Don’t let the ballot box you in
Now fully grown feline friend Zenger, who’s watching as I write this, occasionally tolerates my occupying portions of what has become his house.
Tolerance comes with a price, however. I must be ready to have every cabinet, closet, and countertop regularly inspected — doors opened, and contents indelicately arrayed on the floor.
If I dare devote too much time to a phone call, Zenger launches like a heat-seeking missile, targeting anything made of paper — last week’s issue, this week’s refund check, even a paper sleeve around a straw — and shredding it to train me that tossing a spring or dangling yarn is more productive use of my time.
Like journalistic hero John Peter Zenger, for whom he is named, Zenger is an editor. He typically sprawls in classic cat fashion between keyboard and screen of my home computer, a paw at the ready to do what many readers — especially officials — would love to do: prevent me from typing anything that might challenge a reader’s view.
It will, therefore, take a bit of trickery — a special treat in a food bowl or a new helping of litter in an enter-from-the-top indoor outhouse — to distract him long enough for me to write what I’m about to pontificate upon.
MAMA: Make America a Mess Again
For many years, this paper hasn’t weighed in on political races, especially national ones. Rarely does it actually endorse candidates, even locally.
I’d love to break that trend this year, but despite volcanic outpourings of pros and cons about both presidential candidates, I still find myself unable to decide.
One candidate quite literally is a con — a crude, often rude felon, even if you believe his convictions were political. He seems less a leader and more a power-hungry follower of whatever shake-things-up populist sentiments happen to be found in polls.
His stance on immigration is so onerously overstated and reprehensibly racist that I wonder whether any of our forefathers, all of whom were immigrants, could have made it to America if he had been around. Scapegoating ethnicity is the stuff of dictatorships not democracies.
With all of this, you’d think his opponent would be a shoo-in. But the shoe simply doesn’t fit. Both she and her opponent are busy making basically the same promises that polls say will play well in toss-up states. But she also is grossly misrepresenting her opponent’s positions while carefully concealing unpopular stances she has taken in the past.
The notion of Trump wanting to impose a national sales tax that will increase cost of most goods is as much a lie as things Trump often spouts about immigration. What he has proposed is a tariff on imported goods. As any first-year economics student can tell you, costs like that are not automatically passed along as higher prices. The more competitive a marketplace is, the less a tax or tariff can be passed on. The whole idea is to increase competition, so the notion of the tariff being a sales tax everyone would have to pay is a bankrupt idea.
Kamala Harris’ stance on reproductive rights may be admirable, but her stance on gender affirmation at government expense seems to be merely the tip of an iceberg of out-of-step liberalism that could well sink our ship of state if she came to power.
Her penchant for treating corporations as evil is as bigoted as her opponents’ treatment of undocumented workers. Big corporations desperately need to be reined in, but never forget that most businesses — even mom-and-pop ones like this newspaper — are corporations, too. And tiny corporations pay the same exorbitantly high tax rates as huge ones that have far more loopholes they can slip through to avoid paying their fair share.
Protecting endangered RINO species
I could talk at length about the race to represent our heavily gerrymandered district in Congress, but what would be the point? The district was drawn to make it a safe Republican seat, and there’s little reason to expect anything but a landslide.
What’s most interesting is that the landslide is likely to carry off what previously had been seemingly moderate views by the Republican candidate.
Ours is a region that supported compassionate, sensible leaders like Dwight Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum, who continues to reside here. Yet somehow their once proud party has been infiltrated and overrun by extremists who regularly flirt with crossing over into the lunatic fringe.
For any candidate to make his or her way onto the dominant Republican ticket requires abandoning sane views and a sense of cooperating to govern. Instead you must adopt views with which even a majority of the public disagree.
Taking the Republican Party back from the thieves who so skillfully stole it needs to become a priority lest our next election, two or four years from now, resorts to yet another slate of lesser-of-evils candidates.
Hitting closer to home
Our choices are limited to two commissioner races, a write-in race for county attorney, and judicial retention balloting.
I’m biased, but I strongly believe judges who fail to take time to read documents or follow the law or who avoid accepting responsibility for making decisions on controversial matters may not be who we want in the judiciary. My advice to you is to retain them at your own peril. You never know when they might fail to exercise their constitutional responsibility to protect you, not just us, against illegal searches and seizures.
The attorney race appears to be a toss-up. One appears to be a better prosecutor, but the other is the only one who promises to move to the county that would employ him. The fact that Republican extremists don’t like him may actually give him a bit of an edge, but background and experience give his opponent an equal boost.
In one commissioner district, two thoughtful candidates with extensive involvement in public dialogue seem to be running. In the other, experience seems limited to a write-in candidate, and views of those on the ballot seem to take a back seat to their opposition to wind farms.
Whoever wins these races, I hope commissioners manage to put wind farms, 30x30, and other issues on a shelf and begin focusing instead on the main challenges the county faces. And, no, that’s not roads. Rural residents think so, and the way districts are gerrymandered, they hold undue sway. But the main issues the county faces are bloated or featherbedded payrolls and ambulance costs that threaten the county’s financial health more than the physical health most ambulance calls deal with.
The county’s exorbitantly expensive building spree needs to end. If it needs new county shops, the best location would be Batt Industrial Park in Marion. All of us need to recognize that we can’t afford to have six expensive paramedics on duty 24/7 and we have to do something about recovering cost of ambulance calls that have become little more than free ways to decide whether to call a physician or drive on your own to an emergency room.
Helping those who have fallen and can’t get up is an important service, but it need not be done by such highly trained people in highly expensive vehicles. And every town in the county doesn’t need its own costly ambulance station as a badge of honor.
Above all, commissioners need to redistrict the county so that a chunk of Marion isn’t attached to a district six miles away.
Ending all catty comments
Much more needs to be said, but a certain furry censor has returned, renewing his noble effort to prevent me from incurring the wrath of those I might write about.
Maybe instead of Zenger I should have named him Cody. Oh, well. At least he can’t vote. I can. So can you. Like turning your clocks back an hour Saturday night, just don’t forget to do it.
— ERIC MEYER