Monthly Archives: January 2021

Why I’m not leaving the Republican Party…

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Arizona censured three fairly middle of the road Republicans for not supporting Trump’s attempted sedition. The Oregon Republican Party declared the siege of the Capitol a “false flag” operation. Hawaii’s state GOP sent out tweets in praise of QAnon.

It’s hard to imagine Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, or even Dick Nixon signing off on that level of absolute fuckery… and if you’re too tied up in conspiracies and chasing down enemies for Nixon, you really need to ask yourself how far from the flock you really have strayed.

The easiest thing in the world to do would be pack my bags and decamp from the Republican Party. What happens after that is a bit problematic. I certainly can’t register as a member of the Democratic Party. The number of issues I fundamentally disagree with them on is just too long. The Libertarians are OK, I guess, though they don’t seem likely to ever get enough of their members to agree on any one thing to be effective players. Going independent has a charm of its own, though it basically locks you out of the primary process in Maryland.

It’s that last one that, for the moment, is keeping me in the Republican Party. To have any voice at all in how the party shapes itself in the future, you’ve got to be there for the primaries – for the elections no one really cares much about – for the county commission races and the state delegates. Being a vote cast in opposition to batshit crazy and for elemental conservative values is the only way to exert any influence at all in who ends up being tapped for the main events in 2022 and 2024.

For the time being, it feels like a better use of whatever limited talents I have to be inside the party shouting dissent rather than on the outside throwing rocks.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The MVA. Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administration keeps spamming me with notices that I’m “almost” due for my next emissions inspection. Look, I already consider the emissions check an unqualified inconvenience and a blatant grab for an extra $14 a year in taxes disguised as service fees. If there were something really wrong with my four-year-old vehicle, it’s a fair bet that the onboard computer would know about it and fire up an idiot light long before I’m due for a helpful state mandated inspection. Also, it’s just a little bit hinky that they cancelled my original due date eight months ago due to COVID, but now, when cases are significantly higher, it’s suddenly ok to trundle on over to my local inspection station. If the message is stay home, minimize trips outside your home when possible, but then making it mandatory to go do something as completely useless as an emission inspection under penalty of government sanction for non-compliance, it feels just a little bit intellectually disingenuous.

2. Executive Orders. Executive Orders, even ones that direct the federal bureaucracy to do things you don’t like, are not prima facie evidence of “tyranny.” The Congress remains free to craft legislation that would circumscribe or override an Executive Order, essentially rendering it moot. The courts are likewise free to rule against Executive Orders, thereby enjoining the Executive Branch and bureaucracy from enforcing them. Unless you’re going on to specify which one of your constitutional rights a particular Executive Order violates, maybe replace “tyranny,” with “doing stuff I don’t like.” It lets you express an opinion without sounding like an idiot. 

3. Kevin McCarthy. The House Minority Leader is schlepping to Florida to have a meeting with a former president who a) Lost the White House; b) Cost his party the majority in the Senate in 2020; c) Cost his party the majority in the House in 2018; and d) Incited a seditious insurrection against the United States. I’m trying hard to imagine another circumstance in the long history of our republic where a sitting member of a party’s congressional leadership team was so quick to seek out the advice and blessing of a recently defeated candidate for president – especially one that in his final days in office worked so hard to sunder both his country and his political party. I never imagined I’d miss the good old days when you hid your failed candidates away like the drunken uncle at Christmas dinner, but here we are. 

Lack of substance…

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I’ve long been in favor of informed debate over just about any issue you could name. Note carefully that I didn’t say argument. I also didn’t say just “debate.” In context, “informed” is the operative part of this sentence. I’m in favor of informed debate.

This means you need to know actual facts and use them to support your asserted position. 

“I disagree” isn’t a debate point.

“You’re stupid” isn’t a debate point. It’s even less of a debate point when it’s “Your stupid.”

“That’s dumb” isn’t a debate point.

If you want to support your position, you need to assert statements of fact. Say something like “X happened on Y date and these three things happened as a result.” I’m always happy to consider new information. It’s historically how we as a species learn things.

Asserting that “If you don’t believe X, Y, and Z, you kick puppies and hate America” isn’t a statement of fact. More than likely it’s a mindless regurgitation of some less than reputable cable television talking head or “internet personality.”

I’m up for just about any debate on the modern political landscape that you’d like to have, but I’m not going to pretend that I have to lend any credibility to people who flail their arms, stomp their feet, and pretend they’re defending a well-reasoned and intelligent position. 

We could be having a great national debate on the merits of the issues that confront our republic. We won’t, though, because throwing a tantrum on national television or social media is easier and creates a better five second clip to use so you can get many, many likes. 

I’ve finished with pretending adults who can’t behave like grown-ups are worth the time and effort it takes to engage with either in the real world or across the universe of social media platforms. I welcome a debate. I welcome learning new things… but statistically speaking, I’ve burned through a little more than half of my allotted time on this rock, so I no longer welcome ideas or people wholly lacking in substance. I have neither the time for, nor interest in entertaining them.

Thoughts on the death of a pipeline…

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I was raised in coal country. My childhood memories are punctuated with the sound of a CSX locomotive and open coal cars rumbling through the center of town. I don’t have to tax my memory to recall its whistle screaming as the engine pulled its load across the level crossing at Union Street. Those trains were as much a part of town as any of the buildings that stood overlooking the tracks. Still, they haven’t run coal south through Midland in a long time. Then again, a lot of those old buildings are gone now, too. 

My home town’s entire reason for being was to support the men who went down the mines in the 19th and 20th centuries. I grew up riding bikes in the shadow of draglines and immense tailings piles carted out of the deep mines a hundred years before I was born. Even those “coal banks,” pressed hard against the backs of the town’s two churches, are long gone following a spate of reclamation and restoration efforts made a decade or two ago. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that, for good or bad, we’re living in the closing era of the coal industry. Government – and the people – are going to demand “clean” energy options going forward.

You can rage against it all you want.  There’s no silk weaving mill in Coney anymore because it didn’t make economic sense in 1957. There’s no Kelly-Springfield plant in Cumberland because it didn’t make economic sense in 1987. There’s no Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore because it didn’t make economic sense in 2012. Maybe you see where I’m going with this line of thought.

Sure, hang on grimly to your plant or pipeline. Get out of it whatever you can in the time it has left. The oil is still going to flow – by rail or truck or one of the hundred other pipelines crisscrossing the continent. A few mines may hang on for decades yet, but the battle is over. Coal from western Maryland will never again fuel the ships of the Great White Fleet. Oil, over the next few decades, is going to be phased out. The future is ugly ass wind turbines marring every mountaintop and offshore vista and acres of solar panels where there use to be open fields.

The economy has always been built on creative destruction. It sucks when you’re on the “destruction” side of the equation. Ask the men who built wagons what happened after Henry made the car affordable to the masses. I take no pleasure in acknowledging this, because the end of this type of industry is going to have real and lasting negative impacts on my old home town and the people I know there. Pretending it’s not going to happen, or that we can somehow reverse the inexorable march towards the future isn’t going to help them, though. 

Times change. Technology evolves. King Canute couldn’t order the tide to go out and we’ll fare no better trying to resuscitate dead and dying industries and ordering the future to be an exacting continuation of the past. 

That’ll be an unpopular opinion where I’m from, but as a lifelong holder of unpopular or controversial opinions, I’m ok with that. 

Take it where you find it…

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After ten months of watching interest rates plummet through previously unimaginable record lows, I’ve finally stuck out my hand in an effort to catch the falling knife. Almost six years ago, I was thrilled to lock in 4.25% for 30 years. I’d taken 7.5% back in 2001when I bought my St. Mary’s County condo. At the time, that was a steal – especially for a 23-year-old with no significant credit history. I refinanced that one a few times over the years and the shopped around for financing for the Tennessee house in 2007. I closed on that one about three months before the bottom fell out of the housing market in 2008. Good timing, that.

I’d gotten used to being able to move through the mortgage process pretty effortlessly. I have every conceivable piece of electronic paperwork the underwriters may need at my fingertips – often sending it off before the call asking for it even ended. I’m still good for that, but the mortgage business itself is having a bit of a struggle at the moment. Just getting a broker to call me back proved to be more of a challenge than you might think. I suppose it’s a case of having an embarrassment of riches as everyone is racing to their favorite banker to take advantage of the unprecedentedly low rates. I was warned that getting through to closing, usually a 30-day affair, could take up to 90 days because of how much of a backlog they already have in the pipeline. The rate is locked in, with an option to go lower if they should continue to fall, but now that I’ve started the process, I’m impatient to start getting my monthly savings.

Plague, famine, sedition are all loose upon the world. Maybe we’re all going to hell in a handbag. It’s important to take your happiness where you can find it in strange times, so damned if I’m not going to appreciate a blisteringly low interest rate with no points on the way to the collapse of civilization.

Disorienting but comfortable…

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I’ve lived through the four presidential transitions as an adult. They all come with the same basic features – mostly the victorious and defeated parties trying to figure out the shape of their brave new world.

What I wasn’t mentally prepared for in 2021, though, was just how quickly Donald dropped off the radar (unless you’re steadfastly tuned in to “alternative news” sources).  After hearing his steady drumbeat for 4 years, waking up each morning and scrolling Twitter before my feet hit the floot to see what batshit crazy thing happened overnight, the last few days have been a remarkable return to politics being just politics. 

It’s like having walked through a foggy landscape only to emerge, unexpectedly, into a bright, clear upland of well-known surroundings; disorienting, but comfortable.

I’ll be railing against President Biden’s agenda soon enough, but I’m kind of determined to take the weekend and really just appreciate the wonder of how completely different it feels.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. But the rioters! Look, no one called out the rioters more than I did over the summer. Rioting is bad. Burning cities is bad. I don’t have any sympathy or offer any support for anyone who engaged in those activities. Bad as those things are, though, attempting to subvert the lawful transfer of executive power by engaging in a seditious attempt to overthrow the Congress is worse. Far worse. I have no idea how that’s so very hard for some people to understand. Believe me when I tell you it’s entirely possible to loath the actions of both rioters and seditionists without excusing one or the other in any way.

2. They were mean first! My Facebook timeline is filled with posts saying something like “Well, Democrats said mean stuff about Trump so I’m saying mean stuff about Biden.” Ok. That’s a fine argument if you’re either five years old or know nothing about American political history.  Republicans definitely didn’t talk shit about Obama. And Democrats absolutely didn’t talk shit about George W. Bush before him. Way the hell back in 1800, partisans in favor of Jefferson labeled Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman,” while those who support Adams railed that Jefferson was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” That’s what happens in the heat and battle of a campaign… but you’ve got to be an unbridled idiot to think that’s the way anyone can be expected to actually govern. 

 
3. Fight them on everything! My Republican friends seem to want to double down on their electoral loss. The reality is, the Democrats now hold the presidency have the majority in both houses of Congress. That just the mathematical fact of it. We Republicans can either work with them in an effort to moderate some of their more extreme notions, or we can stand on the sidelines and stomp our feet for at least the next two years. If you’re not a wild eyed partisan who can’t imagine a world in which you don’t always get your own way, this is the time for working out the best deals we can to protect Republican priorities. Failing to play ball isn’t a show of strength. It’s a concession that we’re afraid our ideas can’t compete – and one that will allow the Democratic majority to run the table without so much as consultation with the opposition party. But hey, if you want to spend the next two years watching a Democratic Congress jamming through everything they want, with precisely the language they want, on a strict party line vote, feel free to keep being obstinate for no good reason.

Catching my breath…

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I had the privilege of attending two inaugurations in person during the opening years of this century. It’s an experience – one I’m glad I had when I was younger and more tolerant of crowds, necessarily intrusive security screening, and standing around for hours in the cold with no access to coffee and limited availability of restroom facilities. It’s a bit of unique Americana I recommend everyone do if they’re able at least once in their life.

Today’s inauguration of President Biden looked different, even from the toasty warm vantage point of my home office. As it turns out, during the Great Plague era, even pomp and ceremony ain’t what they use to be. I suppose whatever poor bastards were stuck planning the thing did the best they could within the confines of virus-constrained procedures. I’m happy beyond measure for their sake that the big show is over. The Treasury doesn’t have enough cash on hand to convince me to want their job. 

Here we are on day one of the Biden Administration. I could try waxing philosophical, but honestly, I’m just trying to catch my breath a little after the last two weeks, so I’ll just congratulate, again, our new President and Vice President… and we’ll just have to pick up with any necessary ranting and raving tomorrow. 

Taking stock…

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With less than 18 hours left to run in the Trump administration, it’s time to take stock. 

Besides firing off tweet-storm broadsides and creating a few new words, what’s to be made of this president’s time in office?

– Appointed a shit ton of vaguely originalist judges not just to the Supreme Court but across the federal bench

– Ended American participation in the appeasement of Iran

– Asserted that a rapidly strengthening China is an increasing threat to America’s global interests

– Entered into a new and improved free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico

There are more, but those are fine exemplars of the modest improvements, mostly around the margins, that we can attribute to the Trump Administration. The question, then, is what was the cost?

– Abandoning the centuries old traditions of American political life by subverting the electoral process and attempting to raise and insurrection

– A general foreign policy legacy best labeled “America only” that badly damaged relationships with our most important global allies and empowered some of our most bitter enemies

– An inexplicable failure to respond to the dangers of a new and deadly pandemic as it swept the globe and the United States

– Ratcheting up government spending and driving up the national debt to unprecedented and unsustainable levels

Even leaving out the sedition, historians would have eventually filed this administration away as inconsequential at best and a failure at worst. There was simply too little forward motion on priority efforts when weighed against how much was guided so badly off the rails.

The damage done to America’s standing in the world and the mortal division of our internal politics will be the work of generations to patch up – if the job can be done at all. The alternative, though, is simply unthinkable, so let us begin.  

The post holiday slump…

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We’re back in that part of a year where hoarding vacation days is a thing. The next long weekend milepost is Washington’s Birthday. Then it’s the long slog through to Memorial Day before holidays start appearing regularly on the calendar again.

These are the days when I’m least likely to burn off annual leave. That’s doubly true as we prepare to enter Plague Year II. With the promise of a vaccine coming over the horizon, business as usual, and filling cubicles won’t be far behind. Vacation days then will be far more valuable than any vacation day taken while we’re still living under plague protocols and working mostly from home.

If it sounds like I’m more surly than usual in the next few weeks, it’s mostly because I am. Without even the hint of a week’s long weekend on the horizon for the foreseeable future, it’s fair to say I’m in a mood.