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School day politics

On October 24 the Idaho Department of Education announced, and appeared to encourage, a new option for Idaho public schools: “supplementary resources from PragerU Kids, available for use free of charge.”

Gee, sounds wonderful.

So what’s the catch?

If you get the impression, which you easily could get from the state press release, that PragerU is just a milquetoast, academic, centrist, non-ideological supplier of educational materials, think again. Here’s where it helps to take a national view, because PragerU has become familiar, and highly controversial, in other states.

First some background: Dennis Prager is a conservative radio talk show host, not an academic, and “Prager University,” founded in 2009 as a nonprofit, is not a school and does not have a campus. It is a large-scale operation, one of the biggest “political spenders” on Facebook. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times.”

Where does the money to do this come from? The core funding was from Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their bucks in fracking, and may be familiar to Idahoans who recall their purchase of tens of thousands of acres of land in Idaho and the subsequent cutoff of access in much of it. If you were wondering about an Idaho connection to PragerU, there you are. (Prager has said he no longer receives money from the Wilks.)

So where else has the (abundant) money come from? Here’s one small example. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “A Hungarian education foundation paid Dennis Prager $30,000 in public funds for two appearances during an August youth festival where he and Fox News host Tucker Carlson touted the country’s far-right stances on the media, immigration and LGBTQ issues, according to a contract obtained by Hatewatch.”

Prager, in turn, has called the SPLC “a hate group on the left.” Not exactly a love fest there.

A year ago Forbes magazine, no liberal agitator, said: “PragerU, a nonprofit known for producing short and often controversial videos promoting conservative viewpoints of different civic topics, had its content approved for use in Oklahoma’s public schools Tuesday, about a month after Florida adopted the use of the content in its own classrooms, prompting backlash over its presence in public classrooms.” Backlash is a mild way of putting it.

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi studied Prager and concluded with a warning that, “the implications of creating a dense network of extremist thinkers allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic. Leveraging the thoughts of someone like Stefan Molyneux can have disastrous consequences considering that Molyneux regularly promotes ‘alt-right’ ‘scientific racism’ on his own YouTube shows.”

One very popular video (watched 11 million times) from conservative Candace Owens is called “Playing the Black Card,” in which she says, “The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you have never been oppressed. With the black card you can sell books full of indecipherable prose because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?”

The PragerU YouTube channel has featured a video showing Christopher Columbus saying slavery was no problem and George Floyd was simply a  “Black man who resisted arrest.”

Even the Weather Channel has blasted PagerU’s take on the environment and climate change as “misinformation.”

The Media Bias Fact Check site gives PragerU a rating of low credibility: “Overall, we rate PragerU Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks, and the publication of misleading information regarding immigration and climate change.”

And there is much, much more. Look ‘em up online (or on Idaho Ed News). You have to wonder if the state’s top education office did.

Coming soon, very possibly, to your child’s classroom.

So, in the interest of fairness and balance, when does Bernie Sanders get to run a video series in Idaho schools?

 

Endorsement: Kamala Harris (reposted)

My favorite presidential endorsement editorial this year is also the shortest, just a single sentence. In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris said (in total): "On the whole, we’d rather this not be America’s last election."

The point was valid, and surely one of the better reasons, but it highlights the sad aspect of this year's presidential campaign: One of the candidates, Republican Donald Trump, is so astoundingly awful in so many ways, ways that would take a library of books to compile, that the reasons to vote for Harris - and there are good reasons - tend to migrate to the back burner. And that's unfair to us as well as to Harris.

But it can hardly be helped, because Trump really is that bad.

Eight years ago I easily compiled a list of 100 reasons not to vote for Trump; overwhelmingly, those reasons still hold up, and the four years of his presidency and the years of his post-presidency have only reinforced most of them and caused the number of additional reasons to explode. And that's even counting as a single reason things like the more than 30,000 lies he told just during his time in office.

He cannot be trusted to put the nation above himself (or his personal enrichment), nor can he be trusted with the nation's security, or the security of the people within our country. He has no respect for our military or anyone else in our government or even, for that matter, his own supporters. (Try searching his recent comments about "fat pig" in one of his recent speeches.) His mind, such as it ever was, is cratering, to the point that we seem to be watching a daily slow-motion collapse. Anyone concerned earlier this year about the age of President Joe Biden ought to remember that Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president.

He appears to have more loyalty to the nations and dictators who would do us harm, than he does to us. When he talks about "us," he talks about building mass concentration camps ("detention centers" - and not just for people here illegally, since the forces he would employ are unlikely to be very precise) and using the nation's military against our people, meaning against anyone critical of him. All of this would demolish our free speech, and press, and right to association, personal security and privacy. Many of his most vigorous supporters are eagerly working on imposing a state religion, with the effective result of an end to true freedom of religion as well. If he is elected and does half of what he says he plans to do (not to mention what's in Project 2025, which was compiled by the people who would lead and develop policy for his new administration), your freedoms are gone. None of us will be safe.

He is an active, imminent and crisis-level threat to the United States of America - to you.  Al Qaeda was never such a threat as he is.

The final evidence of that - which ought to be irrefutable to anyone with a fair mind - should come from all those people who worked with him while he was in office, and now either disown him or outright endorse Harris. The number of people involved in security and foreign policy concerns is disproportionately high among that group. The list of hundreds of prominent Republicans, a list far longer than any comparable collection of party rebels from the past, is far too long for this column; but it can be found easily enough online. No president has ever been so disowned by the people who worked in his administration.

Just one example: John F. Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, remarked of Trump (among other things) "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

(Memo to J.D. Vance: Maybe you should have checked, before accepting Trump's Veep offer, into what almost happened to the last guy, who was almost hanged by a mob, which outcome Trump remarked would be perfectly fine.)

Or you could ask any of the many Republicans who have turned against their own party because of him, many saying that Trump must be defeated for the Republican Party to regain a sense of decency. Charlie Sykes was a long-time Republican radio talk show host in Wisconsin, but he could not stomach what he sees from Trump. From one of his recent comments:

Leave aside for a moment Trump’s serial lying, fraud, grifts, alleged sexual assaults, criminal indictments and one very public attempt to overthrow an election. Set aside his abandonment of free trade and fiscal restraint. This is a man who has called for terminating “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; who promises a presidency built around retribution; whose campaign has become a bullhorn for bigotry; who is increasingly leaning into fascist rhetoric, and who leads his rally crowds in cheering for Russian President Vladimir Putin and booing Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky. And who now threatens to use the military against political protesters and the so-called “enemy within.”

There's a big and growing crowd of thoughtful Republicans who in no way are thrilled by the idea of voting for Democrat Harris but find they must do what they can to block Trump - to protect the country.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times, a staunchly conservative columnist, said on Monday that though he was "dragged kicking and screaming," he would vote for Harris because "I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest."

Or, to balance that a bit with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, "Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball fighting to end: The global economy that has made us prosperous; the Western alliance that has kept us safe; American democracy that has keep us free. We cannot let this deranged, traitorous old man win."

Well. What is there left to say about Harris?

She is, for one thing, a safe choice. Put aside for the moment anything else about her, but just imagine a candidate whose career has been that of a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president, gaining the approval of her constituency (in the most recent case, her party's nomination) to move steadily up through the ranks. That's not the portrait of a radical or of an incompetent.

Her ability in this campaign to build, rapidly, a strong organization, unite a vast array of interests and make regular necessary and sometimes difficult decisions on the fly speaks well of the capability she would bring as president.

She has the strong potential to be a very good president, and no major red flags to the contrary are apparent.

None of the negatives - the legitimate, as opposed to the phony - I have seen about her come close to the downsides of Trump. These are two different universes.

She is clearly strong and intelligent, could represent the United States well on the world stage and at home.

Would she be the perfect solution to all our problems? No. But no president ever is.

I expect she is honest enough, even in the heat of campaign season, to acknowledge that. Her opponent obviously never would.

Eight years ago, I quoted Trump as saying at the 2016 Republican convention, "I alone can fix it." That, I said, is the statement of a man who never should be entrusted with the presidency.

But in this year, if he said "I alone can break it" - break America, shatter our nation into pieces and into a shadow of what it has always been - he might be right. There are people among us, some of whom insist they are patriots, who are fine with that.

It's on the rest of us, now in these days leading up to the election, to make sure that does not happen.

 

Back

Some of you might have been wondering where I’ve been. That’s a common question posed about us Idaho Democrats.

Well, I’ve been up on ladders and planks and some real rickety scaffold, painting the second story window trim in a long hot summer. There was the bathroom remodel, refinishing the cabinets and fixing the exhaust on the Adventurewagen. I’ve been busy. I really doubt I have been missed.

Despite what the Republicans might claim, I have not attended any Communist Party conventions, nor gone to any Antifa weapons training weekends. I’m an Idaho Democrat and don’t have time for such folly. I’m just painting old, cracked boards that will peel again this winter, despite my efforts. I have my own folly. It involves maintaining old houses, old cars, my old body, and mind. So, I take a break now and then.

And as an Idaho Democrat, I know fallacy. Peeling paint and super minority status are about equal in my book. So, I scrape and paint.

I did attend a fundraising effort by the local Idaho Democratic Party. It was actually well attended. The food was good, and the drinks were paid for, and the band played. I had two beers. The local candidates gave their pitches. I remember those days.

Most were pretty good, though for some the applause was obligatory.

I mingled.

I started asking how many of these folks at this event were registered as Idaho Democrats. I knew most of them by name.

I found that at least a quarter of the folks at this Idaho Democratic fundraiser admitted to being registered as an Idaho Republican. About a tenth said they were unaffiliated.

No wonder some Idaho Republicans have tried their best to purify their taxpayer-funded primary election. Some of these rascally Idaho Democrats are wearing sheep’s clothing.

I just see it as a testament to how avidly people want to participate in the electoral process. Let’s be honest. A couple thousand voters choose the candidate in the May Republican primary election. The muttering crowd endorses the nominee in November.

It makes sense that the Idaho Republican party wants to purge us voters from their rolls. Those Idaho Democratic supporters who probably gave money to Idaho Democratic candidates don’t really support Idaho Republican values.

But the current system is rigged.

Some Republican wacko candidate wins their primary with maybe 2000 votes. They for sure will go on to win the general election. Because Idaho voters vote Republican, no matter.

The Republican wacko or moderate primary winner now goes on to represent the 45,000 people in their legislative district.

Does this current system in Idaho represent the values of our representative democracy?

Maybe.

Back when our founders scribbled this up on parchment, women couldn’t vote. Slaves couldn’t vote. Indeed, the landed, rich mostly slave-holding patrons ruled. Don’t miss the good old days. We have them here in Idaho.

So, Idaho Democrats are in a quandary. The Initiative, Prop 1, for open primaries and rank choice general elections will undoubtedly help more moderate republicans get elected. But it won’t help Idaho Democrats gain any legislative seats.

Besides scraping, painting, and climbing ladders, I have knocked on a few doors for my local party. I now hold the lowest elected position, precinct committeeman in the Latah County Democratic Party. We should get out and know the people in our precinct.

Few of the people in my precinct are registered to vote. I helped with that. I talked to them about local candidates. But I also talked to them about Prop 1. Almost everybody I spoke with thought it made good sense.

I endorse Prop 1, knowing it will not elect more Idaho Democrats. It’s just the right thing to do for our state.

It’s good to take a break.

 

 

A long night ahead

The Democrats have done it again. When faced with a well-organized but extraordinarily controversial Republican candidate for president in Donald Trump, and having their own lawfully elected candidate withdraw from the race midstream, the Dems have reached out for a significant nobody to head their ticket.

In early 2024, Joe Biden was duly selected through the state-by-state primary races to be the Democratic candidate for president for a second term. He was expected to be nominated at the Democratic convention and to again select Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential candidate.

However, after the mid-summer televised debate between Biden and Trump, and in the midst of the concerned despair that followed what some believed was Biden's dramatically flawed performance in the debate, Biden suddenly announced his decision to withdraw from the race. Many thought his performance in the TV debate – which was to keep his head down and his answers directly and precisely confined to the questions asked, and to ignore completely the blistering stream of invective comments coming from Trump – was exactly proper. Others, in a mounting whirlwind of comment, thought Biden was overwhelmed by Trump, and was completely defeated by him in the contest.

This whirlwind overtook the party officials and they considered whether any action could or should be taken. In years past, and in other races, switching horses, or even trying to switch horses, midstream was usually met with disaster. Witness recent memory in Idaho when gubernatorial candidate Charles Herdon's sudden death and the scramble by the Democrats to replace him contributed to the election of Republican Don Samuelson, the lackluster and generally thought to be incompetent state senator from North Idaho, and later, Jack Murphy's failed attempt to resign from his candidacy for governor contributed to Cecil Andrus's campaign. Recall that Andrus then trounced Murphy soundly, being elected with an unheard of 70% of the vote.

Biden's television debate with Trump took place before the official Democratic convention was held, and the party officials publicly wondered whether, when, why and how they could deny Biden the office. Despite all the problems of switching candidates midstream, and despite the argument that the tempest over Biden's performance at the television debate was probably only of teapot size, the party powers decided to accept Biden's resignation.

There was no renewed primary election process, and no other candidates officially offered their names as replacements. The Democratic powers met in their proverbial closet and decided to accept Biden's withdrawal and designate Kamala Harris to replace him on the ticket. They then presented her to a willing convention as the sole nominee for office.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was for all intents, and unknown as a presidential candidate. She had been vice president under Biden, but her only real qualifications were strictly local to California.  She had been a respected lawyer there with her public local offices served being a county prosecuting attorney and the state attorney general. Nationally, she had only been the recently elected United States senator for California when, in 2020, Joe Biden tapped her to serve as his vice president. Her service there was clearly under Biden, with little opportunity to demonstrate her own qualifications. The upshot is that with her short stint as senator and her position as vice president under the shadow of Biden's presidency, her experience in national service is limited. She is still an untested candidate to run the country.

To top these issues, she is female, non-white, and married to a Jew. Any one of these facts could trigger a defeat from an electorate that rejected Hillary Clinton, the only other female national party candidate in history, was generally reluctant to accept Biden's Catholic religion, and only grudgingly accepted Obama's half-white existence. The combination in Harris may be overwhelming.

On the other hand, Harris has proved to be an extraordinary candidate, collecting more than a billion dollars in campaign contributions, besting Donald Trump soundly by most critics in their only televised joint appearance, and running a flawless campaign on issues. In addition, it appears that Republicans in droves are deserting their party's candidate to cross over to her side.

The result, with less than a week to go, and despite all the unexplainable infirmities of Trump's candidacy, is an election that is too close to call. Both sides are claiming victory, but the polls still show it as being essentially a dead heat. With less than a week to go, and with the margin of error considered on the specific reports, the overall polling results still stand generally at 50 – 50.

Get plenty of rest next Tuesday. It's going to be a long night.

 

Vote countin’ time

Voting in our national election concludes a week from today.  At our house, we submitted our ballots some time ago.  By mail.

Nationwide polling has been completed.  And all of them - ALL of them - show the same thing.  Tied at within the statistical margin of error.  Separated by fractions of a point.  On election night, it may be the next morning before we know who got the most votes.  Or even the next week.

I didn't say won.  "Won" may be used by the candidate who seemingly got the most votes at the time.  "Won" is likely to be used wistfully by whichever political camp you call home.  "Won" may be the euphemism used by people who think their candidate was victorious.

But, in this election, we may not know the victor - the one who "won" - for several days.  Even weeks.  Challenges there will be.

Our many elections offices are run by intelligent, honest public servants.  They've practiced and practiced their jobs for months.  They know what they're doing and they'll try as hard as humanly possible to get the counting done right.  The first time.   ASAP.

Still, there are those looming challenges.

If Trump wins, the Harris folks will almost certainly want recounts in specific cases.  If Trump loses, he's already talking challenges up to your knees.  Which means we might not know who won for up to a week.  Or more.

We're at a place in our national history we've never been before.  We've always cast our ballots and, in the vast majority of times, accepted the final count.  National recounts have been few and far between.

Not this time.  If Trump loses - as he likely will - there'll be a rush to the nearest court house with briefcases filled with paperwork.  Because judges often call a temporary stop to whatever is being challenged so the legal niceties can be worked out, the outcome of our election could be stopped in a single court.  All he needs is one - just one - of those challenges to throw the outcome into doubt.

So, be of stout heart.  Lay in more than the usual amount of popcorn and some liquid refreshment.  Get some blankets for the couch and settle in election night in front of the telly.  And, the morning after.

It's gonna be late.  Very late.

 

Desperation among ranked choice critics

It is telling that the loudest voices against Prop 1 are those who hold office because of the closed Republican primary in Idaho. Federal and state officeholders who came to power because of Idaho’s corrupt, taxpayer-funded GOP primary are desperate to perpetuate themselves in office. That’s why they are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Prop 1, the Open Primaries Initiative, hoping to defeat the election reform measure with deceptive claims.

And they are using taxpayer money to create confusion about the initiative. Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1376 in the last session, authorizing sitting legislators to use “public property or resources” to advocate against an initiative. Legislators are the only public officials in Idaho who can legally use taxpayer resources to propagandize. The officials who oppose Prop 1 are taking full advantage of public funding to badmouth the initiative, so as to retain their stranglehold on political power.

The extremist branch of the Republican Party has used the low-turnout GOP primary to bolster its ranks with culture warriors who have little inclination to solve important problems facing the state. When their extremist candidates can pick off responsible Republicans with as little as 8.8% percent of the registered voters in a legislative district, why waste their time doing the difficult work of governing. It is easier to win votes by stoking fear and outrage over fake culture war issues, than trying to solve serious issues–water policy, crumbling infrastructure, tax inequality, complying with the constitutional mandate to fund and maintain public school buildings.

We have witnessed too many ethical, reasonable and civil legislators getting picked off by dark-money-funded radicals. Geoff Schroeder, Linda Hartgen, Chenele Dixon, Julie Yamamoto, Kenny Wroten, Matt Bundy, Greg Lanting and several others were defeated in May by a small slice of the electorate in scorched-earth, truth-deprived campaigns.

The dysfunction in the Legislature grows each election as problem-solving Republican candidates get beaten by extremists in the closed primary. But that is just part of the problem. Some reasonable GOP officeholders observe the fate of primaried colleagues and take a sharp turn to the right in order to avoid being primaried themselves. Several officeholders have turned toward the extreme side of the political spectrum in recent years to avoid a far-right challenge in the closed primary.

For instance, Lance Clow and Wendy Horman used to be regarded by many observers as moderate legislators. That is no longer the case. Clow has taken a far-right turn since the 2013 legislative session. Horman has become one of the chief sponsors of school vouchers, which would force taxpayers to subsidize religious education, even though the church many of her constituents belong to does not operate religious schools. She and House Speaker Mike Moyle have threatened to repeal Prop 1 if the voters approve it, the voice of the people be damned. Several other generally-reasonable elected officials have felt compelled to make overtures to appease the extremists.

There are a great number of Idaho Republicans who are sick at heart with the havoc being wreaked by the extreme culture warriors currently in control of the GOP.  They include former Governor Butch Otter, former House Speaker Bruce Newcomb and well over 100 traditional Republicans who have formed Republicans for Open Primaries to eliminate the closed GOP primary. Butch and Lori Otter eloquently stated the case for opening up primary elections to all voters in a press briefing at the State Capitol in September of last year.

If voters approve Prop 1 on November 5, as expected, many of the extreme candidates who have benefitted from the closed GOP primary, such as Attorney General Raul Labrador and House Speaker Mike Moyle, will no longer be able to knock traditional, problem-solving Republicans out of the running in the low turnout primary election. They will have to face real competition from reasonable candidates in the general election.

 

A brawl in Oregon 5

The only definitive fact about the campaign for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, now fewer than four weeks from its finish line, is that it is close.

The limited available polling says so, suggesting the candidates are within the margin of error of each other. Both – and their allies – are spending enough that the election is unlikely to be decided because one candidate swamps the other financially.

And the candidates, Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum, act as if they think so as well.

Last week, on Tuesday night at KOIN TV in Portland and Thursday night at KTVZ in Bend, they met for two of their three planned debates, which, aside from the flood of paid messaging from their campaigns, may be the main basis on which undecided voters will decide between the two of them.

The debates struck a different tone, with the second more energetic and combative. In Tuesday’s exchange, they walked cautiously while firing occasional shots. On Thursday, both sharpened their game, and fireworks exploded in nearly every exchange. Both candidates said the other cannot be trusted, Bynum drilling that point more frequently across a wider range of subjects, even addressing her opponent directly: “We can’t trust you.”

The debates reveal a difference between this race and others across the country. In many congressional districts, Republicans attack the Biden administration at nearly every opportunity, but Chavez-DeRemer has done so sparingly. Her stronger emphasis, especially at the KTVZ debate in Bend, was on bipartisanship, noting that of the 300 bills she has backed in Congress, 84% were bipartisan. She fired occasional shots at Oregon’s Legislature, where Bynum is in her fourth term, but not often directly at Democrats, who account for nearly 32% registered voters in the 5th District compared with 27% for Republicans.

One of Chavez-DeRemer’s stronger moments in both debates came after Bynum cited close work on public safety legislation in the House Judiciary Committee with former Republican Rep. Ron Noble of McMinnville. Chavez-DeRemer fired back that Noble has given a very different account. On Thursday, she even cited a letter she said Noble had written to her describing the relationship very differently.

Bynum replied, “Ron Noble is a man of the cloth. I’m quite surprised he would lie to you.”

Bynum lashed back, blasting Chavez-DeRemer for part of the majority in the U.S. House: “It’s chaotic, it’s confusing and it’s the least productive Congress we’ve had.”

She frequently linked Chavez-DeRemer with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress. She tied her to proposals in Project 2025, to proposals extending abortion bans and changing or limiting Social Security – which Chavez-DeRemer sharply denied – and said her opponent is looking out for the top 1% of the country while ignoring the concerns of others.

The 5th Congressional District has, in recent elections, leaned slightly Democratic, and that seems to have hemmed in Chavez-DeRemer from either firing broad partisan arguments or even making full-throated defenses of either Republicans in Congress or the presidential ticket she’s backing.

In the Tuesday debate, the candidates seemed relatively closely matched, but on Thursday, DeRemer spent more time on the defensive while Bynum appeared relaxed and better able to make broader points, many of them sharply barbed.

There were exceptions. DeRemer focused on crime, inflation and fentanyl, and the two candidates contested those closely.

Anchors asked the candidates specifically about Measure 110, the drug decriminalization measure, which Bynum supported – and voters approved – but Chavez-DeRemer opposed. Bynum acknowledged it hadn’t worked, but said that was largely because the agency infrastructure needed to implement it wasn’t in place, and that she’s worked on that since.

Chavez-DeRemer replied that “when you’re a visionary, you don’t put something on the board if you can’t finish it.”

Another Chavez-DeRemer effort, however, backfired on Thursday.

On Tuesday, she spoke about Bynum’s role in a sexual harassment case, about which Bynum said she had acted appropriately, appearing to tie off the question.

On Thursday, Chavez-DeRemer brought it up again at the end of the debate as the centerpiece of her closing statement. This time Bynum replied amid some self-description, “I’ve been the person who doesn’t take the bait.” She followed that with: “Don’t take the bait, Oregonians. She’s trying to make you forget who her man is” – namely Trump, who in 2020 lost what is now the 5th District.

The second debate especially (less so in the first) found Bynum relaxed, confident and operating mostly on comfortable terrain, drawing broader strokes and more effectively bringing home larger themes.

This is a close race, but the debate suggests that Chavez-DeRemer has the more difficult job to do in winning it.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Un-gaming the elections

Across the border in Oregon, voters this fall are considering whether to approve a ballot issue that would set up a statewide system of ranked choice voting. The bases of support and opposition for that idea are a lot different than they are in Idaho, where voters are about to make a similar decision.

The Oregon measure was developed and put on the ballot not by an independent group, but by the legislature - the same governmental organization that in Idaho (in its majority at least) is fiercely in opposition to it; although in Oregon, it is Democratic legislators who are in favor, with most Republicans in opposition.

But Republicans are not alone in opposing the Oregon measure. So are quite a few Democrats, who point to flaws in the plan. Unlike the Idaho issue, it wouldn’t change the strict party registration requirements for voting in primaries. (In Oregon, only people registered with a party get to vote in that party’s primary election.) It also would set up two entirely different ranked choice systems for statewide candidates and for local offices (those choosing to use ranked choice, which could result in a local government patchwork). And - this is the real red flag for a lot of people - the legislature exempted itself from ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting, which has as a hoped-for end result the election of candidates who have support from a majority and not just a thin plurality of the voters, can be done in a lot of different ways. Some of them are complicated.

Others are not, and the ballot proposition Idaho voters will decide on election day is not very complicated at all.

It is similar to the system in Alaska, which has worked generally as intended and seems to have general satisfaction in the state. That level of popularity will be put to the test with a repeal proposal on the ballot, but early indications seem to favor ranked choice. So far it seems to have resulted in the election of candidates, of both parties, with broad appeal.

The battle over ranked choice may be fiercer in Idaho than anywhere else, though. The state Republican Party organization is solidly lined up against it, and some several key legislators have spoken about killing it if the voters should dare to cross them and pass it.

The higher intensity in Idaho probably has to do with the more focused political stakes. In Oregon and Alaska the effects of ranked choice voting are more scattered and less targeted.

In Idaho there is a target: The hard-edged and highly ideological group that has taken over much of the Idaho Republican Party, including its statewide leadership, and many of the Republican seats in the Idaho Legislature. As columnist Jim Jones has written, in this year’s primary election alone a long list of mainstream Republicans, including the Senate president pro tem, lost to the more extreme alternatives in races where only about 10%, or fewer, of the registered voters cast a ballot, which allows people on the political fringe to dominate the results.

The theory of the case is that if more voters were involved in the choices, candidates who are more centrist would win, not all the time, but more often. A change along the lines of the proposal on Idaho’s ballot may, in the short haul, be the only way to make that happen.

If it does, be aware: This is not a solve-all.

Ranked choice is like late in-person canvassing in intensive elections: It can matter where elections are already close, within a percentage point or two or maybe three, but not if the margins are already wide. It won’t create a win for a candidate who otherwise would have lost in a landslide. It will not upend all of Idaho politics.

But it would bring more people into the decision of who will, given the state. If the number of Idahoans who participate effectively in choosing their leaders in a primary is closer to a third than a tenth, and if the eventual winner has to generate appeal across a larger group of voters in the general election, that has the sound of moving closer to “government by the people.”

(image)

 

Nuclear War

What with all the other things on our plate, many of us have shoved to the side, or into the background, something that used to be - as in, it was when I was growing up - Topic A among serious items for discussion: Nuclear warfare.

This book, Nuclear War by Anie Jacobsen, ought to restore our consideration of the threat to its proper, and much more prominent, place.

She structures this highly readable overview within a fictional but stunningly compelling frame: A scenario for how a large-scale nuclear war could happen today or in the near future, and what would result if it did.

Such a war could happen all too easily, and the consequences could be far more absolute than many of us probably have come to think.

After all, in this day of super-tech capabilities, the prospects for shooting missiles out of the sky should be realistic, shouldn't they? (Look at what Israel has recently done to non-nuclear missile swarms sent from Iran.) But it turns out that no, we don't actually have a decent defense against something like that.

And we must surely have enough safe4guards and backups to keep sanity at the fore? Well, no. One of the scariest elements of the book is its gamed-out time frame: Less than a half hour from an initial missile launch until World War III is well and truly underway. All the critical decisions probably would be made in the span of about 15 minutes. The whole immense global war could be over and done - along with all of us - in a couple of hours. No time to prepare, or even run for a shelter (not that those would do any significant good, given the power of today's nukes.)

The scenario Jacobsen sketches involves an initial nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, which on its surface suggests something of limited scope. But no: The whole world is rapidly drawn up, and all or nearly all of human civilization, as well as most of the human population on our globe (not to mention immense numbers of other living things) are rapidly wiped from existence.

There's no going back. Since the first person figured out how to create a nuclear weapon, humanity has been stuck with it: We could (in theory) destroy every nuclear weapon, but we can't eliminate the knowledge of how to make a new one.

Jacobsen offers few thoughts on how to improve our situation - that's one weakness in the book - but possibly additional research on blocking the weapons, improving defenses and maybe ultimately finding ways to disarm them could be helpful. Maybe, since you could never say can't-ever to technology.

In the meantime, here's a book with some solid motivation to work toward finding some answers, and avoiding the nobody-wins scenario that would be nuclear war.