Category: Politics

My state representative, Elinor Levin, on her official Facebook account:

There’s a lot of chatter around Johnson County Board of Supervisors Chair Jon Green’s decision not to fly the flag at half staff in honor of Charlie Kirk.

I abhor violence to my very core. It sickens me. I am a child who lost a parent young (not to violence, thankfully), and every time a person dies of unnatural causes, every time someone threatens another person, every time someone is at risk- I don’t think about the victim or potential victim- I think about those who will be left behind. It is never the person who dies who is left heartbroken- it is those who love them.

So, I have thought a lot about it in the past three days, and I respect Chair Green’s decision. Charlie Kirk SHOULD NOT have been shot. It was wrong, and left so many people across the country in grief.

But, we CANNOT let the honor of a flag at half-staff be used as a political plaything. We cannot lower it for every person who dies due to gun violence in the USA; there are not enough days in the year. Chair Green did not call for Charlie Kirk’s death- he would never do such a thing. He did not celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death- he would never do such a thing.

He recognized that Charlie Kirk was a man who, through the exercise of his right to free speech, hurt many, many people. Kirk spoke against the right to exist freely, to self-determination, for so many of the people I know and love. He invited people to “prove [him] wrong” without any demonstrated interest in changing his mind. He uplifted division and disenfranchisement.

Those he left behind have my deepest condolences and love. He does not get my respect.

Pretty pitch perfect.

Ryan Hansen for the Press-Citizen:

Iowa City and Johnson County leaders held their first public meeting to discuss a joint law enforcement facility, though city leaders stopped short of committing to the project.

The full panel of Iowa City City Councilors and Johnson County Supervisors heard presentations from local design firm Shive-Hattery and the Johnson County Attorney’s Office during a 90-minute meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 10.

[…]

Johnson County formally asked Iowa City to consider a joint facility on Aug. 28. The Iowa City City Council is expected to formally consider the county’s inquiry at its next meeting on Sept. 16.

If the city is interested, the county likely will ask them to consider forming a “joint authority” by Oct. 1. A joint authority is required by Iowa law to operate a combined facility.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Facebook, criticizing Jon Green, current chair of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, for deciding the Johnson County would not lower its flags in honor of Charlie Kirk.

It’s disgraceful that a locally-elected official has chosen to put politics above human decency during a time like this.

Instant a politician criticizes another politician for being political you can ignore the rest of their argument.

The truth is that “politics” and “human decency” do not align well unless your politics are “human decency” which often, unfortunately, isn’t very popular in practice (see: NIMBYism). Of course accusing a politician of putting politics above human decency is hypocritical and in bad faith.

Update: Ironically, Supervisor Green is reportedly getting death threats. The “human decency” Gov. Reynolds says she wants, includes, at least in my mind, not threatening to kill locally elected officials who decide to…[checks notes]…fly the American flag at full-staff. I look forward to her condemnation of these threats.

John Deeth on his eponymous blog:

Caucuses with hundreds of people that take three or more hours to complete do ACTIVE DAMAGE to our organizing efforts. 

[…]

We don’t lose Democratic votes over it in the fall, and eventually they caucus again, only because they have no choice. But we lose PEOPLE. People who might be donors or volunteers instead sit on the sidelines because they are convinced the local Democrats are a shit show – because their first experience when they try to join is getting told “stand in line for 45 minutes to sign in, then go stand in the corner for three hours to vote.”

This is not the reason I’m convinced the local Democrats are a shit show, but Deeth isn’t wrong, either.

So much joy after all the recriminations of the campaign. Grassroots movements , and welcoming people in, matters.

Josh Marshall has a sobering post at Talking Points Memo in which he quotes Lee Bollinger from an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.

We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.

“Failure of imagination” is a nice way of saying “people who shouldn’t be are in denial of what’s happening.” I’d point to Chuck Schumer’s failure to hold the line this past week.

Back to Marshall:

That is what is happening. And we’re in the middle of it. As semi-familiar as the words and concepts are, we all collectively need to concentrate on that statement. It’s neither a future possibility nor an accomplished fact.

That is, as John Connor says in Terminator 2, there’s no fate, and we can’t act like there is.

Trump and his administration, with the help of the Republican Party, while dismantling the federal government, are also simultaneously attacking other nodes of power outside of government: the government. Obviously higher education, but also, and here’s where Marshall goes deeper, the law firms that are necessary for private actors to work within the legal system.

A free society exists not simply because there are limits on the power of the government. The state may have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But it does not have a monopoly on power. It’s free because there are multiple nodes of power — cultural, economic, social — in the national space. Universities are one of those. The private sector economy is another.

We each need to resist in our own spaces and places.

We’ve got a huge job on our hands and there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed. But the first step of acting is knowing exactly where you are. People who are thinking in terms of Viktor Orbán are not surprised by each successive move. It’s actually pretty textbook. How it all shakes out comes down to the decisions countless private actors make. It also means supporting institutions that are meaningfully supporting free society. That doesn’t have to be a matter of performative spectacles. At its most essential, it means not changing behavior.

This is war, and we need to observe, orient, decide, act faster than those we oppose.