GOP, Insurrection

Whitewashing Insurrection…

By one account local and federal law enforcement authorities have arrested at least 444 people and charged them with crimes related to the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the insurrectionist assault that left five dead and dozens, including many police officers, seriously injured. 

One of the injured, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was brutally assaulted by the mob, said this week he has had difficulty watching some Republican elected officials “whitewash” the outrageous episode over the last few weeks. 

“I experienced the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life. Let alone my policing career, which spans almost two decades,” Fanone told CNN. “It was nothing that I had ever thought would be a part of my law enforcement career, nor was I prepared to experience.”

Police officers stand guard as supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, U.S., January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis

One of the latest Northwesterners arrested was a 62-year-old Hillsboro, Oregon man who, among other things, is charged with striking police officers and breaking through barricades. Nearly a dozen residents of Idaho, Washington and Oregon have been charged in what has been described as the most documented crime in American history. Many of the insurrectionists took time out to snap selfies or willingly commented to journalists on camera. 

Yet, even with nearly daily reports of more arrests the unprecedented events of January 6 feel more and more like ancient history rather than a still fresh wound. Part of the reason is our collective short national attention span, but an even more important factor about why this bloody riot is rapidly receding is what Officer Fanone identifies – a conservative whitewashing of events that took place in real time on live television over the space of several hours. 

The man with the most to gain from erasing history – other than the guy who incited the riot – is, of course, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of California. By continuing to downplay the events of January 6, McCarthy is hoping fellow Republicans can use their gerrymandered districts across the country to reclaim control of the House next year. McCarthy, as craven and vacuous a politician as our craven and vacuous age is able to produce, would then almost certainly become Speaker of the House. 

“After the House chamber was evacuated on January 5, Mr. McCarthy retreated to his Capitol office with a colleague, Representative Bruce Westerman, Republican of Arkansas,” Mark Leibovich reported recently in the New York Times. “When it became evident the rioters were breaking in, Mr. McCarthy’s security detail insisted he leave.” But Representative Westerman was left behind, as he confirmed in a recent interview.

Fearing for his own life, while rioters shouted “hang Mike Pence” Westerman said he grabbed a Civil War sword from a display in McCarthy’s office and then barricaded himself in the minority leader’s private bathroom, waiting out the siege, crouching on the toilet.

To appreciate the extent of the effort by McCarthy and numerous others to diminish and ultimately dismiss January 6, you have to recall in some detail what transpired in the immediate aftermath of the riot and then analyze that information side by side with what is happening now. 

While the riot was underway, McCarthy called the instigator at the White House to implore him to call off his mob. We know this because Washington state congresswoman Jamie Herrera Beutler reported that McCarthy told her the substance of the call and that the then-president dismissed the attack, lying about its origins as the work of antifascists. 

After McCarthy told the president he was wrong – and the president knew he was wrong because he had spoken to his supporters that very day and then watched them storm the Capitol on live television – the then-president responded: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy stands to gain from whitewashing insurrection

A week after the riot McCarthy told the entire House of Representatives, the American people and the world: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.” 

Fast forward to last Sunday when McCarthy is sitting across the table from Fox News Sunday questioner Chris Wallace. “I was the first person to contact him when the riot was going on,” McCarthy said in a feeble and fabulist effort to defend the indefensible. “He didn’t see it, but he ended the call . . . telling me he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did. He put a video out later.” Hours later. 

Recalling this timeline is important not only for what it says about the lengths political figures like McCarthy are willing to go tell us what we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears didn’t really happen, but also because it’s a reminder that the shape shifting McCarthy is no outlier as a Republican whitewasher. 

With a very few notable exceptions, Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Herrera Beutler, and Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois among them, the vast majority of Republican officeholders have quietly and gladly moved on from January 6. Northwest lawmakers like Idaho’s Mike Simpson and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rogers immediately decided they wouldn’t hold the highest figure in the government accountable for his actions leading up to and including January 6. They have said nothing of substance about it since. 

Idaho Congressman Russ Fulcher remains deeply implicated in the January 6 events due to his very public efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, so his silence about the still unfolding aftermath and efforts to whitewash history makes sense, at least from the standpoint of avoiding having his reprehensible role in encouraging the violence highlighted over and over. 

No Northwest Republican has called for the kind of investigation of January 6 that would in more normal, rational times receive bipartisan support. No major Republican figure in Idaho has joined Cheney in saying the riot instigator should have no future in the party. None have acknowledged that the domestic terrorism behind the insurrection has been, as the FBI director said in March, “metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.” 

“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Liz Cheney said back in January. “Everything that followed was his doing.” 

Morally deficient Republicans want us to forget the single greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. They lack courage. And honesty. It’s up to us to hold them to account just like those who stormed the Capitol to kill, maim and destroy democracy must be held to account.  

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Additional Reading:

For your consideration…some worthwhile items…

PANDEMICS – THEN AND NOW

John Barry is the historian of the 1918 pandemic. He writes in Wilson Quarterly about the lessons learned and lost from the last time the world faced what the world is still facing. 

“In 1918, the public was lied to, and the lies mattered. Initially, when the public still believed official pronouncements, lies killed people who exposed themselves. But soon deaths became too common for anyone to trust what the government said. I believe that ultimately society is based on trust, and as trust dissipates, society begins to fray; one saw this alienation in 1918 both in large cities and rural communities – even to the extent that people starved to death because others lacked courage to bring them food.” 

Read the full piece. Worth your time


HOW DONALD TRUMP WANTED THE END OF HISTORY

The great Rebecca Solnit reckons with the end of the last presidency. 

“To those who opposed him, the years felt like a constant barrage of insults to fact, truth, science, of attacks on laws, on rights, on targeted populations from Muslims to trans kids, on the environment, on scientists, on institutions that might protect or promulgate any of these preceding things, and on memory itself. It was a disorder from which we were forever trying to emerge into order, like people clawing a slimy bank, only to slump back into the ooze.”

Read her piece here:


NEVER STUPID TO ASK QUESTIONS 

“Philip Marlowe, that most self-reliant of fictional detectives, had no boss and no one to boss around. Not so his creator, Raymond Chandler, who needed some help.”

Chandler

I love Chandler’s stories. This is good


Thanks for reading. Be careful out there.

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In Praise of Good Politicians…

In a political age too often dominated by performance outrage and petty grifting where conspiracy theories shoulder out known facts it can be difficult to remember that we once had more people than not – in both political parties – committed to the messy, but essential work of politics. Let us praise one of them. 

On only one occasion did I have the pleasure of spending time in the company of Walter F. Mondale, the former Minnesota senator, vice president and U.S. ambassador to Japan. The occasion was a big public policy conference in Boise in 2003 jointly sponsored by the Andrus Center for Public Policy and the Frank Church Institute. The world was still reeling from the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and U.S. troops were in combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a dangerous and unprecedented time, but the timing of the gathering focused on “freedom and secrecy” was close to perfect and we drew a big crowd and an impressive line-up of experts. 

Former Governor and Interior Secretary Cecil D. Andrus with his friend and Carter Administration colleague Walter F. Mondale

Slade Gorton, the former Washington senator, came to the gathering fresh from his role on the special commission that investigated the 9-11 attacks. Gorton made his first public comment about the investigation at the conference. The distinguished Washington State University historian and Frank Church biographer LeRoy Ashby explained the legacy and importance of the Idaho senator’s investigation of the nation’s intelligence agencies more than 20 years earlier. A former CIA director, federal judges, the lawyer who represented John Walker Lindh, the so called “American Taliban” and Dave Broder, the Washington Post reporter all participated. 

Mondale, his flat Minnesota voice strong and authoritative, was the eloquent star of the show, both for what he said, which is still memorable and important all these years later, and also because of his warmth, decency and commitment to democracy. Mondale came to Idaho not as duty, but as a favor to both the memory of Church and to acknowledge his long-time friendship with former Governor Cecil Andrus. 

Mondale, before his death this week at 93, was one of the last remaining direct ties to Church’s historic investigation of the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies. That investigation disclosed, among other things, evidence of assassination plots against foreign leaders, illegal spying on American citizens, including FBI spying on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and, as Mondale noted, “that every president from Roosevelt to Nixon had pressed these secret agencies to go beyond the law. This was a bipartisan problem.” 

While acknowledging that even in a democracy there are some secrets that must be kept, Mondale reminded the audience, and heads nodded all around, that Americans should never “underestimate the lengths administrations of either political party will go to protect themselves from public disclosure of erroneous, unethical, or illegal behavior — or just plain embarrassment. The instinct for self-protection is often disguised in the name of national security.”

Mondale, as Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Bernstein wrote this week “belonged to a generation of outstanding liberal Democratic senators, serving from 1965 until he assumed the vice presidency in 1977. Birch Bayh, Frank Church, Fred Harris, Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie and others took the job seriously, legislating and performing oversight. (They were joined by a very talented group of moderate and conservative Democrats, and a similarly excellent group of conservative, moderate and even liberal Republicans. It was a very good era for the Senate.)” 

It was indeed a good era for the Senate, not perfect by any means, but a vast improvement over the many grubby political strivers – Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Rand Paul come easily to mind – that dominate the Senate today. Beyond performing for two-minute cameos on Fox News, the typical Republican senator today inhabits a policy-free zone where faux anger and manufactured grievance substitute for any agenda that might actually address a national priority. 

Mondale inhabited a wholly different political world. In addition to his work with Church to bring oversight to the intelligence community, Mondale was the key driver in defeating a filibuster and passing a landmark fair housing bill in 1968, a political and legislative accomplishment that still provides the basis for prohibiting discrimination in the rental or sale of housing nationwide. Mondale’s political skill helped secure bipartisan support for the legislation. Idaho’s bipartisan Senate delegation, the liberal Church and conservative Republican Len Jordan, supported the fair housing legislation that was passed in the wake of the murder of Dr. King. 

Jonathan V. Last, a conservative who knows his political history, remarked that Mondale was long considered a political “punchline” due to the landslide blowout he suffered at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1984, a humbling defeat that Mondale accepted with good humor and genuine grace. 

Fritz Mondale was very much in the tradition of his “happy warrior” Minnesota mentor, Hubert Humphrey

“It’s funny to think, “ Last wrote this week, “but Mondale came from a day where most national politicians had served in the military and not all of them—not even many of them—were products of the Ivy League.

“His father was a minister. His mother a music teacher. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and then enlisted in the Army. He wasn’t a war hero or a super soldier: Just a normal middle-class American who served his country honorably for a couple years.

“He went to law school and had politics in his blood.” 

You don’t have to agree with Walter Mondale’s policy ideas to acknowledge, as his biographer Finlay Lewis wrote, that he “never emulated the crude, politico macho of Lyndon Johnson and despised Nixon’s brand of partisan hardball.” Mondale’s toughness was of a different, better type. “It is a toughness,” Lewis observed, “born of an understanding that progress, even in minute, incremental steps, is still progress.” 

In our fraught and fractured political times, it bears remembering – and the passing of Fritz Mondale is an appropriate reminder – that there have been times when we had better people in politics and better outcomes, too. He was no punchline, but the first major party candidate to have a woman as a running mate and a model of vice presidential influence that every successor has followed.

“It is impossible to view his life as anything other than a beautiful, quintessentially American story,” Jonathan Last wrote of the Methodist preacher’s kid from Ceylon, Minnesota. We need some role models right now and the Senate needs some members like Walter Mondale. 

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Additional Reading:

Some other items you may find of interest…

Would the Governor’s Signature Match?

Some great old fashioned journalism here from the Tampa Bay Times.

Perhaps you’ve read about the efforts of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis to force what he says would be better enforcement of ballot integrity laws by more efforts to verify voter’s signatures.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a COVID-19 testing site, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

“Some election officials say limiting signature samples could make it harder to authenticate the identities of thosewho voteby mail, perhaps leading to more rejected ballots. Signatures change over time, they say, and are often affected by the choice of pen, the writing surface, fatigue or a person’s health.

“DeSantis’ own John Hancock has undergone a transformation during his time in government, as demonstrated by 16 of his signatures compiled by the Tampa Bay Times from publicly available sources between 2008 and now.”

Holding the politician to account for his own idea by showing how it would apply to him.

Bravo. Read the story here.


New Russia Sanctions Resolve a Mystery That Mueller Left Unanswered

It seems like ancient history, but…we now know that Donald Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort really did give the campaign’s sensitive and secret 2016 polling information to a man known to be a Russian intelligence agent. From the excellent Lawfare blog at the Brookings Institute.

“Both the Mueller report and the Senate investigation established that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had passed that sensitive information to Kilimnik—but only now, years later, has the Treasury Department unveiled what Kilimnik did with it. With President Trump no longer in office, the development has attracted less excitement than it might have during the era of constant outrages about Trump’s friendliness with the Russian government and the former president’s attempts to hamstring investigations into his willingness to accept foreign help. But the Kilimnik news is worth paying attention to. As the New York Times put it, the Treasury Department’s press release provides ‘the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign’ in 2016.”

Read the detail:


Thanks for reading. All the best.

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Village Idiots…

Naturally, since I write for an Idaho newspaper, a good deal of my commentary focuses on the state where I lived for more than 40 years and whose politics I’m been observing closely for just as long.

But today’s subject: the reactionary, ideological forces of the modern conservative right fighting new “culture wars” is a national phenomenon, playing out in Republican dominated legislatures from Florida to Iowa, Montana to Kansas.

The Florida Legislature, for example, has passed a bill calling for a survey of the political beliefs of public college and university professors in that state. You can’t call that even thinly disguised McCarthyism. One critic asks, “Could this information potentially be used to punish or reward colleges or universities? Might faculty be promoted or fired because of their political beliefs?” Of course it’s an effort to intimidate.

In Montana Republican lawmakers are headed for the showdown with the state’s judiciary after all members of the Montana Supreme Court were subpoenaed by a legislative committee and told to appear and bring records related to a separation of powers and policy dispute.

Iowa’s Republican legislature wants to outlaw talk of “diversity” and proscribe what subjects can’t be taught in public schools.

And in Idaho the worst, most anti-education legislature in memory is slashing and burning its way through a COVID interrupted session. Frankly, much of what the GOP-controlled legislature has been doing is appalling.


The late, great Texas journalist Molly Ivins was both an astute and acerbic observer of political stupidity and a world class wit. She was fond of saying as Lone Star state legislators annually gathered in Austin to abuse their constituents that suddenly “many a village is without its idiot.” 

Once wonders what Molly would have made of the village people who gathered in Idaho’s Statehouse since early January. 

In 45-plus years of observing the annual convocation of the 105 most self-confident bumblers in Idaho, I’m left to conclude that the present legislative fiasco tops – or bottoms out – every other reckless, disgusting, ill-informed and damaging legislative session in modern memory. Just when you think they can’t possibly go lower, they go lower. 

Idaho voters are clearly not sending the best people to Boise. To paraphrase a famous American: they’re sending their cranks, the science deniers, the destroyers of public schools and higher education, the self-proclaimed experts on absolutely everything. And a few of them are nice people. 

The crappiest legislature in modern times is clearly a product of Idaho’s down the rabbit hole one party politics where the most outspoken cranky local conspiracy theorist is able to appeal to the narrowest band of likeminded Republicans, and low and behold they are suddenly lawgivers. As the old joke goes, yesterday many of them couldn’t spell legislator, today they are one. 

The narrowness, ignorance and grievance of the Idaho Legislature has been appalling

Consider just a partial list of what the anointed few of Idaho legislative politics have done recently in the name of 1.8 million of their fellow citizens: 

  • After being forced to shut down the legislative session for two weeks because of a COVID outbreak that many lawmakers deny or ignore – during the hiatus they kept paying themselves, of course, with your money – they approved legislation to prohibit mask mandates by local officials. “This is a matter of our personal rights and our liberty,” said Republican Representative Karey Hanks, the bill’s sponsor. The Associated Press’s Keith Ridler noted the obvious, that Hanks, whose public health expertise consists of having been a school bus driver, was contradicting “virtually all public health experts… cited information she has that masks aren’t effective in preventing disease.” It seems worth noting that Hanks has twice been elected to the legislature by simply putting her name on the ballot. She’s never had an opponent. 
  • Not liking Governor Brad Little’s wimpy and often ineffective leadership in battling the deadly virus that has now claimed the lives of 2,000 Idahoans, Little’s fellow Republicans voted to further limit his and future governor’s powers to deal with emergencies
  • Unhappy with Republican Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, a truly exemplary public official who has repeatedly attempted to protect the legislature from its own hubris and save your money from being wasted on senseless litigation, the legislature tried to gut the AG’s authority to represent certain state agencies and then settled for merely slashing his budget. Wasden had the audacity to refuse to join a spectacularly undemocratic lawsuit – Texas idiots, again – seeking to overturn the presidential election. That angered certain of the knuckle dragging caucus and because grievance is their guiding principle, they lashed out. 
  • This legislature’s attacks on public schools and higher education have truly been unprecedented. A bill to fund Idaho teacher salaries died this week after a nonsensical debate about “critical race theory,” a Fox News staple that no one in the legislature can define. As Betsy Russell of the Idaho Press wrote, the teacher pay legislation went down “after debate that focused alternately on whether Idaho values and wants to pay its teachers, and whether ‘critical race theory’ is somehow being promoted in Idaho’s public schools because the state funds teacher professional development.” What an absolutely horrible message to send to thousands of teachers who have had the most trying year imaginable. 
  • The legislature’s blindly ideological assault on higher education prompted University of Idaho president C. Scott Green to go public in an effort to address “misinformation and half-truths” that he said profoundly threaten the state’s colleges and universities. Green put a fine point on the problem when he wrote to Vandal alums and business leaders: “There is a troubling void of voices in the legislature standing up for the principles of critical thinking, the pursuit of knowledge, and the ability of students and faculty to explore ideas, examine the facts, and come to their own conclusions.”
  • Having disposed of education and pandemic concerns, legislators devoted hours of time and untold amounts of your money this week to discussing a clownish idea to create an expanded state of “Greater Idaho” by sweeping in vast acres of eastern and southern Oregon. This idea has precisely nothing to do with public policy, but is grievance driven political performance. “Greater Idaho” will happen when pigs fly, but hey it’s entertaining to blather about stuff that fires up the rubes back home. 
  • And last buy not least, lawmakers are working to make it virtually impossible for citizens to mount an initiative campaign to create a law at the ballot box. This despite Idaho’s history of having created some of the state’s most important public policy through initiatives, including expanding Medicaid, mandating campaign finance disclosure and limiting residential property taxes.

One guesses it’s mighty difficult to tell anything to people who are happily confident in their own ignorance. What these legislators think they know they’re confident of. What they don’t know they can’t be bothered with. 

For the rest of the good people of Idaho – and particularly for those in the business community – who care about a competent government, who don’t believe public school teachers and college professors are engaged in a vast Marxist conspiracy to indoctrinate children with dangerous ideas about diversity and actually want a better education system that fuels a better economy there is only one question: How far down this rabbit hole are you willing to go? 

If you think the collection of dunces and nitwits who have taken over state government have gone as low as they can possibly go think again. They haven’t. If you like this legislature your task is easy: keep sending your local nincompoop to Boise. If you’ve got some concerns about what’s happening there is an alternative course. 

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Go Partners With the President…

On the morning of August 4, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt had breakfast in his private Great Northern Special railroad car on a siding in Ephrata in east central Washington. After breakfast Roosevelt left in a motorcade to drive to the Grand Coulee damsite. 

The president’s irascible Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, a huge backer of big, costly and transformative infrastructure projects like Grand Coulee was part of the group and he recorded the details in his diary.

“The dam to be built here will take six times as much concrete as will be required at Boulder Dam,” Ickes wrote, referring to the massive dam – now called Hoover Dam – spanning the Colorado River south of Las Vegas. “There are at least a million acres of extremely fertile land which will be able to produce abundant crops if and when they get water from this project.” 

Ickes expressed amazement that 20,000 people, many traveling hundreds of miles, gathered at the Grand Coulee construction site – literally the middle of nowhere – to cheer on the prospect of irrigation and energy. These folks knew the desert would bloom. New jobs would be created.  Economic opportunity would come to Grant County and the larger region. 

Spending money to put people to work building big things was the essence of Roosevelt’s Great Depression fighting New Deal in the Pacific Northwest. The huge dams spanning the lower Columbia and the upper Missouri, among the greatest human built structures in the world, are the most visible monuments to a Democratic president’s infrastructure plans, but the concrete is only a part of the story.  

It is not hyperbole to say that FDR’s New Deal built the world we inhabit: Schools in Boise, Parma and a half dozen other places; a golf course in Idaho Falls; post offices in Grangeville, Orofino, Bonners Ferry and Buhl, even the Red Ives Ranger Station up the St. Joe. 

The June 1937 issue of Western Construction News took notice of the electric infrastructure under construction in north central Idaho. The Roosevelt Rural Electrification Administration (REA) allotted $75,000 to the Clearwater Valley Light and Power Association in Lewiston “for construction of a generating plant of 800 KW capacity.” Another $400,000 was handed over to “for construction of 300 miles of transmission lines in Idaho and Washington.” 

Farm to market roads were improved in Asotin County. Husky Stadium in Seattle was expanded. A high school built in Kennewick, a library in Dayton and $141,000 was spent on municipal sewer improvements in Spokane

A marker in Idaho designating a Roosevelt-era infrastructure project

The “Living New Deal” history project has catalogued no less than 114 separate infrastructure projects in Idaho and 259 in Washington that have the roots in Roosevelt’s massive – the critics said socialistic – infrastructure program of the 1930’s. 

It’s no accident that Joe Biden, a rare politician with connections to the New Deal generation of builders, has placed a portrait of Roosevelt in the Oval Office and is proposing a New Deal-like $2 trillion infrastructure program. Somewhere Harold Ickes is smiling down on Biden’s determination and no doubt chuckling at the conservative handwringing over an initiative that could prove to be as transformative as when FDR came to Ephrata and celebrated his ambitions. 

The conservative push back to Biden’s initiative – too expensive, not really infrastructure, pure old socialism – would be more credible if Republicans had anything to propose or hadn’t squandered four years of the incompetent last administration promising to address infrastructure and failing to do so. 

The truth is there is no conservative alternative, no proposal, no suggestion of what might be done to rebuild what has crumbled and build new what is needed. As with so much of the politics of the moment, the conservative alternate is to complain. Mitch McConnell bemoans a “massive tax increase,” which is what Biden is proposing – a long-term tax increase on corporate America, including some of the biggest corporate names in America who pay, well, nothing in taxes. 

Twenty-six different companies by one recent study, including Nike, FedEx and Duke Energy, paid zero while reporting a combined income of $77 billion. You might think a guy like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, struggling by as the world’s richest man on his $177 billion fortune, would be up in arms about Biden’s proposal. He isn’t. Bezos said this week he supports long-term corporate tax increases to fund the infrastructure effort. 

A key piece of Biden’s proposal would finally see serious action on broadband in rural America, an absolutely essential component of economic revitalization in much of the West. Expanding high speed internet access in rural America was not that long ago a Republican talking point, but now that Biden has actually teed up a real proposal, congressional conservatives have lost their enthusiasm. 

Governor Brad Little apparently didn’t get the GOP memo since he said recently, as National Public Radio reported, that infrastructure, particularly rural infrastructure, is a genuine priority. “As we work on our quest for more broadband and better roads,” Little said, “that means that that growth can be dispersed out into areas, particularly areas that have had a dislocation, that have lost a major employer.” 

That sounds a lot like FDR in eastern Washington in 1934, and also like the making of an economic strategy that both parties should get behind. 

The political debate over whether and to what extent to involve the government in rebuilding a battered economy certainly didn’t begin with a deadly pandemic that has crushed job growth and decimated many small businesses. But the current posture on the right – ignoring the scope of the economic problem, while belittling every solution and hoping the neglect reaps political rewards – is an old tune, the kind of cynicism Roosevelt’s critics wallowed in the 1930’s. 

There are signs that American business isn’t falling in lock step with McConnell’s economic nihilism, but rather embracing the 21st Century infrastructure proposal for what it is: a launching pad for a new American economy. Republicans, meanwhile, promise a fight to end, and to hell with the economy and the folks who would benefit.

Yet public opinion is on his side, so Biden would be well advised to parrot Roosevelt’s famous statement about his do-nothing opponents in 1936. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred,” Roosevelt said, and then won a landslide re-election. 

For their part, Republicans would be smart – not likely – to heed the advice of Jesse Jones, a hardheaded Texas businessman who was a top aide to FDR. “Be smart for once,” Jones begged the conservative critics of those earlier days. “Go partners with the President in the recovery program without stint.” 

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Additional Reading:

Some other suggestions for items worthy of your time

Ozzie and Harriett Went Off the Air in the 1960’s

I was pleased to have a column earlier this week in the new, non-profit news site Idaho Capital Sun. I wrote about Idaho’s long struggle to deal with a no-brainer, early childhood education:

“An enduring debate for the last half century in Idaho has been the question of establishing, sustaining and attempting to expand educational opportunities for very young children. Idaho’s systematic failure to develop a policy for early childhood education is a key factor – perhaps the key factor – in why the state habitually ranks so low in educational achievement.”

Read the full story:


In Sickness and Health

A lot of buzz about a new book with an inside view of a hospital struggling to survive in rural America.

A journalist’s fly-on-the-wall coverage of one small Ohio hospital reveals the deeper story of America’s broken medical system—and the heartland’s decline

“The first remarkable thing about Brian Alexander’s new book, The Hospital, is that he managed to pull off an exception to this seeming iron law of U.S. health care. He never explains exactly how, but in early 2018 he persuaded the CEO and board of a small, community hospital in rural Bryan, Ohio, to give him fly-on-the-wall access to their struggling institution—and complete freedom to write up what he witnessed. “

The Washington Monthly has a review:


The filibuster can be conquered: I know — I helped do it

And I really enjoyed this piece by John G. Stewart, a former top aide to Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, on how the filibuster was beaten to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

“The recounting of what happened in 1964 points the way in 2021.

“Force the opposition to hold the floor and talk. No more premature “test votes.” No weakening amendments prior to cloture. Get organized by assigning senators to monitor the floor and be ready to defeat likely quorum calls. Coordinate closely with outside support groups and the media. Stay on the offensive.”

Required reading to understand the current battle over Senate rules.


Thanks for following along. Be safe out there.

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A Statement for Our Times…

Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois was a towering figure on the American political stage in the 1950’s and 60’s, a man who said his overarching principle as Senate minority leader, a position he held for ten years prior to his death in 1969, was “flexibility.” 

Dirksen, dubbed among other things “the wizard of Ooze” owing to his florid speaking style – he had hoped to be an actor as a young man, and had a voice that one admirer said reminded him of “honey dripping on metal tiles” – was a marvel at changing a position, something he did repeatedly.

Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen at the time he served as Senate minority leader

Dirksen embraced the historic Civil Rights Act in 1964 after initially voicing doubts. He flat our rejected a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union when John Kennedy first proposed an agreement only to later lead the Senate effort to ratify what became the foundation of all subsequent efforts to limit nuclear weapons.

“Life is not a static thing,” the conservative Dirksen said in 1965. “I try to be a realist and appreciative of what you have to do in the world in light of changing conditions.” 

One might think that the last year would have provided a level of realism and appreciation for “changing conditions,” and might have prompted some serious rethinking of old assumptions, particularly on the conservative right. But for a significant segment of the American population continuing to defy public health advice is now just one more political hill to die on, literally.  

Ignoring the shocking pandemic numbers in her state, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a favorite in Trump world and a would-be presidential contender, boasts that her’s “is the only state in America that never ordered a single business or church to close. We never instituted a shelter in place order. We never mandated that people wear masks.”

All true, but oh the cost. 

South Dakota’s spread-out population numbers 885,000 souls, a total, as of earlier this week, diminished by 1,935 victims of COVID in the last year. As a point of comparison, consider Oregon’s population of 4.2 million and the state’s 2,390 virus deaths. Oregon has imposed strict lockdown procedures and mandated masks. And, surprise, the number of Oregon deaths, while tragic, is remarkably lower as a percent of total population than wide open South Dakota. 

And there is vaccine hesitancy, or denial.

New polling from the NPR/PBS/Marist survey indicated that 49% of Republican men are, so far at least, refusing COVID-19 vaccines, a vastly higher percentage than any other demographic. Only 6% of men who identify as Democrats said they would forgo the shots. 

“We’ve never seen an epidemic that was polarized politically before,” Robert J. Blendon, a health policy scholar at Harvard, told Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus. Politics and partisanship explains a lot about tragedy. 

There has been an unrelenting logic to pandemic since it came fully into our lives in March of last year. While there is much we still do not know about the disease there is no mystery to its exponential march. When public and personal efforts to control the spread are ignored in places like South Dakota – and it a large degree in Idaho and many other conservative states – the numbers of infections, hospitalizations and deaths roll from one wave to the next. The fourth wave is upon us.

COVID-19 vaccines are a huge success story. Now we need to get people vaccinated

More than 95 million Americans have had one dose of the vaccine and more than 50 million have been fully vaccinated but getting the last ten percent treated in order to make the country safe for everyone may prove a daunting, even impossible, challenge. 

The former guy, tucked up in south Florida, kind of urged his followers to take the vaccine recently, but he didn’t have the moral courage – big surprise – to actually make a production out of getting his own shot. He makes a production of everything, but takes a pass when lives, even the lives of his supporters, are at stake. 

In Iowa, another conservative state where politicians have declined to lead, while caving under a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theorizing, a local GOP official who recovered from COVID said recently, “I’m not a rebel by any means. I know this stuff is real. I’ve lived it, but I also believe strongly in personal choice.” Still she said she would make no effort to communicate with fellow Republicans that the vaccine is a very good thing. 

The conservative mantra of “personal choice” has become for many conservatives just another way to be irresponsible. 

Now, brace yourselves for the coming fight on the right over “vaccine passports,” some method to allow those who have been vaccinated to show proof of that fact. Journalist Kevin Drum sensibly said the passport issue, which could make it easier to screen airline or cruise line passengers or deem a warehouse crew disease free, should be left to the private sector to figure out. That would, after all, be a conservative value, but oh no. 

The U.S. House of Representative’s wackadoodle caucus immediately moved to add proof of vaccine to “cancel culture,” insurrection denial and the vast threat to the Republic from transgender girls playing basketball to the list of its defining issues of our time.

Georgia Congresswoman Margorie Taylor Greene (Republican – Lalaland), a politician as historically ignorant as she is conspiracy crazed, equated a private business requiring proof of vaccination to “corporate communism,” thereby proving she doesn’t comprehend either word.

It is clear we are headed into another very rough patch where the unrelenting logic of this horrible disease that has claimed 550,000 American lives will again prove to all that you can deny it, but you can’t avoid it. Cases are increasing again everywhere. The inevitable rise in hospitalizations will follow in a couple of weeks and then the death rates will increase. Again. 

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, while expecting different results, we’ve moved to an advanced stage. One suspects that the old pragmatic midwestern conservative Ev Dirksen would have been astounded. 

“The only people who do not change their minds,” Dirksen said, “are incompetents in asylums, who can’t, and those in cemeteries.” Now, there’s a statement for our times. 

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Additional Reading:

A couple of additional reads worthy of your time…

Did racism kill Jackie Robinson?

The start of a new baseball season means we will, as we should, remember the remarkable life and career of the man who broke baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson.

An all-time great – Jackie Robinson

A thoughtful piece here about how racism contributed to Robinson’s too short life.

“Though Robinson’s illnesses were diagnosed in early adulthood, they could have had their roots in childhood. Adverse social and physical conditions as well as limited access to and poor quality of health care serve as barriers to illness prevention and treatment, limiting the ability to protect one’s healthExperiences of racial trauma and discrimination like those Robinson experienced are linked to smoking, unhealthy eating habits and alcohol usedecreased trust in health care providers, increased cardiovascular risks and negative cardiovascular outcomes.”

Read the entire piece from The Conversation:


Too many people who helped the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq face a deadly problem

I’ve known Jim Jones, a former Idaho attorney general and justice of the state supreme court, for a long time. He occasionally went toe-to-toe with my old boss, Governor Cecil Andrus, but more often despite their differing political faiths they ended up in the same place politically.

Jones has had an impactful career and in this piece that appeared this week in The Washington Post he speaks forcefully and urgently about his Vietnam service and how it relates to the moral responsibility of the United States to its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The threat to Iraqis who helped the United States from Islamic State terrorists and others has not ebbed, while the danger for Afghans grows worse by the day. If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the flow of refugees, including thousands who helped U.S. forces, will increase to a torrent. We must be prepared to provide them sanctuary. The United States should do everything in its power to avoid repeating the disgrace of its exit from Vietnam.”

Read the full op-ed:


A Minor Regional Novelist

I read – and valued – many of the tributes to Larry McMurtry, the Texas writer who died recently. During the reading I stumbled on this Texas Monthly piece from 2016. It’s really good.

Larry McMurtry – as he called himself “a minor regional novelist”

“In American letters, he is something of an icon—winner of both a Pulitzer Prize (for the novel Lonesome Dove, about a cattle drive in the 1870s) and an Oscar (for the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, which he co-wrote with Ossana, about two sexually conflicted modern-day cowboys). His storytelling has been compared to that of Charles Dickens and William Faulkner, and even the famously self-absorbed novelist Norman Mailer—himself a winner of two Pulitzers—once confessed his admiration. “He’s too good,” he said, explaining his resistance to McMurtry’s novels. ‘If I start reading him, I start writing like him.'”

The writer is Skip Hollandsworth…here’s the link:


Thanks for reading…be safe out there.