Salem Political Snark

Good and bad of Mayor Hoy's 2023 State of the City address

A few days ago Salem Mayor Chris Hoy gave his first State of the City address at the Salem Convention Center. You can read what he had to say by clicking on the "continuation" link at the end of this blog post.

Hoy's talk was well-written and informative. I came away impressed by the rundown on what has been accomplished in Salem. 

The homelessness section made me think that maybe, just maybe, we're finally making a dent in the number of people without a place of their own to call home. The micro shelters are helping with this. The Navigation Center to be opened in a few months sounds like a terrific addition to our homeless services.

I noticed in the section of the speech below that Mayor Hoy failed to mention that a big reason why the homeless person wasn't arrested for methamphetamine use is Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs like meth.

I'm a supporter of Measure 110, so I wanted to point out that it facilitates addicts asking for help, since now they don't have to worry about jail time. Hoy said: 

In fact, an officer recently contacted an individual living on the streets who was an admitted methamphetamine addict. He told the officer he was ready for help. The officer knew it was critical to get the person into help right then. Through his contacts with local service providers, they were collectively able to get him into substance abuse treatment. Previous approaches would have resulted in the individuals arrest, but now he is getting the intervention he needs that will hopefully help him break the cycle of addiction. 

Mayor Hoy says that paid on-street parking in the downtown area is inevitable. Well, maybe. I just hope that before the City Council approves downtown parking meters, doing away with the current 3-hour free on-street parking, there's a genuine attempt to gauge public opinion on this.

City officials shouldn't assume that the people pushing for parking meters, which I suspect includes the Salem Main Street Association, truly represent a broad cross-section of downtown visitors, business owners, and residents.

Given that I strongly suspect the push to bring back commercial passenger air service to the Salem airport is doomed to fail like previous attempts have, the laudatory mention of this effort by Mayor Hoy may not age well when looked at in a few years.

Since air travel is one of the biggest ways individuals contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions, it's perplexing that Hoy, who strongly supported the Salem Climate Action Plan, is so positive about bringing commercial passenger air travel to the Salem airport.

My biggest problem with Mayor Hoy's talk was his unabashed support for adding 70 new officers to the Salem Police Department and 111 new firefighters to the Salem Fire Department. Those departments already suck up the majority of general fund tax dollars, about 60% to my understanding.

Crime rates in Salem are stable. Salem has about the same number of police officers per 1,000 population as other Oregon cities our size. So adding 70 new officers seems wildly out of place.

Fires are a small proportion of calls to the Fire Department, since it mostly is a "Medical Department." It's crazy that giant fire engines are used to respond to medical calls, that all of those engines need to be replaced at considerable cost, and that there's an effort to add 111 new firefighters to the Salem Fire Department without first looking at ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the department.

Mayor Hoy began his talk by saying "It's a time of fresh ideas." OK, then let's explore fresh ideas for the Police and Fire Departments that don't involve massive tax increases to pay for many more officers and firefighters who, apparently, would be doing the same un-fresh things.

You can read Mayor Hoy's talk below.

Conservative Salem city councilors flame out on neighborhood association motion

As I noted back in March 2022, before the May election for Mayor and half of the Salem City Council seats, the main qualification for Ward 6 candidate Julie Hoy seemed to be her last name -- which probably not coincidentally also is the last name of Chris Hoy, who was the previous Ward 6 councilor and now is Mayor Hoy.

So the way I see it, conservatives in Salem recruited Julie Hoy to be a right-wing replacement for Chris Hoy, hoping that their shared name would make Ward 6 voters think Julie was similar to Chris. Which, for sure, she isn't.

Because Chris Hoy is a progressive. And Julie Hoy is a conservative.

Evidence of Julie Hoy's political leaning came when she introduced a peculiar City Council motion aimed at having term limits for the Chair and Vice-Chair of neighborhood associations. That's such a weird idea, only someone with a right-wing agenda would think it made sense. 

After all, these days most conservatives mistrust democracy. They prefer to have decisions made from the top down rather the bottom up. So if neighborhood associations in Salem can be weakened by forcing current leaders to leave their positions, that's a dream come true for Julie Hoy.

This is a screenshot of Councilor Hoy doing her best to argue for her motion at the March 13 City Council meeting. Because she didn't have any good reasons for her term limits motion, that was an uphill battle.

In discussing her ill-considered motion, most of the progressive councilors politely said that Hoy's motion was put forward with "good will" and "good intentions." They're much nicer than I am. I think her motion was introduced with ill will and bad intentions. 

As was noted in the discussion period by Councilor Nordyke, with longevity of neighborhood association leaders comes institutional memory. So kicking the Chair and Vice-Chair out of office via term limits would tend to weaken neighborhood associations.

Further, elections for leadership positions are held regularly. If members of a neighborhood association don't like the job being done by the Chair and Vice Chair, they can be voted out.

Mayor Hoy added another reason to vote against Hoy's motion: he said that we don't like it when the state tries to take authority away from the city; likewise, neighborhood associations don't like being told what to do by the City of Salem.

The vote on Councilor Hoy's motion was 6 against and 3 in favor. The three "ayes" came from the conservative members of the City Council: Julie Hoy, Deanna Gwyn, and Jose Gonzalez. The six "nays" came from the progressive members: Vanessa Nordyke, Micki Varney, Virginia Stapleton, Linda Nishioka, Trevor Phillips, and Mayor Chris Hoy.

If Julie Hoy and her conservative colleagues want to make a difference on the City Council, they should shelve their right-wing agendas and work collaboratively with the progressives on policies that benefit everybody in Salem -- not just Republicans and other conservatives. 

Now we know Fox News doesn't care about news

Unless you're a MAGA sort of Republican who only watches Fox News, you should be aware that legal filings submitted by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox have made it crystal clear that Fox News doesn't care about reporting the truth.

All it cares about is keeping its viewers happy by telling them only what they want to believe, not what they should know.

So bizarrely, Fox News hasn't been reporting on the lawsuit that is one of the biggest news stories in the country right now.

Because court documents show that both executives and on-air personalities at Fox News knew that the 2020 election wasn't stolen from Trump, but they were afraid to tell their viewers this truth out of a fear that they'd turn off Fox and go to even crazier right-wing media like OAN.

Thus Fox News spread lies about Dominion machines switching votes from Trump to Biden, and gave lots of airtime to other conspiracy theories concerning Trump's Big Lie that he actually won the presidential election.

Watching coverage of the Fox News scandal today, I was struck by a mention on MSNBC that for lots of Fox News viewers, probably a majority, Fox is the only place they go to learn about what's happening.

By contrast, liberals like me have many options. I watch CNN and MSNBC. I read the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other news sources that I find on Google News and elsewhere.

This makes the failure of Fox News to accurately report news more serious than it would be if avid conservatives could turn to other sources of information about current events in the United States and the rest of the world.

Sometimes I wonder how my mother, a hard core Republican, would look upon the sorry state of conservatism in our country. She was an intellectual. My mother loved to learn. She devoured books and magazines, along with listening to right-wing radio commentators like Paul Harvey.

I'm pretty sure she would be aghast at how so many modern-day Republicans care so little about truth. My mother could be an annoying person to talk politics with, because she had such strong conservative opinions.

But she always tried to be factual.

That's why even though as a divorced woman without much money during my childhood, my mother subscribed to all of the major news magazines in the 1950s and 60s. Time, Life, Look, Saturday Review, National Geographic, National Review (a conservative publication with smart, well written stories).

There's simply no basis for saying that in 2023 Fox News and MSNBC, say, are equally biased toward one side of the political spectrum. Fox News lies. MSNBC either tells the truth or admits when it got something wrong. 

 

This blogger is irked at a Florida bill aimed at censoring bloggers

Well, if Florida state Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican, wanted to get himself criticized by bloggers, his introduction of a bill that would take away the free speech rights of bloggers was a genius move.

But unfortunately, Brodeur has other motivations than social media masochism.

That seems clear, given that Florida governor Ron DeSantis hates the media because they call him on his right-wing authoritarian bullshit.

It's unclear whether Brodeur's bill has a chance of becoming law.

Regardless, it grabbed the attention of the New York Times editorial board, which published "Florida Is Trying to Take Away the American Right to Speak Freely" today. Here's how it starts out:

A homeowner gets angry at a county commission over a zoning dispute and writes a Facebook post accusing a local buildings official of being in the pocket of developers.

A right-wing broadcaster criticizing border policies accuses the secretary of homeland security of being a traitor.

A parent upset about the removal of a gay-themed book from library shelves goes to a school board meeting and calls the board chair a bigot and a homophobe.

All three are examples of Americans engaging in clamorous but perfectly legal speech about public figures that is broadly protected by the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in a case that dates back nearly 60 years, ruled that even if that speech might be damaging or include errors, it should generally be protected against claims of libel and slander.

All three would lose that protection — and be subject to ruinous defamation lawsuits — under a bill that is moving through the Florida House and is based on longstanding goals of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The bill represents a dangerous threat to free expression in the United States, not only for the news media, but for all Americans, whatever their political beliefs. There’s still time for Florida lawmakers to reject this crude pandering and ensure that their constituents retain the right to free speech.

“This isn’t just a press issue,” said Bobby Block, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation. “This is a death-to-public-discourse bill. Everyone, even conservatives, would have to second-guess themselves whenever they open their mouths to speak or sit in front of a keyboard.”

I don't make any money from blogging. My three blogs have never had any ads, and never will. Anyone can read what I write for free. In fact, I have to pay Typepad, my blogging service, an annual fee. So I lose money from blogging.

However, I have nothing against bloggers who get paid. After all, reporters get paid for their journalistic work, and blogging is a form of journalism -- just less formal and more opinionated than most other types.

The MaddowBlog on MSNBC describes the Florida bill.

“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register” with the appropriate office within five days of the post, the legislation says.

As NBC News’ report added, the measure defines “elected state officer” as “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature.”

Those who failed to comply could face thousands of dollars in state penalties.

If this approach sounds at all familiar, it might be because Vladimir Putin signed a similar measure — known as the “bloggers law” — in 2014, requiring online writers to register with the Russian government.

This bill is so horrible, and so obviously unconstitutional, that in normal times few people would take it seriously. But we don't live in normal times. 

Under Trump and his MAGA devotees, the Republican Party has dedicated itself to disparaging the media and promoting lies that, bizarrely, when the falsehoods are pointed out by reputable journalists, earns the epithet of "fake news," even though it's the lies that are truly fake news.

And the Supreme Court has shown that it is capable of taking away fundamental rights of Americans on a whim, as occurred when fifty years of women having the right to an abortion was trashed just because three Trump-appointed justices felt they wanted to do this and were part of a 6-3 majority.

Read the entire New York Times opinion piece to learn how bad the Florida bill is. It does more than just require paid bloggers to register with the state. 

The bill goes much further than this attempt to hobble the press. It makes it clear that the new defamation rules would also apply to any single “utterance on the internet,” which could mean a tweet or a Facebook post written by anyone, or “any one presentation to an audience,” which could include statements made at school board hearings and other public meetings.

In a direct attack on a key aspect of free expression, it says that whenever someone is accused of discriminating against others on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, that accusation is automatically considered enough to sue for defamation.

Any person accused of bigotry based on sexual orientation or gender identity could file a defamation lawsuit and be virtually guaranteed of winning by saying the discrimination was based on personal religious or scientific beliefs. The penalty for calling someone a bigot would be a minimum of $35,000.

Parking meters could be coming to downtown Salem

For at least ten years, maybe more, parking meters in downtown Salem has been a contentious issue.

Back in July 2013, Carole Smith, a downtown resident, property owner, and activist, collected more than 8,000 signatures, many more than were needed to put a Stop Parking Meters in Downtown Salem initiative on the May 2014 ballot.

This celebratory poster appeared on many downtown businesses.

Because when confronted with the widespread opposition to parking meters in Salem's core, the conservative-leaning City Council at first did away with all time limits on downtown parking, then reversed itself in the fall of 2014, instituting a 3-hour time limit. 

I wrote about this confusing back-and-forth state of affairs in one of my Strange Up Salem columns in Salem Weekly.

At its last meeting the city council initiated the return of a 3-hour time limit even though discussion of downtown parking was billed as “informational” on the agenda, with no action expected.

Yet without advance notice a motion suddenly appeared and was quickly passed unanimously. This violated the spirit, if not the letter, of Oregon’s public meetings law, which requires “that decisions of governing bodies be arrived at openly.”

Also, Council President Chuck Bennett falsely claimed that in 2013 the council had to adopt a citizen initiative to ban downtown parking meters and do away with 2-hour limits.

Actually the city council didn’t have to adopt the initiative language after 9,000 people signed a petition. Initiative backers wanted citizens to vote on the proposal in the May 2014 election.

Instead, the council voted unanimously to implement it immediately, choosing on its own to institute free unlimited parking.

Now the council has flip-flopped, unanimously moving to impose 3-hour limits from October through January after 30 downtown businesspeople submitted a petition asking for parking time limits to be reinstated, along with other changes.

Battling via successive dueling petitions is no way to form a viable downtown parking policy. This bouncing back and forth is absurd: 2-hour limit…parking meters on the way… no parking meters; no limits… 3-hour limit.

All in less than a year.

Now Salem Mayor Chris Hoy has said that he will make a motion at the Monday, February 27 City Council meeting "to direct staff to return to City Council with a plan to implement paid on-street parking in the downtown parking district and phase out the parking district tax."

Here's the reason as stated in the Discussion part of the motion:

Approximately ten years of parking studies indicate that downtown parking usage supports moving to a paid on-street system to manage demand. In 2020, 2021, and 2022 the Downtown Advisory Board’s Parking Fund Budget recommendations included a recommendation to transition to a paid on -street parking system.

Since 2013, the downtown parking tax has been capped at 2% annual growth or the CPI, whichever is less. The parking tax has not kept pace with the inflationary impacts to the costs of operating the downtown parking system. Additionally, the fund has lost significant revenue in recent years due to the closures of the Nordstrom, JC Penney, and TJ Maxx department stores, and pandemic impacts including an increase in remote working and online shopping habits.

A paid on-street system will improve parking demand management as well as stabilize and enhance the parking fund.

I'm uncertain about whether having parking meters in downtown Salem is a good or bad idea. It all depends on the details.

I'd view parking meters more favorably if the City of Salem dedicated the revenue from them to making improvements in downtown Salem. Deciding on how that money would be spent should be up to a genuine independent Downtown Association, which currently doesn't exist. 

Using parking meter money to maintain the parking garages, where parking is free for downtown visitors, doesn't make a lot of sense. Why not charge for parking in the parking garages, so they are self-sustaining? 

And I don't get why the current parking tax paid by downtown businesses is used to pay $200,000 a year to the Police Department to patrol the downtown area. That's crazy. I doubt that any other neighborhood in Salem has to pay for police services.

A Statesman Journal story says that in 2021 the downtown parking district collected $1.086 million in revenue.

Parking tax collections comprised $365,840 of the total revenue. Parking rent — fees that people pay for permitted spots —accounted for another $505,780.

Routine maintenance at the parkades cost a combined $355,490 in the 2021-2022 fiscal year. Police services to downtown cost $200,000. Trash disposal and container repair cost $36,630. A downtown clean team cost $75,000, and security services were $5,000.

Hopefully the staff report requested by Mayor Hoy won't simply be a City of Salem wish list, but will delve into the pros and cons of charging for downtown on-street parking. The Salem Climate Action Plan calls for this, since free parking encourages the use of cars and essentially is a subsidy for the most climate-unfriendly means of transportation.

Maybe this is finally the time for downtown parking meters to become a reality.

However, whether that reality is welcomed or cursed by downtown visitors and businesses will depend on how wisely the transition to parking meters is managed, and what benefits accrue from their introduction.

I demolish more myths about Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Today is the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The United Nations General Assembly marked the occasion by overwhelmingly backing a resolution condemning Russia's invasion and calling for the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine and an end to the fighting.

There were 141 nations on the side of freedom and democracy; 32 countries abstained; 7, including Russia, voted against the resolution. 

I'm commemorating Ukraine's incredible brave fight against the Russian aggression, and war crimes, by once again demolishing myths about the war that keep being sent to me by someone who clearly has bought into lies being spread about Russia's invasion by both right-wing and left-wing Putin sympathizers.

Here's a selection of this person's newest falsehoods, which were easy for me to refute. I'm going to stop correcting the person's disinformation, because while I enjoy standing up for truth, if someone doesn't care about learning the facts about Ukraine, there's little point in pointing out what they're wrong about.

The person's statements are in italics. My debunking are in regular type. 

Your statement ‘Putin…invaded Ukraine for no good reason’ is not accurate. Russia is threatened by having Ukraine become a NATO member.

Totally false. Not only are there no plans for Ukraine to join NATO, there aren't even any plans for Ukraine to join the European Union anytime soon. 

Missiles fired from Ukraine could destroy Moscow in minutes without warning. Everyone knows the USA is willing to use nuclear weapons.

Totally false. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, following a vote of 92% of Ukrainians in 1991 to become independent of the Soviet Union. Russia was one of the nations that signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. Russia agreed "to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine," a vow that it obviously broke when it invaded Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022.

There are no missiles in Ukraine that could strike Moscow. It is Russia's Putin who keeps threatening the use of nuclear weapons, not the United States. Putin just paused Russia's cooperation with the last nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States. So it is Russia that's most willing to use nuclear weapons, not the United States.

Crimea is home to Russia’s important naval port. For 20 years a friendly government was running Ukraine and Russia was not threatened by the loss of their naval port. Shortly after an unfriendly government took power, Putin decided that Crimea would again be part of Russia.

Highly misleading and false. Crimea is part of Ukraine, not Russia. So Russia never had a naval port in Crimea. It only gained that port after it invaded Crimea in 2014. The "friendly government" in Ukraine referred to here was led by a Putin-puppet who was forced to flee the country for Russia when the Ukrainian people rejected his attempts to loosen Ukraine's ties with the European Union and strengthen its ties to Russia.

It is helpful to understand that the Russians were not invading a land of strangers. People in Crimea and the Donbas region are closely tied to Russia. They speak Russian at home and in business. Many are Russians that moved to this area during Czarist and Soviet times. The Donbas region fought a successful war to separate from Ukraine that resulted in the Minsk Accords, in which Ukraine recognized their autonomy, but has broken that treaty.

Highly misleading and false. Actually it was Russia that broke the Minsk Accords, according to Wikipedia:

Amid rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022, Russia officially recognised the DPR and LPR on 21 February 2022. Following that decision, on 22 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed", and that Ukraine, not Russia, was to blame for their collapse. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. 

And most people in the Donbas region want to remain Ukrainians. 

With renewed negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region on the horizon, the views of those people most affected by the war – the residents of eastern Ukraine – should be taken into account. Russia insists that the people living in areas of the Donbas currently controlled by separatists, who it supports, do not want to reintegrate with Ukraine.

But two surveys I carried out in the Donbas in 2016 and 2019, revealed that a majority of those we surveyed in areas not controlled by the government would prefer to be part of the Ukranian state.

Strong evidence of the close ties between Russia and the Donbas is where the refugees are going. Over a million refugees have fled to Russia. What other invading country has had over a million refugees flee to the invading country? The French didn’t flee to Germany during WWI or II. 

Totally false. It's well known that after its invasion, Russia prevented people in eastern Ukraine from fleeing west into areas controlled by the Ukrainian government. Instead, they were forced to go to Russia, often after being put through "filtration" camps.

Q2: Why and how are Ukrainians going to Russia?

A2: Since the invasion, 2,772,010 Ukrainian refugees have been recorded crossing the border into Russia. Some report voluntarily moving through Russia as a means of eventually reaching the European Union. However, there are more troubling reports of forcible transfers of Ukrainians to Russia or Russian-occupied regions as Moscow tries to rid eastern Ukraine of people sympathetic to Kyiv.

Long feared as a tactic of war Putin’s Russia would be willing to deploy, more concrete allegations were made public during a UN Security Council meeting in September, during which U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians had been “interrogated, detained and forcibly deported” to Russia.

Many of these people are from eastern Ukraine, specifically the Mariupol and Kharkiv regions near the Russian border. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield went on to say that “there is mounting and credible evidence that those considered threatening to Russian control because of perceived pro-Ukrainian leanings are ‘disappeared’ or further detained.”

A recent Human Rights Watch report provides such credible evidence, showing that Ukrainians are being rounded up by Russian authorities before being forced to go through an intense screening process referred to as “filtration,” during which they are subjected to body searches, biometric data collection, interrogation about their political views, and at times, beatings.

Those deemed to have connections to the Ukrainian military or nationalist groups are reportedly taken into detention centers in Russian-controlled territory. The rest are put onto buses to Russia—despite some Russian officers lying about the buses being destined for other parts of Ukraine. These victims of state-sponsored forced transfer—which constitutes war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity—have been sent as far as Khabarovsk and Vladivostok in the far eastern reaches of Russia.

Many Ukrainians who fled or were forcibly transferred into Russia have faced difficulties returning to Ukraine. For example, those traveling with undocumented family members (including newborns) or without accepted documentation (or only electronic documentation, commonly used and accepted in Ukraine) have been unable to leave Russia.

Many of those who went through the filtration and forced transfer have had their identity documents confiscated or were forced to sign papers renouncing Ukraine, tactics which have made it more difficult for these people to leave Russia and return home.

City officials still keeping secret why deputy police chief got $53,500 on way out

The City of Salem slogan, At Your Service, deserves to be changed to At Your Secret Service, given the lengths city officials have gone to preserve a veil of secrecy over Deputy Police Chief Steve Bellshaw's highly unusual $53,500 taxpayer payment as he was leaving his position under suspicious circumstances.

The Salem Reporter has been doggedly trying to pry what should be public information out of the closed fist of city officials. Here's how their newest story on this subject starts out.

The city of Salem was prepared in the fall to release key documents about the unusual departure of a top police official suspected of misconduct but stopped in the face of a legal threat from the former deputy chief, according to newly released records.

Salem city officials instead decided the documents were confidential even though Steve Bellshaw had retired under a special deal in which he was paid $53,500 in taxpayer money and agreed not to sue the city.

The city has been quiet about the deputy chief’s retirement in February 2022 and has resisted disclosing anything about the matter in the seven months since Salem Reporter requested Bellshaw’s separation agreement with the city. 

So much for hopes that the new City Manager, Keith Stahley, would bring with him an increased commitment to transparency. It sure looks like he's endorsing the same approach his predecessor practiced: make it as difficult as possible for the public to learn how their tax dollars are being spent.

When a government agency refuses to reveal information to journalists or concerned citizens, almost always it's because they're trying to hide something. In this case, it's what Bellshaw was being investigated for, and why the City of Salem gave him $53,500 rather than pursue the investigation.

It's bizarre that an on-again, off-again investigation into wrongdoing by Deputy Chief Bellshaw ended up not with Bellshaw being held accountable for whatever he did, but with him getting what appears to be a hefty hush money payment when he decided to retire.

Though it's impossible to know exactly what went on here given the refusal of city officials to come clean about the investigation into Bellshaw and the $53,500 payment, my suspicion is that whatever Bellshaw did, disclosing it would have made both Bellshaw and the Salem Police Department look bad, so city officials decided to let Bellshaw retire with a big bonus in hopes the whole wrongdoing thing would just go away.

Which, it might, since it doesn't look like the City of Salem is ever going to release the records requested by the Salem Reporter. Here's how their story ends.

City officials have refused to explain the allegations against Bellshaw, claiming state law wouldn’t allow it and that they had to protect the city’s legal work. But documents the city released in November showed an off-and-on effort to bring in an outside investigator.

Thenell told Salem Reporter in a November interview that Bellshaw was never told there would be an investigation. Thenell said talks to reach a settlement started with the city at the time Bellshaw was placed on administrative leave, which happened on Nov. 12, 2021.

John Fetterman's depression deserves deep compassion

Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman, the bald, goateed, year-round shorts and hoodie-wearing guy who beat Mehmet Oz in last year's midterm election after suffering a stroke, is severely depressed.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who suffered a near-fatal stroke in the midst of his campaign last year, checked himself into the hospital on Wednesday evening to receive treatment for clinical depression, a remarkable disclosure from a politician about mental health.

The senator voluntarily admitted himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington at the recommendation of the attending physician of Congress, Brian P. Monahan, who on Monday evaluated the senator and on Wednesday suggested inpatient care, Fetterman’s chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, said in a statement.

“While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” Jentleson said. “After examining John, the doctors at Walter Reed told us that John is getting the care he needs, and will soon be back to himself.”

Ordinarily someone suffering from deep depression would elicit sympathy from everybody who heard about their condition. But given the nasty state of our national politics, I won't be surprised if some Republicans take cheap shots at Fetterman. 

After all, they made fun of his difficulty with understanding speech and speaking himself after his stroke, a problem that has continued. So joking about his depression would be in line with previous attempts to make it seem like Fetterman is incapable of being a United States Senator.

I'll try to be optimistic though. Hopefully Fetterman's openness about his battles with depression will help people around the country realize that depression isn't an emotion, like sadness. It's a serious disease.

It may not even make sense to call it a mental illness, since depression can be kicked off by physical problems, including a stroke. And treatment often includes taking an anti-depressant that affects brain chemicals.

This subject is close to my heart because I was diagnosed with a major depressive episode back in 2017. That happened after my bladder became dysfunctional, requiring me to use a urinary catheter five times a day to pee. 

Since that had major negative effects on my life, I started off sad and ended up depressed. Getting painful leg cramps that woke me up 4-5 times in the night caused sleep deprivation, which made my depression worse until I went to a sleep doctor and was prescribed gabapentin for the cramps.

In September 2017 I wrote a blog post, "Too depressed to do anything else, I'll write about my depression." This was when I first realized that what I thought was ordinary sadness actually was something much different: clinical depression.

It's a new experience, being depressed. Now, to be honest I haven't actually gotten a depression diagnosis. But my wife, Laurel, is a retired psychotherapist. And she tells me, "Brian, you aren't just tired. You're depressed."

At first I didn't believe her. But Laurel gave me a Psychology Today article, "Depressed Without Knowing It," and that helped to change my mind. 

I knew that several health problems had made me anxious, sad, worried, nervous about the future. I also was feeling a lack of energy, and was having trouble doing things that I used to enjoy. But since I'd never suffered from depression, being a pretty damn optimistic person, it took a while for me to realize that something different was happening to me.

...During the past few weeks I'd have occasional (OK, frequent) crying spells and near-panic attacks when I'd think, or tell Laurel, "I feel myself slipping away." Yet obviously there was still a Me able to say that. What I really meant is that the Brian I was used to being was feeling more and more foreign to me, like a person I used to know well, yet now was fading from memory.

If you've never been depressed, it's difficult to imagine feeling like the bottom has fallen out of your previously fairly content psyche. Again, depression isn't like the opposite of happiness. It's much worse than that. 

It's feeling like there's no meaning to your existence, or at least very little meaning to it. It's feeling so down, you can't find any hand holds that would let you climb out of your despair. It's feeling like you've got no hope of ever being the person you used to be, because that person is a distant memory.

Fortunately, all of those feelings turned out to be temporary, even though at the time it seemed like they'd be with me forever. I was able to see a psychiatric nurse practitioner at my primary care physician's office, who prescribed me Mirtazapine, an antidepressant. 

It took quite a few weeks, but eventually my depression lifted. As I'm confident John Fetterman's depression will. He deserves all the compassion that the American people can send his way, as does every other person suffering from clinical depression.

I debunk conspiracy theories about the Ukraine war

Recently I heard from someone opposed to the war in Ukraine. Their reasons sounded screwy to me, so I decided to fact-check what they said.

It just took me a few minutes of Googling to debunk virtually all of their objections to the Ukraine war, which in my opinion, is totally justified -- since it was Putin, the autocratic leader of Russia, who invaded Ukraine about a year ago for no good reason.

The United States, the European Union, and other allies are strong backers of the democratically-elected government of Ukraine against Putin's attempt to rekindle the bad old days of World War II, the last time a sovereign European nation was invaded by another country seeking to expand its territory.

Below, in italics, is what the person who messaged me said. My debunking of those conspiracy theories is in regular type.

FIRST FALSE STATEMENT. The US started the war in Ukraine when we overthrew the elected government that favored close relations with Russia. Obama and Victoria Nuland confirmed our involvement led to that 'revolution'. Yes, that overthrown government was corrupt, but so is the current government of Ukraine.

 

This was an easy statement to debunk, since the well-respected Politifact addressed this claim. Excerpts from their Pants on Fire conclusion.

It’s a conspiracy with mainstream crossover: The United States bankrolled the bloody political uprising in Ukraine.

We saw the claim pop up recently in a story on RT (the Russian-funded English language cable network), and found lots of talk about it on reddit, Facebook and other websites.

The claims have the same basic structure. While President Barack Obama publicly said Ukrainians have the right to determine their own future, the U.S. government pumped $5 billion into the country to promote regime change.

In a Facebook meme, someone put it this way:

Obama "spends $5 billion paying Ukrainians to riot and dismantle their democratically elected government."

So is there any truth to this claim? PunditFact dove in.

...Our ruling

Contrary to claims, the United States did not spend $5 billion to incite the rebellion in Ukraine.

That’s a distorted understanding of remarks given by a State Department official. She was referring to money spent on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since it broke off from the Soviet Union in 1991.

We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

 

SECOND FALSE STATEMENT. We also started the war when we broke our promises to not move NATO east after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Politifact also examined this claim. Here's some excerpts from their Mostly False conclusion. 

Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine with an assault that intelligence officials had warned was coming, conservative commentator Candace Owens insisted that the U.S. was "at fault."

"NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward," Owens said in the Feb. 22 tweet, which directed her more than 3 million followers to remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin that she said showed "what’s actually going on." 

Owens’ comment echoed a grievance claimed by Putin and other Russian leaders regarding the West’s negotiations with the Soviet Union after the Cold War. 

The subject of the grievance is whether the U.S. and its Western allies promised the Soviet Union during negotiations over the reunification of Germany that they would not allow NATO to expand its membership east of the Cold War border.

...Our ruling

Owens said, "NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward."

There is an ongoing historical debate over comments that Western leaders, including Baker, made during post-Cold War negotiations, and whether what they said amounted to assurances that NATO would refrain from welcoming in countries closer to modern-day Russia. 

But NATO as an organization made no such pledge, and the formal agreement signed at the end of those negotiations said nothing about the alliance not expanding eastward.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

THIRD FALSE STATEMENT. This war and most of our other wars are primarily profit generators for our arms and oil industries.  Our inflation was caused by price gouging by the oil industry and not by the slightly higher pay for employees. The war gave us an excuse to blowup Nordstream 2 so that we could sell more gas to Europe. 

 

What's almost certainly false in this statement is the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline.

 

I also disagree that the Ukraine war is primarily a profit generator for our arms and oil industries, since our motivation for supporting Ukraine is to protect a democratic nation against an unprovoked invasion by Russia. I do agree that price gouging by the oil industry is a primary reason for our high gasoline prices, but other countries also have higher fuel prices caused by Putin's war.

 

Snopes looked into the claim that the United States blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline. It found that this claim was based on a single anonymous source, so it isn't very credible. Excerpts:

On Feb. 8, 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published on Substack a theoretically blockbuster revelation: A covert U.S. military operation in June 2022 was responsible for the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines that run natural gas from Russia to Germany. The claim has been met with skepticism by other journalists, denials from U.S. government officials, and credulous promotion in Russia.

In this article, Snopes explores the controversy, separating the factual background in Hersh's reporting that provides an air of plausibility to his blockbuster claims from the anonymously sourced assertions of a single person that hold — however weakly — those claims together. By email, we asked Hersh to respond to criticism that his article's claims are based on a single source. We also asked if any undisclosed parties verified or vetted any of that source's assertions as part of his reporting. In response, he told Snopes, "I protect my sources."

...The Bottom Line

This story, when deconstructed, is merely a pile of purported second-hand information allegedly collected by someone connected in some unknown way to deliberations of a highly secret, multi-agency task force. Such a story falls prey to the same criticisms of other more recent work published by Hersh, which has relied on similarly questionable anonymous sources.

If the U.S. did conspire to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, Hersh's reporting has not proved that case. Hersh has, instead, made a very successful blog post that essentially transcribes a compelling story someone unknown to the general public told him.

Hersh was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, "It's a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what's going on." 

FOURTH PARTLY FALSE STATEMENT. For evidence that this is a war for profit not for Ukraine note that Ukraine desperately needs tanks now, but instead of sending a few of the 4800 tanks we currently have, we are building new tanks at $10 million each to be sent in August.  Oil and arms guys love this war and do not want it to end.  We spend billions on weapons, killing Russians and civilians, and we have no body bags coming home. 

It's true that the United States is having new Abrams tanks built to send to Ukraine, rather than sending tanks from our existing inventory. A New York Post story says this is because the United States doesn't have enough excess tanks. The larger question is whether the Ukraine war is driving increased American defense spending. 

A New York Times story says that while the Ukraine war is a factor, the bipartisan push to increase our defense spending also stems from longer term concerns about threats from Russia and China.

The prospect of growing military threats from both China and Russia is driving bipartisan support for a surge in Pentagon spending, setting up another potential boom for weapons makers that is likely to extend beyond the war in Ukraine.

...Even more orders are coming in to military contractors from U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, as they too have concluded they must do more to arm themselves against rising global threats. Japan moved this month to double its spending on defense over the next five years, putting aside a pacifist stand it has largely maintained since 1945.

Marjorie Taylor Greene gives Joe Biden a gigantic gift

Watching last night's State of the Union address was highly pleasurable for me in several ways.

One, Biden gave a great speech with energy belying his 80 years. Two, ultra-MAGA-crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Biden a great gift when she yelled "you lie" and other things at him while doing her best angry baboon imitation.

(To those who think it's insulting to baboons to pair them with Greene, the image popped up in my Twitter feed today, so complain to whoever came up with this inspired comparison -- which admittedly puts baboons in a bad light that they don't deserve.)

This was a truly memorable State of the Union address. Long-time observers of the ritual said that Biden's speech was the most confrontational in modern times, and maybe ever.

President Biden correctly recognized that while it was important to praise the bipartisanship that helped make his first two years such a legislative success, this is the beginning of what appears to be his reelection campaign, so the stark differences between how congressional Republicans and Democrats view our nation's problems and potential needed to be stressed.

Even so, the speech was shaping up to be fairly traditional until Greene and her MAGA cronies decided to ignore the advice of Speaker McCarthy to his caucus and act like jerks.

The impetus for their jerkiness, not that it takes much for the MAGA far-right to be pushed into this mode, was Biden absolutely correctly saying that some Republicans have called for the sunsetting of Medicare and Social Security, which would require that these essential entitlement programs be reauthorized by a Congress that currently can't do anything useful, given the new GOP majority in the House.

Gosh, where could Biden have gotten that sunsetting idea? Why, in part from Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who included it in his 12 point Rescue America plan that he fashioned when he was chair of the committee to elect Senate Republicans in the 2022 midterm election. 

(The GOP lost a Senate seat in that election, so obviously Scott didn't do very well.)

There it is, in the Government Reform & Debt section of Scott's plan:

Medicare and Social Security are federal legislation. So Biden was correct when he said that some congressional Republicans want to sunset these programs. And Greene's you lie outburst was wrong, which is par for the course in the world of Green's habitual purveyor of falsehoods.

But it got even better. Because Republicans at the State of the Union address kept complaining about Biden's accurate claim that some in the GOP want to sunset Social Security and Medicare. 

I loved it when Biden said that he admires conversions. Then he did some quick thinking and said that it sounds like congressional Republicans want to make sure that no cuts occur to Social Security and Medicare, that seniors will be protected.

That got a lot of applause, which meant that President Biden was able to negotiate an important aspect of upcoming budget talks with the GOP right in the middle of his State of the Union address. Now it will be virtually impossible for Republicans to try to make changes to Social Security and Medicare given how outraged they were at the very idea of this -- which, again, was part of Senator Scott's Rescue America plan.

Like most Democrats, I've been hoping that my party could find a younger alternative to Biden to run in the 2024 presidential election. I still lean that way, but Biden's masterful performance last night sure made me feel better about him. 

Whether he's able to keep up that level of energy in the coming election cycle remains to be seen. For now, what's clear is that he kicked the butt of Marjorie Taylor Greene, though she's so clueless, there's no way she'll ever understand how badly she got trounced by President Biden.