Tonight at 6:30 p.m. is the annual "Taste for Art & History" fundraiser at the Carnegie Center for Art & History, located at 201 E. Spring Street in downtown New Albany. The bill of fare includes wines from all over the place, craft beers from NABC and World Class Beverages, gourmet snacks and a wide-ranging silent auction. Interested? The price is $55 for members and $60 for non-members, and you can call (812) 944-7336 or visit http://www.carnegiecenter.org/ for information.
Last year, the Carnegie Center's annual fete became a flash point for the ongoing guerrilla war fought against modernity by selected local troglodytes, at least one of whom have since been exiled to Birdseye or points beyond, while others remain, hooded, hiding, and with brickbats in hand.
For the sake of fond remembrance, here are the links:
Ritz, Whiz and Ripple: Envious troglodytes point random disinformation generator at the Carnegie Center, demand full investigation of wine and cheese.
Should I have taken issue with the fiscally conservative random rumor generator? Or is doing so merely enabling dysfunction?
Meanwhile, back in the slightly more progressive present (that is, if Dan Coffey doesn't have his way), NABC's Bank Street Brewhouse eventually will be doing business right across the street from the Carnegie Center, and I put together a fact sheet for distribution this evening.
---
Craft brewing returns to downtown New Albany for the first time since 1935 when NABC opens its Bank Street Brewhouse later this year. This second NABC location will be located at 415 Bank Street downtown, adjacent to the Carnegie Center for Art and History. Work to renovate the former Bakery Thrift Store is ongoing.
NABC’s goals:
To be leaders in the craft beer segment and the community, not followers.
To be progressive, not regressive.
To challenge and to educate, not to pander.
The New Albanian Brewing Company is:
Sportstime Pizza (founded 1987)
Rich O’s Public House (founded 1992)
NABC (started brewing in 2002)
The new Bank Street Brewhouse at 415 Bank Street will function as NABC’s larger-capacity production brewery, with a 15-barrel mash and kettle and 30-barrel fermentation capacity, with fabrication by industry leader DME. Primary NABC brands like Elector, Community Dark, Hoptimus, Bob’s Old 15-B, Mt. Lee, Beak’s Best, Kaiser and Thunderfoot will be brewed, conditioned, kegged and canned for regional distribution. It will also be possible for consumers to buy kegs and carry-out growlers.
NABC’s existing brewery on the North Side at 3312 Plaza Drive will remain in operation, with small batches, seasonals and specialties being brewed there. NABC’s existing pizzeria and pub, which has garnered nationwide recognition for excellence, will function as it always has.
Why expand to downtown New Albany?
12% craft beer growth rates nationally in each of the past two years
Local and regional potential for distribution of NABC brands in kegs and cans (both environmentally friendly modes of packaging)
Rapid expansion of the “eat and drink locally” movement
The craft beer demographic mirrors that of the “creative class” and “New Urbanism”, all of which combine for downtown transformation
What else besides brewing at the new operation?
NABC’s Bank Street Brewhouse will feature a taproom, with NABC’s beers on tap, and a limited Belgian-style café food menu prepared by a professional chef. NABC wearables, glassware and souvenirs will be sold on site.
What does it all mean?
The Bank Street Brewhouse will be phased into operation, with the taproom opening first in the 4th quarter of 2008 (target: November), and the brewery to be installed during the fall and winter (target: January). Beer will be ready for distribution in the 1st quarter of 2009, and the existing NABC brewery will supply the tap room and selected outside accounts until then.
Significantly, the NABC Bank Street Brewhouse represents an expansion of an established, existing business from a suburb back into a reviving downtown, and as such, NABC firmly believes there is a future both for the brewery’s “progressive pints” and for the cause of progressivism itself in city of New Albany… and Floyd County, metro Louisville and the surrounding region.
Unsurprisingly, the craft brewing revolution has prospered by emphasizing beer’s artisanal, localized roots, and in like fashion New Urbanism urges the progressive reuse of cities. For NABC to return brewing to a downtown, urban setting is to complete the circle initiated by New Albany’s beer-loving founders two centuries ago.
Roger A. Baylor, NABC Beer Director
(For my business partners Amy and Kate, our brew staff and all other employees, and both the New Albanian Brewing Co., Inc., and New Albanian Bank Street Brewery, Inc.)
Questions? Call me at 502-468-9710
Friday, September 05, 2008
"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/Nor hell a disingenuousness like Jeff Gahan scorned."
It wasn’t the substance of what happened at last evening’s council meeting that was strange or unexpected. Rather, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s smoking ordinance veto by Mayor Doug England, it was the choreography that made little sense to me.
(Gee, if only I could be elected, and then become eligible to understand – and comment on the proceedings.)
Certain of the maneuvers were seemingly preordained. I predicted in advance of the meeting, and afterward gleefully detailed, another in a series of shameless Dan Coffey caterwauls seemingly dating back to New Albany’s founding by the Scribner Brothers.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and Coffey gotta grandstand – nothing unusual there, and it’s just another reason for the outside world to laugh hard and long at any municipality or personage willing to tolerate such raging mediocrity on the part of an elected representative.
All of which brings us to the confusing segment of the program.
The late, unlamented smoking ordinance had five council backers. Correct me it I'm mistaken, but by my count, John Gonder’s and Bob Caesar’s motives were sincere and genuinely reflective of strong personal beliefs. Pat McLaughlin was and remains an unknown quantity on this and numerous other issues, and served as the pro-bloc’s Blevins Memorial Swing Vote in the absence of discernable substance.
President Jeff Gahan and Coffey may or may not have had coherent views as to the science prefacing the alleged harmfulness of second hand smoke to captive workers – go ahead an give ‘em a shard of the benefit of the doubt – but there is absolutely no doubt that the two, now ensconced in an open anti-England loving embrace that verges on the pornographic, were perfectly willing to wield the smoking ordinance like a vengeful scimitar aimed at the mayor’s electoral chest.
That sort of behavior constitutes transparently partisan politics, and accordingly, New Albany’s summertime smoking debate careened off the scientific rails and was transformed into tactless political posturing for an otherwise slow news month.
With a sparse crowd of 15 looking on, and looking at the clock in hopes that cocktail hour would soon blessedly arrive, Gahan waited until the “ordinances and resolutions” portion of last evening’s program to broach the topic of the mayor’s veto, and in doing so, matters were comprehensible – at first. The C-J’s Dick Kaukas quotes Gahan as saying, "We have accepted the mayor's veto as final."
There was a shuffling of papers, and (I believe) brief comments from deputy mayor Carl Malysz pertaining to the three revisions to the ordinance being sought by the mayor and how these might be incorporated into future smoking legislation, and at this juncture, Gahan gave every indication that while he understood the finality of the veto, he had no knowledge whatsoever of the mayor’s proposed exceptions.
It bears noting that these three exceptions, which were the very conceptual basis of the mayor’s veto, had for two days been highlighted in newspaper reports, on Louisville television, and in the local blogosphere, and yet, watching the council president fumble with his papers, it seemed either that he didn’t know or was performing an obscure set piece for the benefit of … whom?
Jamey Aebersold? Tim Filler? Yul Brynner?
Gahan announced that the council would come back to this startling (new?) development after concluding the Riverboat Fund backpedal of a fiscal rectitude gospel show, and so he did, and the performance became even more oblique.
Having drawn out the cognitive process to maximum possible effect, Gahan concluded aloud that further research was necessary, and he appointed a spanking new committee to examine the mayor’s press release for typos, invisible ink and, presumably, loopholes. Kaukas describes the scene:
Gahan named Councilmen Dan Coffey, Bob Caesar and Patrick McLaughlin to the committee. That drew an immediate objection from Councilwoman Diane Benedetti, who had voted against the ordinance.
Benedetti noted that all three members Gahan appointed had voted in favor of the smoking ban.
In fact, Benedetti turned toward Gahan and said, “I think there should be” someone else on the committee from the anti-ban bloc, and the council president’s response to her:
“You’re wrong.”
Oooh …face!
In essence, Gahan upheld his right to appoint as he sees fit, and whether or not it makes sense. As a direct result, the city now has an anti-development crusader (Coffey) sitting on the Redevelopment Commission, a pro-decay advocate (Steve Price) on the board of the Urban Enterprise Association, and as pertains to a possible future smoking ordinance, three pro-ban councilmen on a committee to ponder the topic.
One of these three is not John Gonder, who presumably is being censured for being the only sitting council member willing to engage in reasoned discussion of the smoking ordinance on the blogosphere – for that matter, reasoned discussion about it anywhere at all. Indeed, no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to politics over progress ... and in that sordid game, we're seeing little improvement over the waning months of King Larry's reign of error.
My take? Thanks for asking.
If Gahan’s confusion over the mayor’s smoking ban exceptions was genuine, and he truly failed to digest the implications of it during the 48+ post-veto ceremony hours accorded him, then he’s confessing to unpreparedness – and that isn’t something I’d be bragging about in public.
On the other hand, if he did digest it, and last night’s cat ‘n’ mouse thespian routine was mere prelude to the predetermined goal of appointing a bizarrely biased committee to review the mayor’s proposals, then he’s guilty of disingenuousness.
Either way, what continues to evolve is strategy whereby the council president has elevated the importance of strategic opaqueness to a position far that of the city’s best interests. When your deputy sheriff is Dan Coffey, that's scary business, indeed.
A bit of advice to the new committee: Check with the Indiana Alcohol & Tobacco Commission as to the state’s legal definition of a bar. It just might help you avoid more embarrassment than already exists owing to the biased methodology of the committee’s founding. Neither the city council's nor the mayor's definitions trump that of Indiana's most powerful regulatory agency.
(Gee, if only I could be elected, and then become eligible to understand – and comment on the proceedings.)
Certain of the maneuvers were seemingly preordained. I predicted in advance of the meeting, and afterward gleefully detailed, another in a series of shameless Dan Coffey caterwauls seemingly dating back to New Albany’s founding by the Scribner Brothers.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and Coffey gotta grandstand – nothing unusual there, and it’s just another reason for the outside world to laugh hard and long at any municipality or personage willing to tolerate such raging mediocrity on the part of an elected representative.
All of which brings us to the confusing segment of the program.
The late, unlamented smoking ordinance had five council backers. Correct me it I'm mistaken, but by my count, John Gonder’s and Bob Caesar’s motives were sincere and genuinely reflective of strong personal beliefs. Pat McLaughlin was and remains an unknown quantity on this and numerous other issues, and served as the pro-bloc’s Blevins Memorial Swing Vote in the absence of discernable substance.
President Jeff Gahan and Coffey may or may not have had coherent views as to the science prefacing the alleged harmfulness of second hand smoke to captive workers – go ahead an give ‘em a shard of the benefit of the doubt – but there is absolutely no doubt that the two, now ensconced in an open anti-England loving embrace that verges on the pornographic, were perfectly willing to wield the smoking ordinance like a vengeful scimitar aimed at the mayor’s electoral chest.
That sort of behavior constitutes transparently partisan politics, and accordingly, New Albany’s summertime smoking debate careened off the scientific rails and was transformed into tactless political posturing for an otherwise slow news month.
With a sparse crowd of 15 looking on, and looking at the clock in hopes that cocktail hour would soon blessedly arrive, Gahan waited until the “ordinances and resolutions” portion of last evening’s program to broach the topic of the mayor’s veto, and in doing so, matters were comprehensible – at first. The C-J’s Dick Kaukas quotes Gahan as saying, "We have accepted the mayor's veto as final."
There was a shuffling of papers, and (I believe) brief comments from deputy mayor Carl Malysz pertaining to the three revisions to the ordinance being sought by the mayor and how these might be incorporated into future smoking legislation, and at this juncture, Gahan gave every indication that while he understood the finality of the veto, he had no knowledge whatsoever of the mayor’s proposed exceptions.
It bears noting that these three exceptions, which were the very conceptual basis of the mayor’s veto, had for two days been highlighted in newspaper reports, on Louisville television, and in the local blogosphere, and yet, watching the council president fumble with his papers, it seemed either that he didn’t know or was performing an obscure set piece for the benefit of … whom?
Jamey Aebersold? Tim Filler? Yul Brynner?
Gahan announced that the council would come back to this startling (new?) development after concluding the Riverboat Fund backpedal of a fiscal rectitude gospel show, and so he did, and the performance became even more oblique.
Having drawn out the cognitive process to maximum possible effect, Gahan concluded aloud that further research was necessary, and he appointed a spanking new committee to examine the mayor’s press release for typos, invisible ink and, presumably, loopholes. Kaukas describes the scene:
Gahan named Councilmen Dan Coffey, Bob Caesar and Patrick McLaughlin to the committee. That drew an immediate objection from Councilwoman Diane Benedetti, who had voted against the ordinance.
Benedetti noted that all three members Gahan appointed had voted in favor of the smoking ban.
In fact, Benedetti turned toward Gahan and said, “I think there should be” someone else on the committee from the anti-ban bloc, and the council president’s response to her:
“You’re wrong.”
Oooh …face!
In essence, Gahan upheld his right to appoint as he sees fit, and whether or not it makes sense. As a direct result, the city now has an anti-development crusader (Coffey) sitting on the Redevelopment Commission, a pro-decay advocate (Steve Price) on the board of the Urban Enterprise Association, and as pertains to a possible future smoking ordinance, three pro-ban councilmen on a committee to ponder the topic.
One of these three is not John Gonder, who presumably is being censured for being the only sitting council member willing to engage in reasoned discussion of the smoking ordinance on the blogosphere – for that matter, reasoned discussion about it anywhere at all. Indeed, no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to politics over progress ... and in that sordid game, we're seeing little improvement over the waning months of King Larry's reign of error.
My take? Thanks for asking.
If Gahan’s confusion over the mayor’s smoking ban exceptions was genuine, and he truly failed to digest the implications of it during the 48+ post-veto ceremony hours accorded him, then he’s confessing to unpreparedness – and that isn’t something I’d be bragging about in public.
On the other hand, if he did digest it, and last night’s cat ‘n’ mouse thespian routine was mere prelude to the predetermined goal of appointing a bizarrely biased committee to review the mayor’s proposals, then he’s guilty of disingenuousness.
Either way, what continues to evolve is strategy whereby the council president has elevated the importance of strategic opaqueness to a position far that of the city’s best interests. When your deputy sheriff is Dan Coffey, that's scary business, indeed.
A bit of advice to the new committee: Check with the Indiana Alcohol & Tobacco Commission as to the state’s legal definition of a bar. It just might help you avoid more embarrassment than already exists owing to the biased methodology of the committee’s founding. Neither the city council's nor the mayor's definitions trump that of Indiana's most powerful regulatory agency.
That's a lot of non-redistricted daze, eh?
I need some help.
We need to run a digital counter on NAC that counts the days that have passed since the city council last legally redistricted. That'd be some time in 1992, which puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,840 days, give or take a few unbalanced electoral months.
If we can get the count right, then we can take turns bringing an actual digital counter to meetings.
Can anyone come up with a closer count?
We need to run a digital counter on NAC that counts the days that have passed since the city council last legally redistricted. That'd be some time in 1992, which puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,840 days, give or take a few unbalanced electoral months.
If we can get the count right, then we can take turns bringing an actual digital counter to meetings.
Can anyone come up with a closer count?
Or perhaps a window into a vapid soul?
You read it here.
Yesterday I predicted that on a light council agenda night, 1st district Neanderthal Dan Coffey would seize upon the proposed appointment of Brendan Brown to the Historic Preservation Commission as the pretext for another round of his self-serving, pathological caterwauling.
Tonight the council is being asked to approve an appointment to the Historical Preservation Commission, and this should provide the likes of Dan Coffey the opportunity to pontificate, grandstand and entertain the somnolent gallery with his trademark nonsensical banter. I'll be disappointed if he doesn't flash his Bazooka Joe degree in vinyl siding installation (permit, schermit ... cash is fine, ma'am).
But I was wrong about the vinyl. Coffey chose instead to make historic window guidelines his topic for finger-wagging sermonizing, and asked that the candidate be present to defend what he characterized as energy inefficient windows (that look out on on a world Coffey loathes) lest the traditionally permit-free contractor and rag picker be expected to learn something about the historic preservation guidelines that a previous edition of his own city council approved.
Brown was voted onto the commission, and Coffey was so supremely annoyed about the matter that he … that’s right: He abstained.
Raw courage, eh?
In a city packed to the brim with dull political blades, the butter in Coffey’s fridge need not worry about being sliced.
Meanwhile, I'm catching some z's, then I'll be back to describe council president Jeff Gahan's latest smoking-related skullduggery: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/Nor hell a disingenuousness like Jeff Gahan scorned."
Yesterday I predicted that on a light council agenda night, 1st district Neanderthal Dan Coffey would seize upon the proposed appointment of Brendan Brown to the Historic Preservation Commission as the pretext for another round of his self-serving, pathological caterwauling.
Tonight the council is being asked to approve an appointment to the Historical Preservation Commission, and this should provide the likes of Dan Coffey the opportunity to pontificate, grandstand and entertain the somnolent gallery with his trademark nonsensical banter. I'll be disappointed if he doesn't flash his Bazooka Joe degree in vinyl siding installation (permit, schermit ... cash is fine, ma'am).
But I was wrong about the vinyl. Coffey chose instead to make historic window guidelines his topic for finger-wagging sermonizing, and asked that the candidate be present to defend what he characterized as energy inefficient windows (that look out on on a world Coffey loathes) lest the traditionally permit-free contractor and rag picker be expected to learn something about the historic preservation guidelines that a previous edition of his own city council approved.
Brown was voted onto the commission, and Coffey was so supremely annoyed about the matter that he … that’s right: He abstained.
Raw courage, eh?
In a city packed to the brim with dull political blades, the butter in Coffey’s fridge need not worry about being sliced.
Meanwhile, I'm catching some z's, then I'll be back to describe council president Jeff Gahan's latest smoking-related skullduggery: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/Nor hell a disingenuousness like Jeff Gahan scorned."
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Incognito.
I may have to begin wearing disguises to city council meetings. The one at left is a classic, if for no other reason than the fact that Groucho Marx remains a personal hero of long standing.As a time filler, here's a slightly ribald anecdote from Groucho, who was "recounting a War Bonds tour in his Carnegie Hall appearance" (6 May 1972; attributed by Wikipedia):
I did a bond tour during the Second World War ... We were raising money, and we played Boston and Philadelphia and most of the big cities. And we got to Minneapolis. There wasn't any big theater to play there, so we did our show in a railroad station. Then I told the audience, that I knew a girl in Minneapolis. She was also known in St.Paul, she used to come over to visit me. She was known as "The Tail Of Two Cities." I didn't sell any more bonds, but eh ... they didn't allow me to appear anymore.
I'll be the one wearing the Groucho mask, back in the cheap seats.
Tribune reporter Daniel Suddeath previews tonight's council meeting: Withdrawal from Riverboat Fund up for vote in New Albany City Council.
It's a light agenda, barring unlikely but always conceivable additional smoking ordinance pyrotechnics, although it should be noted that arson by novelty lighter is strictly prohibited.
Enforcement? Don't ask.
With non-smoking civic issues queued outside the council chamber like Indiana cars in front of West End liquor stores at 12:57 p.m. on Sunday, 2nd and 3rd readings of the appropriation described above are the only items of new business for the council, which -- if you're just tuning in -- spent the past month wasting everyone's time on an issue entirely off the city's radar screen.
However, tonight the council is being asked to approve an appointment to the Historical Preservation Commission, and this should provide the likes of Dan Coffey the opportunity to pontificate, grandstand and entertain the somnolent gallery with his trademark nonsensical banter. I'll be disapointed if he doesn't flash his Bazooka Joe degree in vinyl siding installation (permit, schermit ... cash is fine, ma'am).
Merriment like that keeps me coming back for more – that is, whenever I’m permitted to remain. Soon there may be an ordinance against me, and until there is, the council president presumably is soaking his ejection thumb in IcyHot.
After all, the only other choice tonight is to watch the geriatric John McCain on television, and contemplate the levels of theocratic fascist torture that former political "mavericks" are able to withstand before breaking down and crying "Uncle".
Nope. I'll take my chances wth Steve's nickels and dimes.
It's a light agenda, barring unlikely but always conceivable additional smoking ordinance pyrotechnics, although it should be noted that arson by novelty lighter is strictly prohibited.
Enforcement? Don't ask.
With non-smoking civic issues queued outside the council chamber like Indiana cars in front of West End liquor stores at 12:57 p.m. on Sunday, 2nd and 3rd readings of the appropriation described above are the only items of new business for the council, which -- if you're just tuning in -- spent the past month wasting everyone's time on an issue entirely off the city's radar screen.
However, tonight the council is being asked to approve an appointment to the Historical Preservation Commission, and this should provide the likes of Dan Coffey the opportunity to pontificate, grandstand and entertain the somnolent gallery with his trademark nonsensical banter. I'll be disapointed if he doesn't flash his Bazooka Joe degree in vinyl siding installation (permit, schermit ... cash is fine, ma'am).
Merriment like that keeps me coming back for more – that is, whenever I’m permitted to remain. Soon there may be an ordinance against me, and until there is, the council president presumably is soaking his ejection thumb in IcyHot.
After all, the only other choice tonight is to watch the geriatric John McCain on television, and contemplate the levels of theocratic fascist torture that former political "mavericks" are able to withstand before breaking down and crying "Uncle".
Nope. I'll take my chances wth Steve's nickels and dimes.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Smoking law - go away!/Come back another day/We have so much work to do/Not that we ever knew …
Dick Kaukas’s C-J coverage of yesterday’s veto of the city council's smoking ban ordinance paints by the numbers, but he contributes a handful of largely unintended but fascinating observations from council members: New Albany's smoking-ban ordinance vetoed. Noting Mayor England’s pledge to sign legislation that incorporates his three proposed exemptions, Kaukas writes:
The nine-member council could override the veto if a two-thirds majority -- at least six members -- vote to do so. But no members have indicated a willingness to change their votes, and the council could decide to let the veto stand.
It would appear that unless the council has a sixth vote in favor of the smoking ordinance, and accordingly, votes unanimously on Thursday night to suspend its rules and tack a veto overturn vote onto the evening’s agenda, the ordinance is dead. It might be reintroduced verbatim in the future, or in revised form according to the mayor’s wishes.
The only sure thing to me is that the future of New Albany's smoking ordinance will be plotted according to the internal political calculations of council president Jeff Gahan and his ally of the moment, Dan Coffey, who'll viciously turn on Gahan at the drop of a hat when it become politically expedient for him to do so.
C'mon, people: Did you really think any of this was ever about workplace safety? The petty political machinations are mind-numbing, though not unexpected. Accordingly, reporter Kaukas performs a commendable journalistic service with these framed quotes from three council members:
Councilman Bob Caesar, who sponsored the ordinance, said yesterday that he believes that the council needs to address other issues and that "I will not bring it up again” ...
... After England left, Councilman Dan Coffey, who had voted for the smoking ban, and (Councilwoman Diane) Benedetti each made statements.
Coffey accused England of "playing politics," adding that the mayor never provided his views when council members who were working on the ordinance asked for his input.
Benedetti said she and other council members had hoped the mayor's decision to veto or sign the measure would settle the issue.
"We do not want it back on our plate," she said. "We have too many other things to do."
Simply bretahtaking, isn't it? The obvious question for citizens of New Albany to ask Caesar and Benedetti (who, in fairness, voted against the ordinance):
If you’re cognizant of all these “other things to do", then why has so much of the council's time been wasted on the smoking ordinance?
The obvious question for the perpetually conniving Coffey, for whom intricate political maneuvering comes as naturally as greenhouse gas from a coal-fired power plant:
Are you the pot, or the kettle? Or both?
The nine-member council could override the veto if a two-thirds majority -- at least six members -- vote to do so. But no members have indicated a willingness to change their votes, and the council could decide to let the veto stand.
It would appear that unless the council has a sixth vote in favor of the smoking ordinance, and accordingly, votes unanimously on Thursday night to suspend its rules and tack a veto overturn vote onto the evening’s agenda, the ordinance is dead. It might be reintroduced verbatim in the future, or in revised form according to the mayor’s wishes.
The only sure thing to me is that the future of New Albany's smoking ordinance will be plotted according to the internal political calculations of council president Jeff Gahan and his ally of the moment, Dan Coffey, who'll viciously turn on Gahan at the drop of a hat when it become politically expedient for him to do so.
C'mon, people: Did you really think any of this was ever about workplace safety? The petty political machinations are mind-numbing, though not unexpected. Accordingly, reporter Kaukas performs a commendable journalistic service with these framed quotes from three council members:
Councilman Bob Caesar, who sponsored the ordinance, said yesterday that he believes that the council needs to address other issues and that "I will not bring it up again” ...
... After England left, Councilman Dan Coffey, who had voted for the smoking ban, and (Councilwoman Diane) Benedetti each made statements.
Coffey accused England of "playing politics," adding that the mayor never provided his views when council members who were working on the ordinance asked for his input.
Benedetti said she and other council members had hoped the mayor's decision to veto or sign the measure would settle the issue.
"We do not want it back on our plate," she said. "We have too many other things to do."
Simply bretahtaking, isn't it? The obvious question for citizens of New Albany to ask Caesar and Benedetti (who, in fairness, voted against the ordinance):
If you’re cognizant of all these “other things to do", then why has so much of the council's time been wasted on the smoking ordinance?
The obvious question for the perpetually conniving Coffey, for whom intricate political maneuvering comes as naturally as greenhouse gas from a coal-fired power plant:
Are you the pot, or the kettle? Or both?
Moral of the smoking ordinance story? The sordid collection of corpses from a political wasteland.
Following is the opinion of the senior editor. You’re perfectly free to disagree.
On Labor Day, comfortably ahead of the mayor’s press conference on Tuesday, I received this missive from the ever mysterious Even Deeper Throat. In it, our periodic informant’s reference to the “guy on the stool” is to an article I wrote on Sunday: Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.
The guy on the stool does not need clout. John Mattingly will have the mayor veto it---not a paid lobby--maybe not professional--but effective. Either way doug loses---the veto causes him to be raked over the coals in the paper and makes him (i think ) a one and done mayor---this time around. If he doesn't veto --- the envelopes stop coming----I am not kidding. Of course there are some slumlords with millions--believe it or not----so the envelopes could still be there.
From the start of the city council’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ‘08, the stench of small town, small time, small pond politics emanated from the usual suspects, corridors and back alleys.
You should know that I don’t doubt the sincerity of two and maybe three of the ordinance’s backers, who seem genuinely to believe that the purpose of the legislation was to protect workers.
But as much as I’d love to see a newly coherent Jeff Gahan emerge and fulfill his potential for leadership, I believe that neither he nor his current sidewardly mobile swingman, Dan Coffey, can be counted among this group of true believers, and for me, Even Deeper Throat’s testimony is the clincher.
My take is this. Stuck at 5-4, and absent a sixth veto-proof vote, the impetus of the ordinance abruptly shifted from science and health, where it was only tenuously rooted from the beginning, to a somewhat crass and ill-disguised resolve to use the mayor’s expected veto to future political advantage. Why else would John Mattingly's name be mentioned if not as an egregious anti-England slight?
Soon enough, Gahan will feel the pain when Coffey deploys his antediluvian tactics to pull one or another rug out from under the president’s feet. I’m told that both entertain notions of occupying the mayor’s office. Fortunately for New Albany, Coffey is as unqualified for the job as the flower urn that sits atop the mantel shelf.
Gahan? A huge "maybe" at this juncture. At least I used to think so. If only we knew who he is and what he stands for … and I, for one, no longer will hold my breath awaiting the press release.
---
Another useful function of the smoking ordinance apart from its pseudo-crocodilian concern for the private employment decisions of adult bar staff has proven to be the exploitation of fissures in what by New Albany’s standards passes for a “progressive” movement. I know that I’ve played a part in this. In rhetorical terms, I called it like I saw it, and I take no pleasure in being proved right in privately predicting this aftereffect, hence a steamy and simmering frustration with pretty much all involved in pushing this smoking angle to the exclusion of everything else.
To be succinct: How can such miniscule political personages generate such catastrophes – and why do we permit them to do so?
All along, from the beginning of this legislative travesty, wherein a seemingly innocuous city council cadre has taken the legitimate issues of smoking and workplace safety and subordinated them to the idiocy of New Albany politics as usual – making us think it was about one thing, when of course, it was about something else entirely – I kept reminding readers that this is precisely the sort of thing that divides, not unites.
And, scandalously neglected for no other reason than an expedience – heck, those lobbyists do all the heavy lifting and we don’t even have to pay ‘em! – afforded by contracted professionals from afar, all of New Albany’s truly important issues remain, orphaned, unaddressed, and ignored, like always, so that time servers will be better positioned for their next race for office.
Sadly, it’s all symptomatic of this ridiculous, polarized society that we’ve chosen to encourage and inhabit. It’s exacerbated by the Tim Fillers of the planet, people from elsewhere with loyalty only to paychecks from still further away, and to obtain their favors for a millisecond, we see our own local small timers posturing for advantage in this wretchedly inbred political water.
Only now, after the veto, do we hear council members confide that yes, there’s much work to be done, and no, time needn’t be wasted by returning to the smoking battlefield.
No kidding? Could any of you have been bothered to grasp this point before the carnage started?
Ah, yes, but such civic foresight would have negated the sought-after political gamesmanship. Sorry, all you well meaning workplace safety advocates. Science doesn’t stand in a chance in a place like New Albany. Straight up and unalloyed, and from the legislative perspective, what we’ve just witnessed was inelegant, artless, poorly managed, badly timed, but necessary for one reason and one reason only: Serving the personal political interests of the few at the expense of the many.
That’s New Albanianism at its enduring lowest. That's Coffeyalbany. Next time, you’ll know going in.
You’ll also know more about the muddying of scrums.
Good luck … and don’t forget your flak jackets.
On Labor Day, comfortably ahead of the mayor’s press conference on Tuesday, I received this missive from the ever mysterious Even Deeper Throat. In it, our periodic informant’s reference to the “guy on the stool” is to an article I wrote on Sunday: Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.
The guy on the stool does not need clout. John Mattingly will have the mayor veto it---not a paid lobby--maybe not professional--but effective. Either way doug loses---the veto causes him to be raked over the coals in the paper and makes him (i think ) a one and done mayor---this time around. If he doesn't veto --- the envelopes stop coming----I am not kidding. Of course there are some slumlords with millions--believe it or not----so the envelopes could still be there.
From the start of the city council’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ‘08, the stench of small town, small time, small pond politics emanated from the usual suspects, corridors and back alleys.
You should know that I don’t doubt the sincerity of two and maybe three of the ordinance’s backers, who seem genuinely to believe that the purpose of the legislation was to protect workers.
But as much as I’d love to see a newly coherent Jeff Gahan emerge and fulfill his potential for leadership, I believe that neither he nor his current sidewardly mobile swingman, Dan Coffey, can be counted among this group of true believers, and for me, Even Deeper Throat’s testimony is the clincher.
My take is this. Stuck at 5-4, and absent a sixth veto-proof vote, the impetus of the ordinance abruptly shifted from science and health, where it was only tenuously rooted from the beginning, to a somewhat crass and ill-disguised resolve to use the mayor’s expected veto to future political advantage. Why else would John Mattingly's name be mentioned if not as an egregious anti-England slight?
Soon enough, Gahan will feel the pain when Coffey deploys his antediluvian tactics to pull one or another rug out from under the president’s feet. I’m told that both entertain notions of occupying the mayor’s office. Fortunately for New Albany, Coffey is as unqualified for the job as the flower urn that sits atop the mantel shelf.
Gahan? A huge "maybe" at this juncture. At least I used to think so. If only we knew who he is and what he stands for … and I, for one, no longer will hold my breath awaiting the press release.
---
Another useful function of the smoking ordinance apart from its pseudo-crocodilian concern for the private employment decisions of adult bar staff has proven to be the exploitation of fissures in what by New Albany’s standards passes for a “progressive” movement. I know that I’ve played a part in this. In rhetorical terms, I called it like I saw it, and I take no pleasure in being proved right in privately predicting this aftereffect, hence a steamy and simmering frustration with pretty much all involved in pushing this smoking angle to the exclusion of everything else.
To be succinct: How can such miniscule political personages generate such catastrophes – and why do we permit them to do so?
All along, from the beginning of this legislative travesty, wherein a seemingly innocuous city council cadre has taken the legitimate issues of smoking and workplace safety and subordinated them to the idiocy of New Albany politics as usual – making us think it was about one thing, when of course, it was about something else entirely – I kept reminding readers that this is precisely the sort of thing that divides, not unites.
And, scandalously neglected for no other reason than an expedience – heck, those lobbyists do all the heavy lifting and we don’t even have to pay ‘em! – afforded by contracted professionals from afar, all of New Albany’s truly important issues remain, orphaned, unaddressed, and ignored, like always, so that time servers will be better positioned for their next race for office.
Sadly, it’s all symptomatic of this ridiculous, polarized society that we’ve chosen to encourage and inhabit. It’s exacerbated by the Tim Fillers of the planet, people from elsewhere with loyalty only to paychecks from still further away, and to obtain their favors for a millisecond, we see our own local small timers posturing for advantage in this wretchedly inbred political water.
Only now, after the veto, do we hear council members confide that yes, there’s much work to be done, and no, time needn’t be wasted by returning to the smoking battlefield.
No kidding? Could any of you have been bothered to grasp this point before the carnage started?
Ah, yes, but such civic foresight would have negated the sought-after political gamesmanship. Sorry, all you well meaning workplace safety advocates. Science doesn’t stand in a chance in a place like New Albany. Straight up and unalloyed, and from the legislative perspective, what we’ve just witnessed was inelegant, artless, poorly managed, badly timed, but necessary for one reason and one reason only: Serving the personal political interests of the few at the expense of the many.
That’s New Albanianism at its enduring lowest. That's Coffeyalbany. Next time, you’ll know going in.
You’ll also know more about the muddying of scrums.
Good luck … and don’t forget your flak jackets.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Coffey to world: We're confused, and so should you. Be. Too.
After Mayor England concluded his comments this morning, council persons Dan Coffey and Diane Benedetti assumed positions behind the microphones to answer media questions about their reactions as council representatives. Steve Price was skulking somewhere in the crowd, but I guess he didn’t have press credentials.
The odd couple spoke for somewhere around 10 minutes, but I ceased listening after CM Coffey’s introductory remarks, which were offered in the trademark Cappuccino whine, outlining many of the major policy areas that no council blessed by his presence has ever attempted to address, blaming these failures entirely on the past two mayors, and noting that now, with the council finally accomplishing something (albeit a misdirected smoking ordinance that not a single candidate, Coffey included, openly supported in the 2007 elections), the mayor first refused to assist the council by offering potential exceptions to the ordinance, and then vetoed the result.
Let me get this straight: What we should have been doing as a council, we couldn’t, wouldn’t or just plain didn’t … and then we finally did something, even if it made a mockery of our ability to prioritize given previous glaring omissions … therefore, it’s the mayor’s fault that we’re confused, and he should give us even more latitude accordingly.
Right. Like I told the television interviewer, there’s a fallacy in there somewhere (theatrical batting of eyelids), but I just can’t find it amidst the flagrant grandstanding.
For early local blogosphere returns, go to http://www.thevillevoice.com/, which selects England (as) Worst Politician of the Day.
Here are some photos of the festivities.
The photo of me come to us from WFPL-FM. The others I took.
The odd couple spoke for somewhere around 10 minutes, but I ceased listening after CM Coffey’s introductory remarks, which were offered in the trademark Cappuccino whine, outlining many of the major policy areas that no council blessed by his presence has ever attempted to address, blaming these failures entirely on the past two mayors, and noting that now, with the council finally accomplishing something (albeit a misdirected smoking ordinance that not a single candidate, Coffey included, openly supported in the 2007 elections), the mayor first refused to assist the council by offering potential exceptions to the ordinance, and then vetoed the result.
Let me get this straight: What we should have been doing as a council, we couldn’t, wouldn’t or just plain didn’t … and then we finally did something, even if it made a mockery of our ability to prioritize given previous glaring omissions … therefore, it’s the mayor’s fault that we’re confused, and he should give us even more latitude accordingly.
Right. Like I told the television interviewer, there’s a fallacy in there somewhere (theatrical batting of eyelids), but I just can’t find it amidst the flagrant grandstanding.
For early local blogosphere returns, go to http://www.thevillevoice.com/, which selects England (as) Worst Politician of the Day.
Here are some photos of the festivities.
The photo of me come to us from WFPL-FM. The others I took.
England vetoes smoking ban, Tim Filler packs up lies in carpetbag and moves on.
While we await a more complete report, I'll leave an open thread so that all the ban apologists can further adopt big tobacco tactics in their quest to prove them diabolical. It's entertaining in a masochistic sort of way.
11:37 a.m. update
Thanks, Bluegill.
I'm back from the scene in front of the City County Building, where the first salvo in the Jeff Gahan for Mayor 2011 campaign was fired earlier this morning.
In other news, the the sitting mayor also vetoed the smoking ordinance, as reported above, and councilman Dan Coffey made as hypocritical a public statement about council priorities (and persistent failures) as I've heard uttered in four years of writing this blog ... but I need to be at work, and it will have to await a future posting.
Mayor England seeks three exemptions to the smoking ordinance, which if implemented would "garner (his) support":
(1) bars
(2) private clubs
(3) restaurants with bars that serve and employ only persons who are 21 years (of age) or older
Here is the mayor's closing statement:
"In conclusion, I am really trying to heal our divided community via compromise. I have heard snokers and non-smokers alike speak in favor of and against the bill. This is not 'black and white' as the activists on either side of the issue would have you believe. I believe that my proposal strikes such a compromise. It is time for the Common Council and the activists to strike this balance, as well."
Let the games begin.
11:37 a.m. update
Thanks, Bluegill.
I'm back from the scene in front of the City County Building, where the first salvo in the Jeff Gahan for Mayor 2011 campaign was fired earlier this morning.
In other news, the the sitting mayor also vetoed the smoking ordinance, as reported above, and councilman Dan Coffey made as hypocritical a public statement about council priorities (and persistent failures) as I've heard uttered in four years of writing this blog ... but I need to be at work, and it will have to await a future posting.
Mayor England seeks three exemptions to the smoking ordinance, which if implemented would "garner (his) support":
(1) bars
(2) private clubs
(3) restaurants with bars that serve and employ only persons who are 21 years (of age) or older
Here is the mayor's closing statement:
"In conclusion, I am really trying to heal our divided community via compromise. I have heard snokers and non-smokers alike speak in favor of and against the bill. This is not 'black and white' as the activists on either side of the issue would have you believe. I believe that my proposal strikes such a compromise. It is time for the Common Council and the activists to strike this balance, as well."
Let the games begin.
Monday, September 01, 2008
From the horse's mouth? Erika says so.
Professor Erika is reporting that Mayor Doug England will "veto" the smoking ordinance.
COMMON SENSE APPROACH ON LABOR DAY
News flash: Mayor will not sign smoking ban. Mayor England will suggest a change in wording in the Smoking Ban Ordinance on Tuesday.
Source: Mayor England
See you all at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. I'll be the tall one with the cigar ... the lighted cigar. Don't worry. I'll stay well clear of the door.
COMMON SENSE APPROACH ON LABOR DAY
News flash: Mayor will not sign smoking ban. Mayor England will suggest a change in wording in the Smoking Ban Ordinance on Tuesday.
Source: Mayor England
See you all at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. I'll be the tall one with the cigar ... the lighted cigar. Don't worry. I'll stay well clear of the door.
Tribune: “'No! Bad council!' But in this case, the ban should stand."
For the record, the Tribune's editorial board has cast a vote in favor of the smoking ordinance, but with no plaudits (and many rebukes) for the city council's methodology in passing the initiative.
TRIBUNE EDITORIAL: Mr. Mayor, sign the smoking ban
Just like a broken clock is right twice a day, we believe the New Albany City Council has got this one right. The ban on smoking in public places is the right thing for our city. We hope Mayor Doug England realizes that too and signs the ordinance.
A broken clock is right twice a day?
Where have I heard that one?
Anyway, NAC's take can be found here: Veto the smoking ordinance, yer Honor. You’ll survive squawking that primarily comes from afar.
TRIBUNE EDITORIAL: Mr. Mayor, sign the smoking ban
Just like a broken clock is right twice a day, we believe the New Albany City Council has got this one right. The ban on smoking in public places is the right thing for our city. We hope Mayor Doug England realizes that too and signs the ordinance.
A broken clock is right twice a day?
Where have I heard that one?
Anyway, NAC's take can be found here: Veto the smoking ordinance, yer Honor. You’ll survive squawking that primarily comes from afar.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Anger management? No, thanks. I’ve had all the placid acceptance I can stomach.
I’ll begin this essay with a promise. This is my final posting on the topic.
And, an observation.
Thanks to New Albany’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08, I know conclusively that in spite of numerous personal differences, which I’m only now, this year, in the process of resolving, I am in fact my father’s son.
It may not seem like the sort of revelation designed to hang one’s rhetorical hat, but considering the year I‘ve had, it’s huge.
And if it means parting ways with my progressive brethren by sneering at orthodoxy, so be it. It’s healthier to sneer at orthodoxy than it is to dip snuff or smoke cigars, wouldn’t you think?
---
Several hundred people visit NAC on a daily basis. Among regular readers of this blog, there is a smaller, select group composed of true friends. Among this group, there are fewer still with whom I’m very close, and they know what a challenging year it’s been in my world. I’ll leave it at that, as background information.
Looking at it objectively, during the past month I’ve expended a disproportionate amount of time and energy in vigorously and vociferously contesting the city council’s smoking ban decision, and yes, that fact may seem counterintuitive to casual acquaintances, given that I’ve never smoked cigarettes, am not enamored of the odor they generate, and have little desire to be a pariah on my own side of the fence.
It’s just that the effete stench in this case isn’t emanating from an ashtray.
Furthermore, it certainly isn’t that I have ample time to devote to this particular struggle. Like many other people, I’m working two jobs: I’m helping my partners run our existing business, and I’m trying to start a second business. I’m serving on two volunteer boards. I’m married, and we own a home, and there are four cats and a 25-year-old truck in need of an oil change. The list goes on. Quite a few people out there have it far worse than me, and because I know that’s true, I’m not going to make it into a federal case, but if you haven’t owned a small business, you have no idea how difficult time management can be.
Or how much it pisses you off to be told that you obviously don’t know how to manage your own affairs.
---
Recently, the Bookseller asked me about my frequent disparaging of “out-of-towners” during this discussion. His unspoken question has been, “Why are you taking all this so personally?”
Fair enough, and I’ll try to explain why the professional cessation lobbyist’s comments during the last city council meeting grated on my nerves so thoroughly with each passing moment (lest we forget, many moments past the previously mandated “one”) that I felt compelled to speak aloud from my front row seat with reference to the unfolding travesty, and to remind the pusillanimous council president to follow his own stated “rule” … and to be ejected as a result of my insolence … and, just for the hell of it, what all this has to do with my father’s life.
At its most basic, I reacted the way I did out of pure instinct, because just like my father before me, I simply can’t resist throwing in my lot with the underdog, and as the smoking spectacle has stupidly proceeded, it’s become increasingly obvious that the truest underdog is the dude sitting on a barstool smoking a cigarette I’d never smoke, and drinking a beer I’d never drink, and probably watching a NASCAR race that I’d never watch.
Why do I so resent the presence of the paid professional anti-smoking lobbyists, the carpetbaggers from afar, and the associated health fascists who’ve descended on the city, then decamped just as quickly for further adventures in expense account living in other unfortunate burgs down the lonely Interstate from here?
It’s because they don’t have to do more than one thing at a time, while I don’t have the time to do anything, and what they’re being paid to do is intolerable from a standpoint of basic human fairness.
To me, they’re the health fascist obermenschen, these nannying, passionless people who are paid to perform one task and one task only sans the endless multitasking that fills my days, and that task is to demonize cigarette smokers, to the exclusion of anything and anyone else, and it infuriates me, because my fellow bar owners, who by the admirably frank admission of prime anti-smoking campaigner John Gonder must now cope with ground unexpectedly “shifting” beneath their feet, don’t have the luxury of spending 40-hour weeks defending their interests from predatory attack.
They’re peasants armed with mere sticks, squinting through the clouds at bombers cruising 20,000 feet or above … and the cluster bombs are hurtling through the air.
These bar and restaurant owners have next to no time to take away from their labor-intensive business creations, and no kneejerk lobby to level a playing field tilted against them from the start. They must scramble during rare off-hours to protect conditions that they genuinely perceive as important to their livelihoods, to rally their workers and customers (who’ve no time, either) to fight against something that was sprung on them without substantive warning, with not a solitary soul on a suddenly non-reactive council preparing them for the unexpected.
Just deft politics?
Pfui.
The speed of the council’s smoking represents cowardice by any reasonable definition.
Frozen in the headlights, with indignity piling atop indignity, and in the almost complete absence of clear public communication from the pro-ban bloc (how long will Jeff Gahan use his president’s chair as a shield from scrutiny?), these hard working business owners attended as many of the incredibly scant public hearings as possible, and were compelled to limit their comments to one minute, graciously complied in the main, and then were forced to listen with mounting frustration as they were lectured like dawdling kindergartners by Tim Filler, the carpetbagging cessation lobbyist from another city, who of course couldn’t possibly have any clear notion of how to run the businesses these people have operated on a daily basis, in some cases, for decades.
Want to respond? Sorry, suckers – you already had your minute … and by the way, Mr. Filler, just keep talking. Keep demeaning. Keep insulting. To hell with science. Just make these redneck bar owners look bad.
Mr. Filler, you can have as many minutes as you like to call honest people liars, to dispute their professional acumen, and to denigrate their comprehension of their own business, of their own interests, of their own customers – including that non-confrontational fellow on the barstool who wants above all else to have a few minutes away from it all, and can’t understand why we’re yelling about smoking when the street outside remains unpaved.
Detecting a wee bit of anger?
I won’t deny it.
---
It should make you angry, too, to have two sets of rules, and to have someone you’re never met speak with a theatrically straight face about your own inadequacies as an operator. Gee, how did I ever keep a business open for 16 years knowing as little as I do?
Anyone possessing a shard of empathy and a trace of solidarity with people engaged in the same pursuit as yours would feel the same way as I do, but this is different. This is the smoking “debate,” which manages to muddy the scrum comprehensively without my tossing buckets of water on the pitch.
So tell me, fellow fair-minded progressives, what part of any of this is fair to these extremely hard working people?
I may be a progressive, but what part of importing a for-hire suit to tell people they don’t know how to run their own businesses makes sense to you?
Why must smokers and operators be demonized in such a manner?
Wasn’t it supposed to have been about workplace safety?
Why did Jeff Gahan permit the “debate” to devolve into anarchy?
Why is John Gonder the only council pro-ban advocate to have basic human respect for the other side, while the other four remain as ziplocked as the barbecued bologna sandwich in Dan Coffey’s Bazooka Joe lunch box?
Take your time before you answer – but no more than a minute, because another important point that we’ve been taught by the smoking ban debate is that when it comes to social engineering campaigns undertaken by ward heelers, debate really isn’t necessary at all. Lip service to disposable principle is it, and nothing more.
Perhaps this oppressive absence of meaningful discourse will go down in history as the King Gahan Doctrine, and maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and the council will retain some semblance of a “progressive” bloc to enforce limited debate on slumlord abatement to the barest minimum necessary to appear civilized, but somehow I doubt it. Coffey will scurry when the time is right ... and then what?
---
Why did it come down this way?
You see, neither that quiet guy on the barstool, nor the bar owner serving him, have anywhere near the lobbying clout that rental property owners have, and in the end, that’s why the pro-ban council bloc decided to schedule them first for the ritualistic ostracizing. It’s because sitting there, minding their own business, they couldn’t see it coming.
They were easy marks, and at a low, low price.
It’s because the out-of-towners would do the heavy lifting, the council members voting in favor would have three and half years for people to forget about it, and the socially unacceptable smokers with no organized resistance would be chased into the street to pitch their filthy nicotine-stained pup tents in the unrepaired pot holes that this council hasn’t had the guts to address, primarily because there’s no money, just like there’s no money (and likely, no will) to enforce the non-smoking mandate.
Y’all feel better about yourselves now that you've solved a purely cosmetic problem by disenfranchising people who did nothing to provoke it?
Not so fast, Jeff, John, Pat, Dan and Bob.
That question is aimed at my fellow progressives, not the council.
----
And what of my dad?
My father spent his life chasing populist windmills, and most of the time he got burned, but his instincts were noble. He looked at any problem from the perspective of the guys like him, and guys like him were the underdogs, and yeah, while it’s true that I’ve spent most of my adult life distancing myself from getting hurt by believing in something so much that losing it would matter to me, sometimes I guess blood is thicker than water.
I asked the council why this, and why now? Gonder tried, and I appreciate it, but in truth, there has been no answer. Yet.
The Bookseller asked, why this issue and not another?
It’s because there’s something so repugnant about this, and that cuts at such a deep level, that I’m forced to do something I seldom sanction, and that’s douse the lights and start swinging. Sorry if it offends you. Like my dad before me, I'll get over it ... but not before I'm finished having my say.
We didn’t always get along, but my dad taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. In my view, a smoking ordinance that purports to protect defenseless workers has achieved its aim only by targeting and vilifying business people and their customers, because in the end, at closing time, no one really wants to talk about science at all.
Science simply can’t be trusted to assuage individual prejudices, to scratch irrational itches, and to make us fear dying any less. At the same time, substituting one prejudice for another strikes me as hypocrisy of a very high order. The hypocrisy is what I'll remember when I'm standing outside the building I own, smoking my cigar, and wondering if Sam will run again for the sixth in 2011 ... and whether redistricting will have been achieved by then for the first time since 1992.
This hasn’t been a fair fight, and my dad taught me that fights should be fair, even if the outcome is preordained.
And that’s why I’m angry about it.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, I’m being feisty, prickly, disputative and contrarian about something that the majority of my own friends and acquaintances would prefer me to let lie and peacefully move on to other issues, but damn it, the more you see rigid orthodoxy enveloping you, the more someone – anyone -- has to try to state an opposing viewpoint.
That is what I’ve tried to do. At least I’m open and fully transparent about it. Jeff Gahan and the council pro-ban bloc has chosen opaqueness and subterfuge. Let history be the judge of which has shown more integrity in the process … and I accept the verdict.
Just don't limit me to a minute. That's just plain insulting to an intelligence seldom valued in this town.
And, an observation.
Thanks to New Albany’s Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08, I know conclusively that in spite of numerous personal differences, which I’m only now, this year, in the process of resolving, I am in fact my father’s son.
It may not seem like the sort of revelation designed to hang one’s rhetorical hat, but considering the year I‘ve had, it’s huge.
And if it means parting ways with my progressive brethren by sneering at orthodoxy, so be it. It’s healthier to sneer at orthodoxy than it is to dip snuff or smoke cigars, wouldn’t you think?
---
Several hundred people visit NAC on a daily basis. Among regular readers of this blog, there is a smaller, select group composed of true friends. Among this group, there are fewer still with whom I’m very close, and they know what a challenging year it’s been in my world. I’ll leave it at that, as background information.
Looking at it objectively, during the past month I’ve expended a disproportionate amount of time and energy in vigorously and vociferously contesting the city council’s smoking ban decision, and yes, that fact may seem counterintuitive to casual acquaintances, given that I’ve never smoked cigarettes, am not enamored of the odor they generate, and have little desire to be a pariah on my own side of the fence.
It’s just that the effete stench in this case isn’t emanating from an ashtray.
Furthermore, it certainly isn’t that I have ample time to devote to this particular struggle. Like many other people, I’m working two jobs: I’m helping my partners run our existing business, and I’m trying to start a second business. I’m serving on two volunteer boards. I’m married, and we own a home, and there are four cats and a 25-year-old truck in need of an oil change. The list goes on. Quite a few people out there have it far worse than me, and because I know that’s true, I’m not going to make it into a federal case, but if you haven’t owned a small business, you have no idea how difficult time management can be.
Or how much it pisses you off to be told that you obviously don’t know how to manage your own affairs.
---
Recently, the Bookseller asked me about my frequent disparaging of “out-of-towners” during this discussion. His unspoken question has been, “Why are you taking all this so personally?”
Fair enough, and I’ll try to explain why the professional cessation lobbyist’s comments during the last city council meeting grated on my nerves so thoroughly with each passing moment (lest we forget, many moments past the previously mandated “one”) that I felt compelled to speak aloud from my front row seat with reference to the unfolding travesty, and to remind the pusillanimous council president to follow his own stated “rule” … and to be ejected as a result of my insolence … and, just for the hell of it, what all this has to do with my father’s life.
At its most basic, I reacted the way I did out of pure instinct, because just like my father before me, I simply can’t resist throwing in my lot with the underdog, and as the smoking spectacle has stupidly proceeded, it’s become increasingly obvious that the truest underdog is the dude sitting on a barstool smoking a cigarette I’d never smoke, and drinking a beer I’d never drink, and probably watching a NASCAR race that I’d never watch.
Why do I so resent the presence of the paid professional anti-smoking lobbyists, the carpetbaggers from afar, and the associated health fascists who’ve descended on the city, then decamped just as quickly for further adventures in expense account living in other unfortunate burgs down the lonely Interstate from here?
It’s because they don’t have to do more than one thing at a time, while I don’t have the time to do anything, and what they’re being paid to do is intolerable from a standpoint of basic human fairness.
To me, they’re the health fascist obermenschen, these nannying, passionless people who are paid to perform one task and one task only sans the endless multitasking that fills my days, and that task is to demonize cigarette smokers, to the exclusion of anything and anyone else, and it infuriates me, because my fellow bar owners, who by the admirably frank admission of prime anti-smoking campaigner John Gonder must now cope with ground unexpectedly “shifting” beneath their feet, don’t have the luxury of spending 40-hour weeks defending their interests from predatory attack.
They’re peasants armed with mere sticks, squinting through the clouds at bombers cruising 20,000 feet or above … and the cluster bombs are hurtling through the air.
These bar and restaurant owners have next to no time to take away from their labor-intensive business creations, and no kneejerk lobby to level a playing field tilted against them from the start. They must scramble during rare off-hours to protect conditions that they genuinely perceive as important to their livelihoods, to rally their workers and customers (who’ve no time, either) to fight against something that was sprung on them without substantive warning, with not a solitary soul on a suddenly non-reactive council preparing them for the unexpected.
Just deft politics?
Pfui.
The speed of the council’s smoking represents cowardice by any reasonable definition.
Frozen in the headlights, with indignity piling atop indignity, and in the almost complete absence of clear public communication from the pro-ban bloc (how long will Jeff Gahan use his president’s chair as a shield from scrutiny?), these hard working business owners attended as many of the incredibly scant public hearings as possible, and were compelled to limit their comments to one minute, graciously complied in the main, and then were forced to listen with mounting frustration as they were lectured like dawdling kindergartners by Tim Filler, the carpetbagging cessation lobbyist from another city, who of course couldn’t possibly have any clear notion of how to run the businesses these people have operated on a daily basis, in some cases, for decades.
Want to respond? Sorry, suckers – you already had your minute … and by the way, Mr. Filler, just keep talking. Keep demeaning. Keep insulting. To hell with science. Just make these redneck bar owners look bad.
Mr. Filler, you can have as many minutes as you like to call honest people liars, to dispute their professional acumen, and to denigrate their comprehension of their own business, of their own interests, of their own customers – including that non-confrontational fellow on the barstool who wants above all else to have a few minutes away from it all, and can’t understand why we’re yelling about smoking when the street outside remains unpaved.
Detecting a wee bit of anger?
I won’t deny it.
---
It should make you angry, too, to have two sets of rules, and to have someone you’re never met speak with a theatrically straight face about your own inadequacies as an operator. Gee, how did I ever keep a business open for 16 years knowing as little as I do?
Anyone possessing a shard of empathy and a trace of solidarity with people engaged in the same pursuit as yours would feel the same way as I do, but this is different. This is the smoking “debate,” which manages to muddy the scrum comprehensively without my tossing buckets of water on the pitch.
So tell me, fellow fair-minded progressives, what part of any of this is fair to these extremely hard working people?
I may be a progressive, but what part of importing a for-hire suit to tell people they don’t know how to run their own businesses makes sense to you?
Why must smokers and operators be demonized in such a manner?
Wasn’t it supposed to have been about workplace safety?
Why did Jeff Gahan permit the “debate” to devolve into anarchy?
Why is John Gonder the only council pro-ban advocate to have basic human respect for the other side, while the other four remain as ziplocked as the barbecued bologna sandwich in Dan Coffey’s Bazooka Joe lunch box?
Take your time before you answer – but no more than a minute, because another important point that we’ve been taught by the smoking ban debate is that when it comes to social engineering campaigns undertaken by ward heelers, debate really isn’t necessary at all. Lip service to disposable principle is it, and nothing more.
Perhaps this oppressive absence of meaningful discourse will go down in history as the King Gahan Doctrine, and maybe we’ll be extremely lucky and the council will retain some semblance of a “progressive” bloc to enforce limited debate on slumlord abatement to the barest minimum necessary to appear civilized, but somehow I doubt it. Coffey will scurry when the time is right ... and then what?
---
Why did it come down this way?
You see, neither that quiet guy on the barstool, nor the bar owner serving him, have anywhere near the lobbying clout that rental property owners have, and in the end, that’s why the pro-ban council bloc decided to schedule them first for the ritualistic ostracizing. It’s because sitting there, minding their own business, they couldn’t see it coming.
They were easy marks, and at a low, low price.
It’s because the out-of-towners would do the heavy lifting, the council members voting in favor would have three and half years for people to forget about it, and the socially unacceptable smokers with no organized resistance would be chased into the street to pitch their filthy nicotine-stained pup tents in the unrepaired pot holes that this council hasn’t had the guts to address, primarily because there’s no money, just like there’s no money (and likely, no will) to enforce the non-smoking mandate.
Y’all feel better about yourselves now that you've solved a purely cosmetic problem by disenfranchising people who did nothing to provoke it?
Not so fast, Jeff, John, Pat, Dan and Bob.
That question is aimed at my fellow progressives, not the council.
----
And what of my dad?
My father spent his life chasing populist windmills, and most of the time he got burned, but his instincts were noble. He looked at any problem from the perspective of the guys like him, and guys like him were the underdogs, and yeah, while it’s true that I’ve spent most of my adult life distancing myself from getting hurt by believing in something so much that losing it would matter to me, sometimes I guess blood is thicker than water.
I asked the council why this, and why now? Gonder tried, and I appreciate it, but in truth, there has been no answer. Yet.
The Bookseller asked, why this issue and not another?
It’s because there’s something so repugnant about this, and that cuts at such a deep level, that I’m forced to do something I seldom sanction, and that’s douse the lights and start swinging. Sorry if it offends you. Like my dad before me, I'll get over it ... but not before I'm finished having my say.
We didn’t always get along, but my dad taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right. In my view, a smoking ordinance that purports to protect defenseless workers has achieved its aim only by targeting and vilifying business people and their customers, because in the end, at closing time, no one really wants to talk about science at all.
Science simply can’t be trusted to assuage individual prejudices, to scratch irrational itches, and to make us fear dying any less. At the same time, substituting one prejudice for another strikes me as hypocrisy of a very high order. The hypocrisy is what I'll remember when I'm standing outside the building I own, smoking my cigar, and wondering if Sam will run again for the sixth in 2011 ... and whether redistricting will have been achieved by then for the first time since 1992.
This hasn’t been a fair fight, and my dad taught me that fights should be fair, even if the outcome is preordained.
And that’s why I’m angry about it.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, I’m being feisty, prickly, disputative and contrarian about something that the majority of my own friends and acquaintances would prefer me to let lie and peacefully move on to other issues, but damn it, the more you see rigid orthodoxy enveloping you, the more someone – anyone -- has to try to state an opposing viewpoint.
That is what I’ve tried to do. At least I’m open and fully transparent about it. Jeff Gahan and the council pro-ban bloc has chosen opaqueness and subterfuge. Let history be the judge of which has shown more integrity in the process … and I accept the verdict.
Just don't limit me to a minute. That's just plain insulting to an intelligence seldom valued in this town.
Making your own dirt: Why not evangelical atheism?
It used to be that you couldn’t switch on an old-fashioned non-digital television set and watch a major sporting event in peace without seeing a man with a crazy rainbow Afro, always seated somewhere squarely within the most prominent camera angle, and holding up a sign touting John 3:16, which for the uninitiated, is a Bible verse that provides a handily terse defense of Christian doctrine so that we, too, can sign on the dotted line.
Accordingly, Wikipedia tells the story of Rollen Stewart.
Rollen Frederick Stewart (born May 20, 1944), also known as Rock 'n' Rollen and Rainbow Man, was a fixture in American sports culture best known for wearing a rainbow-colored afro-style wig and holding up signs reading "John 3:16" at stadium sporting events around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
Apparently at first just in it for the publicity stunts, Stewart became a born again Christian obsessed with "getting the message out" via television.
His first major appearance was at the 1977 NBA Finals; by the time of the 1979 MLB All-Star Game, broadcasters actively tried to avoid showing him. He "appeared behind NFL goal posts, near Olympic medal stands, and even at the Augusta National Golf Club" strategically positioned for key shots of plays or athletes. Stewart's fame led to a Budweiser beer commercial and a Saturday Night Live parody sketch, where he was portrayed by Christopher Walken.
Stewart was briefly jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Olympics. Other legal troubles followed. In the late 1980s, he began a string of stink bomb attacks. Targets included Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the Orange County Register, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and a Christian bookstore. The stated intent of an attempted attack at the American Music Awards was to show the public that "God thinks this stinks."
Stewart was arrested in 1992 after a standoff in a California hotel during which he entered a vacant room with two men he was attempting to kidnap and surprised a chambermaid who then locked herself in the bathroom. Reportedly, Stewart believed that the Rapture was due to arrive in six days. During the standoff, he threatened to shoot at airplanes taking off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and covered the hotel room windows with "John 3:16" placards.
Rollen is currently serving three consecutive life sentences in jail on kidnapping charges. He became eligible for parole in 2002, but was denied as recently as September of 2005. After this conviction, he was found guilty of four stink bomb attacks.
Rollen Stewart’s career of religious advocacy came back to me in vivid Technicolor after I read a recent guest column in the Tribune.
DeKAY: Latest import — New Atheism, by Peggy DeKay (local Tribune columnist)
What's new about the New Atheism? The New Atheism, and its believers, aren't satisfied to deny the existence of God, or even condemn the belief in God, but they are out to destroy our “respect for our belief in God,” in short, they want to make atheism “cool.”
They paint believers with a broad, harsh brush.
(Richard) Dawkins is an atheist; but he is not content to be an atheist, he wants converts and lots of them. His killing field is comprised of agnostics and non-committed non-believers. He, and his fellow British atheist, Christopher Hitchens represent the New Atheists religion.
DeKay offers the usual tired arguments in favor of theism in general and “intelligent design” in particular, but what seems to annoy her the most is that atheists would have the unmitigated gall to go out in public, write books, and attempt to convince others that there is no supreme being.
That’s breathtakingly hypocritical.
Think of Rollen Stewart. Think of every Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon who has ever come knocking at my door while I’m busy eating, drinking, sleeping or fornicating. Think of the transformational zeal of generations of ravenous Christians, traveling overseas for the peaceful purpose of subduing decadent native culture and spreading Western microbes even as they blame the dying natives for being sick and urging them to find God as a cure.
In short, the entire history of Peggy DeKay’s preferred religion is one of evangelical outreach, to put it mildly, except that it’s seldom anything but intrusive, amounting to incessant interference in the space of non-believers as well as believers in other forms of supernatural fiction. And yet, she’s aghast that an atheist would dare to explain why he or she doesn’t believe, and ask other to consider the evidence?
Most readers know that I’m an atheist. I don’t go door to door, and I don’t show up at the front gate of Christian churches on Sunday mornings to protest the delusion residing therein. I don’t go to the balcony and swing my Oakland A’s pennant or, even worse, wave my portrait of Bertrand Russell at the minister and demand the honcho repent from sin -- or whatever that other columnist, the prison lawyer, wants to call it.
Peggy DeKay needs desperately to get a clue. Until she does, here’s the reprint of a piece I wrote a year or so ago on much the same topic.
---
No better day than Sunday to be a gadfly.
A few weeks back, as Tribune syndicated religion columnist David Yount wrote carefully erected a straw man out of atheism before predictably and delightedly bashing it to bits, he ventured, “It is no more credible that there is no God than that God indeed exists.”
I submit that this statement is at best an example of logical sleight of hand, and at worst, downright nonsensical.
If I were to write, “It is no more credible that there is no Blue Speckled Hungadunga than that a Blue Speckled Hungadunga indeed exists,” it is quite likely that any rational person would demand an immediate definition of a Blue Speckled Hungadunga in order to proceed with the discussion.
Moreover, lacking persuasive proof for the existence of the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, there would be no need for further debate, and subsequently no need for a syndicated religion columnist to utter a statement that is at base invalid, for it assumes the existence of a conjectured entity, then uses this assumed (and as yet unproven) existence to impugn the allegedly faulty perception of those who insist in pointing to the obvious nature of the theist’s logical fallacy.
In fact, atheists don’t “believe” there is no God; rather, they are absent such a belief. As with the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, the responsibility for proving the existence of God lies with the one advancing a positive belief in the conjectured deity, not with the one who has no belief.
Atheists offer no positive claims with respect to knowledge presumed to derive from outside the realm of human experience and perception. As Yount correctly notes, some atheists go a step further and proselytize in the manner of the religionist, but it’s a very safe bet that during the past two thousand years far more people have been asked to convert to religion at the point of a bayonet, and died as a result of their refusal, than have been forcibly converted to atheism.
After all, if religious belief really remains a matter of heart and soul, isn’t it impossible to “convert” anyone to atheism? Outward symbols and pageantry are superfluous with regard to inner feeling, aren’t they?
In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy stick. We respect a separation of church and state and take such a division at face value precisely because we’ve studied history, and we know against whom that public policy stick inevitably is wielded – against us, to be sure, but far more often against other religionists who believe in their variant of the supernatural entity just as much as the ones shooting at them from a nearby trench.
The result is a sad continuation of the war, violence and strife that has accompanied religion throughout human history.
To summarize, atheism is a negation in the absence of verifiable evidence, and it is the theist who is obliged to prove that God exists – not the other way around.
With apologies to the Tribune’s youthful, periodically published “natural law” guest writer: “It is no more credible that there is a necessary higher power than such a necessary higher power does not exist.”
Accordingly, Wikipedia tells the story of Rollen Stewart.
Rollen Frederick Stewart (born May 20, 1944), also known as Rock 'n' Rollen and Rainbow Man, was a fixture in American sports culture best known for wearing a rainbow-colored afro-style wig and holding up signs reading "John 3:16" at stadium sporting events around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
Apparently at first just in it for the publicity stunts, Stewart became a born again Christian obsessed with "getting the message out" via television.
His first major appearance was at the 1977 NBA Finals; by the time of the 1979 MLB All-Star Game, broadcasters actively tried to avoid showing him. He "appeared behind NFL goal posts, near Olympic medal stands, and even at the Augusta National Golf Club" strategically positioned for key shots of plays or athletes. Stewart's fame led to a Budweiser beer commercial and a Saturday Night Live parody sketch, where he was portrayed by Christopher Walken.
Stewart was briefly jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Olympics. Other legal troubles followed. In the late 1980s, he began a string of stink bomb attacks. Targets included Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the Orange County Register, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and a Christian bookstore. The stated intent of an attempted attack at the American Music Awards was to show the public that "God thinks this stinks."
Stewart was arrested in 1992 after a standoff in a California hotel during which he entered a vacant room with two men he was attempting to kidnap and surprised a chambermaid who then locked herself in the bathroom. Reportedly, Stewart believed that the Rapture was due to arrive in six days. During the standoff, he threatened to shoot at airplanes taking off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and covered the hotel room windows with "John 3:16" placards.
Rollen is currently serving three consecutive life sentences in jail on kidnapping charges. He became eligible for parole in 2002, but was denied as recently as September of 2005. After this conviction, he was found guilty of four stink bomb attacks.
Rollen Stewart’s career of religious advocacy came back to me in vivid Technicolor after I read a recent guest column in the Tribune.
DeKAY: Latest import — New Atheism, by Peggy DeKay (local Tribune columnist)
What's new about the New Atheism? The New Atheism, and its believers, aren't satisfied to deny the existence of God, or even condemn the belief in God, but they are out to destroy our “respect for our belief in God,” in short, they want to make atheism “cool.”
They paint believers with a broad, harsh brush.
(Richard) Dawkins is an atheist; but he is not content to be an atheist, he wants converts and lots of them. His killing field is comprised of agnostics and non-committed non-believers. He, and his fellow British atheist, Christopher Hitchens represent the New Atheists religion.
DeKay offers the usual tired arguments in favor of theism in general and “intelligent design” in particular, but what seems to annoy her the most is that atheists would have the unmitigated gall to go out in public, write books, and attempt to convince others that there is no supreme being.
That’s breathtakingly hypocritical.
Think of Rollen Stewart. Think of every Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon who has ever come knocking at my door while I’m busy eating, drinking, sleeping or fornicating. Think of the transformational zeal of generations of ravenous Christians, traveling overseas for the peaceful purpose of subduing decadent native culture and spreading Western microbes even as they blame the dying natives for being sick and urging them to find God as a cure.
In short, the entire history of Peggy DeKay’s preferred religion is one of evangelical outreach, to put it mildly, except that it’s seldom anything but intrusive, amounting to incessant interference in the space of non-believers as well as believers in other forms of supernatural fiction. And yet, she’s aghast that an atheist would dare to explain why he or she doesn’t believe, and ask other to consider the evidence?
Most readers know that I’m an atheist. I don’t go door to door, and I don’t show up at the front gate of Christian churches on Sunday mornings to protest the delusion residing therein. I don’t go to the balcony and swing my Oakland A’s pennant or, even worse, wave my portrait of Bertrand Russell at the minister and demand the honcho repent from sin -- or whatever that other columnist, the prison lawyer, wants to call it.
Peggy DeKay needs desperately to get a clue. Until she does, here’s the reprint of a piece I wrote a year or so ago on much the same topic.
---
No better day than Sunday to be a gadfly.
A few weeks back, as Tribune syndicated religion columnist David Yount wrote carefully erected a straw man out of atheism before predictably and delightedly bashing it to bits, he ventured, “It is no more credible that there is no God than that God indeed exists.”
I submit that this statement is at best an example of logical sleight of hand, and at worst, downright nonsensical.
If I were to write, “It is no more credible that there is no Blue Speckled Hungadunga than that a Blue Speckled Hungadunga indeed exists,” it is quite likely that any rational person would demand an immediate definition of a Blue Speckled Hungadunga in order to proceed with the discussion.
Moreover, lacking persuasive proof for the existence of the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, there would be no need for further debate, and subsequently no need for a syndicated religion columnist to utter a statement that is at base invalid, for it assumes the existence of a conjectured entity, then uses this assumed (and as yet unproven) existence to impugn the allegedly faulty perception of those who insist in pointing to the obvious nature of the theist’s logical fallacy.
In fact, atheists don’t “believe” there is no God; rather, they are absent such a belief. As with the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, the responsibility for proving the existence of God lies with the one advancing a positive belief in the conjectured deity, not with the one who has no belief.
Atheists offer no positive claims with respect to knowledge presumed to derive from outside the realm of human experience and perception. As Yount correctly notes, some atheists go a step further and proselytize in the manner of the religionist, but it’s a very safe bet that during the past two thousand years far more people have been asked to convert to religion at the point of a bayonet, and died as a result of their refusal, than have been forcibly converted to atheism.
After all, if religious belief really remains a matter of heart and soul, isn’t it impossible to “convert” anyone to atheism? Outward symbols and pageantry are superfluous with regard to inner feeling, aren’t they?
In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy stick. We respect a separation of church and state and take such a division at face value precisely because we’ve studied history, and we know against whom that public policy stick inevitably is wielded – against us, to be sure, but far more often against other religionists who believe in their variant of the supernatural entity just as much as the ones shooting at them from a nearby trench.
The result is a sad continuation of the war, violence and strife that has accompanied religion throughout human history.
To summarize, atheism is a negation in the absence of verifiable evidence, and it is the theist who is obliged to prove that God exists – not the other way around.
With apologies to the Tribune’s youthful, periodically published “natural law” guest writer: “It is no more credible that there is a necessary higher power than such a necessary higher power does not exist.”
At The NewAlbanist.
There's a new blog portal: The NewAlbanist. The most recent posting is What’s really going on, and here's an excerpt. For the complete text, hit the links.
---
First off, I’m as befuddled as the next gal at the New Albany City Council’s decision to make now the time to address workplace smoking hazards. Not that now isn’t the right time (it is). But where in the world did council president Jeff Gahan get the idea that this was the most necessary legislation for the council to take up?
On this holiday weekend, an amateur drama is being rehearsed. The curtain will rise for the public and the mainstream media on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. But those who’ve seen the previews have informed my understanding of the game that is afoot.
Mayor England has painted himself into a corner with his pledge that Sept. 2, 2008 will not become a memorable day in New Albany’s almost 200-year history. He has promised far too many people that he intends to veto the workplace smoking ban, passed 11 days ago by a 5-4 city council vote. It is beyond credible to think that England will agree to the comprehensive ordinance.
I believe the mayor is trying to leverage this issue in exchange for support for some of his initiatives. Some of those are initiatives that I favor. Some are ones I’m suspicious of. And to pretend that politics is not “political” is naive.
---
First off, I’m as befuddled as the next gal at the New Albany City Council’s decision to make now the time to address workplace smoking hazards. Not that now isn’t the right time (it is). But where in the world did council president Jeff Gahan get the idea that this was the most necessary legislation for the council to take up?
On this holiday weekend, an amateur drama is being rehearsed. The curtain will rise for the public and the mainstream media on Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. But those who’ve seen the previews have informed my understanding of the game that is afoot.
Mayor England has painted himself into a corner with his pledge that Sept. 2, 2008 will not become a memorable day in New Albany’s almost 200-year history. He has promised far too many people that he intends to veto the workplace smoking ban, passed 11 days ago by a 5-4 city council vote. It is beyond credible to think that England will agree to the comprehensive ordinance.
I believe the mayor is trying to leverage this issue in exchange for support for some of his initiatives. Some of those are initiatives that I favor. Some are ones I’m suspicious of. And to pretend that politics is not “political” is naive.
Gamborg Gallery on-line exhibition: Soviet electrification.
My dear friend Allan Gamborg, who hails from Arhus, Denmark, and formerly made his late and much lamented orange couch in Copenhagen available to me on too many occasions during my youthful European jaunts, currently is an art dealer in Moscow. He sent me this e-mail earlier today, and I thought I'd share it.Allan's taste for art of this nature is simply incredible.
---
Dear Friends,
We have a series of new exhibitions on the Gamborg Gallery on the web:
THEMES:
Electrification of the Whole Country - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=293
One of the more famous quotes by Lenin is “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” (Коммунизм - это советская власть плюс электрификация всей страны). The slogan was used from the 1930s and through the 1960s when bringing electricity to the remote regions through the construction of hydro power plants for example in Bratsk, and nuclear power plants. In the arts, the slogan was illustrated in posters, prints and oil paintings
ARTISTS:
Tatyana Livshits (born 1925) - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=290
Boris Rybchenkov (1899-1994) - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=294
Ivan Tsarevich (1908-1992) - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=295
Ivan Staroselskii (1914-1980) - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=289
Viktor Semyonov (1942-1980) - http://russianart.dk/exhibition.asp?e=288
The Creamer Theorem: Is there any reason for this being part of the smoking debate?
That is, apart from shameless (read: irrelevant) propaganda value?
This one really baffles me. Like a can of light beer, it’s an example of something that may seem significant at first glance, but doesn’t survive scrutiny (or, in light beer’s case, actually swallowing the insipid liquid). As a prelude to what follows, I know who Gary Creamer is, but I don’t know him personally.
New Albany mayor urged to sign smoking ban, by Dick Kaukas (C-J).
Gary Creamer, a New Albany resident, said the city is losing restaurant business because residents have so few smoke-free places to go for meals.
Creamer said he and a group of friends eat together once a week and spend $17,000 to $20,000 annually. He said he and his friends have gone to New Albany restaurants only twice during the past year because so few are smoke-free.
Admittedly, that’s a lot of money to pump into Little Chef’s coffers, given that it might be the very last restaurant hereabouts that doesn’t actually have a non-smoking seating area. There may be others, but of course the obvious question is this:
Given Gary Creamer's eagerness to publicly advertise the amount of money that his group withholds from still-smoky New Albany restaurants, are those establishments really the sort of place that Creamer’s party wants to be seen patronizing?
Consequently, it seems fair to ask why on earth Gary Creamer and Company’s discretionary spending habits have been made part of this noble campaign to protect workplace health?
Is there even the remotest connection between worker safety and conspicuous consumption of this sort?
I’m searching in vain for a causal relationship, and I’m open to assistance in locating it. Surely it’s fair to ask: Where and to whom is Creamer’s party constrained from transferring wealth because of second hand smoke? To put it bluntly, if Little Chef suddenly was smoke-free, would Creamer's party be dropping dollars therein?
And: Isn’t is somehow unseemly that even the ban’s proponents can’t stick to their own magic bullet of science, and must instead hoist an example of personal preference for us to lacerate?
Why again is it that in the midst of scrum of this magnitude, political interpretations are somehow off limits to contrarians?
I’ll have more to say a bit later on that particular angle.
This one really baffles me. Like a can of light beer, it’s an example of something that may seem significant at first glance, but doesn’t survive scrutiny (or, in light beer’s case, actually swallowing the insipid liquid). As a prelude to what follows, I know who Gary Creamer is, but I don’t know him personally.
New Albany mayor urged to sign smoking ban, by Dick Kaukas (C-J).
Gary Creamer, a New Albany resident, said the city is losing restaurant business because residents have so few smoke-free places to go for meals.
Creamer said he and a group of friends eat together once a week and spend $17,000 to $20,000 annually. He said he and his friends have gone to New Albany restaurants only twice during the past year because so few are smoke-free.
Admittedly, that’s a lot of money to pump into Little Chef’s coffers, given that it might be the very last restaurant hereabouts that doesn’t actually have a non-smoking seating area. There may be others, but of course the obvious question is this:
Given Gary Creamer's eagerness to publicly advertise the amount of money that his group withholds from still-smoky New Albany restaurants, are those establishments really the sort of place that Creamer’s party wants to be seen patronizing?
Consequently, it seems fair to ask why on earth Gary Creamer and Company’s discretionary spending habits have been made part of this noble campaign to protect workplace health?
Is there even the remotest connection between worker safety and conspicuous consumption of this sort?
I’m searching in vain for a causal relationship, and I’m open to assistance in locating it. Surely it’s fair to ask: Where and to whom is Creamer’s party constrained from transferring wealth because of second hand smoke? To put it bluntly, if Little Chef suddenly was smoke-free, would Creamer's party be dropping dollars therein?
And: Isn’t is somehow unseemly that even the ban’s proponents can’t stick to their own magic bullet of science, and must instead hoist an example of personal preference for us to lacerate?
Why again is it that in the midst of scrum of this magnitude, political interpretations are somehow off limits to contrarians?
I’ll have more to say a bit later on that particular angle.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Health fascism, healthism, and other purely amateur renderings from an unpaid homeboy.
I’ve been asked to explain my previous references to “health fascism.”
To the best of my recollection, I first encountered this term in the late 1980’s. I believe I read it in The Nation, as used by Alexander Cockburn in one of his “Beat the Devil” columns.
To Google “health fascism” is to find numerous British Isles references. To judge from the Wikipedia entry on “healthism,” the latter carries equal weight, too. Here's an excerpt.
(Petr) Skrabanek: the threat of health fascism
According to Skrabanek, "healthism" begins when the government begins to use propaganda and coercion to establish norms of health and begins to attempt to impose norms of a "healthy lifestyle." All human activities are weighed in the balance of their real or imagined effects on health: all human activities are divided into "healthy" and "unhealthy", prescribed and proscribed, approved and disapproved, responsible and irresponsible, based on this measure.
In Skrabanek's view, "healthism" goes hand in hand with what he calls "lifestylism", another neologism, which Skrabanek uses to describe the view that most diseases are the result of unhealthy habits or behaviour. Skrabanek notes that while "lifestylism" is ostensibly founded on a basis of mathematics and statistics, it nevertheless has a strong moralistic flavour. Skrabanek cites a British epidemiologist, Geoffrey Rose, as expressing the belief that most people live "unhealthily" and constitute a "sick population". But since (according to Skrabanek) this message would lead to a fatalistic rejection of the lifestyle doctrine, it must be recast to be socially and politically acceptable, quoting Rose for the view that the "sick" society must be re-educated in its "perception of what is normal and acceptable."
Ultimately, Skrabanek claims that "healthism" either leads to, or is a symptom of, incipient totalitarianism. Skrabanek claims that healthism justifies racism, segregation, and eugenic control; for the healthist, what is "healthy" is moral, patriotic, and pure; while what is "unhealthy" is foreign, polluted, and impure. The doctrine of "lifestylism" suggests that state actions to prescribe what is healthy or forbid what is unhealthy are limitless in scope, and offer no grounds for privacy.
That’s a lot to digest. Luckily, I believe the following comment, made on councilman John Gonder’s blog earlier in the week, actually makes the case for the existence of “health fascism” with little additional testimony required.
I freely admit to being condescending toward smoking ban opponents and their "reasons" because I have facts and evidence on my side and they have none.
That's even more frightening than second hand smoke, don't you think?
To the best of my recollection, I first encountered this term in the late 1980’s. I believe I read it in The Nation, as used by Alexander Cockburn in one of his “Beat the Devil” columns.
To Google “health fascism” is to find numerous British Isles references. To judge from the Wikipedia entry on “healthism,” the latter carries equal weight, too. Here's an excerpt.
(Petr) Skrabanek: the threat of health fascism
According to Skrabanek, "healthism" begins when the government begins to use propaganda and coercion to establish norms of health and begins to attempt to impose norms of a "healthy lifestyle." All human activities are weighed in the balance of their real or imagined effects on health: all human activities are divided into "healthy" and "unhealthy", prescribed and proscribed, approved and disapproved, responsible and irresponsible, based on this measure.
In Skrabanek's view, "healthism" goes hand in hand with what he calls "lifestylism", another neologism, which Skrabanek uses to describe the view that most diseases are the result of unhealthy habits or behaviour. Skrabanek notes that while "lifestylism" is ostensibly founded on a basis of mathematics and statistics, it nevertheless has a strong moralistic flavour. Skrabanek cites a British epidemiologist, Geoffrey Rose, as expressing the belief that most people live "unhealthily" and constitute a "sick population". But since (according to Skrabanek) this message would lead to a fatalistic rejection of the lifestyle doctrine, it must be recast to be socially and politically acceptable, quoting Rose for the view that the "sick" society must be re-educated in its "perception of what is normal and acceptable."
Ultimately, Skrabanek claims that "healthism" either leads to, or is a symptom of, incipient totalitarianism. Skrabanek claims that healthism justifies racism, segregation, and eugenic control; for the healthist, what is "healthy" is moral, patriotic, and pure; while what is "unhealthy" is foreign, polluted, and impure. The doctrine of "lifestylism" suggests that state actions to prescribe what is healthy or forbid what is unhealthy are limitless in scope, and offer no grounds for privacy.
That’s a lot to digest. Luckily, I believe the following comment, made on councilman John Gonder’s blog earlier in the week, actually makes the case for the existence of “health fascism” with little additional testimony required.
I freely admit to being condescending toward smoking ban opponents and their "reasons" because I have facts and evidence on my side and they have none.
That's even more frightening than second hand smoke, don't you think?
I stand corrected.
Previously I implied in this space that certain local politicians are hypocrites, but one of me friends sent me this, and I'm now suitably penitent.
Roger
Certainly aware that the statement, “Politicians are hypocrites,” is a tautology in rhetorical terms. In other words, you have committed a redundancy!
I’m sorry, and I apologize.
Roger
Certainly aware that the statement, “Politicians are hypocrites,” is a tautology in rhetorical terms. In other words, you have committed a redundancy!
I’m sorry, and I apologize.
Friday, August 29, 2008
If it's good enough for zoning ...
On the topic of polling data, today I decided to conduct a sampling in my workplace. The error rate for this informal questionnaire was plus or minus 6.2% abv.
This question was posed to 25 customers: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?
The results were 7 in favor of a smoking ban, 17 in favor of paving, and one who said that our progressive pints cost too much. He was a Republican, so I threw him out into the street, where the smokers soon will be expected to congregate.
Coupled with the irrefutable evidence of the last council meeting, when twice as many people spoke publicly against the ban than in favor, I believe we have a fair reading of the people's will.
Lies, damned lies ... and what?
This question was posed to 25 customers: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?
The results were 7 in favor of a smoking ban, 17 in favor of paving, and one who said that our progressive pints cost too much. He was a Republican, so I threw him out into the street, where the smokers soon will be expected to congregate.
Coupled with the irrefutable evidence of the last council meeting, when twice as many people spoke publicly against the ban than in favor, I believe we have a fair reading of the people's will.
Lies, damned lies ... and what?
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Veto the smoking ordinance, yer Honor. You’ll survive squawking that primarily comes from afar.
Here it is: The resident contrarian’s case in favor of mayoral intervention in the Greatly Unnecessary Smoking Debate of ’08.
(After all, I wouldn’t want to use the word “veto” … so, sticking to my principles, I’ll happily persist in doing so.)
I’m told that Mayor Doug England will hold a press conference next Tuesday morning circa 10:00 a.m. to reveal whether he’ll put the kibosh on the city council’s controversial smoking ordinance, or permit it to stand on its wobbly feet.
None of us on the outside will ever know the full depth and range of Mayor England’s thought processes in making this decision. I imagine he’s being pelted with advice from all angles (see below for mine), and predictably, outside interests already have weighed in with a full page advertisement in the Tribune, as referenced in today’s Courier-Journal:
Opponents and supporters have continued to lobby England in an attempt to win him over.
One of the latest efforts was from the American Heart Association and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, which took out a full-page ad in today’s New Albany Tribune.
The ad said second-hand smoke causes heart disease, cancer and other health problems, that bar and restaurant workers are at greatest risk and that most area residents support the ordinance.
The ad, which asked if England would stand for “all workers and the public” or “big tobacco and its allies,” urged people to contact the mayor and ask him to sign the measure.
The money spent on that ad alone might have purchased a working toilet or two for a rundown rental property, don’t you think? But I forget so very quickly that the professional public health lobbyists don’t have a dog in the slumlord abatement fight.
----
Me?
I believe the mayor should veto the ordinance, primarily because there has yet to be a telephone poll that asks the truly pertinent question: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?
I’m guessing that such a poll would return a majority in favor of smoother driving surfaces, and one well in excess of that portion of the populace favoring a smoking ban in the absence of substantive progress in other areas.
I believe the mayor can make a perfectly logical case that far from being a measure assisting in the furtherance of public health, the ordinance in fact is little more than frivolous in nature – that it is yet another in a series of unfunded mandates of the sort that usually emanate from Indianapolis or Washington, D.C., except that this time around, it comes from our own council. The ordinance as written is unenforceable, and as such, frivolous isn’t too strong a word to describe it.
I believe that the mayor can plausibly connect the smoking issue with economic development by noting that the city council, having established a changed condition of daily business operation that will require fair and equitable enforcement, has made no provision for such enforcement apart from expecting the businesses that stand to be hurt most by the ordinance to pay for its accommodation by constructing elaborate outdoor smoking areas that surely will be the next target of an insatiable (and perpetually carpetbagging) anti-smoking lobby.
I believe the mayor can accurately decry the transparently shambolic nature of council president Gahan’s somewhat less than deft guidance of the smoking “debate,” which in the end comprised a solitary and inadequate public meeting and two catastrophically truncated public “speaking” allowances, all of which amounted to the council’s pro-ban bloc honoring the need for discourse only in the barest of minimum permissible breaches, and not in such a manner as to allow anything remotely approximating sufficient discussion pertaining to a topic destined to divide the citizenry.
Yes, these may be viewed in some quarters as procedural technicalities. I’m not a lawyer, but it is a regular, recurring and fully justified feature of the American system of governance that we expect important decisions to be made in a way – in the “right” way -- that involves people, and not excludes them, and yet the unprecedented speed with which an eternally dormant council moved to facilitate legislative action that was nowhere to be seen or sighted in any council candidate’s platform during the last election.
This largely underreported aspect of the current situation is perhaps the most annoying of all.
----
Does anyone else wonder why an issue now being portrayed as critically important did not produce a blip on last year's electoral radar screen?
Does anyone else remember when King Larry Kochert, then the council president, announced that 2007 would be the year when his cherished smoking ban finally came into effect, and the same reactionary who did so much for so long to keep New Albany rooted in the 19th century would suddenly leapfrog the moribund experience of long decades by the magically simple act of chasing smokers from their bar stools, into the streets, to disappear into unrepaired pot holes?
Remember how the smoking ordinance unceremoniously died almost on the spot, and how none of the council members at the time – and none of the candidates challenging them – uttered so much as a peep about smoking as the 2007 election loomed?
How not one of them campaigned on a platform of smoking as the issue most deserving of immediate action in 2008 -- for that matter, was it even in the Top 10 of any candidate's published list of aims?
Was it ever mentioned publicly on the campaign trail one single time?
Actually, to be fair to the candidates, not a one of them offered a decipherable platform of any sort, smoking or otherwise, but I digress.
Which brings me to the primary reason I hope Mayor England vetoes the smoking ordinance. As my high school baseball coach was known to say, the covert way all this has come down, and the timing of it coming down, is chickenshit, plain and simple, and I’m not using that word because I want to spare Steve Price the indignity of being the only potty mouth hereabouts.
Rather, this legislative spectacle was transformed into political theater early on, and it has been bereft of political courage from start to finish. Why this, and why now? No one has provided a satisfactory answer, and until they do: Mayor England, muddy the scrum and veto this ordinance.
Give ‘em a year under strict supervision to do something genuinely progressive, and to undertake it sans the subterfuge that has been such an alarming aspect of the smoking travesty, and I’m quite willing to visit the smoking issue again, but not under the current discredited terms.
I know that quite a few of you disagree with my thoughts, and that’s fine. In the end, given my personal interests and my chosen vocation, perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the historical atrocities wrought by the prohibitionist instinct in America. They’re documented, and they’re real. Given that experience, the legislative bar needs to be higher, doesn't it?
(After all, I wouldn’t want to use the word “veto” … so, sticking to my principles, I’ll happily persist in doing so.)
I’m told that Mayor Doug England will hold a press conference next Tuesday morning circa 10:00 a.m. to reveal whether he’ll put the kibosh on the city council’s controversial smoking ordinance, or permit it to stand on its wobbly feet.
None of us on the outside will ever know the full depth and range of Mayor England’s thought processes in making this decision. I imagine he’s being pelted with advice from all angles (see below for mine), and predictably, outside interests already have weighed in with a full page advertisement in the Tribune, as referenced in today’s Courier-Journal:
Opponents and supporters have continued to lobby England in an attempt to win him over.
One of the latest efforts was from the American Heart Association and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, which took out a full-page ad in today’s New Albany Tribune.
The ad said second-hand smoke causes heart disease, cancer and other health problems, that bar and restaurant workers are at greatest risk and that most area residents support the ordinance.
The ad, which asked if England would stand for “all workers and the public” or “big tobacco and its allies,” urged people to contact the mayor and ask him to sign the measure.
The money spent on that ad alone might have purchased a working toilet or two for a rundown rental property, don’t you think? But I forget so very quickly that the professional public health lobbyists don’t have a dog in the slumlord abatement fight.
----
Me?
I believe the mayor should veto the ordinance, primarily because there has yet to be a telephone poll that asks the truly pertinent question: Would you rather the city council ban workplace smoking, or take action to pave the streets?
I’m guessing that such a poll would return a majority in favor of smoother driving surfaces, and one well in excess of that portion of the populace favoring a smoking ban in the absence of substantive progress in other areas.
I believe the mayor can make a perfectly logical case that far from being a measure assisting in the furtherance of public health, the ordinance in fact is little more than frivolous in nature – that it is yet another in a series of unfunded mandates of the sort that usually emanate from Indianapolis or Washington, D.C., except that this time around, it comes from our own council. The ordinance as written is unenforceable, and as such, frivolous isn’t too strong a word to describe it.
I believe that the mayor can plausibly connect the smoking issue with economic development by noting that the city council, having established a changed condition of daily business operation that will require fair and equitable enforcement, has made no provision for such enforcement apart from expecting the businesses that stand to be hurt most by the ordinance to pay for its accommodation by constructing elaborate outdoor smoking areas that surely will be the next target of an insatiable (and perpetually carpetbagging) anti-smoking lobby.
I believe the mayor can accurately decry the transparently shambolic nature of council president Gahan’s somewhat less than deft guidance of the smoking “debate,” which in the end comprised a solitary and inadequate public meeting and two catastrophically truncated public “speaking” allowances, all of which amounted to the council’s pro-ban bloc honoring the need for discourse only in the barest of minimum permissible breaches, and not in such a manner as to allow anything remotely approximating sufficient discussion pertaining to a topic destined to divide the citizenry.
Yes, these may be viewed in some quarters as procedural technicalities. I’m not a lawyer, but it is a regular, recurring and fully justified feature of the American system of governance that we expect important decisions to be made in a way – in the “right” way -- that involves people, and not excludes them, and yet the unprecedented speed with which an eternally dormant council moved to facilitate legislative action that was nowhere to be seen or sighted in any council candidate’s platform during the last election.
This largely underreported aspect of the current situation is perhaps the most annoying of all.
----
Does anyone else wonder why an issue now being portrayed as critically important did not produce a blip on last year's electoral radar screen?
Does anyone else remember when King Larry Kochert, then the council president, announced that 2007 would be the year when his cherished smoking ban finally came into effect, and the same reactionary who did so much for so long to keep New Albany rooted in the 19th century would suddenly leapfrog the moribund experience of long decades by the magically simple act of chasing smokers from their bar stools, into the streets, to disappear into unrepaired pot holes?
Remember how the smoking ordinance unceremoniously died almost on the spot, and how none of the council members at the time – and none of the candidates challenging them – uttered so much as a peep about smoking as the 2007 election loomed?
How not one of them campaigned on a platform of smoking as the issue most deserving of immediate action in 2008 -- for that matter, was it even in the Top 10 of any candidate's published list of aims?
Was it ever mentioned publicly on the campaign trail one single time?
Actually, to be fair to the candidates, not a one of them offered a decipherable platform of any sort, smoking or otherwise, but I digress.
Which brings me to the primary reason I hope Mayor England vetoes the smoking ordinance. As my high school baseball coach was known to say, the covert way all this has come down, and the timing of it coming down, is chickenshit, plain and simple, and I’m not using that word because I want to spare Steve Price the indignity of being the only potty mouth hereabouts.
Rather, this legislative spectacle was transformed into political theater early on, and it has been bereft of political courage from start to finish. Why this, and why now? No one has provided a satisfactory answer, and until they do: Mayor England, muddy the scrum and veto this ordinance.
Give ‘em a year under strict supervision to do something genuinely progressive, and to undertake it sans the subterfuge that has been such an alarming aspect of the smoking travesty, and I’m quite willing to visit the smoking issue again, but not under the current discredited terms.
I know that quite a few of you disagree with my thoughts, and that’s fine. In the end, given my personal interests and my chosen vocation, perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the historical atrocities wrought by the prohibitionist instinct in America. They’re documented, and they’re real. Given that experience, the legislative bar needs to be higher, doesn't it?
Wow, redux.
It's impossible not to be awed by the crowd in Denver. The MSNBC camera just panoramically scanned the crowd. I keep expecting a football game to break out, and yet, incredibly, the people are there for a presidential candidate.
Senator Richard Durbin, who was in New Albany at the Parthenon back in May, will introduce Barack Obama soon.
Eight years of idiocy, really about to come to a close? I can only hope.
Senator Richard Durbin, who was in New Albany at the Parthenon back in May, will introduce Barack Obama soon.
Eight years of idiocy, really about to come to a close? I can only hope.
Downtown parking permits (thumbs up) but waivers (thumbs down), says City Clerk.
Thoughts and discussion, anyone?
New Albany City Clerk disagrees with waiving outstanding tickets for downtown parking passes, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)
City Clerk Marcey Wisman likes the idea of downtown parking permits in New Albany, but is opposed to waiving unpaid tickets for those who purchase a pass.
Wisman made her concerns known during Tuesday’s Board of Public Works and Safety meeting, reading aloud a letter she drafted questioning whether Mayor Doug England’s administration realizes the ramifications of waiving outstanding tickets.
“No one is ever happy about paying a parking ticket, but to change the rules to benefit a few makes it even more difficult to justify the need to pay to many others who receive them,” Wisman said.
New Albany City Clerk disagrees with waiving outstanding tickets for downtown parking passes, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune)
City Clerk Marcey Wisman likes the idea of downtown parking permits in New Albany, but is opposed to waiving unpaid tickets for those who purchase a pass.
Wisman made her concerns known during Tuesday’s Board of Public Works and Safety meeting, reading aloud a letter she drafted questioning whether Mayor Doug England’s administration realizes the ramifications of waiving outstanding tickets.
“No one is ever happy about paying a parking ticket, but to change the rules to benefit a few makes it even more difficult to justify the need to pay to many others who receive them,” Wisman said.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Kucinich rocks the DNC.
Hillary Clinton made the "Democrats for McCain" look like the disreputable turncoats they are ... and Dennis Kucinich made Clinton look tame. Even when they're scripted right down to the restroom breaks, major party conventions can still make for compelling viewing.
Just for the record, anatomically speaking.
Getting "permission" to publish is one thing, and refusing to attribute sources quite another. When the forum for non-attribution is a cowardly trognonymous blog, then the bar is raised higher.
So it goes. If Screech had integrity, we'd be discussing this in the comments section there, but alas, it doesn't exist.
Grow some balls, "Erik".
So it goes. If Screech had integrity, we'd be discussing this in the comments section there, but alas, it doesn't exist.
Grow some balls, "Erik".
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Klingons, run-ons and put-ons ... but please, don't take off your hoods.
I confess that I still read Freedom to Screech for amusement. Lately, the blog’s chief writer has been making the case for Hillary Clinton to exact revenge for her loss to Barack Obama by throwing her party “under the bus” at the onging convention in Denver.
It’s been hilarious. Not only is the blog as trognonymous as ever, but suffice to say that any pretense of a male voice at Freedom to Screech has been abandoned, and the longtime fiction that it is written by a never-before-seen professor of political science and history has largely been jettisoned, too. Nowadays it's an angry female voice, only, and Hillary's defeat has her feeling like she's ready to rumble ... with another's words, of course.
Hello from Denver
Freedom of Speech Goes to Denver
It may be true that "Freedom of Speech Goes to Denver,” but I thought I’d go to a blog called Free Me Now to see where Erika’s stealing her recent commentaries.
Yep. That'd be the place.
For more on the embittered and perhaps unemployable former teacher behind the mother lode of Erika’s plagiarism, go here and here.
With posts like these recent ones, it is shuddering to think that Republicans like the calcified John McCain are the least of Obama’s worries as the meat of the campaign looms. Aren’t you glad you’re not in Denver? On the other hand, after a few gallons of Great Divide Hibernation Ale ... anything's possible.
It’s been hilarious. Not only is the blog as trognonymous as ever, but suffice to say that any pretense of a male voice at Freedom to Screech has been abandoned, and the longtime fiction that it is written by a never-before-seen professor of political science and history has largely been jettisoned, too. Nowadays it's an angry female voice, only, and Hillary's defeat has her feeling like she's ready to rumble ... with another's words, of course.
Hello from Denver
Freedom of Speech Goes to Denver
It may be true that "Freedom of Speech Goes to Denver,” but I thought I’d go to a blog called Free Me Now to see where Erika’s stealing her recent commentaries.
Yep. That'd be the place.
For more on the embittered and perhaps unemployable former teacher behind the mother lode of Erika’s plagiarism, go here and here.
With posts like these recent ones, it is shuddering to think that Republicans like the calcified John McCain are the least of Obama’s worries as the meat of the campaign looms. Aren’t you glad you’re not in Denver? On the other hand, after a few gallons of Great Divide Hibernation Ale ... anything's possible.
Open thread: To veto, or not to veto?
Should Mayor England veto the smoking ordinance? What are the reasons for and against a veto? What do you think?
(Note to potential posters: Our usual rules of non-anonymity apply. Photo credit goes to Christopher)
Reading comprehension and the New Albany Syndrome.
At the rental registration and code enforcement meeting on Saturday, I heard one rental property owner state that he is "taxed twice."Later, on another blog, a trogonymous correspondent claimed that rental property owners pay higher property taxes than "business" owners. Leaving aside the fact that rental property ownership is a business, irrespective of how effectively one's Indianapolis lobby extracts legislative concessions and in the process twists common English into semantic pretzels, here's one reference among many (from a South Bend real estate blog) that explains the property tax situation following the "reform" bill earlier this year.
The passed bill retains the “one-two-three” percent caps on property that is residential and owner-occupied (1%), rental or agricultural (2%), and commercial (3%) but requires more than a few asterisks ...
That seems fairly clear to me. You?
Monday, August 25, 2008
8664: Who killed the study?
A press release from 8664 today revealed a Kentucky Transportation Cabinet secret:
(click on photo for larger version)
8864's letter to Kentucky Governor Beshear offered to help pay the $3,654.31 needed to complete the study and release the results.
If I were running for governor in Indiana, I'd be on the phone right now getting to the bottom of yet another voluntarily induced yet inexplicable quagmire. If I wanted to win the southern counties, I'd make a point of letting voters here know that I cared enough about them and the eastern bridge to not let a few East End financial concerns dictate transportation policy to the state of Indiana.
Current Governor and candidate Mitch Daniels has referenced that dastardly influence but has yet to act. Will he or Jill Long Thompson be the one to finally inject Hoosier interests and fiscal responsibility into the situation?
The C-J is reporting that the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will now complete the study but quotes an official as saying it will focus on two new bridges rather than one while examining the concept of a ground-level parkway where the downtown portion of I-64 now stands.
You can almost hear it now: The state will claim that 86'ing 64 won't work based on some gerrymandered inability of a misrepresented parkway to function in the shadow of a 23 lane Spaghetti Junction. That junction, of course, would be greatly simplified by the actual 8664 plan, as would the current bottleneck at the intersection of I-64 and I-265.
8664 is the only plan that would rework that Indiana merge point. The Bridges Project, which aims to inject much more traffic onto I-265 as well, doesn't address it at twice the cost.
(click on photo for larger version)
8864's letter to Kentucky Governor Beshear offered to help pay the $3,654.31 needed to complete the study and release the results.
If I were running for governor in Indiana, I'd be on the phone right now getting to the bottom of yet another voluntarily induced yet inexplicable quagmire. If I wanted to win the southern counties, I'd make a point of letting voters here know that I cared enough about them and the eastern bridge to not let a few East End financial concerns dictate transportation policy to the state of Indiana.
Current Governor and candidate Mitch Daniels has referenced that dastardly influence but has yet to act. Will he or Jill Long Thompson be the one to finally inject Hoosier interests and fiscal responsibility into the situation?
The C-J is reporting that the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will now complete the study but quotes an official as saying it will focus on two new bridges rather than one while examining the concept of a ground-level parkway where the downtown portion of I-64 now stands.
You can almost hear it now: The state will claim that 86'ing 64 won't work based on some gerrymandered inability of a misrepresented parkway to function in the shadow of a 23 lane Spaghetti Junction. That junction, of course, would be greatly simplified by the actual 8664 plan, as would the current bottleneck at the intersection of I-64 and I-265.
8664 is the only plan that would rework that Indiana merge point. The Bridges Project, which aims to inject much more traffic onto I-265 as well, doesn't address it at twice the cost.
Greenpeace, solar truck, and Happy Feet on the riverfront this Sunday.
Received from the local Greenpeace reps ... seems we need beer there, right?
---
Don't miss a free, solar-powered showing of the movie Happy Feet! Join us at the Riverside Amphitheater.
Hello!
We are excited to announce that, in conjunction with the City of New Albany, the New Albany Farmer’s Market, and Develop New Albany, Greenpeace’s Global Warming Story Tour will be at the New Albany Riverside Amphitheater this Sunday, August 31st at 7:30 pm. Greenpeace's "Rolling Sunlight" solar truck will power a viewing of Happy Feet, free of charge!
Local vendors will also be there to sell ice cream and smoothies, and the solar truck will be used to make free popcorn for all! Greenpeace volunteers want to also ask you about how global warming is impacting your life. You will have an opportunity to record a video, write a postcard, or send an email to our candidates for Congress to demand action to end global warming.
Bring your entire family to watch "Happy Feet" outdoors, tell your story about why you care about global warming and learn more about renewable energy! It's a great family activity close to home this Labor Day weekend! So save some gas money and join your community members this Sunday! To check out the trailer for the movie please click here.
Location:
Riverside Ampitheather, New Albany, IndianaNew Albany, IN 47150
Date:
Sunday, August 31st 7:30pm
Let us know you're coming: RSVP. Also, we still need a couple of volunteers to help out at the event! If you are interested please e-mail me (Edyta) at esitko@greenpeace.org.
Background on the Rolling Sunlight: The tour is powered by the Rolling Sunlight, a demonstration and educational vehicle that runs on biodiesel and is equipped with 256-square-feet of solar panels that supply enough energy to power three homes, concerts, and events without creating any pollution. The solar power will run an action tent featuring a video station for visitors to learn more about global warming and computers wired to the Internet so they can send emails to Congress. Global warming will be a key issue this election year. Already, dozens of community members this year have joined with Greenpeace in asking the candidates for Congress to commit to ending the crisis.
To learn more about the Rolling Sunlight tour please visit: http://us.greenpeace.org/site/PageServer?pagename=PHS_Rolling_Sunlight
See you soon!
Greenpeace
702 H Street, NW Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20001 (800) 326-0959
---
Don't miss a free, solar-powered showing of the movie Happy Feet! Join us at the Riverside Amphitheater.
Hello!
We are excited to announce that, in conjunction with the City of New Albany, the New Albany Farmer’s Market, and Develop New Albany, Greenpeace’s Global Warming Story Tour will be at the New Albany Riverside Amphitheater this Sunday, August 31st at 7:30 pm. Greenpeace's "Rolling Sunlight" solar truck will power a viewing of Happy Feet, free of charge!
Local vendors will also be there to sell ice cream and smoothies, and the solar truck will be used to make free popcorn for all! Greenpeace volunteers want to also ask you about how global warming is impacting your life. You will have an opportunity to record a video, write a postcard, or send an email to our candidates for Congress to demand action to end global warming.
Bring your entire family to watch "Happy Feet" outdoors, tell your story about why you care about global warming and learn more about renewable energy! It's a great family activity close to home this Labor Day weekend! So save some gas money and join your community members this Sunday! To check out the trailer for the movie please click here.
Location:
Riverside Ampitheather, New Albany, IndianaNew Albany, IN 47150
Date:
Sunday, August 31st 7:30pm
Let us know you're coming: RSVP. Also, we still need a couple of volunteers to help out at the event! If you are interested please e-mail me (Edyta) at esitko@greenpeace.org.
Background on the Rolling Sunlight: The tour is powered by the Rolling Sunlight, a demonstration and educational vehicle that runs on biodiesel and is equipped with 256-square-feet of solar panels that supply enough energy to power three homes, concerts, and events without creating any pollution. The solar power will run an action tent featuring a video station for visitors to learn more about global warming and computers wired to the Internet so they can send emails to Congress. Global warming will be a key issue this election year. Already, dozens of community members this year have joined with Greenpeace in asking the candidates for Congress to commit to ending the crisis.
To learn more about the Rolling Sunlight tour please visit: http://us.greenpeace.org/site/PageServer?pagename=PHS_Rolling_Sunlight
See you soon!
Greenpeace
702 H Street, NW Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20001 (800) 326-0959
Steve Price on rental registration and code enforcement: "This is a bunch of (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)."
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.---
Or maybe it's a religious ritual?
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 had asked if Price really lost it, and Jeff replied:
Yes, G, (Price) said it, apparently right after he told Lloyd 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 my 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.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
I am, we are, he was.
Saturday, circa 12:00 p.m.
Accidental 3rd district councilman and full time landlord Steve Price, as he stomped out of the room after the first meeting of the council's rental registration and code enforcement committee, of which he is also a member:
"This is all a bunch of fucking bullshit."
-----
Saturday, circa 10:30 p.m.
Iamis, just before their set in conjunction with a viewing of German U-boat film Das Boot:
"Hey, people. Das Boot is about to start. We're gonna play along with it. So we're gonna sing all our songs in German. We are iamis. You are iamis. Beer drinkers unite. We've been drinking all day, too."
-----
Saturday, sometime during the set:
A new acquaintance:
"New Albany? Hey man, I was over in New Albany a while back. Are you guys trying to get some alternative going over there?"
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Circus departs town, leaving acres of butts (some on the ground).
I’m preparing to walk down Spring Street and occupy a seat at the library as councilman Gonder convenes his rental registration and code enforcement committee.
Boss Hogg and the meaning of life.
Speaking only for myself, I look forward to seeing in attendance this morning the same passionate defenders of public health who spent the past few weeks (years?) advancing the topic of workplace safety through smoking bans: Dr. Harris, Mr. Aebersold, Ms. Adams-Wolf, Mr. Filler, Mr. Sodrel, and so on, and so forth.
Anything less than an equally passionate dedication to public health through slumlord abatement would be indicative of a certain inconsistency, wouldn’t you say?
Just don't spoil the afterglow by suggesting that their attention has already migrated to the next hot button.
Boss Hogg and the meaning of life.
Speaking only for myself, I look forward to seeing in attendance this morning the same passionate defenders of public health who spent the past few weeks (years?) advancing the topic of workplace safety through smoking bans: Dr. Harris, Mr. Aebersold, Ms. Adams-Wolf, Mr. Filler, Mr. Sodrel, and so on, and so forth.
Anything less than an equally passionate dedication to public health through slumlord abatement would be indicative of a certain inconsistency, wouldn’t you say?
Just don't spoil the afterglow by suggesting that their attention has already migrated to the next hot button.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Boss Hogg and the meaning of life.
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 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 swing vote.
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
This 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.
Just my 'pinion, dog.
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 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 swing vote.
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
This 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.
Just my 'pinion, dog.
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