Showing posts with label 2018. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2018. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Why an understanding of history is important.

They (the Kurds) didn't help us in the Second World War; they didn't help us with Normandy.
Donald Trump on the Kurds.

Of course they didn't. 

In 1944-45 the Kurds were where they are now, which means that they were unwilling citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey.  Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey also didn't help us in the Second World War.

Indeed, the Turks were courted by the Germans throughout much of the war but wisely stayed out, having learned their lesson by siding with the Germans during World War One.  Turkey was a neutral power, lead by the aggressively secular military man Ataturk,. 

Syria was a French possession going into World War Two, a League of Nations mandate from World War One.  It became independent in 1946 basically as the British forced a weakened France to depart.  Iraq became independent in 1932 but following a pro fascist coup at the start of World War Two, the British defeated it in a short war in 1941.  Iran was a neutral during the war, but a neutral that leaned heavily towards the Allies and which allowed transportation of supplies from the Western allies to the Soviet Union across its territory.

So what does one make of all of this?

Well not much. 

World War Two was the single most significant event of the modern era, but it's now 75 some years ago.  All of the nations that were our allies, or perhaps more accurately that we became allied to, are still our allies. But the two major nations we fought in World War Two, Germany and Japan, are also our allies.  One of the nations that was a major ally of ours during World War Two, the Soviet Union, would be our major opponent for decades thereafter.  Russia, its predecessor and successor, can hardly be called our friend.

And bizarrely, perhaps World War One now has more to do with what's gong on in that region than World War Two, at least in some ways.  World War Two, followed by the Cold War, put the issues that the Great War's peace shoved into prominence back on the back burner.  The major wars were too big and the ideologies too deep for the rights of small peoples to take the place that seemed so prominent in 1918.

Now those issues are back.

Yes, the Kurds didn't fight at Normandy.  How could they?  But the Western Allies didn't save the Armenians from the Ottomans.  How could they?  The Allies didn't save the Turks from the Greeks nor did they save the Greeks from the Turks.  They probably could have done something about that.

In 1918 the European powers that carved up the Ottoman Empire, as well they should have, imagined a much smaller Turkey.  That Turkey would have suffered injustices. Greek claims to the interior of Turkey were unjust.  Italian claims to some of Turkey were absurd.  But the imagined Kurdish and Armenian states that some saw were not. And Armenia did manage to emerge. Kurdistan did not. We didn't do anything about that.

Maybe we couldn't have. But we could have kept this from breaking out.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Lex Anteinternet: Challenges legal and financial to the extractive i...

Yesterday we ran this item
Lex Anteinternet: Challenges legal and financial to the extractive i...: I haven't written much on energy topics recently, and a I have a lingering two part series that's related to this that I have yet t...
In today's tribune we learned that the coal industry lost a little under 200 jobs last year, which all in all, given the circumstances, isn't as big of decline as might have been feared.

And its reported that Wyoming is ninth in the nation in income, which of course is good for the state.

Both would suggest that there's been a period of stability or perhaps the coal decline is slowed while oil has picked up. 

Thursday, February 21, 2019

Mueller Musings

On the television news today there was a report that special investigative attorney Mueller's report "may be released in a matter of days."

On the internet news the headline is that "Bombshell Mueller report may never be fully released.

I guess I should withhold judgement until whatever happens, if it happens, happens, but at this point a couple of comments:

1.  After all of this lead up, the entire freaking report should be released in full no matter what.

It should be released as putting the country through all of this and then just teasing the public with whatever it says would be cruel and stupid.  Cruel for obvious reasons, and stupid for the well known evidence of history that even pretending something is withheld leads to endless speculation.  Some are still speculating on the Kennedy assassination, for goodness sakes.  When I was a kid, a few still were speculating on the Lincoln murder.

And I don't care if its devastating to anyone.  The result of failing to disclose what was known about one person or another has given us entirely false histories on some thing, the internal history of the United States and the United Kingdom during the Cold War for one.   Were you aware that one of the leaders of the British Labor Party was known to have been a KGB informant until 1968 (this was learned after 1968) but British intelligence chose to keep it to themselves until fairly recently?  They shouldn't have.  Even now its denied, a la Alger Hiss style.

2.  I don't care if Mueller is the greatest lawyer on earth, this investigation is a good example of why you don't give special attorney generals open ended commissions or assign projects to lawyers who are 74 years old.  Commissions of this type should have a reasonable time limit to them in which they expire absent an extension so that the people assigned to them don't take two years to get a single investigation completed, if not longer than that.  If that's too much for the person assigned, it should go to somebody who can get it done.  If its too complicated to get done, as it turns out, report on that and why.  If commissions of the type issued by the United States were issued in ancient Rome, the report of the special investigator looking into the murder of Julius Caesar would be coming out "soon".

By saying all of this I'm not commenting on the quality of the investigation or its results.  It may be great work.  But if its work that would require or even suggest requiring impeachment, it's taken so long that the work will have been nearly completely pointless in this term (although it would certainly have some impact on a campaign for reelection) and even if Congress got rolling on that it would be literally all they would do for the next two years.  If it doesn't suggest that, whatever it has suggested, and its lead to an impressive number of indictments so far, its taken far too long to get there and its added endlessly to news cycle drama that's been dramatic enough as it was.

Friday, January 11, 2019

Of Shutdowns and Symbols

I haven't really commented on the shutdown of the Federal government directly.  There's so much talk of it, so much of which is completely superficial, that it almost seems to be a waste of electrons to do it.

Once all the rhetoric is boiled away, there are some things that are serious, in various manners, that are evident however.  One is that the base that elected Donald Trump, which consists principally of blue collar workers and their immediate descendants, wants something done about immigration, which frankly is grossly over any sensible limit, and right now.  Trump cannot ignore that and if he does, he will not only loose the 2020 election, but the GOP will loose his voters who will go on to be a permanently disgruntled class, the results of which nobody knows.  The wall is purely a symbol of that as it is not seriously believed by very many that it would be effective, but to that base it's a symbol of resolve.  It may be a policing waste of money in the views of most people, but then a lot of symbolic items of resolve are. He really can't yield.

The Democrats can yield but right now they won't, as the shutdown is a symbol for them of an a Presidency they despise.  In terms of disgust, therefore, two New Yorkers, Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump, and one displaced East Coaster, Nancy Pelosi, have become the symbols of a broken government all the way around, as well as being symbols of a Baby Boom generation that simply won't yield power to anyone younger.

On not yielding power, Ruth Bader Ginsberg has not made it to Supreme Court Oral Arguments this week.  Nobody really knows what this means, but there's very good reason to believe that a figure who has in the past never missed arguments would only be doing so now if she absolutely can't.  RBG is a very elderly woman and never had the appearance of one in good health, even if she was clearly always a person of vigorous minds.  Almost nobody is speaking what's now on their mind, but what that is, is pretty clear.  Somewhere in the departments of the Administration people are dusting off the barely shelved lists of potential Supreme Court nominees to see which one should be made next.

On shutdowns, one thing of notable interest, one way or another, is the degree to which the legislature of the State of Wyoming has been very quiet.  Going to the last election the Republicans fielded, in the primaries, two candidates who would have thrown Federal employees in jail for doing their jobs and a third who would have taken over their work in a slow motion fashion, most likely.  The voters rejected all of that nonsense and so far the legislature hasn't been reviving any of it, perhaps finally getting the message.

But at the same time what's been notable is that those who seriously maintain such positions haven't been saying much.  With the Federal government partially shut down in the state, you'd think they'd be crying for Wyoming to take over the Federal government's operations until the Federal government goes back to work.  Nope.  Not a word on that.

There's been no suggestion that Wyoming take over administering the parks.  People worried about Federal oil and gas leasing grinding to a halt (the Feds sent those guys back to work), but nobody suggested that maybe the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission could step in.

Of course, all of that would be quite unrealistic. But that's the point.  When push comes to shove, even the pushers know that.

Which won't stop, I'm sure, the shutdown being used as an argument for reviving this nonsense when the shutdown is over.  Put to the test, people choose not to take it.  Which doesn't stop them from complaining about pop quizzes later.

Saturday, January 5, 2019

On the other hand. Was: The end of the republic?

I just posted this earlier today (okay, the other day):
Lex Anteinternet: The end of the republic?: Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post, whom I don't always agree with but whom I enjoy reading, believes that American democracy has c...
This post raised some disturbing questions about our ability to govern ourselves, and it cited a couple of examples, far from the most important, that contribute to that question.  All of that remains perfectly valid in my opinion.

However. . .

this was all before the video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing as a college student went viral in no small part to snark over it..

What's that have to do with anything?  Well, maybe more than we might wish to admit.

Ocasio-Cortez is all of 27 years old.  She's right out of college, basically.  Did she dance in college?  I sure hope so.  If you have to criticize that, ask yourself if you danced when young.  If you didn't, why the heck not?

And that is what I think she's taking flack for.

In an era when the government is dominated by a select group of East Coast monied elite, no matter how crude they may be, she 's not part of it.  Donald Trump is.  Chuck Schumer is.  Nancy Pelosi, her supposed California base aside is.  Joe Biden is.  Bernie Sanders even is.  

Ocasio-Cortez is from the East Coast but what it is evident is that she's a fiery Puerto Rican ethnic who is, at least so far, absolutely unyielding in her positions.

Do I agree with all of those positions?  No I don't. But in looking them up, I don't think they're as universally off base as some might suppose in every single instance.  Indeed, some of them have moved from radical to accepted within the last six years even if I don't agree with them or remain stoutly opposed to them. And what she really stands for is replacing the old dead wood, and it's thick, in both political parties with some youthful chutes.

It'll be interesting to see if time and experience burn this out of her, or if she's simply a flash in the pan. But maybe not.

Maybe she's a Robert LaFollette, or a W. E. B. Dubois, or a Malcolm X.  All of them were radicals and quite frankly, had I been commenting during the lives of any of them (only Malcolm X's life overlaps mine, but I was a young child when he died) I would have disagreed with them on most things. But their fiery nature stoked a flame when things really needed to be addressed.  No, I don't think Battling Bob LaFollette was right on World War One, the economy or most things, but his voiced raised questions that needed to be asked, even if I wouldn't have been supporting his views at the time.  No, I don't think W. E. B. Dubois was right when he sympathized with Communism (and he later admitted that position was wrong), but voices like his gave rise to progress for African Americans that came later.  No, I don't think Malcolm X was right on most things, and I don't even think his conversion from Christianity to Islam (which I think he would have abandoned and returned to Christianity from had he lived) was wise nor justified, but I do think that his radicalism ended up being the flanking protection for what those like Martin Luther King advanced.

My point is that there really are things that desperately need to be addressed.  People like Trump, Pelosi, Schumer are going to talk about issues, probably superficially, but there's no reason to believe that they're going to address them. They are too ingrained in their long lives to do so.  People like Ocasio-Cortez have long lives yet to live and have to live in a world that is impacted by what they do.  Trump, Pelosi ,and Schumer aren't going to be around long enough, given the natural advances of time, to where that this is true and only have their future legacies, which none of us live to appreciate in this world, to contemplate.

No, I don't think that Ocasio-Cortez is right on everything, or even on most things.  But she's willing to stick to her position in spite of harassment, even from the liberal press, that's basically sexist and juvenile in nature.  And at least that should give us hope that there's still people like Roosevelt, LaFollette, and Rankin around who are willing to advance a fresh conversation irrespective of the entrenched old one.  And even where we vigorously disagree with them, that means that there's hope conversations can advance on a real level.

Monday, December 31, 2018

What? No scenes of wild December 31, 1918 New Years Celebrations. And none for 1968 either. And New Year's Eve 2018-2019.

 Yup, it's December 31 all right.

Nope, couldn't find any.

And I was surprised.

Cameras were obviously in fairly common circulation by then, although frankly the defeated Germans were the masters of snap shots as they already had a lot of personally owned cameras, whereas that would have been unusual for soldiers from other countries. Still, press photographers were common already, as were military photographers and photographers from organizations, such as  the Red Cross.  

I'm sure somebody took photos, but I didn't find anything for this New Years Eve.

I'm sure celebrations were held too, but I didn't find any record of them.  Indeed, outside of one of the Casper newspapers, even the papers didn't really note it.  The Saturday Evening Post did run a Leyendecker illustration for the New Year on its issue from the last week of December that was New Year's themed, but oddly enough I couldn't find a copy of the cover either.

Anyhow, I'm sure they occurred, and I'm sure relief over the end of the war featured in a lot of those celebrations in the U.S. and the Allied nations.  

Of course in a lot of the U.S. that celebration would have been dry, or if not dry, it would have featured the anticipated last of the suds.  Prohibition was coming in strong and it had the force of public sentiment behind it.  Indeed, in the same Casper paper I noted the first of the counter waive on that movement appeared with a notation that Tennessee was already becoming the center of bootlegging, and openly so.  Anyhow, in a lot of homes the celebrations may already have been dry, in contrast to the way New Years has become, and for many establishments in many states it would have to have been.  

It wouldn't have had to have been in Wyoming, but the press was pretty steady in its drumbeat to bring Prohibition on, so the seeming tide of history seemed pretty clear.

But I'm sure a lot of people gathered and celebrated at homes, or in bars and restaurants that evening.  Lots of Americans, over one million, were still overseas, and they likely celebrated in barracks rooms, with those on occupation duty in Germany probably restricted to post, I'll bet.

Of course, some took note of the changing of year from posts in Russia, where I'll bet that change, which would probably not have been observed by locals at all, most still acclimated to the Old Calendar, was probably a little somber.  Troops stationed near British troops, as some were, I suspect celebrated a bit more.  Those in the Navy no doubt celebrated however that's done in the Navy, which I'm not familiar with but as the Navy is long on tradition, not doubt something occurred.

Of course, if you were a German, except perhaps, ironically, if you were in the Occupied Zone, this was a pretty bad New Years, and not just because your army had been defeated in a four year long war that killed huge numbers of your countrymen. The country was in revolution and falling apart, at war with itself and facing a rebellion in Posen.  It was bad.  Your trip to Mass, if you were in southern Germany or western Germany, was probably pretty somber.

Which it also would have been in you were anywhere in what became Poland or any of the Baltic States, all of which were aflame.  And while this was New Years in Russia, probably few observed it both because the peasantry, which most Russians were, were still on the Old Calendar for observances but also because a massive civil war was raging in the country.

And so ended 1918.  But it's reached continued on. Even until now.

I didn't bother to look to hard for anything from 1968, for which I've been running some dates.  I'm not going to do a  continual1969 retrospective.  1968 was run specifically as it was such a pivitol year in history but I'm finding myself no more informed on that than I was before I started doing that, and my inquiries here and there as to why it turned out to be remain unanswered.  It was, with turmoil in the United States, France, Germany and elsewhere.  Something was going on, but what?  I was around for the 1968 to 1969 New Year but don't recall it, I think, and if I do its from a child's prospective.  Had I been older in 1968, I think I would have been glad that year was over but dreading 1969.

Which is sort of how I feel about this New Years.

It's not like 2018 has been a super bad year for me by any means whatover. Quite the contrary by most measures.  But it has been stressful on a personal level and it featured near its end the terminus on something that I had long hoped would have worked out which did not and the fixation of something to the contrary thats has a real element of bitterness about it.  I'll continue to deal with that in early 2019 until I become fully used to it (the most likely thing), accept it (ditto), or become just very bitterly disgruntled about it.   

And politically the past three years or so  have been about all I can take on the nation's politics, which just seem to get wackier and wacker, and which have spilled over a bit to the local.  There's really serious things to be done that haven't been done.  Maybe 2019 will surprise me and people will start to get to work on them, but right now a person predicting that would have to be doing it based on sheer unsupported optimism.

Oh well.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!

Chorus.-For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o'kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne.
For auld, &c.

And there's a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Queen Elizabeth II's 2018 Christmas Message

Queen Elizabeth II's 2018 Christmas Message:
For many, the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, is when Christmas begins. Listened to by millions of people around the world, it starts with a chorister singing the first verse of Once in Royal David's City.
The priest who introduced this service to King's College chapel, exactly one hundred years ago, was Eric Milner-White. He had served as a military chaplain in the First World War. Just six weeks after the Armistice, he wanted a new kind of service which, with its message of peace and goodwill, spoke to the needs of the times.
Twenty eighteen has been a year of centenaries. The Royal Air Force celebrated its 100th anniversary with a memorable fly-past demonstrating a thrilling unity of purpose and execution. We owe them and all our Armed Services our deepest gratitude.
My father served in the Royal Navy during the First World War. He was a midshipman in HMS Collingwood at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The British fleet lost 14 ships and 6,000 men in that engagement. My father wrote in a letter: 'How and why we were not hit beats me'. Like others, he lost friends in the war.

At Christmas, we become keenly aware of loved ones who have died, whatever the circumstances. But, of course, we would not grieve if we did not love.
Closer to home, it's been a busy year for my family, with two weddings and two babies, and another child expected soon. It helps to keep a grandmother well occupied. We have had other celebrations too, including the 70th birthday of The Prince of Wales.
Some cultures believe a long life brings wisdom. I'd like to think so. Perhaps part of that wisdom is to recognize some of life's baffling paradoxes, such as the way human beings have a huge propensity for good, and yet a capacity for evil. Even the power of faith, which frequently inspires great generosity and self-sacrifice, can fall victim to tribalism.
But through the many changes I have seen over the years, faith, family and friendship have been not only a constant for me but a source of personal comfort and reassurance.
In April, the Commonwealth Heads of Government met in London. My father welcomed just eight countries to the first such meeting in 1948. Now the Commonwealth includes 53 countries with 2.4 billion people, a third of the world's population.

Its strength lies in the bonds of affection it promotes, and a common desire to live in a better, more peaceful world. 
Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human being is always a good first step towards greater understanding. 
Indeed, the Commonwealth Games, held this year on Australia's Gold Coast, are known universally as the Friendly Games because of their emphasis on goodwill and mutual respect

The Christmas story retains its appeal since it doesn't provide theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life. 
Instead it's about the birth of a child and the hope that birth 2,000 years ago brought to the world. Only a few people acknowledged Jesus when he was born. Now billions follow him.
I believe his message of peace on earth and goodwill to all is never out of date. It can be heeded by everyone; it's needed as much as ever.
A very happy Christmas to you all.

Friday, December 21, 2018

Ginsburg has cancerous growths removed from lung

Ginsburg has cancerous growths removed from lung




And Now Mattis

Soon to be "the former", Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

When I wrote this yesterday, and teed it up to run this morning, I had no idea how bizarre events were going to turn over the day in terms of Trump Administration resignations.

What's the deal with Ryan Zinke?

The Trump Administration has become such a revolving door that I've really lost track of what's going on with it.  People come and go, are hired and fired, with such rapidity that a person would have to be a political fan in the extreme, right or left, to keep up with it.

So many figures have resigned from the Trump Administration it's become a bit of a stunner to realize that some figures have been there all along, and have done a good job in the opinion of most.

One such figure is Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Mattis was a former Marine Corps general with a reputation for toughness.  He is a traditionalist in terms of his military views, as most Marine Corps officers, at least up until recently, have been.  For that reason he drew some opposition in his confirmation as it was feared that he'd roll things back in terms of women in combat roles, which I sincerely wish he had done.

Instead it seems he spent much of his time trying to moderate and back down Donald Trump wackier ideas.  Well, he's had enough of that.

This past week the President declared victory in Syria and announced a troop withdrawal and he's been hinting that he'll pull troops out of Afghanistan.  Both are major mistakes and Mattis has taken the Napoleonic officer option of resigning rather than putting up with it.

As readers here know, I never thought getting into Syria was a good idea, but we entered in a small and specialized way anyhow and frankly, it's worked really well.  Getting out now flatly hands everything over to the Russians who are allied with the Syrian government, the latter of which is allied with Iran.

A person could perhaps debate on Syria, although this seems clearly to be giving up on the military progress we've made there and hand things over to the Russians. But the way its come about is a bit of a shocker.  Trump has claimed that the Russians are upset to see us go.  Not hardly.  On at least on one occasion American troops engaged a Russian unit in combat, and roundly defeated it.  Handing Syria completely over to the Russians makes Hashemite Syria a species of Russian satellite and a frightening Iranian ally, given the way things have gone.  When you get into a war, pulling out this way is tantamount to a surrender.

Frankly, the way it has come about, moreover, pours gasoline on the fire of Trump's connection with the Russians.  It's very difficult not to wonder about a President who seems to be slouching towards impeachment due to dealings involving the Russians when he takes an action that so benefits their goals in the Middle East.

Pulling out of Afghanistan, moreover, is a major military mistake. There's serious belief at the present time that a negotiated end to the war there is in sight.  This will torpedo that and leave the country most probably in the grips of a Taliban victory, sooner or later, and probably sooner. 

Mattis is the first Secretary of Defense to resign in protest in American history.  He's far from the first member of the Trump Administration to resign, however.  His resignation is a stunning act and its intended to be.

This Administration is in crisis.  Perhaps ironically, the best thing that could happen for the Republican Party right now would be for Mueller to confirm in some fashion the worst, and bring thing to a head in the House of Representatives.


Wednesday, December 5, 2018

The passing of George H. W. Bush

George H. W. Bush during his single term in office.

This isn't going to be a lengthy post nor is it going to be a hagiography.

All too often when a former President dies, the recollections of the man turn towards just that.  People who thought the President the most vile of men are suddenly his greatest admirers, and he had no faults, political or personal.  This post isn't like that.  I don't think that George Bush was a great President, which isn't to say that I thought he was a bad one either.

Having said that, when I pondered the passing of the first President Bush, it first struck me that George H. W. Bush was the last American President I actually respected.  I pointed that out to Long Suffering Spouse and she in turn said "Not President Clinton?".

I pondered that for a moment, and frankly I have to revise my comment.  I did respect President Clinton as President, although his personal conduct was reprehensible, which is something that relates to this post.*  And I didn't disrespect  his son George W. Bush.  So clearly I have to modify my statement to fit what I really was feeling.

So I'll modify my comment.  George H. W. Bush was the last Republican President that I respected.  President Clinton is the last Democratic President that I respected, and I respect him pretty much solely as an effective President, not as a human being.  George Bush was a really admirable human being, it not a really great President.  Beyond that, frankly, he was a really admirable man.

I can't claim that he was a really effective President.  Clinton was probably better in that regard. But Bush really stands out for two reasons; 1) he entered his country's service as a teenager in a really dangerous role when he didn't really have to and, 2) he was married to his wife Barbara for 73 years.

In those ways, he stands out as a really exemplary person.

So point one.

George Bush entered the U.S. Navy and became the youngest pilot in American service World War Two.**


He didn't have to do that.

He would have had to serve in the military, no doubt, during World War Two.  But he didn't have to join the Navy and seek to be a combat pilot, which lead to his being shot down during the war.  

The submarine rescue of George H. W. Bush.

But that is reflective of his generation (and no, I don't think they were the "Greatest Generation").  They did things like that.

Now, in fairness, one U.S. President since George H. W. Bush was also a military pilot, that being his son George W. Bush.  He never saw combat, but he did volunteer for Vietnam but wasn't sent.  I think that speaks well of him.

But, while it will engender controversy or even rage with my conservative friends, others of the post World War Two generation who have floated up to high office don't compare as well as a rule, although some do.  Al Gore did go to Vietnam, but he was in the military press corps. Still he went.  John Kerry served in the Navy as a SEAL and that's really admirable, but then he came back and became a war protester and I'm not really very impressed with that.  

There are other examples of men and women in high office (particularly now that they're entering politics as veterans from recent wars) so my view here may be over broad, but I am speaking of those who have made very high office.  Dick Cheney, who is a conservative hero to some and particularly in my state, where its often mistakenly assumed that he's a native (he's not, he's from Nebraska actually) received draft deferments five times.  Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam either.  President Obama, whom I credit as being a very intelligent and personally decent man, was obviously post Vietnam War in age, but it isn't as if "community service", whatever that is, amounts to the same thing in any sense.***

Secondly, he was married to Barbara Bush for 73 years.

Barbara Bush, Boris Yeltsin, and the Bush dogs, on the White House lawn.  Somehow this reflects all of three of them in a way that we aren't surprised by, but which would surprise us about any post Bush President (except perhaps George W. Bush) and any post Yeltsin leader of Russia.

That may seem like an odd thing to note, but its a sign of his decency.  Devotion to a single person, as a spouse, is something that's very significant and which has become sadly lacking in the decades following the 1950s.  Barbara Bush herself noted that for a time she suffered severely from depression and her husband George stuck by her side.  Now, that sort of things is pretty rare.  It shouldn't be.

So, there you have it.  as an example, he's a really good decent personal one.  And that's why he seems to be to have been the last really admirable man to have served in the oval office.  He might not have been the most effective, and I don't agree with all of his political decisions by any means. But in terms of life's tests, he passed them better than most.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*My strongly Republican friends, of whom I have many, will be absolutely horrified by that comment, but frankly President Clinton was a very effective President.  He had the personal morals of an alley cat, but then so did the excessively beloved and not nearly effective President John F. Kennedy, whom everyone on both sides of the political tent, save for me personally claim to love and admire.

Clinton not only had a balanced budget on occasion, he ran a surplus at least once.  He also fought an air war in the Balkans nearly without controversy and without drawing in ground troops, a really dangerous situation that turned out well.  It's the only example of that being done in history.  But personally, he's not very admirable at all, nor his is, in my view, his spouse.  He's a good example of a politician being a potentially really good office holder while not necessarily being a really good person.  Jimmy Carter was an example of the opposite.

**I'm not suggesting that a person needs to have experience in the military in order to be President. Rather, I'm suggesting that people who have risen to the call of some sort of service are better people in an intrinsic sense than those who don't.  I'm  not including myself, I'll note, in some sort of special admirable status, even though I do have peacetime military service.  But that's different.

Part of that is that some rational call to service has to exist in order for it to be meaningful.  I'd give as an example of this Herbert Hoover's post World War One service to the country and to Europe which was of a humanitarian service nature.  Highly effective, it also came to him at great personal cost.

FWIW, Bush will be, as has been noted, the last veteran of World War Two to have been President.  That there were several is hardly surprising given the size of the conflict.

***President Obama, whom again I'll credit with being very intelligent and personally very decent, both of which are true of his wife Michele as well, shared Woodrow Wilson's belief that speech was action, which it isn't, and turned out to be extremely flexible on certain issues that show a certain lack of a backbone.  He strikes me as a person who was a naturally great professor, but not President.

Saturday, December 1, 2018

The Central American Mess and Citations to the Statue of Liberty. Nobody is going to do anything, probably.

The Statue of Liberty from a distance view, the way its likely often seen by people who live in the neighborhood.

Somewhere on this blog I have some posts about arguments you shouldn't make. That is, things that when you hear them, you ought to just quit listening as the argument has become a cliche of a cliche ("think of the children" is one such example, although I still haven't posted that example, which remains in draft).

One of the things I should include in that list would be citations to the poem The New Colossus and references to the Statue of Liberty in general.  Indeed, I've made that argument here before.  But sure enough, any time a debate on immigration comes up, somebody will drag out The New Colossus as if its a foundational document for the country.  It isn't.  It's just bad poetry.

Frankly, I'm not all that super wild about the Statue of Liberty either, although I will credit it a great deal more.  Our copy of the statue is version 2.0, a prior smaller one having existed in France, where its designers lived.  It's a fairly typical French statue of the period, which tended to feature women with very muscular features (as in the French Railway Workers Memorial post the other day).  I'm not exactly sure what was up with that, but it was quite common at the time.  The Statue of Liberty is actually one of the better examples of such statues and it is attractive, which doesn't make it over all absolutely great art, save for its gigantic size.


Anyhow, any time the question of immigration comes up, if the suggestion is anything other than just open the borders up in a country that has the most open borders on the planet, somebody will drag out the Statue of Liberty and the poem and post it as an argument.  I just saw the first one regarding the refugees from Central America in the paper this morning in the form, predictably, of a political cartoon in which the statue wonders if she should go back to France (which is a totally absurd argument given that the annual immigration rate into Europe is minuscule as a rule compared to the United States.)

This symbolizes a lot of the American problem with fixing immigration in the country, and it desperately needs to be fixed.  The current system, a byproduct of the mushy thinking of Senator Edward Kennedy, amplified by the destruction of internal immigration law enforcement in the 1970s, assumes that the United States is physically growing like a cancer cell and that its impossible to reach the point where the population of the country, mostly growing due to immigration, is harming the country as a whole both economically and environmentally  It's likely that we achieved that point quite some time ago, perhaps in the 1970s itself.

Which makes most of the arguments about immigration complete and unadulterated baloney.  Large immigration rates like we have are not necessary to sustain the economy in any fashion whatsoever, which is the the prime intellectual argument on their behalf.  It only serves to depress wages in a country in which the lower middle class is already having a very hard time.  In an era in which computerization is wiping out jobs, and in which General Motors just announced its taking out 14,000 jobs in manufacturing, importing no skilled labor is really detrimental to the lower middle class laboring demographic, let alone American born urban minorities, whom it directly impacts.  Indeed, ironically, at one time the leadership of the largely Hispanic United Farm Workers was actually violently opposed to illegal immigration for that very reason, and it could hardly have been regarded as a right wing organization.

What importing no skill labor does do is to create a pool of very low wage labor at the bottom end which is great for the upper middle class and the wealthy and it makes for low class domestic servant labor.

It's also okay, but not really great, for the immigrants who come in, in that class, which is why their plight can't be ignored and they can't be disregarded.  But simply citing a poem as policy is, frankly, stupid.

Immigration at the current rate, we should note, is also fueling, although only in part, the ongoing mass urbanization that chews up American rural areas daily, which is arguably an environmental disaster (again, that's only part of the explanation and in fact probably not the primary one. . . most immigrants don't live in those places and could hardly ever afford to).  And then there's the argument that "we're a nation of immigrants", which is a sort of race based argument taking the position, more or less, that the original native population doesn't really county (they were here, they weren't immigrants) and which isn't an argument anyhow rather than a statement.  A better argument related to that is that our diversity gives us strength, which likely is true, up to a point, but which doesn't actually counter the problems which immigration at our current levels create.

Which takes us to the current flood of Central American refugees trying to get into the United States, the members of the recent caravan being only part of a movement that commenced some time last year.

Refugees are a different deal entirely, and perhaps citation to the "Give me your tired" and all makes sense there.  I've posted along those lines here as well.  All peoples and nations have a duty to refugees no matter where they are from.

But what if you can solve the root problem causing the refugee crisis?

I.e., what if the United States, or a combination of nations including the United States, can solve the problem?

Something is clearly going on in Central America causing people to flee there, but what?  What's motivating this?

What's going on in Central America is what is always going on in Central America, but at epic levels.  

Anarchy is going on in Central America. . . or at least a lot of it.

Occasionally Naive Reddit Rubes will wax philosophic on Reddit's various economic forums about how anarchy would be nifty.  If you think so, just move to Honduras.  They have it.

Flag of the Federated Republic of Central America.  A Central American republic that existed in 1821, and then again from 1823 to 1840. There's been efforts to put it back together ever since.  From Wikipedia Commons, by grant of Huhsunqu.

To some degree, they always have, and all the things that flow from anarchy, including massive corruption, crime and violence.

The flag of Honduras.  Honduras became independent, in a sense, in 1821 when it became independent from Spain as part of the first federated Central American state.  Almost immediately after that, however, it became First Mexican Empire.  In 1823 it became independent of Mexico and part of the new United Provinces of Central America, a democratic federated Central American state.  That state repeatedly failed and Honduras carried on as an independent nation, but sadly it was one of the Central American countries that was most in favor of a single Central American nation, something that would have gone a long ways toward preventing the current crisis and much of the regions tragic history from occurring.  The United States intervened in Honduras militarily in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925.

Things are so bad in Honduras, which underwent a coup in 2009 and then reemerged as a democracy about a year later, that even Dunkin' Donuts have armed security guards.  The majority of the current emigrants are from Honduras, and have traveled through helpless Guatemala and into Mexico (which resisted it at its southern border, something that's been largely missed in the news).  Things are otherwise not perfect in the neighborhood either.  El Salvador has become enormously lawless.  Nicaragua has gone form being a major tourist destination from being in crisis in just a year, following the removal of economic supports from Venezuela, which is also a mess.  Honduras, Guatemala (which is doing much better) and Nicaragua together are in a titanic economic and social mess or have the potential to be.  Only Costa Rica and Belize seem to be doing well.

Guatemala's flag, noting its 1821 independence date from Spain.  Guatemala's Independence came within the United Provinces of Central America, not as an independent nation.  The United States overthrew a left leaning democratic governing in the late 1950s (an earlier plan to do that in the early 50s was aborted when details started to leak) and the country fought a bitter civil war that came to an end in 1996.  Since then the Catholic Church provided enormous assistance in providing a means by which the country could overcome its violent past, something that's generally not appreciated by Protestant missionary groups that oddly regard the region as missionary territory.  The country has been doing well and recovering overall but at the current time it cannot help but be stressed by the massive human influx from Honduras.

They do have governments, to be sure, but those governments are not wholly admirable and the entire region has become embroiled in what is essentially a series of gang wars as the economy collapses. That's why people are leaving.  Entire regions are now controlled by criminal gangs and the governments, which in many instances in the past have been pretty criminal in and of themselves (I'm not familiar with any of the current governments).

The blue and white flag of El Salvador. . .notice the theme here?  Like Mexico, El Salvador went into rebellion when a Catholic Priest made a cry for justice and the same, in its case in 1811.  A revolution ensued.  It too was a province of the original Central American state which could not stay together.  Very densely populated, the country fought a war with its former co-province Honduras in 1969.  The country itself went into a civil war in 1979 that lasted until 1992, with the United States backing the right wing side and the left wing forces, including the Soviet Union and Cuba, backing the left wing side in one of the Cold War's proxy wars.

And that makes their plight genuine.

Nicaragua's flag, which is nearly indistinguishable from El Salvador's.

But nobody seems to be taking the root problem into account.

Unless the United States and Mexico are willing to absorb the entire population of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, a solution needs to be found what is going on.  And the agonizing truth of the matter is that the solution isn't going to come from inside any of those countries, or at least it appears unlikely that it will.  It's going to have to be imposed on them, or at least that can be argued for Honduras.  And they'll resist it, most likely.  And not without justification.

Indeed, we've had similar examples from Africa in the past couple of decades, and there have been local solutions that have worked.  They all principally involved an armed invasion by an upset neighbor.

And there you have it. The problem, the solution, and whether the solution is a problem itself.

At one time, what is going on inside of these countries, would have been solved by now.   Theodore Roosevelt would have solved it.  William Howard Taft would have solved it. Woodrow Wilson would have solved it.  Do we dare solve it in that fashion, and should we?  Would it be moral to?



Indeed, we're getting an ironic lesson, for which we do not appreciate the irony, and for which we aren't paying much attention, on why an entire series of Presidents didn't think twice about interfering in the affairs of Central American states and toppling their government.

Which may be both a theoretical solution today, as much as we hate to admit it, but which is also part of the root of the problem on what's going on today.

Today's crisis is partially a byproduct of our own actions, dating back to the 1950s, when we started heavily interfering in these nations in a Cold War context.  No, that's only partially true. . .their governments at the time and the forces inside those countries also reflected reaction and counteraction to actions we'd taken dating back to about 1900 or so. Well even that isn't right, as the entire region had an odd and chaotic 19th Century history.  But the Cold War interference was major and has cast a very long shadow.  We propped up a military government in El Salvador that prompted a left wing insurrection.  We did the same in Nicaragua with worse results which resulted in that country falling to a left wing government which turned out to be less left wing than we supposed but which is still in power and not completely democratic. That conflict helped spread another one into southern Mexico.  We overthrew the government of Guatemala. Our gunboat diplomacy evolved into CIA diplomacy, and now neglect is letting the boils that developed at that time really fester.  The whole region, save for Costa Rica, Belize and Panama, is a mess.

And its a mess that those countries probably can't fix themselves.

Of course, not only can they not fix them, those countries really shouldn't exist.  Frankly, they're too plagued with internal problems and too small to be able to address them. A federated state comprised of all of them, and probably Panama, would make more sense and be more stable but that's not going to happen.  Indeed, in a different context, it would have been easy to imagine the enter Central American region outside of Panama (which the U.S. created by backing a regional uprising against Columbia) being part of Mexico, given that it differs little culturally from southern Mexico.  Mexico, no doubt, is highly relieved that this never came about, but it shows the degree to which Mexico lacked territorial ambition as the United States, had it been in Mexico's geographic position, would undoubtedly have adsorbed the entire region.

But all of that could have occurred, and indeed darned near did.  In fact, it briefly did. . . more than once.

Emperer Augustin I, formerly Gen. Augustin Itubide, the first Emperor of Mexico.  When Mexico became an independent state those who brought that about weren't necessarily looking for a liberal democracy by any means.  In fact, while the revolution was initiated by a liberal Catholic Priest, it was taken up by Mexican Spanish aristocracy who didn't have a problem with aristocracy. . . just aristocracy in Spain.  Iturbe was from a Basque aristocratic family and have lived an aristocratic life.  He initially fought for the crown and against the Mexican rebels until switching sides.  He was actually a fairly popular emperor but the country was divided from the start and he served only briefly before going into exile, first in Italy and then in England.  He'd return later to Mexico where he was executed under dubious circumstances.  His last words were "Mexicans! In the very act of my death, I recommend to you the love to the fatherland, and the observance to our religion, for it shall lead you to glory. I die having come here to help you, and I die merrily, for I die amongst you. I die with honor, not as a traitor; I do not leave this stain on my children and my legacy. I am not a traitor, no."  He's interned in a cathedral in Mexico City.

Most of Central America became independent of Spain in 1821.  Interestingly, most of it became independent by default when Mexico obtained its independence.  With the exception of El Salvador, Central American countries did not rise up against the Spanish Empire. El Salvador did in 1811, however, the year after Mexico did, and by way of the same initiating source, the cry to rebellion by a Catholic Priest. The rest of the region found itself independent, however, in 1821 when Mexico was released by Spain.

The flat of the Mexican Empire, the nation that obtained independence from Spain, and which collapsed in 1823.

When that occurred, interestingly enough, two of the forces noted above in fact occurred.  There was a movement to form an independent confederation, but at first the region became a province of the Mexican Empire. The Mexican Empire, however, was itself short lived and collapsed under widespread opposition in 1823, at which time the Central American provinces formed their own country, the Federal Republic of Central America.  The country even expanded up into what today is the Mexican state of Chiapas.  Only Panama, which was part of Columbia, was not part of it.

Had the Central American Republic persisted, much would be different about the region today.  It only held together, however, until 1840 when it fell apart in civil war. All of the modern nations of Central America that were in it use a flag that's based on the one the Central American Republic had, and some of them use a national crest that's based upon it.  Even though the state fell apart, in some ways it was never forgotten and there were real efforts to recreate it, sometimes by force.  In 1907 all of its former regions, except for Belize, joined together in a political agreement to integrate their economies in a manner that all but contemplated future union. The agreement remains in force, but union has not been achieved.  In 1921 all of the old participants except for Nicaragua and Belize signed a treaty of union but did not follow up on it, making the 1921 agreement moribund.

All of which shows that what I've noted here is not simply wild speculation.  The region was united as a province by Colonial Spain, achieved independence as a nation briefly, was absorbed by Mexico as a province, and then achieved statehood again before division drove the nations apart. Ever since then there's been efforts on their part to reunite, but they have not succeeded.

 The flag of Belize, a self governing English possession.  Belize was, early on, part of the Central American Republic but it quickly became a British possession in the wake of the republic's collapse.  The English have made efforts to make it an independent country but its' resisted.  Like much of Central America, Belize's economy has been dominated by foreign interests in its agriculture sector, in this case oddly enough in moder times by Coca Cola, but its developed a successful tourists sector and British political influence has lead to a stable political culture.

Had the Central American republic been able to hold together, it would still be a small nation, but it would be a bi-coastal nation with a somewhat diverse modern economy.  Indeed, if we somewhat assume that the rest of history played out as it did (not a safe assumption at all), it would be a nation today that would be surprisingly diverse in some ways.  Belize, which was part of it, fell into British rule almost as soon as the republic fell apart but today, in spite of having an economic monoculture like much of the various Central American states, has a stable economy and and a booming tourist trade, is surprisingly multicultural even including an Amish farming population.  Costa Rica is likewise booming due to the tourist trade and, for good or ill, has an increasingly large American ex-patriot population as well as a surprising number of citizens who immigrated from South America and Europe.

Costa Rica's flag.  Costa Rica's history in Central America has become unique as during the 20th Century, following upon the fall of a military dictatorship, it abolished its standing army. Thsi made the democratic regime highly stable and seemingly immune from American intervention in spite of its early democratic government being very left leaning.  Costa Rica's modern economy is dominated by the tourist industry.

Additionally, if the Central American Republic had managed to hold things together, it would have helped prevent the region from being sort of the "anti United States" in the Star Trek bizarro world way.  That is, almost everything that seemingly happened to make the US successful didn't happen in Central America.

 U.S. Marines in Nicaragua in 1926, displaying a captured Sandinista flag.  Nicaragua was occupied by the United States from 1913 to 1933.

Indeed, right from the outset, while the advantages  of union were obvious, as the region had been granted Independence due to the Mexican rebellion, rather than its own, there was no real unity in political views.  Now, that's the case with the early U.S. to a degree as well, but this was very much so for the small political class in Central America. As with Mexico, some of this class remained monarchist in view and had no real problem with their former Spanish rulers.  Others were radically republican in an era in which radical republicanism was spreading in Europe. . . after all, this was the era of Napoleon Bonaparte.  That basically doomed the republic and it frankly also made a mess of early Mexican history.  Liberals couldn't bet along with monarchists on anything, and the country simply fell apart. 

That early history carried on for decades and made political cohesion difficult in any of the individual states.  Moreover, it mean that the small states were always economically weak due to their economic monocultures and they were constant prey to foreign, i.e., European and American, economic and military intervention, the only often following the other.  That fact in turn further weakened them, and that all carried through well into the 20th Century.

All of which takes us back to the problem.  A person could argue that a regional or perhaps international mandate should be issued requiring states that aren't flying apart in the region to intervene and impose order.  That would amount to a type of invasion.  The type of invasion that the OAS has occasionally sanctioned in the past, and to which everyone has turned a blind eye, but nobody in the world would turn a blind eye to this.

 Panama's flat.  Panama was never part of the Central American Republic, it was part of Columbia until a U.S. sponsored rebellion separated it in 1903, although in fairness a long running war of rebellion had been trying to do the same for quite some time, and there had been prior efforts to do that as well.  While it doesn't share the history of the other Central American nations in once having been part of a unified nation, it would make sense that it would be, if one ever came together.

Nor perhaps should they.  These are all sovereign nations and while things seem to be flying apart now, they all made huge strides towards functioning democracy after the 1960s.  Even El Salvador, which fell in revolution to a government we thought was going to be a Communist one, didn't really take that turn and the Communists turned into liberal democrats, for the most part.

And would that type of intervention be even moral?  It's very doubtful.  Can in an international body suspend sovereignty in that fashion?  It could declare that it could, but that's problematic.  Of course, at some point governments can descend into such anarchy that they don't exist at all for a country in question, such as in the example of pre 9/11 Afghanistan.

Well, it's all academic. Nobody is going to do anything.  Instead we'll get trite arguments about the Statute of Liberty. 

Monday, November 5, 2018

Is citizenship a birthright? Politics and the U.S. Constitution.

I frankly thought that this was a universal norm.  I.e., I thought that every nation basically held that point of view.

It turns out that I was wrong, which surprises me:

Where Is Citizenship Granted By Birth?

As can be seen, it's actually a minority of countries that hold this view, although a substantial minority. Forty-one countries to be exact, although in five of them, that's somehow qualified in some manner (and I don't know in what manner).

This comes up, of course, due to the recent news that President Trump may attempt, by executive order, to hold that children born of non citizens are not American citizens.  This brings up the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which we hear about all the time in other context, but rarely in this one. The part of the Fourteenth Amendment we're hearing about now provides:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
We don't hear about this much as it hasn't been a matter of contested law.  I think everyone pretty much has held the view that the Fourteenth Amendment means that if you are born in the U.S., you are a citizen.

Now, it's actually a bit more nuanced than that, particularly in a historical context, but not much.

The amendment came about in the wake of the Civil War as there was some doubt about this due to the results of the war.  By and large it had always been the American view that if you were born in the United States you were a citizen, just as it had been the English view that if you were born anywhere in the United Kingdom or its Empire that you were a "subject" of the King.  The American oddity, however, is that this view cannot be accommodated to slavery, which was legal everywhere when the United States became a nation.  This was less of a problem, oddly enough, for the English as being a citizen isn't quite the same as a subject, but it was clearly an early problem for the United States.  Americans obviously couldn't accommodate slaves as citizens nor could the accommodate Indians as citizens, at least automatically, either.

The early U.S. Constitution didn't address this at all, except in reserving to Congress the right to deal with Indian tribes, implicitly thereby recognizing their sovereignty and thereby creating a peculiar subset of sovereignty, which in fairness also somewhat, but somewhat not, dated back to the Colonial era.  Indian tribes were sovereign, but only as sovereign as the U.S. decided they were.  Indians tribes that weren't fully incorporated into society at large were not citizens.  Slaves, of course, were also not citizens in those states were slavery was legal, but were where it wasn't.  If that seems really odd, keep in mind that before women were given the franchise nationally, they had the right to vote in some states and not others.  Allowing states to decide such things was pretty common.

But following the bloodbath of the Civil War disenfranchising blacks was obviously contrary to the position of the victor. That is, however, exactly what some Southern states would have done, maybe all of them, treating them effectively as non citizens due to their race, the same way that many Indian tribes were non citizens, although for a theoretically different reason.  The Fourteenth Amendment was passed to clear that issue up, along with a bunch of others.

The issue was cleared up for Indians in 1924, as shockingly late as that may seem, by way of a statutory provision, which stated:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States:
Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.
Approved, June 2, 1924. June 2, 1924. [H. R. 6355.] [Public, No. 175.]
SIXTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS. Sess. I. CHS. 233. 1924.
Note that the Indian Citizenship Act was tied to being "born within the territorial limits of the United States."  In other words, it adopted the same

So how does a question like this even come up?

It seems to have come up several years ago in the context of the children born of immigrants who have been given the term "anchor babies".  I.e., there was a concept that immigrants were running across the border just to have children so that these children could claim U.S. citizenship later on, and perhaps their parents could then legally migrate into the U.S., sponsored by their child.  I have no idea how common that was, but I suspect it wasn't hugely common.  Not that illegal immigrants don't have children in the U.S., they of course do, but the anchor baby situation was likely not terribly common.

I heard that term for the first time in a long time the other day again, but I think those who started opposing birthright citizenship several years ago had spread the concept out and left the anchor baby thing behind and instead were arguing that birthright citizenship doesn't exist in the U.S. because the reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that's generally accepted is incorrect.

Which takes us into odd territory.

Americans claim to love their Constitution, but in reality people tend to love parts of it, and others not so much.  The Constitution should be given its plain and ordinary meaning whenever possible, and then interpreted based upon legislative history when it can't be, but people oddly only like partially doing that.

Here, for example, I suspect that a lot of the people who are claiming that the plain and ordinary meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong and that birthright citizenship isn't protected by the Constitution would argue that the plain and ordinary meaning of the Second Amendment means exactly what it says.  I think they both mean exactly what they say.

Which takes us to this.  If people don't like the text of the Constitution, they can argue to change it. But people don't get to argue that one part should be interpreted as written while another should be read in a strained manner.

And yet politically, that tends to be what both camps do.

Friday, October 19, 2018

The 2018 Wyoming Election Volume Five: On To The General Election.

Some of these signs will be coming down after the first entry on this thread on August 21, 2018.

The polls will be opening in one hour at the time this post goes up on Tuesday, August 21, 2018; the Primary Election Day.

And hence the new thread. They'll soon be an update here on who won, who lost, and maybe why those things occurred.

August 21, 2018  The Primary Results Edition.

For the first called races, it's clear that John Barrasso handily defeated Dodson in spite a of a vigorous well monied campaigned by Dodson.  Barrasso appeared to be worried towards the end but he seems to have pulled in over 60% of the vote.  He'll go on to face Trauner in November, who nearly unseated Barbara Cubin for the House some years ago but who has a tougher candidate in Barrasso.  The Tribunes endorsement of Dodson doesn't seem to have made much of a difference.  Unless final results change, Dodson only carried his home county, Teton.

Cheney defeated her two challengers with nearly 70% of the vote. The surprising thing in that race is that Blake Stanley, who was virtually unheard of in the campaign, pulled down over 10% of the vote.  She'll face Gregg Hunter in the fall, who prevailed in the Democratic primary and who has nearly no chance whatsoever of winning in the fall.

While it hasn't been called, Kristi Racines seems to have won the Republican Primary against Nathan Winters.  She will face Jeff Dockter in the fall, who is unlikely to win.

Ed Buchanan prevailed in an uncontested race for Secretary of State and will face respected Democrat James Byrd.

Mark Gordon, who early on was regarded as the favorite, will in fact be the nominee.  He appears set to pull over 30% of the vote in a crowded field.  Gordon was the victim of a really aggressive campaign by Harriet Hageman, who appears likely to come in third place behind Foster Friess, the eccentric conservative monied import.  Friess appears likely to cone in with about 26% of the vote and Hageman about 22% of the vote. Galeotos, who did really well early on just tanked late in the campaign, pulling in only, so far, about 13% of the vote.

In my view, Galeotos made a big miscalculation by associating himself with Trump during the campaign and just before all the most recent news about Russian intrigue.  To add to that, real Trump fans were probably more likely to go to Friess who received the endorsement of Donald Trump, Jr. and, just yesterday, Donald Trump.  So Galeotos likely lost favor with Republicans who are not keen on Trump and those who really are likely went for Friess or Hageman.  Gordon, who never associated himself with Trump but who ran to the more or less center as the campaign went on can take some comfort in the fact that if Galeotos had dropped out, as he probably should have, most of those votes would have gone to him, which would have put him up around 45% of the vote.

Hageman did take some counties, with all of them either being farm belt or coal belt counties, which is telling.  Elsewhere, at least in my view, she did some damage to those associating themselves with her campaign.  One local candidate that invested a lot in signs lost his race as an example.  He heavily associated himself with her effort, and at least a couple of people I know determined not to vote for him for that reason.

Gordon goes on to face Mary Throne in the fall.  Throne has been a very active Democratic candidate but her chances are now decreased by Gordon winning the primary.  Her best chances would have been against a more extreme Republican so she's now lost that

(Note, quite a few of the races were called as I was typing this, which is probably why it reads a bit odd).

August 22, 2018.  The Day After Edition.

Well, now its the day after, so to speak.

So what does the primary race tell us.  And it's a question worth asking as, for many of these races, they are now over.

Wyoming is a Republican state. The Democratic Party, in the past thirty or so years, has been capable of putting a candidate into the Governor's office and to that of the Secretary of State, and to elect a few legislators, but little else.  While that the Democrats can get a candidate through the door anywhere in Wyoming at all is actually impressive, the trend line has been towards Democratic deminishment, not increase.

But the GOP hasn't been healthy either.  Starting at some point during Governor Mead's term in office, or perhaps more accurately Barrack Obama's Presidency, a minority, but a significant one, turned towards the Tea Party element of the party.

Yesterday that element was repudiated.

That doesn't mean it's gone, but it did receive, to borrow the term of Tom and Ray, the dope slap.

And so, to an extent, did Trump loyalist in a state that's presumed to be the most loyal to Trump, but which is highly likely not.

In choosing Mark Gordon as the GOP candidate for Governor, the state went with a candidate that went increasingly towards the middle as the campaign went on. Wisely, when attacked for essentially being a RINO, Gordon talked up his local credentials and didn't go to the hard right.  Indeed, while he's a poor speaker, in my view, he and those on his staff proved to be politically savvy on the Wyoming voter, going increasingly towards the middle rather than the right.  Hageman's efforts to taint him with the Sierra Club and the like didn't hurt him, and in fact likely helped him, something that people with Hageman's frame of mind should keep in mind.

Also telling was the spectacular fall of Sam Galeotos in the race. Galeotos was at one time nearly neck and neck with Gordon but fell sharply at the end of the race. Some of that was likely due to his supporters seeing that Gordon was a little stronger and opting to make sure that Hageman was defeated.  Some of, however, was that he tainted himself in a political miscalculation in which he embraced Trump.  That likely drove GOP moderates who are conservatives but not Trump fans towards Gordon.  I know for a fact that at least some younger voters were horrified by Galeotos' Trump embrace and totally rejected him at that point.

Galeotos didn't do well anywhere, but did come in third position, behind Gordon and Fiess (but not necessarily in that order) in Sweetwater and Laramie Counties, the latter being his home county.

Somebody who did much better than I would have anticipated and who did embrace Trump was Foster Friess.  I frankly regarded Friess as a joke when he entered the race but he ended up with 26% of the vote, more than Hageman's 21%.  Friess is a true conservative who was endorsed by the Trumps in the race and likely did pick up some Trump fans who were not fans of Hageman's hard right Tea Party views, the two not being the same. And to his credit, Friess managed to sound less goofy as time went on.  He ended up taking the majority of the votes in six of Wyoming's twenty three counties in geographic groupings that are a bit hard to figure.  One group was concentrated heavily in the southwest corner of the state which suggests, but only suggests, that he may have pulled well with Mormon voters who make up a significant demographic in that region.  Friess is not  Mormon but an evangelical Christian, but he did campaign on that in a state where that's almost never done, suggesting that whoever discerned a voting block of religious voters may have been right.  He also did well in Park and Big Horn Counties, both of which also feature a large Mormon demographic. That's just a guess as to what was going on in those areas, however.

Teton County, where Friess hangs his Stetson, went overwhelmingly for Gordon, which is interesting.  They also put Hageman in the basement with less than 10% in third place which means that Galeotos grossly under performed in that county.

Friess was less than 1% behind Gordon in Natrona County, the state's second most populous county, and I don't know what that means, so I could be off the mark on why people did or did not go for Friess.

The map reveals that Hageman pulled in the majority of votes in the few Wyoming counties that are farming, rather than ranching, counties, and the coal counties.  While little discussed, the farming counties have tended to be much more aggressive in "taking control" of this or that than the other counties, including the ranching counties, which is more than a bit of an irony in that there's little public land in those counties.  Those counties were the epicenter of a landowner effort to seize control of hunting licenses back in the 1980s. Apparently much of that view simply remains.  She did very well in all of those five counties save for Campbell County, the state's biggest coal county, where she was less than 1% in front of Friess.  That was the only county which went for Hageman in which Gordon wasn't in second position.  Hageman did not do well in the Friess counties (nor in all of the Gordon counties either, obvious, given her overall third place finish) which raises the question of whether her discourtesy was a factor in counties that went for a very courteous Friess.

Hageman was sufficiently divisive, I'm convinced, that association with her took at least one local candidate down. One of the county commissioner candidates in Natrona County heavily associated himself with her during the campaign, with his sign appearing in very high frequency with hers, and with him endorsing her.  I know that this turned off GOP voters in the primary and while I never heard a single person suggest that they'd vote for him due to the association, I did hear some say that they would not based on the association.

It's worth noting that the strongest dose of tea, that offered by candidate Taylor Haynes, was flat out rejected by the voters . . . again.  Haynes pulled 5.6% of the vote.  Even if his share of the polls was added to Hageman's, which it would have been if he had not run (at one time I thought he'd act as a spoiler in regards to Hageman, but that didn't occur), she still would have fallen short of defeating Gordon, although that would have placed her in second position.  As noted, if Galeotos has likewise pulled out, and towards the end I thought he might act as a spoiler to Gordon. . .and he somewhat did, he would have polled much higher as Galeotos did pull down 12% of the vote.

What all of this would seem to tell us is that Tea Party elements remain strong in the state, but they also remain a distinct minority and are concentrated in areas where the impact of their views are actually unlikely to be felt or where coal has been a significant employer.  Public land issues, which came up a lot during the race, but not as much as public land backers would have like, likely surfaced and drove a lot of voters towards Gordon, which individuals who have proposed monkeying around in this area should remember.

The Tribune, on the other hand, noted the reelection of Chuck Gray as evidence that these views remain strong and growing, but they may wish to take a second look at the pool results.  Gray won reelection, but 36% of the vote when for GOP contender Daniel Sandoval who barely campaigned.  Sandoval's main point was that Gray, in his view, was a divisive extremist.  If Sandoval could pull 36% of the vote without really campaigning it shouldn't be assumed that Gray is all that popular in his own district.

Gray not need worry, however, as the Democrats are running Jane Ifland, who is the type of candidate that pulls the Democrats down every election.  Candidates like Mary Throne lose a lot of votes due to candidates like Ifland as it becomes hard for middle of the road voters to support somebody from a party that tends to regular field candidates who are so far to the left. So Gray is now secure, and Throne, who is a good candidate but who occupies the middle, is not really very likely to go anywhere in a campaign against Gordon.

On other races, incumbents did well, as expected.  John Barrasso did much better than it looked like he might do, which means that Trauner now has virtually no chance, which Trauner, who had to have hope going into the primary, is likely aware of.  Barrasso pulled down 65% of the vote in a race in which he didn't do much campaigning until the very end, when his campaigning looked a little desperate.

Cheney, whom I'm convinced was vulnerable to a primary challenge, pulled own 68% of the vote, better than Barrasso, but those results show that she likely was vulnerable.  Her opponents basically didn't campaign at all and at least one could be regarded as highly eccentric. That they pulled over 30% of the GOP vote by doing nearly nothing is telling.  Her seat is safe, however, as the Democrats chose Greg Hunter, an import from the Mid West, who has absolutely no chance whatsoever.

In other races, a trend toward the more traditional type of Wyoming Republican was seen in the election of Kristi Racine for GOP State Auditor candidate.  She certainly had the credentials, but she was faced by candidate Nathan Winters who simply ran on his being a Baptist minister and a legislator.  Winters supported one of the land grabbing bills earlier and his candidacy seemed to rely heavily on his legislative history and his occupation.  It failed with Racine taking 60% of the vote.

So, at the end of the day, the Tea Party elements in Wyoming failed and the GOP received a wake up call.  Whether those in Washington, who are really hard to unseat, heard it, is another matter.  But locally the GOP should have.  Republican voters went much more towards traditional Wyoming Republicans than they did for Tea Party insurgents.  As has tended to be the history for state's entire existence, the state looked favorably on somebody occupying one of the state's traditional industries, indeed its longest traditional industry, as long as that person also respected the state's outdoor history.  It rejected the extremes.  Those who were claiming that "it's out time" and "time for a change", by which they meant a leap to the Tea Party right, were disappointed to learn that this isn't what Wyomingites wanted and its unlikely to ever be.

The alarm bell should also have gone off a bit for those who made a lot of assumptions about Wyoming voters and the state's economy, and in an interesting way. Hageman couldn't see an economy that extended beyond the state's two long time primary ones, agriculture and the extractive industries, and was hostile to the concept that the state should look at anything else.  The state rejected that reward looking vision. But notable in that, the ranching counties rejected it as much as any other county.  Only the coal and farming counties went for Hageman. The long held assumption heard by me personally during this election, that "all the ranchers are for Hageman" was flat out wrong.  Of course, it didn't hurt that Gordon is a rancher, while Hageman could only say she was "from" a ranch, but rather obviously "is" a lawyer.  But more than that, in ranching country the tide has turned in my view on the public lands issue as local ranch families fear a transfer from the Federal government to the state, and for good reason.  That idea only is popular in the lower ranks of the extractive industries, were the decisions are not made, and in farming country, which it won't impact.

The state, however, also rejected a massive modification of the state's economy, which was a position that Galeotos took.  This fits into a topic that I posted earlier which may be that the state is basically comfortable with the economy as it is and perhaps only wants a slight modification of it.  It didn't adopt the radical new computer economy proposed by Galeotos, and it didn't feel that businessmen who had done well elsewhere and then come back in, or just came in, such as Galeotos, Dodson and Friess had any solutions to things that they were willing to listen to.

A wake up call should also have been sent to those who like to believe that Wyoming always, and closely tracks national trends.  It does track national trends to some extent, but often it doesn't, and often not closely.  The results of the last general election left some assuming that Wyoming is super solid Trump Country.  It isn't.  Double Trump endorsements didn't carry Friess over the bar and embracing Trump in the primary probably doomed Galeotos to defeat.

The results by the end of the night also had to be a disappointment for Democrats, however.  Democrats fielded a couple of good candidates for the fall but their chances are now basically dashed and they likely know it.  Throne supporters who secretly hoped for Hageman to run, as she had her best chances against her, know that her chances against Gordon are extremely poor.  Trauner supporters who would have hoped for Dodson on the basis that Trauner is more Dodson than Dodson, will have a straight forward race in front of them but one in which a Barrasso who is more unpopular than might have been supposed was still able to command a large majority in the primary.  The Democrats didn't even field a candidate for some offices, and in the remainder where they did their candidates are unknown and have virtually no chance whatsoever, except for some local races where the odd Democrat or two who is well known stands a chance.  The sole exception might be Jim Byrd's race against Ed Buchanan, but that's a real long shot.  Against Elizabeth Cheney, who would have been vulnerable, they did not field a candidate who can win in the fall, which says a lot about the state of their party in general and also says why, for a lot of voters, including former Democrats, the Republican primary is the real election.

A final note might be made of the very odd nature of American elections and the Wyoming primaries in general.  Because of the suicide of the Democratic Party in Wyoming, as noted before, the primary has become the general election, effectively, for many offices.  That's okay I suppose, and most Wyomingites, even those who register as Democrats, actually are Republicans of the old school variety.   So the process is functioning democratically, if oddly.  On the other hand, the first past the post system continues to provide some odd result, but then a party election, which this is, isn't supposed to provide the final results, even if it often does.

August 23, 2018.  The Setting Records Edition.

According to the Tribune, Tuesday primary had an all time record number of voters participate in it, which likely reflects the nature of the candidates.

One thing, however, which wasn't a record, were the number of Democrats. . . all time low.

In other observations, between yesterday's post and today, I've now heard or read a couple of more observations that Galeotos' going for association with Trump did him in, with one of those observations coming from Bill Sniffin, in the Tribune, the former newspaper man and a backer of Galeotos.

And it can't help that the investigations of Trump are getting closer and closer to Trump himself.

August 24, 2018.  The Conspiracy Theory Edition.

You'd think that you'd at least get a break from politics for a couple of days, but this unusual election continues to feature. . . well, the unusual.

And the absurd.

Reader's the Tribune today are graced by a story of the absurd in the form of a conspiracy theory being advanced by Rex Rammell.  Rammell, you will recall, is the extreme libertarian with Constitutional ideas that befit his role, this election season, as a candidate for Wyoming's Constitution Party as that party seems to be populated by people who have a copy of the constitution that the rest of us don't.  I.e, their interpretation of the Constitution is, well, wrong.  Generally, they're state focused libertarians of a really extreme bent.

Rammell ran for Congress last time but dropped out prior to the end and endorsed another candidate who now holds a state office.  He hasn't gone away, however. The relocated Idaho veterinarian who first showed up in Wyoming's newspapers when his Idaho elk ranch was causing problems announced early on to run in the GOP primary on a platform even more extreme than Taylor Haynes, which is really saying something.

Now Rammell is claiming that Mark Gordon "hijacked the [Republican] party" and he's only running as high ranking Republicans urged him to do so in anticipation of Gordon winning the primary as an illegitimate candidate.  Rammell, Rammell claims, is the Republican Party's plan B.

Bull.

Rammell would have been the Democrats dream as there's no earthly way that he could win the race, but that must truly be regarded as a dream as he's so extreme there's no way that he could have won. The poor showing of Haynes is plenty proof of that, as is the defeat of the fairly extreme but nowhere near as extreme Harriet Hageman.

It's hard to know if Rammell really believes this absurdity, but he likely does.  There's a group of people for whom the terms "conservative" and "liberal" are presumed to wholly define who is right and who is wrong, even though in the modern context the terms are less than applicable to many situations.  I don't really regard Rammell and Haynes as "conservative" in the real sense, and I'm not sure that I fully put Hageman there either.  Rammell certainly is extreme right wing, however.

Rammell isn't the only one grousing over the GOP primary results.  Foster Friess is as well.

I never thought Friess had a chance until the very end of the election.  He's not from here, he lives in Teton County (probably part of the kiss of political death for Dodson), and his connection with the state was obviously rather poor.  So that he did as well as he did really surprised me.  I still don't know what all to make of that, but I think the result showed us some sleeping demographic information and the combined results of a lingering late oilfield transient population combined with lots of advertising money.  Be that as it may, Foster is now upset because he believes that thousands of Democrats switched parties to vote.

Before we go to that, his actual statement shows the delusion that some candidates, including Friess and Galeotos, had about Trump's popularity here.  I frankly don't think Trump is popular in Wyoming and I now know of  several voters who would have voted for him but for his self identification with Trump.  One of the Cheyenne newspapers reported his choice to attempt that association as risky at the time.

Friess did that as well and secured, as readers here know, the endorsement of father and son Donalds prior to the election.  Donald Jr.'s, I thought, read particularly oddly as it essentially emphasized that the Trumps have a lot of money and Friess has a lot of money and they met at things that people who have a lot of money meet at. . . which you and I, Wyoming voter, don't go to.

Anyhow, Friess sent a letter out to each GOP candidate running except for Gordon which stated, according to Wyofile:
It seems like the Democrats have figured out this party switch deal to their advantage, . . .  I guess there’s 114,000 registered Republicans and 17,000 registered Democrats. No way is that the actual mix, and with Trump getting 70% of the vote, it shows how the Democrats have been able to control our elections with putting on a Republican coat.
This is a really odd complaint in that both political parties claim they're right and that everyone should be in them.  This shows, quite frankly, that candidates really mean everyone should think like them.

I'll get to the actual news, to the extent we have any, in people switching parties, but perhaps Friess should actually try to board the logic train here.  Trump getting 70% of the Wyoming vote isn't a good result.  It's awful.  Hillary Clinton had about as much chance of winning in Wyoming as Karl Marx would, and yet Trump only got 70% of the vote.  That doesn't show massive Trump support, it shows that even with Clinton as the single worst candidate that the Democrats could have run in 2016 he still didn't get almost every vote.

Indeed, it might be worth noting that Republican voters, when given a choice of candidates in the primary, only gave 7.2% of their vote to Trump.  Not exactly a "woo-wee, we love Trump" vote.  That 7.2% probably better reflects what Republican voters actually have been thinking of Trump even if 70% of the general voters went for Trump in the general election.

None of which means that he doesn't actually have a bit of a point, but even that doesn't play out the way people of his mindset might think.

The Albany County Clerk has stated that she think 2,000 to 3,000 Albany County voters switched parties this election.  This happens every election, she notes, but this was more than normal. And those voters switched to the Republican Party.

Defeated Republicans, like Friess, view this as a conspiracy and are urging the laws be changed so that you have to change your registration twenty five days prior to the election, if you are going to, and also to feature a runoff between the top two vote getters. We note that Friess came in second. This, he feels, would make it more likely that a real "conservative" would get elected.

In actuality, what it likely would do is boost the overall chances of Democrats.  What has been occurring is that there is an election season switch of independents and Democrats into the GOP as it's the only chance they have of actually getting a say.  Frankly, there aren't that many Democrats left in the state anymore and of the ones who remain, quite a few are in the left wing extremist camp and aren't going to switch no matter what. So the Democrats who move over, and the independents, are the centerist ones who likely could be in either party but who don't go with the GOP as they view some of its candidates and politicians as extreme.  The bigger story here, however, is that there's been a migration from the Democratic Party to the GOP in the state dating back to the 1980s.

Indeed this is best symbolized by the fact that some of the Republican stalwarts of long standing were at one time real Democrat standouts.  Fremont County's Eli Bebout is a solid Republican legislator who at one time was a real Republican contender for the Governor's office. But before that, he was a really notable Fremont County Democrat.  Indeed, Fremont County and Sweetwater Counties were very Democratic counties in Wyoming prior to the mid 1980s. As trends like this are long, it's worth noting what occurred.

Starting in the mid 80s and then continuing on to the present day voters who are really old style Democrats lost faith in the Democratic Party and started moving to the Republicans or to no party at all.  As the Democrats became less blue collar and more abortion on demand and every radical social cause.  With each step to the left more Democrats left, but some remain.  

What's missed by the bellyaching from Friess and the like-minded on that is that at the same time that the Democrats were marching left nationally, the GOP tended to be marching right.  A person can argue for or against any of these things but for middle of the road voters the GOP in Wyoming still tends to remain the only party that they can logically be in, which in turn means that the actual party isn't anywhere near as far right as Friess and Rammell believe it is.

And that's because the Wyoming electorate is actually sui generis.

Friess and Rammell, neither of whom are from here, don't seem to grasp that.

And that's why the GOP ought to rejoice about people joining it at the polls.

A lot of the new GOP voters will remain in the GOP. Yep, they'll pull it to the center. But that fact means that the GOP continues to remain viable.

If folks like Friess had their way, the result would mean that thousands of independent and moderate Democrats would have no say until the general election. And as the Democrats have managed to actually field moderates for the Governor's office and the D.C. offices most years, that means that the fortunes of Democrats would be enormously boosted.

Put another way, if Friess believes that because he's an evangelical Republican with a lot of money who is really conservative, he would have won the primary but for switching Democrats, how would have have done against Marty Throne, a Presbyterian Wyoming native who has lived here her whole life?  I don't know where Throne stands on social issues and the election may have well come down to that, but he shouldn't assume that a more controlled primary yields a more "conservative" figure in the Governor's office.  

And for matter, there's no real reason that either party should burden the state with picking their candidate to run in the general, if they don't want an open primary. They could just do it in a convention.  But there's no reason to believe that would result in a Friess or a Hageman either.
On other political matters, things aren't looking good for that figure that Friess cited in his example the other day, Donald Trump.  Indeed, the chances of him getting impeached are getting higher and higher, although its still unlikely.  Amazingly, Trump has managed to make his controversial choice for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, look really good, as Sessions turns out to be pretty principled and won't interfere with ongoing investigations.

So this of course means that the Democrats are beginning to lick their chops about their chances of retaking the House, which means that Nancy Pelosi is of course anticipating being Speaker again and is already saying she won't step out of the way in regards to that office.

Which of course brings us back to the modern Democratic Party and why it has done so poorly.  Why can't it find anyone to run it other than those whose political views were formed when Lyndon Johnson was the President?

August 31, 2018   The Write In Edition

Oh, you thought you'd be so fortunate as to not have this thread reappear before September, didn't you.

So did I.

Well, no such luck.  It turns out that the primary had some surprising results, and people who were surprised by the results continue to unfortunately make news as well.

First, the surprises.

Some Democrats mounted last minute, although very quite, write in campaigns that had an effect.  The most significant of those was for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in which legislator and lawyer Mike Massie secured the Democratic nomination for that office.

Massie ran, and lost, for this position some years ago in a race that saw Cindy Hill take the position.  In retrospect, most folks likely later wished that Massie had won.  He likely stands less of a chance against incumbent Balow, but he is a solid candidate and it is a good thing that the race now features two solid candidates.

Chris Lowry took the Democratic nomination for State Treasurer.  I know almost nothing about him other than that he's a chemist for a laboratory in Laramie.  That's about all I know, and I feel he stands no chance of success, but at least there's now a choice.

Some state races also saw successful write in campaigns for both Republican and Democratic seats i the legislature, but as I don't know anything about them, I'll pass on further comment.

I can't help but comment, however, of Foster Friess who is taking his loss in the primary very badly.

Frankly, the degree to which Friess was successful really surprised me but I think there's a lot going on there.  If I ever finish some threads that are pending, I'll expand more on that in the future.  But what I'd note is that Friess seems absolutely convinced that Wyoming's politics are quite similar to Arkansas' and that his victory was assured but for mean old Democrats crossing into the GOP and stealing the election from him.  I know that there's a case to be made there, somewhat, but there are other explanations for what occurred and what may very well have occurred is that his loss in the primary means his party won't see the other party take the Governor's chair in November.

Be that as it may, he apparently was seriously contemplating a run in campaign.

Friess, who isn't from here, and who has lived in Teton County only, seems to very seriously have a political demographic model of the state which fits a Southern state rather than a Western one.  He'd do well to winter over in Helena, Missoula, Laramie or even Denver this year, and get a bit of a clue.  He seems to think the nomination was his by applying almost Leninistic logic to the effect that he represents the people, those being the people who count, i.e., the conservative people, who think like he does.  Frankly that isn't exactly how that works at all as Wyoming (future thread, maybe) isn't that type of conservative.

People who are that type of conservative have reason to be really concerned right now in general as it appears that the political winds really are changing in general.  Friess is a diehard Trumpster and Trump is in huge trouble.  By November the Trump political credit might very well be spent.  In any event, it likely was never that great in Wyoming anyhow.

Friess was talked out of mounting a write in campaign, he says, by fellow Republicans who argued that this would only throw votes to Throne.  They were probably correct.

I have to say that while Friess did much better than I thought he would, and while he seemed less of a gadfly as the election went on (and obviously a lot of Wyoming voters came to view him favorably enough to vote for him) there's been a real lack of humility here post election to a degree that's fairly stunning.  To suggest that that the law ought to be changed as you lost, and then contemplate a write in campaign against your own party because you feel that you should have won by right, demonstrates a concept of possession of the office that's really stunning.

It would be different, in my view, if in a closely run race there was a major issue that was hugely distinct between your opponent and you.  I can think of examples of that from the 1970s where national candidates reflected that, although not in a way that I think makes their personal stands admirable.  But if you really have a big issue, such as on a national scale a topic of war vs. peace.  Or if you have a have a local issue where your own party's candidate is sharply at odds with you on a matter of grave importance, that would make sense to me. But here that's simply not the case. There are really no issues where Friess and Gordon aren't basically on the same page, more or less.  That means, quite frankly, that Friess was the weaker candidate simply because he's a rich outsider, and that would have been taken into account by some voters who would otherwise have gone fro the GOP in the Fall.

A couple of real differences, although not ones, that are in sharp distinction, that may weigh into Friess' odd reaction is that Friess appears to be a genuine Trumpster.  Most Wyomingites aren't, but those who are, tend to feel that Trump is right on things at a level that's dogmatic.  That scares quite a few rank and file Republicans, but those who feel that way don't grasp that at all.  Trump is right, they feel, on everything, and people who don't agree with that are deluded or worse.  The second thing, however, is that Friess is clearly an evangelical Christian and thinks because Wyoming is a conservative state it is by default an evangelical Christian one. That's flat out wrong.  In fact, historically Wyoming had been one of the least religiously observant states in the union, and that for its entire history.  We will have more on that in the thread I keep mentioning, but in terms of really strong religious adherence that may make a difference in an election you have to look towards practicing Catholics and Mormons here, both of whom are a demographic minority and neither of which are evangelicals.

For all those reasons, it seems to me that Friess has forgotten where he says he lives, which was apparent during the election and which has become rather obvious after it.

September 6, 2018  The Money Edition and Fifth Column Edition.

The Tribune reported yesterday that the recent primary pushed this current election up to the most spendy in Wyoming's history. . . and its' not even over.

Costs for a Wyoming election do have to be kept in context.  Even expensive Wyoming elections are cheaper than man of those around the country. But at the same time, with the smaller population, they should be.

The Tribune reports that the total amount spent in the 2010 Gubernatorial contest was a little over $4,000,000. That is, that's entire amount spent by all candidates during the entire campaign.  This year, by contrasts, the Republican contestants have already spent $8,000,000.

Of those, Foster Friess spent a whopping $2, 680,000 in his race to defeat.  The victor, Mark Gordon, spent a little over $2,000,000, which was a little under the amount spent by defeated candidate Sam Galeotos.  Third place finisher Harriet Hageman, the only candidate to only use Wyoming vendors in her campaign, spent a little over $1,000,000.

This certainly tells us that the campaign was unusually vigorously contested, to be sure.  It probably also tells us something about the role that Friess played in the campaign, as the megabucks Teton County import had a lot of money to spend, and frankly it worked fairly well for him as he did quite well in the overall vote count.

That may also give us a bit of an insight, sort of, as to why Friess has seemed to take the results badly.  He seems to have expected to actually win and even commissioned a private poll that showed that he would.  He's made some somewhat odd statements about perceiving a Devine mandate to run for the office and paradoxically seems to also view that mandate to have been frustrated by late Democratic changes to Republican registration at the polls, which if thought about deeply might tend to suggest that he ought to reconsider what he perceives to be that calling, or perhaps ought to be more careful how he phrases his statement so that its not misunderstood.

Wyoming's candidates to date spent more than those running for the same office in Maine, Nevada and Alaska, the latter of which doesn't total up to $1,000,000.

On spending less than $1,000,000, Democrat Mary Throne only spent $142,000.  In that fashion this race continues to resemble the one in which Democrat Mike Sullivan took the office, as he basically didn't have to do much until the general election, by which time the Republicans had ripped themselves apart in the primary.  We'll see if that history repeats itself.

Speaking of Friess, who received a couple of endorsements from Donald Trump, Jr. and one very late one from the President himself, that President is blaming a late reminder from Don Jr. for the lateness of that endorsement.  According to the President, his son reminded him to make the endorsement a bit too late, which is why he came out at the bitter end rather than earlier.

I really have my doubts that a Trump endorsement would have pushed Friess up over the bar, and indeed, I think associating with Trump turned Galeotos' campaign into a $2,000,000 failure.  As I've noted before, I don't think Trump is that popular in Wyoming and at any rate the news for Trump keeps getting worse and worse, which is beginning to have an undeniable impact in pending elections around the country. Galeotos has plenty of company.  The Trump administration is beginning to recall the Nixon administration in its late stages more and more, something that's bound to play itself out on the national political stage.

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article by an individual they claim to know by name who reports himself as a conservative fifth columnist inside the Trump administration, and not the only one, who is secretly working against the Presidents wilder actions.  Basically, the columnist reports that the truly conservative things that have been happening are largely the work of insiders who resist Trump's incoherent directions and that the nation should take solace that this is occurring.  Basically, the columnist claims that there are a group of administration insiders acting as a conservative rear guard holding down the fort until the President is gone.  It even claims that they considered removing him under the Constitutional impairment clause but elected instead just to sabotage Trump's worst inclinations and in their place enforce genuinely conservative ones.

In most administration this would be a real bombshell but by this time everyone is so acclimated to constant turmoil I'm skeptical that will occur. We'll see.  This would actually explain why Trump seems to head in one direction, such as embracing Putin, while the official policy of the US heads in another, such as imposing tough sanctions.

But it's also a bit much in some ways.  For one thing, if such a deeply caring person was a secret insider, why is he blowing it now (unless the whole administration is a house of cards and he knows its about to collapse).  And the history of such "secret insider" events usually tends to show that real events are much more mundane and the big conspiracies tend to be just the urging of cabinet members on the office holder, rather than anything more fifth column.  Indeed, the history also tends to show that the secret person is much more junior than the breaking news would hint at.

Of course, right now, we know none of that.

Trump, predictably, is raging against the New York Times.

My prediction is that Facebook will be left and right insane today.

September 6, 2016  Part Two: The Big Sky Edition

Donald Trump is going to Billings Montana today.

Why?

Well that's a good question and there are a number or reasons this is likely why.  In former years Presidents who were in political trouble tended to fly overseas. . . or at least after World War Two they started doing that.  That was always good for press.  Now, however, Trump tends to appear at rallies.  Appearing to his base appears to be the one thing that he can still definitely do that turns people out and gives him good press. . . although the results where he has appeared haven't been sterling by any means.

So why Montana?

Senator John Testor is the reason.

Montana's Senator John Testor.

Democratic Senator John Testor is running for reelection in Montana.  He's occupied that office since January 2007 after moving to the United States Senate from being President of the Montana state senate.

Running against Testor is Matt Rosendale, who is going to lose.  Rosendale is the Montana State Auditor and I frankly know almost nothing about him.

Which doesn't mean that this will be a cakewalk for Testor.  Outsiders will note, inaccurately, that Montana is a Western state (correct), Western states are conservative (generally correct but misunderstood) and that Trump is popular in the West (incorrect).  While those things have some element of truth in them, they're very misunderstood as the recent Wyoming primary demonstrated.  Nonetheless, Testor has been pointing out recently things that he supported Trump on.

Testor's from a state that's very odd politically and he's always had to walk a fine line on some things.  Montana is not nearly as conservative as people imagine it to be, and an immigration of California expatriots has impacted the state's politics in general.  It tends to have an old fashioned mix of conservative, but Democratic, farm interests, conservative Republican ranch interests, and liberal town interests.  And this has been the case for a long time and has reflected back in its politics.  Montana had a stout mineral severance tax long before Wyoming did and has been really aggressive on water conservation in a way that Wyoming has not been.  It passed really repressive and nativist legislation during World War One but it also sent Janette Rankin, the pacifist Democrat, to Congress twice making Montana the only state to have somebody in Congress who voted "no" on entering World War Two (which she also did in regards to World War One).  Testor, therefore, fits a certain Montana mold.

And that mold is one that Republicans need to worry about and apparently are. Testor has been mentioned by insiders as a potential Presidential candidate in 2020.

Indeed, Testor has to be well aware that if he had run in 2016, and his name had been mentioned, he'd be the President now.  He's not a whackadoodle Socialist like certain neo and paleo Democrats are, and he's not of the Democrats Bright Young Club of 1972, like every other Democrat who tends to be mentioned for the office tends to be.  He's a wheat farmer by trade, which is about as American as you can get, never lived far from where he was born until elected to the Senate, butchers his own beef and takes it with him to Washington D. C.. and has a family that even now still looks like your average farm family from the anywhere farming.   He has an A- rating from the NRA, higher than some Republicans get and almost certainly higher than anyone who the Democrats might otherwise ponder running.  He's generally a moderate, but has exhibited the Democratic middle migration on social issues.

In other words, had he ran in 2016 he'd have looked like a Republican to Republicans who couldn't stand Trump.

The GOP is in a situation where, right now, it has to be worried about Democrats running for the office in 2020.  Joe Biden is apparently considering doing so, knowing full well that his decision not to enter the race late gave the office to Trump.  The Democrats being what they are, there will be serious discussion of dragging out some musty candidate from the 1970s again and I wouldn't even put it past them to run the Pants Suit one more time, but Testor has to be pondering entering the race.

Which is why Trump is in Billings in a quixotic effort to boost his opponent in a region where Trump isn't really that popular, but the GOP hasn't managed to figure that out.  Perhaps Trump ought to stop and talk to Sam Galeotos on his way to Billings.]

September 12, 2018.  The election wasn't stolen edition.

From University of Wyoming Senior Research Scientist Brian Harnisch's Twitter feed, and as followed up on by the Casper Star Tribune:
Sep 10
Sure doesn't look like "Democrats meddled" in the Wyoming Republican primary. Instead - A few Democrats, more independents, and even more Republicans wanted a say in who governor will (or won't) be.

 

So it turns out that more Republicans registered to vote, but those increased numbers didn't come from the Democratic Part or from Independents in sufficient numbers to make a difference in the general election.  The State gained 3,738 new Republican voters it appears, or that's the net result after those who switched parties are taken into account.

This boosts some theories I have about what we saw in the primary, but I haven't had the time to finish the posts. Maybe that's a good thing as this did sort of make me question some of my assumptions, but this data bolsters them.

So, at the very most, after all the whining and complaining by those like Friess about changing the law to shut the door on party hopping Democrats, the actual result of that would be to shut the door on Republicans who want to participate.  Not that I think they'd care that much.  Based upon their statements I think it can't be assumed that those sorts of Republicans are regarded as the ones who aren't right thinking Republicans. . . . in more than one way.

September 27, 2018. The family squabble edition

Could it really be twenty days since our last entry here?  Wow.

Bet you didn't miss it either.

Yes, Wyoming politics has been really quiet.  Politics elsewhere have not been, but here they have been, thankfully.

Not that they've been entirely quiet.

In what must be regarded as both quixotic and minor, some disgruntled conservatives, probably of very limited numbers, have started a Draft Foster Freiss movement.

What could possibly make somebody think that this would work is beyond me.  It won't.  If he coldn't win the GOP primary and felt that was because the wrong kind of people (i.e. Democrats) were allowed in to vote against him, what makes anyone who is a Freiss backer think that in the general, where everyone could vote, he could pull it off.

No, if anything, and it would likely not amount to anything, Freiss actually being drafted into the election would help Throne who is going to have a tough time against Gordon.

In other news, the prominent western Wyoming Gosar family is involved in an odd dispute with their sibling, Paul Gosar, who moved away and became a Congressman from Arizona.  The family dispute spilled into the election when members of the Gosar family appeared in an advertisement for his opponent and it's become a general argument.  Paul Gosar blamed the other Gosar's appearing in an advertisement on former President Obama, which is additionally odd.

The Gosars are well known and one of them has run for office within the state previously  Still, seeing a Wyoming family, and they really are a Wyoming family, spill into the national scene in this fashion is truly odd, to say the least.

October 9, 2018.  The Quiet Man Edition

If anything could better demonstrate that the primary election is the real election for most offices in Wyoming than the non campaigning currently going on, I don't know what it would be.  Almost nothing at all has been going on since the primary in virtually all of the races. And indeed, why should anything be going on? They're over.

The Tribune did run an article on the race for the U.S. Senate on Sunday which was interesting.  Gary Trauner is a known name and you would think that the Senate race would be noisier.  Trauner wold apparently like it to be as he's complaining that Barrasso wont' debate him, other than one scheduled event.

Barrasso's declination on debating is wise.  He has nothing to gain from it and he's almost certainly going to win.  Quite frankly Barrasso doesn't come across well at all as a speaker except on rare exception (I saw him speak once at a Boy Scout event where he was very comfortable and came across very well, for example).  Indeed, at least according to the Tribune he's been making appearances in Wyoming but they're basically unannounced, which keeps them from being really focused on.  He's always returned to Wyoming on every occasion that allowed.

The Tribune's article was fair to both sides and noted that the Senate has been very busy, which is obvious.  Of interest in the article, however, was that Barrasso apparently did worse in the primary for his position than any candidate in Wyoming's history.  He still took 64.9% of the primary vote in the GOP primary but apparently that's worse than the incumbent normally does.  Dodson took 28.5%.  Far fight wing candidate Holz took 2.6%, which was worse than the 4% that went to others.

Dodson was very well funded and made a serious run at the office and normally that would be a good thing for Trauner, but I don't expect Trauner to do much better than Dodson, and I doubt that Trauner does either.  Trauner came within .5% of beating incumbent Barbara Cubin in 1988 in the U.S. House race and that has to be weighing on his mind.  Absent a real gaff by Barrasso, he'd be lucky to get 30% of the vote.  But he might get that.

Indeed, Barrasso is vulnerable on some things, particularly his poor stance on public lands.  If Dodson had chosen to keep running as an independent, as he originally had planned on doing, this might be a really noisy and different race at this point.

October 10, 2018. The They're Still Running Edition.

This thread has grown so in active that a person might reasonably assume that the election is over, nothing is going on, or the author has grown tired of politics.

Hmmm. . . ..

Well, anyhow, the race has been pretty quiet, or races I should say, but some things are going on and those things are debates.

Apparently the various candidates, including the third party candidates for Governor, had a debate recently, although I didn't hear it and only watched read about it in the Tribune.  The Tribune's article wasn't enormously informative, but did indicate that what distinguished it was that Liz Cheney emphasized her actual record while the other candidates spoke on their general platforms.  As she's the only one who has held office, that makes sense.

I did listen to the Gubernatorial candidates debate that was held at Casper College, on the radio, on October 19. It was quite interesting.

I can't say that there were any enormous surprises associated with it, but there were at least some minor ones.  Mary Throne, who I have heard speak personally at a public function I was at, did much better as a speaker than the one time I heard her, and like her closing remarks emphasized, she didn't shy away from stating some positions bluntly that are likely to be unwelcome locally, which is to her credit.

Mark Gordon also performed a little better than he did in the primary debates.  Gordon doesn't generally come across as a great speaker, which of course not everyone is, but his performance in the debate was better than it had been in the primaries.

The real surprise in the debates was Libertarian Larry Struempf.  Struempf's campaign has been so silent that I had a hard time finding him and even a Libertarian website doesn't list him as a candidate.

Struempf is holds a PhD and works a computer professor for Laramie County Community College.  In response to questions from the panel he frankly came across much more like a middle of the road leaning left Republican rather than a Libertarian.  Listening to him, exactly one of his answers was really of a Libertarian nature.  The rest weren't. For example, at least twice he suggested that Wyoming needs to raise property taxes.  On a question relating to firearms carry at the University of Wyoming both he and Throne deferred to the school on the question, but he did so more succinctly than Throne.

If Struempf was a surprise, Rammel, at least by the end of the debate, was not.  Rammel conceives of himself as the only conservative in the race and seems to genuinely believe that only he can save the state and its people from "becoming blue", and that he's the last bastion preventing a liberal takeover of the state.  He went after Gordon a couple of times in the same fashion that Harriet Hageman did in the debates, but in a much less polished fashion, accusing him of being a secret liberal.

All in all, the debate was well done and refreshing.  Having said that, I remain disappointed by the failure of the panelist to ask certain questions.  There were no questions directly on public lands, which remains a hit issue with voters and which I'd like to hear Throne, Gordon and frankly Struempf, discuss.  And there was no discussion on hot ticket social issues, which with the recent rightward shift of the United States Supreme Court may become relevant to the next Governor of Wyoming fairly quickly.

On national shifts, those listening to the national news and in particular the national news programs would have noted that it's now believed that the GOP may pick up Senate seats next month but that there's an 80% chance the Democrats will take the House, so we'll be in for a divided Congress.  That the GOP would pick up seats is a big change in Republican fortunes and is apparently a result of the Kavanaugh hearings. That would mean that the Senate would remain favorable to President Trump's appointments for the remainder of his term.  It would also mean, with a divided government, that probably next to nothing would get done otherwise.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.  The murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside of the embassy in Turkey seems to be working a real shift in Congress.  While the President remained equivocal about who was to blame for what early on, Republicans in the Senate have not and over the weekend they were making it plain that they would be part of a bipartisan effort to sanction Saudi Arabia in some fashion and that they had very little care or concern about the President's view of the matter.

Occasionally, although it is rare, a big event like this cause Congress to rediscover itself and while its far too early to tell, there is some reason to believe that if the Republicans and Democrats in Congress unite over Khashoggi, and they should, that they may rediscover their authority and each other and begin to function again.  It remains to be seen, but the degree to which they were making it plain that they had no doubt over matters and were prepared to move forward was indeed interesting.
___________________________________________________________________________________ 
Related Threads:


Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 5. Dare we speak of demographics and Wyoming politics?
The 2018 Wyoming Election. Volume Four 
Knowing them by the company they keep
Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (e). The Economy again. . . what if we really don't want it to change?