HinesSight

Trump passed 3,000 lies this month. That's horrific.

Everybody lies. Sometimes. A little bit.

But Donald Trump lies to a degree that far surpasses any other president, and indeed most human beings in general, aside from pathological liars such as psychopaths. 

I have to give the Washington Post credit for having staff with the fortitude to chronicle Trump's lies since he took the oath of office. On May 1 the Post reported "President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims so far."

In the 466 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.

That’s an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. Slowly, the average number of claims has been creeping up.

Indeed, since we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day.

So we can add about 300 additional lies to Trump's tally, given that the month of May is almost over. Now, the Post uses the term "false or misleading claim" rather than lie, since "lie" implies that someone knows the truth but speaks a falsehood anyway.

Me, I think lie is a perfectly fine word to describe what Trump is doing. Here's a couple of reasons why.

First, a Politico piece, "Trump's Lies vs. Your Brain," points out that Trump has been lying for a long time, not just after he became president. Lying is his habit. Trump does it knowingly and proudly.

The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed “crooked,” Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.)

Those who have followed Trump’s career say his lying isn’t just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. New York tabloid writers who covered Trump as a mogul on the rise in the 1980s and ’90s found him categorically different from the other self-promoting celebrities in just how often, and pointlessly, he would lie to them. In his own autobiography, Trump used the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own.

Second, Trump often lies about the same thing repeatedly.

Thus even after the truth has been pointed out to him, Trump persists with his lying. This is despicable behavior for anyone. It is horrific when someone is President of the United States, since citizens have a right to expect that their president is being truthful with them.

The Washington Post has an interactive graphic that documents Trump's most frequently repeated lies. For example, he's repeated this false claim 72 times: “So we have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.”

The truth is:

Trump’s tax cut is nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning it would be far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth largest tax cut — and even smaller than two tax cuts passed under Barack Obama.

What's almost as astounding as the frequency with which Trump lies is the unwillingness of Republicans to hold him accountable for those lies. Amazingly, GOP Congressman Jim Jordan has said that he's never heard Trump lie.

An adult human possessed of all his sensory capabilities said he has never heard the president lie. By The Washington Post's count, Trump hit 2,000 lies with 10 days to spare in his first year in office. As Cooper rightly asked, do none of these qualify as falsehoods for Jordan?

Did Jordan think the president was saying true things when he suggested Ted Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination? When he said Mexico was going to pay $12 billion for The Wall, which will now cost American taxpayers $25 billion? When he started saying in private that it wasn't him on the Access Hollywood tape?

Of course he didn't. But Jordan, like pretty much everyone else in his party, is terrified to cross the president in public.

History is going to judge all those conservative apologists for Trump harshly.

In fact, I'll go further and say that everybody who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election should be held accountable for their willingness to put politics over morality and love of country, since Trump's propensity for lying was on clear display all through his campaigning.

I find it decidedly depressing that 38% of voters in Salem, Oregon, where I live, cast their ballot for Trump. This means that an awful lot of people in my town are totally fine with having our country led by a pathological liar. And that is indeed... awful. 

Look -- I'm almost 70. I remember many presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama.

None of them lied anywhere near as much as Trump does. Further, Trump's lies are having the effect that he desires: destroying the fabric of our democracy so his totalitarian desires can come to fruition. The Politico piece says:

The dynamic we are seeing unfurled in the United States is not merely hypothetical. We already have a model of this process—a country regressing when its leader goes from progressive to deceptive: Russia under Vladimir Putin.

“This worldview”—a zero-sum, I win-you lose one—“is relatively more prevalent in Russia and other cultures with weak rule of law, high corruption and low generalized trust, as compared with Western democracies,” Cushman says. But when Western democracies start looking like those cultures, the norms can quickly shift.

The distressing reality is that our sense of truth is far more fragile than we would like to think it is—especially in the political arena, and especially when that sense of truth is twisted by a figure in power. As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain put it, “The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much.”

False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible. It’s little wonder that authoritarian regimes with sophisticated propaganda operations can warp the worldviews of entire populations.

“You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that all is lost,” as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s “reeducation” campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert Lifton. “You accept anything he says.”

Police need to give up the "21-foot rule" and other dangerous myths

It was great to see a recent story in the Portland Oregonian, Officers get new de-escalation training, which de-bunked the myth that police officers need to keep someone with a knife at least 21 feet away from them, because supposedly "a person with a knife within that distance can stab you before you can shoot."

This never made sense to me, as I noted in a 2010 post, "Why I'm bothered by another Portland police killing." 

The transient, Jack "Jackie" Collins, was intoxicated and threatening people at Hoyt Aboretum. After Walters knocked on the restroom door, Collins came out. Pretty clearly, Collins had been cutting on himself. There was no report that he had hurt anybody.

So Walters is faced with a 58 year old drunk guy armed with an x-acto knife. I've got several in my tool box. They're handy for stripping wallpaper and handling other chores. Yes, they have a sharp blade. However, they aren't a "bad guy" weapon of choice.

Walters, after having two days to talk things over with his attorney, says that he was backing up, ran into some barrier, and had no choice but to shoot Collins four times. I find that difficult to believe.

If it's true, then Walters is to blame. Restrooms are for public use. Public walk up to them, and people walk away from them. If Walters made the mistake of backing into a barrier, Collins didn't deserve to die for that.

Walters had called for backup. There was ample opportunity to defuse the situation once the police officer realized that all he was dealing with was a drunk transient, possibly suicidal, who only had an x-acto knife.

...One of the guys in my martial arts class, who I've trained with for quite a while, also has been a bouncer in several bars. He says that he has had knives pulled on him several times. The guy never had to kill anybody. Nor has he ever been injured.

I understand fear. I don't blame Walters for fearing for his life. But here's the thing: if you sign up to be a police officer, you should be prepared to "protect and serve." That means putting your life on the line in order to protect and serve the public.

Given that last paragraph, I really liked how Tom Wilson, a retired patrol bureau chief from a Maryland police agency who has been training Portland police on how to handle emotionally disturbed people, modified a familiar adage:

The forum instructors urged Portland police not to repeat the message they've likely heard as young officers.

"You probably were told 'your No. 1 job is to make sure you go home at night,' '' Wilson said. "Isn't it our No. 1 job to make sure everybody goes home?''

For sure.

Too many police officers in the United States are overly ready to use deadly force when this really isn't necessary. As Wilson said, they should have the attitude that it is as important to protect the lives of the people they're dealing with, as their own lives. 

Naturally this is a general rule. If someone is seriously threatening the life of an officer, obviously the officer has a duty to protect themselves. 

An emotionally disturbed person with a knife doesn't meet this criterion. Which gets us back to the myth of the 21-foot rule. The Oregonian story says:

The forum's training departs from traditional training, where officers have been taught to respond to a threat immediately, take charge with commands, hold their ground, and ratchet up the type of force depending on a suspect's behavior. It also debunks the 21-foot rule, used in Portland police training, which says that a person with a knife within that distance can stab you before you can shoot.

''Just simply holding a knife isn't necessarily an imminent threat,'' said Camden County police Lt. Kevin Lutz, who also taught Portland police this week. "We're not throwing out the concept but believe it should be a guide, not a rule. We don't want officers to think of that distance like a kill zone.''

Lutz was among officers from around the country who helped the research forum develop the training, called ICAT for Integrating Communications, Assessment and Tactics. It sprang from a review of basic police training in Scotland, where officers don't carry guns.

"Why is it when you have someone who is a mentally ill person with a knife in Glasgow, you're able to handle it without someone being shot and we can't?'' Wexler asked, when visiting the country. Wexler brought officers from around the United States to observe the Scotland training. They studied Scotland's approach and modeled the forum's curriculum after it.

Among the training videos is footage from a police body camera that captured an unusual response by Camden County [New Jersey] police to a call involving a man with a knife in a restaurant in November 2015.

When police arrived, the man had walked out of the restaurant and ignored calls to drop the knife. Instead of surrounding him, a handful of officers formed a walking perimeter and followed him as he strode down several city blocks, waving the knife. Some officers stayed ahead, clearing out pedestrians in his path, others to his side and behind.  Taser shots were unsuccessful. Few officers had guns visible. Eventually, the man dropped the knife and was arrested.

March For Our Lives, Salem -- photos, video, commentary

Here's photos, a video of a moving song, and some commentary on today's uplifting March For Our Lives rally at the Capitol. The organizers estimate a crowd of 3,500, which seems believable to me. I enjoyed taking photos of people with creative signs that had great messages. We've got to act to prevent more mass shootings. Repeat: GOT TO. 

Click on the image below to see the Adobe Spark page I made.

"How Democracies Die" advises against hardball tactics with Trump

Well, it wasn't the most fun reading I've ever done, not by a long shot, but today I finished "How Democracies Die" by two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

A basic message of the book is summarized in the final chapter:

When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted -- mutual tolerance and institutional forebearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one's institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to. 

Trump, of course, is pushing hard against what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the "guardrails" of democracy.

He's notoriously prone to denigrating his political opponents, going so far as to threaten Hillary Clinton with jail time, which Trump's supporters applauded with cries of Lock her up!

And Trump not only ignores the forebearance of former presidents who acted in accord with historical precedent, he takes childish pride in behaving as unpresidential as possible, wrongly viewing this as some sort of authenticity rather than as what it is -- boorish behavior. 

After reading the scarily cogent descriptions of how Trump is acting like other authoritarian national leaders, I was fully prepared for the Saving Democracy chapter to be full of hard-hitting advice about how to resist the dangers of Trumpism.

I wasn't disappointed. However, I was surprised. 

Probably I shouldn't have been, since what Levitsky and Ziblatt call for in that chapter is fully commensurate with the tone of their entire book. I guess it was my own desire to give Trump and his GOP enablers a taste of their own medicine that caused me to anticipate a harder-edged tone regarding how our democracy is to be saved.

In short, to do what Trump should be doing, but isn't: engage in mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Here's some passages from the Saving Democracy chapter on this subject.

In our view, the idea that Democrats should "fight like Republicans" is misguided. First of all, evidence from other countries suggests that such a strategy often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians. Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. 

And they unify pro-government forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an uncompromising opposition. And when the opposition fights dirty, it provides the government with justification for cracking down.

...Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic -- for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective guardrails. 

If the Trump administration were brought to its knees by obstructionism, or if President Trump were impeached without a strong bipartisan consensus, the effect would be to reinforce -- and perhaps hasten -- the dynamics of partisan antipathy and norm erosion that helped bring Trump to power to begin with.

As much as a third of the country would likely view Trump's impeachment as the machinations of a vast left-wing conspiracy -- maybe even as a coup. American politics would be left dangerously unmoored.

And here's a passage that resonates particularly true given yesterday's marvelous win of Democrat Conor Lamb over his Republican opponent in a Pennsylvania special election for a House seat. Lamb took some positions at odds with liberal orthodoxy, but that's what was needed to win in a district that had voted Republican for many years.

Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply about. 

If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a "litmus test" for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. 

We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us. It means temporarily overlooking disagreements in order to find common moral ground. 

Why calling shooters "mentally ill" won't reduce school massacres

Following the most recent school shooting in Florida that resulted in 17 deaths, Trump and the NRA are resorting to their usual blather about mental illness being the problem, not guns. 

This is crazy. 

The United States doesn't have more mentally ill people than other countries with vastly fewer school shootings. What distinguishes our country is the number of guns we have. With around 4% of the world's population, we have about 48% of the world's guns.

Also, most school shooters aren't really mentally ill. My wife is a retired psychotherapist. She understands mental illness. And she understands that most school shooters are angry, bitter, enraged, depressed -- but not clinically mentally ill. 

UPDATE: A New York Times story, "Opening Mental Hospitals Unlikely to Prevent Mass Shootings, Experts Say," makes the same points as I do. Just better, since they cite psychiatrists who have studied mass shooters and discuss the shooters themselves, who are typically angry and depressed, as are countless other teenagers, but not mentally ill.

There's loose talk from Trump of reopening mental hospitals and forcing disturbed teenagers to be admitted. This makes no sense. It isn't easy to commit someone to a mental institution, nor should it be. 

"Disturbed" isn't at all the same as "mentally ill."

By definition, anyone who goes into a school and kills people is disturbed, because this behavior isn't normal. However, taking that sort of action requires planning and forethought. A would-be school shooter who is psychotic or otherwise out of contact with reality likely won't be able to carry out his plan.

Sure, disturbed youth who appear to pose a threat to themselves or others need to get help. But a policy of committing them to a mental institution or taking their guns away probably is going to backfire.

Potential school shooters aren't insane. They know what they want to do and how to do it.

It stands to reason that they will be well aware of a policy in their community that anyone who makes threats about killing others will face serious consequences: forced mental health treatment, having guns confiscated. 

Trump and the NRA seem to believe that would-be school shooters won't change their behavior in the face of those sorts of policies. This is the same sort of simplistic thinking that led to everyone being forced to take off their shoes before boarding a plane because once a terrorist tried to detonate a shoe bomb.

Um, terrorists can read. They can think. They know that measures are being taken to detect shoe bombs, so almost certainly they now will try other ways of bringing down an airplane.

Same applies to people pondering a school shooting. If they know that acting angry and making threats will bring them to the attention of authorities, many, if not most, will alter their behavior. They won't want to have their guns confiscated, so they will act as normal as possible.

Focusing on mental illness after a school shooting is just a ruse by the NRA and their supporters to deflect attention from the real cause of school gun deaths. Which is, of course, guns. 

Automobile accidents are called that because, duh, it takes an automobile to have an automobile accident. Likewise, it takes a gun to have a gun death. How many people have been killed in school by a knife or explosive? To my knowledge, zero. 

Easy access to guns is the reason our country has so many school shootings. Universal background checks, banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines -- these are what will save lives, not a misguided focus on mental illness.  

Seventeen young lives cut short. We need a real culture of life.

Four days ago seventeen people were shot to death at a Florida high school, fourteen students and three staff.

It infuriates me that there's any debate about what needs to be done: ban the AR-15 and other assault rifles along with high capacity magazines, and strengthen background checks for all gun purchasers. 

More could be done, of course. But this is a good place to start. The surviving students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School understand this. They're pressing hard for gun control legislation. 

Shut up and listen!

That’s the message seething students have for President Trump and other gun-friendly lawmakers, demanding they stop making excuses and immediately pass reforms in the aftermath of the Florida bloodshed — or face being voted out of office.

What's deeply irritating is that many conservatives who oppose gun control legislation that would save many lives claim to be in favor of a "culture of life" because they oppose abortion.

This is total B.S.

Anyone who doesn't do everything in their power to stop the snuffing out of young lives has zero credibility on the culture of life front. 

And we know what needs to be done, because other countries that have done that thing have a much lower rate of school shootings. 

Between 2000 and 2010 there were 57 incidents of school violence in 36 countries. The United States, with about 300 million people, accounted for about half of those incidents, 28.

The other half of the incidents were in 35 countries that have 3.8 billion people, and thirteen of those countries have never had a school massacre. What makes the United States so special, in a very bad way?

Guns.

We have way more guns than those other countries. They have mentally disturbed people, just as we do. But guns are the problem, not people. Other countries have much stronger gun ownership laws, so they have many fewer gun deaths.

Violence in U.S. schools is much more likely be carried out using a gun, too. As Quartz explained about the study:

In the vast majority of U.S. killings, perpetrators used guns. By comparison, China — with the second-greatest number of incidents — saw 10 mass killings, but none involving firearms. Germany saw three mass shootings; Finland saw two. Thirteen other countries each saw one incident with at least one person being wounded or killed; in the rest nobody was reported as hurt.

There's evidence, too, that school violence is declining in other places. As my colleague explained this morning, “in Europe, there hasn't been a major high-casualty gun attack on a campus in almost a decade.”

That's because Americans have a disproportionate number of guns (at least 300 million, about one per person), especially handguns and semiautomatic weapons. (A bullet from an AR-15 rifle, which the alleged shooter used in the Florida attack Wednesday, can penetrate a steel helmet from five hundred yards.)

Experts say it is time to bring back the assault weapons ban. Gun massacres (6+ deaths) were much reduced in 1994-2004 when assault rifles were banned, compared to the decades before and after. 

The average life expectancy at birth for both sexes is 79 years. Premature deaths at any age are bad. When teenagers die in a school shooting, it is horrific. Those fourteen students who were shot to death by an AR-15 rifle started Valentine's Day feeling that a long life lay before them.

By the end of the school day they had no life left. They were dead, victims of a rabid gun culture in this country that doesn't give a crap about how many people die from guns, so long as gun nuts can have unfettered access to their beloved weapons of mass destruction.

I'm fed up with useless thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting. I'm proud of the students who are vowing to vote out any politician who doesn't support strong gun control legislation. 

No more excuses. If a politician isn't willing to get on board the gun control train, hopefully they will be kicked off at the next election. Most Americans in both parties support gun restrictions. It's time for this silent majority to speak super loudly. 

Early spring on our property shows need for Oregon cap-and-trade bill

Global warming is real. We humans are causing it. Urgent steps need to be taken to reduce carbon emissions.

These three facts are borne out by some photos I took a few days ago of how vegetation is leafing out much earlier than usual on our ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon.

We've lived here for 28 years. This is really unusual plant behavior for February 4. The green shoots screamed to me, Global warming is making us do this!

Now, I'm old enough (69) and have lived in Oregon long enough (47 years) to run the risk of sounding like the proverbial geezer talking about the Blizzard of Ought-Eight, when the snow reached as high as grandma's chin.

But I sure do remember when December, January, and February here in the Willamette Valley typically were filled with weeks of solid rain, ice storms, freezing temperatures, and other weather nastiness. 

Such is much less common now. Temperatures are warmer. More precipitation is falling as rain in the mountains rather than snow. We've only had a few days of freezing temperatures. Our daffodils are getting ready to bloom.

Yes, I understand the difference between weather and climate. But I've got almost a half century of experience with western Oregon weather, and there's been changes over those years that certainly are due to global warming.

Which, of course, is caused by carbon pollution. 

Environmentalists, business people, and many others concerned about reducing Oregon's carbon footprint have been working on a cap-and-trade bill that is desperately needed. 

An Oregonian story briefly summarizes what the bill would do:

In addition to creating a limit on greenhouse gas emissions, the plan would require many of Oregon's largest polluters to pay for their emissions by purchasing allowances at an auction. The state would spend the proceeds from the auctions to reduce the financial impact to households, support projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help areas disproportionately impacted by climate change.

What's aggravating, though, is that the same story says that Democrats in the state Senate claim there isn't time in the shorter 2018 legislative session to pass the cap-and-trade bill -- even though Dems control both houses of the legislature and the governor is a Democrat.

So how long is it going to take? And another question: how much time does the world have to reduce carbon emissions? My answers: too long, and no time to waste.

Disturbingly, Governor Kate Brown didn't mention cap-and-trade in her recent State of the State address. Yet pleasingly, Nike has joined the Oregon Business Alliance for Climate, a group supporting the cap-and-trade bill.

Every day I get an email from Brown's re-election campaign asking for a donation.

Earth to Brown, via me: When you start pushing legislators to pass the cap-and-trade bill this year. and promise to sign the bill if it reaches your desk, that's when I'll start to consider contributing additional money to your campaign. 

Bridging our Divide meeting was a mind-opening experience

I'm a left-leaning atheist. Last night I had pleasant interactions with a Christian conservative.

That was the goal of the Bridging Our Divide meeting at the IKE Box: to get people to listen to those with differing political views with empathy, respect, open-mindedness.

Here's part of how the Bridging Our Divide web site describes their mission (they're based in Portland, but hold meetings around the country):

Bridging Our Divide is working to promote constructive dialogue across political and ideological divides by creating forums for conversation.  

Our work is focused on hosting Community Dialogue Events and Common Ground Debates in various cities around the United States. 

As a nation, we're being split apart by an inability to communicate and see common ground. There's a growing sense of division and contempt fueled by partisanship, social media, and geographic separation.

We need to work together to improve communication between people with different ideologies and different visions of America, because our core values and needs overlap more than they differ. 

Many on the left and right are failing to see the underlying values and humanity of those on the other side of the political divide. We're seeing a rise in extremist rhetoric on the right, and on the left, many have taken to labeling, shaming, and shutting down those with a different perspective. This drives away potential allies, pushes others further in the opposite direction, and creates a climate of contempt for everyone involved. 

I saw two city councilors at the meeting, Chris Hoy and Jim Lewis. They occupy different ends of the political spectrum, which naturally was what the Bridging Our Divide organizers wanted -- diversity. Here's a slide that shows the self-described make-up of the people who registered for the meeting.

I put myself in the "liberal or left-leaning" category. Like I said, one of the women at our table said she was very conservative. The other three were a very liberal man, a left-leaning woman, and a man who didn't really share much about his political views. Here's a photo of my four discussion partners.

Prior to the small group part of the meeting, Shiloh Halsey, the Bridging Our Divide founder, explained what his group was all about and described how the evening would go.

Then five people who had volunteered to be part of a kick-off panel went up to the stage and answered questions designed to elicit how they view their political persuasion and the general state of political discourse in our country at the moment.

This took almost an hour.

There were two liberals, two conservatives, and an independent (a political science professor from Corban University who was one of the local organizers). In line with the warm and fuzzy tone of the meeting, the panelists did a pretty good job of not being too in-your-face about those with a differing political viewpoint.

Nonetheless, I probably wasn't the only person in the room who felt, at times, like what was being said was off-base. One reason I felt this way was that all five of the people on stage, if I recall correctly, said they were Christian. And one man in particular wasn't shy about bringing Jesus up when he defended his conservative worldview.

At first I thought this was strange, that all five were Christian, but since most people in this country are, I guess it wasn't really so surprising. It was mainly that, as an atheist, I don't feel the need to talk about my non-belief in God when discussing politics, so when the Christian panelists brought up their religious beliefs, that struck me as unusual. 

My liberal mind also took issue with a prevailing perspective among the five panelists: that it is difficult to find unbiased news sources. Actually, it isn't. Just stay away from Fox News, and read the New York Times and Washington Post. That's what I do, daily. 

After a short break the small group discussion part of the meeting began. To me, this was the best aspect of the evening. I wish the panelist part had been a bit shorter, so the small group discussion part could have been a bit longer. We got some tips ahead of time from Halsey (click to enlarge):

Good advice.

The small group part of the evening consisted of one of the people at a table choosing a question from a list provided by the organizers and asking it of another person.

This was an enjoyable experience.  Mostly I talk with people who see the world pretty much as I do, from a non-religious liberal perspective. So it was refreshing for me to be able to ask the conservative Christian woman, "Do you believe in life after death?" Not surprisingly, she did. 

I responded with "Well, I hope you're right." Which was absolutely true, even though I don't believe in an afterlife. Hey, common ground! The woman is certain she'll live on after she dies, and I wish this was true. 

There's a power to simple non-judgmental listening. (Well, mostly non-judgmental; like I said, I couldn't help but mentally disagree with what some of the panelists were saying, because it struck me as factually wrong.)

I came away from last night's meeting feeling like I understood conservatives better. A theme of the meeting was that social media, like Facebook, exaggerate political differences, because we only get sound bites, by and large, and aren't able to directly experience the presence of the person expressing an opinion.

When I hear a conservative viewpoint coming from a person I'm sitting next to, I realize that they're a complex human being with whom I have much in common, aside from our political differences. Social media detract, and distract, from this realization.

The Bridging Our Divide meeting wasn't life-changing for me, but it definitely was life-affirming.

I came away determined to do two things simultaneously: (1) keep on expressing my own political views as strongly as ever, while (2) trying to do a better job of looking upon those with a differing view as people who are just like me, in that they feel they have good reasons for believing as they do, and also want to make the world a better place.

Moderation in the pursuit of justice is a virtue. Usually.

Today I came across a letter written by Martin Luther King while he was in jail. It criticizes "white moderates."

That got me to thinking about Barry Goldwater's saying about moderation. Interestingly, King and Goldwater seem to have something in common, though their political views were very different.

King: 
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Goldwater: 
Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Now, despite King's words in his letter, he actually did practice moderation in his fight for civil rights. Non-violence was his credo. He spoke strongly, but as far as I know didn't insult or disparage his opponents (by and large; the letter from jail is quite biting). 

Most of us, certainly me included, would rather have our political leaders tilt toward moderation and away from extremism. The problem is, and this also is me included, extremism can just feel so good. 

When we believe that we're totally right and the other side is totally wrong; when we can't find anything amiss with our position, and nothing correct with what those idiots on the other side want; when our hearts thrill to voices from our political tribe, and we feel disgust at the braying of those on the other side -- there's a fulfilling primal sense of going into battle with flags flying in the name of righteous truth, justice, and our sense of the American way.

Yet this belief, this feeling, this sense, it's dangerous.

What the world needs now, especially our country, is an understanding that people should develop the capacity for responding to perceived injustice, inequity, and unfairness with varying degrees of intensity, depending on the situation. When everything is a Code Red call to arms, and sometimes my Facebook feed seems this way, we're less able to distinguish between a need for moderation and compromise, and a need to lay everything on the table, going all-in, hooray for our side!

During a recent meeting of a monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I belong to, I made some observations about moderation. Naturally they made sense to me, since I'm me. In part, they went something like this:

When was the last time any of us liberals found some good in what Trump or the Republicans in Congress are doing? Isn't it bothersome that we've gotten so tribalistic, so dismissive of those who hold a markedly different political view, that we're unable to visualize the benefit of finding a moderate common ground somewhere in the middle of extreme views?

For example, probably reducing corporate taxes was a good thing. Sure, the way Congress did it, this will result in more income inequality, but taken by itself, that portion of tax reform seemed to make sense. Yet I find it difficult to admit that the GOP can do anything right or good. 

It seems to me that our default attitude should be moderation, taking the best from both sides of an issue, finding middle ground. Hey, this worked for the Buddha, so why not us?

I'm not saying that I'm naturally inclined to do this when it comes to politics. But at least I have some inclination in that direction, even though right now I'm pretty piss-poor at backing up that inclination with action.

If there's an extreme injustice, as was the case with segregation, then extreme measures usually need to be taken against it. However, most of our political disputes, especially at the state and local level, don't fall into that category. Yet often those on either side of an issue act as if they were.

Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I shared eight tweets by Sam Harris about morality. They point to the fact, that, well, facts are a big part, maybe the essential part, of what moderation is all about. This was his final tweet:

8/ So what is morality? What *ought* sentient beings like ourselves do? Understand how the world works (facts), so that we can avoid what sucks (values).

Segregation super-sucked for so many people it was super-obvious that it needed to end. Moderation wasn't a virtue in this instance, since no facts were needed to know that segregation was bad, other than the brute fact of its existence.

Most political issues, though, aren't so clear-cut.

Policies in the areas of  taxes, environment, health care, education, housing, defense, land use, and such typically come in shades of gray, rather than black and white. Debates require a moderator. Facts really are the impersonal "moderator" in most political debates.

Because Republicans are in control of Congress and the Presidency, and today's GOP is notoriously adverse to facts, most of the blame for a lack of moderation at the national level falls in their laps.  On the local and state level, though, there's more opportunity for facts, and reasoned discussion/debate about the meaning of those facts, to moderate extreme positions on both ends of the political spectrum.

Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Well, the only reason for this is that liberals are more respectful of facts. Which goes a long way toward explaining why they're typically more inclined to compromise, to moderate their positions, than Republicans are.

Unless the facts strongly support a liberal position, in which case they're doing the right thing by being immoderate. 

2017 Salem Women's March in words, photos, videos

Wow, in the course of writing about the 2018 Salem Women's March, which looks like it will be a Womxn's March for reasons I'm unable to fully fathom, I just realized that I never put up a blog post about the 2017 Women's March.

I must have been so eager to share the Adobe Spark page I made of that event -- words, photos, videos -- on Facebook, that I forgot to do the same in a blog post. 

So... enjoy.

It's fitting that I'm doing this on Christmas day, since the 2017 Women's March was a huge gift to Salem. There was amazing energy, enthusiasm, joy, and community spirit on that cold, wet, windy January 21 day. Hopefully organizers of the 2018 march will be able to recapture that.

"Intersectionality" can be dangerous left-wing tribalism

I'm a liberal. Which is why I support liberalism. Meaning, in this context, open-minded discourse about the nature of reality where all views are welcomed, so long as they're backed up by reason and facts. 

The interesting thing is that liberals can act in illiberal ways. Of course, so can conservatives.

But it's more shocking and surprising when liberals try to shut down discussion of certain topics because they've bought into a dangerous tribalism that views one side, their side, as possessing all goodness and truth, and the other side as being all bad and wrong.

Recently I had a taste of this when I -- a old white heterosexual man -- dared to critique the decision of some women who decided to call an event next month the 2018 Womxn's March, rather than a Women's March, as the highly successful 2017 event that my wife helped organize was called.

Now, what surprised me about the response on Facebook wasn't that people were disagreeing with me. I'm used to that as someone who regularly writes about local political goings-on. 

The surprising thing was that I was being told that as a "cis-gendered white male" I didn't even have the right to weigh in on whether calling this event a Womxn's March was a good idea. I found that idea so absurd, I pushed back on the attempt to suppress my free speech.

Today I came across a summary of a recent talk by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt that does a good job of explaining the dynamics of what was going on. Even though obviously my blog post and the reaction to it didn't take place in a university setting, the same left-wing tribalism seemed to be at play here.

In "The Age of Outrage," Haidt starts off by noting that our strong tendency toward tribalism is rooted in evolutionary history. 

I’d like you to consider an idea that I’ll call “the fine-tuned liberal democracy.” It begins by looking backward a few million generations and tracing our ancestry, from tree-dwelling apes to land-dwelling apes, to upright-walking apes, whose hands were freed up for tool use, to larger-brained hominids who made weapons as well as tools, and then finally to homo sapiens, who painted cave walls and painted their faces and danced around campfires and worshipped gods and murdered each other in large numbers.

When we look back at the ways our ancestors lived, there’s no getting around it: we are tribal primates. We are exquisitely designed and adapted by evolution for life in small societies with intense, animistic religion and violent intergroup conflict over territory. We love tribal living so much that we invented sports, fraternities, street gangs, fan clubs, and tattoos. Tribalism is in our hearts and minds.

We’ll never stamp it out entirely, but we can minimize its effects because we are a behaviorally flexible species. We can live in many different ways, from egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups of 50 individuals to feudal hierarchies binding together millions. And in the last two centuries, a lot of us have lived in large, multi-ethnic secular liberal democracies. So clearly that is possible. But how much margin of error do we have in such societies?

Well, not as much there used to be. Haidt notes several reasons for this. Our society needs a balance between centrifugal forces that push people apart and centripetal forces that bring people together. 

Currently the centrifugal forces have gained strength, owing to, according to Haidt: (1) no unifying common enemy, as there was in the two world wars: (2) social media being a tool to express outrage; (3) diversity reducing bonds of trust between individuals; (4) the more radical Republican party, and (5) the new identity politics of the Left.

Which gets me to Haidt's discussion of intersectionality, a word that had been thrown at me once or twice in the debate over Womxn and Women. Here's how Haidt views the term.

Let us contrast [Martin Luther] King’s identity politics with the version taught in universities today. There is a new variant that has swept through the academy in the last five years. It is called intersectionality. The term and concept were presented in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, who made the very reasonable point that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience.

She analyzed a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors, even when the company could show that it hired plenty of blacks (in factory jobs dominated by men), and it hired plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by whites). So even though GM was found not guilty of discriminating against blacks or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. This is an excellent argument. What academic could oppose the claim that when analyzing a complex system, we must look at interaction effects, not just main effects?

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile.

Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately.

They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country.

Well, I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered, mostly able-bodied atheist male. So I guess that puts me in the crosshairs of those who practice the extreme form of identity politics that is also found on liberal college campuses.

As Haidt argues, intersectionality is a bad idea on those campuses, and it also is a bad idea elsewhere. What's most ridiculous is that I'm on the side of the Womxn's March organizers. I simply disagree with them on some points and have been trying to explain why I feel that way in an open, reasonable fashion. 

Most recently in "My open plea to 2018 Salem Womxn's March organizers" and "Everybody should be able to talk about anything (just about)."

I heartily agree with Haidt's view of the danger that intersectionality poses. It needs to be resisted. Haidt says:

Let me remind you of the educational vision of the Founders, by way of E.D. Hirsch: “The American experiment . . . is a thoroughly artificial device designed to counterbalance the natural impulses of group suspicions and hatreds . . . This vast, artificial, trans-tribal construct is what our Founders aimed to achieve.”

Intersectionality aims for the exact opposite: an inflaming of tribal suspicions and hatreds, in order to stimulate anger and activism in students, in order to recruit them as fighters for the political mission of the professor.

The identity politics taught on campus today is entirely different from that of Martin Luther King. It rejects America and American values. It does not speak of forgiveness or reconciliation. It is a massive centrifugal force, which is now seeping down into high schools, especially progressive private schools.

Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation.

But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens—power—and told to apply it to all situations.

Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.

Everybody should be able to talk about anything (just about)

We live in strange times. They got a bit stranger for me yesterday, after I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "Salem should have another Women's March, not a Womxn's March."

Among other things, I talked about how using Womxn rather than Women didn't seem to be a wise idea, especially since the 2017 Salem Women's March was a huge success, and people thinking of attending the 2018 event would be confused by a word that is both unpronounceable and unfamiliar. I said:

My biggest concern, though, is how featuring "Womxn" in the name of the event is going to affect how Salemians view the march. Obviously the focus of the 2018 march should be on the horrors being wrought by the Trump administration, women's rights, and the "Me Too" wave of sexual harassment awareness.

Anything that detracts from this focus is a distraction. And often progressive groups get involved in unproductive disputes over who is more politically correct to the Nth degree which dissipate energy that should be directed at the real enemy: Donald Trump and his Republican cronies.

It appears that the organizers of the 2018 Salem Womxn's March have settled on that name. Well, I'm hoping that they will change their minds. 

"Womxn," in case you're wondering, is another step away from having "men" right there in "women," replacing the previous "womyn" which reportedly is a white, liberal-feminist concept while "womxn" includes transgender people who identify as female, along with other marginalized womxn.

OK. Words come and go. I'm fine with that.

In my blog post I echoed what some women were saying on the Facebook page belonging to Salem Resists. Those women felt that it made more sense to use "Women" in the name of the event, especially since numerous major cities in this country are having Women's Marches on Saturday, January 20, while Salem would be having a Womxn's March on Sunday, January 21.

(Note: I've corrected the paragraph above to take out a mention that the Womxn's March is being sponsored by Salem Resists. I've been informed that Salem Resists just shared a notice of the event, but isn't sponsoring it.)

Well, my post was met with a bunch of comments from women (oops, womxn) who said that I shouldn't be talking about the upcoming event, even though my wife was a lead organizer of the 2017 Salem Women's March and I created a web page that chronicled it. 

Here's an example:

Well, I don't agree that my opinion doesn't matter. Everybody's opinion matters on everything, is my writer's attitude.

Once society starts saying that only certain people can express their opinion about something, we're headed down a dangerous road that leads to censorship, limits on free speech, and obnoxiously extreme political correctness. 

Philosophically, I heartily disagree with the assumption that only those who have had a certain experience -- such as being female or a racial minority -- can weigh in on certain subjects. My disagreement stems from the fact that everybody has a unique life experience. 

Sure, women have their own special perspective. Yet so does everyone else. Like, to choose someone I'm pretty damn familiar with, me. 

As I noted in my blog post about Women vs. Womxn, I was deeply involved with the 2017 Salem Women's March, surely more so than most or all of the women who are involved in planning for the 2018 event. As noted above, my wife was a lead organizer of the 2017 march and she kept me informed of all the goings-on. 

Standing on stage during the speaking part of the event, holding onto a "tent" pole to keep the shelter from blowing over on a cold wet windy January day, I had a wonderful view of the thousands of people in attendance, who were marvelously cheerful and energetic given the blustery weather.

It was an experience I'll never forget. So I feel completely entitled to express my views about plans for the 2018 Womxn March, since I'm well aware of what worked and didn't work in 2017 (such as, the sound system needed improving, given the unexpectedly large size of the crowd).

But even if I wasn't as well informed as I am, I still believe that I'd have a perfect right to express my opinion about not only the Womxn March, but anything else that my little mind sprouts up in the fertile field of my consciousness. Free speech has few limits. I can be wrong; I can be stupid; I can be boring.

And I still can speak.

The notion expressed by the women who felt that I should be silenced because I'm a man offends me. If that sounds politically incorrect, too bad. When we start putting limits on who can express an opinion because of their sex, race, age, ethnicity, or any other characteristic, we've crossed into dangerous First Amendment territory. 

Which I'm pleased to share.

Gun nuts are like children playing with light-sabers (but more dangerous)

I'm hugely enjoying Kurt Andersen's book about how our country became the world's #1 purveyor of kookiness. "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" is filled with right-on observations.

Andersen chronicles our nation's love affair with fantasy from 1517 up to the near-present -- which is where I am now in the book. 

Today I read the Gun Crazy chapter. The following excerpt is one of the best descriptions of gun nuttery I've ever come across. Andersen is a hunter and gun owner, so this makes his characterization of gun wackos even more believable.

Andersen writes:

One set of fantasies has had more current, awful, undeniable real-world consequences than any other: the one that recast owning guns as among the more important rights, as American liberty and individualism incarnate. During my lifetime, the love of guns has become a fetish. It is picking our pockets and definitely breaking our legs.

...Today only about a quarter of Americans own guns -- but the average owner has three or four. Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns. Members of that tiny minority of superenthusiasts own an average of seventeen guns apiece.

Let me put a finer point on what I'm saying.

Very, very few of the guns in America are used for hunting. Americans who own guns today keep arsenals in a way people did not forty years ago. It seems plain to me that that's because they -- not all, but many -- have given themselves over to fantasies. 

The way I did as a child and still do on the rare occasions I shoot, they imagine they're militiamen, Wild West cowboys, soldiers, characters they've watched all their lives in movies and on TV, heroes and antiheroes played by Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson and the Rock, like Davy Crockett or Butch or Sundance or Rambo or Neo (or Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor).

They're like children playing with light-sabers, except they believe they're prepared to fight off real-life aliens (from the Middle East, from Mexico) and storm troopers, and their state-of-the-art weapons actually wound and kill. 

Why did gangsters and wannabe gangsters start holding and firing their handguns sideways, parallel to the ground, even though that compromises their aim and control? Because it looks cool, and it began looking cool after filmmakers starting directing actors to do it, originally in the 1960s, constantly by the 1990s.

Why are Americans buying the semiautomatic AR-15 and rifles like it more than any other style, 1.5 million each year? Because holding and shooting one makes them feel cooler, more like commandos. For the same reason, half the states now require no license for people to carry their guns openly in public places.

It's the same reason, really, that a third of the vehicles sold in America are pickups and four-wheel-drive Walter Mittymobiles, even though three-quarters of four-wheel-drive off-road vehicles never go off-road. It's even the reason blue jeans became the American uniform after the 1960s. 

We are actors in a 24/7 tableau vivant, [living picture] schlubs playing the parts of heroic tough guys. 

Spectacular  mass killings happen in America far more often than anywhere else, and not just because we make massacre-perfect  weapons so easy to buy. Such killers are also engaged in role-play and are motivated by our besetting national dream of overnight fame.

The experts say that most mass killers are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics in the throes of clinical delusion; rather, they're citizens of Fantasyland, unhappy people with flaws and failures they blame on others, the system, the elitists, the world. They worry those resentments into sensational fantasies of paramilitary vengeance, and they know that acting out those fantasies will make a big splash and force the rest of us to pay attention to them for the first time. 

"Mingling of the Tribes" effort could help to heal divisiveness in Salem

I don't know if this is a great idea, a crazy idea, a great crazy idea, or some other variety of idea (such as, worthless).

I just keep envisioning the notion of a citywide Mingling of the Tribes effort here in Salem that would bring people together in these divisive times to better understand our differences and foster respectful communication, while having fun in the process -- without trying to force agreements.

Back in March I took my first blog post crack at this idea in "Salem should have an annual political roast: 'A Mingling of the Tribes.'"

Nationally, politics is really divisive. Less so in Oregon. Here in Salem, we're kind of at a middling state of political tension. Intense nastiness rarely is overt, but under the surface irritations fester.

Conservatives, progressives, and everybody in-between (or something else) never are going to hold hands and sing kumbaya together.  But I've got a more realistic goal:

Local politicians and other community leaders get together annually for a good-hearted roast of each other and, equally importantly, themselves. 

...I sort of like this name for the roast: “A Mingling of the Tribes." By tribe, I mean a collection of like-minded people who normally hang out mostly with each other. Salem has many "tribes" with different political, cultural, religious, and other sorts of views.

So I like the theme of mingling, strange bedfellows, that sort of thing.

This morning, during my half-baked barely-concentrating daily attempt at meditation, I found myself thinking, a common occurrence when I'm trying not to think, about the Mingling of the Tribes idea.

Once again it hit me that what bothers me the most about the state of our country today is the divisiveness. I readily admit that I've contributed to this in my progressive zeal to change things. Conservatives do the same thing, divide.

There's got to be a better way. That way isn't going to happen at the national or even state level. If it is going to happen, it will have to happen at a local level where people can meet face-to-face and talk eye-to-eye. 

I realized that I'd like to go beyond the original Mingling of the Tribes idea that I talked about in the March blog post, yet still include the roast notion. 

I envisioned a community-wide ongoing effort with a goal of getting different "tribes" in Salem to understand each other better, to communicate with each other more effectively, while still feeling free to fight for what one believes in fairly, respectfully, truthfully, and vigorously.

An image that came to mind is football teams eating together before a bowl game and exchanging back-slapping hugs after the game. During the game they battle. Before and after, they mingle. A time for each. 

I'd love to see the Statesman Journal and Salem Weekly each get behind a Mingling of the Tribes effort.

I have ideas for how this would go. But almost certainly how anybody thinks it would go isn't how it would actually go. The goal would be to spark some collegial fires in Salem and not worry overly much where or how they spread.

Web site. Facebook page. Community events. Videos. Neighborhood association presentations. And yes, an annual roast. Lots of possibilities. 

My wife is a retired clinical social worker who was a psychotherapist in private practice. She knows a lot about how to guide people who vehemently disagree on certain issues to interact positively with each other. I'm sure she'd be glad to advise on the Mingling of the Tribes idea.

I'm not thinking only politically.

Salem also has divisions along economic, racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, cultural, sexual preference, and other sorts of divides. There are countless opportunities to get people talking with each other who strongly disagree on specific issues, yet almost certainly agree on many others, including the basics of living in a complex, often-frustrating world.

Anyway, I just wanted to share these rough ideas that came to me today for what they're worth. Which may not be much. This Mingling of the Tribes idea may be too crazy to pursue. It just feels right to me, especially at this time in our country's history.

Hey, Congress, don't take away my state and local tax deductions

These days the Republicans in Congress and the White House are adept at doing stuff that irritates my sense of fairness. But usually it doesn't directly affect me. Or at least, not much.

For example, attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act upset me because of the horrendous impact this would have on millions of people who have insurance through Obamacare. Yet since I'm on Medicare, repeal wouldn't have meant much to me personally.

The tax reform efforts that are making their way through the House and Senate committees are different, though. One thing that grabs my attention is the proposal to do away with deductions for state income taxes and local property taxes. 

I live in Oregon. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax.

So to keep state government going we have a high income tax: for couples the rate is 5% up to an income of $6,700, then 7% up to an income of $16,800, and 9% on income between $16,800 and $250,000 -- after which the rate is 9.9%. Obviously Oregon's income tax is quite regressive, since a rate in the 9% range hits every couple with an income between $16,800 and a gazillion dollars.

Our property taxes also are high.

They are restricted, capped, or something I don't really understand owing to several citizen initiatives that passed many years ago. Regardless, property taxes obviously are particularly high in cities like Portland that approve lots of bond measures.

My wife and I live in a rural area, so our property taxes are lower. Still, we're paying over $500 more a year now after voters approved a school bond in the May 2017 election.

Now, I'm no tax expert. But I just spent about twenty minutes Googling the question of state and local tax deductibility, so I know more than I did before researching this topic.

What I found doesn't change my sense of unfairness at the efforts in Congress to either markedly scale back the deduction for state income and property taxes, or eliminate it entirely. 

A CNN Money piece irked me the most, "There's a loophole in GOP's plan to kill the state and local tax deduction." It says that while individuals won't be able to claim these deductions, most pass-through businesses would. 

But tax experts have spotted what appears to be a big exception to the repeal: The owners, shareholders and investors in so-called pass-through businesses would still be allowed to deduct their state and local taxes in full.

The provision allows the deduction if the state and local taxes are "paid or accrued in carrying on a trade or a business ... [or on expenses related to] production of income."

As for everyone else who currently takes the SALT deduction? Sorry, Charlie, no can do.

Pass-throughs make up the majority of U.S. businesses. They take the form of sole proprietorships, LLCs or S corps. And those with an ownership stake in them pay taxes on the entity's profits on their individual returns.

So for them, under the House bill, state and local taxes could be treated as a business expense on their personal return. That would include President Trump, who typically structures his businesses as pass-throughs.

But ordinary employees of such businesses would still be barred from taking the deduction against their wages.

This is ridiculous. Some people would get to deduct state and local taxes as a business expense, while ordinary employees and retired folks like us wouldn't. 

There's a good argument to be made that not allowing the deductibility of state and local taxes, SALT, is double taxation. Sure, a piece by the Tax Foundation argues otherwise. But if those arguments are valid (and I don't think they are), then the deduction for state and local taxes should be eliminated for everybody, businesses as well as individuals.

The Tax Policy Center has good information on this subject, noting that while 29% of federal returns overall claim the SALT deduction, higher income households are much more likely to claim a deduction for state and local taxes. So politically, the suburban voters who just gave Democrats big wins in yesterday's elections would be hit the hardest by a tax reform bill that axes this deduction. 

Lastly, an opinion piece by a tax expert, "The GOP gets a big part of its tax plan backward," makes some good points about the relative wisdom of allowing deductions for state versus local taxes. 

The House Republican tax plan proposes repealing much of the state and local tax deduction, allowing individuals to deduct up to $10,000 of local property taxes but eliminating the rest of the deduction. This gets sound tax policy precisely backward. Smart tax reform would allow taxpayers to deduct what they pay to states — and would end the deduction for local taxes.

...Understanding that the state and local deduction is in fact two deductions is important because states and localities fund very different things.

Local taxes typically benefit those within relatively homogeneous localities in a way that is similar to a purchase of private goods. When residents pay local taxes, those taxes fund local schools, parks and recreation, police and fire agencies, and so on, that provide a relatively direct benefit to those paying the taxes. Wealthy individuals benefit from their local taxes in much the same way they benefit from purchasing a membership to a private club. No one seriously argues that a membership to a private club should be deductible, yet in effect that is what the deduction for local taxes allows.

State taxes, on the other hand, are less like private purchases because states spend a significantly higher percentage of their revenue on redistributive programs, such as state welfare programs, funding for poor school districts and health care for low-income residents. When wealthy individuals, who gain the most benefit from deductibility because they pay higher marginal tax rates, pay state taxes, that cost looks more like a charitable contribution than a membership in a private club, and so a deduction is more justified.

Therefore, smart tax policy would allow taxpayers to deduct the cost of state income taxes while eliminating the deduction for local property taxes. As it happens, because local taxes account for approximately half the overall deduction, this change would raise approximately $500 billion over the next decade.

Instead, House Republicans propose doing just the opposite. By retaining deductibility for local property taxes, their approach would continue to disproportionately subsidize wealthy, country-club-like localities, albeit to a smaller degree for the wealthiest towns and cities because of the $10,000 cap. And by eliminating deductibility for state taxes, the tax plan would end the federal government’s subsidy for state governments, which spend a significant percentage of their revenue on redistributive programs.

So at least maintain the deduction for state taxes, Congress.

However, I'd be even happier if the whole tax reform effort failed, because it's mainly a giveaway to corporations that are already doing just fine, while screwing over many middle class people with either a minuscule tax reduction or even a tax increase.

More misguided cougar and wolf hysteria strikes Oregon

Oh, my! Lock the doors and keep the children inside! A cougar may have killed a house cat in Seaside, Oregon. So all student activities at Seaside Elementary School were moved indoors. 

Which is ridiculous, because while cougars may kill cats (so will dogs, of course, and much more often), a cougar has never killed a human in Oregon. 

As I said in "Danger warning! -- people and dogs sighted in Salem park," what Seaside school authorities really should be concerned about are adult men and family dogs roaming around near the playground.

I've done some research to quantify the relative risk of being killed by (1) a person, (2) a dog, and (3) a cougar. These United States statistics cover 2001-2010, the previous ten years.

There were 162,230 homicides during that decade, an average of 16,223 per year. In 2010, ninety percent of the killers were men, according to the FBI. Fifty-three percent of murder victims were killed by someone they knew; a quarter were slain by a family member.

The lesson: if you spot a man in a park, be fearful. Especially if you know him. Males you've met before are the most dangerous killing creatures any human will ever encounter. 

Dogs are considerably less likely to kill you. Still, 263 people were slain by dogs over the last ten years, an average of 26 per year. 

What about cougars?

Most people are more afraid of cougars than of their fellow humans or dogs. But they shouldn't be. Cougars killed just 3 people in the United States from 2001-2010. That's an average of .3 per year.

So you're 54,000 times more likely to be killed by a person (probably a man) than by a cougar. And you're 87 times more likely to be killed by a dog, than by a cougar. This is why, if you value your life, people and dogs should be feared much more than cougars.

Unfortunately, irrationality reigns when it comes to wildlife. Why? Seemingly because they're wild. We're used to seeing men and dogs in parks. Cougars are rare, so people freak out when one is sighted.

Then there's the case of the hunter in eastern Oregon who shot and killed a wolf, claiming self-defense. His story is highly suspicious, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, he admits that at first he thought he saw three coyotes moving around him. Then he claims that one of the animals ran at him. Supposedly fearing for his life, he shot and killed the animal, which turned out to be a woif -- which can't be killed by hunters in Oregon unless it is a case of self-defense.

The man's story started to unravel when it was revealed that his bullet entered the side of the wolf and exited the other side. So the wolf couldn't have been running at him when it was shot. 

The pictures and police report paint a different picture, according to wolf advocacy group Oregon Wild... Steve Pedery, the nonprofit's conservation director, said in an email that he'd like to see further investigation of the hunting incident. He's not convinced the animal was running at the hunter, and questioned why the wounds are on the animal's side. 

"How can a wolf that is moving away from someone be a threat?" Pedery said, "and why would ODFW [Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife) sign off on a report that is directly contradicted by the evidence?"

A commenter on the original Oregonian story, "Go Figure," makes some great points.

According to information and photos described by KGW, the wounds on the animal are inconsistent with the description of the wolf running toward the shooter. Instead, it seems the wolf was running away from the shooter at an angle, the bullet having entered mid-body and exited through the front of the animal at the left shoulder.

"The wolf has what appears to be an entry [wound] on her right [side], midway between the hind quarters and front shoulder. A larger exit wound appears to exist near the front left shoulder of the wolf."

If the hunter was fearful of being attacked by coyotes (he said he assumed they were coyotes until closer inspection) that were surrounding him at close range, which would prevent shooting toward all of them, a quick and reasonable first response would be a warning shot into the dirt. And, indeed, the hunter describes the animals he did not kill, which were protected wolves, immediately ran away after his one shot.

Western United States wild wolf attacks on an adult human who is not running (1) in mild weather, (2) in an area of plentiful game, (3) with no record of the wolves becoming habituated to a human population, or (4) being fed in the area are, to the best of my knowledge, unheard-of. That should have cast doubt on the hunter's story of being targeted by a group of wolves as if he was prey.

In any case, the evidence does not match the story, and the story is inconsistent with not wanting to harm animals he was not hunting. It seems likely that he may have poached a protected wolf, then, upon conferring with his buddies, hatched a cover story to try to avoid responsibility for an illegal kill. Certainly, based on the description of the photographic evidence alone, further investigation is warranted.

For sure, further investigation is warranted. Wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare. 

Despite what The Onion might have you believe, wolf attacks are exceedingly rare. In 2010, a fatal wolf attack in Alaska marked only the second documented case ever of a wolf killing someone in the wild. There are some 77,000 wolves in North America. The first-ever confirmed case of fatal wolf attack in the wild in North America occurred in 2005, when Kenton Carnegie was attacked by a pack of wolves in Saskatchewan, Canada.

In 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle found evidence of only 27 non-fatal wolf attacks on humans in North America. Most of those cases involved rabid wolves, which are themselves exceedingly rare, according to the Chronicle.

So it's very, very unlikely that the hunter, Brian Scott, actually was attacked by a wolf. Probably what happened is that Scott thought the animals were coyotes, decided to shoot one of them, and then made up a story after realizing he had killed a protected wolf.

We've got to get beyond irrational fairy tales about Big Bad Wolves. Just as with cougars, wolves are hugely less of a threat to humans than other people and dogs are. Live and let live should be our basic wolf and cougar policy, not shoot on sight. 

Apple wanted a credit check via Equifax. I paid cash for an iPhone 8 instead.

Screw you, Apple. I love you dearly for the beautiful devices you make. I've owned lots of Apple computers, tablets, printers, and phones ever since the Apple II+ with a floppy drive came into my life way back when.

But when I got to the very end of the ordering process for an iPhone 8 plus today, wanting to purchase it through the Apple financing program that I used to buy my iPhone 6 plus, I got a message that there was a problem with my credit.

I was pretty sure that I understood what the problem was. When this email message came a little while later from the bank Apple uses, Citizens One, I for sure knew what the problem was. 

I have a freeze on my credit report with each of the four major credit bureaus, which naturally includes Equifax -- the credit bureau that Apple, through Citizens One, is using to process applications to buy an iPhone on a monthly payment plan.

Yes, the very same Equifax that recently had a data breach affecting 143 million people. Yes, the very same Equifax that wants those people to sign up for a year of free credit monitoring that will probably turn into paid credit monitoring after 12 months are up. 

I've zero interest in voluntarily having anything to do with Equifax. They screwed up big time by having such poor security on those 143 million credit files. Yet Apple, through Citizens One, is requiring that anyone who wants to buy an iPhone through their payment plan have Equifax provide a credit report.

So I started over on the Apple web site. When I got to the "how to pay" part of my iPhone 8 plus purchase, I entered credit card information and bought the phone outright. 

Yeah, it was over a thousand bucks, with AppleCare, a case, and a wireless charging gizmo. 

But it was worth it to have nothing to do with Equifax. Sure, I know how to unfreeze my credit history for a couple of days with a $10 payment to Equifax. It's just that after the Equifax data breach, I don't want to unfreeze my credit for any length of time if this isn't absolutely necessary.

Here's what also irritates me.

Just about every story I've read about the Equifax breach recommends putting a freeze on one's credit for maximum protection. Also, I financed the iPhone 6 + purchase through Citizens One and made a timely monthly payment for two years.

That doesn't count, though. When I phoned Apple support, I was told that with a new iPhone purchase, I'd have to make a new credit application.

Like I said, screw you, Apple.

I realize that corporate decisions are made well in advance of product roll-outs. It just sure seems like after the Equifax breach, Apple should have demanded that Citizens One use a different credit bureau than Equifax. Lots of people, maybe millions, must have put a freeze on their credit history after the breach.

Us iPhone buyers shouldn't have to fork over $10 to Equifax to unfreeze our credit history. Bad move, Apple. I'm sure I'll love my iPhone 8 plus when it arrives. But the buying process sucked because of the Equifax connection. 

Highway 20 fire closure on Santiam Pass raises arson suspicions

So many wildfires are burning in the Cascades and central Oregon. Today a fire started just south of Highway 20 in the Potato Hill area between the Santiam Junction (of highways 20 and 22) and the Hoodoo ski area. 

Bend's KTVZ reports:

A new wildfire prompted closure of U.S. Highway 20 west of Santiam Pass and a second closure near Suttle Lake Tuesday afternoon, hours after three new brushfires erupted around the Newberry National Volcanic Monument south of Bend, one prompting evacuations of Lava River Cave and the Lava Lands Visitor Center, authorities said.

Willamette National Forest officials said the fire was reported around 3 p.m. near Potato Hill, around milepost 76 on Highway 20. The fire began on the south side of the highway but jumped the highway and was burning near Lost Lake.

Crews and air resources responded to the fire, estimated late Tuesday afternoon at about five acres, burning in the area of the 2003 B&B Complex Fire, the 90,000-acre blaze that was the largest in Deschutes National Forest history.

Eastbound traffic was being stopped at Santiam Junction and westbound traffic at Santiam Pass. ODOT warned, “This could be a lengthy closure, so travelers should consider using an alternative route, avoid the area or expect delays.”

The other closure was a mile east of the intersection with Suttle Lake Loop.

This is bad.

The only (small) good news is that currently ODOT's TripCheck site is reporting that while Highway 20 is closed to eastbound traffic at Potato Hill, westbound traffic is being let through via a pilot car. Be sure to check for current updates if you plan to travel to or from central Oregon on Highway 20.

[Update: I read the TripCheck report wrong. Just saw a tweet that explains both eastbound and westbound traffic now is being let through via a pilot car, so even better news.]

A Facebook friend who lives in the Sisters area clued me in to the Highway 20 fire and road closure via a post. Some commenters wondered, as I did, about whether there's a non-natural reason for the rash of fires breaking out near roads.

Meaning, someone is starting them on purpose.

Understand: there's no proof of this. Maybe careless people are responsible. Maybe smoldering lightning strikes are coming to life. It just seems strange that several fires in central Oregon started near roads today. The KTVZ story also said:

Meanwhile, three new fires south of Bend were reported around 1 p.m., One fire, Incident 1036, was stopped at two acres and fully lined by late afternoon, with crews working to contain it, said Deschutes National Forest Public Affairs Officer Jean Nelson-Dean.

A second fire burned two miles southeast of Lava Butte, on the east side of Highway 97. It also was lined by late afternoon and crews were working to contain it.

Probably investigators are looking into the possibility of arson. I can't imagine why someone would want to torch Oregon's beautiful forests, but humans are capable of some crazy stuff. 

For now, the priority has to be on getting the fires under control. Commenters on the Facebook post painted a disturbing picture of how things are in the Camp Sherman, Black Butte Ranch, and Sisters area.

We should be OK, though lots of smoke/ashes and eerie looking today.

The sun is totally obliterated and it is not even 7:00PM, but very ominous feeling. My deck is covered with ashes.

These fires (including Newberry Crater) seem suspicious to me. Starting independent of other fires, and near highways. 

Trump's transgender policy is unscientific and unfair

A few days ago President Trump unleashed another ridiculous Twitter storm, this time about transgender people serving in the military.

On Wednesday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that “after consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military."

"Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” Trump added. “Thank you."

Not surprisingly, these short sentences are filled with lies. 

There's no evidence that Trump consulted military experts about the transgender issue. His Defense Secretary was caught off guard by the Twitter announcement, saying he was "appalled." 

Trump's intention to ban transgender people from serving in the armed forces appears to have been made for purely political reasons. 

Mr. Trump elected to announce the ban in order to resolve a quietly brewing fight on Capitol Hill over whether taxpayer money should pay for gender transition and hormone therapy for transgender service members. The dispute had threatened to kill a $790 billion defense and security spending package scheduled for a vote this week.

But rather than addressing that narrow issue, Mr. Trump opted to upend the entire policy on transgender service members.

Given that there aren't many transgender individuals in the military, their gender-transition related health care costs -- between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually -- are a minuscule fraction of overall defense spending. And Trump's frequent Mar-a-Lago trips cost much more than transgender military health care.

Lots of things bug me about Trump. One of the many irritations is how Trump cares very little about understanding policies, choosing to focus almost entirely on politics.

(Yet he isn't very good at political machinations, leaving aside his slim presidential victory, having just crashed and burned on his pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and having no other significant legislative accomplishments so far.)

The same day Trump announced his intention to ban transgender people from serving in the military, I read a chapter in D.F. Swaab's book, "We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimer's." Swaab, says the book jacket, "is an internationally renowned researcher in neuroscience and a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam."

In his Sexual Differentiation of the Brain in the Womb chapter, Swaab talks about some basic transgender facts that Trump should have learned before he issued his banned-from-the-military tweets. 

All the data indicates that gender problems arise in the womb. Tiny variations in genes associated with the effect of hormones on brain development have been found to increase the likelihood of transsexuality. It can also be increased by abnormal fetal hormone levels or by medication taken during pregnancy that inhibits the breakdown of sex hormones. 

The differentiation of our sex organs takes place in the first months of pregnancy, while the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs in the second half of pregnancy. Since these two processes take place at different times, the theory is that in the case of transsexuality, they have been influenced independently of one another. 

Thus a transsexual comes to feel that he/she is inhabiting a body that doesn't match with his/her mind. 

In 2007 V.S. Ramachandran published an interesting hypothesis and provisional research finding on transsexuality. He believes that the neural body map of MtF [male to female] transsexuals lacks a penis, while that of FtM [female to male] transsexuals lacks breasts, due to these not being programmed into the map during development. As a result, they don't recognize these organs as their own and want to get rid of them.

Regardless of the exact biological cause of transsexuality, it seems clear that transgender individuals don't choose to transition to the other gender like someone chooses to dye one's hair or get a tattoo. Almost certainly, transsexuality isn't a choice. Neither is homosexuality.

Virtually all of the evidence points to the fact that when it comes to sexual identification as male, female, something in-between, or something else, people are, in Lady Gaga's words, "born this way." 

I realize that Trump doesn't like to read much. But maybe he'd watch a video.

Some of the lyrics:

Don't be a drag, just be a queen
Whether you're broke or evergreen
You're black, white, beige, chola descent
You're Lebanese, you're orient
Whether life's disabilities
Left you outcast, bullied, or teased
Rejoice and love yourself today
'cause baby you were born this way

No matter gay, straight, or bi,
Lesbian, transgendered life,
I'm on the right track baby,
I was born to survive.
No matter black, white or beige
Chola or orient made,
I'm on the right track baby,
I was born to be brave.

I don't like the Fourth of July because I'm super-patriotic

Patriotism is way over-rated. At least, the way this word usually is defined makes it highly limiting: love for or devotion to one's country. 

OK. I love the United States. I'm devoted to this country.

I also love...

My neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates
My city, Salem
My county, Marion
My state, Oregon.
My country, United States (as already mentioned)
My continent, North America
My planet, Earth
My galaxy, Milky Way
My universe, which let's call Universe

So I'm super-patriotic.

I love and am devoted to so much more than just my country. Celebrating Independence Day (today!) by focusing on the American flag, fireworks, nationalism, our military, the Founding Fathers (no mothers, apparently) strikes me as an excessive attention to a small slice of what every person in this country should be devoted to.

In short, everything in existence, because nothing stands alone. 

There's no such thing as independence. The United States wasn't really independent in 1776, or any other date. Today, as every day, our country is embedded in a web of physical, cultural, economic, environmental, and other sorts of connections. 

All too often, people view patriotism as elevating one's country among all those other levels of reality I listed above. There's many problems with this. I'll just mention a few. 

First, as just noted, the plain fact is that the United States doesn't stand above (or below) the other entities I listed. The United States is a concept, an abstraction, a way of thinking about the territory, political institutions, and such that now encompasses 50 states. 

Viewed from space, there is no evident United States or any other country. Countries aren't so much physical realities as they are conceptual realities. 

So when viewed from a loftier systems perspective, we can see that without individual states there would be no United States. And without the United States, there would be no conceptual union that those states could belong to. Thus the United States can't exist without other entities, and those other entities can't exist without the United States.

This interrelatedness of everything makes it impossible for me to view patriotism as love of country. I'm also a neighborhood, city, county, state, continent, planet, galaxy, and universe patriot. 

In different ways these aspects of reality all touch me. I love each of them. I'm devoted to each of them.

Naturally I spend most of my life at my neighborhood and city level. This is where my mind and body touch existence most directly. However, I recognize that without every other level of reality -- notably the level of my planet, Earth -- I couldn't enjoy the small slice of planetary goodness called Spring Lake Estates and Salem. 

Second, then, "my ________ (choose a level) right or wrong" makes no sense. I heard this sentiment a lot in my college days when so-called patriots would say to us hippie Vietnam War demonstrators, love it or leave it. Meaning, the United States.

No. False choice.

I don't have to love my country or leave my country. I can disapprove of what my country is doing and work to change it while still loving the United States. Further, to give a current example, I can love the Earth and heartily disapprove of the Trump administration's disregard of the Paris Agreement and other efforts to combat the harmful effects of global climate change.

In this regard I'm an Earth patriot.

I understand that the United States has a responsibility to our planet that it isn't fulfilling. When my wife and I took part in the Salem March for Science event on Earth Day this year, I felt super-patriotic criticizing Trump's anti-science stance, because my love and devotion extended beyond the narrow confines of nationalism.

Like my sign said, "Science is Universal." 

That's why I like super-patriotism. It doesn't have any boundaries. A super-patriot loves, and is devoted to, every aspect of reality -- from one's immediate neighborhood to the furthest reaches of the universe. 

Which doesn't mean that I like everything in reality. There's a lot I want to change, to make better, to improve on the planetary levels of existence (there's no way I can alter anything on the galactic or universe scale; I can only admire this vastness from afar).

Third, and lastly, an ordinary patriot believes "The United States is the greatest country on Earth." A super-patriot realizes that this is a subjective opinion, not an objective fact, because their view is broader.

Consider: I'd never say that my neighborhood, city, or state is the greatest.

I love where I live, but I understand that most people love where they live. From this Oregonian's perspective, I find it astounding that some people adore North Dakota. Yet, they do. I have no doubt that lots of North Dakotans consider their state to be the greatest in our country. 

As do lots of people in every other state.

Likewise, people in every country believe that theirs is the greatest nation on the planet. A 2016 YouGov poll asked respondents in 19 countries whether "they believe you live in the best country in the world." Here's the results as reported in a Business Insider story, "RANKED: How patriotic 19 world-leading economies are."

19. France - 5%
18. Germany - 5%
17. Vietnam - 6%
15. Sweden - 7%
15. Singapore - 7%
14. Hong Kong - 8%
13. Finland - 11%
12. Norway - 11%
11. Malaysia - 11%
10. Denmark - 13%
 9. UK - 13%
 8. Indonesia - 14%
 7. Philippines - 15%
 6. Thailand - 25%
 5. Saudi Arabia - 25%
 4. UAE - 27%
 3. Australia - 34%
 2. India - 36%
 1. United States - 41%

So what does this mean, objectively speaking? Nothing. 

Because there is no objective way to determine which country is the best in the world. So patriotism based on a feeling of "We're #1" is ludicrous. Many people in every country believe they are #1. The United States just happens to have the highest percentage.

(But India would way outvote us, since it has so many more people.)

This comment on the low German result of 5% was interesting: "Over six decades have passed since the Second World War, but Germans still have a 'pathological fear' of patriotism, according to German magazine Der Spiegel."

That's understandable.

However, I believe everybody should have such a fear, given that nationalistic patriotism is limited, divisive, and works against a broad view of our interconnected reality.

I encourage super-patriotism: a love of country that doesn't elevate devotion to one's nation above love of neighborhood, city, county, state, continent, planet, galaxy, and universe.

Common facts are the bedrock of democracy -- which Trump is blasting away at

There's a lot of reasons to detest what President Trump is doing to our country.

What's most concerning, though, isn't any specific outrage -- destroying health care, denying global warming, tearing apart the social safety net -- but his general attack on shared reality.

If people can't agree about the basic nature of the world we all live in together, it isn't possible to even discuss the problems we face, much less agree about what needs to be done about them. 

About a week ago I wrote about "On Tyranny," a little book that packed a big punch. This is one of the excerpts that I shared:

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If  nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

The next book I read was "The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time," by Brooke Gladstone. It also is little (just 87 pages). 

I didn't like it as much as "On Tyranny," partly because Gladstone's call to action to save reality left me lukewarm, if not confused. The author's intent seemed more to explain how we got to our current post-truth era, than to lay out a path back to consensual reality. 

These are the last three sentences in "The Trouble With Reality." They didn't make me feel that our troubles could be over.

We breed infinite realities and they never can be reconciled. We cannot fully enter someone else's. But if we really look, we might actually see that other reality reflected in that person's eyes, and therein lies the beginning of the end of our reality problem.

Well, maybe, though the notion of seeing Trump's reality reflected in his eyes makes me want to barf. It's a nauseating prospect which I have difficulty finding any purpose in, and certainly doesn't strike me as being the "beginning of the end of our reality problem."

Maybe this is because I imagined our country's most notorious reality-denier. I do agree that finding common ground with people we disagree with (leaving Trump aside) is the only way to return our society to a functional state. 

Which is the point of one of my favorite passages in Gladstone's book, a quote from an article Ned Resnikoff wrote on ThinkProgress.

Consensus is the bedrock of democracy.

For differences to get resolved in a properly democratic fashion, there needs to be agreement over the terms of the debate. Interlocutors must be aware of their shared rights and responsibilities, and they need to be capable of proceeding from a common set of facts and premises.

When political actors can't agree on basic facts and procedures, compromise and rule-bound argumentation are basically impossible; politics reverts back to its natural state as a raw power struggle in which the weak are dominated by the strong.

A great example is this short video of Senator Claire McCaskill, a minority Democrat, asking Senator Orrin Hatch, a majority Republican, if there will be a hearing on the Senate Republicans' health care bill. 

In three minutes, McCaskill demonstrates what indeed is the trouble with reality in Washington, D.C. Political power struggles are par for the course in Congress. 

But these Trumpian times have led to bizarre situations like this one. A bill to reshape 1/6 of our nation's economy, the health care sector, is being fashioned behind closed doors by a dozen or so white male Senators. So far there is no plan to hold a hearing on the bill.

Worse, there is no publicly-revealed bill for McCaskill or anyone else to examine, study, dissect, analyze, and suggest improvements to. Democracy can't function where there is no shared reality, no set of common facts that can be discussed and debated. 

I agree with Gladstone that facts are not enough. But they are an essential beginning. As she says below, reality is more than facts. 

Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.

Yes, reality is personal.

However, our personal realities can find common ground when they are based on shared facts. Otherwise, in politics and in other areas of life, we never really come in contact with each other if every person feels free to adopt their own "alternative facts." 

"On Tyranny" is a disturbingly great read for these Trumpian times

On Tyranny by historian Timothy Snyder is a small 126-page book that I read in about ninety minutes. But it's impact on me was huge. 

Yes, good things come in small packages. And in this case, only cost $5.26 (from Amazon). 

Snyder never mentions Donald Trump by name. But his frequent references to "the president" make it clear about the tyrant he's warning us about. 

This is the most astounding thing about Snyder's book: that he wrote it. 

Now. After Trump's election. To alert Americans to the danger of tyranny arising in our liberal democracy that, until recently, was generally felt to be immune to what befell Germany in the 1930's. 

Being 68, I have memories of many U.S. presidents. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. And now, Donald Trump. 

Before these Trumpian times I never worried seriously that our democracy was in danger.

I opposed much of what Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush (the W. variety) sought to inflict on our country. But this all seemed within the bounds of normal political goings-on. Conservative presidents try to achieve right-wing ends. Liberal presidents try to achieve left-wing ends.

Back and forth we go between right and left while the all-important institutions that guarantee our constitutional democracy carry on regardless of who is in power.

Well, Snyder shocked me out of that complacency -- even though I already knew that Trump was a whole different sort of president. Here's an excerpt from his final chapter:

Until recently we Americans had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. 

After communism in eastern Europe came to an end in 1989-91, we imbibed the myth of an "end of history." In doing so, we lowered our defenses, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

Unfortunately, they're back. And not in some third-world country led by an autocratic ruler.  Snyder uses historical examples in his 20 short chapters to show that right here in the United States we face authoritarian dangers in this Age of Trump. 

I encourage you to read "On Tyranny."

Even if you think you're aware of the threat Trump poses to our liberal democracy, believe me, Timothy Snyder will wake you up even more, big time. Here's some additional excerpts from the book that I especially liked.

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
----------
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If  nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
----------
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.  

Publicly defend your incompetent president, Trump voters

With every passing day, Donald Trump's astounding incompetency to serve as President becomes more obvious.

His lies, blunders, and disrespect for the office he won with the aid of Russian meddling in the 2016 election make it perfectly clear that Trump is on track to be the worst president in our nation's history.

His dismal approval rating, 43% as of yesterday, is an accurate reflection of the low regard most Americans have for our Idiot In Chief. By comparison, Barack Obama had an 62% approval rating by March of his first term in office. 

I proudly voted for Hillary Clinton. Her campaign arguments regarding Trump being unfit to serve as president are becoming more evidently true with every new Trump tweet. 

So I'm wondering: 

How many Trump voters here in Oregon, and particularly in my home town of Salem, are willing to publicly defend the guy they favored to lead our country? 

Being a progressive, I mainly talk politics with people who share my liberal views. We detest Trump, for many excellent reasons. But 39% of Oregon voters cast their ballot for Trump; 38% of Salem voters did the same.

Thus there's a lot of people out there in my area of the country who thought Donald Trump would be a good president. At least, a better president than Hillary Clinton. I'd like to know if they still defend Trump.

I don't see many signs of this.

On my Facebook feed, conservative friends or acquaintances aren't standing up for Trump. Right-wingers in Oregon, or Salem, aren't making obvious statements of "I'm still a strong supporter of the man I voted to be president."

But maybe Trump-lovers will come out of the closet. If you're one of them, leave an I love Trump comment on this post with your real name. Show the world that you're still proud to have put him in the Oval Office.

More...

Defend Trump's recent Tweet-accusations that Obama "wire-tapped" his phone before Election Day, despite the fact there is zero evidence to support this ridiculous claim.

Apparently the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, believes this crap because he read about it on some wacko right-wing media outlets. 

WASHINGTON — It began at 6 p.m. Thursday as a conspiratorial rant on conservative talk radio: President Barack Obama had used the “instrumentalities of the federal government” to wiretap the Republican seeking to succeed him. This “is the big scandal,” Mark Levin, the host, told his listeners.

By Friday morning, the unsubstantiated allegation had been picked up by Breitbart News, the site once headed by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Less than 24 hours later, the president embraced the conspiracy in a series of Twitter posts accusing his predecessor of spying on him, setting in motion the latest head-spinning, did-he-really-say-that furor of Mr. Trump’s six-week-old presidency.

This is the latest, but certainly not the last, highly outrageous WTF action by the fool who was voted into office by a minority of Americans -- who still constituted a large proportion of the electorate, even here in liberal Oregon.

So Trump voters should either admit to the rest of us that you made a BIG MISTAKE, or publicly support the man who is now bringing disgrace on the highest office in the land. 

It'll be interesting to see how many of you take me up on this offer to leave an I still love Trump comment with your real name. Maybe there are more people willing to go along with Trump's falsehoods and screw-ups than I suspect.

Which would be disturbing. Because the only way we're going to be able to get our country back on track is if citizens stand up to the demagoguery of the Man Who Would Be King, or even Dictator, rather than "merely" President.   

Let's make Salem an island of sanity in an increasingly crazy country

We're one week into four years of a Trump presidency.

If the trend line of Crazy continues, it will be so far off the charts I'm worried our United States will disintegrate into a tangled mass of splintered humanity, with most people saddened, angered, and frustrated, and a minority cheering the arrival of whatever disastrous future Trump's barely-there mind envisions for our country.

When I wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying about what kind of hellscape awaits our nation, the only thought that calms my frazzled psyche is this:

Here in Salem, we can be a refuge of love in a wilderness of hate; an island of sanity in an ocean of craziness; a town that comes together in a country that is splitting apart. 

Look, I realize this may sound unduly idealistic given that 38% of Salem voters cast a ballot for Trump and 49% for Clinton.

There's no consensus among our citizenry on anything, including how to deal with homelessness, whether a Third Bridge is needed, what to do about a Plan B for a new police facility, how to revitalize downtown, and what improvements, if any, need to be made to our schools, mass transit system, roads, bike paths, and other communal aspects of Salem.

This doesn't really matter, though. 

Heck, it is rare that my wife and I start off with a consensus about anything. For example, until recently I didn't even know that we needed a new living room couch. Our current one seemed absolutely fine to me. But Laurel gently and persuasively explained why she doesn't like the couch. Yesterday we ordered a new one. She was happy. I was happy. And I'm sure when the new couch arrives, our dog also will be happy with it.

What we did was simple:

Talk to each other; listen to each other; understand how the other person feels; give reasons for why we feel the way we do; compromise; engage in give and take; come to a mutually satisfying agreement; realize that we don't have to see something in exactly the same way, just similarly enough to be able to converse about it.

Hopefully Salem's elected officials, public employees, business leaders, civic activists, advocates for this-and-that, and citizens of all sorts will be able to come together in these Trumpian times, demonstrating that while Washington D.C. may be a place of rancor and people talking past each other, our town can be different.

Which means, of course, that we have to talk to each other. And not just through social media, as President Obama said so eloquently in his farewell speech: 

Understand democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders argued, they quarreled, and eventually they compromised. They expected us to do the same. But they knew that democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity. The idea that, for all our outward differences, we’re all in this together, that we rise or fall as one.

...For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable.

And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

And this trend represents a third threat to our democracy. Look, politics is a battle of ideas. That’s how our democracy was designed. In the course of a healthy debate, we prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other.

...So, you see, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Salem needs more opportunities for diverse people to come together and talk openly, honestly, and, yes, sometimes heatedly, about what we have to do to make our town better. 

Face to face. Eye to eye. 

Sure, we always are going to feel more comfortable in our own "tribe." I'm a progressive atheist vegetarian. I readily admit that hanging out with conservative religious carnivores can stretch my ability to empathize, understand, relate, grok. But I need this stretching, a form of psychological yoga. It helps keep me limber.

We here in Salem can get through the next four years, and the four years after that, whatever the future may bring, if we keep in mind a saying that is as true as it is a cliche: what unites us is stronger than what divides us. 

We come to understand this most intensely when we break out of our cultural and political shells, daring to peck our way out of hardened beliefs that often bear little resemblance to reality, or to how other people truly look upon our shared world. 

Like I said, I had no idea that a new couch was what our living room needed until my wife ushered me into this fresh understanding. All things are possible when approached with open minds.

Let's give it a try, Salem. I really need our town to come together, given the clear and present danger that our nation is going to split apart.

Clinton's election-eve campaign speech reminded me of how far women have come

Driving home from my Tai Chi class tonight, my election-obsessed brain caused my fingers to choose the MSNBC button on my car's satellite radio rather than the Chill or Classic Vinyl music stations that ordinarily attract me.

I heard President Obama's voice. 

He was speaking at one of Hillary Clinton's final campaign events, a 40,000 person rally in Philadelphia. Obama was inspiring. Obama strongly urged people to get out and vote tomorrow. Naturally, for Clinton.

Then Clinton took the stage. You can hear part of what she said in the video below.

What moved me was how positive she was, how competent-sounding she was, how uplifting she was. The title of a New York Times story about the last full day of campaigning put it nicely: "Optimism From Hillary Clinton and Darkness From Donald Trump at Campaign's End."

The contrasts between the candidates and their messages were on vivid display in the campaign’s last full day.

As she embarked on a four-state tour, Mrs. Clinton gave a sunny and optimistic summation of her candidacy for the White House.

“Tomorrow, you can vote for a hopeful, inclusive, big-hearted America,” she told a crowd in Pittsburgh.

Mr. Trump, who campaigned in five states on Monday, took a harsher approach, assailing the “crooked media,” attacking a “corrupt Washington establishment” and mocking Mrs. Clinton over and over.

“It’s a rigged, rigged system,” he declared in Raleigh, N.C. “And now it’s up to the American people to deliver the justice that we deserve at the ballot box tomorrow.”

It's difficult, really difficult, for me to understand why anyone would vote for Trump.

Trump is spectacularly unqualified to be president. He lies constantly, and with relish (hugely more than Clinton).  He is uninformed, emotionally unstable, a habitual insulter, and virtually devoid of substantive policies that have a chance of fulfilling his pledge to "make America great again." 

By contrast, as you can hear in the video below Clinton speaks of building bridges, not walls; of being stronger together; of how love trumps hate. Sure, Clinton has her acerbic side. All politicians do. But she is far and away the better person in the 2016 presidential race -- more moral, caring, intelligent, committed, and wise.

Also, a woman.

It's been strange how her female'ness has been downplayed in this election. In 2008, there was tons of talk about how amazing it was that Barack Obama would be this country's first black president. However, there's been much less explicit attention paid to an equally amazing fact: tomorrow, most likely, Hillary Clinton will become our first female president.

Maybe this is because women have come so far, compared to where they used to be. 

I'm a man.

So I readily admit that I can't fully appreciate the meaning of feminism, equal rights, breaking the glass ceiling. Yet neither can most Americans, because they have grown up in a time when women have enjoyed many more opportunities than in, say, the semi-dark ages I grew up in: the 1950s and 1960s.

In my high school, girls couldn't wear pants. They took Home Economics. My highly intelligent mother, born in 1912, never graduated from college, even though her Massachusetts senior class yearbook says she was "College Preparatory for Wellesley." 

Her brother became a businessman. My mother and her sisters all got married at a young age. They didn't have careers. After she got divorced and raised me by herself, my mother got a job as postmaster (postmistress?) of a tiny branch office in Three Rivers, California.

I'm pretty sure that of all my elementary school classmates, I had the only mother who worked. At a job that was far below her capabilities. But that was the way things were back then. And the odds were still stacked against women when my daughter was born in 1972.

August 1970

Below the Clinton video, I'll share a You Tube clip of a 1974 "Free to Be... You and Me" special. I heard Marlo Thomas' record played over and over by my daughter when she was a bit older. It was filled with positive feel-good feminism.

These sentiments in the song will seem damn obvious to girls and women today. Believe me, they weren't as recently as the 1970s.

I see a land bright and clear, and the time's comin' near
When we'll live in this land, you and me, hand in hand
Take my hand, come along, lend your voice to my song
Come along, take my hand, sing a song

For a land where the river runs free
For a land through the green country
For a land to a shining sea
For a land where the horses run free
And you and me are free to be you and me

Every boy in this land grows to be his own man
In this land, every girl grows to be her own woman

At the risk of sounding like an old geezer who can't stop talking about the way things used to be, I'll do just that.

Young'uns, there was a time not long ago when it was freaking impossible to imagine a woman becoming president. Yes, I realize this sounds crazy, but it's true. Heck, like I said, it was difficult to imagine a woman being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Or for women my mother's age, even being able to work at a job society reserved for men.

So when Clinton is elected president tomorrow (or so I hope and expect), this is going to mean different things to different people in this country.

I just wish that almost everyone could agree that the woman speaking in the New York Times video below is eminently qualified to be president, and it will be a wonderful thing to have a woman lead our country.

Follow FiveThirtyEight and PredictWise to stay presidential-poll sane

For political junkies like me, it's easy to go a little (or a lot) crazy during the excruciatingly long presidential campaign season -- becoming joyful when a chosen candidate (Clinton, in my case) is ascendent in the polls, and despondent when a downturn happens.

Here's my advice about how to handle this:

Follow the best poll analyzer around, FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's operation. After he left the New York Times, Silver and Co. branched out into analyzing sports and other areas.

But politics, not surprisingly, is his emphasis at the moment. I follow FiveThirtyEight on Twitter and enjoy his highly competent take on what's happening in the Clinton-Trump battle.

He regularly reminds people that single polls aren't meaningful, like the recent CNN poll that showed Trump with a 2-point lead nationally. Looking at averages of many polls over time is the way to go.

Currently FiveThirtyEight gives Clinton a 67% chance of winning, almost exactly the same as in early June. There have been ups and downs for the candidates, but no overall movement in the past three months. 

I'm also a fan of prediction markets, where people lay bets on political and other sorts of contests. I don't follow prediction markets very closely, so had to do some Googling to find a good example to share. 

PredictWise popped up. This is the web site's pitch:

PredictWise reflects David Rothschild’s academic, peer-reviewed, research into prediction markets, along with polling and online/social media data. The backbone of predictions on this site are market-based, generated from real-money markets that trade contracts on upcoming events. While we have great respect for: polls and online/social media data, the topline predictions reflect data that are more accurate, flexible, and update in real-time.

Below is the current presidential chart.

It shows Clinton with a 75% chance of winning, and Trump 25%. Which isn't far off from FiveThirtyEight's 67% chance of a Clinton victory.

You can see that the prediction markets are more stable than the FiveThirtyEight model. FiveThirtyEight had the race tied in late July, while at that time PredictWise had it 70-30 in favor of Clinton.

At any rate, there's two months left before the November election.

Quite a few ups and downs likely remain for both presidential candidates. Like I said, it's easy to get overwrought about temporary blips in the long term trend. The time to worry is when your favored candidate is on a steady downward trend close to election day.

Once the presidential debates begin, I suspect we'll see some significant bumps for the candidates. The debates will give people a chance to see Clinton and Trump on the same stage, talking about the same issues. I'm predicting Clinton will benefit from the debates.

But I'm not betting on it. I'll be watching PredictWise as a detached observer.

Melania Trump's plagiarism shows why Donald would be a horrible president

If anyone needed a reason to oppose Donald Trump's presidential ambitions, the debacle of his wife's plagiarized speech at the Republican Convention last night sure offers up a good one.

It's obvious to anyone with half a brain -- which apparently doesn't include Donald Trump -- that Melania Trump borrowed from Michele Obama's 2008 speech at the Democratic Convention where her husband won his first presidential nomination. 

The New York Times has a clear comparison of the Trump and Obama speeches in "Questions Over Melania Trump's Speech Set Off Finger-Pointing." Here's the more extensive example of plagiarism. (click to enlarge)

The chance that Melania Trump independently came up with the same ideas, the same words, and the same order of expressing them as Michelle Obama did is so close to zero, let's just round things off and say... zero. 

Supporting the near-certainty that significant portions of Trump's speech were copied almost verbatim from Obama's speech is a follow-up New York Times story: "How Melania Trump's Speech Veered Off Course and Caused an Uproar." The story is based on interviews "with more than a dozen people involved in and close to the Trump campaign." 

The Trump campaign turned to two high-powered speechwriters, who had helped write signature political oratory like George W. Bush’s speech to the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, to introduce Ms. Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, to the nation on the opening night of the Republican National Convention.

It did not go as planned, and it has eclipsed much of the action at the party gathering in Cleveland, where delegates on Tuesday night formally nominated Mr. Trump for president.

The speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, sent Ms. Trump a draft last month, eager for her approval.

Weeks went by. They heard nothing.

Inside Trump Tower, it turned out, Ms. Trump had decided she was uncomfortable with the text, and began tearing it apart, leaving a small fraction of the original.

...The two original speechwriters were not aware of how significantly the speech had been changed until they saw Ms. Trump deliver it on television Monday night, along with the rest of the country.

In the prime-time address, Ms. Trump unfurled a sequence of life lessons — about how “your word is your bond,” about “your dreams and your willingness to work for them,” and the “integrity, passion and intelligence” of her parents — in the same sequence and using much of the same language that Mrs. Obama employed in 2008.

So Melania Trump, likely with the aid of her staff, used Michelle Obama's words without attribution. That's plagiarism, a cardinal sin in speechwriting.

In interviews, alarmed Republican speechwriters outlined the layers of formal scrutiny, apparently disregarded by the Trump campaign, traditionally applied to almost every draft of a major convention address. They described word-by-word fact-checking by a dedicated team of experts and computer software designed to catch plagiarism. Several online programs, like DupliChecker, are available at no cost.

“It’s pretty standard,” Mr. Stevens said of the software, which detects overlap in word choice and sentence structure. “We used it.”

An urgent priority: avoiding the slightest hint of oratorical theft.

“The most cardinal rule of any speech-writing operation is that you cannot plagiarize,” said Mr. Latimer, the Bush speechwriter, who is now a partner at Javelin, a communications firm. If you do, he said, “you lose your job.”

Now, the smart and honest thing for the Trump campaign to do would have been to acknowledge the plagiarism, explaining how and why it happened. 

For example, perhaps Melania Trump wasn't aware that using part of someone else's speech in your own speech is a major no-no in this country. As a youth she was focused on modeling, not English literature.

I would have found it charming if Ms. Trump had told the public, "I loved what Michelle Obama said. I'm sorry that I copied her words, rather than expressing her view in my own language. I'm new to speechwriting. I won't make this mistake again.

Instead, though, the Trump campaign has dismissed the uproar over Melania Trump's plagiarism, denying it even happened.

The Trump campaign on Tuesday dismissed criticism that Melania Trump directly lifted two passages nearly word-for-word from the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention, calling the complaints "just absurd."

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort insisted no mistakes had been made with the speech and said the issue was "totally blown out of proportion."

Wow. 

Unfortunately, there have been so many wow's coming from the Trump campaign, the American public is getting used to them. This doesn't make them acceptable.

A presidential candidate needs to demonstrate that he or she is in touch with reality. Sure, they will have their own unique viewpoint on things, but it is vitally important that their understanding of the basic nature of those "things" be factually correct.

It's really bothersome that Trump plays so fast and loose with facts. This shows that he would be a terrible president, since the leader of the United States has to be in command of what is actually happening in the world -- not what he or she wants to have happen, or hopes to have happen. 

Here's the PolitiFact summary of their Donald Trump fact-checks. A freaking 75% are mostly false, false, and Pants On Fire false. Yes, 75% are false. 

By contrast, here's Hillary Clinton's fact-checks. Only 27% are mostly false, false, and Pants of Fire false. That's still too many, but it is almost a mirror image of Trump's truth-telling. I'd much rather have a president who is speaking truthfully 3/4 of the time, than a president who is speaking falsely 3/4 of the time.

Melania Trump's plagiarism, and how the Trump campaign has handled it, is just another indication that Donald Trump is totally unqualified to be president of the United States. 

Five reasons to vote "No" on $82 million Salem Police Facility bond

I like the Salem Police Department. I don't like the City of Salem's proposed $82 million "supersized" plan for a new police facility. Likewise, I can support our armed forces and still oppose wasteful military spending.

I've made an Adobe Spark web page that lays out five good reasons to vote NO on the $82 million bond measure that will be on the November ballot. Plus, a bonus reason. Scroll down and click to see it.

Tonight I'm planning to testify during the public comment period at a City Council meeting where, almost certainly, approval of the bond measure referral will occur. 

Here's what I told City officials recently in an email where I gave them advance notice that I'd be opposing the police facility bond measure:

I want to let City officials know that I (along with others) will be actively opposing the $82 million police facility bond measure that, almost certainly, will be approved by the City Council at the upcoming June 27 meeting. 

This is unfortunate, because a lyric from an Adele song comes to mind: “You could have had it all.” After the ill-fated plan to build a new police facility on the Civic Center campus was dropped due to strong community opposition, Salem was close to a consensus on how to proceed:

Build a 75,000 to 106,000 square foot police facility away from the Civic Center, with surface parking, and make vital seismic upgrades to City Hall and the Library. 

But the size and cost of the police facility doubled, and the seismic upgrades got squeezed out by the new supersized “full meal deal” plan. So now some of the people who have closely followed this project feel duty-bound to oppose the $82 million bond measure. 

Me included. 

As a first step, I’ve put together a Salem Can Do Better web page — which presents five reasons to vote “No” on the bond:

http://www.salemcandobetter.com

Since community discussion on important issues is always good, Salem will benefit by having a vigorous debate between now and the November election about the merits of the $82 million police facility proposal. As you know, polling showed just about an even split between those who initially favored and opposed a bond for this purpose. 

So I look forward to being a voice on the “No” side of the debate, recognizing that others will speak up for “Yes.” Then voters will decide the question, hopefully based on a full and accurate understanding of what it would mean for the bond measure to pass or fail.

     — Brian

Bernie Sanders' revolution is turning into a whimper

Oh, Bernie. This Hillary supporter wants so much for you to recognize the reality that she will be the Democratic presidential candidate, not you. 

And then to work hand-in-hand with Clinton and the Democratic Party to (1) defeat Donald Trump in November, and (2) bring about the progressive policies that you so ably championed during your campaign.

But this tweet by Mark Murray, the senior political editor for NBC News, neatly expresses how your revolution is turning out at the moment:

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

Ouch! Biting, yet true. 

A story in today's New York Daily News has a headline with a similar message: "Enough, Bernie, enough: Sanders needs to hang it up."

After decisively losing the nomination of a party that was never his political home, Bernie Sanders is revealing egotism of practically Trumpian proportions.

Sanders insists that he deserves powerful sway over the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, whom he savaged during the campaign as an “unqualified” stooge of Wall Street.

As they say at closing time: Bernie, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

...Having become the surprise man of the moment because his lifetime of droning about a rigged system came into vogue, Sanders has lost acquaintance with the American political system.

In 2008, Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama by a grand total of 41,622 votes and 127 pledged delegates.

Despite the razor-thin margin, Clinton she did not have the gall to suggest that she could pressure the victor to accept any of her platform. She understood, as everyone should, that the winner’s ideas carry the day.

Obama embraced Clintonian ideas only when he deemed them worthy. He graciously offered her the position of secretary of state. He bent in her direction on health care, building an individual mandate into his eventual plan.

These were choices made of his own free will, not because Clinton insisted that her 18 million votes entitled her to anything.

This time, Sanders pulled in 3.7 million fewer votes than Clinton and far fewer delegates.

The way Sanders is acting now that he has lost the nomination makes me realize that I was correct in not voting for him in the Oregon Democratic primary. Sanders' grand political vision is fine. However, his perception is horribly blurred when it comes to dealing with concrete, practical, realistic policy decisions. 

Bernie doesn't seem to realize that he has lost, and Hillary has won.

The loser of a presidential primary doesn't get to decide what the party platform is, determine who chairs the Democratic National Committee, or get their way on Democratic Party election reforms.

Sanders is entitled to work for these things. But he doesn't get to demand them. Sanders needs to congratulate Clinton on her victory, then get to work campaigning for her and fighting against Trump. 

Unfortunately, today much of his focus was on those Democratic Party reforms (some of what he wants is problematic, such as allowing Independents and Republicans to vote in open Democratic primaries), rather than on conceding defeat and endorsing Clinton. 

If Sanders keeps up his Whining Game, he risks alienating the clear majority of Democratic Party primary voters who preferred Clinton's political views. It's amazing that a guy who lost the presidential primary, big time, somehow feels that his positions have to be adopted by the person who defeated him.

Be a good loser, Bernie. Then join with Clinton in bringing about the progressive revolution that both of you want.

Tough to know what to do about mass shootings in United States

I wish I had a realistic answer to stopping mass shootings in this country. I wish somebody did. 

But here we are again, 50 dead and 53 wounded in an attack on a gay nightclub, the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States, and no realistic answers are apparent.

Depressing.

The problem is with that word, realistic.  Because it's pretty obvious why this country has way more gun killings than any other nation: we have way more guns. 

We're not going to get rid of all those guns, though. No way. Not going to happen.

Australia was able to ban semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. It also instituted a mandatory buy-back program for newly banned weapons. Mass shootings stopped. However, we've got the 2nd Amendment, a fanatic group of NRA-backed gun nuts, and a House of Representatives that likely will remain in Republican control for a while.

This country's best hope for common sense gun control is to change the membership of our Supreme Court enough to allow a return to the legal principle that held sway throughout our nation's history until very recently: the "right to bear arms" isn't an individual right, so reasonable restrictions can be put on it.

I'd like to see assault weapons banned.

They don't serve any sort of hunting or self-defense purpose. I own guns for those purposes (I don't hunt, but I've used a shotgun to blast ground squirrels burrowing under our house's foundation). I've never felt like I needed an assault weapon.

This would be a positive step to reducing the toll of mass shootings. It's hard to believe that Omar Mateen, the gunman in the gay nightclub massacre, could have killed and wounded so many people without using an AR-15-style assault rifle. 

Still, a New York Times piece, "How They Got Their Guns," looks at the guns used in 16 recent mass shootings. Only five involved assault-style weapons. Further:

The vast majority of guns used in 16 recent mass shootings, including two guns believed to be used in the Orlando attack, were bought legally and with a federal background check. At least eight gunmen had criminal histories or documented mental health problems that did not prevent them from obtaining their weapons.

So stricter universal background checks seems like a good place to start in our nation's quest to reduce mass shootings. It seems crazy that Mateen was able to buy his guns so easily, even though he'd been investigated by the FBI as a possible ISIS-sympathizer. 

Beyond this, I'm having trouble thinking of what can be done. Realistically. 

Sure, it'd be great if nobody believed in fantasies about how an imaginary God wants those who don't believe in a certain made-up religion to kill unbelievers. This isn't going to happen anytime soon, though. 

And while better mental health treatment is needed, the United States doesn't have more disturbed people than other countries. We have more freaking guns. People aren't the mass shooting problem in this country. Guns are. So it seems obvious that stronger gun control is the answer.

Along with more and better research on gun violence. The ban on this is absurd. That April 2016 story said;

A coalition of 141 medical organizations sent a letter to four senior members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees on Wednesday urging them to restore funding for gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Medical professionals and our communities work to address the devastating and long-lasting physical and emotional effects of gun violence on victims, their families and their friends, but are hampered by the insufficient body of evidence-based research to use to point communities toward proven gun violence prevention programs and policies,” the letter reads.

How many more automobile deaths would there be today if car manufacturers had gotten Congress to ban research on air bags, antilock brakes, road design, and such? So here's another realistic step toward reducing gun deaths: put researchers to work on figuring out the best policies to do this.

Sanders needs to do "Golden Rule" thing, now that Clinton is presumptive nominee

Today is historic. The New York Times headline says it all.

Hillary Clinton Has Clinched Democratic Nomination, Survey Reports.

Hillary Clinton became the first woman to capture the presidential nomination of one of the country’s major political parties on Monday night, according to an Associated Press survey of Democratic superdelegates, securing enough of them to overcome a bruising challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders and turn to a brutal five-month campaign against Donald J. Trump.

Almost eight years after she ended her campaign against Barack Obama before a crowd with many teary women and girls, Mrs. Clinton signaled the news to a jubilant crowd at a campaign stop in Long Beach, Calif.

“I got to tell you, according to the news, we are on the brink of a historic, historic, unprecedented moment, but we still have work to do, don’t we?” she said. “We have six elections tomorrow, and we’re going to fight hard for every single vote, especially right here in California.”

It would have been nice if the Sanders campaign had acknowledged the historic nature of a woman finally being the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party.

A spokesperson could have said something like, "We congratulate Ms. Clinton on gaining enough delegates to be the apparent nominee of the Democratic Party. We hope to change the minds of some superdelegates, but we know this will be very difficult to do. Still, we will try, since so many people have supported Senator Sanders. If we fail, rest assured that we will be strong supporters of Ms. Clinton in her race against Donald Trump."

But the quotes in the New York Times story were nothing like this. Instead, I read:

“It is unfortunate that the media, in a rush to judgment, are ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer,” said Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, in a statement.

“Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination,” the statement continued.

“She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then.”

This reeks of sore loser -- especially since Sanders has railed against the ability of superdelegates to overturn the will of voters in the Democratic primaries. Who, it turns out, gave Clinton millions more votes and hundreds more pledged delegates than Sanders. 

Yet now Sanders is signaling that he will try to overturn the will of the clear majority of primary voters by getting superdelegates to give him the presidential nomination that he wasn't able to win in a fair fight with Clinton. 

I understand how tough it is to go through a bruising race for the Democratic presidential nomination and come up short. I also realize how passionate Sanders supporters are about their favored candidate. 

Both Sanders and his supporters need to do the Golden Rule thing, though: imagine how they would feel if things had turned out differently, and today the Associated Press had declared Bernie Sanders to be the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party -- having won enough pledged delegates and the support of enough superdelegates to put him over the top.

They would be freaking outraged if a spokesperson for the Clinton campaign had said something like:

"Sure, Sanders has gotten the majority of votes and delegates. But this doesn't matter, because we're going to do our best to convince superdelegates that Clinton is the more electable candidate. America isn't ready to elect a socialist as president, no matter how many Democratic voters think otherwise."

They'd be screaming about the unfairness of Democratic party insiders being able to overturn the will of the majority of primary voters. 

Yet this is exactly what Sanders says he is intending to do. 

Along with most other supporters of Hillary Clinton, I have a lot of fondness and respect for Bernie Sanders. His positions aren't hugely different from Clinton's, but I like his unique passion and genuineness. Sanders has brought issues to the nation's attention that needed to be in the spotlight. 

Kudos to him for that. I'm worried, though, that Sanders is going to fritter away much of that goodwill by engaging in a mean-spirited, fruitless battle to achieve through superdelegates what he couldn't achieve through the primary process.

If he spends the time between now and the Democratic convention trying to take the nomination away from Clinton that she has fairly won, this is going to make progressives like me want to shun Sanders -- because it irks when he is trying to do to Clinton what he wouldn't have wanted done to him, if he'd won the majority of primary votes and delegates.

I'm an Oregonian who votes by mail. Everybody should.

It's a no-brainer is an overused phrase. But it sure fits when it comes to vote by mail.

In 1998, Oregon, where I live, became the first state in the country to conduct all elections by mailed ballots. Since, Washington and Colorado have followed suit.

(Coincidentally, or maybe not, along with Alaska these three states also are the only ones to legalize recreational marijuana. So not only can residents of Oregon, Washington, and Colorado vote in the privacy of their own homes, we can also do so while smoking pot. Sweet!)

Having moved to Oregon in 1971, I've experienced both ways of voting: (1) going to a polling place on election day, standing in line, and voting in a cubicle; and (2) getting a ballot in the mail several weeks before election day, filling it out whenever I want, and mailing it in.

Believe me, voting by mail is way better. Us Oregonians can't understand why the whole country doesn't do it. There are no real drawbacks and plenty of positives. 

I've never encountered anyone in this state who longs for the old way of voting.

Sure, voting by mail costs you a first class stamp. But lots of people drop off their ballots at a collection box. Many like to do this on election day. Me, I fill out my ballot and mail it in as soon as possible. This gets me off the list of people who receive phone calls from candidate campaigns asking, "Have you voted yet?"

Here's a report from the Marion County Elections Office showing ballot return rates in the recent May 17 primary election. (Marion County is where Salem, Oregon's capital, is located.)
Download 5-17-16 Ballot Return Rate

The final Marion County return rate was 49%.

Thirty-four percent came in gradually during the two weeks prior to election day; fifteen percent came in on May 17, election day. Most of the day-of-election ballots were dropped off, since there's plenty of warnings not to mail your ballot even a week before election day, because of the risk of the USPS not delivering it in time.

(In Oregon, all ballots have to be received by 8 pm on election day. In Washington state, they have to be postmarked by election day.)

Just about the only halfway reasonable supposed drawback to vote by mail that I've heard is the ability to cast your ballot several weeks ahead of election day. Some people argue that this prevents early voters from considering late-breaking information about a candidate.

Well, I've never had regrets about who I voted for two weeks before election day. And many states have some form of early voting, including the ability to cast an absentee ballot. So this seems like a very weak argument against vote by mail.

Phil Keisling was Oregon's Secretary of State from 1991-98. His recent piece in Washington Monthly, "Vote From Home, Save Your Country," discusses the excellent reasons to have vote by mail everywhere. Higher voter turnout is one of them. 

In 2014, Oregon’s active voter turnout rate was 70.9 percent—23 percentage points higher than the national average—despite having no hotly contested top races. Colorado, which had both a close Senate and governor’s race, logged a 71.9 percent ARV rate in its debut UVBM election. Washington State had no U.S. Senate or governor’s race in 2014, but its 54 percent ARV turnout still handily beat the national average. (In 2010, thirty-eight of Washington’s thirty-nine counties used all mail ballots, and its 71.2 percent rate that year was second only to Oregon’s.)

Voter fraud is virtually non-existent in Oregon, just 13 cases since 2000. That's less than one a year. 

My ballot has my name and address on it. I sign the envelope that the ballot is returned in. My signature has to match the one that is on file with the elections office. When my ballot is received, I get an email telling me this:

Hello Brian Hines,

Welcome to Marion County Clerk - Elections Track Your Ballot.

Your ballot for the November 2015 Election has been accepted and is being processed for counting. Thank you for voting! If you have any questions call 503-588-5041.

Visit http://www.co.marion.or.us/co/elections for more election information.

Bill Burgess
Marion County Clerk

So get with it, you 47 states other than Oregon, Washington, and Colorado that don't let citizens vote by mail. The only reason not to do this is to suppress voter turnout. Which appears to be why Republican/Red states are reluctant to have vote by mail.

Ooh, scary! Lots of people voting! Democracy!

Well, be even more afraid of Oregon, because we also have automatic voter registration when people register with the Department of Motor Vehicles ("motor voter" law). Since January, more than 50,000 new voters have been registered in Oregon this way. 

And then they can vote by mail. Making it easy to vote... works here in Oregon. The rest of the country should give it a try.

"Listen, Liberal" is a must-read book for progressives

I'm finding my progressive views being challenged by Thomas Frank's new book, "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?"

He's the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" which took shots at Republicans. Now he's aimed his considerable rhetorical and intellectual skills at Democrats.

To great effect. 

I'm about halfway through with the book. Though I'm still a Hillary Clinton supporter in this year's presidential primary contest, I can now better understand why Bernie Sanders' supporters feel like the Democratic Party has screwed over ordinary people. 

I couldn't resist peeking at the last pages of "Listen, Liberal." As suspected, Frank doesn't cut Democrats any slack in his conclusions.

Now, all political parties are alliances of people with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the "party of the people" even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class.

Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Agreed. 

This is why I've come to feel that if Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee, as she almost certainly will be, infusing her policy positions with a Big Dose of Bernie will be the best course for both this country and her campaign against Trump. 

Not that Sanders has got everything right. But I've read enough of Frank's book to feel convinced that much of what Democrats have done over the past few decades has been misguided -- even though it seemed justified at the time. (Frank himself admits that he has changed his views over the years.)

I want to finish "Listen, Liberal" before I weigh in on Frank's overall conclusions.

So far, I think his general viewpoint is right on: Democrats have been, and are, way better than Republicans at standing up for ordinary people, the "99%," but still -- in many ways us Democrats have failed the non-professional, non-creative class, non-kale eating/latte drinking citizens of this country.

A few things are bothering me about what I've read so far, though. Frank has a habit of criticizing Democratic policy-makers for doing this-and-that without making much of a case for an alternative approach. 

For example, he castigates President Bill Clinton for assuming that globalization was akin to a force of nature that couldn't be stopped, so the United States needed to adjust to the trend as best we could. Hence, NAFTA and other trade pacts.

Question is, though, how else could this country have dealt with globalization? Trade wars, higher tariffs, and such aren't exactly recipes for economic success. Further, globalization has helped hundreds of millions of people in other countries escape extreme poverty.

Sure, much needs to be done to make their working conditions more fair and equitable. And those hurt by the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country need more than a (Bill) Clintonesque, "The world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn." (direct quote in the book)

But globalization is a ship whose course is pretty much set. Democrats need to adjust important details about where the ship is heading, while recognizing that business is going to be increasingly conducted across national borders -- and this is a good thing, overall. 

I also am finding Frank's critique of "new urbanism" folks like me to be a bit off-putting.

Yes, it isn't enough to have cities with marvelous bike paths connecting mixed use areas with art galleries, coffee houses, restaurants, and other attractions for those with enough disposable income to enjoy these amenities. However, there isn't an inherent contradiction between a city being "cool" and being "socially equitable." 

Meaning, we can take care of the less fortunate in this country while also making communities in the United States much more livable. European countries have shown that social democracy and livability go well together. Bicycling isn't just for hipsters; it also is a low-cost, green way to get around. 

In general, though, I like Thomas Frank's style and substance. He presents a way of looking at the Democratic Party which is making me rethink the history of the Clinton years, and onward. These two paragraphs are typical of Frank's blunt prose:

On the financiers, the real Clinton legacy came down to four words: Grab what you can. For them, there were bailouts and trade deals that protected their interests and tax cuts and a timely shot of "liquidity" whenever stock markets seemed to be flagging. And a little deregulation should the laws of the land not meet with their favor.

But the poor needed to learn discipline. That seems to have been one of the ideas behind NAFTA: People employed in manufacturing had to accept working harder for less or else watch their jobs depart for Mexico. Discipline was the point of the '94 crime bill too: The poor were to live in a state of constant supervision where there was "zero tolerance" for those who stepped out of line. Mercy was to be a luxury item now, a thing reserved for those who could make big donations to the Clinton presidential library. 

OUCH! Anyone who thinks my political blog is snarky, read Frank's book for some real snark. 

What Trump's triumph tells us about the nature of reality

Lots of people are talking about what Donald Trump's triumph -- he looks certain to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee -- means for the future of the Republican Party, America, and the world.

To me that stuff is interesting. But I've got my philosophical sights set much higher: on what Trump's ascendancy tells us about the nature of reality. 

More specifically, human reality. So far as I can tell, the rise of Trump doesn't say much about cosmology, dark energy/matter, or how quantum physics and general relativity fit into a theory of everything. 

But having closely watched the Trump phenomenon unfold through my political-junkie eyes for the past however long it has been (seems like forever), I feel qualified to weigh in on its implications for our all-too-human understanding of how the world works.

(1) Life is unpredictable. Obvious statement, right? Hard to argue with. But we Homo sapiens love to believe that we've got a firm grasp on how reality will unfold. Virtually every supposed political expert confidently predicted that Trump would flame out once voters got to know him.

They were wrong. They had no idea. They were surprised by what actually happened. So were we all, pretty much. (I know I was.)

This should have been expected: that expectations were almost certainly going to be wrong. Stock market predictions; long-range weather forecasts; how well a new romantic relationship will work out -- people are crappy at predicting what will happen in the future, by and large.

Yet we keep on believing that next time, we'll get it right. Of course, we probably won't. Life's complex dynamics are way beyond the ability of the human mind to fathom. Also, computer intelligence, so far.

(2) Stories are a sorry substitute for reality. People adore stories. We love telling ourselves Daytime Stories about how the world is, and what will happen in the future. Psychologists and neuroscientists say that story-telling basically is hard-wired into human nature. 

If someone says, "I probably shouldn't reveal this, but did you hear about the embarrassing thing that happened to Sophie on her honeymoon?" we're all ears! Gossip is delicious, even if we're reluctant to admit this. Further, even when happenings can't be linked into a coherent narrative, no problem. 

We'll make up a story that fits what we want to hear.

"Trump is an idiot. He's a political flash in the pan. It won't take long for voters to see through his egotistical bullshit. By spring he'll have dropped out of the race." Except, it's spring, and Trump has won the freaking Republican nomination for president!

There are stories about reality. Then, there is reality. Two different things.

Because we can't know reality as it is, only as how it appears through the imperfect lens of the human mind, we like to make life more coherent than it actually is -- conjuring up stories that tell a pleasing tale about the world. Then, those damn messy facts come along, forcing us to either ignore them, or change our story to fit them.

(We should do the change-our-story thing, but the ignore-them thing is so enticing.)

(3) Nobody is in charge. Not God. Not the "establishment." Nobody. This uncomfortable conclusion fits with my first two points. Life is surprisingly unpredictable, and our stories typically are at odds with reality, because most of us assume that someone or something is purposefully guiding what's happening.

God. Destiny. Gaia. Karma. Cosmic consciousness. The Universe. Unfolding of Our Higher Nature. Whatever...

So we tend to assume that events tend toward a happy ending. Or at least, a meaningful ending. There's got to be a reason this is happening. 

Um, actually, no. Who says there has to be a reason beyond the blind play of cause and effect?

Trump is on track to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States. That's a fact. There is no evidence of a Grand Design behind that fact. In fact (I love that word, fact), every other candidate who believed they were impelled or chosen by God to run for president has dropped out. 

Only chaotic, profane, insulting, irritating, godless (beyond his thin religious facade) Donald Trump is still standing.

I understand the appeal of thinking that there's some ultimate purpose to his presidential candidacy -- he will insure Clinton's election, a Democratic Senate, and progressive Supreme Court nominations, praise Tao!  However, there's no evidence of anyone or anything propelling the 2016 presidential election in any particular direction.

Life just happens. What is, is. 

Just because those words can fit on a bumper sticker doesn't mean they aren't true.

 

How Salem's candidates and other local leaders look upon climate change

On Earth Day 2016, April 22, I asked 30 civic leaders in Salem three questions about climate change.

These were candidates running for Mayor and City Council in the May election (9 people); City councilors not running in this election (6 people); the Mayor, City Manager, and Public Works Director (3 people); Chamber of Commerce execs (2 people); top Statesman Journal and Salem Weekly staff (5 people); Marion County commissioners (3 people); plus KYKN talk show host Gator Gaynor and Salem Health CEO Cheryl Nester Wolfe.

Those folks were non-scientifically selected by me while I was sitting with my laptop at a south Salem Starbucks, thinking about who I should email my three questions to while sipping a grande Pike Place.

My email message and subsequent reminder message are in a continuation to this post, at the very end. I asked the same questions as I did in 2014, spurred by a Salem City Club talk by Jane Lubchenco. In a blog post at the time, I wrote about speaking with her after her talk:

Since Lubchenco mentioned climate change often in her City Club talk, I wanted to ask her if she could think of any reason why local public officials shouldn't be willing to say whether they agree with the scientific consensus about climate change/global warming.

"No," she told me. Which is the answer I expected, since she'd just said that science isn't political.

Science seeks to learn about the nature of shared reality, the world everyone inhabits -- conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, religious believers and non-believers, everybody.

Lubchenco's talk spurred me to compose a message I'll be sending to Salem-area public officials. And other local leaders: newspaper editors/publishers; Chamber of Commerce executives; corporate and non-profit organization leaders; people running for elected office.

Before I discuss the 2016 responses -- and non-responses -- from the 30 Salem-area leaders, here's the results. A blank obviously means the person didn't respond with a YES, NOT SURE, or NO to the three questions I asked. 

So far, I've gotten responses from 10 of the 30 people. Six were candidates in the May election, which says something. (I'll let readers decide on their own what that "something" is.) I also got a narrative reply from Jan Kailuweit, who is running for the Ward 1 City Council seat against Cara Kaser.

Kailuweit said:

Thank you very much for the opportunity to respond. As I'm sure you've been able to tell from my Facebook posts, I'm deeply committed to reducing my carbon footprint. This is one of the reasons why I own an older home (the ultimate act of recycling, as opposed to building or buying a brand new home), why I'm a strong believer in a pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly infrastructure, and why I moved to downtown, so I can walk to the office. (Besides, not having to commute, I have more time for family and my car insurance gives me a sizable discount.)

Having grown up in Europe, which is much more densely populated and hence has dealt with pollution and waste reduction for many decades, I believe there is room for improvement in Salem. 

I trust my answer suffices for now.

I also heard back from Jason Tokarski of Mountain West Investment. He said:

Brian, thank you for inquiring of me on this subject. I have long wanted to better understand this subject and have looked for non-biased sources, but to this point have found nothing that I felt was informative without an agenda. Given that, I am not comfortable responding to your survey.

I thanked Tokarski for his directness, saying "I’m a big believer that it’s better to be honest about how we feel about something, rather than say what is politically correct or what we think people want to hear."

Which helps explain why I fondly look upon Warren Bednarz' "NOT SURE" about whether humans are mostly responsible for global warming. I disagree with Councilor Bednarz on some important local issues, and I don't agree that there's any doubt humans are causing global warming.

But I admire Bednarz for directly responding to the questions.

Almost certainly, some of the non-respondents are global warming deniers in one form or another. However, I suspect they're reluctant to admit this in a state and city where most citizens are strong defenders of protecting the environment. And there is no bigger threat to the habitability of our one and only Earth than global warming. 

A 2014 national Gallup poll about global warming found this:

Over the past decade, Americans have clustered into three broad groups on global warming. The largest, currently describing 39% of U.S. adults, are what can be termed "Concerned Believers" -- those who attribute global warming to human actions and are worried about it. This is followed by the "Mixed Middle," at 36%. And one in four Americans -- the "Cool Skeptics" -- are not worried about global warming much or at all.

Those Cool Skeptics, 25% of the adult population, lead decidedly to the right of the political spectrum: 80% are Republicans/lean Republican; 65% are conservative and only 9% liberal. Conversely, 76% of the Concerned Believers are Democrats/lean Democrat.

Thus it wouldn't be at all surprising if a good share of Salem's conservative leaders are skeptical about the scientific consensus on global warming. I just wish they'd be up-front about this, because it would make policy debates more fruitful in this town.

For example, one reason liberals oppose the planned billion dollar Third Bridge across the Willamette is its contribution to increased carbon emissions. But if conservative leaders in this town deny global warming, yet won't admit this, it is difficult to have an honest discussion about the pros and cons of the Third Bridge. People talk past each other, rather than with each other.

Lastly, I'll note that Michael Davis, executive editor of the Statesman Journal, told me he wouldn't respond to the survey because Davis doesn't like what I've written and said about him. Well, I readily admit that I'm a frequent and strong critic of what Salem's daily newspaper has become under his leadership.

But as Jane Lubchenco told me (she was Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration from 2009-13), there is no reason local public officials shouldn't be willing to say whether they agree with the scientific consensus about climate change/global warming. I'd add, local private leaders who take part in policy discussions also.

Whether you like the person asking questions about global warming shouldn't matter. However, in Davis' case it did. 

So if anyone else wants to contact the people who haven't responded yet to my survey, and ask them the same three questions, please do. The questions are in the continuation to this post that follows. Email me any responses you get, and I'll update the global warming survey results.

(The email addresses of those who haven't responded are publicly available. But if you can't find them, email me and I'll send you the ones you want.)

Here's the messages I sent out:

"The True Cost" film shows need for fair global trade

Some of the 2016 presidential candidates -- notably Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders -- make it sound like global trade is a bad thing. They talk about bringing jobs back to America and even forcing manufacturers like Apple to make their products in the United States. 

In discussions with fellow liberals, I've questioned the wisdom of this negative attitude toward international trade. 

I'll argue that while global trade agreements have caused some jobs to be lost in this country, overall international trade (a.k.a. "globalization") has been positive for the world as a whole. Many millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty in Third World nations.

So I enjoyed watching "The True Cost" last night at Salem's Progressive Film Series. 

This is a story about clothing. It’s about the clothes we wear, the people who make them, and the impact the industry is having on our world. The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically. The True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?

Filmed in countries all over the world, from the brightest runways to the darkest slums, and featuring interviews with the world’s leading influencers including Stella McCartney, Livia Firth and Vandana Shiva, The True Cost is an unprecedented project that invites us on an eye opening journey around the world and into the lives of the many people and places behind our clothes.

There's a lot I could say about the movie, which touched me deeply. It was heartbreaking to see the working conditions in Bangladesh factories where clothes are made on the cheap. But I want to focus on one thing that wasn't spoken about in "The True Cost."

Reversing the globalization push that has led clothing manufacturers to make their wares in developing countries. 

The filmmakers were critical of how cotton is grown with nasty chemicals, how factories mistreat their workers, how environmental pollution spews from unregulated clothing factories, how wasteful the "Fast Fashion" trend is, and such.

But there wasn't any mention of closing down the Third World factories and bringing clothing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. This ship has already sailed, by and large. It may adjust its course, but it isn't making a 180 degree turn in the opposite direction.

Yes, working conditions in developing world factories need to be much improved. The employees need to be paid more. Environmental regulations need to be made stricter. Global trade, though, isn't a bad thing. 

This is the message in a Vox piece I came across today, "Free trade critics love to cite this economist. But he actually thinks trade is essential." It presents a nicely-balanced look at international trade.

Here's some excerpts:

Gordon Hanson is an economist at the University of California San Diego, and you'd expect him to be a fierce critic of free trade. He's a co-author of perhaps the most famous study showing the downside of trade for American workers, which concluded that exports from China in the 1990s and 2000s cost the US a huge number of manufacturing jobs.

Yet Hanson is anything but anti-trade. Those job losses, Hanson told me, were inevitable so long as rich countries were willing to trade with relatively poorer countries like China. Those poor countries needed trade, Hanson argues, in order to fuel the massive declines in extreme poverty we've seen since World War II.

"Exports were what allowed China to grow," Hanson told me. "We haven't seen poverty fall dramatically in any country that kept itself closed."

In other words, there was a trade-off: Rich countries lost a significant number of jobs, but poor countries gained enormously. What follows is a transcript of our conversation about why this had to be the case, edited for length and clarity.

[Following are Hanson quotes]

...We haven't seen a country that got rich, and we haven't seen poverty fall dramatically, in any country that kept itself closed. That openness is a necessary condition for development, [though] it’s not a sufficient condition.

[The export-driven growth story] was especially true in the countries that were particularly good in manufacturing, because those are the sectors where you're going to be employing lots and lots of labor. So as you engage the global economy, you're going to see this dramatic improvement in the standard of living. That was the story for East Asia. It’s also been mostly the story for Southeast Asia.

...The US, along with Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and other similar countries, built the global trading system through multiple rounds of negotiation for the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which then morphed into the WTO in 1994. Countries that liberalized said, "Okay, we're now going to join the global community of trading nations." They could join the WTO and benefit from access to markets for all those other WTO members.

If you want to think about the aspects of the US trade policy that mattered most for poverty reduction, it was that component. The bilateral deals had been much less important, in part because we're making bilateral deals with countries that had already liberalized quite a bit. NAFTA mattered, but what the US did through the seven or eight rounds of GATT and WTO negotiations over 40 years mattered much, much more.

...I think the fair statement to make is that trade is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poverty reduction.

There are plenty of countries that have fully liberalized their markets and haven’t seen big reductions in poverty. I don't think economists would say, "Trade globalization is the magic bullet. You do this and you're going to see massive reduction in poverty in the country." The evidence just doesn’t support that.

I think the evidence also doesn’t support the idea that you can have massive reductions in poverty without globalization. We just haven't seen it.

I think we've come to realize that when you talk about development, trade policy is one of many changes that need to happen in a society to allow income growth to occur.

Salem City Councilor Warren Bednarz accused of ethics violations

Over on my new Salem Political Snark blog I've put up a post about two complaints that have been filed with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission against Warren Bednarz, a city councilor. 

Check out "City Councilor Warren Bednarz hit with ethics complaints." 

Both relate to Bednarz' failure to declare a conflict of interest when he voted on motions before the City Council that would financially benefit members of his family. 

After a preliminary review of the first complaint, it was considered serious enough by Commission staff to warrant an investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.

...The second ethics complaint is still under review. It seems more serious than the first complaint, since it involved the Bednarz family actually getting money from the City of Salem, $13,000 for property needed to construct street improvements at the Commercial and Kuebler intersection.

Even before I learned of the ethics complaints, I felt that residents of Ward 7 would be much better served by Sally Cook, who is running against Bednarz in the May election. 

Now I'm even more convinced that Bednarz should be retired by voters.

Salem needs fresh, energetic, creative city councilors like Cook who understand that livability is something different from mindless adherence to whatever the Powers That Be in this town want. 

Progressive Salem should endorse Carole Smith for Mayor

I'm a proud member of Progressive Salem, an organization out to get progressive candidates elected to local offices. But I disagree with the board of directors' decision to stay neutral in the upcoming Mayor's race.

Of the two candidates, Carole Smith and Chuck Bennett, Smith clearly seems to be the most progressive. (I couldn't find a web site for Bennett.)

I say this for some good reasons. 

(1) Tom Andersen being on the short side of 8-1 votes. Chuck Bennett currently is a Salem City Council member who represents Ward 1, the downtown area. Tom Andersen was elected to the City Council in 2014 with strong Progressive Salem support. For good reason Andersen is featured on the home page of Progressive Salem. 

Numerous times I've heard Andersen speak about the frustration of being on the short side of important 8-1 votes in City Council meetings. Naturally Bennett was one of the eight who opposed progressive policies.

For example, ending the push for an unneeded billion dollar Third Bridge that would require $1.50 tolls each way on it and the current two bridges, along with decimating homes and businesses in the path of this freeway'ish monstrosity. 

Andersen can rattle off various other issues where Bennett and seven other City Council members stood in the way of progressive policies. 

(2) Bennett's Chamber of Commerce endorsement. When Chuck Bennett announced he was running for Mayor, and an explicit Chamber candidate didn't emerge, it seemed obvious that Bennett was the Chamber's guy.

Now this is definitive. On March 21 the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce endorsed Bennett. Here's how the endorsement was prefaced.

Salem’s City Council is the single most impactful decision making body as it relates to economic growth and prosperity in our community, and is responsible for the governance that determines the rate at which Salem will flourish.

With a sound process that is inclusive to all candidates, the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce reached out to all candidates that filed to seek election to these offices as of late January to answer a questionnaire for endorsement by our organization. This endorsement process also included an interview with our Public Policy Committee, and a vetting by our Board of Directors.

The core of these endorsements surrounds job creation and economic growth, and it is our pleasure to offer endorsements to the following candidates:

Mayor: Chuck Bennett (current Ward 1 Councilor)

The Chamber of Commerce and progressive policies are like matter and anti-matter. They are unable to coexist. If the Chamber likes Bennett, it is because he has voted their way in the past, and they're confident he'll vote for conservative, pro-big business Chamber priorities in the future.

(3) What Bennett said on his Chamber of Commerce questionnaire. This was put on the Chamber's website. To an environmentalist progressive like me, it's ghastly.

Bennett opposes business taxes, such as a payroll tax for mass transit that other cities have successfully used to improve livability and economic vitality. Yet Salem suffers from no weekend or evening bus service, a major embarrassment for Oregon's capital. Bennett said: 

The city has successfully avoided any new business specific taxes or cost increases other than the growth of the property tax or costs that are worked out with all interested parties. 

Bennett favors the above-mentioned billion dollar Third Bridge and, one must assume, the local taxes and tolling needed to pay for this boondoggle. 

It’s clear the city needs to continue to be a major driver in completing the EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] for the third river crossing. That process is near completion with land use decisions planned for this summer but it must be followed as quickly as possible with a design and cost planning program that allows the regional, state and federal partners an opportunity to engage the community on this issue.

Bennett supports a supersized $80 million, 150,000 square foot new police facility that is way larger and more expensive than is needed, and squeezes out much-needed funding for seismic upgrades to the Library and City Hall that will make them earthquake-ready. 

The structure needs to be large enough to meet the city’s needs over the next 30 to 40 years and that appears to be about 150,000 square feet if it also includes the 911 center. I am concerned that we not make the same mistakes made at City Hall where the Police Department was already looking for space eight years after it was built.

Also, I know Carole Smith quite well.

I've socialized with her. I've worked with her on various community issues, including trying to save the U.S. Bank trees from being needlessly killed in 2013 after a backroom deal was made between Peter Fernandez, the City of Salem Public Works Director, and Ryan Allbritton, the bank president and incoming Chamber of Commerce president. 

Chuck Bennett supported that backroom deal and the removal of the beautiful, large, healthy trees on downtown's State Street for no good reason. To me, this alone is plenty of reason to not support Bennett for Mayor. 

I'm trying to learn more about why Progressive Salem is sitting on the fence when it comes to the Mayor's race, which will be decided in the May 17 primary election. Hopefully they'll decide to jump onto the side where Carole Smith is waging a vigorous battle to be a genuinely progressive Mayor.

Open letter to Oregon's governor from a pissed-off wolf advocate

Dear Governor Kate Brown, 

You made a big mistake when you signed anti-wolf House Bill 4040 not long ago. I'm a proud progressive who is deeply irritated by this, notwithstanding my agreement with you on many other issues.

Oregon Wild says:

I am sad to report that Monday night, Governor Kate Brown signed HB 4040. This bill shielded the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife from public scrutiny and judicial review of their decision to strip endangered species protections from Oregon’s gray wolves.

There was no signing ceremony. There were no smiling politicians or stakeholders standing behind the Governor as she ratified the bill. There was no press conference. In fact, the bill was signed at night, and a simple statement was emailed by her staff the following day.

If that is not evidence that the Governor is ashamed of this bill, I don’t know what is. But she put her name on it.

 

My wife and I are long-time advocates for top predators such as wolves and cougars. We're familiar with the solid research regarding their benefits to ecosystems through a trophic cascade. 

In the years since the wolf reintroduction, Yellowstone has become a premiere scientific laboratory for wilderness observation and ecosystem recovery.  Scientists have come from around the world to watch the effect wild wolves have on the park.  We have discovered that an ecological effect called the “trophic cascade” has taken over Yellowstone, with the wolves initiating a more natural ecosystem balance than has been seen in over 65 years.

With only 5% of our nation’s wilderness left, people are recognizing the important roles complete ecosystems play in keeping all of us healthy. With new knowledge of the trophic cascade, we can now begin to focus wilderness recovery efforts on a wider variety of ecosystems. Using Yellowstone as an example, we can teach the world about the wolf’s positive and vital role in the wild.

Science. Facts. Reason. These are wonderful things. Until you signed HB 4040, I thought you believed in them. 

Guess not.

Because HB 4040 was written by the Oregon Cattlemen's Association and passed with two-thirds Republican support. (See my previous post: "Why Governor Brown should veto the horrible Oregon wolf bill, HB 4040")

So it's pretty damn obvious that some sort of backroom deal was reached between the R's and D's at the legislature to approve the bill with sufficient Democratic votes for passage, given that Dems control both the House and Senate, plus the Governor's Office.

HB 4040 is an outrageous affront to Oregon's separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Almost certainly it prevents a court's review of the questionable evidence that led the Fish and Wildlife Commission to decide that having about 100 wolves in this state means they no longer are endangered. 

A Salem Statesman Journal editorial said:

The legislation, House Bill 4040, is mystifying. It endorses the state wildlife commission’s decision last fall to take the gray wolf off Oregon’s official list of threatened or endangered species.

In doing so, the legislation apparently would block a lawsuit that conservationists have filed to overturn the commission’s decision.

So here we have the legislative branch of government lining up with the executive branch — the state Fish and Wildlife Commission — to preempt the third branch of government, the courts, from doing its job.

That seems like a blatant violation of the constitution’s separation of powers.

So now the Oregon Cattlemen's Association, which considers that the only good wolf is a dead wolf (I know this, because my wife has testified at numerous legislative hearings where ignorant ranchers in cowboy hats have said as much), is thrilled with your signing HB 4040, while environmentalists like me are outraged.

Well, Ms. Brown, I hope your campaign for another four years as a Democratic governor of this state gets lots of money from the Oregon Cattlemen's Association and their Republican friends, because I don't feel like giving you a dime.

When you signed HB 4040, this was an insult to sound science, transparency in public policy-making, your progressive supporters, and this state's environmental community.

You chose political expediency over doing the right thing. Sure, I understand this is the way governing works, but I don't have to like it, or approve of it. I often don't agree with Statesman Journal editorials, but in this case I do. 

We firmly believe that Oregon and our natural resources are better off when competing interests find areas of agreement instead of resorting to litigation. Ranchers have legitimate concerns about wolves’ impact on livestock.

But it would be grossly unfair, and a bad precedent, for the Legislature to change the rules after the litigation has started.

Besides, aren’t Democrats — who control the Legislature and who drew DeFazio’s ire — the politicians who demand that environmental decisions be made on sound science, not unsound politics? 

Why Gov. Brown should veto the horrible Oregon wolf bill, HB 4040

A lot of Democrats/progressives in Oregon consider the just-completed 2016 legislative session to have been a success.

But in my view the passage of HB 4040, which aligns our state with science-denying, anti-environment right-wing extremism that I'd hoped would be confined to Congressional craziness, is a huge negative that takes away from the positive steps taken: increasing Oregon's minimum wage, eliminating coal as an energy source, promoting more affordable housing.

Here's how the Center for Biological Diversity describes the bill, which awaits Governor Brown's signature.

The Oregon Legislature passed a bill tonight ratifying the delisting of wolves in Oregon and effectively preempting the right to any legal challenge. The 17-11 Senate vote to pass HB 4040 follows the bill’s passage in the House two weeks ago. The bill was introduced by Republican proponents of delisting on behalf of the livestock and sports-hunting industries seeking to block judicial review of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission’s illegal wolf-delisting decision last November.

There's so much not to like here.

(1) Ratifying the delisting of wolves in Oregon. This was a highly controversial action by the Fish and Wildlife Commission -- taking wolves off the list of endangered species in Oregon. As the Center for Biological Diversity points out:

In November 2015 the Fish and Wildlife Commission voted 4 to 2 to strip gray wolves of state endangered species act protections, despite having received comment letters from 25 leading scientists noting significant disagreement with delisting, and 10,000 public comments, 96 percent of which opposed the delisting.

(2) Preempting the right to any legal challenge. HB 4040 fulfills the dream of irrational wolf haters. It made wolf management in Oregon a political matter, rather than a policy issue founded on solid scientific facts and judicial review. 

In December the Center for Biological Diversity, Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild filed a legal challenge to the commission’s decision. Shortly after the 2016 session of the Oregon Legislature convened earlier this month, bills were introduced by Senate and House Republicans to ratify the commission’s decision in order to block judicial review of the delisting decision.

(3) The 17-11 Senate vote...introduced by Republican proponents. Oregonians have elected Democrats to lead our state and reflect our values. So how did an anti-wolf bill pass, given the strong support for environmental protections in Oregon? 

Because HB 4040 was a legislative "bone" thrown out to Republicans as part of session deal-making. Meaning, Democrats knew it was substantively a bad bill, but politically some D's felt inclined to vote for it.

In the end, the bill passed with about two-thirds Republican votes, even though Democrats have majorities in both houses of the legislature. In the Senate, 11 R's and 6 D's voted yes; in the House, 23 R's and 10 D's voted yes.

Editorial page editor Dick Hughes wrote in the Statesman Journal:

Republicans showed they had the parliamentary wits to tie the Senate in knots. R's saw themselves as stacking against the D's hijacking of the legislative session. D's see the R's as hijacking the legislative process. Finally, both sides agreed to session-ending compromise. 

Then came the wolf bill... the political symbolism was huge, which is why the Democratic leadership provided sufficient votes for the minority Republicans to pass House Bill 4040. The wolf bill was a chance to give Republicans a bone after they had been run over by high-profile Democratic legislation.

...HB 4040 is not good policy. But signing it would be good politics for Oregon.

Well, I disagree with Hughes (as I usually do). HB 4040 establishes a horrible precedent for this state.

If this bill becomes law, legislators can point to it as justification for ignoring facts/science when making other environmental decisions, and denying opponents of those decisions a right to challenge them judicially.

What if -- scary thought coming -- Republicans took over the Governorship along with both the state House and Senate? Then they pass a bill saying it is the official policy of the State of Oregon that human-caused global warming does not exist, and this (erroneous) conclusion can't be challenged in court.

They can point to HB 4040, should it be signed by Governor Brown, as a precedent that supports politicians making final decisions that, up to now, have been challengeable through our judicial system.

The wolf bill is bad for Oregon in many ways. Please urge Governor Brown to veto it.

Phone her at 503-378-4582. Email her via the Governor's web site.

Tell Brown you are opposed to HB 4040 both because it enshrines ill-considered wolf policy, and sets a dangerous precedent for ignoring science and cutting off the right of citizens to challenge state agency decisions in court.

If you need more convincing that HB 4040 is a bad idea, check out Quinn Read's opinion piece in the Oregonian, "Governor should veto anti-wolf bill."

Put simply, if Oregon wants to maintain its national leadership role in wolf conservation, Gov. Brown must veto this anti-wolf bill. She must show her constituents that Oregon's imperiled wildlife are not political bargaining chips and that decisions about wildlife management should be based on the best available science, not politics or the wishes of powerful special interests. A veto of this bill will allow Oregon's wildlife officials to get back to the real task at hand: ensuring robust protections are maintained for Oregon's fragile population as the wolf plan is updated.

Salem citizens: save lives by sending an email to the City Council

Look, I know it's a cliche: "It's about saving the children." But in this case it's true.

And not only the children -- we're also talking about saving the lives of everybody who works at or visits the Salem City Hall and Library. 

I feel strongly about this, earthquake-proofing the Civic Center buildings so they won't collapse in a major earthquake. We in the Pacific Northwest know this is a matter of when, not if, because hugely powerful Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes occur with semi-predictable regularity. 

And Oregon is due. For The Really Big One.

Unfortunately, City officials have lost interest in making essential seismic upgrades to City Hall and the Library.

Why? Because the money this would have cost, $20 million or so, is now slated to be spent on a supersized, overpriced police facility whose price has jumped from $30-$40 million to $60-$80 million in just a few years, owing to a doubling of its size from 75,000 to 150,000 square feet. 

Yes, Salem needs a new police facility. The current one on the ground floor of City Hall is too small. Also, the area where the Police Department is housed likely will be crushed under three floors of rubble when The Really Big One earthquake strikes.

So a few years ago, City officials correctly recognized that Police Department staff needed to be in a seismically sound building. They also correctly recognized that if it is important to save the lives of police staff, it also is important to save the lives of everybody who works at, and visits, City Hall.

In 2014 the plan was to build a new 75,000 square foot police facility on the Civic Center campus, AND earthquake proof City Hall. (Making seismic upgrades to the Library also was being considered, in response to public pressure from Salem Community Vision and others to do this.)

This is the first slide in a January 2014 City Council work session presentation. The proposed three story 75,000 square foot police facility with underground parking is on the right, overlooking (and partially over) Mirror Pond. A renovated and seismically reinforced City Hall is on the left, in the background.

Note the title of the presentation: NEW POLICE FACILITY, CIVIC CENTER SEISMIC REINFORCEMENT. Two complementary goals, to be paid for by a Public Safety bond.

Make the Police Department staff safe by getting them out of the unsafe City Hall building. Make everybody else also safe by seismically reinforcing the Civic Center. Other renovations to the Civic Center also were planned .

Total cost estimate for all of this in 2013: $70.5 million, with about $35 million being the direct cost of constructing a new 75,000 square foot police facility with expensive underground parking.

Now fast forward to yesterday, February 22, 2016. The slide below is from a presentation made to another City Council work session -- after the size of a proposed new police facility at a different location doubled to 150,000 square feet.

(Click to enlarge.) The cost of building the supersized police facility at either of two possible sites is $80 million. Not surprisingly doubling the size of the police facility doubled its cost.

The Mayor, city councilors, and other City officials no longer talk of making seismic upgrades to City Hall and the Library. Naturally the clear and present danger of The Really Big One earthquake hitting the northwest and devastating Salem still remains. 

As does the validity of this quote from Linda Norris, the former City Manager, in an October 2013 Statesman Journal story:

"The way it is, right now, city employees wouldn't even be able to get out of the building alive, much less use the building.”

 

The building she refers to is City Hall. The same applies to the Library.

Visitors and staff at the Library, including children enjoying StoryTime, wouldn't be able to get out alive if a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake hit.

This bothers me. A lot. I hope it bothers you also -- enough to get you to email the Mayor, city councilors, and other City officials: [email protected]

Say that you are submitting testimony for the February 29 City Council meeting where the only agenda item will be a public hearing on plans for a new police facility.

Urge the Mayor and City Councilors to restore funding for seismic upgrades to City Hall and the Library. 

Tell them that if it is vital to save the lives of Police Department staff by getting them out of the unsafe Civic Center, it is equally vital to save the lives of everybody else who works at, or visits, City Hall and the Library.

Remind them that a January 2014 poll of 400 registered voters commissioned by the City of Salem found that the preferred answer of a clear majority, 59%, was to do BOTH: seismically upgrade City Hall and the Library, and build a new police facility.

To me it is morally wrong to risk the death of children at the Library because City officials have chosen a supersized and superexpensive 150,000 square foot police facility over a perfectly adequate 75,000 square foot police facility -- which the Mayor and Police Chief were happy with until recently.

Please consider coming to the Monday, February 29 public hearing in the City Council chambers (6:30 pm; arrive a bit early to sign up to testify) and speaking in person about how you feel. 

Lastly, I encourage you to read the highly readable Salem Community Vision position paper, "Salem's New Police Facility: The Best Way to Achieve It." Yes, I wrote it, so I'm biased. But it really is highly readable.

Download Police Facility Position Paper

Eye-opening, disturbing, inspiring: "Where to Invade Next" movie

My wife and I just got back from seeing Michael Moore's new movie, "Where to Invade Next," at Salem Cinema. We hugely enjoyed it. 

It should be a political game-changer for the United States.

Unfortunately, the people who should see it, those who really need to see it -- the right-wing flagwavers who wrongly consider America is #1; the tax-cutting fanatics who don't believe in the efficacy of government programs; the strong-military zealots who fail to understand the harm our giant defense budget is doing to this country -- they won't risk having their delusions challenged by seeing the movie.

Hey, even an ardent progressive like me had my eyes opened repeatedly by Moore.

Before we bought our tickets I knew that his core theme was correct: other developed countries provide a much higher quality of life for their citizens than the United States does, so we should steal their more enlightened social policies (hence, the name of the movie).

But I still came away deeply disturbed about many of the specific ways European nations kick our red, white, and blue ass. "Where to Invade Next" convincingly shows that the United States is way behind in...

-- Providing vacation time, sick days, and maternity leave to employees
-- Educating our children
-- Making it possible to attend college without running up big debts
-- Running an effective prison system
-- Dealing with drug use
-- Holding Wall Street criminals accountable
-- Feeding elementary students tasty nutritious meals
-- Guaranteeing reproductive health care to women
-- Teaching sex education in ways that work
-- Etc. Etc. Etc.

Now, Moore points out that many of the policies other nations have implemented so effectively originated in the United States. We've just fallen away from putting them into practice. 

Much of the blame falls on the increasingly radical slash-and-burn social policies of the Republican Party, along with the outrageously large percentage of our taxes that feeds bloated military spending.

The movie makes clear that while Americans pay a somewhat lower percentage of our income in taxes that Europeans do, we're still screwed over economically because of the much higher personal "taxes" we pay to go to college, get health care, care for a newborn baby, and obtain other necessary services that other countries provide more efficiently and effectively through public programs.

Over and over, interviews with ordinary citizens in other countries, along with interviews with foreign business leaders and government officials, showed how uncaring the United States is.

Our national morality sucks.

Harsh words, but true. In lots of ways we really don't give a shit about other people, because the United States is so focused on individuality, watching out for our own personal interests, letting those in need do without instead of offering a helping hand.

This was evident right here in Salem not long ago when the Chamber of Commerce, Salem Hospital, and other corporate types (including some small businesses) were unwilling to support a small payroll tax that would provide weekend and evening bus service for people who need mass transit to get around.

Opponents of the payroll tax only were concerned about themselves. They had a lot of compassion for keeping their own pocketbook as fully stocked with cash as possible, but couldn't muster up empathy for people who don't own a car, can't drive, or choose not to drive.

By contrast, "Where to Invade Next" is filled with talk by people in other countries who view caring for others as a main purpose in life.

They said that they wouldn't be happy living in the United States, where GOP negativism toward government, plus our inherent ego-centered sense of individuality, leaves so many citizens in terrible situations.

Sick. Lonely. Homeless. Abused. Disrespected. Unhappy.

I could go on and on about how Moore's movie affected me. But I'll just share a few other parts of the film that hit me hard.

The way we treat prisoners, and especially prisoners of color in this country, is super shameful. So is the general approach to policing in the United States, which is way more militaristic and heavy-handed than policing practices in European countries. 

The movie shows police in those countries saying the obvious: treat people with respect, even (and especially) if they have broken the law. Let prisoners vote. Do away with the death penalty. Rehabilitate, don't punish.

Lastly, it was moving to learn how extensively Germany continues to remind its citizens about the horrors of the Nazi past. Children are educated about the injustices that were done. Plaques on city streets memorialize the houses taken from Jews.

Yet the United States does its best to cover up our history: slavery, lynchings, genocide of Native Americans, stealing of land from those who inhabited our territory before Columbus arrived. 

Germany faces historical injustices head-on. Too many people in the United States pretend they never happened. So in no way are we the greatest nation in the world. We've got pluses and minuses, strengths and weaknesses.

Our goal should be to learn how to do better from other countries who are surpassing us in various areas. Thank you, Michael Moore, for making a movie that does this.

Here's the trailer, along with a good Thom Hartmann discussion of the film. 

 

 

 

What's most dangerous about the Malheur militants' mentality

I'm glad the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff is over. I'm equally pleased that Cliven Bundy has been arrested and charged with crimes that could lead to him spending the rest of his life in prison. 


I readily admit that, like lots of other people here in Oregon and elsewhere, I became quasi-obsessed with the twists and turns of this drama -- especially after the four militants remaining at the refuge started broadcasting a live audio feed featuring their wacko rants and bullhorn pleas from a FBI negotiator to surrender peacefully.

So it's good to have the Malheur situation on the road to getting back to normal. The folks in Burns, Oregon must be way happier than I am that this is happening.

What worries me, though, is that even though this band of supposed "patriot" militants has been dealt with, there are many people in the United States who have the same sort of twisted mentality. It isn't stretching the case much, if at all, to say that these right-wingers pose more of a threat to this country than ISIS/ISIL does.

Consider this excerpt from the Oregonian story about the crimes Cliven Bundy has been charged with, stemming from the 2014 standoff at his Nevada ranch. I've boldfaced the scariest parts.

On March 15, 2014, Bundy is accused of publicly stating that he was "ready to do battle'' with the federal land management bureau and would "do whatever it takes'' to protect his property, the complaint says.

On April 12, 2014, Bundy ordered his followers to get the cattle, directing a crowd of hundreds to travel more than five miles to the site where the cattle were corralled while another group kept officers at bay at the main entrance to the site. The complaint alleges Bundy organized his followers into bodyguards, armed patrols and security checkpoints to prevent officers from carrying out federal court orders.

"The most immediate threat to the officers came from the bridges where gunmen took sniper positions behind concrete barriers, their assault rifles aimed directly at the officers below,'' the complaint says.

Federal law enforcement officers backed off because they were outnumbered, the complaint says. More than 400 Bundy followers, openly brandishing assault rifles and others bearing side arms had converged at the cattle impound site, the complaint says. About 40 supporters were on horseback, and there were "militia snipers concealed on the bridges'' with rifles zeroed-in on officers, Willis wrote in the complaint.

"Outnumbered by more than 4:1, unwilling to risk harm to children and other unarmed bystanders who had accompanied the Followers, and wishing to avoid the firefight that was sure to follow if they engaged the snipers on the bridge who posed such an obvious threat to their lives, the officers had no choice and were forced to leave and abandon the cattle to Bundy,'' the complaint says.

Amazing.

Bundy and his supporters were in open rebellion against law enforcement officers trying to enforce court rulings. They weren't engaged in a peaceful protest against supposed government overreach. No, they had sniper rifles trained on the officers.

Worse, a good share of Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and, especially, members of the so-called Patriot Movement, thought this was OK. 

Listening to the audio feed of the four militants' rantings and ravings helped me grasp how dangerous this bizarre way of looking at the world is. People who share the Bundy mentality actually believe that they, and only they, understand the Constitution of the United States.

Not the courts, including the Supreme Court, which naturally is the final arbiter of what is constitutional and what isn't -- under the freaking Constitution. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the federal government's ownership of land is completely constitutional.

Yet the Malheur militants believe it isn't. So do lots of other people who agree with their view of the Constitution, though not their gun-toting attempts to take over federal land and return it to private ownership.

So this is one big worry: that so many Americans are willing to toss the Real Constitution aside and replace it with a Fake Constitution of their own making. That way lies insurrection, chaos, instability, loss of respect for law and order.

Feeding into and supporting that worry is the theocratic nature of how Bundyists see the world. Like Islamic fundamentalists, most of them believe that God is on their side, and that their own imaginary conception of what God wants them to do supercedes the law.

This way of thinking even is on display among the GOP presidential candidates. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have spoken of their religion being a more powerful guiding principle for them than the Constitution. 

Listening to the audio feed of the militants' blathering, which was aided and abetted by outside supporters who were on the phone with them, I felt like throwing up after the millionth (roughly; I stopped counting) time they paused for prayer.

Prayer?! 

You're heavily armed. You're illegally occupying a federal facility that belongs to the public. You're calling the FBI officers who are trying to get you to peacefully surrender horrible obscenities, along with "evil" and "going to hell." 

And you think your beloved Jesus is going to help you if you pray? I am so glad I'm an atheist. 

Religiosity is bad enough by itself. It is way worse when fantasized religious beliefs are used to justify illegal and immoral actions. Those with a Bundy mentality actually think that God is on their side. Even after the FBI arrested them peacefully, I saw mentions of "praise God, He answered our prayers." 

No, God didn't. The militants kept praying that they'd be able to leave the refuge without being charged with crimes. So their prayers didn't work. They couldn't work. There is no evidence that God exists. 

Yet when right-wing wackos believe God is guiding their anti-government steps, this adds theological fuel to their dangerous insurrectionist fire. Normal conservatives try to limit government through political action: voting, lobbying, public pressure, and such.

This is fine.

What isn't fine is picking up an assault rifle and pointing it at federal law enforcement officers who are trying to enforce legal court orders. What isn't fine is taking over federal property and strutting around with guns, intimidating both police and citizens who disagree with you.

It's good to see that the government is cracking down hard on this sort of behavior. I'll end by quoting a Facebook post I put up this morning:

Great. David Fry just gave himself up.

Now, I'm waiting for condemnations of the absurdly-named Patriot Movement from Republicans, property rights activists, Christians, and others who may share their wacko right-wing views, but should disavow their twisted view of the Constitution, propensity to threaten gun violence, and what their demented minds think Jesus wants them to do.

Conservatives are always saying, "Mainstream Muslims need to disavow Islamic extremists." Well, now let's see a bunch of disavowing from mainstream Republicans and Christians. 

"You're a dick" often means "You're telling the truth"

I don't hear "You're a dick!" very often. Maybe never. But my citizen activism leads to me being called other derogatory names, like bombthrower. 

I've made that into a term of endearment. Here's what I said in a 2014 post:

I've been called a bomb-thrower by folks at City Hall. I guess this is supposed to be an insult. I consider it a compliment.

I'm proud to speak out loud and powerfully when I see stuff going on in Salem that shouldn't be. My goal is to throw truth-bombs that open up minds and demolish barriers to seeing what is happening behind closed doors.

So when I came to a chapter called Fighting the Good Fight in David Silverman's book, "Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World," I enjoyed what he had to say on the subject of being a dick.

Usually this is viewed as an insult. But Silverman has an appealing take on the term that rings true to me.

Understandably, he uses atheist activism as an example in the passages below (Silverman is the president of American Atheists). However, the principles of dickishness he talks about apply to every circumstance where truth is valued more highly than getting along for the sake of niceness.

Excerpts from David Silverman's book, Fighting God:

I'm sick of being told not to be a dick, and not just because I dislike gender-specific insults (which I only use in this case because it's what some people call me).

It's sometimes important to do things that make people call you a dick. I'm going to spend some time talking about why acting in a manner that some people regard as dickish is not only appropriate, but also necessary to the movement and the country, and, in an important way, downright nice.

So, what's a dick?

The definition varies from person to person, but to many I'm a dick whenever I say something that makes theists angry or even mildly puts them out. If I call a religion a myth, I'm a dick. What I say may be true, but I'm still a dick... I simply tell the truth and use labels that are accurate, if not politically correct.

...I may be called a dick for speaking the truth, but some of the real dicks are the atheists who tell me not to be one. Some verbally attack me with a holier-than-thou attitude usually reserved for the most pompous of preachers, laced with bile and vulgarity reminiscent of the crap we get from the Religious Right.

...I am not saying all "nice guy" atheists are assholes, just those who are so shortsighted they can't see how quickly and by how much this movement would lose its steam without firebrands to blaze the way for discussion by breaking the barriers of political correctness.

Not calling bullshit on bullshit is bullshit. 

...Diplomacy alone cannot trump greed, money, and power. That's why diplomacy alone will always ultimately fail to produce the results all atheists seek in a timely manner.

...Enter the firebrands. We chip away at privilege, disrespect the unrespectable, and refuse to obey someone else's religious rules. We laugh at threats of hell, literally and loudly, while demanding total equality. 

We attract everyone's attention to atheists' existence and issues. Firebrands are the movement's awareness generator. Firebrands go on TV complaining and shouting and demanding, and then the diplomats come out to soften our statements -- sometimes emphatically so. 

In the end, the firebrands look like "bad atheists," the diplomats look like "good atheists," and guess what that means to believers? Good atheists do exist.

This is called "shifting the Overton window" (a new name for an old strategy), and it is well described by Josh Bolotsky at beautiful trouble.org as follows:

The Overton window...designates the range of points on the spectrum that are considered part of a "sensible" conversation within public opinion and/or traditional mass media. 

The most important thing about the Overton window, however, is that it can be shifted to the left or the right, with the once merely "acceptable" becoming "popular" or even imminent policy, and formerly "unthinkable" positions  becoming the open position of a partisan base. 

The challenge for activists and advocates is to move the window in the direction of their preferred outcomes, so their desired outcome moves closer and closer to "common sense."

There are two ways to do this: the long, hard way and the short, easy way. 

The long, hard way is to continue making your actual case persistently and persuasively until your position becomes more politically mainstream, whether it be due to the strength of your rhetoric or a long-term shift in societal values.

By contrast, the short, easy way is to amplify and echo the voices of those who take a position a few notches more radical than what you really want.

Because of the firebrands, change is happening not on an individual level, but rather on a national level... It is the firebrand who primes the theist for the diplomat.

 

Rubio and Clinton are the odds-on favorites in presidential race

OK, let's get this straight right off the bat: I'm pretty much clueless about betting. So if I make some dumb-ass mistake about odds and what-not in this post, that's because I'm a betting dumb-ass. 

(I'd say there's at least a 50-50 chance of that happening.)

That said, I'm a believer in prediction markets. Which basically involves a bunch of people betting that something will, or won't, happen. 

A Washington Post story, "Why Marco Rubio now has the best chance of winning the GOP nomination," caught my eye today. 

Marco Rubio placed third in the Iowa caucuses Monday, but observers liked what they saw from the Florida senator's campaign. Now, the most likely outcome of the GOP presidential primary season is a victory for Rubio, according to bookmakers.

On Monday, bookies gave Rubio a 1-in-3 chance of winning the nomination. Since the results from Iowa came in, Rubio's chances are now better than even, according to data aggregated by Oddschecker.

To be sure, Rubio has a long way to go. Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) won more delegates than he did in Iowa. Rubio was trailing those two by a wide margin in the most recent national polls.

All the same, economists say that betting markets often better predict the outcomes of elections than polls. When there is cash on the table, people are less likely to be swayed by attention from the fickle media, which might momentarily inflate a candidate's polling. On the other hand, bettors who are prepared to put their money on a candidate might be more familiar with that candidate's strengths before the general public is aware of them. 

Naturally I had to click on over to Oddschecker. Where I instantly was abjectly confused, given how little I know about how betting works. 

I had no trouble finding the Republican and Democrat Presidential Candidate Betting Odds. But the numbers confused me. A "Help" section on Odds and Winning, um, helped. 

Key terms used to express the odds:

Odds on - The probability of this event occurring is judged to be more than 50%, so the amount you win is less than the amount you stake.
Evens/Even money - The probability is judged to be 50%, so the amount you win is the same as the amount you stake.
Odds against - The probability is judged to be less than 50% so the amount you win is more than the amount you stake.

Ah... so if the number on the right side of the backslash thingie is bigger than the number on the left side, that's Odds On, more than a 50-50 chance of winning. And vice-versa. That cleared some things up. 

Then I noticed some small type on the Oddschecker site that said "sort by fav/name," and "fav" was highlighted. So since the Republican candidate page had Rubio first, then Trump, then Cruz, that told me these guys were 1-2-3 in the betting game.

Rubio did indeed have numbers like 5/6 and 8/11 on various betting sites. Odds-on!

I'm not completely sure what single numbers like 100 and 200 in the Ben Carson row mean. Probably that's shorthand for 100/1 and 200/1 -- which seems about right in the case of Carson. 

The most lucrative potential bet appeared to be Carly Fiorina at 500/1. However, I don't think I could bring myself to bet a buck on Fiorina, even if it meant I'd win $500 if she became the GOP presidential candidate. 

(Well, on the plus side, now that I think about it, $500 would buy a lot of pot and booze, which is exactly what I'd need to get through four years of a Fiorina presidency.)

On the Oddschecker Democrat page, Hillary Clinton was rocking it. Typical were odds like 1/5 and 1/6, really odds-on. Sorry, Berniacs.

I can't resist noting that last October I made a bold prediction that Clinton and Rubio would be the presidential candidates. Guess I should have placed some bets at that time. My vice-presidential prediction on the GOP side wasn't so great, though: Fiorina.

Could still happen, of course -- a depressing thought. 

Is the presidential race over yet? It's gone on too long already.

Way back when, I thought I'd be more excited tonight, what with the Iowa caucuses finally kicking off voting that will culminate in November 2016 with a new president of the United States.

Problem is, it feels to me like the campaigning has already gone on forever, plus or minus a few eons. 

I just looked at the online New York Times front page. With most of the Iowa voting counted, Ted Cruz appears headed to a narrow victory, as does Hillary Clinton.

Whoopee. That's my lack of enthusiasm talking. And I'm a political junkie. 

There's something wrong about an election process that leaves people like me feeling burnt out as soon as the first actual flame has been lit on the primary campaign fire. 

When I read that Bernie Sanders (I think it was) raised $20 million last month, I thought, "What a waste of money." 

It isn't a waste because Sanders got the cash. It's wasteful because the whole U.S. election process stinks. Campaigns start way too early before the election. Way too much energy, money, and attention goes into the campaigning.

Sure, in the big economic scheme of things $20 million, or $200 million, or even $2 billion isn't a huge amount of money. But I keep thinking of much better ways to spend it. 

In other countries an election to decide who gets to run things only takes a few months, or even less maybe. That sounds about right to me. Short and sweet. How many times do we need to hear candidates say the same things, over and over?

With the Super Bowl coming up, a football analogy is in order.

What if the pro football season lasted years, rather than months? What if most of the early games had essentially zero impact on who becomes the final champion? What if most of the sports talk revolved around what might happen during the extremely long season, rather than what actually has happened?

Then pro football would be as boring as the campaigning for president.

People have been obsessing over who is going to win in 2016 since 2014, if not earlier. It's well known that winning in Iowa, and even in New Hampshire, doesn't have a lot of predictive value for becoming president. Because of the drawn-out campaign process, where nothing much happens for a very long time, all pundits have to talk about is how the political game could turn out in the future.

As I write this paragraph, with 94% of the Iowa caucus vote counted, Clinton has an estimated 49.8% of the delegates and Sanders has 49.6%. Yet tomorrow there will be much talk about who won and who lost. 

Yawn. Wake me up when something has really begun to be decided. Like after Super Tuesday on March 1. 

Most irritating thing about the Malheur Wildlife Refuge takeover

Like so many other people in Oregon, I've been avidly following developments over in Harney County, where a bunch of wacko right-wing militants have taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for bizarre reasons only their twisted minds have a chance of comprehending.

(The Portland Oregonian has extensive coverage of the takeover, now in its 24th day.)

Every morning I fire up my laptop and head to the Oregonian's "What you need to know today" page. There's always something newly irritating -- a fresh outrage by Ammon Bundy and his band of no-nothings.

As we enter the third week of the thoroughly illegal takeover, with no end in sight, I've been thinking about what is The Utterly Most Irritating Thing about it.

Opinions will differ, but here's my nomination:

Inaction by law enforcement -- federal, state, local -- supports the oft-heard contention by gun nuts that only by owning lots of weapons can the heavy hand of government overreach be prevented from taking away citizens' God-given constitutional rights. 

Is there any doubt that if Bundy and company weren't heavily armed, they would have been kicked out of the refuge a long time ago?

Or at least, had the electricity cut off, and been prevented from freely traveling around the countryside to do whatever they choose, then return unimpeded to the refuge headquarters?

I'm no conspiracy theorist. I generally believe government officials are honest and competent.

But I can sure sympathize with those who see clear signs of racism and discrimination operating here, given how law enforcement has let the militants do whatever they want after their takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

If these guys weren't white, wearing cowboy hats, and heavily armed, almost certainly they would have been arrested and charged with numerous crimes by now. Early on in the standoff, an Oregonian story said:

When black residents took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, the National Guard responded. The guard called protesters "enemy forces" and "adversaries," according to documents that became public this year.

When Ferguson residents’ anger spread and African Americans across the country protested, too, local police responded while wearing riot gear.

Why then, some people across the country wondered this week, were there no law enforcement officials confronting the 20 or so white men occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters?

The men carried pistols and long rifles to the refuge. One man told Oregon Public Broadcasting he came prepared to die. Yet reporters on the ground said they saw no police officers.

Since, things have gotten worse.

The militants have attacked another group of "patriots." They've used federal computers and accessed confidential information. They've destroyed a refuge fence. They've intimidated law enforcement officers. They've stolen refuge vehicles. They've urged ranchers to defy federal law. They've threatened to unleash "rapid response teams" against federal employees doing their jobs.

And we need to remember the previous 2014 Bundy Standoff in Nevada. 

BLM enforcement agents were dispatched in response to what were seen as threatening statements by Bundy, such as calling the events a "range war." There was no armed battle. When those guns were brandished, multiple violations of federal and state law occurred: It is a felony to point a weapon at a law enforcement officer and a federal felony to take aim at a U.S. government agent. And yet there were no arrests that day — no meaningful action has yet been taken against anyone involved.

So its no wonder Ammon Bundy and his fellow militants feel that they're above the law. Nothing ever happens to them. Law enforcement officials let them do whatever they want. A million dollars in grazing fees the Bundy family owes remains unpaid.

Why? Again, the only reason I can come up with is because they're white, wear cowboy hats, and are heavily armed.

The militants spout nonsense about defending the Constitution and converting federal land to private ownership. They plan to have citizen panels indict people for going against their bizarre views. They go to public meetings with their guns and intimidate locals in Harney County, almost all of whom want them to go home.

Irritating. Super irritating. 

Problem is, I'm just about as irritated at President Obama, the FBI, the federal Justice Department, Harney County Sheriff David Ward, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, and every other public official who has encouraged Bundy and the other militants to keep on doing what they're doing by not doing anything about them.

It sure seems like the lesson for other protesters is, carry a gun and nothing will happen to you. Oh, unless you're black. Then, even if the gun is fake, law enforcement will deal with you harshly (very harshly).

Why the Malheur militants aren't like the Occupy protesters

Being a proud progressive, I'm committed to rationality, fairness, sound arguments, and fealty to facts. (Which makes me much different from most right-wing conservatives these days.)

So I've been pondering whether I'm justified in being outraged at what the militants who have taken over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge here in Oregon are doing, given that I was supportive of the Occupy Movement. 

After all, both groups took over public property in an attempt to bring attention to their causes.

Which basically are transferring federal land to private ownership in the case of the militants, and reducing social/economic inequality in the case of the Occupy protesters.

But after giving this quite a bit of thought, I've concluded that I'm justified in feeling angry at the militants while mostly admiring the Occupy Movement. Here's why.

(1) Guns versus being unarmed. Ammon Bundy and his band of anti-government militants brought a bunch of guns with them to the wildlife refuge. They're armed and dangerous, given the history of a previous protest involving Bundy and his father where federal agents had guns pointed at them in a threatening manner (they should have been charged with a crime, but haven't been so far).

By contrast, the Occupy folks were unarmed.

There's no mention of "gun" in the Wikipedia article about the Occupy Movement. So the moral high ground goes to them. Armed protesters are sending the message, "Don't mess with us, or we'll shoot." To my mind, whatever justification they might have for protesting an injustice gets obliterated once firearms are brought into the picture.

This relates to...

(2) Patriotism versus insurrection. Since my college days, I've done a lot of protesting during the past fifty years. None of the groups I was involved with advocated going against the Constitution of the United States, or overthrowing the federal government in any way.

We understood that if we broke the law, there would be consequences, even though the law might appear to be unfair.

However, the Malheur militants consider themselves to be above the law, above the Constitution, above the Supreme Court rulings that confirm the legality of the federal government's ownership and management of public lands.

This makes the actions of Bundy and Co. much more akin to insurrection, than patriotism. They don't want to work within the Constitution; they have weird ideas about setting up an extra-legal court system that goes against the principles on which this nation was founded.

The Occupy Movement never advocated overthrowing constitutional law or the authority of the federal government. So here also, the militants are morally inferior. 

(3) Reasonable versus unreasonable demands. A legitimate protest movement either makes reasonable demands, or recognizes the pie-in-the-sky nature of what is being asked for. In other words, the protesters either call for changes that are possible, or understand the impossibility of this happening.

The Occupy Movement didn't say, "Until tax rates on the wealthiest 1% are raised substantially, we won't leave the public spaces we're occupying." But the Malheur militants have strongly implied that they won't leave the refuge until a process for returning federal land to private ownership is instituted.

This won't happen.

It can't happen without an act of Congress and approval by the president. Even Greg Walden, the Republican congressman who represents eastern Oregon, says this won't happen -- even if the GOP captures the White House this year. 

Overall, then, it's one thing to stage a peaceful unarmed protest to draw attention to your cause, knowing that you'll have to face legal consequences if you break the law, while making reasonable demands that either are possible to fulfill or accepting that the requested changes can't happen now, if ever.

This is what the Occupy Movement did. Kudos to them for doing it.

But it's a whole other thing for gun-wielding militants to take over public property, vowing to remain there until their extremely unreasonable demands are met, including returning federal lands to private ownership in a completely unconstitutional manner.

So get out of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, Ammon Bundy and your fellow unpatriotic troublemakers.

Accept whatever charges law enforcement throw at you for your illegal acts. Be happy that your crazy ideas have been publicized way beyond what they deserve. Go home and try to change this country for the better through the rule of law and political action, not via unreasonable armed threats.

I was pleased to learn about the #GOHOMEMALHEUR movement.

They're requesting daily donations for three organizations opposed to the militants' goals that will be made until the illegal occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge ends. I like this effort, but preferred the option of making a one-time donation to the Friends of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Index investing lets me relax in a stock market crash

Nobody likes to peek at their investment portfolio after a day like today: a 390 point drop in the Dow (-2.4%), with the S&P 500 not much better at -2.2%.


But even though I toyed with the idea of brewing up a Cheerful Cocktail before I logged in to our Schwab account -- recipe: equal measures of anti-depressants, whiskey, potent marijuana, and caffeine extract -- I realized that our index fund investing approach would leave me feeling fine after I inspected our holdings.

Not happy. Not ecstatic. But fine.

Why?

Because since 2002 I've been a happy passive investor, having kicked the addiction of believing that I, or anyone else for that matter, can consistently beat the market. (See "Index Funds: the 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors.")

I described this approach in a 2009 post, "Index investing rocks and Jim Cramer sucks."

I've been a fairly serious investor for about twenty-five years. For quite a while I was the type of guy who'd be a Cramer acolyte. I subscribed to investing newsletters, researched stocks, tried to devise foolproof investing schemes.

Until I realized that I was acting foolishly. And started reading about index investing.

Since 2002 we've had a big chunk of our investments in DFA (Dimensional Fund Advisors) index offerings. DFA is a pleasingly geeky outfit. Their approach is highly sophisticated, as you'll see if you take their philosophy tour -- which starts on this page.

I don't claim to understand all the economics jargon. But I do know that I sleep a lot more soundly now that I've given up trying to outsmart the market.

Today our investment portfolio dropped in value by 1.1%.

That's exactly half of the S&P 500 decline of 2.2%. Which is typical, and unsurprising, since I aim for a roughly 50-50 mix of stocks and bonds. If stocks go down 2.2%, bonds will stay about the same or even increase in value as investors flock to safety. 

Hence, we lose half as much as the stock market loses. But this isn't the only reason, or the biggest reason, why I'm largely unbothered by how global financial markets are behaving currently.

It's the passive investing, doing almost nothing in good times and bad times alike, that has made such a big difference in my outlook about our investment assets. I talked about this in a 2008 (bad times!) post on my Church of the Churchless blog, "Profitable spiritual investing."

As the world financial crisis deepens, conversations tend to turn toward money rather than other subjects. Last night I was with a group of people who discussed the ins and outs (not to mention the ups and downs) of investing in tough times like these.

I didn't have a whole lot to say.

Briefly I held forth on the Buddha-like nature of index fund investing, where you don't try to beat the market through some clever scheme but rather rest content with rising and falling in concert with the overall financial tide.

I told my friends, "If the world and national economy go to hell, so will our investments. If things improve, so will our portfolio. It's a humble way to invest, since you're happy to be average."

About all I do, other than embrace my average'ness, is try to keep our investments balanced fairly close to 50-50 between stocks and bonds/cash.

Right now they're at 56-44, which is close enough. (Aside from index funds, we own shares in an actively managed total return fund that aims for a 60-40 stock/bond split; since I have no control over what it does, I shoot for 50-50 with the index funds we own.)

Index investing has improved my life a lot. I used to worry when markets went down. Now I'm much more tranquil -- even without a Cheerful Cocktail. 

There's a lot to like about having a "we're all in the same boat" philosophy of investing. To illustrate this, here's excerpts from a Morningstar X-Ray report on our investments I just printed out.

Asset Allocation: Your portfolio is moderately risky. Financial planners typically recommend this type of portfolio for investors who have three- to 10-year investment horizons and who are concerned by volatility and not preoccupied by it.

Stock Style Diversification: Your portfolio's stock exposure is spread evenly across the market and includes a good mix of small, medium, and large companies, as well as a fairly even mix of conservatively priced value stocks and high-flying growth stocks. For most investors, maintaining such broad-based market exposure is a prudent way to invest.

Stock Sector: You have a core portfolio. Compared with a benchmark with a similar investment style, you have very normal exposure to all market sectors. 

World Regions: You have a fairly healthy stake in foreign stocks. Comparing your foreign exposure to a common international index, you have a pretty standard regional breakdown. 

Fees & Expenses: The mutual funds in your portfolio tend to have very low expense ratios. This is good, because expense ratios have been shown to be a major factor in mutual-fund performance over the long term.

So there we are. These words aren't exciting, but they're just how I want our investments to be described.

"Moderate." "Spread evenly." "Good mix." "Prudent." "Very normal." "Pretty standard." 

We're average. Happily average. How the U.S. and global markets go, is how we go. That's the beauty of index investing.

You trade feelings of being a genius, or an idiot, depending on how your active investing strategy is working out, for a peaceful Ces't la vie.

Congressional Republicans refuse to applaud a cure for cancer

Watching Obama's 2016 State of the Union address last night, my wife and I were struck by how rarely Republicans applauded anything Obama said. 


The Daily Kos has a partial list of the subjects that left Republicans cold and apathetic in "What did Republican lawmakers hate about President Obama's State of the Union address?"

For those keeping score at home, here are just some of the issues that President Obama raised during Tuesday’s State of the Union address that Republican Senators and Congressmen in attendance refused to clap for, let alone get off their asses and cheer:

• Nearly 15 million new jobs and the unemployment rate being cut in half.
• Equality for all Americans.
• Cutting pollution levels.
• A good education for our children.
• Fighting terrorism.
• The idea that America is the strongest nation on earth.
• Avoiding war.
• Making it easier to vote.

And—drumroll, please—saving the best for last …

• Curing cancer! 

File this one under shit-you-can’t-make-up.

What made this display of extreme partisanism even more disturbing was this: while Republicans were deliberately failing to applaud things that are good for all Americans because Obama was mentioning them, Obama was talking about the urgent need to improve the atmosphere of our political discourse.

Here's some of what Obama said. I've boldfaced especially pertinent lines.

And that brings me to the fourth, and maybe most important thing that I want to say tonight. The future we want, all of us want — opportunity and security for our families, a rising standard of living, a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids — all that is within our reach. But it will only happen if we work together. It will only happen if we can have rational, constructive debates. It will only happen if we fix our politics.

A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country, different regions, different attitudes, different interests. That’s one of our strengths, too. Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, fiercely, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.

But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t — it doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, it doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America.

Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise or when even basic facts are contested or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention. And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.

Too many Americans feel that way right now. It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

But my fellow Americans, this cannot be my task — or any president’s — alone. There are a whole lot of folks in this chamber — good people — who would like to see more cooperation, would like to see a more elevated debate in Washington but feel trapped by the imperatives of getting elected, by the noise coming out of your base. I know; you’ve told me. It’s the worst-kept secret in Washington. And a lot of you aren’t enjoying being trapped in that kind of rancor.

Well, I'm not so sure about those last sentiments. Last night Republicans sure seemed like they enjoyed sitting on their hands when Obama talked about subjects that everybody in this country should support.

Like, curing cancer. And generating many millions of jobs the past seven years.

People often wrongly say that both sides -- left and right, liberal and conservative -- are responsible for the breakdown in Congressional cooperation. 

Well, there's some truth to that, but Republicans have moved much farther to the right over the years than Democrats have moved to the left. This is a fact, as graphically illustrated in the Washington Post's "How Congress became so partisan, in 4 charts."

Here's the 2012 chart.

Ideology is along the horizontal axis. Conservative is to the right; liberal is to the left.  Party unity scores are along the vertical axis. Greater party unity is up; less party unity is down.

You can see that Republicans (in red) are considerably more rightward ideological than Democrats (in blue) are leftward ideological. Numerically, .675 versus -.394 (0 is ideologically neutral). And quite a few more Democrats fail to vote with a majority of their party.

Here's how things looked back in less rancorous days, 1992.

It's cool how this chart looks like the wings of a bi-colored bird. Because back then, members of Congress could actually get together and agree on things in a bipartisan fashion. 

Tellingly, the ideological scores for the two parties were much closer together then than they are now: Republicans were at .359; Democrats were at -.317. 

So in twenty years, Congressional Republicans went rightward from .359 to .675. That's 88% more conservative. 

During the same time period, Congressional Democrats went leftward from -.317 to -.394. That's 24% more liberal. 

Thus Republicans have moved over three times more to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. Which means they are mostly responsible for the parties being so much farther apart these days.

Obama is trying to bring our country together again. Democrats like me are ready and willing to help with this. We just need some interest from Republicans.

Failing to applaud curing cancer, putting Americans back to work, and fighting terrorism isn't helping with this, GOP.