Seventy Years Ago: November 14, 1943

November 14, 1943  

In a freak accident, President Roosevelt, Generals Marshall and Arnold, Admirals Leahy and King, plus scores of distinguished politicians, and army, naval and air force strategists came under fire while traveling to the the Tehran Conference on board the battleship Iowa. While running a torpedo drill, the US destroyer William D. Porter was targeting the Iowa's #2 magazine, a live torpedo was ejected and headed for the battleship. After maneuvering, the torpedo detonated 1200 feet aft of Iowa in her wake turbulence. When the incident was concluded, Air Force General Hap Arnold leaned over to Fleet Commander Admiral King and asked, "Tell me Ernest, does this happen often in your Navy?"

Oriental Town Board Meeting November 13, 2013

I attended last night's meeting of Oriental's Town Board.

I'm not quite sure why I keep going. Possibly because I believe in democracy and think everyone should take part. Possibly because I remain puzzled about why so little of importance gets done, why so much of the activity is expended on trivialities and so little on planning for the future.

You can learn a bit by reading Town Dock's account:

"Oriental’s Town Board met last night. Among other things, the Board okayed, in a 4-1 vote, the lettering for a Town Hall dedication plaque that will list the Town Board members and the Town Manager at the time of the renovation. Cost: upwards of $875 (on top of the $160 spent on an earlier rendition the Board rejected.) Commissioner Larry Summers said after the meeting that he voted against it because “I don’t believe in self-aggrandizement.” He said it was also, “quite a bit of money.”

"Earlier in the meeting, the Board put off spending money on 20 chairs for the public to sit on the Town Hall meeting room. Some commissioners said they thought the price too high. The chairs, from Staples, were listed as $54 apiece.

"It was also stated at the meeting that the dock the Town got in the Chris Fulcher land swap cannot be extended now — it’s not CAMA that decides if it can be made longer, as first thought. Turns out it’s up to the Corps of Engineers, whose review is seen as a more onerous process. The dock will stop at 80 feet. The town’s already spent $12,000 to have planks laid and other modifications."

But that's not all. The board held a public hearing on an amendment to the GMO "for clarification," the mayor explained. Balderdash! The purpose of the amendment was to "get" one of our citizens. This was never clearly explained, but one of the commissioners let slip the true objective.

A good question to ask at one of these hearings about an amendment is: "what is the problem to which this is the solution?"

We should be about fixing the town's figurative and literal potholes, and not pursuing personal vendettas.

Is that too much to ask? Maybe it is.

America's Eleven Nations: A Map

In an earlier post, I made reference to Colin Woodard's article analyzing his breakdown of the eleven nations into which he sees America divided. I might quibble with some of his analysis, but on the whole it seems close to the mark. How would I know? I have lived in and have family connections to ten of Woodard's eleven nations. What's missing? Only New Netherlands. Even there, I have ancestors who immigrated to New Amsterdam about 1628. My wife's ancestors immigrated to Nouvelle France about the same time. And our grandsons are native Americans.

So we have seen it all, up close and personal.

Seventy Years Ago: November 12, 1943 - USS Iowa (BB-61)

November 12, 1943, President Roosevelt and his senior advisers traveled on the President's yacht Potomac to the Norfolk area to board USS Iowa (BB-61). Destination: Teheran. Purpose: strategic meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

Security measures were elaborate. See the description here.

Iowa was fitted out with a bathtub in the Captain's quarters for the president's comfort. It remains aboard to this day.

This was not a peacetime cruise - German submarines and aircraft still menaced the seas.

USS Iowa - our newest, best armored and most powerful battleship, was the safest platform available for the president.

One Nation, Indivisible? Not Exactly

I wasn't pleased with the results of last Tuesday's municipal election in Oriental. That makes three elections in a row that I found disappointing, but I am not discouraged. My adult life has been spent defending democracy, and I still believe in it. But the older I get, the more I understand Winston Churchill's remark that democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others that have ever been tried.

We need to remember, though, that our form of democracy is not the only possible form.

Can we get better (more democratic) results with a little tweaking, or do we need more fundamental restructuring? Maybe not.

Last week, I received in the mail my copy of the Fall, 2013 alumni magazine from Tufts University. It included an article by a 1991 graduate, Colin Woodard, entitled "Up in Arms." "The battle lines of today's debates over gun control, stand-your-ground laws, and other violence-related issues," the heading declared, "were drawn centuries ago by America's early settlers."

Woodard looks at all of North America, dividing it into eleven identifiable nations: Yankeedom, New Netherlands, The Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, Deep South, El Norte, The Left Coast, The Far West, New France, and First Nation. The Washington Post asks, "which of the11 American nations do you live in" and includes a link to the article. It is well worth reading. Building on the work of historian David Hackett Fisher, whose seminal work of cultural history, Albion's Seed, calls attention to four original migrations from the British Isles, Woodard also cites later work by the social psychologist Nisbett, Robert Baller of the University of Iowa, Pauline Grosjean of Australia and others.

The most interesting feature of Woodard's article is a map depicting, county by county, the location of each of the eleven dominant "nations" today. It turns out that I have lived in eight of the eleven nations.

How does this play out in American political life?

Since 1990, I have followed the work of the Times-Mirror Center, now the Pew Research Center for The People and The Press. Following each presidential election for the past twenty-two years, the Center has surveyed the public for opinions on public policy. Each survey results in a "political typology," breaking down the population into anywhere from nine to eleven clusters of opinion.

The most recent typology, published here, breaks the population down into ten groupings. None is likely to correspond to First Nation, but I find it interesting that the number of the Pew Center's clusters is so close to the number of "nations" in Woodard's article. It would be very interesting to see a county by county breakdown of the Pew Center's typology.

Now The Town Of Oriental Has Three New Faces On The Board

It remains to be seen whether the outcome of yesterday's election is good news, bad news or just news.

I think the present board, which will be replaced next month, has not moved the Town forward in any way. It has been a disappointing board. It has been a disappointment both for what it has done and for what it has left undone.

The failings are those of individuals, but also failings resulting from the dynamics of small town politics.

Some of those failings can be addressed by changing the structure of Town government. It should have become clear over the last two years that the Board of Commissioners doesn't want to hear from the public.

We can change that. If we amend the town's charter so that at least a majority of the commissioners are elected to represent districts, every citizen would have at least one commissioner who would have to listen. It might also help to have the commissioners elect the mayor. That would certainly bedebatable, but we need to have that conversation.

Let's put the matter on the ballot by petition.

We can shoot for the May primary.

Tomorrow Is Election Day: Vote Wisely

I wish Oriental's voters could all have been at tonight's meeting of the Pamlico County Board of Commissioners. They would have seen the kind of board at work that the Town needs.

Those who have been following the issue know about Alan Propst's articles in Pamlico News and the Sun Journal exposing the effort of an out of state corporation to unlawfully convert a very large tract of land from wetlands to farmlands. If successful, this could result in vast profits for the firm and vast damage to the county.

The Pamlico County courtroom was filled with citizens concerned about the environmental damage this plan could cause.

As commissioner Chris Mele explained, the commissioners learned about the problem only two weeks ago. The last thing the county needed was the kind of dithering that has become routine in Oriental.

At tonight's meeting, the County Comissioners took three actions aimed at gaining control over the situation:
1. Approved a letter from the chair of the Board of Commissioners to the US Corps of Engineers detailing the reasons the Corps decision concerning the Trent Road parcel should be reexamined;
2. Referred a draft ordinance to the county planning board, which would require notification of such actions to the County Government as well as to state and federal officials;
3. Agreed to ask our legislators to seek a local bill clearly granting legal jurisdiction to the county over wetlands matters.

All three measures were unanimously approved. Clearly the commissioners had shared views with each other and with the county manager and had achieved a measure of agreement before the meeting. Only a few small details were discussed and quickly resolved.

Just as clearly, the County Commissioners were aware of public sentiment on the matter and arranged the agenda so that the problem could be presented to the board and the public.

It was a well-run meeting, addressing and engaging public concerns, and taking action.

Would that we had a mayor and Board of Commissioners in Oriental capable of such effective measures.

Affordable Care Act: What's The Real Problem?

Economist Brad DeLong calls attention to a piece by Jim Tankerslee in Ezra Klein's Blog. Tankerslee explains the problems poor workers in Rome, Georgia have with the ACA as "due to a quirk in the law."

DeLong makes it very plain that it is NOT due to the law. It IS due to a decision by Justice Roberts and his cohorts on the US Supreme Court, coupled with efforts by Republican Governors and State Legislators who intentionally sabotaged the law.

Here is how DeLong explains it:

"The phrases "because of a quirk in the health-care law, and the fact that Georgia declined to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income people like him, Rizer can’t qualify for a subsidy to buy coverage" are not adequate. What Tankersley means is:

1. The ACA provides subsidies for people with incomes more than 1/3 above the poverty level to afford insurance via the exchange-marketplace.
2. The ACA provides coverage for people with lower incomes via the expanded Medicaid program.
3. Chief Justice John Roberts and the other four right-wing justices broke this system by giving individual states the option not to accept the federal money to pay for the expansion of Medicaid.
4. This was a lawless and unforeseen action: no precedent for it in previous court decisions and no warrant for it in the constitution.
5. Because it was a lawless and unforeseen action, it had never struck the minds of anybody drafting the ACA that the John Roberts, C.J., and his Four Horsemen of the Constitution-in-Exile would do such a thing.
6. Thus people with incomes less than 1 1/3 times the poverty level are left high and dry: since they are supposed to be covered by expanded Medicaid, there is no language in the ACA allowing them to claim subsidies.
7. If Roberts, C.J., had been a public-spirited an intelligent man, he would have realized that if he was going to rewrite the ACA to break its Medicaid expansion provision, he also needed to rewrite the exchange subsidy provision to provide people with incomes less than 1 1/3 times the poverty level with access to subsidies.
8. Roberts, C.J., did not do this.
9. Perhaps Roberts simply wanted to harm people with incomes lower than 1 1/3 times poverty who lived in states that would pick up the ball not to expand Medicaid he had given them and run with it, on the theory that creating an aggrieved class for whom the ACA is clearly not working would redound to the political benefit of the Republican Party.
10. Perhaps Roberts did not understand what he was doing.
11. In any event, Roberts rewrote the ACA from the bunch--and so left people with incomes like Donald Rizen's in red states with governors and legislatures who fear the Tea Party out in the cold. All of numbers (1) through (11) are inside Tankersley's "quirk in the health-care law". I know that that is what is inside Tankersley's "quirk in the health-care law". But how many of Tankersley's readers will know that?
12. The state of Georgia did, indeed--in spite of the protests of doctors and hospitals that want Medicaid expansion so they don't have to keep playing the shell-game of cost-shifting in order to raise the resources to cover the treatment of the uninsured--did indeed refuse to expand Medicaid.
13. And that is how the Governor Nathan Deal, the legislature of Georgia, John Roberts, C.J., and the Four Horsemen of the Constitution-in-Exile casually #@#&^ed Donald Rizen, a fifty-something with a bad shoulder, and many other Americans as well. All of numbers (1) through (13) are inside Tankersley's "quirk in the health-care law, and the fact that Georgia declined to expand Medicaid". I know that's what those clauses in Tankersley's article are really saying. But how many of Tankersley's readers will know?
14. And then comes the end of Tankersley's article: "When he visited the federal health insurance exchange Web site, he found the cheapest policy available to him cost $200 a month — one quarter of his current salary. 'Obama', he said, 'he thinks that he’s helping things, but he ain’t'. He fished out a bruised green apple and tossed it aside. Only a few boxes were left." Could there be a crueler irony? The original ACA--the one that Pelosi and Reid passed and that Obama signed--provides Donald Rizen with health-insurance coverage (Medicaid, admittedly, but coverage) for free. It is Republicans John Roberts, Nathan Deal, the legislature, and the Four Horsemen who have casually #@#&^ed him. But who does he blame? He blames Barack Obama."

Make no mistake. That is the Republican scheme.