Bonanza Column 273 - Don't let NLTFPD become average

Recently I had occasion to read an evaluation of the emergency medical services provided throughout Washoe County. The evaluation was done by the TriData Division of the System Planning Corporation under contract to Washoe County. TriData’s report included several findings and recommendations regarding actions that could be taken by the affected agencies including the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District.

 

The NLTFPD is the exclusive provider of emergency medical services for Incline Village and Crystal Bay. The Fire District has provided these services to our communities here at the Lake with great success for several years, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who lives or visits here who has less than the highest regard for the NLTFPD. The problem is that, as with so many things, the report fails to distinguish between the part of Washoe County that is inside the Tahoe Basin from the rest of the County.

 

EMS programs in the Truckee Meadows, including both Fire and REMSA in the Reno/Sparks area, come in for substantial criticism in the report, and TriData’s recommendations come under the heading of “Washoe County Wide” changes to emergency medical services that are needed.

 

The concern is that if County-Wide changes are made with a broad brush, NLTFPD’s ability to deliver the excellent service we have come to expect could be impacted.

 

The report recommends that “The future of EMS in Washoe County should include a countywide EMS system with responsibility for total system oversight…A countywide EMS system could be overseen by the Washoe [District Board of Health] or a Washoe County public safety agency. An EMS lead agency should include an EMS Manager and staff and an EMS Medical Director. We include several possible EMS organization models and specify EMS staff requirements.”

 

I have no argument with the notion that such oversight could result in improved service for Reno, Sparks, and most of the County, but I have every expectation that it would be disastrous for services here at the Lake. When you put an excellent service provider under management that is (a) distant and (b) broad in scope, you get what in statistics is called “regression toward the mean.” In other words, if NLTFPD is an A and the rest of the County is a C, everyone will get to be a B. Good for them, bad for us.

 

NFLTPD must obviously cooperate with Washoe County to ensure that any improvements to county-wide emergency medical services are successful. Any changes of ordinances, laws, protocols or certifications that may affect the operations of the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District’s existing ability to provide the high level of emergency medical services currently provided should require approval from the Board of Fire Directors of the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District, and may require approval of the voters of the District as well.

 

Rather than wait until we are fighting a defensive action, IV/CB residents should let the County know that we will not accept any solution, county-wide or otherwise, that detracts from the level of services we have and that our taxes pay for. The TriData report went to John Slaughter, Director of Management Services and Kurt Latipow, Fire Services Coordinator, in the Washoe County Manager's Office, and those would be two good people to communicate with, along with County Manager Katy Simon, the District Board of Health, the NLTFPD Board, and the IVGID Board of Trustees who should be in the forefront of this effort.

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Bonanza Column 272 - Time to Stop this Ridiculous Lawsuit

So once again we have the interests and opinions of a vocal few blocking the implementation of hard science and the will of the majority.

I’m referring of course to the ridiculous lawsuit by the Sierra Club and Friends of the West Shore attempting to block implementation of the TRPA Regional Plan Update (RPU) and the scurrilous, radical guest column in last week’s Bonanza by their hangers-on.

As a reminder, while I did work for TRPA I no longer have any administrative or management accountability there, though I am doing some training for the staff This column is intended to represent my views and my views alone, and not those of the Agency or any of its staff or Governing Board.

Let’s review the bidding: The RPU is the first significant update to environmental protection standards at Lake Tahoe since 1987. The update was years in the making, involved countless hours of scientific and public input, and fostered an unprecedented level of bi-state collaboration to come out with a plan that incorporates much of what the Sierra Club itself has advocated over the years. It institutes and retains growth control limits and restrictions that are among the strongest in the US.

The League to Save Lake Tahoe, historically an advocate for the most stringent environmental regulation and no friend of TRPA responded to the lawsuit this way:

“This is the wrong move for Lake Tahoe....While the plan is not perfect, it is a product of community collaboration and compromise, and is designed to be adaptive...litigation will likely result in the dissolution of this compact and no compact means no regional environmental standards for Lake Tahoe. Preserving the compact and implementing the RPU will provide the greatest long-term benefit to the lake and its communities.”

Similar responses came from the Nevada Conservation League and in a joint statement from California Secretary of Natural Resources, John Laird and Nevada Director of Conservation and Natural Resources, Leo Drozdoff. Laird and Drozdoff were the principal architects of the bi-state collaboration.

Despite all this, the Sierra Club and its partners apparently consider their opinion of what is good for Lake Tahoe superior to the collective conclusions of environmental scientists, the agencies of California and Nevada, the TRPA, the majority of public input and almost everyone else. I guess it must be nice to have that smug sense of superiority that is impervious to rational consideration – kind of like Wayne La Pierre and the NRA.

One of the basest fabrications on the part of these self-appointed guardians of what’s good for the rest of us is that somehow TRPA (and presumably the scientists, public, and state agencies) are “in the pocket of developers.” I worked at TRPA as a contract executive for a year, and if any largesse was being passed out by some evil cabal of developers I never saw any evidence of it and, worse yet, they missed me! If you’re out there, evil cabal, I’m waiting for my check. But I won’t hold my breath because no one had produced one shred of evidence to support that canard.

If you have the stomach to plow through the 33 pages of the legal complaint, you will see that it is poorly formulated and based on the thinnest foundation imaginable. The Federal Court should summarily dismiss it and can do so on any number of grounds.

One last thing: isn’t it time that these self-appointed “guardians of the lake” come clean about their real agendas and conflicts of interest? What about the realtor who rails against development but makes her living selling Mc Mansions on the lake shore to millionaires? What about the vocal critic of any human inroads into the environment who owns property in a sensitive stream environment zone? Or the loud critic of TRPA who has been cited for numerous serious environmental violations and refuses to correct them?

It’s time to give up the knee-jerk negative response to government in general and TRPA in particular and stop listening to these hypocrites. The RPU may not be a perfect plan, but it is a good one with enough checks and adaptability built in that if offers the best chance for a balance between humans and nature in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

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Bonanza Column 271 - Is the Fix In at IVGID?

I was in St. Louis all last week on business and so couldn’t attend the IVGID Board meeting that was on Wednesday, so I made a point of talking with some of the 60 or so people who did make it. I was surprised at the number of times that words like “disarray,” “chaotic,” and “silly” came up in accounts of the meeting.

Then I read the recap of the meeting in last week’s Bonanza, and I started to understand.

In what universe does filling the job of General Manager with an amateur, locally focused search make sense? IVGID has a budget of over $35 million and over 550 full and part time positions on its staff (both according to the 2012 – 2013 Budget Book). These 550 people range from seasonal life guards and ski instructors to highly skilled craftspeople, engineers, and professionals. Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, the IVGID staff are top notch at what they do – that’s why we’ve had great people recruited away by Reno, Truckee, Washoe County, and others. It takes a top General Manager to lead top people. A weak leader will see the best people leave and the worst rise to new levels of mediocrity. We have been fortunate to have had such an General Manager for 11 years, and unfortunate in his decision to retire.

The General Manager manages the entire operation under policy set by the Board. The skill set of a GM or CEO from one industry to another is not interchangeable. It takes a very different CEO to lead a retail chain than it does to lead a worldwide non-profit, and than it does to lead a hotel chain, a financial institution, or a high-tech firm. Most times when a CEO was hired under the misguided notion that a good executive can lead anything, the results have not been good – think of Carly Fiorina, and John Sculley to cite two well-known examples.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of firms in a variety of industries that went through CEO successions. In almost every case, internal candidates were considered, and in absolutely every case an expert search firm was employed from the writing of the job description and qualifications through hiring. There is a profession called Public Administration. Its "fundamental goal... is to advance management and policies so that government can function." (Handbook of Public Administration) Colleges and Universities offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in Public Administration. Why? Because it is a professional discipline, and any professional discipline starts with study and is advanced through experience. Translating policy into execution and services for a municipality of 9,000 residents with a budget and staff like ours is not a job for even a very talented amateur, and we can’t afford to have someone learn on the job.

This is not a comment on the three people who were mentioned in the Bonanza story – I know and have worked with Claudia Andersen, Mike Brown, and Lynn Gillette and hold them in the highest esteem, and knowing the Hyatt organization’s standards, I have no doubt that Fred Findlen is very good at what he does. There are two problems with all these good folks: first, they have jobs to which they are dedicated, and second, they are not trained or experienced in public administration.

There is a rumor going around that the fix is in on the whole GM search, that the job description will be tailored toward a particular individual and the “search” will be a sham. I pray this is not true – if it turns out to be true, we are headed for a level of cronyism and incompetence in the governance of IVGID that has not been seen in my 17 years here and probably not ever. The job description will be the Board’s first opportunity to dispel this rumor – if it calls for a professional, experienced public administrator, then the rumor is clearly not true; if it is vague in regard to the parameters of the job, does not require more than generic credentials and experience, then the Board will have to answer some tough questions. Now this Wednesday’s Board meeting has been cancelled because “There are no matters requiring action by the board,” even though it was clearly stated at the last meeting that the job description would be on the agenda. So we will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out which way the wind is blowing on this one.

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Bonanza Column 270 - Public Private Partnerships

The recent discussion over the eLearning Lab’s proposal to partner with the library brought to light a situation that, regardless of the merits of that particular issue, ought to be of concern to all of us.

Over the past decade or so, so-called “public-private partnerships” (PPPs) have been of increasing importance all over the world in extending the ability of governments to provide services in difficult economics. According to the U. S. State Department, “Such partnerships have leveraged the creativity, innovation, and core business resources of private partners for greater impact on global issues. To date, the Department has worked with over 1,100 partners and mobilized more than $650 million in public and private resources to support key foreign policy objectives including climate change mitigation, women’s empowerment, economic growth, and human rights.” The State Department’s participation in PPPs represents only a small portion of PPPs worldwide.

In most countries these PPP arrangements have been aimed at overcoming broad public sector constraints in relation to either a lack of public capital; and/or a lack of public sector capacity, resources and specialized expertise to develop, manage, and operate infrastructure assets. Public Private Partnerships are now commonly used to accelerate economic growth, development and infrastructure delivery and to achieve quality service delivery and good governance.

The need for PPPs in many countries has been accelerated by the public sector‘s recognition of the vital role of modern infrastructure in economic growth, and PPPs are now accepted as an important avenue for funding major public sector infrastructure projects. PPPs are joint ventures in which business and government co-operate, each applying its strengths to develop a project more quickly and more efficiently than government could accomplish on its own. The private sector may be responsible for the designing, financing, constructing, owning and/or operating the entire project. The private sector may want to be assured that the public-private partnership structure is designed to provide competitive rates of return commensurate with a financial rate of return that they could earn on alternative projects of comparable risk.

In the case of the eLearning Café/Washoe County Libraries discussion, the Library Board’s counsel delivered an opinion that the PPP could not happen because of a peculiarity of Nevada Law. Under the Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) anything of this sort that is not explicitly enabled or permitted in the Statutes is considered to be prohibited. Not surprisingly, PPPs are not included in the NRS, which was originally formulated in 1861.

The provision that effectively prohibits anything not explicitly permitted is particularly problematic in a state where the Legislature only sits every two years and then only for a few months.

PPPs are proving to be an especially effective vehicle in the environmental area as recognition increases that a focus on the environment in isolation from the larger picture is in most cases ineffective. Current thinking in the mainstream of the environmental movement is that there is a “triple bottom line” that requires attention to environmental, economic, and social factors, and this lends increasing importance to looking beyond government for solutions. The TRPA Regional Plan Update depends on such PPPs that are represented in part by developments such as Homewood, Boulder Bay, and Edgewood on a large scale, and also partnerships such as that between TRPA and the Tahoe Resource Conservation District for boat inspections in service of keeping aquatic invasive species under control.

The 2013 Regular Session of the Nevada Legislature begins on Monday, February 4, and while it is too late to hope for new legislation to enable PPPs, it is possible to attach such a measure to existing legislation being introduced. I’ve written to Senator Ben Kieckhefer and Assemblyman Randy Kirner asking them to look into this situation, and thus far have received no response. If enough people raise this issue with them, it’s possible we can get something done in this legislative session.

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Bonanza Column 269 - IVGID Trustees Need to Slow Down

If there is one theme in the early reports about the new IVGID Board of Trustees, it is “slow down.” The new Trustees (three of the five on the Board) were no sooner sworn in than the Board embarked on a four-hour meeting to consider such matters as the search for a new General Manager, the e-Learning Café’s proposal to the Library Board, and Board meeting locations and frequency. The Board packet for this meeting totaled 171 pages and covered a lot of ground. One assumes that the Trustees, particularly the newly-elected three, pored over this packet and studied it carefully to be able to deliberate on all this in just four hours.

Two of the three new Trustees ran on almost identical platforms of cost-cutting and “efficiencies.” As I’ve discussed before, interpretation of election results is at best an inexact art. Except in the case of a landslide, everyone is able to read in the tea leaves of vote counts anything they want to, but objective conclusions are difficult. In my view, the best course for a newly elected official to take is to consider his or her election a limited endorsement (at best) of whatever views they put forth in their campaign, and tread cautiously with a finger on the public pulse.

According to the 2010 census, the population of Incline Village/Crystal Bay is 8,777. Of these there were, in the 2012 election, 5,566 registered voters (Washoe County Registrar of Voters), or 63% of the total population. The three who were elected, Mssrs. Smith, Devine, and Hammerel, received 47.75%, 39.5%, and 39.3% of the vote respectively. This means that 50 to 60% of the electorate did not endorse the three who were elected. I’m not saying that means their positions were wrong, just that they do not necessarily reflect the views of over half of those who voted.

Based on this it would be a mistake for the Board (and I’m speaking here about Trustees Smith and Hammerel in particular) to think their only job is to cut costs and create “efficiencies.” Yes, these are high priorities for governments at all levels, and every decision taken should include an analysis of fiscal impact, but as any executive will tell you, cost is only half of the financial picture – the other half is benefit, whether financial (return on investment, ROI), or environmental or social – and it is the cost/benefit ratio that should guide decisions.

The Trustees need to remember that they are stewards of the District’s resources. A steward manages property and affairs on behalf of someone else. Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources, and is generally understood to include returning the resources in improved shape, and where stewardship of financial resources is concerned, growing the resource wherever possible.

This point about stewardship is an important distinction because Trustees are not the same as representatives. The IVGID Trustees are elected by the whole village to be the stewards of the District, not necessarily to do what is popular. At the same time, they have to be responsive to the “owners” of the resources, and where there is no clear downside should probably act in alignment with vox populi. However, it’s important that they have a good read on what that voice of the people is telling them. In the case of the eLearning Café and the Library Board, while the Café’s founder asserted that the majority of the community is in favor of her proposal, there is scant evidence to support this assertion and there is definite opposition. For the Board to have endorsed the idea without a clear sounding of the community was precipitous at best.

This brings us to the matter of the new GM, a decision that will have a major impact on the direction of IVGID in the future. I can’t see how the Board can make this decision without a clear indication from the residents about what we want the character of the community to be. When Bill Horn announced his impending retirement, the work of Incline 2020 went from interesting and important to crucial. Hopefully the Board will take this work into account and not base its decision on generic hiring parameters.

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Bonanza Column 268 - Who Does the NRA Work For?

So there is this device that is in widespread use – almost every family has at least one. Used carelessly or incorrectly it can do damage or even create lethal effects. It is often used in the commission of crimes, and theft of the device itself is a common crime.

This device must be registered – anyone who wishes to own one has to give personal information and obtain insurance against its misuse. The owner is required to display evidence of registration prominently, and every device has a unique identification number so even if it is found without the evidence of registration, the owner can be identified and located. Further, even non-owners of the device must be licensed if they wish to use one. The licensing involves extensive testing on knowledge of the rules for operating the device and practical operation of the device under real-world conditions.

If a used device is sold, the sale must be registered with the government and the buyer is subject to all the above requirements. If the device is retired or destroyed, its registration must be cancelled.

Improper or illegal operation of the device can result in revocation of the operator’s license, confiscation of their registration, and cancellation of their insurance.

Notwithstanding all this, there is almost no resistance to the registration, licensing, and insurance requirements. Registration and license fees provide significant revenue to government agencies, and insurance provides a substantial private market as well. To date no government has undertaken a mass confiscation of these devices, nor has their use been significantly restricted – in fact there are more of these devices in private ownership than at any time in history.

I suspect you’ve figured out by now that the device in question is motor vehicles – cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc. If someone proposed the above set of requirements for gun ownership, however, the outcry from the NRA and its disciples would be loud and long.

Why do we have this whole system for vehicle registration? Because while cars don’t kill people, people in cars kill people at a rate very close to the rate at which people with guns kill people. Yet no one worries that the government is coming to take their cars, no one threatens revolt if cars are regulated, and no one much worries about car registration.

The current debate on gun control has given rise to a whole raft of nonsense. “Gun ownership is a mainstay of American culture.” Hogwash – 39% of US households own guns; 95% own cars. Even if the 39% figure is low, it’s still not close to car ownership. Yet the rates of fatalities by cars and by guns are, by all accounts very close.

“Gun ownership is a God-given right.” Errant nonsense, and also the usual right-wing cherry picking of the Bible.

“The Second Amendment guarantees my right to own guns.” This is true by usage if not by intent. The Second Amendment says “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The ownership argument never bothers with that first part – it seems to me that “well-regulated” is a good argument for (wait for it) REGULATION! Also, by way of intent, there is a school of thought that the Second Amendment was created to appease southern states, and the “militias” referred to were slave-catching vigilantes.

And finally, who exactly is the NRA working for? Poll after poll indicates that the views of a significant majority of its membership on regulation are not nearly as extreme as what its leadership espouse, and while La Pierre and his cronies scream about the government “coming for your guns,” not one person in government from the President on down has put confiscation forth as even an idea.

I don’t know about you, but I have to think that the corporate leadership of the NRA have some other agenda. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not hard to make some educated guesses. According to research reported on the National Gun Forum website, LaPierre, the Executive Vice President of this non-profit organization, pocketed about $950,000 in compensation in 2005. It’s not a leap to suppose that he and others in the NRA have a vested interest in keeping the funds coming in, and scaring gun owners seems to work for that. And of course there is also the cash that comes in from gun manufacturers and others.

I’m just sayin’ – maybe the NRA is to the interests of gun owners as Lance Armstrong is to the interests of competitive cycling.

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Bonanza Column 267 - Who is Being Represented?

According to a number of respectable polls, 57% of Americans favor some form of gun control. Ninety-plus percent of NRA members favor background checks for gun ownership. The fact that Congress has failed to take any meaningful action on any form of gun regulation illustrates, in my view, a situation that is both unfortunate and dangerous.

We elect our Senators and Representatives, yet once they are elected a large majority of them are unresponsive to what the electorate thinks and wants. Instead, they become the servants of those who pour large amounts of money into their campaigns and continue to find ways through their lobbyists to keep those in Congress in their debt. I am referring, naturally, to groups like the NRA, major businesses and business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, and, yes, even more liberal-leaning groups like labor unions.

In a poll taken last June, 61 % of respondents favored allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26, 72 % of respondents wish to maintain the requirement that companies with more than 50 workers provide health insurance for their employees, and 82 % of respondents favored banning insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions – all components of the Affordable Health Care Act.. Notwithstanding that, 34 bills have been introduced in Congress for the wholesale repeal of the AHCA, the latest just this week by the redoubtable Michelle Bachman (R-MN).

We cherish the myth of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” when a grass-roots campaign by a determined lay person could send them to Congress where their passion and the rightness of their cause could change the course of political events, and it’s possible that before about 1940 that could work. Now, however, the cost of running for national office makes politics beyond the most local level the province of the well-financed, whether through personal wealth or outside support. When that outside support comes in large infusions of cash, it would be naïve to think it comes without some expectation of quid pro quo, no matter if the infuser is Sheldon Adelson, the NRA, the UAW, or the Sierra Club.

I’ve always been fond of the Chinese proverb that says if we don’t change our direction, we are likely to get where we’re headed. In this case a change of direction means a radical reform of how our government is elected. That starts with genuine campaign finance reform, and meaningful finance reform requires that we reassess the legal fiction that a corporation is a person. This doctrine originated in the Dartmouth College case of 1819, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation may sue and be sued in court in the same way as “natural persons.” This doctrine in turn formed the basis for legal recognition that corporations may hold and exercise certain rights under the law The ruling was never intended to mean that corporations are "people" as that word is normally understood, nor did it grant to corporations all of the rights of citizens. Given that there is no bar to restricting or even barring corporations’ donating to candidates and campaigns, and to eliminate PACs and Super-PACs which are connected to corporate entities.

There should be a limit to donations by individuals as well, both to candidates and PaCs and Super-PACs, so that millionaires and billionaires have no greater ability to influence elections than do the 98 or 99% of Americans who fall below that level of wealth.

Finally, and this would require a Constitutional amendment, the terms of Representatives should be four years rather than two. The two-year term means that a Member of Congress start running for his or her next term almost immediately after the current term begins. This was not the case when the Constitution was written, and to extend the term would simply be to acknowledge the realities of governing and running for office in the modern era.

None of this can happen unless the American people demand it, loudly and persistently, until the stranglehold of special interests and the very wealthy on the electoral process is broken. This is not an issue that fractures along the Right-Left fault line. Whichever way you lean politically, your interests are being represented only to the degree that they coincide with the interests of those in control, and that is clearly not what the Founders had in mind.

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Bonanza Column 266 - Here Comes 2013

The 112^th Congress, arguably the least effective in US history, has ended, and there are at least some indications that the 113^th won’t be as feckless. One can argue over the interpretation of election results ad nauseum, and as I’ve said many times in this space, interpretations can’t be proven or disproven Nonetheless, I assert that the overall results reflect what my colleague, Verita Black Prothro, called “a slight but fundamental shift in our country’s ethos [that is] encouraging for those of us on the left.”

While I don’t think we’ll see the immediate disappearance of the Tea Party and its supporters, I do think we’re seeing the sun start to set on that distorted world view that each of us lives separately from the rest of the human race and it’s every person for him or herself. Issues such as marriage equality (now the law in nine states and the District of Columbia) are coming to be seen (correctly) more and more as civil rights issues. Women are standing up for their interests and to maintain the gains of the movement for women’s equality, and while the House failed to renew the Violence Against Women Act this week, such regressive moves are being seen more and more for what they are – a rear-guard action in a losing cause. John Boehner was re-elected as Speaker of the House over the Tea Party’s opposition, so hopefully he won’t feel so inclined to kowtow to them.

So I, for one, am optimistic going into 2013. I realize there will be setbacks such as the House’s action, but there will be victories as well and as Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the Universe bends toward justice.

On the local scene, just as we have a new Congress in Washington, we have a new Board of Trustees for IVGID, a new County Commission, and a new Board of Governors for TRPA. Arguably these three governing bodies have a more direct and immediate effect on us as residents of Incline Village/Crystal Bay than do the President, Congress, and Supreme Court in DC. Here again I’m cautiously optimistic.

The IVGID Board has three new members who have not served in our local government before; the two Trustees who were not up for re-election are in their first four-year term, so we have a Board that, while it may be short on history and institutional memory, is to that same extent not likely to be bound by “how we’ve always done it.” Two of the three new Trustees ran on platforms promising greater accountability and closer fiscal management. Both, along with their third Freshman colleague, are young enough and intelligent enough to allow us to hope that this will go beyond mindlessly cutting spending or services and lead to a real consideration of what this community will be like for the next twenty or so years.

I’ve had the chance to meet and talk with our new County Commissioner, and she seems intelligent, non-doctrinaire, and eager to learn about her constituency. She also strikes me as articulate and persuasive, which is important as she is our one voice among the five County Commissioners.

The TRPA Regional Plan Update has survived extensive public scrutiny and seems to have stimulated an unprecedented level of bi-state collaboration. There are those who are certain that their analysis of the likely effects of the RPU are more accurate and honest than that of the TRPA Staff, Governing Board, and experts, which I think is unlikely to be true. If those well-meaning (but misguided) folks can restrain themselves from filing suit, which will delay, but, I am convinced, not deter the implementation of the RPU, they will have ample opportunity to make their case on a project-by-project basis. I am confident they will not do any better there than they did in the adoption process, and I am of the view that the RPU, in both the short and long-term will be one of the best things ever for the environment, economy, and people of the Basin.

On to 2013!

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Bonanza Column 265 - The Calendar

I’m writing this as we approach January 1 and as it is every year, much is being made of the “change” from one year to the next, as if it means something. Like most folks, I don’t mind an excuse for a party, but it’s probably worth remembering that calendars aren’t real.

Early on in human history, people observed that nature follows cycles – among the most obvious of these cycles is the alternation of daylight and darkness, and since all animals sleep and human being sleep at night, it was natural to treat each renewal of daylight as a “new day.” Another easily observed cycle was the apparent waxing and waning of the moon, which seemed to begin about every 28 days, so along with days people spoke in terms of months (moons). Finally, in the mostly temperate climates where humans lived, there was the cycle of the seasons.

These cycles gave us days, months, and years as naturally occurring phenomena. Then the human mind began to intervene. Cycles have no real beginning or end – like circles they just keep going round and round, but most things in human life have beginnings, middles, and ends, and so it was perhaps natural to see the cycle of the seasons as one of birth (Spring), growth (Summer), aging (Fall) and death (Winter). But if that is the case, why not begin the year in April, with the onset of Spring? Well, here another human feature comes in – call it religion or superstition depending on your bent. Along with the weather changes of the seasonal cycle, in most latitudes the cycles of daylight and darkness varied as well, and the “dying” part of the seasonal cycle, was also the time of year with the least daylight. Early religions incorporated festivals involving lights to fend off the darkness, and when the days began to gradually lengthen after the Winter Solstice, the darkness receded and they felt the world was reborn, so the custom of demarcating one year from the next in mid-winter was born.

Note that all of this calendaring is the result of human interpretations of natural phenomena. Now, thousands of years later we treat these interpretations as if they were facts. Religions set their “new year” according to their own calendar. The hijri, the Islamic New Year will occur anywhere from September to December during the second decade of the 21^st Century (another invention – Centuries), rosh hashanah, the Jewish New Year is generally in September or October, tet, the Asian New Year occurs in a variation tied to the Winter Solstice, and the standard or secular New Year is, of course, January 1^st. In all cases, though, the holiday supposedly marks a significant change – different years have different astrological and astronomical influences, as do different cycles, etc., and otherwise rational people vary somewhere between full credence and sheepish uneasiness in their relationship to the changes. Look at the turn of the millennium a dozen years ago or the supposed end of the Mayan calendar last week for illustrations of this phenomenon.

So let’s have a party, wish each other a happy “new year,” and remember to write 2013 on our checks (does anyone write checks any more?), but let’s not take it too seriously. Things will change, and we’ve set certain things (e.g. the government, budgets, credit card expirations) up to change in concert with changing over to a new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar or whatever, but remember the aphorism “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they are the same thing). The world in 2013 will consist largely of the effects of what happened in 2012, 2011, etc., and we would do well to keep working at what we began in 2012 and not expect any magic to occur when we take down one calendar and put up another.

Happy 2013.

 

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Bonanza Column 264 - The Need for a New National Dialogue

It ought to be too obvious to bear mentioning that the problem of gun violence in the United States does not admit of easy answers, but the spate of reactions in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown indicates that a significant number of people with access to public platforms don’t seem to understand that simple fact.

I understand the appeal of simplicity. The problem is that in order to come up with a simple solution, you have to over-simplify the problem. It’s easy to say “ban all guns,” but as we’ve learned from Prohibition and the “war on drugs,” banning anything only creates an underground economy in the banned substance, and underground economies are much harder to regulate and control than open trade. Conversely, the “let’s arm everybody” argument is equally unrealistic – to have all kinds of untrained and unscreened people running around with deadly weapons hardly seems likely to improve the situation.

The spokesman for the NRA says we should have armed guards in every school, ignoring both the financial costs and the psychological costs of our children having to go to school behind armed guards. It also ignores the fact that in the shootings at Fort Hood in 2009, in the most populous U.S. military installation in the world, a single gunman killed 13 people and wounded 29 others. Despite being surrounded by armed, trained military personnel, some of whom engaged him, the killer fired 214 rounds before being stopped. There were also armed guards at Columbine and Virginia Tech, to no good effect.

Here are some things we can say: first of all, automatic and semi-automatic weapons have only one function, which is to shoot as many rounds as possible in the shortest possible times. Fully automatic weapons have been illegal since Prohibition, and the most recent ban that was allowed to expire, was full of holes including, incredibly, “grandfathering in” weapons manufactured and sold before the ban and already in people’s possession, i.e., potentially on the market. These are not hunting weapons or self-defense weapons, they are designed for and work well in combat situations against multiple adversaries.

Secondly, weapons for hunting or self-defense do not need ammunition clips that hold 30 rounds or more. Hunting, say deer or elk, you’re going to get one shot, maybe two at a time before the animal is either down or gone. If I’m defending my home against intruders, there are unlikely to be more than a couple of them, and they are likely to take off after the first shot or two.

Third, analogies advanced on both sides of the argument are flawed – yes there are countries where a large part of the population own and even carry guns, and those countries have lower rates of gun violence than the US. And there are countries where almost no one owns guns and those countries have lower rates of gun violence than the US. Looking at it logically, one has to at least entertain the notion that gun ownership, whether free or restricted, has no correlation with gun violence. What does? I have to assume that the culture of those countries – how people approach violence in general and gun use in particular – has something to do with it.

Fourth, blaming easy scapegoats is unlikely to make anything useful happen. In the past ten days we’ve seen attempts to place blame on everything from the media to the NRA, to violence in movies, to the State of Connecticut’s position on same-sex marriage, to the absence of prayer in schools, you name it. All of that is blatant opportunism on the part of the speakers, cynically taking advantage of a tragedy to advance their pet agenda. Twenty children and six adults are dead – that is a fact; anything else is just opinion, and in most cases the “connection” between what is being blamed and the tragedy exists only in someone’s fevered imagination.

So what do we do? As with most complex problems there are some obvious steps to take – restore the ban on automatic weapons and beef it up – get them off the market and make the penalties for violating the ban draconian. In the longer run, though, let’s get into a serious national conversation about what facilitates a culture in which gun violence happens at a rate far higher than anywhere else in the world. Is the Second Amendment really central to what America is about? Given the Founders wrote that amendment when the most deadly weapon around was a flintlock, does it need to be modified? How is it that the NRA has a stranglehold on so many of our elected officials? What do we need to maintain, modify, or eliminate in our national dialogue to have people be safe in their own homes, schools, military bases, and streets? Until we address these questions, we’d best keep in mind the aphorism, “If we don’t change our direction, we’re liable to get where we’re headed.”

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Bonanza Column 263 - A Possible Lesson from Newtown

In the wake of Friday’s tragic killing of 20 elementary school children and 8 adults in Connecticut, it’s almost impossible to write about anything else. Everything – the fiscal cliff, the war in Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, Gaza – pales in comparison.

At the same time, there is hardly anything worth saying. The 24-hour news cycle has shown the horror repeatedly as if somehow it is still news 24 and 48 hours later. There are the predictable calls for tighter gun controls and the equally predictable disgusting attempts by self-styled religious “authorities” to exploit the tragedy by asserting that it is God’s punishment for not enough prayer in schools and a host of other agenda-based causes.

Mostly what happens in this situation is a carnival of opining which does nothing other than give the opiners some air time. Somehow we have become a society in which the important distinction between opinion and facts has been lost, and opinions are routinely stated as if they were facts. Let’s look at some facts:

·        Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass murders (killings involving 4 or more victims) carried out with firearms across the country, in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii.

·        Of the 142 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally. The arsenal included dozens of assault weapons and semiautomatic handguns.

·        Half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 19, respectively); the other 31 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, government buildings, and military bases.

Now you can make any interpretation of those facts you want to – everyone has the right to their opinion – but don’t confuse your interpretation with fact. If you say that the fact that three-quarters of the weapons used were obtained legally means that we should ban all guns, it’s your right to say that and to believe it. It’s not your right to argue it as a self-evident fact; it’s not a fact, it’s your opinion. Similarly for the idea of arming teachers or having greater security in schools.

Here’s an opinion that we keep hearing as if it were a fact: “the problem is that not enough people are armed; if there had been armed people in the theater in Colorado, they would have stopped the shooter before he could kill as many as he did.” Here’s a fact: in all the 62 mass murders cited above, not one armed person attempted to stop the shooter. It’s possible that there were no armed people at any of those shootings, but that seems statistically improbable, particularly in places like Arizona and Colorado that have very loose concealed carry laws.

Here’s a fact: A teacher, Victoria Soto hid her students in a closet. When the killer confronted her, she told him they were in the gym; he killed her, and her students remained safe. My opinion about that is that it was heroism of the highest order.

We are also seeing a flood of statistics regarding gun ownership, crime rates, murder rates, etc., in the US versus the rest of the world. These statistics are facts – in and of themselves they don’t mean anything until they are interpreted, and interpretations are not facts, so it isn’t legitimate to argue whose interpretation is right or wrong, better or worse.

This failure to make the distinction between facts and opinions is (in my opinion) a large part of what has us in the situation we are in now as a nation. Whether it’s economic strategy, environmental strategy, education, you name it, we are mired in divisiveness, and divisiveness is never fact-based – it’s always about whose opinion, whose interpretation of the facts is “right.” Here’s a news flash – no opinion is right, no opinion is wrong. The value of opinion and interpretation is that they create avenues for action – we rarely act based on the facts, we act based on how we interpret those facts. The most useful conversation is not who’s right, but which interpretation gives us the most opportunity for effective action.

This tragedy will be politicized – both sides of the gun control issue will argue that it proves their point. It does not. In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King said “We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” If we concern ourselves with that, we will be discussing opinions. Here’s a start – when you speak, notice when you speak your opinion as if it were a fact, and then correct yourself – say clearly that it’s your opinion, and open your mind to listen to and learn from other points of view. In that way we can honor the memory of Victoria Soto and all those children who were robbed of their future.

 

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Bonanza Column 262 - Education Needs to Learn from Business

I'm well aware of my tendency as I grow older to look upon the past as a time when all was good and to worry about the present and despair of the future, and I do my best to control it. I try to remember that the idyllic small-town youth I remember was obtained only by a tacit agreement to ignore institutionalized poverty, racism, homophobia, gender bias, and all the rest of the ignored factors that made the 1950's a fool's paradise for the white, male-dominated, heterosexual middle and upper classes. 

 

Notwithstanding those very real flaws, the bitter fruits of which we are harvesting to this day and likely will continue to harvest for years to come, there were some things we did right. Even in the backwater upstate New York town where I grew up, everyone got a solid educational grounding for adult life. To be sure, there were two tracks, one for those destined for college and the other for those whose education would end at High School, but care was taken that both groups got an education that did more than merely pander to their transitory teen-age tastes or prepare them only to pass tests, and too much of today's education seems to be about those two dubious goals. In this the educational establishment is showing itself to be decades behind the business world.

 

In the latter stages of the manufacturing economy, roughly from 1850 to 1950, American business measured its success by the numbers - units produced, revenue in, profits out, etc. Peter Drucker, a leading management thinker for much of the 20th Century was famous for the dictum that "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," and American industry took this to heart. Measurement and its cousin statistics became the supreme power worshipped at the altar of American business.

 

With the transition to a new age of business - call it the Information Economy or the Interaction Economy, or the Experience Economy - there probably won't be an "official" name until after the next transition - the primacy of "the numbers" began to be challenged. Not that numbers and measurement won't always have a place, but the importance of Drucker's other maxim, "you don't measure what you get, you get what you measure" began to become clear. If you measure salespeople's activity (e.g. number of sales calls) you will get a lot of activity; if you measure their productivity (e.g. number of sales closed), you will get a lot of productivity, and so qualitative factors, considered "soft and fluffy" in the Manufacturing Economy came into increasing prominence.

 

Our education system seems to be going the other way. Under the banner of "performance-based" education, what is being emphasized is test scores, and just as when you measure salespeople's activity you get more sales calls but not necessarily more sales closed, when you measure test scores you get higher test scores but not necessarily more education. In other words we are in danger of turning out skilled test-takers rather than educated people.

 

One unintended consequence of the emphasis on test scores is a dumbing-down of the education system. Makes sense doesn't it? If you want higher test scores, teach easier material! So increasingly we find the "harder" subjects being dropped or made optional. For example, in more and more school districts, the classics are no longer required or in some cases even taught. The classics of world literature, music, philosophy, as well as the forms of mathematics that taught us to think - algebra, geometry, trigonometry, are going by the wayside in favor of whatever is currently trendy in too many schools.

 

The culprits in this unfortunate trend are not the teachers. I’ve yet to meet a teacher who is happy with "teaching to the test." Rather it is the educational administration, beginning with the Federal Government that seem to be looking for a simple way to measure and have neglected to pay attention to Drucker's second principle. If you measure test scores, you will raise a generation of good test-takers, not educated citizens. Secretary Duncan should take a leaf from Business's book, see what is at the source of real learning, and measure that, messy as it may be.

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Bonanza Column 261 - Climate Change - the Long and Short of It

In the long run, the question of how much human activities are contributing to climate change is an important one. While a substantial majority of climate scientists agree that overuse of fossil fuels and other factors do contribute significantly, the possibility remains, however slim or substantial you might judge it to be, that over geological spans of time, the Earth’s climate fluctuates naturally on a spectrum between ice ages and global warming. As I’ve said before, this is a question that should be resolved on the basis of science, not opinion, notwithstanding the fact that we seem to be living in a time when many vocal non-scientists seem to think that science and opinion/religious interpretation deserve equal consideration. (As the Dalai Lama said, “someone whose faith is not grounded in reason is like a stream of water that can be led anywhere”)

In the shorter term, we have to deal with the reality that, whatever the causes, we are in a period of climate change in the warming direction. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), 50% of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast and that number has been increasing substantially over the past 30 years. Add to that the population who live in non-coastal flood plains, e.g., near rivers and major streams, and you have a significant portion of the population whose lives and livelihoods are affected by rising sea levels and by rain in areas and at times when not long ago there would have been snow. Areas around Lake Tahoe in this latter category include Truckee, and in the greater region, we’ve just seen Reno and Sparks gearing up for potential major damage. In 1997, we saw Reno flooded significantly when the Truckee River overflowed its banks.

While the nature and necessity of societal response to long-term climate change may be considered to be debatable (and while I don’t think it is, I’m aware that others disagree), the need to respond to the short-term issues is not. We’ve seen what rising sea levels combined with a weather emergency can do in coastal communities from New Orleans to New York, and having seen that further loss of life and property without significant attempts to defend against them is politically, societally, and humanly unacceptable.

Make no mistake, there is a limit to what we can do. Earthquakes, tornados, superstorms, tsunamis and other cataclysmic weather events will continue to occur and there will be damage and loss of life. Nonetheless, it is our responsibility as citizens and the government’s responsibility as well to do what can be done to minimize these effects. In Hawai’i, for example, the State and local goverments have detailed plans to do this – tsunami warning sirens, organized evacuations to higher ground, and significant efforts to educate citizens and visitors so that when execution of these plans is needed, things go generally smoothly and effectively.

This distinction between the long-term and short-term issues of climate change is important. When they are lumped together, those whose economic interests and/or religious convictions are threatened by the consideration of human contribution to the long-term effects rally against efforts to do something about protecting against the short-term effects, whatever their causes, and lives and property are lost.

The regular reader of this column knows that, by training and disposition, I am a rationalist, and an empiricist, which is to say I am biased toward a scientific approach and I trust the scientific interpretation of data to create theories that can be tested and revised as new findings arise, or that can be promoted from the status of theory to that of scientific law, which is itself subject to revision. Those who do not wish to deal with science claim this constant revision invalidates science and prefer to cling to rigid, if unsubstantiated, belief. That is their right, but it leads to a kind of fatalism that I abjure, and as the Dalai Lama said, it creates the danger of being led around by the nose. Either way, if we are not to simply be victims of the vagaries of weather and climate change, we need to be vigorous in our approach to both the possibilities of human contribution to climate change and to the need to protect ourselves from its effects, regardless of the causes.

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Bonanza Column 260 - Collaboration and Compromise

Occasionally, to make a point, a pundit or Internet troll will pompously assert that the United States “is a republic, not a democracy.” The occasion for this sophistry is usually when something that the majority of people favor goes against what the writer wants. Well, the statement is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough – a democracy, you’ll recall, is based on majority rule, period, and as such is prey to what John Adams called “the tyranny of the majority,” wherein the needs/rights/concerns of the minority are ignored or trampled.

A republic, on the other hand, is a form of government that is established by a charter that lays out the broad outlines of governance and that is administered by representatives of those who are being governed, with a head of state whose powers are derived from the charter and whose office is not hereditary.

The United States was the first country to institute a hybrid of these two, called a “democratic republic.” In this form, most fully elaborated by Madison in Federalist Paper number 10, the source of the power of the government is the citizenry and is exercised through representatives who are accountable to the citizens by means of frequent re-election (or not) and such safeguards as initiative, referendum, and recall. The Constitution, the charter of this democratic republic has, over the years, become increasingly sensitive to the danger of the tyranny of the majority, and so the rights of minorities – minority voting blocs, minority races, genders, sexual preferences, religions, etc., have come under greater and greater protection.

In government over the past four years the notion of “majority” has been stretched to its thinnest. The Executive Branch has been held by the Democrats, with the Legislative Branch split. Even in the Judiciary, the Supreme Court has often split 5-4 on important issues. The popular vote in the presidential election was won by about 2.2 million votes out of a total of approximately 125 million cast, or 3.3%. In 2004 George W Bush won by 2.4% and claimed a mandate of “political capital,” so some have claimed an even “greater” mandate for President Obama, but as I said in this column a couple of weeks ago, “mandate” is in the eye of the beholder.

What does seem clear is that governing in this climate must be based on collaboration and compromise. Either party has the power to stop the wheels of government by itself, but neither has the ability to govern alone. The country cannot afford the gridlock we have seen for the past four years – there are important matters that must be dealt with – health care, the deficit, climate change, jobs. The litany is as familiar as it is daunting, but without action things can only get worse, and action is only possible if both sides are willing to work together.

President Obama has shown a certain willingness to compromise. On the other hand he was elected to lead and govern and his platform was clear, so in all integrity and good conscience there are places where he will and must stand. He has already said as much on the issue of extending the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy, and it seems reasonable to expect similar stands on health care and some other areas. Members of the GOP have shown encouraging signs of flexibility –repudiation of the “Grover Norquist pledge” has begun and will hopefully grow. John McCain’s rants notwithstanding, it seems reasonable to hope that if the President nominates Susan Rice for Secretary of State in his second term, that nomination will be considered on its merits and not on the specious grounds of a statement made during the Benghazi tragedy. Whatever their public rhetoric, all but the most rigidly doctrinaire right-wingers in the Republican Party must recognize that the most extreme elements of their platform were rejected in the election.

I’m not suggesting that this means the GOP should just roll over or that the Democrats should try to roll over them – on the contrary, if we are to be true to what the Founders intended in establishing the world’s first democratic republic, both sides should recognize that there is support for both views and that only compromise and collaboration will allow for effective action against the very real problems we are facing. Woody Allen said, “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” In this case the correct choice is neither, but a new path forged by reason and the triumph of concern for the general welfare over narrow partisan interests.

 

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Bonanza Column 259 - The Attitude of Gratitude

As Thanksgiving, 2012 approaches we in America find ourselves in an interesting situation. While the result of the recent election was clear, the campaign reflected a nation that is arguably more divided than it has been at any time since the Civil War era. We are engaged in conflicts that are being fought by 1% of Americans and all but ignored by the other 99%, and the Middle East looks on the verge of escalating into a war from which there may be no turning back.

So it might seem odd to consider the question of gratitude, or it might be argued that there is no better time, no greater need than now.

We are accustomed to thinking about gratitude or giving thanks as transactional – we are grateful FOR something or some things, we are thankful FOR specifics. But gratitude is more like a state of mind. The word “gratitude’ comes from the same root as “grace,” and one definition of grace is “the unmerited (or unearned) love of God for humankind.” If we consider gratitude in relation to this derivation, then “transactional gratitude” makes it too small. It puts us in the position of being grateful for the “good” things in our lives and less grateful or not grateful at all for the “bad” things. But who has not had the experience of something that appeared to be a negative turning out to be a blessing in disguise?

I had the experience not long ago of seeing an off-Broadway play called “Falling,” about a family with a severely autistic grown child. The play was extremely well written and acted, and pulled no punches about the challenges of living with this situation, while at the same time portraying how for all the difficulties, the parents, sister, and grandmother of the boy grew in compassion, love, and understanding from the experience. Probably none of us would have an ill or disabled family member if we had a choice, but all of us can relate to the situation of having that situation occur, and finding the blessings inherent in learning to live with and continue to love the person.

There is an aphorism dating from the 17^th Century that says, in German, “Denken ist Danken” – to think is to thank. The 20^th Century philosopher Martin Heidegger expanded on this idea to say that genuine thinking, by which he meant contemplating the meaning of being human, inherently leads to gratitude. The 13^th Century theologian Meister Eckhart said “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ it would be enough.” The Dalai Lama suggests that even encounters with those who irritate or annoy us are opportunities for gratitude: “…there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So, when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare.”

So let’s try, on this one day of the year that is dedicated to gratitude, to put our differences aside and to adopt, for 24 hours at least, an attitude of gratitude. To be thankful not just for our well-being and comfort but also for the opportunities life gives us to practice patience and tolerance, to aid the needy, to comfort the afflicted. Every religious teacher and every religion’s teaching tell us that the meaning of life is not material things and comforts, but to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to comfort those in pain, and to rejoice in others’ joys. This week, this Thanksgiving Day, let’s remember that and practice the gratitude that is there in a kind word, a thoughtful gesture, and in reaching out, even to those we don’t like or agree with.

Have a happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful holiday season.

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Bonanza Column 258: Mandate or No, the Voters Have Spoken

As you would expect last week’s election results have led to an enormous amount of opining from both sides on what it all means. There is debate on whether a margin of 2.5% in the popular vote constitutes a mandate or not, and in my view you can argue either way – “mandate” is not a fact, the truth of which can be argued and proven, but an interpretation of the data and no interpretation is ever right or provable.

So let’s let the facts speak for themselves:

·        As of Noon on Friday, with nearly all votes in, Obama led Romney in the popular vote by a count of 61,173,739 or 50.5% to 58,167,260 or 48.0%.

·        Obama won the electoral vote by a greater margin than Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, or Bush.

·        Obama is the fourth president to win two terms by 50% or more, joining Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan.

·        The Democrats gained two seats in the (already Democrat-controlled) Senate, and while they did not gain a majority in the House, narrowed the margin of difference.

·        Far-right Republicans lost races they were expected to win (e.g.,Mourdock, Akins, McMahon) lost or won by much closer margins than expected (Bachman, Heller).

·        Tax reforms, particularly increasing the tax share of the wealthy was an explicit platform difference between the two parties, and the voters elected the guy who favored that increase.

·        Marriage rights, a hot-button issues for the right wing, was approved in four states by margins of 3 to 6%.

I’m not going to argue whether these results constitute a mandate for President Obama and the Democrats or not. I am suggesting that they, along with a great deal of post-election polling, reflect a trend among centrist and undecided voters away from the Tea Party/Evangelical Right’s positions and a growing disgust with the obstructionism by the Republicans in Congress that was fueled by their pandering to the extreme Right. The results for Mourdock, Akins, and McMahon in particular, along with the defeat of Scott Brown by Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and George Allen by Tim Kaine in Virginia should cause Mssrs. McConnell and Boehner to step back and reevaluate their tactics. McConnell proclaimed four years ago that the main task before the GOP was to make sure Obama was a one-term president – the main task – not the economy, not the endless wars, not poverty or health care. And they failed decisively at that task. Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, so we could see the change of tactics (or not) as a test of the GOP’s sanity.

A decisive majority of the voters have shown how they felt about all the issues the GOP bet their campaign on – tax reform, and Obamacare in particular. Post-election polling indicates that a vast majority of the electorate were disgusted by the campaign – its length, and particularly its mendacity. There was lying on both sides, but fact checkers across the spectrum agree that the dishonesty on the Romney/Ryan side was greater than on the Obama/Biden side by a large multiple. Personally, as I’ve said in this space, I have no use for lying on either side, and that includes lies of omission and lies by telling half-truths, and the American people seem to be showing that they feel the same.

It’s time now for both parties to get back to the business of governing. Liberal/Progressive as I am, I like the two-party system. It should serve to keep all parties honest and to ensure that the best aspects of both the liberal and conservative views are incorporated into policy. I like the parliamentary system of multiple parties better for the same reason, but third parties have never gained much traction here and when it operates effectively the two-party system should accomplish the same thing. It can’t, however, when either party decides that its survival and reelection is more important than what it was elected for and is willing to effectively stop the process of governing for four years in order to unseat a duly elected President.

Boehner has expressed some willingness to collaborate; McConnell still sounds intransigent. The future of the country may very well depend on their willingness to lead their party rather in cooperating to govern rather than maintaining their “my way or the highway” approach. Let’s hope that underneath the bombast, the results of the election are speaking to them and their colleagues and that the next four years are more productive than the last.

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