New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Just last night, there was no end to the government shutdown in sight. But when airport workers started calling in sick and raising the threat of a strike, everything suddenly changed.
As recently as Thursday evening, elected officials were engaged in theatrical, go-nowhere resolutions with no real chance of reopening the government.
But by Friday afternoon, President Trump abruptly announced a deal to reopen the government, at least temporarily. What changed in less than twenty-four hours? Massively disruptive worker sickouts and the threat of strikes.
Earlier this week, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) international president Sara Nelson raised the possibility of a general strike to fight the shutdown, and a group of aviation unions issued a dire warning that the aviation system’s safety was degrading.
Then on Friday, the second missed payday of the shutdown, a significant number of air traffic controllers called out from work, temporarily grounding all flights at New York’s LaGuardia airport and causing flight delays across the East Coast. A source inside the White House told CNN Friday that the flight delays were a “contributing catalyst” to the hasty deal ...
It's a very simple question: exactly how can Flat12 in Jeffersonville be considered a brewery?
Asking this very simple question isn't to be construed as a knock against Flat12. I like some of Flat12's beers, and I enjoy drinking beers at their riverside taproom. What I like far less is journalistic inconsistency, hence my question. As an aside, be aware that I'm not directing this query to Kevin Gibson, a free-lancer who gets beer right and doesn't make editorial decisions.
According to LEO Weekly, which lately fancies itself a Louisville-area craft beer authority, Flat12 in Jeffersonville is a brewery.
There are few better ways to celebrate the solstice than a nice warming beverage to help keep the night at bay. From black IPAs to hearty stouts, there are a host of options, spiced, smooth or otherwise, to cheer you up on the darkest days. As the brewing community grows here, so does its variety, including collaborations with several coffee shops in town, including Sunergos, Quills and Heine Bros. From dark brews to holiday specials, our Louisville breweries have you covered.
Flat12 Bierworks Dan Patch in a Pear Tree
By far the most ambitious beer on the list, the Dan Patch in a Pear Tree, is a pear-flavored seasonal with a nice pop on the front end. A light body capped with a faint white foam lace, this is much lighter than many beers typically gravitate toward in this season, but it’s a wonderful diversion as such. Yielding a 4.7 percent ABV and 12 IBU, this is an imminently sessionable beer, perfect for sharing. The fruited flavors are never overwhelming, instead they form delicious and ephemeral moments that creep in occasionally.
Let's review a few facts from actual history. Flat12's Jeffersonville expansion was announced in 2014. The usual economic development incentives were harvested from Jeffersonville municipal officials amid glowing predictions of future impacts, and remodeling slowly began.
Just weeks after Flat 12 Bierwerks announced it would open a taproom in Jeffersonville, the company decided to expand operations to include a fully functioning brewery on site.
Sean O’Connor, CEO of Flat 12, said the brewery will make “more than a couple” beer varieties, many that will be unique to Southern Indiana. The facility will have the capacity to brew at least 40,000 barrels of beer per year, which could be more than the amount made at the Indianapolis brewery. For most brewers, a barrel is equal to two kegs, or 31 gallons.
The taproom finally opened in 2016, but the brewery never came about.
The Jeffersonville taproom exists without making beer much in the same way that Tin Man-Kokomo existed with Tin Man Brewing in Evansville before the original brewery dissolved into Falls City Beer under the ownership of their Neace Ventures owner.
Flat12 in Jeffersonville was not included in an ownership change announced earlier this month, which concerns only the original Indianapolis location.
The Flat12 team is excited to announce we have changed ownership, as we welcome Books & Brews owner, Jason Wuerfel, our new CEO.
The Flat12 production team, led by our Head Brewer, Sean Lewis, has been contract brewing Books & Brews’ beers for the past two years, so it was a natural move for our organizations to join forces. Aggressive adaptation is necessary in this increasingly competitive craft beer landscape, and the move will allow both of our companies to continue to produce the beers, events and ambiance our consumers have come to love.
There already had been an ownership reshuffle at Flat12 in 2016, occurring after the 2014 Jeffersonville brewing expansion was announced -- and did I mention that brewing by Flat12 never took place in Jeffersonville?
Andy Teed explains.
In 2015, I started looking for a business here at home that I could own which would allow me to strengthen my community ties. The opportunity to buy Flat12 came in late 2016, and I jumped on it.
At some point during the process of Teed taking control of Flat12, co-founder and Indianapolis resident O'Connor relinquished his ownership share of the mother ship, but retained the Jeffersonville taproom.
Where brewing never once took place.
All this and LEO Weekly persists in describing Flat12 not only as a brewery, but as a "local" brewery, when the owner lives in Indianapolis and there has not been a single batch of beer "brewed" on site by Flat12 in the city of Jeffersonville, ever.
So, how does LEO Weekly define "our Louisville breweries"?
What a glorious time to love beer! The Louisville region, including Southern Indiana, has 21 breweries, including 19 locally-owned breweries. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number. Each has its own style, tastes and reasons to visit. That includes much more than the craft brews, as many brewhouses match their creative, award-winning suds with inventive, delicious food. We’ve been to all 19 of our homegrown beer-makers more than a few times, so here is the 411 on where to go for what.
Absent any clear reasoning or coherent criteria, the definition still should be easy: if brewing takes place there, it's a brewery -- right? Hence LEO's list of 19 "homegrown beer-makers," which seems not to count multiple brewing locations, as with Against the Grain, New Albanian and the like.
Except make that 18 -- because Flat12 isn't homegrown and doesn't brew, meaning that Gordon Biersch -- which isn't homegrown but does brew in Louisville every drop of Biersch-branded beer it sells in Louisville -- belongs on the list according to at least one of LEO's weirdly contradictory barometers.
Allow me to add that Biersch is excluded even though its Louisville brew team creates unique in-house recipes unavailable at any other Biersch.
Meanwhile, who's the second of two non-local breweries? I suppose BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse in the Oxmoor Center, but of course everyone knows they don't brew, because BJ's just sells beers of its own, brewed somewhere else and brought to Louisville for tapping.
In short, just like Flat12 in Jeffersonville. LEO Weekly has some homework to do, although for some reason I can already hear the excuse: Spuds McKenzie ate it.
The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there.
Sorry, lost the thread ... immersed as I am in Jeff Gahan's 2018 financial report, which details exactly why he's here -- and why he needs to go away.
Too bad the Democrats have a human money suction machine like Gahan and not a straight shooter like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but of course our local Democrats don't know what to do with smart and strong women, do they?
With its silly swipes at AOC, the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to its own unpopularity
One of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.
The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.
The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras.
Too many hacks float to the capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then — once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags — start thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all things are eagerly desired.
So they talk. What do they talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet “is not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?
There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other.
We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.
That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish ...
At a bend on the Indiana banks of the Ohio River, hardscrabble river camps give way to flood-prone woods. Stacks of crushed cars line a dead-end road. A landfill borders Silver Creek.
But to the nonprofit River Heritage Conservancy, the roughly 400-acre area near the Falls of the Ohio in Clarksville is the ideal spot for a park that would dwarf Louisville’s Waterfront Park and take in more land than Grant Park in Chicago ...
Our cherished friend Miss Nadia cashed out her ninth and final life on December 20, while we were in Bamberg during the Munich trip. Our human friends and diligent cat-sitters Karen and Jeff were with Nadia at the end, for which we're extremely grateful.
People don't come any better than those two.
Nadia was 16, around 80 in human years. She'd suddenly lost her appetite in early November, and for a cat whose life revolved around food, this was a warning sign. After a couple of visits to the vet, the collective decision was bad teeth, which implied extensive oral surgery. We knew there were risks. Although weakened, Nadia seemed to make it through this ordeal fairly well. She was getting better, but there came a sudden turn, and she was gone.
We were asked to consider a necropsy (an autopsy for animals), and agreed. It showed the blood work lab results to have been errant, somehow missing a metastatic cancer stemming from Nadia's thyroid issues -- a phenomenon rarely triggered, but fast-moving and deadly. Of course, had we known this, there'd have been only one sad course of action. As it stands, Nadia died peacefully at home. We can only hope she wasn't in too much pain.
In 2018, we said goodbye to both our elderly cats, as Hugo's death preceded Nadia's by 10 months (he also was 16). Ironically, Hugo passed away just prior to our return from Portugal in February. What are the odds?
At any rate, let's not regret Nadia's passing. After all, we'll be eternally thankful for having experienced her amazingly out-sized personality.
Nadia didn't walk into a room, but sashayed, exaggeratedly shaking her butt and announcing her presence -- and the imminent need for a tasty morsel. She was an epic chatterbox with a startling array of sounds and noises that might have led the untutored to believe a duck or squirrel had wandered past. I'm unembarrassed to concede that Nadia and I had daily conversations, during which I'd harangue her and she'd answer, or sometimes vice versa.
I'll miss those. She was a receptive sounding board for my writing ideas, and never once advised me to tone it down.
With Nadia and Hugo both gone, there no longer exists any need to separate them, which we'd done for behavioral reasons seven or eight years ago. The interior doors have been thrown open, and our second-floor-only feral refugee Mila (circa seven years old) has the run of the whole house.
Following Hugo's loss, Mila abruptly executed a quantum leap in terms of opting for a degree of domestication, and now that Nadia is gone, she's done it yet again.
Mila sometimes spends the bulk of the night on the bed with us, which is amazing given that she essentially refused to be touched by human hands prior to March of 2018. She'll never be a lap cat, and that's fine. We're just beginning to witness the range of her distinctive personality, and it's fascinating.
Uncharacteristically for me, it's taken all this time to gird up for the task of reporting Nadia's passing and eulogizing this wonderful creature, who brought so much mirth and joy into our household. It's been a month, and maybe I'm still a tad numb. Life's about death, and speaking candidly, there's been too damn much death in my life these past couple of years.
However, when we sign on to be adults, we accept the conditions of mourning. As noted, lamentations for the departed are another way to celebrate their lives, and make no mistake: Nadia had one hell of a rollicking, exuberant life. We probably won't see the likes of her again.
And yet ... yesterday we heard about a injured kitten in need of a home. After all, serendipity forever lurks beyond the shady corners of our conscious lives, and kismet inevitably awaits.
Just think about all those times when the bored of works enumerated the many splendid reasons why they couldn't (wouldn't) help make our streets safe.
Just think about city engineer Summers' passive-aggressive protests -- but traffic flow, but INDOT, but whatever else springs to an obstructionist's mind.
Just think about how different it would be if their first response wasn't "here's why we can't and won't help" but "we'll find a way to help."
Just think if the latter constituted Jeff Gahan's instructions to pliant campaign donors like HWC Engineering, rather than deploying them to defend the car-centric status quo.
We'll stop there. After all, "just thinking" is precisely what they're not doing.
In the U.S., pedestrian fatalities have climbed 35 percent since 2008. And federal traffic safety regulators aren’t at work, thanks to the government shutdown.
The status quo in American road design is claiming more and more lives, according to some transportation safety advocates. The 2019 edition of Dangerous by Design, a recurring report by Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, finds that the number of people struck and killed while walking has grown a startling 35 percent since 2008.
There are multiple factors behind this, but the report emphasizes one in particular: overly wide arterials that give too much space to cars and too little to humans. High-speed, multi-lane avenues that underpin sprawling urban growth, as opposed to slower, narrower streets that support walkable neighborhoods, are “consistently linked ... to higher rates of both traffic-related deaths for people walking and traffic-related deaths overall,” it states.
The geography of greatest danger gives some weight to that conclusion. The Sun Belt states of Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and others are home to some of the country’s most spread-out metro areas. And they are among the states with the highest “pedestrian death index,” which measures how deadly it is for people to walk there. The report calculates this metric based on fatality numbers, controlling for population and how many people walk to work, for the years between 2008 and 2017.
By those counts, Florida is by far the most perilous place to walk in America, with a significantly higher state-wide PDI than Alabama, the second-highest state. Eight of the top 10 most dangerous metropolitan areas landed in the Sunshine State. “It sticks out like a sore thumb,” Emiko Atherton, the director of the National Complete Streets Coalition at Smart Growth America, said on a Tuesday conference call. Atherton emphasized Florida’s automobile-oriented development history, combined with its many population centers, as a primary cause for its unusually lethal numbers.
Billy Hattaway, the director of transportation for the city of Orlando, pointed to state and local efforts to enact “Complete Streets” policies in Florida, whereby roads are explicitly designed to protect pedestrians and cyclists with wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and safer crossing areas. It will take years to see these practices become widespread, Hattaway acknowledged. “In time, we’re hoping to see some improvements,” he said.
But the shape of roads and highways alone can’t explain the growing safety risk of walking in America, which has been noted in many other surveys and contexts. Rising vehicle-miles traveled and low gas prices in the post-recession years has been linked to the rising tide of car crashes and pedestrian fatalities. Some researchers has pointed to the popularity of ride-hailing as another explanation for more vehicular mayhem on the streets. Plenty of safety advocates and planners have laid the blame on personal technology. “The thing that has changed is the smartphone revolution,” Mighk Wilson, a transportation planner for Florida’s Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties, told the Orlando Sentinel last year.
Less publicized, but of great importance, is the kind of vehicle that more drivers are choosing to drive. Nationally, more Americans can be found behind the wheels of ever-more-massive pickup trucks and SUVs—huge, heavy machines that tower over smaller road users ...
In case you were wondering, "monnik" is the Dutch word for monk. I'm guessing the brewery's co-owner Ian Luijk probably can tell you more about it.
Monnik Beer Co. is located in the Louisville neighborhood of Schnitzelburg, and Monnik beers now are being carried in Indiana by Starlight Distribution. Next Tuesday (January 29), Pints&union will be throwing a Hoosier release gala for our pals at Monnik.
The event begins at 8:00 p.m., but these two Monnik mainstays will be on tap from the pub's opening at 4:0 p.m.
Mild George English Mild Ale, 4.2% abv
Toasted brown bread and dry, quaffable, low alcohol little brother of our King George.
Eagle Skull Saison/Farmhouse Ale, 6.5% abv
Classic lemon/pepper saison yeast character; herbal hops over a light crackery malt base.
Come for the chance to enjoy Monnik brewer Scott Hand's excellent beers, but stay a while to chat about lots of other aspects of our life and times. Speaking personally, I like just about everyone in the Louisville brewing scene, but Monnik's owners and staff members are especially articulate, engaged and fluent in a wide variety of topics.
The federal government shutdown has brought the dysfunction of American civilization right to our doorsteps, and yet we've spent the past few days screaming at one another about Catholic school students in DC.
Maybe our Pavlovian reactions to social media prompts are the problem, not the solution. Localism is my mantra, and while defining it hasn't always been easy, to me it comes down to paying attention locally.
How does our local habitat work, and can it work in a more human way?
What's happening outside our front doors and in our own communities?
What can we do at the grassroots level to make life here fairer, better and more equitable?
Social media has been both a blessing and a curse as it pertains to localism. The medium is capable of ready use in reaching numerous households with matters of local importance, but just as often serves as an impediment by monopolizing attention spans over a plethora of national and international issues both fake and real, none of which tend to be capable of addressing by direct grassroots action.
In the sense of ancient Rome, bread and circuses: "A diet of entertainment or political policies on which the masses are fed to keep them happy and docile."
Or in our times, increasingly unhappy, angry and feeling pinned down.
I haven't watched any of the videos documenting the MAGA/Native American molehill. I've read none of the commentaries, screechings and tub-thumpings. Rather, I've been viewing the local scene these past few weeks, and noticing the shutdown becoming increasingly divisive -- and why wouldn't it be?
Since time began, the powerful seek to maintain their privilege by dividing the populace; we're already losing our grip on reality, so why not a few more coffin nails? The article below adroitly surveys the situation, most aspects of which are being ignored as we prepare for the arduous demands of the 10-year challenge on Facebook, or the next student field trip outrage.
As for the government workers being held hostage by the two-party system, it's a siege. If you're feeling bad because you've played no role and done nothing to help them, here's an idea: Do something to help them.
Occam's razor and all; the simplest explanation usually is the best.
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Time for the U.S. Yellow Vests, by Paul Street (CounterPunch) Here are seven things you won’t hear much if anything about in the reigning corporate media regarding the ongoing record-setting partial shutdown of the United States federal government: 1: The Longstanding Neoliberal War on “Big Government”: a proper understanding of the shutdown in relation to the longstanding capitalist project of what the leading corporate-neoliberal champion Grover Norquist called “starving the beast,” with “beast” taken to mean “big government.” Norquist wanted, he said, “to cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Now might be a good time to recall how Trump’s former top political adviser the faux-populist Steve Bannon (with whom Trump certainly still regularly speaks) described his main policy goal when speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February of 2017: “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon once proudly told an academic: “I am a Leninist.” Bannon said that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too.” Is the current shut-down not an exercise in “administrate state deconstruction” – something right out of the faux-libertarian (more on why I use that term in my next comment) fever dreams of a Norquist, a Bannon, a Charles Koch, a James McGill Buchanan, a Milton Friedman and others of their right wing and so-called free-market ilk? The orange monstrosity says the shut-down could “go on for years.” You can be sure that capitalist politico and ideologues in the Norquist and Bannon mode are hoping the shut-down can last as long as possible with no clear reported disasters resulting. This will help them advance their “drowning” project. “See?” they can proclaim, as former federal employees work for reduced wages at grocery stores and shopping malls, “we don’t really need this big monstrous and totalitarian government after all. All hail the free market!” 2: On the “Left Hand of the State,” That is: any serious discussion of which parts of government are really targeted by right-wing neoliberal “Leninists” like Norquist and Bannon. Beneath their anti-statist discourse about the great conflict between “government bureaucracy” (bad) and the “free market” (good), they wish to aggressively wield state policy of a specifically regressive, plutocratic, and authoritarian — state capitalist — sort. They don’t really want to destroy the state. They want to de-fund and de-legitimize what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state”— the programs and services won by past popular struggles and social movements for social justice, equality, environmental protection, and the common good. They do not wish to axe the “right hand of the state” – the parts that provide service and welfare to concentrated wealth and dole out punishment (including rampant mass incarceration and felony-marking) for the poor (and right-handed social-control functions tend to rise when left-handed ones fall). They do not go after America’s Pentagon system, a great cost-plus subsidy for high-tech corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing. It’s not about whether the state should work or exist. It’s about who government should work for: the public and the working-class majority or leading centers of concentrated wealth and power. 3: The Bipartisan Terror of Neoliberalism: how richly complicit the contemporary Democratic Party is in the ugly and regressive neoliberal project. The 2018-19 lockout may be primarily owned by Trump and the Republicans (as MSNBC will tell you again and again) but (as “MSDNC” will not report) the Democrats have participated in the assault on positive government functions across the whole long neoliberal era. The deregulation of corporations rose dramatically under the Jimmy Carter presidency. It was the arch-neoliberal president Bill Clinton who proudly proclaimed that “the era of big government is over” and then signed off on ending poor families’ entitlement to federal cash assistance while advancing racist mass-incarceration (a government program) with his “three strikes” bill. Clinton passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a new continental bill of regulation-free rights for global investment capital. He also worked on to work with Republicans to de-regulate derivatives and the financial sector more broadly. Giant Cold War-level “defense” (empire) budgets – a massive taxpayer windful for corporate war masters – remained the rule under Clinton despite the collapse of the only other planetary “super power” (the Soviet Union) right before the beginning of Clinton’s presidency. Bill Clinton was a masterful, silver-tongued fake-progressive champion of the U.S. bourgeois state’s movement from left- to right-handed state power when it comes to enforcing social control on the victims of the nation’s intertwined regimes of class rule and racial oppression. So, of course, was Obama, whose richly right-handed neoliberal and imperial policy record I have detailed on numerous prior occasions here and in other venues. 4: Wall Street Dems for the Wall: how key Democrats like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Minority Leader Charles Schumer have in the past supported border fencing. All three voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and all three supported the 2013 Senate immigration overhaul that passed the Senate, which called for tougher border security including additional physical barrier construction. As Oliver Ortega noted on Counterpunch two years ago, the border wall was a bipartisan project before it became a partisan football under Trump:
“When President Trump signed an executive order last week to complete a wall along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, he was building on decades of bipartisan consensus among lawmakers…In fact, Congress had already approved a border wall not too long ago. In 2006, legislators—including many Democrats—passed the Secure Fence Act, which called for 700 miles of double-fence construction along certain stretches of the border. Trump cited the Bush-era law in the first paragraph of the executive order he signed Wednesday as rationale for his executive authority to order a wall be built. “Many of the same Democratic leaders now bemoaning Trump’s wall voted for one at the time— Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein….Then-Senator Barack Obama, who as President would later deport a record-high 3 million people during his two terms, lauded the bill on the Senate floor, saying it would ‘help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.’”
And let’s not forget Bill Clinton’s critical wall-building activities in anticipation of heightened Mexican in-migration expected to result from NAFTA’s decimation of Mexican farmers. As Ortega noted: “The most pivotal moments in the militarization of the border arguably took place during the time of Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. ‘Operation Gatekeeper,’ passed in 1994, poured billions of dollars into border security. High-intensity stadium lights, motion detectors, and remote video surveillance were installed along key points of the U.S-Mexico divide, and the amount of border patrol agents was increased by roughly a third. With resources deployed to patrol densely populated sectors, undocumented immigrants were often forced to trek barren desert and mountains. Thousands died in their quest for a better life. ‘We will not surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice,’ President Clinton said at the time.” “It’s no coincidence that Operation Gatekeeper followed another landmark in US-Mexico relations that same year: the North American Free Trade Agreement. Under NAFTA, Big Ag flooded the Mexican market with heavily-subsidized corn and other staples, displacing small farmers in Mexico in one of the greatest neoliberal coups in history. The result was a flood of immigrants heading northbound in search of opportunities, accelerating one of the largest mass movements of people in history.” “In short, the U.S. government, acting in the service of corporate profits, caused the very mass migration it has spent the last 25 years trying to keep out and criminalize.” 5: The Authoritarian Idiocy of Our Holy Constitution, crafted to prevent popular sovereignty in the time of the French Bourbon monarchy: how the manifestly un- and even anti-democratic U.S. Constitution empowers the right-wing-led assault on positive federal government functions by absurdly over-representing the nation’s disproportionately white rural “red” (Republican) states in the presidential selection process and in the composition of the U.S.Senate. We hear nothing about how the Constitution helps feed the partisan polarization that lay behind the current government shutdown by enabling states to create House of Representatives districts so badly gerrymandered on partisan lines that right-wing extremists in Republican districts can exercise political influence far beyond their numbers. And we hear little if anything about how the Constitutional system of “checks and balances” is prone to crippling gridlock when its separate components are controlled by different and conflicting, mutually hostile parties (the Constitution’s framers thought they had avoided this flaw because they foolishly believed or claimed to believe that they had created a scheme that would prevent the emergence of political parties). 6: The Need for a Popular Intervention Beneath and Beyond the Masters’ Election Cycle. The Gilets Jaunes (“yellow vests”) in France have given us a taste of what’s required. Among their list of demands is a real and functioning democracy—popular self-rule. Further to that, they have called for a referendum whereby 700,000 citizen signatories would force the French Parliament to debate and vote on a given law within one year. Evoking the French Revolution of 1789, there have even been calls for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution meant to create a new French government—a Sixth Republic based on popular sovereignty and majority rule rather than the demands of a de facto corporate-financial dictatorship. Imagine! The yellow vests have no illusions that their nation’s reigning elite-controlled political parties and time-staggered election cycle offer anything remotely like substantive popular and democratic input on the making of policy. They have already forced the repeal of a regressive fuel tax and are fighting effectively every day and in the streets for things supported by the majority of the French populace. We, like the French, get to vote every few years? So what? Mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where, as the latest and best political science definitely shows, “government policy…reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office” The notion that “we the people” are supposed to sit around with glazed eyes captivated by the endless RussiaGate drama and the already-underway two-year build-up to the next quadrennial electoral extravaganza (U.S. cable news is already obsessing over the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate field when it isn’t panting over crumb of Mueller-Trump-Russia news) while hundreds of thousands of “our” government’s workers go unpaid and key positive government functions are disabled in the present is preposterous from any kind of remotely democratic perspective. 7: The Potency of Direct Action. As the venerable left writer Barbara Ehrenreich recently Tweeted: “The shutdown would come to a sudden end if airport workers stop working and shut down air travel. Business, aka capitalism, cannot function if its minions are all floating in the stratosphere or fattening themselves at Cinnabon. The whole thing should take no more than 3 hours.” That’s a bit too simple, perhaps. TSA workers lack the legal right to strike and are likely afraid of losing their jobs and the back pay that is due them if they walk off their jobs. Still, the basic direct-action point is sound. Hiring replacement airport screeners for no pay would be no small problem for the federal government. The TSA workers would get strong public support for refusing to work without pay – support that might be modeled on the remarkable airport mobilizations that protested Trump’s Muslim travel ban in early 2017. And what if the airline pilots walked off their jobs, reasonably refusing to fly planes under the unsafe conditions created by the non-payment of air-traffic controllers? It’s not for nothing that the remarkable Gilet Jaunes struggle and story has been essentially blacked out in U.S. corporate media. The time has come for direct worker and citizen action against the insane federal shut-down. Since I’m referencing Twitter, let me give the last word to an excellent and dead-on Tweet from the left economist Richard Wolff: “Where are the US ‘yellow vests’ to protest gov’t shutdown and the wall? Millions would sympathize, mobilize. The movement could grow, win demands, and expand just as in France.”
On Tuesday the Green Mouse reported that Sam Charbonneau might be seeking a city council seat in the 6th district. Speaking for myself, he was in attendance at the last council meeting; given the masochism of such daring decisions, few disinterested citizens bother with the peanut gallery unless they're contemplating involvement ... or resistance.
Charbonneau's only previous campaign came last year. Here are the votes for Indiana House in 2018 from the 6th council district.
We see that even while losing the 6th, Charbonneau did quite well, especially for a first-time candidate. Overall, Clere won re-election in 2918 with around 55% of the vote, but in the 6th, the tally was just shy of 51%.
Yesterday Jason Applegate (D) announced his bid for an at-large city council seat in 2019, having lost a commissioner's race last fall to Shawn Carruthers (R) by a razor-thin margin.
Both Applegate and Charbonneau reside in the 6th district, so it might be instructive to compare the totals in the 6th for the Carruthers-Applegate contest in 2018.
Applegate won four of five precincts in the 6th and rolled up a 54%-46% advantage over Carruthers. This seems to suggest that Charbonneau opting for at-large and Applegate in the 6th would be more advantageous to Democrats than the other way around -- although we still don't know for sure whether Charbonneau will be running at all.
Yet again, the big voter turnout in 2018 (around half the registered voters in Floyd County, roughly double the norm) makes it difficult to compare apples with apples.
Here are the results from the last 6th district city council race in 2015.
CITY OF NEW ALBANY COUNCIL MEMBER DIST 6
Total votes: 1,345
LARRY BELCHER (REP) 358 26.62%
CLIFF STATEN (DEM) 404 30.04%
SCOTT A. BLAIR (IND) 583 43.35%
For the past two election cycles, Blair's status as an Independent has muddied traditional norms in the 6th district. He's certainly more R than D in terms of appeal, but in 2019, the Republicans have Scott Evans, a candidate with more potential upside than Belcher, and if Charbonneau goes for it, the Democrats will boast a hard worker who lost in the 6th by a very slim margin to the presumably unassailable Clere.
Fairly accurate analysis. What’s even sadder though, is the progressives you encourage to run against these incumbents will receive absolutely no support from their own party. They’ve already been identified as “threats” and will truly have a hard time campaigning, even if they make it that far in the process.
Good point, and it prompts numerous ruminations, among them a central assumption on the part of reader and columnist that there really are such things as "progressives" in the local sense.
I believe so, though perhaps not as many as imagined. Surely there are progressive-minded residents who tend to project their values by voting Democratic, albeit solely on the basis of hot-button state and national issues, not grassroots concerns here at home.
Our reader's observation begs certain other questions: If progressives receive no support from the local party, why don't progressives organize locally to change the party's stance?
Why don't they leave the party and form a local progressive bloc?
Why don't they contest local races as independent candidates?
A bloc of independent progressives on our city council might stand a good chance of shifting the local Democratic Party's cynical bargain, because the crux of it is that Adam Dickey's smoothly corporate Floyd County Democratic Party offers a Faustian bill of fare to those who consider themselves "progressive" in any substantive way.
They're advised to tolerate the local Democratic patronage fix in favor of Jeff Gahan's special interest donors, nepotism, bullying and all-purpose undemocratic "Democratic" one-person rule, and in return, they'll be given lip service alone as to their progressive values and told that these values can be safely expressed only in the context of state and national races.
Because: Gahan, Dickey and the dozens of machine inhabitants dependent on the local party for their jobs and status aren't progressive at all.
The enduringly fascinating aspect of our bedraggled Democratic council quartet is the beige patina of its blandness. The best historic parallel is those jowly Politburo geriatrics propped atop Lenin’s Mausoleum during Soviet May Day parades of old; colorless and featureless functionaries without the first original thought of their own, committed only to agreeing in lock step with the First Secretary.
If you consider yourself to be "progressives," and yet you remain willing to run back to the regressive local party on the basis of faraway issues while observing plainly regressive local party behavior, there's no incentive for the party to reform, is there?
Gahanism will continue to function first and foremost as a new wave Tammany Hall, a greasy financial conduit for grassroots political patronage as opposed to grassroots solutions -- won't it?
Until local progressives are willing to call Jeff's and Adam's "Mighty Oz behind the curtain" platform of bluster and bluff, there can't be any real progress at all, can there?
Why continue to kid yourselves when reality illustrates the truth? Look at what they've actually done, not said, because when it comes to deeds and words, Gahanism is New Albany's own Grand Canyon of gaping duplicity.
The Green Mouse says Jeff Gahan's march to re-enthronement begins February 5 (Tuesday) at 5:30 p.m. at the Culbertson Mansion. The last New Albany mayor to be elected to three consecutive terms was C. Pralle Erni, whose tenure spanned four terms from 1948 through 1963.
We haven't had a look at Gahan's campaign finance report from 2018, but our best guess is that he went into 2019 with around $150,000 on hand. Primary challenger David White will be an underdog in terms of money, but not personal integrity. We're supporting David, and ask that you do the same.
Don't forget there are reasons why no mayor has been elected to three consecutive terms during the past half-century. Contrary to Gahan's incessant claims of omniscience, he's made plenty of mistakes. The Gahan personality cultists says he's beloved, but he's made plenty of enemies, too -- and party chairman Tricky Dickey might well be more widely mistrusted than Gahan, although that's a coin flip from Hell.
More folks are against Gahan than for him. Granted, they must vote accordingly. Gahan's money machine will try to see to it that apathy reigns. We've no choice but to fight the fix every step of the way, and #FireGahan2019
What New Albany needs desperately right now is Toto -- not the band, but its namesake dog.
Dear Leader? Hardly. It's going to be an exciting spring.
The Facebook post does not reveal whether Applegate is seeking an at-large seat or the 6th district nod, but the Green Mouse has been told it's Applegate at-large and Sam Charbonneau soon to announce in the 6th; they're both Democrats, both closely aligned with Jeff "Dear Leader" Gahan, and both having lost elections in 2018 (Applegate for commissioner against Shawn Carruthers and Charbonneau for Indiana House against Ed Clere).
When there comes time I'll crunch a few precinct numbers, because I'm guessing the prevailing assumption is that Applegate beat Carruthers within city limits, and there seems little reason to doubt this. More interesting to me is how Charbonneau did last year in precincts 27, 41, 42, 43 and 44. If the rumors are true and Charbonneau is running in the 6th, it sets up a very competitive three-way contest with the incumbent Scott Blair (completing his second council term as an independent in the mayor's old seat) and Republican Scott Evans.
Adam Dickey's imagined post-Gahan succession is looking clearer than ever. Just choose between Applegate, Charbonneau and former building commissioner, newly elected township trustee (and forever a local sporting legend) David Brewer. At least they're not tremendously old white males, although it's more of the same for the party of touted diversity that isn't, and it should be recalled that Gahan has a challenger this spring in David White.
The Green Mouse says:
David Duggins might be Gahan’s bag man, but ever since TASER-gate he’s become completely unelectable to any public office with the possible exception of dog catcher – and both SPCA and PETA already have filed preliminary complaints objecting to Duggins being in the vicinity of canines, much less humans. Pending Applegate and Charbonneau bolstering their expanding resumes with election wins, Brewer is the Democratic Party’s future star. Nothing prevents voter thoughtfulness quite like sports, and Brewer just finished bucking the GOP electoral trend with his trustee victory. Has Chris Morris yet figured out that the trustee’s budget henceforth will serve as a handy ATM for a mayor with rapidly diminishing TIF options?
ON THE AVENUES: Democrats should judge city council incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 by their regressive deeds, not their progressive words.
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
Ever since Dan Coffey’s how-did-it-take-so-damned-long-anyway defection from the Democratic Party in January of 2016, New Albany’s nine-member city council has been populated by just four presumed Democrats.
District 2: Bob Caesar (now in his twelfth year)
District 3: Greg Phipps (eighth year)
District 4: Pat McLaughlin (twelfth year)
District 5: Matt Nash (fourth year)
The scuffed fingernails of this motley 44th percentile have managed to cling to an ever-shrinking semblance of significance for a variety of reasons, absolutely none of which attest to any specific distinction or merit as public servants.
Both literally and figuratively, it hasn’t been about them at all. The gradual evolution of mayoral authority, as capable of governing New Albany by authoritarian decree apart from direct council oversight, has allowed the city’s diminished Democrats to hang on to what’s left of their power.
With the municipal populace forever determined to ignore local matters in favor of arguing endlessly over national issues, apathy and inertia play their roles, too.
It also took a while for the three council Republicans and two Independents to come together (occasionally) for a semblance of common cause against the imperial excesses of Jeff Gahan’s reign.
One example: In hindsight, Al Knable probably regrets being conciliatory at the beginning of his council career in 2016, seeing as conniving and opportunistic Democrats lost no time in paying back Knable for his equanimity by savagely attacking his character over the contrived and nonsensical 9-1-1 phone call episode.
Unfortunately the Republican at-large troika hasn’t always been able to maintain a unified front. Their biggest head-slapping disgrace in recent memory remains David “I'm Passionate for Masonry” Barksdale, who resembled a slobbering puppy angling for tasty kibbles and bits during the course of gulping Dear Leader’s cynical pleasantries, as necessary to procure approval for the cherished Democratic Party goal of an election-ready Reisz Mahal luxury city hall boondoggle.
Then earlier this month, a befuddled David AeberSOLD out his compatriot Knable by bizarrely rolling over on behalf of an unctuous Caesar in the election for 2019 council vice-president.
With friends like those, who even needs Adam “Tricky” Dickey as an enemy?
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The enduringly fascinating aspect of our bedraggled Democratic council quartet is the beige patina of its blandness. The best historic parallel is those jowly Politburo geriatrics propped atop Lenin’s Mausoleum during Soviet May Day parades of old; colorless and featureless functionaries without the first original thought of their own, committed only to agreeing in lock step with the First Secretary.
By the end of 2019, New Albany’s four remaining Democratic council critters will have 36 years of combined service – and for what ultimate purpose? They’re faded pawns waiting to be pushed around the chess board, and veritable rubber stamps in desperate need of re-inking. They seem far older than they really are, with a collective demeanor suggesting mute charred hulk burnout.
That’s no surprise, given that their chief duty these past eight years has been to purge their souls of any damning stain of cogitation and meekly obey whatever orders Gahan and Dickey have given them as obsequious toady foot soldiers digging trenches to maintain Gahan’s sole achievement as mayor: a cash-laden political patronage machine constructed to enable VIP treatment for donors and vested interests, boasting pay-to-play as the order of the day, and with the lion’s share of the proceeds going to the mayor himself.
Witnessing these four remaining council Democrats in (re)action at last Thursday’s meeting, and knowing that all of them will trudge forward to re-enlist for four more senseless, torpid years of tuck-pointing Gahan’s prophylactic wall against fresh thinking and new ideas, I couldn’t help noticing their utter political exhaustion.
They’re bored, lethargic and absent anything resembling excitement, save for the sporadic flaring of pet fetishes. As such, Caesar briefly showed a heightened pulse when allowed to gush like a hormonal crush-afflicted schoolboy over One Southern Indiana’s yearly panhandling appointment to tout its oligarch masturbation outreach.
Similarly, Phipps became momentarily lucid on the topic of resuscitating (yet again) his otherwise toothless Human Rights Commission; those of us with long memories winced while recalling the time just a year ago when he dramatically “washed” his hands of the HRC. This exceedingly rare moment of Phippsian candor evidently has been delightfully airbrushed from the narrative, Dickey having issued contradictory marching orders numerous times since then.
In customary fashion McLaughlin said almost nothing the entire evening, leaving the accidental Democratic council yes-man Nash to shock the peanut gallery by erupting at freshly installed council president Scott Blair’s appointment of civilian Scott Whalen to the Board of Zoning Appeals in place of Stephen Pacciano, whose term had expired.
It is the prerogative of the council president to reappoint or replace board members, which the remaining eight councilmen subsequently affirmed. It later emerged that Pacciano had wanted another term, with Blair preferring his own man, although characteristically secretive Nash didn’t clearly explain any of this during the course of his weirdly emotional and garbled complaint.
Nash’s outburst came as a surprise to veteran council watchers, who’ve grown accustomed to the passing of entire seasons between instances of Nash saying anything at all. Last summer when it came time for the final Reisz Mahal vote, Nash remained impassive and unquestioning through a lengthy and detailed discussion without uttering a peep apart from the single syllable “aye” when called upon by Gahan and Dickey to vote in favor of the most misguided expenditure of public funds I’ve witnessed since my council viewing began in 2004.
The 5th council district plainly deserves better than this.
As much as I like Nash personally, the sad fact is that politically, he is a pliable tool of the Democratic Party’s fix-is-in machine, a jalopy lubricated for decades on end by Warren Nash, the councilman’s father.
In 2015 Matt Nash became the nominee for 5th district councilman by predetermined precinct committee decision when Dustin Collins became ill, and later when down on his luck in 2018 after the failure of his business venture, he abruptly and miraculously landed a job with the housing authority, itself the victim of a hostile annexation by Gahan the year before – something Nash has yet to publicly reference even once as a councilman.
If that’s not nepotism and political bondage according to the gnarly Tammany Hall model, American history books might have to be rewritten.
For Nash to be angry about Pacciano’s treatment might well have been exemplary and praiseworthy – but exactly where has Nash’s outrage been hibernating during his council term as Gahan and Dickey have run roughshod over basic human decency, bullying, bribing and bartering without any semblance of empathy or conscience?
Had Nash murmured even once about the immoral morass and selective ethics of his Democratic Party overlords, it might be different for me – but wait, I forget; he has the same tired excuse as every other Democrat in town, namely that Republicans are always worse.
Spare me.
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Meanwhile here in the 3rd, the PhippsBot becomes even further estranged from his self-described powers of cool, analytical detachment, with these skills inevitably being spotted solely as knee-jerk responses to Republican initiatives, and never in gauging the various special interest power plays advanced by his own party.
Last Thursday Phipps haltingly described the inadequacy of the digital speed control installations on Spring Street, and he’s right, but apparently it has not occurred to Phipps that his own cowering and complicit complacency during the run-up to two-way street reversion crucially enabled Gahan to assign HWC Engineering the task of unceremoniously junking the vast majority of Speck-recommended precepts as intended to REDESIGN these same streets to lessen vehicular speeds.
And this is the ultimate truth: unalloyed enablement.
Each of these four Democrats – Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash – are pleasant enough company for a beer (well, maybe three of them, excepting the former jeweler, who still has those Bicentennial Commission finances safely hidden), but the political roles they’ve agreed to play are exuberantly passive.
They’re to emit gurgling sounds of rote acceptance on cue to whatever degraded and dictatorial whims Gahan and Dickey decree – just as Shane Gibson’s daily insider job is to find legal precepts capable of being artfully molded to accommodate a mayor and party chairman so crooked that it takes two valets each morning to help them screw on their pants.
Enablement and passivity, silence and culpability.
These are the de facto re-election “platforms” of New Albany’s four incumbent Democratic council representatives Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash. That’s 36 years of … what, exactly?
As you might expect, Gahan and Dickey are working hard to assure there’ll be no primary opposition to incumbent council candidacies in 2019. That’s highly ironic, given that during mid-term elections last November numerous residents of the council districts represented by Caesar, Phipps, McLaughlin and Nash loudly declared themselves to be progressive, and publicly supported folks like Liz Watson, Dan Canon and Anna Murray.
If we are to assess the situation today, referencing the record of 36 combined years of actual city council seat-warming rather than their imagined stances pertaining to substantive policy, the incumbents in districts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are nowhere near as “progressive” as their 2019 Republican challengers – and Phipps’ underachieving sinecure is as yet uncontested, at least until I get my Independent petition started.
It’s very sad for the Democratic Party, though not for residents of those districts, who have high-quality Republicans ready and waiting for November. Personally, I find it hard to fathom that seemingly none of Watson’s, Canon’s and Murray’s purportedly progressive enthusiasts living in these precincts have grasped that when it comes to deeds and not words, their own Democratic council representatives are the ones who are completely out of sync.
There’s still time. Shouldn’t the local Democratic Party be walking the walk and not just talking the talk?
Just remember that the primary election rationale is based solely on the needs of the political party system. Independent candidacies come later, as with Dan Coffey's probable run for mayor.
Kudos to Jennie Collier, but where are the women and minorities to challenge the Democratic Party's old white functionary council slate?
Only a handful of candidates have officially filed for the municipal primary in May.
All three New Albany City Council Republican At-Large representatives, David Aebersold, David Barksdale and Al Knable have filed for re-election. Maury Goldberg is the only Democrat to throw his hat into the at-large race.
There will be a new representative in District 1 as independent Dan Coffey does not intend to run for re-election. Republican Stefanie Griffith and Democrat Jennie Collier have filed in District 1. Both are political newcomers.
In District 2, Republicans Scott Stewart and Amanda M. Pahmeier have filed, as has incumbent Democrat Bob Caesar. Democrat incumbent Greg Phipps is the only candidate so far to file in District 3. In District 4, Republican Cisa Kubley and Democrat incumbent Pat McLaughlin have filed, as has Republicans Josh Turner, District 5, and Scott Evans, District 6.
I stopped by my former NABC stomping grounds this afternoon to pick up a pizza. Old Lightning Rod went on tap a few days ago, and it remains totally on point. All kudos to the brew crew.
Later during a conversation about the background of Old Lightning Rod ...
... it occurred to me that during the years following this first use of molasses at the brewery, we also deployed sorghum as an adjunct on more than one occasion. The upshot: Molasses and sorghum are similar, but different.
Here's the explanation.
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The Difference Between Sorghum and Molasses, by Max Bonem (Food and Wine) These two dark-hued sugar substitutes deserve your attention. What's your sweetener of choice—honey, agave, stevia? How about molasses or sorghum? You may not keep them in the pantry, but your grandmother probably did. Molasses has always had a following among bakers, but a new generation of Southern chefs has recently reintroduced sorghum to the public. Here’s a look at how the two dark-hued sugar substitutes differ. They have different origins. While both sorghum and molasses arrived in the United States during the 17th century, they have very different origin stories. The sorghum plant, which is a grass, arrived with the African slave trade and spread throughout the American south due to its resilience against hot temperatures and dry conditions. The syrup was then developed as a sugar and molasses alternative. Molasses, on the other hand, was brought to the U.S. from the Caribbean, the epicenter of the sugar cane industry, to be used in rum production. Up until the 19th century, molasses was even more popular than sugar due to its cheaper cost. They have different production methods. Sorghum syrup is made from the green juice of the sorghum plant, which is extracted from the crushed stalks and then heated to steam off the excess water leaving the syrup behind. Conversely, molasses is the by-product of processing sugar cane into sugar. Sugar cane is stripped of its leaves and the juice is extracted from the cane by crushing or mashing. The juice is then boiled to concentrate it, which produces crystallization of the sugar. They have different flavors and consistencies. Sorghum tends to have a thinner consistency than molasses, along with a slightly more sour taste. Additionally, molasses comes in multiple varieties. When molasses undergoes its first boiling and the sugar crystals are removed, the result is called “first molasses,” which is its sweetest form. “Second molasses,” which is considerably milder, is created from a second boiling and then “blackstrap” is the result of a third boiling. It's considered bittersweet. They are used differently in the kitchen. While using either one is mostly just a matter of personal preference, molasses is traditionally used for baking in the U.S., while sorghum is more popular as a syrup on its own or as an ingredient in salad dressings and barbecue sauces.
I'm struck by the introduction to this link at Strong Towns, primarily because so few of New Albany's civic leaders walk -- unless it's an election year.
At Strong Towns, we believe that the single best thing a local leader can do to make their place financially stronger is to take a walk with a constituent and identify little opportunities to improve your place together. This variation on that experiment—giving a homeless citizen a camera—generated some fascinating results. We hope local leaders are watching and listening.
We gave disposable cameras to homeless people living around downtown Salem and asked them to document their lives. Anthony McGuire shows us what Christmas looks like on the streets.
Many of McGuire's photos are nondescript - they show storefronts and buildings downtown, places he walks past regularly.
But for him, each image says something about Salem: what the growing city has prioritized, or where he can get a meal and some relief from the cold.
To begin with a reprise from last year, thanks to a regular reader for this pithy introduction to an important topic.
"After listening to the dismissive remarks Mayor Gahan made earlier this month concerning public housing and Mount Tabor Road residents, I think what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said is very fitting. 'Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.' The mayor is a kakistocrat and a poor excuse for a leader and human being."
MLK Day typically brings out the political posturers and panderers, which in New Albany reveals a bedraggled procession of DemoDixieDisneycrats mounting their seldom-used soap boxes to praise someone who doesn't even remotely figure into their daily lives the other 364 days a year.
As such, it's an ideal time to re-read my column from October 18, 2018. In it, we see the local Democratic Party at its bottom-feeding finest, mangling a Human Rights Commission reconstituted by Republicans, and in short, maintaining the party's hypocritical stance that speechifying about minority advancement and human rights is peachy keen, but actually doing something about it is tantamount to heresy.
Consider Jeff Gahan's seven-year record as mayor of advancing New Albany's African-American community into municipal leadership.
That's right: there is no record, because there has been no advancement, but then again this level of non-achievement is fully in keeping with the Democratic Party's longtime strategy of cynical political patronage, wherein the African-American community is asked to be content with selective hiring of the rank and file just so long as it doesn't expect leadership positions to be among the spoils.
Gahan, Dickey and their minions will be spouting platitudes today. Dear reader, if you can locate any known instances of actions matching their words, please forward to the editor. The next such citation will be the first.
Now, let's reprise the Great Human Rights Commission Debacle of 2018, with this side note: Dr. Staten is said to have stepped aside from the board owing to his impending retirement, leaving one mayoral appointment to be made along with the two new seats created by city council.
This should be interesting and entertaining. Can Gahan and the self-abased Democrats get it right this time?
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ON THE AVENUES: As long as the Democratic hierarchy keeps the Human Rights Commission under its thumb, it's hard to be optimistic.
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
A proposed enlargement of the New Albany Human Rights Commission (HRC) from five board members to seven comes to this week's city council meeting on Thursday night.
That's tonight, for those of you able to attend.
The ordinance is likely to be approved, and stands to generate little in the way of pros or cons. That’s too bad, because the latest HRC saga symbolizes most of the abject failings of the Democratic Party’s flailing leadership cadres – all blow, no show, perpetually diversionary, and power hungry to the very last dollop of campaign finance.
Hilariously, the same Floyd County Democratic Party absently snoozing through four long years of HRC interruptus now feels compelled to gloriously affirm a commission enlargement made relevant by absolutely nothing the party itself has done.
The party's response has been clumsy, to say the least. The GOP's central role in recently re-animating a commission that both Democrats and their mayor, Jeff Gahan, had shown zero interest in maintaining meant Democrats had to do something; forced to respond to council president Al Knable's HRC resuscitation efforts, Gahan's "dependable-functionaries-first" prioritization led to the appointment of two over-60, white, straight but utterly reliable men.
In turn, Gahan's oafishness resulted in the exclusion of African-American candidates, including ideal appointee Nicole Yates, the latter owing to the mayor's and party chairman's fundamental distrust of human rights. The embarrassment aroused by the preceding game-playing disturbed a handful of quasi-progressives, who'd be needed for the coming election even if they fail to grasp the mayor's and party chairman's spoils-driven hypocrisy
Dickey’s typically overcooked blandishments reinforce a fact long grasped by New Albanians with a the faintest of pulses: if you want to know when Dickey is torturing the truth, just look to see if his lips are moving.
Party Chair supports growth of City Commission; urges creation of County HRC
New Albany, October 18, 2018 – In response to a proposed ordinance expanding the New Albany Human Rights Commission sponsored by City Council Members Greg Phipps and Pat McLaughlin, Floyd County Democratic Party Chair Adam Dickey issued the following statement:
"As Democrats, we believe our government works best when it reflects the many faces of our community and is informed through civic engagement. Councilman Phipps’ and McLaughlin’s ordinance to expand the City of New Albany’s Human Rights Commission offers a unique opportunity to not only add strong representation, but to grow the diverse community voices present on this important body. To that end, we support the city’s efforts through this new ordinance."
"In recent weeks, our community has continued to see incidents of hate and bigotry through the vandalism of public property and places. It has long been my sincere hope that Floyd County would adopt a similar Human Rights Commission ordinance to that approved by the City of New Albany under Mayor Gahan’s leadership in 2012. Alas, our Commissioners, led by Republican Mark Seabrook, have failed to act and no such body protects our citizens in the county. With the city’s leadership to once again renew its commitment to the HRC, I hope a new effort to pass a similar ordinance protecting Floyd County residents can be implemented. Together, our community can make a strong value statement against discrimination and ensure that everyone, regardless of one’s race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or economic background, is welcome to be part of our community."
As recently as last year, original HRC mover Greg Phipps publicly stated that he'd washed his hands of the commission, such was his own party's indifference. Meekly, he's skulking back into the tent, forever unwilling to publicly differ with the party's most powerful.
And with elections impending, it's important for the party to do some content-free political posturing (read: play-acting). Note the inclusion in Dickey's broadside of a potshot aimed against presumptive Republican mayoral contestant Mark Seabrook.
Dickey, whose Democrats have done nothing at all about hate crimes -- whose mayor won't acknowledge homelessness or the opioid crisis -- in effect accuses Seabrook of doing as little as his own organization has.
That's principled in a dust-mite-like way, wouldn't you say?
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It's extremely important for onlookers to remember that after the long moribund New Albany Human Rights Commission first was revived six years ago amid much hope, it promptly was allowed wither on the vine by the same City Hall team eager to publicly take credit for its existence.
The general idea was for local Democrats to be seen as upholding human rights, as opposed to actually doing anything about human rights. Of course, it's true that certain local Democrats genuinely believe in the HRC's concept and its mission.
However, as it pertains to the Democratic Party's power-brokering elders (Gahan, Dickey and commission appointee Warren Nash, among others), there is no refuting their determination to restrict the HRC to public relations alone; if the commission actually were to be autonomous with real teeth, the elders might not be able to exercise control over it.
Just as obviously, matters like the mayor's hostile takeover of public housing and his consistent, self-aggrandizing diminution of his nominal party's traditional base (the community's most vulnerable) then would become precisely the sort of human rights violations suitable for examination by a truly independent body.
The impetus for the current re-re-animation of the HRC is Republican councilman and council president Al Knable, whose appointments to the commission (Paul Kiger and Calle Janson) reflected a clear understanding of exactly what such a body should be.
In short: Knable acted decisively to bring life to the HRC when Gahan wouldn't, which was savvy both politically and conceptually. Strangely (at least to Democratic ideologues), some local Republicans are invested in human rights, too.
Hence the predictable response of Gahan, Dickey, Nash and other Democrats devoted first and foremost to the principle of preserving party power patronage; placed on the defensive, their first instinct has been to ensure the HRC remains (a) under their control, and (b) non-functional, while reserving the right to claim any public relations benefits down the road.
This is how your Democratic "leadership" operates, progressives.
Accordingly, and as previously noted, Gahan appointed two white, straight, male Democratic Party stalwarts: Warren Nash (82) and Cliff Staten (64). University professor Staten, whose son Josh recently was hired as head of redevelopment, served on the HRC previously.
As an academic and previous member, Staten's appointment to the HRC is justifiable. But Nash, whose son is Matt -- a city councilman recently hired by the New Albany Housing Authority, an entity annexed by Gahan in 2017 -- is a purely political appointment.
His presence is a dreadful, sad joke, and when it came to the four appointed members picking the fifth, it immediately became evident that the vote wouldn't be easy.
Two of the four members, Paul Kiger and Calle Janson, wanted to vote for the fifth member following the interviews Thursday, but Cliff Staten and Warren Nash preferred waiting a few days in order to review the resumes.
The best candidate to take the commission’s fifth seat was Nicole Yates, who is president of the NAACP; while a strong Democrat, she also has valuable experience working outside the narrow confines of New Albany, for both Greg Fischer and John Yarmuth.
Consequently, she has shown more independence and is less beholden to Dickey, the local party chairman, and that’s why Dickey and Gahan, who fear Yates in much the same way as inferior white men always react to strong, independent and intelligent women, duly conspired to assure the election of Jennifer Ortiz.
The New Albany Human Rights Commission now has a fifth member.
Jennifer Ortiz, a professor at IU Southeast, was elected 3-1 to the commission Tuesday. Nicole Yates was also nominated but failed to get a second.
Last week five New Albany residents were interviewed by the four sitting commission members. Besides Ortiz and Yates, Ken Brooks and Sarah Ring were both considered. Lane Stumler interviewed but withdrew from the process, saying the board needed to add more diversity.
Make no mistake: Ortiz is qualified for a seat, period.
However, she also works with Staten at IU Southeast, which must be mentioned in the context of City Hall's eternally nepotistic tendencies. Undoubtedly Dickey and Gahan believe she's a vote they can count on.
In the final analysis, the overarching point has nothing to do with any of the HRC appointees, save for Nash's inexcusable presence, because Gahan's and Dickey's objectives with their mismanagement of the HRC has not been to represent the community’s diversity.
It has been to assure their continued control of a “human rights” product in pre-packaged, controllable form.
Prof. Jennifer Ortiz appears to be a wonderful addition to the Floyd County Human Rights Commission. As an academic with a background in criminal justice she should lend an intellectual rigor to the Commission and an authoritative perspective on issues that are often at the center of concerns over racial injustice.
However, the failure to directly represent the legitimate and unique experiences of African-Americans on a Human Rights Commission that will likely confront issues of racial discrimination is a remarkable feat of negligence on the part of the City Council and the Mayor’s Office, which were responsible for the other appointments. The issue isn’t about quotas and it’s certainly not a knock against the qualifications and commitment to service of the other distinguished members of the Commission.
The mandate of the Commission requires an authentic representation of the full range of perspectives from members of our community. It is encouraging that Commission Chair Paul Kiger is open to correcting the imbalance.
— Frank Z. Riely Jr., Floyds Knobs
Good, but I'd have Frank be aware that the city council did just fine with its share of the mandate. Dickey and Gahan are the ones who squandered the mandate for purely political considerations, and so city council will enlarge a board which has been suppressed by none other than Dickey and Gahan.
Not one aspect of the HRC board's size matters if City Hall and the Democratic Party continue to regard the HRC as a non-functional, symbolic set piece, not as a tool meant to be used.
Progressives, pay heed. The HRC's comeback needn't have occurred, because it shouldn't have neglected, and once it became necessary, your own party's leadership has politicized it again; if Dickey and Gahan don't get what they want from the HRC, they'll smother it a second time.
What you permit, you promote. What you allow, you encourage. What you condone, you own.
Don't let Dickey and Gahan speak for you. They may be "Democratic" in the sense of a two-party duopoly, but they're by no means "democratic" in any meaningful way.
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