A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
As a visual person who prefers text, I find some tables and charts more confusing than helpful.
These, however, are illuminating.
If you want to understand how money affects our political system, these charts tell the story–no propaganda, no spin, no explaining away the data. As Sgt. Friday used to say, just the facts, ma’am.
CommentsAndy Jacobs died this weekend. The brand of politics he practiced predeceased him.
I was the Republican candidate who ran against Andy in 1980. It was a hard-fought campaign, but hard-fought didn’t imply the sort of mud-throwing and character assassination we have become accustomed to. Andy suggested that some of my positions were uninformed; I argued that he was ineffective. When Andy retired from Congress, Bill Hudnut and I were among those invited to “roast” him, and I admitted that during the heat of the campaign I had called him a name…I had called him a Democrat.
Andy didn’t hold grudges against political opponents. His friendship with Bill Hudnut–who actually defeated him before he won back his Congressional office– is legendary. Not too many years after I ran against him, my youngest son served as his Congressional Page. Andy and I would go on to have an occasional lunch together, and from time to time, he would comment favorably, via email, on columns I’d written.
We probably agreed more than we disagreed. When the Iraq War started, he and I shared the stage at a protest rally on Monument Circle. I seldom saw him after that, and I knew his health was deteriorating.
Indianapolis will miss Andy Jacobs.
The whole country is poorer for the loss of generosity of spirit and the politics of principle he characterized.
RIP.
CommentsThere’s a common saying among political geeks (of whom I am admittedly one): elections have consequences.
This is shorthand for the essential bargain of democratic systems. We The People agree not to wage war and/or insurrection, and instead to conduct contests at regular intervals, during which we try to convince a majority of those who will cast a vote to see things our way. Those contests–called elections–are supposed to be fair (we aren’t supposed to use trickery or intimidation to keep eligible citizens from the polls, for example), and when they are over and the votes are counted, the contenders are supposed to abide by the results.
Now, the losers don’t have to like the results. They don’t have to agree with the wisdom of the electorate. They can console each other by agreeing that the voters were stupid or venal or misled. But in our system–in any legitimate system–the losers’ recourse isn’t sabotage; it’s the next election.
Yesterday’s headlines made it glaringly clear that a substantial portion of the GOP, locally and nationally, is no longer willing to play by those rules.
In Indiana, voters elected Glenda Ritz by a very substantial margin–a margin exceeding that of Mike Pence, who was elected Governor. The Republicans (who hold all the other offices) aren’t happy that they lost this one. Fair enough. But they have proceeded to cheat, to use the offices to which they were elected to undermine the authority of the new Superintendent, and to strip the office of the powers it had when their guy occupied it. They weren’t–and aren’t–willing to work with her until the next election, when they can try to convince voters to elect their candidate. Instead, they are doing everything they can to thwart the will of a majority of Indiana voters and undermine the democratic process.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, we have a group of Representatives–a minority even within their own party–who don’t like a law that was duly passed in a prior legislative session. A majority of Representatives and Senators voted for that law, after many months of debate. It was signed by the President, and its constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court. The wisdom of that law was a central issue in the ensuing Presidential campaign–an election Obama won by more than five million votes, and an election in which a million more people voted for Congressional Democrats than for Congressional Republicans.
Poll after poll confirms that a majority of Americans either favors keeping the Affordable Care Act or wishes it had gone farther. But even if that weren’t the case–even if their hatred of this particular legislation wasn’t so irrational and disproportionate–that’s not the issue. In a constitutional republic, the Tea Party goons responsible for shutting down the government cannot justify circumventing democratic processes and holding the nation hostage.
I’m not a particular fan of Thomas Friedman, but his recent column was exactly right. This is a coup. It isn’t an attack on the Affordable Care Act. It is a frontal assault on the democratic process, on government legitimacy, and on the Constitution.
It’s a refusal to play by the rules, an effort to insure that–if they don’t like the outcome–elections won’t have consequences.
CommentsA colleague informs me that the military has a saying: Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.
Well, batten down the hatches. If you think Indianapolis government hasn’t been performing very well lately, we’re about to see how bad it can get. Not that we’ll see piss-poor results immediately– we won’t. And that’s part of the problem.
The City of Indianapolis has just fired more than half of its planning staff–a staff that was already a bare-bones remnant of what it has been in the past. (And let’s be honest, even in its most robust past it was barely adequate.)
Most citizens don’t see the need for planning. They understand the need for public safety, they appreciate garbage collection and street paving. They know they need sewers. Planning, on the other hand, seems vaguely bureaucratic and arcane.
Modern urban planning began in the early decades of the 20th Century; it was a response to appalling sanitary, social and economic conditions in the rapidly-growing industrial cities of the time. Today, it can be described as a technical and political process that uses extensive public input to guide land use, transportation, urban design and protect the environment.
Planning is what allows us to use our ever-more-limited public resources efficiently to achieve goals that the public has identified as important.
Knowing where growth is occurring tells us where to put new roads. Planning and zoning decisions protect the value of property (you aren’t likely to spend money improving your home if a gas station can be built next door). Planning projections allow us to avoid unnecessary congestion, provide urban amenities like parks where those are most needed, focus renewal efforts on deteriorating neighborhoods, and deploy public safety officers strategically. Planning allows us to ameliorate or avoid things like urban asthma and lead poisoning, ensure that water supplies will continue to be adequate….in short, it helps us ensure that our physical and social infrastructure is serving us properly.
Planning allows city administrators to base the decisions they have to make every day on data rather than hunches. And the public availability of that data allows citizens to hold their government accountable for those decisions–to ensure that they are based on relevant criteria rather than on cronyism or responsiveness to special interests.
The thing is, planners aren’t “front and center.” They work behind the scenes, and their concerns tend to be long-term. So an administration that wants to save money can get rid of planners, knowing that the negative effects won’t be obvious until he or she is safely out of office.
Next time you drive around Castleton Square–if you are hardy enough, or just unlucky enough to have to do so–consider it the face of the future.
CommentsI have an old friend (old meaning duration, not age, although neither of us is getting any younger) who has remained resolutely Republican despite his own distress at the party’s current incarnation. Presumably because of that affiliation, he is evidently on some sort of list that allows him to get the sort of emails that I rarely see, and from time to time, he shares them. (I think he likes to imagine me with my hair on fire as I read them.)
The other day, he sent me one that began:
The American Dream ended (on November 6th) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.
A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the “forever needy,” the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other “fellow travelers” have ended Norman Rockwell’s America.
Next time someone solemnly assures you that their problems with Obama have nothing to do with bigotry or mean-spiritedness–and that what is really racist is to suggest that they do–think about this diatribe.
From the far Right, we increasingly hear these laments–the whine of the poor white male Christian victims. What we get from the far Left is more likely to be naiveté and annoying immaturity, but it also can descend into paranoia.
I have a Facebook friend who is constantly sending email “alarms”–with lots of exclamation points and highlighted passages–bemoaning President Obama’s “sellout” and viewing every presidential or congressional action as a conspiracy against “the 99%.” No one gets the benefit of the doubt. All Republicans are evil, all Democrats are disappointing pussies and/or fellow-travelers.
Interestingly, at the very end of the “Patriot’s” screed, he warns darkly that the nation can only be “saved” by zealots with guns. A similar thread runs through my leftist friend’s hysterical “alerts”–only by taking to the streets can “real Americans” prevail.
Thanks to the Internet, it is sometimes hard to remember that the vast majority of Americans are pretty sensible people who would very much like to see the crazies from both ends of the spectrum return to their caves or wherever they came from.
Most of us think it would be nice if our elected officials spent less time placating hysterical extremists and more time attending to the nation’s problems.
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