Brave & Strong.

Sportswriter Royce Young posted this on Twitter.

The prelude: "First question for (San Antonio Spurs coach) Gregg Popovich today was about Marco Belinelli's status for the game against the Grizzlies. This was his answer."

"Our number one priority as far as the country and society is concerned is racial justice, actually racial injustice that exists in our country and trying to make everything just for all people. Just as a reminder, in this world a lot of people really do not understand the breadth and depth of this horrific situation that Black people have been in for so long. And I just want to give you one example. We're all doing this on our gamedays as we find an opportunity, just so people understand how gross we have been. Not just now, but in the past. It didn't just happen; it's been this way for hundreds of years. As an example: Today, 120 years ago in North Carolina a constitutional amendment was approved and what it did was it established a literacy test for Black people that they had to pass before they could vote. White people did not have the same literacy test and it was so gross that they made a rule that if you had a relative before 1863 that had voted, and you're still illiterate now, you can vote. So that meant White people could vote if they had a relative before 1863 who voted. Well, Black people were enslaved and didn't have any relatives before 1863 who voted. So they were disenfranchised.

"There was a former Confederate officer, William Guthrie, who on the eve of the election made a statement and basically said ... this was very necessary to protect the White women, that they can't go out in the streets and don't feel safe when they're alone. We have to keep the quote-unquote colored people away from them. So he emphasized this just on the eve of the election , to make sure that their way would be the rule that people had to live under. This sort of activity went on over and over and over again, for all this time. And again, it's about education and culture, and none of us knew these kinds of things, none of us were taught these things. Black, Brown, Asian, Native American -- it doesn't matter, none of us were taught these things. Hopefully if people understand how gross this situation really is and how long it's been this gross , maybe we can make some headway.

Marco Belinelli is out tonight."

The most inevitable headline in all recorded history: "Coffey disputes New Albany mayoral vote totals."

We may never see another council representative as dependably entertaining as Dan Coffey.

Whether folks view this as good or bad largely depends on their tolerance to pain.

Coffey disputes New Albany mayoral vote totals, by Chris Morris (Tom May Sermon Coagulator)

NEW ALBANY — New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan won a third term last week by 1,224 votes over his nearest opponent. But one candidate for the same office, independent Dan Coffey, said he believes some of the votes Gahan received were intended for him or Republican challenger Mark Seabrook.

Coffey said many voters had issues with the touch screen machines ...

snip

"With the large turnout I'm not sure that I would have won. I do know we should have carried between 1,500 and 2,000 votes," he said. "With the machine taking votes from me and giving these same votes to one candidate, it would have altered the election results."

Canon on independent local voting: "You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with."

Some fine points by Dan Canon, who lives among us right here in Nawbany.

National Politics Taint Local Races And Lay Waste To Societal Norms, by Dan Canon (LEO Weekly)

... In years past, there was not a lot of daylight between Republican and Democratic candidates at the state and municipal levels in Indiana and Kentucky; you often still can’t distinguish one from the other if they don’t tell you. It is not uncommon for a local politician to switch parties depending on who is likely to get more votes at the top of the ticket. So, to a degree, national-level politics have long influenced what goes on in small towns.

The degree has gradually increased over the last few decades, as federal wedge issues have been made the focal point of every political contest in America, from the Clarksville dogcatcher to the Rabbit Hash dogmayor. This shift has not happened by accident; the GOP was shrewd enough to localize national issues in order to dominate state legislatures and redraw the federal map, a strategy that has proved stunningly successful ...

Allow me to skip to the conclusion.

... The real question is: Given that these are the devils we know, what does a (Matt) Bevin victory or a (Bob) Hall victory say about the degree to which people have adopted the national lens as the one through which all politics should be viewed? Dissembling, insulting teachers, bulldozing family homes or outright insane behavior — do these still matter to heartland voters on Election Day? Or, has our collective attention span been whittled away to the nubs of abortion and immigration, with no room for anything else?

If the former, then I think there’s real hope for our fragile republic and for the Midwest in particular. Nearly a hundred years ago, an editor of the Terre Haute Tribune said of iconic socialist Eugene Debs: “Ninety-five percent of the people [in Terre Haute] don’t like his ideas, but they worship the man.” For now, it is still acceptable — even desirable — to cast yourself as an independent voter in small-town Indiana. You vote not for the party but for the candidate you know; your friend, your neighbor, your friend’s neighbor, someone you went to elementary school with. You couldn’t imagine them doing anything too nefarious. As long as this is still true, there is a chance, however slim, that progressives who’ve laid roots in their communities can win municipal offices and state legislatures. In red states, the image of left-wing populists has needed rehabilitation at least since the McCarthy era, and mainstays of small towns are just the people to do it. Alas, it seems this cycle will be more about expelling the worst devils we know and meeting some new ones. Let’s hope we can at least do that.

Of course, it depends on what is meant by "progressive," given that the differences between Bob Hall and Jeff Gahan are paper-thin at best, but I'll refrain from quibbling with a thought-provoking essay.

As LEO reminds us: Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and law professor. “Midwesticism”is his short-documentary series about Midwesterners who are making the world a better place. Watch it at: patreon.com/dancanon.

Gahan commits violence against our most vulnerable because our most beautiful can't get enough of "sanitary conditions."

It was another morning among many, walking back home from work, entertaining myself by watching as drivers of automobiles routinely violated the traffic rules, all the while ready to turn into road-raging beasts if a solitary bicyclist were to do the same by rolling through a stop sign, when from the shadows emerged a gargantuan 300-pound male pedaling frantically atop a terribly creaky ten-year-old’s bike.

This is the sort of contemporary phenomenon that eludes comprehension, these full-grown adults on kiddie bikes, and yes, I’ve certainly heard the litany of their vagrancy, drug abuse and petty thievery. Some of it may even be true, and deprivation in one of its numerous sanctioned forms surely plays a part, although I insist on thinking it goes deeper.

I believe they're the dispossessed protesting against the current reign of the fashionistas, or as I've termed them previously, the "beautiful" people.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Is there a -cracy word for government by the beautiful people?

... To me the term "beautiful people" is decidedly pejorative.

It's inevitably the people who fancy themselves as beautiful, not necessarily in some accepted sense of outwardly physical beauty, but those possessing the right ideas, the right look, the right connections and the right way of viewing their privileged place in the world.

Obviously I reserve the right to heatedly differ with "right" in these contexts, extolling a alternative definition in the process.

As an awkward and ungainly ugly duckling of a book reader, I've learned the hard way that trying to fit in with the beautiful people is a fool's errand. Whenever I've tried it, the story has ended badly.

I'm not sure whether these experiences made me into a defiant jaded contrarian or the other way around, but there we are. I've become fairly contemptuous of the self-centered milieu of the beautiful people, who know far less about the world than they profess, and who tend to dismiss the "little people" -- and this may be one reason why Donald Trump is president, among other things.

There are beautiful people and homeless people, and almost axiomatically, never the twain shall meet. In fact the beautiful people tend to view the homeless people as blotches to be removed, lest property values plunge and visitors come to believe we weren't taught about deodorant.

To close this post, give it up for this blog's co-editor, who has a knack for finding the center of the target.

---

We were out of town when Mayor Gahan lied to and then destroyed a community of homeless people here in New Albany. His personal actions and the usual lack of substantive response from other Democratic officials are deplorable but not at all surprising given their consistent track records of subsidizing the wealthy while seeking to limit or penalize nearly everyone else. 

What’s mostly gone unremarked, though, owing to them being wholly unremarkable in this country, are the other lessons again made clear: 

1. It’s not just possible but highly probable for working people to be unable to afford a decent place to live. 

2. Medical situations to which we are all susceptible make and help keep people homeless every day.

I’m sure, via occasional donations, thoughts and prayers, etc., some of you think you’re offering support for the homeless. The fact is, though, there isn’t a single good and justifiable reason why the factors above need to be true. When we continue to respect and re-elect a leadership class that doesn’t support a living wage and universal health care, we are choosing to make people’s lives look and function like the photos and videos we’ve all seen too much of lately. We are choosing, in the wealthiest empire to ever exist, to set the humanitarian baseline so low that “unsafe, unsanitary” housing camps are accepted as a “natural” consequence of our systemic beliefs and actions. 

Year after year, a bulk of the American voting public, regardless of party and desperately clung-to delusional self-images, actively chooses and reinforces numerous forms of poverty and violence. It’s what we electorally say we want and it’s precisely what we get.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Did you experience glitches while voting in the primary?

During the early voting period leading up to the May 7 primary election, and on election day itself, the Green Mouse heard several reports similar to this one.

Be very careful when you vote. My daughter and I voted Saturday. She had to watch closely, as her selection kept jumping to someone she did not want. It took her a few times to get her vote in correctly! DOUBLE CHECK YOUR SCREEN WHEN VOTING BEFORE HITTING PRINT, and verify that your vote on the print out is correct!

In other words, instances of the machines confirming a name on the screen and then printing the opponent's name. There also were reports of polling place workers feeding ballots into the hopper, not the voter. Rule of thumb is that workers are not allowed to handle the ballot or to view it.

Verily, the primary turned out to be a tad heated, as with the Election Board's earnest request that candidates go without signage at polling places -- and members of Gahan's beak-wetting coterie openly thumbing their noses at it with their chairman's brutal connivance.

Here at NA Confidential we've remained observant, and yet also circumspect. This owes in large measure to the logical likelihood that any such "jumping" glitches would affect all candidates equally. But it must be conceded that more than a few reports like the one above made the social media rounds beginning on May 8.

It is the Green Mouse's understanding that a citizen inquiry has been made, and the Election Board may be taking these reports into consideration; consequently, we'll pass this along and encourage any voter who experienced anything noteworthy to speak with the Secretary of State's office and tell them about it.

The number is 1-866-461-8683.

"America needs to regularise the status of millions of illegal immigrants, while further improving border security to win consent for that change."

We're wasting a lot of time in this country on the ephemeral. I can only hope the last sentence is prophetic.

---

Donald Trump’s real target is not illegal immigration but diversity, by Lexington (The Economist)

That battle is already lost

When Juan Garcia started work as an urban planner for the government of Gaston County in 1997, he reckons he was the only Latino among its 1,400 employees. Hub of a dying textiles industry, on the western edge of Charlotte, the county was missing out on the boom already rippling through the periphery of North Carolina’s most dynamic city. For that reason Gastonia, its altogether less zippy capital, was not seeing many of the Mexican immigrants then pouring into the state, to labour on the building sites erupting in Charlotte and revive the poultry industry in Union County, east of the city. But this was about to change.

Finding opportunities overlooked by others in Gastonia’s run-down factories and mills, migrants started settling in the town’s trailer parks and poor black neighbourhoods. Its Hispanic population soared, to around 6,000, or 9% of the total, within a few years. This caused friction with Gastonia’s white majority, recalls Mr Garcia, who was born in Colombia. “Mexicans like to get physically closer when they’re talking to you than Anglos do. They might slaughter a chicken in their yard. They play loud music there.” But the ill-will rarely went beyond grumbling about the migrants’ poor English. Some in Gastonia said this reflected the much deeper tensions in the South between whites and blacks. Resentment of immigrants was only a brief distraction from that main drama. In any event, the migrants, many of whom had either moved from Texas or come directly from the Rio Grande, expected no favours. “So long as you treat people the right way, you’re all right,” shrugged Elvira, who came to North Carolina to pick tobacco 25 years ago and now works at the “Las Americas” supermarket in Gastonia.

The influx of Hispanics to the town, and hundreds of unfashionable cities like it, illustrates how much they have changed America over the past three decades. The Hispanic population has risen ninefold since the 1960s, to around 60m. Its members, many of them second- and third-generation immigrants, are dispersing across the country, driving growth and changing the social fabric wherever they go. While the white population is on the cusp of declining, most states have flourishing Hispanic communities. North Carolina, which had around 40,000 Hispanics in 1990, now has almost a million. The high growth rates it has meanwhile sustained owe a lot to this migrant infusion.

To men like Julian, in other words, who had popped into Las Americas on a half-hour break between his jobs. From 5.45am to 3.30pm he works as a machinist in one of Gastonia’s surviving looms; between 4pm and 11pm he drives a fork-lift in a packaging factory. Thus have Gastonia’s Hispanics filled gaps in its old industries, taking low-skilled jobs that blacks and whites no longer want. Meanwhile the many small landscaping and construction businesses they launched have forged an overdue connection between Gastonia and the new services-based economy of the South, a 20-minute drive across the Catawba river in Charlotte. Recognising the community’s importance, as well as its needs, Gaston County now employs over 100 Hispanic public servants, with a premium on bilingual doctors, nurses and social workers.

This transformation is the essential context in which to view Donald Trump’s talk of a crisis at the southern border. The president appears to be motivated less by genuine concern for the state of the border than by his white supporters’ feelings of anxiety over demographic change. His promise of a border-wall, which few immigration experts think America needs, following a steep decline in the number of illegal crossings, is a sign of that. In fact, were Mr Trump not so obviously using his promised border-wall as a political device, he might have built one by now. Last year he turned down an offer from the Democrats that would have given him wall money in return for comprehensive immigration reform—far more money than his emergency is likely to get him. In short, the physical promise of the wall is largely a figment. It is a symbol of Mr Trump’s tacit pledge to his white supporters to defend them against the diversifying of American society that many fear. It is too late for that, however. Most of the growth in America’s Hispanic population is the result of natural increase, not immigration. Mr Trump’s nativist stand is positively Canute-like.

It also carries great costs. The most important is the forgone opportunity to cauterise America’s immigration sore that his presidency represents. The anxiety of Mr Trump’s followers is exacerbated—explained, even—by the chaotic legacy of decades of illegal immigration. It stands to reason that America’s roughly 11m illegal migrants, most of whom are Hispanic, are willing to work harder, in tougher conditions, than indigenous people. Economists may argue over the effect of that on wages; but it is a theoretical disadvantage to natives that they are bound to resent.

Meanwhile the insecurity illegal migrants live with is a barrier to assimilation, which also causes tension. It was fairly amazing that most of the shoppers in Las Americas, despite having spent years in America, spoke little or no English. The answer to these tangled problems has long been clear. America needs to regularise the status of millions of illegal immigrants, while further improving border security to win consent for that change. Given Mr Trump’s hold on the nativist right, he could have done this. Yet that would have required him to want to fix the mess, and not seek to profit from it.

A wave is coming

The pay-off for his party will be short-lived, however, because of another development among Hispanics. For several reasons, including the fact that many are illegal and unable to vote, their political clout has lagged behind their numerical rise. In North Carolina, they are 10% of the population and 3% of registered voters. Yet Hispanic citizens are now entering the property-owning middle-class in vast numbers. The looming calamity for Republicans, who have done so much to alienate them, is that such people vote.

By the numbers: In 2018, Applegate performed better than Charbonneau in the 6th council district.

On Tuesday the Green Mouse reported that Sam Charbonneau might be seeking a city council seat in the 6th district. Speaking for myself, he was in attendance at the last council meeting; given the masochism of such daring decisions, few disinterested citizens bother with the peanut gallery unless they're contemplating involvement ... or resistance.

Charbonneau's only previous campaign came last year. Here are the votes for Indiana House in 2018 from the 6th council district.

Precinct  Ed Clere (R)      Sam Charbonneau (D)

27:            198                               261
41:            336                               276
42:            271                               221
43:            163                               189
44:            323                               300
                                                                    
Total:      1,291                             1,247

We see that even while losing the 6th, Charbonneau did quite well, especially for a first-time candidate. Overall, Clere won re-election in 2918 with around 55% of the vote, but in the 6th, the tally was just shy of 51%.

Yesterday Jason Applegate (D) announced his bid for an at-large city council seat in 2019, having lost a commissioner's race last fall to Shawn Carruthers (R) by a razor-thin margin.

Jason Applegate files for NA city council at-large. Does this mean fellow Democrat Sam Charbonneau will challenge Scott Blair in the 6th?

Both Applegate and Charbonneau reside in the 6th district, so it might be instructive to compare the totals in the 6th for the Carruthers-Applegate contest in 2018.

Precinct       Shawn Carruthers    Jason Applegate

27:                          171                           276
41:                          310                           294
42:                          228                           252
43:                          145                           201
44:                          282                           320
                                                                               
Total:                    1,136                         1,343

Applegate won four of five precincts in the 6th and rolled up a 54%-46% advantage over Carruthers. This seems to suggest that Charbonneau opting for at-large and Applegate in the 6th would be more advantageous to Democrats than the other way around -- although we still don't know for sure whether Charbonneau will be running at all.

Yet again, the big voter turnout in 2018 (around half the registered voters in Floyd County, roughly double the norm) makes it difficult to compare apples with apples.

Here are the results from the last 6th district city council race in 2015.

CITY OF NEW ALBANY COUNCIL MEMBER DIST 6
Total votes: 1,345
LARRY BELCHER (REP)       358      26.62%
CLIFF STATEN (DEM)          404      30.04%
SCOTT A. BLAIR (IND)        583      43.35%

For the past two election cycles, Blair's status as an Independent has muddied traditional norms in the 6th district. He's certainly more R than D in terms of appeal, but in 2019, the Republicans have Scott Evans, a candidate with more potential upside than Belcher, and if Charbonneau goes for it, the Democrats will boast a hard worker who lost in the 6th by a very slim margin to the presumably unassailable Clere.

This one's going to be fascinating.

Fezziwig's Christmas Reading 1: Thank a socialist for voting rights.

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.

`These are but shadows of the things that have been,' said the Ghost. `They have no consciousness of us.'

History is a fascinating thing.

Like Voting Rights? Thank a Socialist, by Adam J. Sacks (Jacobin)

As voting rights increasingly come under attack, we shouldn't forget the crucial role that early socialists played in fighting for universal suffrage.

Stolen elections, decrepit voting infrastructure, draconian ID laws. The recent attacks on voting rights in the US might seem like an outgrowth of pure partisanship — the desperation of a minoritarian party using any means necessary to hold onto political power. But the GOP’s brazen attempts to restrict voting access (particularly for African Americans) should also be viewed as symptoms of a disease that has long afflicted elites: recalcitrant opposition to democracy, including the right to vote.

Since the advent of the modern state, ruling classes have tried to restrain the voting power of workers and those not “well born.” Contrary to the mainstream story that capitalism naturally gave rise to democracy, establishment powers in nineteenth-century Europe restricted the vote for as long as they possibly could. Only when faced with mass mobilization — or when continent-wide war wiped out working-class males en masse — was it clear that the franchise could no longer be withheld.

The particulars of individual European countries varied. In some nations, following intense struggles, workers won limited forms of universal male suffrage before World War I. More commonly, broad suffrage rights appeared only after the war.

But what was consistent were the actors pushing for universal suffrage: trade unions and, crucially, socialist parties. In fact, what has been called the “democratic breakthrough” of the nineteenth century could easily be called the “socialist breakthrough” ...

"Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict."

I'll be perfectly honest with you.

My 40th high school reunion took place earlier this year. I had a previous commitment one of the two nights, and I was busy the other night but might have been able to be there for a little while had I chosen to expend the effort.

I didn't, because my preference is to remember my high school classmates as they were, not as they've become, at least some of the ones with whom I was closest, because I'd rather not listen to higher-income white guys have a few too many drinks and begin prattling on about the wonders of Trump.

That's bullshit.

In fairness, I know for a fact that many of my old friends from school don't feel this way, and of course not all of them are higher income. Yes, I know it's very complicated. But Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and to insist that this disease emanates solely from working class Americans when the national Democratic Party has itself promoted trickle-down economic inequality for decades, while merrily cashing checks from the same donors as Trump's, is bullshit on top of bullshit.

Sorry about my better-heeled pals from days of yore. At the same time, nothing much occurred prior to the advent of Trump to suggest their outcomes would be any different. I've no clue how I managed to escape the contagion. Travel? Core values? Plain dumb luck? I'm just grateful I did.

Now, please read this article in its entirety.

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh (The Guardian)

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

 ... Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

On the topic of the forthcoming Floyd County election.

On social media, my close friend Mark Cassidy had this to say:

"I’m voting for Steve Burks. Who is with me?"

Burks is the Republican incumbent as New Albany Township Trustee, and when another reader asked why, Mark clearly explained.

Steve has proven to me that he can be even-handed. I need to take lessons in respectful discourse from him. Yes, he and I will not agree on many national issues, but that does enter into Trustee duties. Honesty, respect, and civility mean a lot to me on the local level, qualities sadly lacking in the local Democratic Party and most of their candidates. That’s why I’m voting straight Republican in city/county elections until the leadership of Floyd County Democrats is changed. I encourage you to do the same. I know it hurts some “good ‘uns” but those people need to stand up and be counted. I see little sign of that. If they want my vote, and hopefully many others, they'd better start.

For a very long time I've been debating what a marooned Euro-zone Social Democrat like me, still hugging left amid a flood of pathetic Joe Donnelly climb-downs, might contribute to this dialogue.

With the exception of previously stating a tactical expression of support for Carrie Klaus, the Democratic candidate for New Albany Township Advisory Board -- which I've undertaken because of the hope, forlorn or otherwise, that she'll soon cross over to the correct side of "street grid is social justice" history -- I've been unwilling to say much for the record.

However, I replied to Mark at Facebook, and will repeat my response here, in slightly augmented form.

Where there is a Libertarian alternative in state races, I'll vote Libertarian. This spares me the pure nausea of contemplating Indiana's U.S. Senate race, already the impetus for a vast increase in air sickness bag sales. As for Tennessee Trey, well, no.

Liz Watson there. 'Nuff said.

I'm pretty much in line with Mark at the local level apart from a contrarian's unwillingness to vote straight-party-anything.

As such, the prime exceptions for me are the aforementioned Klaus (but has she taken a position on the public housing putsch? It might be a deal-breaker) and Anna Murray, who is challenging Ron Grooms for our State Senate seat.

To me, as with Mark, the prime objective of the mid-term election in 2018 is acting in whatever way that hastens the dissolution of the Dickey/Gahan/Nash "numb-o-cratic" clique, plain and simple.

Another election cycle of DemoDisneyDixiecratic losses and the way should be cleared for the clique's final breakdown in 2019.

This means I'll be casting votes for Republicans. There was a time when this might have been a breathtaking revelation, but now, in addition to the imperative of dismembering Dickeyism, I can honestly say that having come to know local Republicans a bit better over the years, I've found vast tracts of common ground at the grassroots level of local governance.

I can't be a Republican, ever. I'm a left-winger. They're not. But using Mark's words as a guide-- honesty, respect and civility -- my conscience is clean and serene.

Yes, this means refraining from voting for a few quality Democrats, ones I know to be competent; in some of these races, both candidates are quite worthy. It pains me, and rest assured it actually isn't "personal" in any of these races, but as Mark so presciently notes, their cognitive dissonance has grown tiresome.

It's long past time for the ones who actually "get it" to stand up, step forward, and challenge the local Democratic Party's catastrophically narrow orthodoxy.

If the rotten patronage structure can be torn down now, maybe it can be rebuilt into something genuinely useful, consistently ethical and worthy of a leftist's support for the future.

That's all I have to say about it. The Confidentials will vote next week at the clerk's office, then leave town for a trip to Gdansk, Poland and a visit to the home of the Solidarity trade union movement. I'll be visiting the European Solidarity Center in Gdansk for a few lessons in history and democracy of the sort seldom encountered at 312 Bank Street.

In closing, having been a candidate for office twice before, allow me to commend everyone locally who has chosen to run -- even if I disagree with you. The community needs lots more contestants next spring in the primary for municipal positions, but we can't make sense of 2019 until the evening of Tuesday, November 6.

Thanks for reading.

ON THE AVENUES: Fighting the power with ballots, not bullets.

ON THE AVENUES: Fighting the power with ballots, not bullets.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Next summer will be the 30th anniversary of my month’s stay in the German Democratic Republic, or as we still refer to the fading image in our cracked rear view mirrors, East Germany.

In 1989 I had the opportunity to spend more than three months in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the USSR. This period remains a defining experience in my life, something that continues to intrigue and haunt me all these years later.

Regular readers of the NA Confidential blog know this, seeing as I’ve told the story so many times before. In 1989, I was still traveling in Europe when suddenly the Berlin Wall came down. No one expected it, least of all the Ost Berliners who lined up at checkpoints on the fateful evening of November 9 with little more in mind than seeing what life was like on the other side.

Earlier the same day, border guards would have opened fire on them for trying to cross.

For them, for me, for virtually all of us, the Cold War’s spheres of influence seemed eternal at the time. We had no idea drastic change was just around the corner. There were minor fissures, hairline cracks and other warning signs, but no indication they wouldn’t be resolved within the overall context of the postwar victors’ division of power.

Here, there and everywhere, politics ultimately is about power -- who has it, who doesn’t, who is in, who is out -- and who ultimately decides. In East Germany, the Communist regime addressed the people like this: If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

However, it was different in Hungary, no less a Communist state than the GDR, and to be sure, capable of undemocratic threats and repression when necessary. Hungarian leader Janos Kadar artfully borrowed money from the capitalist countries in order to make consumer goods more readily available, thus altering the political power equation: If you’re not against us, you’re for us.

These days it is assumed that political power is about money and vice versa, but in fact it isn’t always about money, even for Mitch McConnell, and as numerous small-time, tinhorn dictators have proven. Not all those Communist-era kingpins were in it for the money, although the closer you got to the Balkans, the more likely there’d be noticeable self-enrichment. Like Kadar, some of them were personally austere.

I’ve always cited Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu as the worst composite of all worlds. He was a true doctrinal believer in Marxism-Leninism who didn’t at all practice what he preached, amassing personal wealth amid widespread societal misery, and also imbued with an evangelistic mission to inflict his inner aesthetic (read: atrocities) on a captive population.

It was power, all right, and the oppressive ability to puff his own ego by commanding uniformity in thought and design from people who didn’t possess the means to resist -- or so Ceausescu thought, until he learned the hard way.

You’ll recall the year 1989 concluding with Ceausescu in the company of his widely detested wife Elena, the two of them captured by revolutionaries, given only a cursory trial and then shot on the spot in the courtyard of a school.

It is reputed that those soldiers chosen to carry out the verdict refused the option of a conscience-salving random blank round, and were so eager they actually started shooting before the video was ready to record the executions.

Frustrated small-timers like Ceausescu who possess grand, unfulfilled ambitions invariably become the worst leaders of all, and to repeat, it isn’t always about the money. Rather, their purported political stewardship becomes a process for assuaging the pain of being picked last for kickball in elementary school.

They begin by seeking vengeance against their perceived betters, but like any addiction, soon too much evening-up isn’t enough, and it doesn’t take long before these big fish in small ponds are mashing members of their own peer group underfoot.

Granted, some of them die with their boots off, in bed. Sick and old, Kadar began seeing the ghosts of the people he’d ordered killed on his way to the top. All the goulash communism in Budapest couldn’t help him by then, and Shakespeare would have had a field day with Kadar’s dementia-laden inner terror.

In 1989, the DDR’s Erich Honecker already was suffering from cancer, perhaps the outcome of his nation’s institutionalized environmental catastrophe. Honecker fled the collapsing police state of his own creation and washed up in Chile, where the terminal disease killed him with the same remorseless efficiency as policeman manning his wall’s many towers targeted potential escapees.

And so I say death to chains … and to tyrants, every last one of them.

---

Maybe I’m digressing, maybe not, so let me try to arrive at a point. While a particular monopoly on political power may seem to be permanent and irreversible, history is filled with evidence to the contrary, and in 1989, as explained here, I witnessed it myself.

The Berlin Wall would stand forever, right up to the point when emboldened ordinary people began chipping at the asbestos-laced monstrosity with screwdrivers, shovels, tire irons and their bare hands. In less than a year, Germany was reunified. The East Bloc disappeared almost overnight, and a few years later, so did the USSR.

The elites, juntas and cliques may seem to have all the power, all the money, all the propaganda, and all the guns – metaphorical or otherwise.

But they never, ever have a monopoly on truth, honesty or simple human decency.

Paranoia’s a big destroyer. So is hubris. Even worse is the reality once addressed by John Lennon: “One thing you can’t hide, is when you’re crippled inside.”

It can be hidden for a while, though not forever. Back in 2008, there was a huge red maple on the west side of our house. It seemed healthy enough, then one night we heard a crash. A branch had fallen, barely missing our car parked in the driveway. Shining a flashlight up the trunk, we could see the tree was hollow and termite infested.

There was little choice except to have the red maple taken down, which was done just a few days before the damaging straight-line winds from the hurricane occurring to the southwest, in the Gulf of Mexico, which probably would have knocked the hollow tree on our house.

I really hated losing that tree. But we needed to be rid of it before further damage occurred. Trees are to be loved, but has anyone of sound mind ever fretted over losing a despot?

This guy got it right.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This passage wasn’t written by Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa or even the fellow clad in denim carving away at the Berlin Wall with his souvenir Bulgarian pen knife.

Rather, it was Thomas Jefferson.

---

Recent columns:

September 11: ON THE AVENUES: After 49 years, two more reasons to be an Oakland A's fan.

September 9: ON THE AVENUES: May, Kennedy, wigs and prayers, but where's the delightful infidel gardening column?

August 30: ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

Courtesy of The Onion.

Here's the link; I've cut and pasted the entire page, and the links are active. They'll take you to the county clerk's site.

But first, a word from our sponsor.

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HOW TO VOTE IN FLOYD COUNTY 

Thank you for your interest in voting in the upcoming election. Provided below are various ways you can vote in the election. Click on a title below to view more information about that method of voting.

Please Note: You must register to vote at least 29 days before the election. Click here for more information on voter registration

ABSENTEE-IN-PERSON VOTING

All registered voters in Indiana are eligible to vote absentee-in-person at the County Clerk’s Office beginning 29 days before Election Day. 

Absentee-in-Person voters will sign an ABS-7 which is a Absentee Ballot Voted in person envelope in which they will place their ballot into after the cast their vote and scan it through the scanner.  That envelope will be sealed by the voter and placed in the ballot box. The box will be emptied and the ballots will be placed in a secure room until the election results have been certified.

ABSENTEE-BY-MAIL VOTING

MILITARY & OVERSEAS VOTING

EARLY VOTING AT SATELLITE VOTING SITES

EARLY VOTING AT SATELLITE VOTING SITES ON 2 SATURDAYS BEFORE ELECTION DAY

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ELECTION DAY VOTING AT VOTE CENTERS

MORE INFORMATION

A pirate looks at '15: "In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections."

I was a year ahead of my time, but that's okay. The point was made, posterity will be generous, and I can't thank Seven Percenters often enough.

In the U.S., Almost No One Votes in Local Elections, by Kriston Capps (City Lab)

... As if incredibly low voter turnout weren’t dispiriting enough, mayoral elections in the U.S. are also barely representative of the population. In the most recent mayoral elections across 50 U.S. cities, the median voter age was 57—evidence of an enormous gap in civic participation between retiring Baby Boomers and rising Millennials. Worse still, perhaps, voters are overrepresented in some neighborhoods and dramatically underrepresented in others.

A new report from Portland State University finds that almost nobody bothers to vote in mayoral U.S. elections. Those who do tend to be much older than the median resident and hail from more affluent neighborhoods to boot. That’s not necessarily a surprise, although the degree of disparity in local voting patterns is alarming.

Politics, good judgment, social media, and why I refrained from voting in the Floyd Circuit Judge race.

On October 12, I posted this paragraph to Judge Terry Cody's campaign page at Facebook. According to the page, the campaign is "very responsive to messages."

Hello. It's impossible for me to vote for Keith Henderson, but I'd like to vote FOR Terry, whom I respect and admire. However, there's the matter of two-way streets in New Albany. Some might say that this topic falls outside the judge's jurisdiction, but I view it differently. Being able to survey facts and gauge research surely impact a voter's view of a candidate's fundamental judgment, which after all is of critical importance for a judge. Besides, a sitting judge is an undisputed mover of community opinion whether or not he's actively politicking. I don't think it is asking too much to get a clarification of Judge Cody's position on two-way streets. Thanks.

Yesterday was the 21st. I'd received no reply, and it was time to go to the clerk's office and vote. I couldn't vote for Henderson, who in effect asks us to allow him to adjudicate his own ethical violations.

But I couldn't vote for Cody, either, because my question went unanswered. The judge declined to explain when asked, but I will -- even if you didn't.

The last time I brought this up on social media, several readers made the point that a judge's campaign isn't political. Cody himself soft-pedaled his involvement with politics when asked during Harvest Homecoming by the News and Tribune's Elizabeth Beilman.

J. Terrence Cody, Democratic Floyd County Circuit Court judge who is running for re-election, was among them.

Cody is running for his fourth term.

"Judges cannot participate in the political process except in years in which they are on the ballot," Cody said.

That means he can't campaign five years out of his six-year term.

To which I must respond:

Cody may well lie low in non-election years, but he is constantly and intimately involved with local Democratic Party politics. See whose name is at the top of this list?

I was at the Tree Board meeting in May when Cody attended and let it be known that he wanted trees removed from city-owned property around his house. Does anyone reading really believe that once a man as prominent as Cody indicated his preference, that there'd be a check-and-balance in place to fairly review the request?

Plainly, Cody is a privileged political figure in the community, and here's the kicker: That's exactly as expected, and should come as no surprise. It's disingenuous to insist otherwise. Politics is about power; who has it, and who uses it.

Does anyone reading seriously believe that Cody does not have power -- every day, every year -- or that he declines to exercise the power he obviously has?

I didn't think so. Henderson exercises power, and so does anyone seeking an elected office, and as such, in spite of rote protests to the contrary, it is perfectly legitimate for me as a voter to acknowledge this reality, and to base my vote (or non-vote) for a candidate on real-world political grounds -- and, in the case of a candidate for judge, to ask myself a simple, pointed question: In his political undertakings, is he or she exercising good judgment?

See what I did there?

Quite apart from the clear-cutting instincts, one he unfortunately shares with other ranking Democrats and more than a few historic preservationists, Cody has let it be known that two-way streets are not to his taste, and when he says this, whether aloud or privately, it's not the opinion of John Q Public. It's coming from a political figure who possesses and uses power.

It's also poor judgment.

I offered Cody the opportunity to clarify his stance, and whether or not he even knew about the Facebook posting is irrelevant, because social media works a certain way, and anyone connected to his campaign knows it. There was no answer to my question.

Consequently, there was no vote cast for Terry Cody.

Tolling inches ever closer as Jeff Gahan announces exciting new water slide.

The funniest part about yesterday's news stories about impending final approval of Ohio River bridges tolling rates can be summarized by this single sentence, in "Final Tolling Plan Released For Ohio River Bridges Project" (by Rick Howlett, WFPL):

Officials will vote on the tolling plan Wednesday.

Vote?

Think of it as the sort of election these guys used to hold.

Ah, yes; those halcyon days of 98.6% "yes," with the lone dissenter forced to relocate to luxury apartments being constructed from balsa and Elmer's.

Speaking of brand-dead regimes, over here in New Albany ...

It's going to be a long and degrading year, isn't it?

Vote early, vote now, vote often and vote Pirate.

The photo above has been doctored, and the extended link with complete information on when, how and where to vote is here: http://www.floydcounty.in.gov/resident/votecenter.htm

The secrecy of voting ... and why the secret ballot should be abolished.

Before Matt Nash recounts his difficulty in casting a secret ballot in the year 2015, let's begin by considering the origins of this institution.

Did you know that Louisville was a pacesetter?

Abolish the Secret Ballot, by Sasha Issenberg (The Atlantic)

For the United States’ first century, Americans elected their leaders in full view of their neighbors, gathering on courthouse steps to announce their votes orally or hand a distinctive preprinted ballot or unfolded marked paper to a clerk. Such a public process made elections ripe for bribes and threats, although the scene around American polling places never matched Australia’s, where a population of criminals and goldbugs made electoral intimidation something of a democratic pastime. To end such shenanigans, each of Australia’s colonies began shifting to a secret ballot during the 1850s, and in 1872 England followed suit.

A decade and a half later, the reform crossed the Atlantic. Louisville, Kentucky, enacted a so-called Australian ballot in 1888 ...

Given Floyd County's propensity for gazing longingly into the rear view mirror, the surprising thing is that we ever accepted the ballot's secrecy in the first place, but we did. Take it away, Matt.

NASH: The secrecy of voting, by Matt Nash (Morris Trucking Fetish Daily)

 ... After the third failed attempt, a man came over and took my ballot and started to review the choices that I had made to see if I had “voted wrong.” I am not exactly sure what would happen if I would had actually voted wrong, but I would hope that the first machine would have forced me to correct the vote before it printed out my receipt. I can’t imagine that it would print out a ballot that showed I had voted for two candidates in a race where I was only allowed to pick one.

At that point, my wife was ready to put hers through the machine when someone said we should compare the two ballots. This is when someone from across the room yelled “secret ballot.”

I started to laugh because two workers already had access to who I voted for and one of them actually looked over it. I said I didn’t mind if we compared, and they were close to identical, and then her ballot went straight through the machine without any issues.