoever it is, isn’t it comforting to know that “political correctness” no longer restrains you from letting everyone know, from “telling it like it is”? It was so silly to disapprove of name-calling, race-baiting, and other forthright communications…

That’s the ugly genie that Donald Trump’s repulsive campaign has let out of the lamp, and I am very doubtful that even his (hopefully significant) loss will allow us to put it back in.

It’s bad enough that the so-called “alt-right”–the NeoNazis, the white supremacists, the Klansmen–have come out from under their rocks to enthusiastically endorse a vile and semi-sentient candidate who channels their fevered hatreds. What is worse–far worse–is that Trump has normalized a dramatically coarsened discourse and made expressions of raw bigotry acceptable in venues where they were previously muted.

A recent post at Washington Monthly by a Jewish commentator is just one example. He writes,

I often get rough messages from people who disagree with me in the thrust and parry of presidential politics and the politics of health reform. It wasn’t always pleasant. It comes with the territory.

None of this prepared me for 2016.

I and many others who write for fairly broad audiences are being deluged with antisemitic messages from Trump supporters. They come mostly on Twitter, but on private emails and blogs, too. Many alt-right messages bracket our names like so: (((haroldpollack))), to indicate that we are Jewish….

Many include four-letter words and colorful vocabulary that is quite familiar to me from my experience working on public health interventions for high-risk adolescents and adults. I block everyone who sends me these messages. For all I know, there are hundreds more.

Pollack shared one long, rambling diatribe, and it was, as he labeled it, hateful and sick. He says he usually doesn’t share such messages–why give them more air–but he does make an observation worth considering:

In a strange way, I’m almost–almost–glad that these anti-Semitic messages are out there. They remind many of us on the receiving end of a few basic realities that hang over our contested, pluralist democracy. They should remind us of what many others are facing, who have so very much more to lose if our nation jumps off the political cliff this November.

I would quibble with only one point: it isn’t only “many others” who stand to lose if this wave of tribal venom and ignorance persists. We all stand to lose something very precious: the ideal and promise of  America.

Granted, we’ve never lived up to that promise, but most of us, at least, have tried. And over the years, we have improved. We’ve become fairer, more inclusive, less intolerant. More adult. We’ve recognized that we’re all in this together (whatever “this” is), and thousands–millions–of us have worked hard to bend that arc of history toward justice.

Those efforts are  what made America great.  Not saber-rattling or bluster or domination of some by others.

It’s those efforts, those ideals, that Trump and his sneering enablers are attacking when they call Mexicans rapists, call blacks thugs, call women fat slobs. That’s the America–our America– that they want to erase.

Comments

Why Not Gary Johnson?

Many of the friends I worked with back in my Republican days have recoiled, understandably, from the candidacy of Donald Trump. Some of them will vote for Hillary Clinton, but others are longtime GOP activists who–despite being heartsick about the current state of the party–cannot bring themselves to pull a Democratic lever.

I do sympathize. When you’ve spent your adult life working for a particular political agenda, it can seem like blasphemy to defect to the other side. (On the other hand, several newspapers have endorsed a Democrat for the first time, and numerous high-ranking Republicans have done so, recognizing that Trump’s GOP is no longer the party they originally joined.)

Several of them plan to vote for Gary Johnson, the libertarian, despite the fact that a vote for a third-party candidate is still a vote for Trump, albeit an indirect one.

I wonder if they really understand what Johnson (“what’s Aleppo?” “I can’t name any foreign leaders”) really stands for. Perhaps they don’t care, since there is no way a third-party candidate will win, but it’s interesting to look beyond the Libertarian’s popular support for legalizing marijuana, to other positions that are a bit less attractive.

A recent article catalogs them.Here are just a few of his more…interesting… positions.

  • No gun control. At all. Johnson says Americans would be safer if everyone was armed.
  • No minimum wage. At all. In July, he told the Washington Examiner that, if given the chance, “I would sign legislation to abolish it.” (In 1999, during his first term as New Mexico governor, Johnson did veto a bill that would have raised his state’s minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.65.)
  • He opposes laws requiring equal pay for men and women doing the same job.
  • He opposes collective bargaining for public employees, and in New Mexico, vetoed the renewal of that state’s collective bargaining law.
  • He advocates cuts to Social Security
  • He wants to remove the federal government’s role in Medicare and Medicaid.
  • He supports privatized prisons.
  • He supports privatizing public education.

These are positions that my friends who are voting Libertarian for President are endorsing.

At least Johnson isn’t running around calling women “fat pigs” and whining that he lost a debate because they gave him a bad mic….I guess that’s something. So several people I know are determined to cast a protest vote for him, or for Jill Stein, to “send a message.”

It’s not the message they think they’re sending, however. As Clay Shirkey recently wrote in the Huffington Post

But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than “R” or “D” boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.” It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that….

Throwing away your vote on a message no one will hear, and which will change no outcome, is sometimes presented as “voting your conscience,” but that’s got it exactly backwards; your conscience is what keeps you from doing things that feel good to you but hurt other people. Citizens who vote for third-party candidates, write-in candidates, or nobody aren’t voting their conscience, they are voting their ego, unable to accept that a system they find personally disheartening actually applies to them.

Yep.

Comments

About That Opioid Epidemic

Credit where credit is due: Medical science and pharmacology have been nothing short of miraculous over the past century. People live longer and healthier lives as a result of breakthroughs in our understanding of how the body works, and how it responds to medications.

But we are also beginning to see some troubling consequences of our reliance on “miracle” drugs. Scientists warn of an emerging resistance to penicillin and other antibiotics, and blame their overuse. And then there is the opioid epidemic, which is yet another example of the problems that emerge when drug use and policy are dictated by the profit motive rather than by medical science and the Hippocratic Oath’s dictum “First, Do No Harm.”

AP and the Center for Public Integrity recently released a study detailing the effects of Big Pharma lobbying on opioid use and abuse. It should give us pause.

Key findings from the reporting:

 Drug companies and allied advocates spent more than $880 million on lobbying and political contributions at the state and federal level over the past decade; by comparison, a handful of groups advocating for opioid limits spent $4 million. The money covered a range of political activities important to the drug industry, including legislation and regulations related to opioids.

The opioid industry and its allies contributed to roughly 7,100 candidates for state-level offices, with the largest amounts going to governors and the lawmakers who control legislative agendas, such as house speakers, senate presidents and health committee chairs.

The drug companies and allied groups have an army of lobbyists averaging 1,350 per year, covering all 50 state capitals.

The opioid lobby’s political spending adds up to more than eight times what the formidable gun lobby recorded for political activities during the same period.

There’s much more.

I know I’m beating a dead horse (what, no medical interventions for the horse?), but there are economic arenas where markets work beautifully, and there are arenas where they don’t. Health care falls in the latter category. “Buying” health care is not equivalent to buying a car or a stove or other consumer good. The parties to the transaction do not possess equivalent information, and the “buyer” needing immediate care is rarely in any shape to go comparison shopping in any event.

The opioid epidemic is just one more example (in a very long list) of what happens when we insist on maintaining markets and encouraging the profit motive in a sector where informational and power asymmetries make genuine competition impossible.

Perhaps–if this election gives us a sane President and legislature–we can begin to correct the situation, by revisiting both the prohibition on government’s ability to negotiate drug prices, and the inclusion of a public option in the Affordable Care Act.

And someday–no doubt after I’m long dead–we might stop letting lobbyists make health policy, get Medicare for All or its equivalent, and join the majority of countries that have recognized that access to health care and lifesaving drugs should not be treated as  profit-generating consumer commodities.

Comments