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Posts published in October 2020

It’s not just going away

October 24, 2020

johnson

Donald Trump and his Republican enablers are ending October the way they began late last winter when the pandemic came to the United States: with gaslighting, misdirection, blatant lying and the largest diversionary propaganda campaign in American political history.

There are really only two words to describe what the president and his lapdogs have done: incompetence and evil.

“People are tired of Covid,” Trump complained on a recent call with his campaign staff, while several reporters were listening. “I have the biggest rallies I’ve ever had. And we have Covid. People are saying: ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it.”

“People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots,” Trump said, “all these idiots who got it wrong.”

Tell that to 223,000 Americans who are not here to listen to a deranged, heartless campaign’s closing argument delivered by the most disastrous president in American history. Or how about the more than 1,700 health care workers in the United States who have died during the pandemic because they cared for the sick. Are they “all these idiots who got it wrong?”

David Eggman, a registered nurse at a hospital in Wausau, Wisconsin, a region overrun with Covid-19 hospitalizations, has seen more than his share of death since March. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he has listened as COVID-19 patients breathed their last, alone without family at the bedside. Frequently they told him, “that they didn’t realize it was as bad as it was.”

But the president did know. He told the journalist Bob Woodward in February that the virus was “deadly” and much more serious than the flu. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said a month later during another exchange recorded on tape. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

After first refusing the reality, and then ultimately failing to deal with a deadly disease, Trump rushed to ignore accepted science and politicized the public health response. He has repeatedly mocked advice about masks, and despite his own near-death experience, has persisted in holding virus spreading – and truth killing – rallies in states where the disease is running wild.

Trump said a week ago that we have “turned the corner” with the virus, a true statement if you understand that the “turn” is upward in daily cases, upward in hospitalizations and upward in the number of rural counties that by his own government’s assessment are trending overwhelmingly in the wrong direction.

A website that reports on rural America said this week that “Covid-19 spread in rural America at a record-breaking pace again last week, adding 160 counties to the red-zone list and bringing the total number of rural Americans who have tested positive for the coronavirus to more than 1 million.” And researchers at the University of Idaho, just to cite one data point, now estimate one in every 30 people in eastern Idaho are infected with the virus.

That Trump would seek to downplay all this, lie about it and fail to heed the advice of scientists is no longer even news. He’s a textbook example of a pathological liar, likely unable to ascertain truth from fiction. He’s also clearly suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, leaving him unable to accept let alone empathize with millions of his fellow Americans who have died, been made sick or economically devastated by his unprecedented failure to lead an effective national response.

What remains surprising, even after all these months, is that fellow Republicans have accepted his failures and made them their own. Two governors – South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Idaho’s Brad Little – exemplify how thoroughly degraded Republican politics have become. With virus cases running out of control in both states, the governors act like this is all business as usual.

South Dakota’s infection rate is four times the national average, but Noem, a rightwing darling, has been hawking t-shirts inscribed: “Less Covid, More Hunting.” Meanwhile, the governor has been all over the country campaigning for Trump, so often missing from the state in recent weeks that columnist Mike McFeely roasted her this week saying, “She’s followed the Trump playbook, and therefore the Republican playbook, line for line. With her T-shirt sales, Noem is even cashing in on the denial.”

Meanwhile, the Republican speaker of the South Dakota House of Representatives, Steve Haugaard, has been in hospital emergency rooms twice this month battling the virus. “It’s been the most devastating stuff I’ve ever had in my life,” the 64-year-old Haugaard told the Associated Press.

Little isn’t as brazen – or as stupid – but ultimately just as ineffective as his South Dakota counterpart. While hospital officials across Idaho were calling this week for more aggressive steps to slow the growth of cases, Little was preaching the gospel of personal responsibility, refusing even the most basic step of a statewide mandate to wear a damn mask. “This is about personal responsibility,” Little said, “something Idaho is all about.”

Right. All that personal responsibility has seen a 46% increase in cases over the last two weeks, including so many cases at the major hospital in south central Idaho that the top doctor there said this week, “It gets back around to, how long can you sustain this? How long can you provide the high-quality health care we provide?”

If you’ve been waiting for the promised Trump October Surprise, it’s already here: the infection and death toll is rising rapidly, and winter will be awful. Donald Trump and his GOP sycophants with their widespread demonization of people of expertise like Dr. Anthony Fauci and with the ignorant rejection of basic public health measures have effectively adopted Stalin’s maxim: a single death is a tragedy; 221,000 deaths are a statistic.

The election in ten days comes down to a stark choice for America: do we embrace science and common sense to lead us to solutions for the worst public health crisis in more than one hundred years or do we empower, as the writer Caroline Fraser put it recently, “a zealotry so extreme that is has become a death cult.”

Benchmarks

October 23, 2020

stapiluslogo1

While much of the nation watches rapt on election night to see who wins where, what will Idahoans have to watch?

Idaho, by and large, is commonly regarded as a baked-in done deal: If an “R” rather than a “D” is attached to the name, then - with some exceptions, as in the city of Boise and a few other places - that candidate will win. The Republican for president, for Senate, for legislature and so on. For example, the FiveThirtyEight website, one of the most careful numbers analysts around, never assigns 100 percent probability to almost anything but does put (dryly) the likelihood of a Donald Trump presidential win in the Gem State at more than 99 percent.

That’s not quite the end of the story. In cases like Idaho, and other places - this applies to both parties - part of the story is in, not just who wins, but by how much, and where. These details have their own stories to tell.

To tell them a little more clearly, it helps to set some benchmarks against which the numbers on election right, or election week, can be measured.

For example, four years ago, Trump won in Idaho with 59.2 percent of the vote. That left a little more than 40 percent for others, but Democrat Hillary Clinton accounted for just 27.5 percent of it. An independent, Evan McMullin, got much of the rest. (Four years before that, Mitt Romney got 64.5 percent.) With no third party candidate on the ballot this time, what’s Trump’s percentage? Well above 60 percent, more like Romney, or below it?

The state hasn’t been polled a lot. The most frequent polling has been by SurveyMonkey, which is not a highly rated pollster; its numbers in September and October have put Trump at around 58 percent and Joe Biden at around 41. But that’s not a lot to go on.

At the U.S. Senate level, Republican Jim Risch, like Trump, gets a 99-plus percent chance of winning in Idaho. One poll from late summer by Spry Strategies showed Risch at 53 percent and Democrat Paulette Jordan at 28 percent, an advantage of about two to one, with a large chunk of voters undetermined. Six years ago, Risch received 65.3 percent of the vote (and six years before that, 57.7 percent). How does this year’s percentage stack up to those earlier numbers?

You can pose similar questions for the U.S. House members. In the first district, Republican Russ Fulcher two years ago received 62.7 percent of the vote against a low-key Democrat (and a tribe of independent and other candidates); Fulcher’s opponent this year, Rudy Soto, has been highly energetic and visible. And in the second district, Republican Mike Simpson in 2018 took 60.7 percent against Democrat Aaron Swisher (his opponent again this time), which was actually his lowest general election number since he won the office in 1998. How well will Fulcher and Simpson do this time? Are the numbers from recent elections indicators of a crack in the wall, or just minor fluctuations in the status quo?

The Idaho Legislature, overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans as it has been for close to three decades, is not likely to change much: The odds are that the Senate, with its six Democrats and 29 Republicans, and House, with its 11 Democrats and 59 Republicans, will not shift dramatically.

But there may be changes, and probably will. At least one Senate seat, in west Boise, is a strong prospect for flipping from Republican to Democratic control, and a few House seats (I’m watching a couple in Moscow and Idaho Falls especially) are also prospects. Republicans are not sitting still either, and the party’s new chair, Tom Luna, has made clear that winning back some now-Democratic seats is a high priority for the state party, and in Idaho few Democratic office holders are really safe.

On the local level, a number of county offices (I’m keeping an eye here as well on Ada County, where two commission seats flipped Democratic two years ago) merit watching.

So it shouldn’t be said of Idaho a week from Tuesday that there’s nothing to see here. The drama is lower, but the lessons could be meaningful.

What are you thinking?

October 22, 2020

schmidt

As a former elected representative, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what the masses I was supposed to represent were thinking. I’ll admit, a lot of the time I thought their thinking didn’t make a lot of sense, but I still thought it was my duty to understand their thinking. If you think of representative government as a contest of opposing or varied ideas, and the election winner takes the trophy (“Elections have consequences” Barack Obama 2009), then understanding the thinking of those you represent is wasted time; just vote for those who elected you, not the people you represent. I just didn’t see the job that way. Maybe that’s why I didn’t last long.

So, I am currently struggling to understand just what Americans, but more Idahoans, my neighbors want from health care. Help me out.

A recent poll showed most people don’t want the Affordable Care Act’s protections of “preexisting conditions” repealed. That means, if you have a preexisting (expensive) health condition, health insurance companies can’t refuse to sell you insurance or increase your rates based on their assessment of your future risk to their bottom line. Even 66% of Republicans (91% of Democrats) thought the preexisting condition protection should be maintained.

But if asked more broadly, “should the ACA be repealed”, 76% of Republicans said YES! REPEAL!

So please, tell me: what are you thinking?

This is of course made more critical in the coming election, but also the Supreme Court appointment shooting through the Senate like goose droppings.

The hope from Trump, and I guess, from Republicans, is that the nominee can sit for and vote on the case that will be heard a week after the election brought by Republican state attorneys general and supported by our Presidents Department of Justice. The suit asks to declare the ACA unconstitutional, even though they have zeroed out the individual mandate penalty in their “Billionaires Benefits Tax Bill”.

Some Republicans want to distance themselves from the possibility that the preexisting conditions limitations might disappear. They argue that through “severability” SCOTUS can wipe out some of the ACA, but not the other parts that we like. I find it fascinating that these elected representatives want appointed-for-life judges, not accountable to the voters, to be making these decisions. It’s like they’re afraid to have the discussion. Is that possible?

So, I want to ask you, my Republican neighbors, to answer some questions: just what should healthcare look like in this country? Can you please give me a clue?

I have spent a short time reading the National Republican Platform, and a little longer reading the Idaho one. In short, the National platform says, “whatever Trump says”. But the state one is a bit more specific, even if it’s on page 10, after Article 12 (Economy) and before article 14 (American Family). Maybe 13 is health care’s lucky number for Idaho Republicans.

I encourage you to read this platform that 80% of Idaho legislators endorse. It could explain why we aren’t talking about this problem. It pretty much says, health care should be affordable, government shouldn’t regulate things, and people should be responsible for their own health.
So, I think Idaho Republicans are telling me the next time I’m in a hurry and fall off a ladder and end up a quadriplegic, I should have been more responsible. I agree, I shouldn’t have been in a hurry, I contributed to my injury, but I now must sell my house if I want to keep alive? What if I’d been T-boned by a drunk driver? No mercy there either I guess.

This is a tough discussion. We should be having it with our elected representatives.

If the Idaho Republican solution to our health care dilemma is to go back to the 19th century, I can’t support it. But I’d sure appreciate a discussion.

Trump’s mendacity

October 21, 2020

 

A guest opinion by Gregory A. Raymond, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at Boise State University, where he held the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs.

Dishonesty is one of the distinguishing features of the Trump presidency. The Washington Post has recorded over 20 thousand false and misleading claims that President Donald J. Trump has made during his first three-and one-half years in office, meticulously recording the frequency, range, and scale of his fabrications and half-truths. Some of Trump’s claims have been petty; others have been egregious; and still others, cruel. But regardless of how provocative they were, he rarely supported them with evidence. His defense was simply to spew out more bombast.

What explains this shameless behavior? Trump’s mendacity is bewildering to many Americans, particularly since the nation’s civic culture celebrates a Founder who purportedly refused to lie.

Pundits generally attribute Trump’s dishonesty to a rhetorical strategy based on deception. It’s a strategy so deeply rooted in the human experience that it defines some of literature’s most memorable characters. In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for example, Odysseus, the legendary warrior-king of ancient Ithaca, proclaims that “words, not deeds, rule over men in everything.” Artful words, he explains, facilitate deception. They enable the cunning to shape themselves to suit the moment’s needs and dupe others whenever it is beneficial. “When one stands to gain,” he insists, “scruples are out of place.”

On the face of it, winning over listeners through any means—fair or foul—seems to account for Trump’s rhetoric. He regularly uses intentionally false and misleading statements to shift attention away from sensitive topics, duck responsibility for policy failures, and burnish his public image. What is more, he stonewalls and equivocates to mask these lies, as shown by his paltering about journalist Bob Woodward’s audio recording of him admitting that he deliberately downplayed the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) when he knew of its dangers.

Not only has Trump been able to dissemble with impunity, but his lying frequently works. According to a large body of psychological research, most people expect others to be truthful and are bad at detecting lies. Moreover, even after falsehoods are discredited, people tend to dismiss corrective information if the falsehoods are consistent with other things that they believe, and if they think that members of a salient reference group believe in them as well. Rather than reject erroneous beliefs, people often go so far as to imagine circumstances where a trumped-up story could have been true. Owing to these behavior patterns, dishonesty gives liars a significant advantage over principled individuals whenever they interact, which enables them to manipulate those individuals and gain benefits that might not be obtainable if both parties were sincere and transparent.

Because the liar’s advantage is a central element in the president’s rhetorical strategy, he bristles if someone calls attention to his prevarications. When fact-checked during press briefings by reporters Weijia Jiang (May 11, 2020), Kaitlan Collins (July 28), and Paula Reid (August 8), Trump abruptly terminated the meetings rather than defend his assertions. Likewise, when asked by S.V. Dáte (August 13) if he had any regrets for all of the brazen lying that he had done, he refused to respond. With numerous books and news reports exposing his duplicity, it is understandable that in an August 28-September 1, 2020 CNN poll only 36 percent of the respondents believed that Trump was honest and trustworthy.

Even his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, has asserted that “you cannot trust him,” an opinion echoed by such diverse observers as Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, and by Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump’s anger at mainstream print, broadcast, and online media is not surprising. Reporters who bring his disingenuousness to light undermine his ability to deceive. Still, a puzzle remains: Why does Trump continue to lie when he knows that the majority of his audience knows that he is lying?

One plausible answer is that his rhetorical strategy entails more than persuasion. In addition to making false and misleading statements to distract, deflect, and delude, there is another, less appreciated facet of Trump’s strategy—domination. Whereas he lies to bolster his support among ardent followers, his aim is different when speaking to those he cannot convert. Here he lies not to convince, but to control; not to entice, but to taunt. Implicit in his con is a boast: “I realize you know that I am lying, but I am powerful enough to do it anyway, despite your objections.” It is a form of bullying, writer-activist Masha Gessen notes, that characterizes many authoritarian leaders.

Flooding the civic arena with wild, sensational claims is a way that Trump flaunts his power. His relentless barrage of fictions, spurious accusations, and fallacious conspiracy theories attracts attention, which allows him to insert himself into people’s everyday lives, regardless of whether or not they believe his allegations. Debunking the confusing jumble of distortions that he propagates is mentally exhausting, like trying to unscramble the contorted images in a house of mirrors. Trump’s swarm of fraudulent claims can overwhelm the most indefatigable fact checkers, bogging down their efforts to hold him accountable for his wayward behavior. As his verbal onslaught obscures the boundary between reality and illusion, desensitizing people to the line between truth and fantasy, it is easy to grow cynical about politics and become resigned to living public life as a passive subject rather than as an active participant.

In short, jackboots and brownshirts are not the only tools for enervating civic engagement. Unremitting mendacity can also beget political acquiescence. By wearing citizens down, it offers a cheap, surreptitious way to demoralize opponents and discourage their involvement in public affairs. Over time, the torrent of lies erodes trust in democratic institutions and practices, which can lead all but the most fervent partisans to withdraw from civil society and seek solace in the quiet joys of private life.

Lying is pervasive among human beings, though most people do it for relatively harmless reasons, such as being polite in uncomfortable social situations. Donald Trump’s mendacity is more egregious and consequential.

While it may be tempting to believe that his outlandish claims are merely intended to shock and should not be should not be taken literally, the sheer volume of false and misleading statements suggests otherwise. Trump’s interminable lies represent more than simple waggishness. They are the leading edge of autocracy.

Into desperation mode

October 20, 2020

jones

With the polls showing Donald Trump heading for a disastrous election loss, he and his crew are desperately grasping for something, anything, to keep their ship afloat.

It has not been working out so well. Trump continues to be his own worst enemy--holding a superspreader event at the White House, publicly dithering over more stimulus aid, commandeering Dr. Fauci for a campaign advertisement after denigrating him and ignoring his wise advice for months. The list goes on.

Now, Trump is trying to shore up his campaign by improperly dipping into public money. He recently hatched a desperate plot to snitch $7.8 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund to send a $200 drug gift card to each of 39 million Medicare recipients. It will cost an additional $19 million to send a letter through the Postal Service, which he is in the process of wrecking, to congratulate himself for his generosity.

The polls show that senior citizens are deserting Trump in large numbers, which accounts for his belated effort to curry favor with them. Seniors may recall, however, that Obamacare closed the doughnut hole for prescription drugs and that Trump is presently before the U.S. Supreme Court trying to kill that law. The doughnut hole would come roaring back.

The government blew another $1 million to put a letter in 75 million USDA food aid boxes, congratulating Trump for helping families feed themselves during the pandemic. Ironically, Trump’s wretched response to the pandemic played a major role in creating the need for massive food aid for families. Many food banks, including the Community Food Basket-- Idaho Falls, have appropriately removed the letter.

On September 18, Trump announced an additional $14 billion in aid to the farm sector for pandemic relief. That follows $19 billion in April, as well as $28 billion for the two previous years to compensate for Trump’s bungled tariff policy. Much of this aid has been needed to sustain the farm economy, but the need was caused by Trump’s Covid-19 and trade policy failures. When the financial aid runs out, farmers will be left trying to figure out how to re-establish the export markets they’d built up over many years.

The Trump administration’s electioneering goes beyond using public money to try to buy the election. Trump has been harassing the Justice Department to come up with some kind of charges against numerous individuals he has villainized over the years.

For months, Trump has been promising that the Justice Department would momentarily produce a report outlining criminal conduct on the part of former President Obama, Joe Biden and a cast of many others. On October 8 he unleashed a storm of tweets and verbal slams against Attorney General Barr, calling for the indictment and arrest of Obama and Biden before the election. The Justice Department has quietly indicated that no such action is going to happen. If there was any merit to Trump’s frantic claims of misconduct, you can bet Barr would be taking action against the royal enemies.

The Trump administration’s herculean effort to keep its election prospects from sinking to the depths of defeat have not worked. No amount of taxpayer funds has done the trick. The fact is that the voters have had their fill of Trump’s dangerous and inept handling of the pandemic, the toxic political atmosphere he has created in America, his pandering to extremists, his disregard for the truth and the swamp of corruption he has fostered over the last four years. The Trump ship is headed to the bottom.

Change is ours to make

October 19, 2020

rainey

O.K., we’ve had a couple of “debates.”

The whole sorry mess has been chewed on by all media extant. Best summary of the whole sorry mess I’ve heard came from political pro, Paul Begala, who said it was “must flee TV.”

Like it or not, Trump’s still the President of these United States. The fact that he’s not a “play-by-the-rules” guy and acts/sounds like the school yard bully is because that’s what he is. He won’t change. But, there’s the dignity and importance of the office he so poorly represents. Cutting him off or arguing with him, as Savannah Guthrie did so well, may seem necessary at times, but he’s still the President.

To me, the storyline emerging so far was what wasn’t said. We’ve got about 50-million people on unemployment. There are many, many more who aren’t counted because they’ve been out of work so long. Anyone get a factual sense of what either candidate would do about the unemployed in these verbal “wrestling matches?”

How about disappearing jobs? The Census Bureau counts total jobs that have vanished since the first of the year at over 21-million. So 21-million unemployed folk have nothing to return to. Airlines, just this month, are laying off many thousands and eliminating those positions. Anyone hear either man say anything about that?

Afghanistan. I don’t recall hearing anything meaningful. We should have! Our longest war is sapping billions of dollars, killing our youth and no end in sight.

Our environment. What about it? Anything “in depth?” Any solid plans?

And a whole lot more.

In many ways, Trump’s belligerence is defining these shameful events. More than that, he’s redefining our government, our politics, our media, our economy, our markets, our very existence as a recognized democratic republic. Changed? Yes. For the better? Not!

Trump’s dominated our existence for four years by “sucking the air” out of every appearance and action. In so doing, he’s succeeded in changing the course of an entire nation. Not for the best, assuredly, but changed nonetheless.

He’s bullied, abused, badgered, threatened, lied about nearly everything. Constantly. With the able assistance of lackey Mitch McConnell, he’s moved our federal justice system to the far-right and is about to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with a nominee whose past judicial actions and personal beliefs will cause even a sharper rightward shift. Nearly all lifetime positions. (Edit note: I’d like to see term limits on federal judicial and SCOTUS appointments but that’s a story for another time.)

So, what do we do about it?

One of the forces endangering this nation is ignorance. Ignorance of what this country is, how government works, the structure of it, what it’s supposed to do, what we should expect from it, who’s responsible for its operation, where do we fit in, how do we exercise change, what do we do if it becomes unresponsive to our needs - as is the case now.

We’re bombarded daily with broadcast lies, continuing affirmation of “facts” that aren’t true. They’re spread by paid - make that “well paid” - folks who have their own agendas which may not, at times, be in the nation’s best interests.

Millions of Americans live in an alternate universe of phony “facts” - as we’ve seen with Trump - because those “facts” support what they think they know, reinforced regularly by fact-less media designed just for them. It’s become their comfort zone and whatever is different - even if based in reality - is rejected. Arguments do no good. Even real facts are useless.

This rejection of real facts has gone on for so long it’s become “institutionalized.” It’s produced a plethora of politicians who’ve injected this group ignorance into our political system, threatening our continued national existence which is - and must continue to be - based on facts. We have 13 professed QANON believers currently in Congress with more on 2020 ballots

All of that means the rest of us - those of us dealing with reality - have to continue to grow our number. We must educate ourselves - re-educate if necessary - in all phases of government and, when presented with an opportunity to do so, knock down the lies.

It can work.

Case in point. There’s a new movement among young evangelicals branching off from their elders. In many instances, that new direction is more earth and reality-based. They’re very concerned about our environment. They’ve taken up societal issues long ignored by older “believers.” If sustained, this new breed can grow and change the future direction of a religious philosophy which, in turn, can change the nation and even our politics.

There are ways - many ways - available to all of us to have an effect on what’s happening around us. We can change things that need changing. We can support what needs our support. We CAN make a difference.

Trump’s open disrespect for the duties of his high elected office, his contempt for law, his belligerence and ignorance in all things, his avoidance of rules, decorum, responsibility and personal conduct have been a national embarrassment. His “debate” antics were unsurprising. We’ve known, for some time, who he really is, how he thinks and acts.

Now, it’s time for us to act - to remove this unwanted player from the stage. We can - we must - in just two weeks.

Voter suppression

October 18, 2020

stapiluslogo1

For most of my adult life, the elections officials and political people I've been around - people of both parties - were advocates both visibly and privately for getting people out to vote. Candidates and parties always recognized that some groups of people were more or less likely to support them, and their answer to this was to try to encourage as many of those likely to back them to get to the polls.

I own and have read a number of books on political campaigns, accounts of them and how to run them. When it comes to voter turnout, they all have said much the same: The answer is to be found is getting as many of your supporters as possible to the polls (or the ballot box, as the case may be).

The election officials I've known were serious and dedicated to the principle that everyone legally allowed to vote should do that, and doing that should be as easy as we can make it.

It's worth restating all this because somehow, in the last decade or so, this basic, core, obvious principle has been increasingly abandoned by one of our major political parties, the Republicans. There are stray cases among Democrats, but nationally active voter suppression - a term once rarely used, and seldom greeted with anything other than an instant and fierce denial - has become a commonplace, and in many parts of the country Republican officials seldom even both any more to deny it.

The American Civil Liberties Union describes on one web page "Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators can redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote. Certain communities are particularly susceptible to suppression and in some cases, outright targeted — people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities."

In Texas, counties with populations larger than the state of Idaho have to make do with a single advance voting box. In Ohio this week: "In Columbus, the line stretched for a quarter of a mile. In Cuyahoga county, the hours-long wait began before polls even opened. All of this was entirely predictable. Thanks to an Ohio state law passed in 2006 by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed by a Republican governor, the number of in-person early voting sites is limited to just one per county."

The League of Women Voters, traditionally a good-government organization dedicated simply to participation in our system of self-governance, now is in the middle of a political fight: "Voting rights are under attack. In recent years, politicians in dozens of states have erected intentional barriers to our right to vote, including forcing discriminatory voter ID and proof-of-citizenship restrictions on eligible voters, reducing polling place hours in communities of color, cutting early voting opportunities and illegally purging voters from the rolls."

The subject has - appallinglly - become far too vast for a single column. The point here is to say just this:

Anyone in politics who makes voter suppression happen, allows it to happen or simply stands by when it happens and could do something to stop it, should forfeit any public trust or responsibility. It should be an absolute disqualifier for that person from holding any public office, now or ever.

We need a suppression, for the generations to come, of anyone who engages in voter suppression.

The white supremacy/milita problem

October 17, 2020

johnson

You can be forgiven if you missed a story a few weeks back that in more normal times would have received a great deal more attention. The details seem particularly important in Idaho and in the Pacific Northwest, but certainly no political figure in Idaho – or the region for that matter – has been drawing attention to the testimony of FBI director Christopher Wray.

“Racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, constitutes a majority of domestic terrorism threats, Wray testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on September 17. The FBI director also said, “We certainly have seen very active — very active — efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” specifically “to both sow divisiveness and discord, and I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, to primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden in what the Russians see as a kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

So, the Russians are doing it again, according to the Donald Trump appointed FBI director, and violence from white supremacist groups is the most serious domestic terrorism threat.

A few days after Wray’s testimony, and after a whistle blower complaint alleged an effort to cover up another assessment of the danger of white supremacist violence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its own threat assessment. “I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years,” said acting DHS director Chad Wolf.

Because Idaho, and the Pacific Northwest more generally, has a particularly long and ugly history dealing with white supremacy let’s focus on what the FBI and DHS say is the single biggest threat when it comes to domestic terrorism – radicalized white guys with guns.

As Seattle journalist Knute Berger wrote more than two years ago in Seattle Magazine: “The Pacific Northwest has long been a sought-after enclave for people with extreme views and utopian, or dystopian, fantasies. On the far right this has included wannabe Nazis, dating back at least to the 1930s, when fascist William Dudley Pelley of the so-called Silver Shirts declared himself America’s Hitler and ran a campaign for president from Seattle in 1936. In the ’80s and ’90s, the Nazi presence emerged with various groups in Washington and what some dubbed ‘the Fourth Reich of Idaho.’”

Most in Idaho celebrated twenty years ago when the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation’s lost a multi-million-dollar jury trial and ended up in bankruptcy. The Coeur d’Alene Press celebrated the outcome as a “victory for justice” that “corrected the misconceptions about Idaho and its people,” but that assessment now seems outdated, if not flat wrong.

Far right agitator Ammon Bundy who led an armed takeover of a federal facility in eastern Oregon now roams Idaho at will, enjoying support from elected Republican officeholders. Bundy and some of his followers went armed recently to the Idaho Statehouse to intimidate and disrupt lawmakers. They caused physical damage but received only mild rebukes.

In August the Idaho Statesman published a long piece based on “interviews, acquired emails and letters, and a review of social media profiles” documenting the ties of various Idaho GOP elected officials “to groups like the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers and the American Redoubt movement.” The newspaper noted that “Tom Luna, chairman of the Idaho Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did many elected officials whose ties to militia groups or extremist ideologies” who were mentioned in the story.

Washington state representative Matt Shea, a Spokane Valley Republican and a leader in the so called Patriot Movement who has his own ties to Idaho Republicans, eventually decided not to seek re-election this year after it was disclosed that he “planned, engaged in and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States Government in three states outside the state of Washington over a three-year period.”

Now comes news that a militant group – the Wolverine Watchmen – plotted to kidnap and try for treason the governors of Michigan and Virginia. The FBI broke up the plot and indicted six men. “The Wolverine Watchmen are not a Second Amendment militia or constitutional patriots in any sense of the word,” says John E. Finn, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University who has studied these groups. “If they are guilty of the charges brought against them, then they are terrorists.”

It requires minimal dot connecting to trace the arc of presidential pronouncements – “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” Donald Trump said after the white supremacy march and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 – to the vast increase in right wing and often white supremacist violence. The president has also repeatedly vilified Muslims and people of color, including many elected officials.

You have to wonder why it’s become so difficult for Republican elected officials to connect these dots and avoid the “both sides” whataboutism argument about these threats to democracy and order. Idaho congressman Mike Simpson fell down this rabbit hole this week in an interview with Idaho Public Television’s Marcia Franklin.

Do you condemn white supremacy, Franklin asked Simpson? “Absolutely, absolutely,” he said, before instantly pivoting to a full-on attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and “these people” who “are out burning down our cities and stuff, that’s a problem.”

It’s possible, indeed intellectually honest, as Simpson must know to condemn the senseless property damage of protests in Portland and elsewhere and still acknowledge that there is a profound and long overdue racial reckoning taking place in the United States. You can condemn violence, including white supremacist and “militia” violence, and still believe that racism must be addressed. Not once, even in passing, did Simpson make the connection.

Franklin twice asked the 22-year House member if it was possible Donald Trump had contributed to “this type of rhetoric and behavior.” Simpson, with more than a minor pained expression on his face, said, “I don’t think he is.”

Then he again immediately shifted to Trumpian talking points, amplified a Fox News conspiracy theory and mispronounced the name of the woman of color running for vice president.

“I think what emboldens these people is when they get arrested and then you have the potential vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, and her, some of her campaign staff putting, and encouraging other people to put funds into a fund to bail these people out that are out burning down out cities, and stuff, that what encourages these people. You have to stand up to these people.”

For the record that is a gross misrepresentation of Harris’s action, but the real point is you have to stand up to these people – unfortunately these days that means a Republican like Congressman Simpson.

Are we listening?

October 16, 2020

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Whatever else you think about Democrat Rudy Soto’s campaign for Congress in Idaho’s 1st district, whether you approve of him and his platform, this much is clear: He’s doing what a candidate should do.

Soto is traveling the first district - no small place, 500 miles or so from top to bottom - intensively, and getting some news coverage. He’s holding events, and has made himself available to voters. He’s issued a pile of press releases (not in unreasonable numbers, but plenty of them) on pertinent and sometimes thoughtful subjects. He’s held his incumbent opponent - Republican Representative Russ Fulcher - to account, dissecting his record in some detail.

There are candidates who file for the office and then maybe show up for the debate but mostly just wait for the results on election night. Soto isn’t one of those: He’s a serious candidate.

There are other serious candidates out there, too, and these days, many of them - those running where they’re in a partisan or other minority - often feel frustrated, and often for good reason.

So my question, pointed not at the candidate but at the constituency: Is anyone listening?

That’s not a call for simply accepting his campaign case. It’s a call for giving it some serious consideration, something that’s probably not much happening.

Back a generation and more ago, more of us probably did listen more. When the heated Senate race between Democrat Frank Church and Republican Steve Symms was underway, both of them campaigned everywhere in the state, and people heard them out. Minds sometimes were changed. Many people resisted the urge to simply hop on Team A or Team B, and actually struggled with what they should do.

Now many of us live in a bubble, and we tend to dismiss people and arguments from outside it. Ask a Republican running in Seattle or Portland (there are a few) what kind of a listen they get in those places. You’d probably find the same for Democrats in Idaho outside of Boise and a few other small places: A reception that's ordinarily polite, but effectively dismissive.

This is not the way we the people are supposed to do politics: Take in one simplistic label (that of a party, usually, but sometimes something else) and decide that’s enough information. It isn’t, not if we’re correctly doing our jobs as self-governing citizens .

It’s a sad turn of events. In generations past, getting information at all about candidates, about the issues before us, was far more difficult than it is now; today, our access is broad. Our wisdom in making use of that access is what seems to be falling short.

We have no lack of useful options.

During the fall seasons of odd-numbered years, our household television is tuned mostly to C-SPAN and its showing of candidate debates around the country (the only kind of reality TV I can abide). They’re plenty dramatic and educational as well. When you hear arguments from South Carolina or Iowa reprised in Idaho, you get a fresh light on them; which make sense, and which don’t. You get a larger, broader picture than you might from a single local debate in which many of the issues may be personalized.

Debates and forums are well worth watching, and we watch as many as we can. (On the presidential level, I watched my first general election debate in 1976, and haven’t missed one since. This next week’s, if it happens, may be especially noteworthy.)

That’s one option, and there are many more. On the flip side, we try to be careful in parsing what we see in social media and other places where agendas often drive facts, rather than the other way around. It’s easy to drown in misinformation.

But one way to make smarter choices is - and this is actually not too hard to do in this season - to listen to the candidates. To Rudy Soto, and Russ Fulcher. And all the others. If they’re willing to put themselves out there to do your work, you can put forth a little effort to listen to them, and think about what they have to say. And then make up your mind.