ON THE AVENUES REPRISE: Die hard the Hunter, or the political "impossibility" of rental property registration in New Albany (2015).

Earlier this morning: Pat Harrison's Enduring Gestapo Fetish in Six (6) Easy Pieces.

My column (below) was published on March 12, 2015, just shy of one year ago. It ties up a few loose ends with regard to Harrison's Slumlord Uprising of 2008, but far more than, with the issue about to come bubbling to the surface yet again, this  morning's posts reinforce the salient point of New Albany's record of rental property registration and code enforcement since 2007:

Nine years passed, NOTHING achieved.  

You're forgiven for questioning how New Albany's political caste, comprised primarily of politicians identifying themselves as Democrats, manages the feat of sleeping at night.

But you see, vampires -- they're both dead and undead, right?

Conscience doesn't factor into it ... does it?

---

ON THE AVENUES: Die Hard the Hunter, or the political "impossibility" of rental property registration in New Albany.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Rental Property Registration is an essential tool for creating a code enforcement system that effectively identifies problem properties and, through random inspections, deters landlords from engaging in deferred maintenance and lax property management. A strongly‐enforced rental registration program “lets the owner understand that he is known to the municipality and accountable for his actions with respect to the property.”
-- "An Analysis of Rental Property Registration in Austin"

The calendar reads 2015, and as we meander yet again down the weed-choked, trash-strewn garden path of pervasive legislative impotence in New Albany as it pertains to building codes -- an exercise sure to be made even more flaccid by the imperative to waffle and pander during an election cycle -- it’s fairly clear that this ongoing abdication of responsibility over a period of decades constitutes the single biggest failing of this city's purported "leadership" caste.

Today we turn back the clock to 2008, a full seven years ago, and a series of NAC posts referencing what surely was among the city’s most theatrical of rental property registration failure.

Read them and weep, because nothing has been achieved, and cannot be for so long as value extraction and decay management remain the dominant motifs of our ever-helpful duopoly of major political parties.

---

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2008
Boss Hogg and the meaning of life
Roger A. Baylor

While we may have been on opposite sides recently, at-large councilman John Gonder is intelligent, well intentioned and conscientious. Saturday morning, he’ll be convening a meeting. As explained at his blog:

The committee formed to address the issue of rental registration and code enforcement will hold its first meeting this Saturday morning, August 23, at 10:00 A.M. in the Elsa Strassweg Auditorium in the Library.

This meeting is expected to be brief. It is intended to simply outline where the committee is headed.

Those interested are welcome, and encouraged to attend.

Of course, Gonder played a prominent role in the (perhaps) concluded smoking ban saga, which turned on a “yea” swing vote by none other than Dan Coffey. The extent to which Gonder cultivated this amazing turnabout is unknown, although it’s fair to surmise that all the council’s quasi-progressives were forced to grudgingly raid their comic book collections to achieve the elimination of workplace smoking through Coffey’s surreal ballot.

The reason I muse aloud about these topics has much to do with my personal feelings about rental property registration, inspection, reform, and whatever other action is necessary to establish three simple facts.

Owning a rental property is a business.

Rental housing is a matter of public health.

Such a business is indeed the city’s business.

I made several predictions with respect to the smoking ordinance, and the majority proved correct. Last evening Coffey was overheard commenting that the council was about to establish a strong rental property registration package, and in honor of this, I’ll make another prognostication (and hope I’m wrong).

When push comes to shove, Coffey will unceremoniously kneecap any meaningful rental property reform, and while doing so, he’ll laugh at – not with – Gonder.

Like I said, I hope I’m mistaken. But color me skeptical. I see the miraculous smoking conversion as a one-off, the true price of which we’ll never know. Now we’re going to get the real Cappuccino, once again … and to the detriment of all.

---

MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2008
Steve Price on rental registration and code enforcement: "This is a bunch of (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)."
Roger A. Baylor

Before we document the 3rd district uncouncilman’s revealingly ill-tempered sex-act-and-defecation outburst at the library on Saturday -- that's right, within whispering distance of the kiddie section -- let’s look back at a bit of pertinent information posted here last week.

Owning a rental property is more than an investment — it's a business. You have to be willing and able to commit the time and resources necessary to run your business successfully.
--GMAC Mortgage website

Did you know that to search the Internet for “rental property” + business is to generate more than 3,000,000 hits?

Yesterday, my colleague Bluegill documented the scene following Saturday’s first rental registration and code enforcement committee meeting. In the comments section, Gina Coyle asked if Price really lost it, and Jeff replied:

Yes, G, (Price) said it, apparently right after he told Lloyd Wimp that he'd do whatever he could to fight it (rental registrations).

He played most of his in-meeting comments to the landlords in the crowd, bemoaning what a tough business rental property is, which I'm sure you saw.

It's paraphrased but here's the gist:

After the meeting, an already angry Steve interrupted my conversation with another committee member.

"You're wrong. Rental property ain't a business", he said.

I told him that it is and asked what he did for a living.

He then went into a semi-intelligible tirade about how it wasn't. I asked him what he did for a living.

He told me my house (which serves as a family residence only) was a business. I asked him what he did for a living.

He hollered that he didn't want to pay any more taxes. I asked what taxes he was talking about since there hadn't been any additional taxes discussed. And then I asked him what he did for a living.

When he started to say something else unrelated, I told him to answer the question about what he did for a living.

"I'm barely breaking even", he said. "I'm living off my council salary."

"Just because your business is struggling," I said, "it doesn't mean it's not a business."

With that he turned for the door, repeated some of the stuff he'd said earlier about people wanting guys with clipboards running around, and then finally pronounced "This is all a bunch of fucking bullshit" as he headed out.

The funniest part to me is Price's unintentionally candid (and ever elastic) definition of "business": It's a business if you're making money, but not if times are hard. Price isn't making any money off his rental properties, therefore, they no longer constitute a business.

Right.

It hasn't stopped him from incorporating a business entity, has it?

I'm guessing Price's state of affairs has more to do with business expertise and the normal cycle of business than the nature of business itself, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding him. That's an easy thing to do. Listening to Price speak publicly is rather like trying to read a goat path map of Tibet -- upside down.

But those priceless expletives … well, the meaning is clear. Ironically, taken together, they also aptly describe the quality of the “work” Price has done during his tenure as councilman.

The same general attitude also helps encapsulate our eternal gratitude that council president Gahan has appointed the transparently biased Price to the rental committee. Before this, Gahan gifted the Urban Enterprise Association board with precisely the same befuddled personage (attendance record: 3 "present" and 5 "absent" so far this year).

Thanks, Jeff.

Actually, "fucking bullshit" describes Gahan's recent attitude toward the community in general just as pithily as it does Price's historically cavalier disregard for his 3rd district neighbors.

Perhaps, then, we should file this under "be careful what you wish for," because having asked for consistency, Gahan's now giving it to us.

Good and hard.

---

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2008
Dude -- you guys live over in that product over there?
Roger A. Baylor

Tonight at the rental property inspection committee meeting, Mr. Haesley, the owner of Property Solutions, made these assertions.

(a) His business is located at (insert Floyds Knobs address here).

(b) All the many houses this business owns, from which the business derives income (dare we imagine … makes a profit?) by charging people a fee (that’d be “rent”) to live there, actually are not properties. They are products.

(c) Does a department store have to register each and every one of the products it sells?

I’ll leave it to Bluegill (who filmed the meeting) and others – was local media present? – to provide the in-depth coverage of the evening.

All I can say is this.

(a) Okay. I have an address, too. It isn’t a post office box, either.

(b) The beers I sell aren’t products, mind you. They’re dreams. How can we tax/register/license a dream?

(c) Pick an item in any store. Every step of the way, licensing is involved. Even if it comes from an unregulated Chinese sweat shop, the product is subject to some manner of importation licensing. What of the truck that delivered it? A licensed driver, of course. I'm sure we could follow this further. Why bother?

A product, huh?

Earlier in the session, Councilman John Gonder took a poll of the people in attendance, asking whether they were for or against a simple rental property registration program without registration fees. The vote predictably split along landlord/activist lines. Gonder did not permit stronger views to be enumerated.

Count me among the latter, though. So long as rental property owners insult my intelligence with arguments as weak as Mr. Haesley’s, then I advocate licenses for every rental unit in town.

Am I am extremist? Maybe. All I know is that my business is in fact a business, it is regulated to the hilt by multiple governmental agencies, and I accept regulation as the cost of doing business.

Business is business … right?

---

See also the late, lamented Lloyd's account of a chat with Haesley, here.

---

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
The next video should be instructional.
Jeff Gillenwater

A video feed of the second rental registration and code enforcement meeting will be posted as soon as I can get it done. The process takes hours and, seeing as how I'm trying to do the traditional media's job with a 12-year-old video camera I bought off eBay nine years ago, patience is appreciated. I think I'll leave the rig at home next time and just smoke a cigarette in the meeting room. Then you can watch it on the 11:00 news.

One needn't view the video in it's entirety, however, to grasp the essence of the situation. Amidst the embroidery of humorously bad arguments, irrelevant anecdotes, and sanitation fantasies, at least one thing is plain:

No one knows the law.

Over and over again, the questions arose: What legal obligation does the city have to notify property owners of code violations and what can legally be done if they don't respond? For that matter, what enforcement and collection options, according to the state, does the city have if they do respond? Every time, the answer was "I don't know".

Given the number of times the building commissioner has expressed exasperation with those unknowns, you'd think finding them out would be the crux of his efforts. If thinking was the hallmark of New Albany's past couple of decades, though, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

As much credit as I give John Gonder for displaying the fortitude so lacking in previous councils, there's not much sense in continuing the foray into chaos until those legal questions are answered. Otherwise, we'll be seeking to build an enforcement mechanism based on faulty remembrances rather than contemporary understanding.

And with all the superfluous talk throughout this conversation of how great things used to be, another myth is the last thing we need.

---

Time passes. Pins drop, and crickets chirp. Somewhere in the night, a dog barks.

---

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2008
The ordinance against "no-brainers" is subject to multiple interpretations.
Roger A. Baylor

There's good coverage of common sense in the morning newspaper, with our own Bluegill in an advisory capacity.

A code of safety: Some feel crime and code enforcement are linked in New Albany, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)

Lax code enforcement welcomes a criminal element into New Albany, according to Jeff Gillenwater.

Gillenwater, a New Albany resident who has lobbied for tougher rules through his work with several neighborhood associations, said deteriorating houses and rentals impact more than merely property values.

“Make it look like nobody cares and potential residents will believe you, including relocating criminals,” he said.

Mayor Doug England promised to lay out his code enforcement plan to the City Council when he returns from back surgery and rehabilitation, which will likely be the first week of January.

Alas, another year has passed during which New Albany's city council has acted boldly on trivial pursuits, such as the currently unenforced (duh) ban on novelty lighters, but proposed nothing of substance to curb the city's empowerment of slumlords, a situation that derives not from ordinance, but from generations of outright political cowardice.

To be sure, there have been fact-finding meetings, and CM John Gonder waxes optimistic, telling the Tribune's Suddeath, "I am very hopeful. I have no reason to think that they will pull out a toothless tiger."

Gonder gets it, and yet toothlessness is such a part of New Albany's heritage of unresponsiveness that it surely must be written into the city's genetic code. According to our political DNA, measures to combat the unchecked reign of the slumlord are DOA. It's going to take more than words. Think: Deeds ... irrespective of the political fallout.

Uncouncilman Steve Price, who by his own testimony yearns to be regarded as a "hobbyist" rental property owner who makes nothing from it (and they call me a socialist), said it best back in August after the initial rental property registration committee meeting: "This is all a bunch of fucking bullshit."

It is, but as usual, not in the way that Price unimagines.

None of us currently know the dimension of the mayor's plan to address the reality of New Albany's default state of non-enforcement. I remain hopeful, although we are well advised to refrain from holding our breaths.

---

Postscript: Doug England did nothing through the end of his term, after which Gahan (seeking re-election this year) has done nothing since the beginning of his. 

Gahan’s 2015 primary opponent, David White, has had nothing to say on the matter, while the GOP’s rental-property-owning mayoral nominee, Kevin Zurschmiede, has led the current effort to reform building codes – without a rental property registration component. 

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Remember back in 2008, when Pat Harrison feared the rental inspection Gestapo?

Ignorance of history is a New Albany birthright. Last night it was ethnic cleansing, but in March of 2008, Pat Harrison saw the Gestapo lurking behind rental property registration and inspection proposals.

That's right.

Seven years of nothingness ago.

Bluegill recalls ...

One of the funniest episodes in the past 10 years of New Albany political history: When Harrison again used the term Gestapo to refer to rental property inspection at another meeting after the one I mentioned, Greg Phipps called the comparison out as offensive, given that the actual Gestapo had murdered so many people like him. Harrison thought he meant Jewish and justified it by saying she had read Anne Frank's diary. You just can't make this stuff up.

NAC's coverage at the time:

Realtor Pat Harrison namedrops "Gestapo," seeks monopoly on disingenuousness.

Patience is a version.

The latter includes a video clip. I think it was just repeated, last night. 

When a Grammy winner played the Public House.

2008 wasn't my finest year. In fact, it was one of my worst. Consequently, I cannot honestly remember the chain of events that led to Mike Farris playing the Public House, apart from the efforts of my then-colleague, John Campbell, to tie together WFPK's Live Lunch, NABC and Farris -- who in 2015 won a Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album.

That's right: $12.50. Indeed, strange days have found us.

It was an unprecedented tariff, given that we've seldom had live music at all, and when we did, it almost never required a coverage charge. John pointed me to My Space (it was that long ago) and force me to listen. Yes, it seemed to be religious music of a sort, but not overt in terms of evangelism -- and that voice. It was otherworldly.

I agreed, and Farris performed. Or did he? I think he did. I'm not sure. We probably lost money. Beer may have been consumed. Like I said, it wasn't my finest year.

Mary Gauthier wrote "Mercy Now," the song embedded here, and she describes it accurately: "Real deal, rotgut gospel." It's not my thing, ordinarily. However, the categories melt away when the music is real, and Farris has an unconventional point of view as it pertains to his religious faith.

Mike Farris' Revival: How a Drug-Addicted Rocker Found God and Grammy, by Joseph Hudak (Rolling Stone)

 ... Like Gauthier says, "Mercy Now," and Shine for All the People as a whole, is able to captivate all music fans, even those who might have preconceived notions about spiritual music. Interestingly, Farris blames any stigma associated with gospel on organized religion. Although a Christian, he refuses to attend church. Instead, he worships onstage with fans, or at home with his wife and their 10 dogs.

"Church is when we're together sharing shit that we're going through on this Earth with each other. Sharing our triumphs as well," he says. "I'm totally against religion."

It's an interesting dichotomy: a gospel singer who doesn't go to Sunday service.

"Forget religion. We're talking about just washing each other's feet. Because that's what Jesus told us to do," Farris says, going on to explain his Grammy-winning album's title. "It's for all the people, not just some of the people. The Grammy is fine, but the big mission is helping somebody make a decision to become a better human being. That's why we do what we do."

ON THE AVENUES: Die Hard the Hunter, or the political "impossibility" of rental property registration in New Albany.

ON THE AVENUES: Die Hard the Hunter, or the political "impossibility" of rental property registration in New Albany.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Rental Property Registration is an essential tool for creating a code enforcement system that effectively identifies problem properties and, through random inspections, deters landlords from engaging in deferred maintenance and lax property management. A strongly‐enforced rental registration program “lets the owner understand that he is known to the municipality and accountable for his actions with respect to the property.”
-- "An Analysis of Rental Property Registration in Austin"

The calendar reads 2015, and as we meander yet again down the weed-choked, trash-strewn garden path of pervasive legislative impotence in New Albany as it pertains to building codes -- an exercise sure to be made even more flaccid by the imperative to waffle and pander during an election cycle -- it’s fairly clear that this ongoing abdication of responsibility over a period of decades constitutes the single biggest failing of this city's purported "leadership" caste.

Today we turn back the clock to 2008, a full seven years ago, and a series of NAC posts referencing what surely was among the city’s most theatrical of rental property registration failure.

Read them and weep, because nothing has been achieved, and cannot be for so long as value extraction and decay management remain the dominant motifs of our ever-helpful duopoly of major political parties.

---

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2008
Boss Hogg and the meaning of life
Roger A. Baylor

While we may have been on opposite sides recently, at-large councilman John Gonder is intelligent, well intentioned and conscientious. Saturday morning, he’ll be convening a meeting. As explained at his blog:

The committee formed to address the issue of rental registration and code enforcement will hold its first meeting this Saturday morning, August 23, at 10:00 A.M. in the Elsa Strassweg Auditorium in the Library.

This meeting is expected to be brief. It is intended to simply outline where the committee is headed.

Those interested are welcome, and encouraged to attend.

Of course, Gonder played a prominent role in the (perhaps) concluded smoking ban saga, which turned on a “yea” swing vote by none other than Dan Coffey. The extent to which Gonder cultivated this amazing turnabout is unknown, although it’s fair to surmise that all the council’s quasi-progressives were forced to grudgingly raid their comic book collections to achieve the elimination of workplace smoking through Coffey’s surreal ballot.

The reason I muse aloud about these topics has much to do with my personal feelings about rental property registration, inspection, reform, and whatever other action is necessary to establish three simple facts.

Owning a rental property is a business.

Rental housing is a matter of public health.

Such a business is indeed the city’s business.

I made several predictions with respect to the smoking ordinance, and the majority proved correct. Last evening Coffey was overheard commenting that the council was about to establish a strong rental property registration package, and in honor of this, I’ll make another prognostication (and hope I’m wrong).

When push comes to shove, Coffey will unceremoniously kneecap any meaningful rental property reform, and while doing so, he’ll laugh at – not with – Gonder.

Like I said, I hope I’m mistaken. But color me skeptical. I see the miraculous smoking conversion as a one-off, the true price of which we’ll never know. Now we’re going to get the real Cappuccino, once again … and to the detriment of all.

---

MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2008
Steve Price on rental registration and code enforcement: "This is a bunch of (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)."
Roger A. Baylor

Before we document the 3rd district uncouncilman’s revealingly ill-tempered sex-act-and-defecation outburst at the library on Saturday -- that's right, within whispering distance of the kiddie section -- let’s look back at a bit of pertinent information posted here last week.

Owning a rental property is more than an investment — it's a business. You have to be willing and able to commit the time and resources necessary to run your business successfully.
--GMAC Mortgage website

Did you know that to search the Internet for “rental property” + business is to generate more than 3,000,000 hits?

Yesterday, my colleague Bluegill documented the scene following Saturday’s first rental registration and code enforcement committee meeting. In the comments section, Gina Coyle asked if Price really lost it, and Jeff replied:

Yes, G, (Price) said it, apparently right after he told Lloyd Wimp that he'd do whatever he could to fight it (rental registrations).

He played most of his in-meeting comments to the landlords in the crowd, bemoaning what a tough business rental property is, which I'm sure you saw.

It's paraphrased but here's the gist:

After the meeting, an already angry Steve interrupted my conversation with another committee member.

"You're wrong. Rental property ain't a business", he said.

I told him that it is and asked what he did for a living.

He then went into a semi-intelligible tirade about how it wasn't. I asked him what he did for a living.

He told me my house (which serves as a family residence only) was a business. I asked him what he did for a living.

He hollered that he didn't want to pay any more taxes. I asked what taxes he was talking about since there hadn't been any additional taxes discussed. And then I asked him what he did for a living.

When he started to say something else unrelated, I told him to answer the question about what he did for a living.

"I'm barely breaking even", he said. "I'm living off my council salary."

"Just because your business is struggling," I said, "it doesn't mean it's not a business."

With that he turned for the door, repeated some of the stuff he'd said earlier about people wanting guys with clipboards running around, and then finally pronounced "This is all a bunch of fucking bullshit" as he headed out.

The funniest part to me is Price's unintentionally candid (and ever elastic) definition of "business": It's a business if you're making money, but not if times are hard. Price isn't making any money off his rental properties, therefore, they no longer constitute a business.

Right.

It hasn't stopped him from incorporating a business entity, has it?

I'm guessing Price's state of affairs has more to do with business expertise and the normal cycle of business than the nature of business itself, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding him. That's an easy thing to do. Listening to Price speak publicly is rather like trying to read a goat path map of Tibet -- upside down.

But those priceless expletives … well, the meaning is clear. Ironically, taken together, they also aptly describe the quality of the “work” Price has done during his tenure as councilman.

The same general attitude also helps encapsulate our eternal gratitude that council president Gahan has appointed the transparently biased Price to the rental committee. Before this, Gahan gifted the Urban Enterprise Association board with precisely the same befuddled personage (attendance record: 3 "present" and 5 "absent" so far this year).

Thanks, Jeff.

Actually, "fucking bullshit" describes Gahan's recent attitude toward the community in general just as pithily as it does Price's historically cavalier disregard for his 3rd district neighbors.

Perhaps, then, we should file this under "be careful what you wish for," because having asked for consistency, Gahan's now giving it to us.

Good and hard.

---

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2008
Dude -- you guys live over in that product over there?
Roger A. Baylor

Tonight at the rental property inspection committee meeting, Mr. Haesley, the owner of Property Solutions, made these assertions.

(a) His business is located at (insert Floyds Knobs address here).

(b) All the many houses this business owns, from which the business derives income (dare we imagine … makes a profit?) by charging people a fee (that’d be “rent”) to live there, actually are not properties. They are products.

(c) Does a department store have to register each and every one of the products it sells?

I’ll leave it to Bluegill (who filmed the meeting) and others – was local media present? – to provide the in-depth coverage of the evening.

All I can say is this.

(a) Okay. I have an address, too. It isn’t a post office box, either.

(b) The beers I sell aren’t products, mind you. They’re dreams. How can we tax/register/license a dream?

(c) Pick an item in any store. Every step of the way, licensing is involved. Even if it comes from an unregulated Chinese sweat shop, the product is subject to some manner of importation licensing. What of the truck that delivered it? A licensed driver, of course. I'm sure we could follow this further. Why bother?

A product, huh?

Earlier in the session, Councilman John Gonder took a poll of the people in attendance, asking whether they were for or against a simple rental property registration program without registration fees. The vote predictably split along landlord/activist lines. Gonder did not permit stronger views to be enumerated.

Count me among the latter, though. So long as rental property owners insult my intelligence with arguments as weak as Mr. Haesley’s, then I advocate licenses for every rental unit in town.

Am I am extremist? Maybe. All I know is that my business is in fact a business, it is regulated to the hilt by multiple governmental agencies, and I accept regulation as the cost of doing business.

Business is business … right?

---

See also the late, lamented Lloyd's account of a chat with Haesley, here.

---

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
The next video should be instructional.
Jeff Gillenwater

A video feed of the second rental registration and code enforcement meeting will be posted as soon as I can get it done. The process takes hours and, seeing as how I'm trying to do the traditional media's job with a 12-year-old video camera I bought off eBay nine years ago, patience is appreciated. I think I'll leave the rig at home next time and just smoke a cigarette in the meeting room. Then you can watch it on the 11:00 news.

One needn't view the video in it's entirety, however, to grasp the essence of the situation. Amidst the embroidery of humorously bad arguments, irrelevant anecdotes, and sanitation fantasies, at least one thing is plain:

No one knows the law.

Over and over again, the questions arose: What legal obligation does the city have to notify property owners of code violations and what can legally be done if they don't respond? For that matter, what enforcement and collection options, according to the state, does the city have if they do respond? Every time, the answer was "I don't know".

Given the number of times the building commissioner has expressed exasperation with those unknowns, you'd think finding them out would be the crux of his efforts. If thinking was the hallmark of New Albany's past couple of decades, though, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

As much credit as I give John Gonder for displaying the fortitude so lacking in previous councils, there's not much sense in continuing the foray into chaos until those legal questions are answered. Otherwise, we'll be seeking to build an enforcement mechanism based on faulty remembrances rather than contemporary understanding.

And with all the superfluous talk throughout this conversation of how great things used to be, another myth is the last thing we need.

---

Time passes. Pins drop, and crickets chirp. Somewhere in the night, a dog barks.

---

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2008
The ordinance against "no-brainers" is subject to multiple interpretations.
Roger A. Baylor

There's good coverage of common sense in the morning newspaper, with our own Bluegill in an advisory capacity.

A code of safety: Some feel crime and code enforcement are linked in New Albany, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)

Lax code enforcement welcomes a criminal element into New Albany, according to Jeff Gillenwater.

Gillenwater, a New Albany resident who has lobbied for tougher rules through his work with several neighborhood associations, said deteriorating houses and rentals impact more than merely property values.

“Make it look like nobody cares and potential residents will believe you, including relocating criminals,” he said.

Mayor Doug England promised to lay out his code enforcement plan to the City Council when he returns from back surgery and rehabilitation, which will likely be the first week of January.

Alas, another year has passed during which New Albany's city council has acted boldly on trivial pursuits, such as the currently unenforced (duh) ban on novelty lighters, but proposed nothing of substance to curb the city's empowerment of slumlords, a situation that derives not from ordinance, but from generations of outright political cowardice.

To be sure, there have been fact-finding meetings, and CM John Gonder waxes optimistic, telling the Tribune's Suddeath, "I am very hopeful. I have no reason to think that they will pull out a toothless tiger."

Gonder gets it, and yet toothlessness is such a part of New Albany's heritage of unresponsiveness that it surely must be written into the city's genetic code. According to our political DNA, measures to combat the unchecked reign of the slumlord are DOA. It's going to take more than words. Think: Deeds ... irrespective of the political fallout.

Uncouncilman Steve Price, who by his own testimony yearns to be regarded as a "hobbyist" rental property owner who makes nothing from it (and they call me a socialist), said it best back in August after the initial rental property registration committee meeting: "This is all a bunch of fucking bullshit."

It is, but as usual, not in the way that Price unimagines.

None of us currently know the dimension of the mayor's plan to address the reality of New Albany's default state of non-enforcement. I remain hopeful, although we are well advised to refrain from holding our breaths.

---

Postscript: Doug England did nothing through the end of his term, after which Gahan (seeking re-election this year) has done nothing since the beginning of his. 

Gahan’s 2015 primary opponent, David White, has had nothing to say on the matter, while the GOP’s rental-property-owning mayoral nominee, Kevin Zurschmiede, has led the current effort to reform building codes – without a rental property registration component. 

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

---

Recent ON THE AVENUES columns:

ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: Adam's rib tips.

ON THE AVENUES: It's just like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

ON THE AVENUES: As Admiral Gahan steers his Speck study into the Bermuda Triangle, crewmen Padgett, Stumler and Caesar grimly toss all the rum overboard.

ON THE AVENUES: Upscale residency at down-low prices.

REWIND: Matt Taibbi, John McCain, The eXile, Rolling Stone and the Open Air Museum.

First, the update: Matt Taibbi is leaving Rolling Stone.

I've linked to his articles far less often than I might have, simply because I didn't want it to be a weekly habit. Back on November 23, 2008, it was time to provide some background. Here is the full reprint.

---

Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

REWIND: On smelling (and not fining) rats.

Lately we've been considering the county and city in the context of money, parks and schools. Almost forgotten is that all the way back in 2008, NA Shadow Council made a very good point about "jurisdiction" with specific reference to the Health Department:

"A cursory investigation indicates that within the incorporated limits of New Albany, the city has exclusive and dominant jurisdiction unless it explicitly delegates it to the county."

---

Shadow considers the Thursday council meeting, and touches on a point near and dear to the senior editor’s professional heart. Here’s an extended excerpt.

When the Mayor's Away... from the NA Shadow Council blog.

The most intriguing legislative action of the evening was the unanimous rubber-stamping of a Floyd County ordinance raising the annual restaurant permit fee. Even the smallest food service establishment (something like the breakfast bar at the Hampton Inn) would now be required to pay $125 each year to remain in business. Inspections that result in violations and that require repeat visits could cause those small establishments to be "fined" half of that again.

Consulting the 2002 economic census data, New Albany has about 140 establishments that you would ordinarily consider to be subject to health department food regulation. Restaurants, bars, convenience stores, groceries, bars, bakeries, confectionaries and ice cream shops that you and I would all want to be inspected. Then, of course, the Health Department has to guard us against food poisoning at fall's Harvest Homecoming! and similar temporary vending opportunities.

Like you, I suspect, I wondered why in the world the city council would even be addressing an ordinance regulating food services when it is a Floyd County Health Department function. A cursory investigation indicates that within the incorporated limits of New Albany, the city has exclusive and dominant jurisdiction unless it explicitly delegates it to the county. I can't verify that, but I have no reason to doubt that.

The city council rapidly ratified the county's new ordinance - unanimously and without debate. The Pride of the 3rd District indicated his wish that restaurant inspection fees be used to fund city mosquito abatement efforts. The health department majordomo replied that he wanted the city to pay for same. D4 added his two cents, making it clear that he wasn't going to be happy if the county health department didn't do something in his home district, and soon.

Shadow5's question is this: What in tarnation do restaurant permit fees have to do with skeeter abatement?

But more seriously, how does the health department justify imposing a minimum $125 annual fee for restaurant inspections. Fees should have a rational basis to the cost of the service rendered, a service rendered primarily to the public, but also to the dining establishments.

What I can't figure out is the rationality of this fee increase. Combined with a recent sales tax increase that is decimating our local economy, not to mention a property tax "relief" program that dumps the cost of government onto businesses at a ratio of three to one, it seems clear that Indiana, Floyd County, and New Albany are bound and determined to drive business away, making New Albany nothing more than a bedroom for a vital and growing Louisville.

My personal response to this measure was aptly summarized by my colleague, Bluegill, in a comment appending the preceding:

Given the ease with which inspection fees were unanimously doubled, what excuse is left for not passing a rental property inspection ordinance immediately?

Eating with rats is bad but living with them is OK?

Is it just me, or are we now seeing the initial surge of enthusiasm for progressive action in the area of code enforcement begin to take the sadly inevitable turn toward slumlord appeasement that any long-term city residents regards as residing in the gene pool? After all, it’s a habit of such long standing that skeptics will yet again point to the tainted water fountains in the city county building as the likely source of liquid-borne contagion, producing degenerative spinelessness in successive generations of public officials and political “leaders.”

Speaking for my own food service interest, rest assured that we’ll pay. We always do. However, will someone please tell me why rental properties in this city are not regulated and inspected as businesses, in the same fashion as mine, and furthermore, why the ongoing absence of discernable cojones toward such matters is a state of affairs to be further tolerated?

Anti-smoking council math, and how it may (or may not) have changed.

In summer of 2008, after refusing to act in the waning months of the 2003-2007 term, New Albany's city council voted in favor of an ordinance that would have banned smoking in almost all enclosed public places, including bars and restaurants. If memory serves, exceptions for owner-operated clubs and tobacco stores were allowed.

In favor: Coffey, Caesar, McLaughlin, Gahan, Gonder

Opposed: Price, Benedetti, Messer and Zurschmiede

As you can see, in 2008, the ordinance was passed, 5-4. It is not in effect today because it was "vetoed" by Mayor England. Six votes are required to overturn a veto, and so England's decision has stood. The council might have returned to the ordinance and softened it, but did not.

After last evening's election, and of course assuming that returning council members would vote the same if asked today, it's now 4-2 in favor, with three new voters (Phipps, Blair and Baird) on board.

Unlike 2008, it is now likely that the vote of only one of these three is required to carry the measure, which almost surely is destined for reintroduction once a new council is seated in 2012. Here's the rub: With the pro-ban Gahan now serving as mayor, six votes no longer are necessary to ensure a veto-proof majority. There'll be no veto. Five will do, although proponents will aim for a higher margin just the same.

Between the dates of May 30, 2008 and September 5, 2008, the search terms "smoking ordinance" appear 32 times at NAC. There were dozens of comments posted, and things got unusually heated. As an example, just this one should do: Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.

On second thought ... maybe I shouldn't have read that one again.

A Candidate’s Progress (8): My question for mayoral candidate Jeff Gahan.

We’ve all become accustomed to legislative scorecards compiled by various lobby groups. Not unexpectedly, these tend to rank the performance of elected officials according to criteria precisely targeted to the wants and needs of the particular interest group doing the scoring.

Here in New Albany, one female voter/candidate goes so far as to pretend she’s a male academic, posting the results of her convoluted canvassing of past city council votes on a blog that refers to the wonders of free speech without permitting any of it to occur.

Just as obviously, individual voters make similar mental calculations according to personal belief systems and preferred policy positions, although when it comes to local matters, perhaps they’re less systematic than the pros, owing to a relative closeness to the candidates, and the very real possibility of soft-pedaling dogma in consideration of proximity.

During the time I’ve been observing New Albany’s city council, it’s my guess that 3rd district council person Steve Price has been wrong three times as often as he’s been right. Conversely, John Gonder (at-large) has been right far more often than wrong. So has Jack Messer, but he’s not running for office again – at least yet – while both Price and Gonder are gunning for re-election.

One of their colleagues, Jeff Gahan, is giving up his 6th district council seat to seek the office of mayor.

(As an aside, I believe it is commendable, if atypical, for an office holder to do what Gahan is doing by risking his currently serviceable sinecure to make a move for something bigger. It takes confidence and chutzpah to put it all on the line).

Both Paul Etheridge and Irv Stumler, Gahan’s opponents in the Democratic mayoral primary, come to us from outside the realm of politics and government service, and consequently neither of them has a legislative voting record for us to examine.

Gahan does, and while I haven’t the time or the interest to quantify his votes in Erika-esque fashion, I trust my gut in saying this: If he has come down on the right side 7 times out of 10, which is likely, those other 3 times have been “fails” of truly epic dimension.

Topping my personal list of these dubious achievements is Gahan’s unexpectedly vehement and eager service in the cause of regressive anti-Constitutional ward heeling way back in 2008, when redistricting and the council’s inexplicable, ongoing refusal to perform its mandated redistricting duties were topics of the day.

The reason I’m bringing this up is not to embark upon an anti-Gahan tirade. Straight up: I like him, and his council tenure has been pretty much exemplary, even if he and I don’t agree on every issue (most prominently, this one).

Furthermore, in raising this issue, I emphatically am not conspiring “against” his mayoral aspirations. In fact, I’m struggling mightily with the comparative merits of the tripartite Democratic field.

So far, neither Etheridge nor Stumler has said anything to inspire me, but Gahan actually has, and the truth of the matter is that I’d like very much to support him in his quest to be mayor – except just now, I cannot.

Not until he addresses and clarifies his role in redistricting, circa 2008, when he blithely dismissed Constitutional imperatives by ensuring that the council would defeat the fairest and most equitable redistricting plan this city has ever seen, and by doing so, knowingly thwarting the intent of a settlement proposed by a Federal judge who knows more about the Constitution than Gahan or me.

Others may have different concerns, and they’re free to ask their own questions. This one’s mine.

Jeff, can you explain the importance of the Constitution and the context of rule of law in the redistricting case of 2008?

Kindly understand that I’m not looking for a contrived answer designed to appease me. It’s just that in private and public conversations at the time, Jeff’s comments with regard to the primacy of the Constitution and the implications of it for rule of law, as elected officials ostensibly are sworn to uphold, were sufficiently ambiguous to merit clarification, especially now that he seeks to occupy the highest elected office in the city.

We might yet agree to disagree on this issue, and if we do, I’d love to be able to cast my vote for Jeff and to encourage others to do the same. I very much want to be able to do this, because during our work together on the steering committee of NA First, I saw a side of the candidate that I had not seen previously. I look forward to his answer.

In a retrospective mode, following is a brief overview culled from a mere two days of NAC posts in 2008.

Wonderfully and delightfully us … and that’s why major surgery is required.

Last evening the city council convened to consider a redistricting ordinance. The ordinance as submitted to the council was derived from the work of a committee. The committee was established for one reason and one reason alone. A previous incarnation of the council had for many years refused to cooperate with mandates set down by the very same Constitution referenced previously, and it had failed in its duty to fairly realign voting districts.

Because the previous council failed so spectacularly to do its job, citizens (of whom I was one) asked a Federal Court to interpret the council’s inactivity. Presiding over that body was a judge, whose job it is to apply Constitutional principles to problems like these, and whose job it is not is to be familiar with irrelevancies ranging from the location of one councilman’s house, whether dogs bark louder before a rainstorm, or the way that one neighbor never really thought highly of the color used by another to paint his house, and always complains about it at the Elks club meetings.

The judge sagaciously considered the previous council’s attitude with regard to its mandate to redistrict, and found it sorely wanting. He examined the previous council’s last-second attempt to implement a redistricting plan contrived in a Geritol-induced haze by the wife of one of its now mercifully retired members, and found that plan sorely wanting, too, because it did not adhere to the principles of the Constitution.

The Constitution. What a concept ... just not here.

In effect, the judge in question laughed the previous council out of court, made the very strong suggestion that it keep the Constitution in mind, and directed it to try again. The committee was approved and was formed, with three at-large councilmen and three community members (only one of whom was involved in the original lawsuit), and the council agreed to consider the results ...

… That is, unless you’re one of the four city council members, including the body’s president, Jeff Gahan, voting against Constitutional principles last evening, and in favor of local self-determination even if it means soiling a parchment all were sworn to uphold.

As ever, the Uncouncilman is “entitled to his opinion” – just not to his facts.

NAC received this e-mail comment earlier today.

In fact, if there is a new lawsuit, I want in as a plaintiff, as I am now pissed and disgusted the way certain councilpersons treat others for attempting to help move this city forward. The committee saved the city tens of thousands of dollars and what they received in return was being accused of politics and, regardless of the fact that they pay property taxes on homes in the city of New Albany, they’re outsiders.

Mere facts without lame excuses and sentimental claptrap ... in New Albany? Are facts even legal?

Jeff Gahan, who was the previous council' s president for two years, now stridently agrees with Price that redistricting is a council mandate, just as it was before, and yet, as we've seen, and as a Federal judge quite forcefully agreed, neither Price nor Gahan ... nor any other sitting council person at the time... was so sufficiently enamored of their Constitutional obligation to undertake redistricting. As best it can be determined, none even mentioned the possibility.

Better late than never, so here’s my list of favorite 2008 albums.

The marvelous thing about being a music buff is that there’ll always be time later to pick up on the releases and groups that were neglected or omitted, Glasvegas and TV on the Radio among them. It’s also wonderful to know that whether I live three more years or thirty, it won’t be necessary to waste a moment’s time on the inanity of country music.

That’s right, so get used to it: I’m a rock-pop-oriented listener, and unapologetically mainstream.

No, I enjoy lots of jazz and classical, too. Sorry, but the “no depression” genre completely depresses me, and although snippets of Americana and roots music peep through (Polk Miller, anyone?), it isn’t very often.

My favorite local, live music of the year was at Fringe Fest. Thanks to John Campbell for arranging it, and I enjoyed each and every one.

Feel free to post your own choices. As I write, “Day & Age” by the Killers is playing. I doubt it would have made the list.

TOP TEN (IN ORDER)

Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
I knew nothing about this British group before April, and now I can’t get one line from the song, “Grounds for Divorce” out of my head: “Soon we will be drinking with the seldom seen kid.” There’s a novel in that one solitary quotation, and more where it came from.

Counting Crows – Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings
Ever unfashionable group, and yet the “concept” moves me: The first half of the album chronicles how thoroughly you hate yourself for doing what it takes while on the prowl, and the other half how the behavior is even less excusable over hot coffee in the cold light of morning.

The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
Contending for “most listened to” disc of the year. Any songwriter who can use the words “subpoenaed” and “sequestered” in successive six-syllable, sing-along chorus lines deserves a vocabulary medal – and it makes sense. He “went there on business.”

Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul
Noisy guitars, the usual snarky attitude, Zak Starkey’s farewell on drums and ramped-up psychedelic ambience add up to only 60% of a classic album in spite of Noel Gallagher’s best songs in a decade, but that’s fine by me.

Coldplay – Viva La Vida
Let’s put it this way: In my world, “U2 soundalike” simply isn’t a pejorative.

Duffy – Rockferry
Welsh sprite with good pipes and an eerie Dusty Springfield vibe, whose atmospheric songs get played on television series promos far too often for my austere taste. I forgive her for it.

Johnny Dowd – A Drunkard’s Masterpiece
My soundtrack during transit to the beer fests during the month of May. A seamless montage of dysfunction, love, murder, betrayal and infidelity – but wait, isn’t he playing “Smoke on the Water” now?

Keane – Perfect Symmetry
Shameless, sugary melodic Brit-pop with meaningless verses and shimmering choruses that can be whistled in the shower. Doesn’t get any better than that. Another U2 opening act that I adore.

John Mellencamp –Life, Death, Love and Freedom
Love the man, and love the direction he’s been heading. Hint: Leftist, populist, bleak, and profoundly disturbed with the asinine legacy of W’s clueless exurban Amerika.

David Gilmour – Live in Gdansk
I’m only a casual Pink Floyd follower, and was not expecting to be enthralled by an album purchased primarily because of the Polish locale where the 2006 concert took place (the former Lenin Shipyards). But I was, and belatedly realize that Gilmour is a true giant.

HONORABLE MENTION (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

Radiohead – In Rainbows
This merits an asterisk: The album was placed on my 2007 list, although it was technically released in the US on January 1, 2008, and it is placed here again only because we saw the band live for the first time ever in Indianapolis on my 48th birthday, August 3, and the performance was transcendent.

Def Leppard – Songs from the Sparkle Lounge
The group continues to tour and record, and there are quality components on display each time out. Toby Keith’s cameo on the first track is not among them.

Supergrass – Diamond Hoo-Hah
The Brit aggregation’s previous album, “Road to Rouen,” is an all-time fave of mine, and expectations were tempered, correctly, for this follow-up.

My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
Granted, I don’t pay close enough attention, but where’d the Prince shtick come from? I love it.

Kings of Leon – Only by the Night
There’s something dangerous and spooky about these guys, and whatever it is, it’s growing on me. I liked the last album better, though, recalling how cool it was to listen while on serious painkillers following my shoulder surgery in ‘07.

REM – Accelerate
Had you forgotten what it’s like to devote multiple sessions to an REM album? Short, restorative, and providing future hope.

Lindsey Buckingham – Gift of Screws
He’s too eccentric to be included in the upper pantheon of creativity, even if fully deserving.

Goldfrapp – Seventh Tree
I’m told that the earlier releases bear less of the acid-trip madrigal influence. No complaints here. Dreamy, spacey, damned English.

The Feeling – Join with Us
Not an improvement over the group’s hook-laden debut. Jury’s out.

Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

Dirty but done: Cochran, Clere and DeNiro ... as young Vito Corleone.

Negative campaigning, also known more colloquially as "mudslinging", is trying to win an advantage by referring to negative aspects of an opponent or of a policy rather than emphasizing one's own positive attributes or preferred policies. In the broadest sense, the term covers any rhetoric which refers to an opponent, if only by way of contrast, but can also include attacks meant to destroy an opponent's character, which may veer into ad hominem.

--Wikipedia

By a razor-thin margin on Tuesday, Republican political newcomer Ed Clere bested incumbent Democrat Bill Cochran, a 34-year veteran of the Indiana House of Representatives (District 72).

Speaking personally, I have nothing against Cochran. I’ve voted for him many times previously, and in the end, I voted for him again in 2008 – although not because his candidacy gave me the warm fuzzies.

Far from it. My intention had been to vote for Clere. On the morning of the election, I still had a Clere sign in my yard in spite of a weekend’s worth of discussion and handwringing in the Confidential household (see below). I had considered removing the sign, but had neither the time nor the inclination to do so.

No sense admitting that I’d allowed myself to be duped. I ceased giving a damn either way, and just wanted it to be over so the bad taste might begin to be washed away.

It wasn’t until early Tuesday afternoon, when I was leaving the house to go to work after an early visit to the polls, that I noticed someone had uprooted the sign, turned it upside down, and replanted it in the same spot.

Imagine that. Overt symbolism, not petty vandalism … and in irony-free New Albany, no less.

----

There’s little need to feel sorrow over Cochran’s departure from the political scene. He undoubtedly accomplished much of merit during his seeming lifetime in power, and while he may have been no better than dozens of other Hoosiers to have held a state legislative office, he surely was no worse. Unfortunately, his sense of timing finally betrayed him, because apart from the case in favor of Clere, there were a handful of legitimate reasons to be wary about what proved to be Cochran’s final re-election campaign.

One was the sheer longevity of Cochran’s incumbency, and the way that such hoary tenures tend to sap the lifeblood of creativity and fresh thinking from the seat’s holder. In the end, Cochran was reduced to making the very worst argument in favor of continuing in his position (paraphrased): I’ve been there forever and am so well connected that you might as well keep me.

A trace of idealism and a smidgen of excitement would have been appreciated. Instead, we got the functionary’s rote repetition: I can fix things for you. The fatigue and the disconnection were sadly palpable, and as a result, Cochran was politically vulnerable.

There also were related questions pertaining to Cochran’s age and health, and while these weren’t openly raised, they were quietly discussed. I heard them often. Cochran seems well liked, and it’s understandable that folks didn’t want to embarrass him. That’s commendable. Like I’ve already noted, in spite of my doubts, I eventually voted for the man again.

----

Why did I?

Because my state’s centralized Rovepublicans took an "interest" in the match, disgracefully swiftboated Cochran with two barrages of nasty postcard mailings and a final pre-election weekend of attack television ads cut from the same cloth … and the latter, shockingly, proved to have been financed by the local campaign committee of the winning candidate, Clere, who originally disavowed a connection with the monied, autonomous cash dispenser whose ads he apparently ended up paying to air.

He disavowed it here, right in this very space. Wow.

I was left to ponder two pertinent questions.

Am I now annoyed because Clere was (treading ever so carefully through the thesaurus) disingenuous with us -- and, by extension, I was too much of a rube to do anything except take his earnest denials at face value?

Or, do I actually feel a grudging admiration for Clere’s clarity of ruthlessness in deploying an ends-justify-the-means strategy to topple the wobbly kingpin and seize the reins?

Right now, I’m leaning toward ignoring the first and answering the second of these questions in the affirmative, acknowledging that what’s done is done, and moving on. All indications are that Clere will be a responsive representative (why am I being nagged by the words "One Southern Indiana?), but future challengers should take note.

This new kid doesn’t fool around. He cooed sweet nothings ever so gently to the progressives, effectively silenced us, and then swung one damned fat stick against the old guy – who didn’t see it coming, and as a result, was decapitated in political terms.

Consequently, fairly or unfairly, and notwithstanding the other factors leading to Cochran’s defeat, the incumbent’s ouster will forever be remembered hereabouts as owing to the spate of disgusting, negative ads unleashed against him.

Yes, in most significant ways, that’s politics. Always has been, probably always will be, but as Mr. Clere Goes to Indianapolis with a garrot secreted in his pocket, there’s a palpable sense of Hamlet’s ghost floating somewhere nearby. I'm straining to hear what he has to say.

----

As a coda, the Courier-Journal offered these observations.

Republicans targeted the race but did not reveal their plans until the closing weeks when they and pro-GOP groups dumped more than $143,000 in cash and in-kind contributions into Clere's campaign …

… "(Voters) are looking for change at all levels, and this is no exception," Clere said. "I think they're ready for a new voice and fresh ideas."

All of which leaves one final question unanswered.

If Clere’s victory owes in any way to these eleventh-hour slimings, how does any of it constitute “fresh ideas”?

Now that it's finished, I suppose we’ll see.

An Extra Golden moment.

We're all going to be intensely busy saving the planet (and perhaps a neighborhood or two) soon enough. Until tomorrow when local hammers start banging out native rhythms again, enjoy a bit of celebration, fusing Chicago indie rock with Kenyan pop sensibilities.

Having been there when this video was shot, I'm in favor of Extra Golden opening for Wilco at the inaugural ball, completing a Windy City troika "powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline"-- which really isn't a half-bad idea for either Midwestern or African geographies when you stop to think about it.

President Barack Obama. Perhaps the Civil War was worthwhile, after all.

I'm taking the day off on Wednesday. Comment if you wish. We'll consider the local races on Thursday. Right now, there are larger matters to consider.

---

President Obama, an editorial in The Guardian.

They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world. Though bombarded by a blizzard of last-minute negative advertising that should shame the Republican party, American voters held their nerve and elected Barack Obama as their new president to succeed George Bush. Elected him, what is more, by a clearer majority than one of those bitter narrow margins that marked the last two elections.

Having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2000 and 2004 it felt at times fated that the Democrats would somehow complete a hat-trick of failures on election day 2008. Instead, fuelled by unprecedented financial support, the key things went right for them yesterday, from the moment just after midnight when Dixville Notch voted 15 to six for Mr Obama (the first time the early-voting New Hampshire hamlet had gone for a Democrat in 40 years), through to the early Obama success last night in the prized swing state of Pennsylvania and on into the battleground areas of middle America.

In the last two presidential elections, the American people divided down the middle, producing a both a geographical and a demographic divide that seemed increasingly set in stone. Blue Democratic America consisted of the west and the east coasts plus the upper Midwest. Red Republican America covered the swaths in between. Women, minorities, the poor and the highly educated voted Democratic. Men, white people, the rich and the religious delivered for the Republicans. In the mind of Mr Bush's strategist Karl Rove this division was the template of 21st century American politics, a base for a conservative counter-attack against 20th-century liberalism.

Rove's America was not just turned on its head yesterday. It was broken up and recast in a very different mould. One of Mr Obama's many achievements has been his refusal to accept the permanence of the blue-red divide. He has reached out across the divide to states and voters that the embattled Democratic party of the Reagan-Bush years had forgotten about, places like the South and the Rockies, voters like farmers and small business people.

With the Democrats powerfully consolidating their position in both houses of Congress yesterday, the shift was consolidated at state and district level. This marks the end of the conservative ascendancy of the past 30 years. Whether it now marks a new, sustained era of American liberalism of the sort which followed the election of 1932 must remain to be seen. What is not open to doubt is that Mr Obama's win is a milestone in America's racial and cultural evolution. It is 45 years since Martin Luther King, in the greatest of all late-20th century American speeches looked forward to the day when his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Almost unbelievably, that dream has now become a reality in the shape of America's first African-American leader and its first black first family. It is a day many thought they would never see. It is hard to know whether to weep or shout for joy now that it has arrived - probably both - but it is a lesson to the world.

Mr Obama will take office in January amid massive unrealisable expectations and facing a daunting list of problems - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the broken healthcare system, the spiralling federal budget and America's profligate energy regime all prominent among them. Eclipsing them all, as Mr Obama has made clear in recent days, is the challenge of rebuilding the economy and the banking system. These, though, are issues for another day. Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America's hope and, in no small way, ours too.