And Now For Something Completely Different….

I tend to use this blog to blow off steam…to rant/pontificate/lecture about politics and policies that set me off. And generally, or so I would argue, the topics addressed raise important policy questions.

In the scheme of things, today’s rant is about something that is pretty trivial–at least in the overall scheme of things. Unless you agree with me that esthetics and the built environment are important elements of our common life, and American consumerism has gotten out of hand.

Yesterday, my husband and I packed, threw our stuff in my car, and left for a long weekend near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Our granddaughter is visiting from England, where she has lived for several years, and cousins and other family are getting together with her in a large cabin–excuse me, chalet–that our daughter rented outside Gatlinburg.

The closure of I65 through most of downtown (in order to fix problems that were inexplicably not fixed during the last shutdown) was a minor irritant, but no biggie. The mysterious six-mile slowdown on I75 south of Lexington was more annoying–we inched along at 4-5 mph, surrounded by trucks and SUVs, with no sign of the cause of the slowdown. Suddenly, we were moving again, but there was still absolutely no sign of the impediment that caused the problem. Okay, these things happen.

But then. Then we entered Pigeon Forge.

If you have never been to Pigeon Forge, you won’t believe what I’m about to tell you. Las Vegas is tacky and ugly, but next to Pigeon Forge, it’s a model of urban charm.

We were in a line of incredibly slow-moving traffic on the main drag, so we had ample opportunity to see it all: the signs inviting us to a fun dinner and show featuring the Hatfields and McCoys, and others promoting the wonders of the mind-reading pig; the huge upside down house (purpose unknown) open for touring; the replica of the Titanic, also open; and a truly indiscribable construction representing several New York buildings, with a gigantic King Kong hanging from the apex and holding a biplane. Or something.

It evidently housed a Cracker Barrel.

In between these unnatural wonders were strip centers of every variety. Tattoo parlors competed with drug stores and discount warehouses–Manny’s of the Mountain, anyone? There were waterparks. Dollywood. And of course, motels. Everywhere. There were cutesy inns, there were massive, cheap-looking ‘lodgings’–all vying for the tourists for whom this entire embarrassing landscape was created.

Then there were the signs. Neon lights, LEDs, and huge billboards. Everywhere.

If you don’t believe that scale is important, you should come to Pigeon Forge–then contrast it to Gatlinburg, where many equally tacky buildings are rendered inoffensive because they are densely packed into a walkable, urban-scale village. In Pigeon Forge, nothing is walkable–hence the four-lane, treeless main street and the widely-spaced insults to architecture.

The effect of all this was profoundly depressing, and not just because there was no evidence anywhere that the place had ever been visited by anyone having the slightest bit of taste (good or bad). It wasn’t even because the layout and traffic were designed–if that’s the word– to create gridlock. It was depressing because this ‘business model’ evidently works. People come here–lots of them, from the looks of it. They get their tattoos, go to dinner to gape at the Hatfields and McCoys, visit Dollywood and for all I know, have their fortunes told by the mind-reading pig.

I’m not sure what the existence of Pigeon Forge tells us about America, but it can’t be good.

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What Is WRONG With These People? Rerun Edition

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently ran a story that left me banging my head on my desk.

“Let me tell you what we’re doing (about ObamaCare),” Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens bragged to a crowd of fellow Republicans in Floyd County earlier this month: “Everything in our power to be an obstructionist.”

After pausing to let applause roll over him, a grinning Hudgens went on to give an example of that obstructionist behavior, this one involving so-called “navigators” who are being hired to guide customers through the process of buying health insurance on marketplaces, or exchanges, set up under the federal program.

“We have passed a law that says that a navigator, which is a position in that exchange, has to be licensed by our Department of Insurance,” Hudgens said. “The ObamaCare law says that we cannot require them to be an insurance agent, so we said fine, we’ll just require them to be a licensed navigator. So we’re going to make up the test, and basically you take the insurance agent test, you erase the name, you write ‘navigator test’ on it.”

As the article points out, Georgia is not the only state where Republicans are in charge and are doing everything in their power to insure that people don’t get healthcare.

Think about that. No matter what your policy differences with the President, no matter what concerns you might have about the ACA’s approach, what sort of human being deliberately–indeed, gleefully–takes steps to insure that other people will continue to suffer?

How much do you have to hate the President that you are willing to let thousands of people go bankrupt and/or die if that’s what it takes to deny him a policy victory?

The Atlanta reporter asked the obvious questions:

Why would you take pride in making it harder for Georgians with pre-existing conditions to get the insurance coverage that had previously been denied to them, and that might save them from potential bankruptcy or even death? Why would you block the federal government from offering Medicaid coverage to more than 600,000 lower-income Georgia citizens, coverage that would allow them to compensate hospitals and doctors now forced to treat them for free? Why refuse to educate uninsured Georgians on the fact that they will soon be eligible for subsidies to help them pay for health insurance, as other states are doing?

I’d ask how low these people can go, but I’m afraid I’ll find out.

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Politics, Budgets and Taxes

The other day, an advocate for the homeless asked me why the needs of the most vulnerable citizens always seem to take a back seat to the demands of sports teams, developers, and bright shiny objects like cricket fields. He attributed this state of affairs to animus against the needy, but–as I told him–I don’t think that’s it. It’s just that politicians respond to pressure from people who show up–people who contact them, who vote and especially people who donate.

The problem we face when allocating public resources is that very few of us who benefit from inequities that unfairly burden others are willing to graciously concede those advantages. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that we are entitled to them.

When the Indiana Supreme Court ruled a few years ago that the system that had yielded grossly unequal property tax assessments for years had to be fixed,  the homeowners who had benefitted from artificially low assessments–and whose taxes had accordingly been  lower than those of folks with far less valuable properties–screamed bloody murder. Rather than sheepishly acknowledging that they’d made out like bandits for years, and that perhaps it was time to pay their fair shares, they saw themselves as victims of a rapacious government and took their revenge by ousting a hapless Mayor who’d had nothing to do with that particular decision.

Fast forward to Mayor Ballard’s proposed budget.

I’ve not been a fan of this Mayor, but his proposed equalization of the tax rate for IMPD is both fair and overdue. For decades, center city folks were taxed to support both the sheriff’s department (which has county-wide jurisdiction) and IPD (which patrolled only the old city limits). When the two departments were combined into IMPD, apparently the tax rates were not adjusted accordingly. As a result, those residing within the old city limits continued to pay more for police protection than those living outside those limits. As I understand it, Ballard’s proposal would equalize the tax and end what has effectively been an unfair subsidy of some citizens by others–and those who’ve benefitted are (predictably) whining about having to pay their fair share.

Since this post is likely to make me even more unpopular than I already am, I will add that I also support the Mayor’s proposal to eliminate the homestead credit in order to pay for the addition of desperately needed police.

Would I prefer that we shift funds from cricket fields and sports teams and too-generous subsidies to the Mayor’s developer buddies instead? Of course.  Is that likely to happen? Not in my lifetime.  Let’s recognize that politics is the art of the possible, and address our public safety deficit before crime rates that approach Detroit’s undermine every other thing we are trying to do in our city.

Speaking of homestead credits, we really should invest in efforts to ameliorate the plight of the people who don’t have a homestead. There are steps we could take now that would actually save tax dollars in the long run.

But we probably won’t because they don’t scream and vote, and they aren’t in a position to make campaign contributions. And because, to our politicians, the “long run” is the next election.

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Whoring After Primary Votes

The New York Times tells us that Liz Cheney has publicly opposed her sister Mary on the latter’s very non-abstract support for same-sex marriage.  By making this declaration, Liz has officially defined herself as more despicable than her father–no mean feat.

Whatever the twisted views of the elder Cheney–or “Darth Vader” as he is un-affectionately known– it is pretty clear that those views were genuinely his. He was and is a chickenhawk, ready to send other people’s children to die in wars that fattened the pocketbooks of his cronies and his old firm Halliburton; he was and is an advocate of the blatantly a-historical  “unitary” theory of Presidential Powers; he was and is a sneering, heartless, self-righteous extremist. But give him credit–repulsive as it all was, it was also authentic.

And he loved his child enough to influence his stance on marriage–enough to recognize the inhumanity of his own party’s retrograde position.

Cheney’s daughter Liz has been a longtime harridan on the talk show circuit. She clearly inherited all of her father’s warmth, which is to say that none has been visible, along with his smug self-certainty. Recently, she decided to return to Wyoming–a state she hasn’t lived in for years, a state she returned to so recently that she can’t even qualify for a hunting permit–to mount a primary challenge to that state’s popular Republican Senator. (Can we spell “sense of entitlement”?)

Of course, opposition to same-sex marriage is part  of the litmus test applied to candidates by today’s rabid Republican primary voters. And Liz Cheney, who has previously expressed no interest in nor opinion on the issue, has chosen to pander to those voters, signaling where her priorities lie. Self-interest trumps both authenticity and any loyalty to her only sister: big surprise.

Science continues to confirm that sexual orientation is heritable and inborn. So, evidently, is being utterly without humanity.

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Making Other People Live By Your Interpretation of the Bible is NOT Religious Liberty

These are the times that try men’s souls…..Okay, that’s a bit much. But there are definitely letters to the editor that try both my woman’s soul and my (very limited)store of patience. One of them was in the Sunday Indianapolis Star.

It was the all-too-typical complaint that, by requiring “religous-based ministries” to offer birth control coverage, the hated Obamacare was violating the writer’s “right to practice our faith and not be persecuted with onerous fines if we won’t deny our faith and worship the national religion of casual sex.”

The profoundly misinformed woman who signed this letter got nearly everything wrong. For one thing, “ministries” aka churches are not subject to the regulation she so completely misunderstands. The First Amendment Free Exercise Clause exempts churches from all manner of secular law–no matter how reasonable–that those institutions deem inconsistent with their beliefs.

The Affordable Care Act does require that other religiously affiliated institutions–hospitals, universities and the like– include birth control coverage as part of their comprehensive health insurance policies. Despite the letter writer’s assertion, this is not a mandate to worship Mammon, nor does the inclusion of an option allowing female employees to get reimbursed for the costs of contraception equate to a requirement that they use it.

What we have here is a longstanding dispute about the nature of liberty and the definition of discrimination. The letter writer and other shrill moralists–the ones who believe they know precisely what their version of God wants–define liberty as freedom to do the “right” thing.  And that they should get to define what the “right thing” is.

Furthermore, they believe that if government isn’t imposing their definition of right behavior on the rest of us, it’s discriminating against them. (Think I’m exaggerating? Read one of Micah Clark’s newsletters some time. Bet you didn’t know that government recognition of civil marriage equality is really a war on Christians, Western Civilization and (probably) helpless puppies.)

Unfortunately for the Puritans, and fortunately for the rest of us, that pre-Enlightenment view of liberty isn’t the definition  that informed the Bill of Rights.  In the system bequeathed to us by the nation’s founders, liberty means personal autonomy–the right of each of us to make our own moral and ethical decisions, free of interference by government or our neighbors, so long as we aren’t thereby causing harm to others.

There can be genuine and difficult disagreements about what constitutes “harm to others,” but it takes real chutzpah to claim that covering the costs of birth control for those women who freely choose to use it constitutes an attack on religious liberty.

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