Monthly Archives: March 2013

Whither Goest The Republican Party?

Like most of you, I take my Republican-issued declarations with large doses of honey and over-the-counter stomach-settlers. So when Reince Priebus, or Prince Rebus as I like to think of him, the Chair of the Republican Party, started issuing declarations about how the GOP needed to change, I naturally expected a bowl of mush.Prince1

Prince was presenting the findings of his 97-page Growth and Opportunity Project Report to a breakfast meeting of assembled Republican leaders, men and women with gray hair, aged bodies, and calcified opinions.

First, the voices from the study rose up to describe how the general population views “the Republican Party today.” Those voices loudly called out, “Scary”, “Narrow minded” and “out of touch”, essentially calling it a party of “stuffy old men.”

To that, I would only add the word “white” as in “stuffy old white men.”

But there was poor Prince Rebus, this morning’s star bearer of bad news, telling his bosses they were so unpopular they needed to stay indoors and away from the windows. And then he offered each of them a tall beaker of hemlock, that poisonous brew said to have killed Socrates, when he went on to explain what the new Republican Party would now stand for.

“First,” Prince declared, defining the way forward for Republicans and their Party, “we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” As if such heretic a thought might get lonely sitting out there by itself, he quickly continued, “Republicans today have to start speaking up for the little guy; it’s time we were the ones blowing the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attacking corporate welfare.”

Honestly, he really said that.

As blue-haired matrons and patrons of the party went faint, Prince ignored their wounded cries of protest, the shouts of pain—shouts of “Never!”, “No!” and “Say it aint so!”— from the gathered party members. Into that wall of growing agitation and protest, he blithely continued, “We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when C.E.O.s receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

“For the G.O.P. to appeal to younger voters,” Prince continued, “we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view.”

Even though everyone at the breakfast knew in their heart of hearts the Party was, indeed, totally… and irrevocably… intolerant of anyone else’s point of view!

Also, in the hope of attracting younger voters, Prince called for an ”RNC Celebrity Task Force” to host star-studded events and fundraisers. Clint Eastwood and Pat Boone were two of the youth-oriented celebrities who first came to mind.

In pushing for more openness and acceptance within the party, Prince pushed his breakfast audience, “C’mon, guys, can we lighten up a bit? Can we stop bashing the gays for once. And stop doling out invasive ultrasounds as pre-abortion punishment? And no more thumping the bible—or the constitution, please!” (Well, he didn’t really say that, but it would have been delightful if he had!)

In an interview with Bob Schiefer around this time, Prince , with great candor, admitted the GOP did a “lousy job” of marketing itself. Adding, “This is no short term view…If we don’t start now, we’re not going to have anymore success in four years, eight years, or twelve years.”

Now, about those four years, eight years, or twelve years…

Here are a few questions I wish Bob Shieffer (perhaps channeling the spirit of Mike Wallace) had had the temerity to ask Prince, starting with.…”What gives you the right to survive as a national political party for those four, eight or twelve years? Shouldn’t your survival depend on earning the support of a significant segment of the population?”

And once Bob got started in that vein, he could have asked, “Why should learning to better market your ideas change anything? If you’re still pushing unpopular or antiquated ideas, you will remain unpopular. Then, the only way you can win elections would be to nominate stealth candidates who pretend to espouse popular viewpoints, but then renege on those positions once winning office. Sort of like Mitt Romney aspired to do in his long term etch-a-sketch evolution from Conservative Republican to Moderate Republican and back to Conservative at the end. Is that the new model? Keeping the lid closed tightly on zealots like Todd Akin or Chrstine O’Donnell so that everybody appears ginger peachy to the boob in the voting booth?”

Then I would have liked Bob to sum it all up, “Prince, can you face up to the fact America has moved beyond—far beyond!—today’s Republican Party? Even if the party has managed to gerrymander enough districts to stay in a crippled position of power. America doesn’t want a Republican Party that disavows everything America stands for—tax fairness, women having the freedom to choose what happens to their bodies, gays having the freedom to marry, economic fairness, a generous government that supports, assists and protects its most vulnerable citizens, a government committed to furthering human rights here and abroad.”

And here’s what I would like to say to Prince once his proposals for an enlightened GOP fail to get traction. “Face it Prince,” I would admonish him, “The Republican Party is a gang of angry, embittered, mostly white and usually wealthy people trying to hold onto their power and their wealth in a country turning less white, more impoverished and more heterogeneous by the day. The first mission of the Republican Party today is to protect the wealth and privileges of the few, to promote a strict almost fundamentalist view of the Constitution, and to cripple the ability of the government to advocate for those less fortunate on the economic ladder.”

Those are the Republican views and policies Prince needs to rewire if the Republican Party wishes to survive as a serious political entity in America.

But rather than working to change the Party’s toxic policies or principles, Prince announced instead a $10 million dollar outreach program to polish up the GOP brand.

Anyone familiar with the Republican brand knows  $10 million won’t even begin to remove the stain.

 

 

 

THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE AND THEY’RE STILL SETTING THE TABLE FOR DINNER!

Think your opinion matters? Apparently not to our City Council. A majority of council members voted at an Ordinance Committee meeting to move along MIT’s upzoning petition before the public had a chance to speak its mind. Arguably, it was to allow our mayor, who had another engagement, to record her vote in favor of the petition. But in reality, you couldn’t fabricate a better example to illustrate what the council feels about your opinion or how they’re responding to the over-heating pressures for development in our city.Cambridge-CityCouncil2012-2013

Put simply, they appear eager to ride the rising tide of development with little concern for those of us who may get flooded out. With little concern for the diversity we’ll lose as they vote to bring in wave after wave of affluent renters. Or for families that get squeezed out by the higher neighborhood rents that accompany new market-rate housing. Or for neighborhoods that will suddenly have 14 or 16 story towers reaching into their sky, and thousands more cars clogging their streets.

The sellers of “progress” tell us this is the price we have to pay to get more housing and create a better Cambridge. Housing has become the shield behind which developers and business interests now hide their self-enrichment and self-interest. If you could prove what I postulated in the previous paragraph, that new market-rate housing chases out more families than it makes room for, and erodes diversity, they would still argue that inclusionary housing forgives all sins. And that providing 11-15% low or mid-level affordable housing in a housing development makes up for whatever loss of low- or middle-income residents it eventually chases out of the city.

Now, as the City Council pretends to effectively review a proposal that will add 2.1 million square feet of office, lab and residential space to a city already densely populated and excessively traveled by car, someone needs to shout “STOP!” Someone needs to exhort them, “Don’t agree to anything until you understand we’re facing a tsunami of development over the course of the next 20 years. Don’t agree to anything until you learn and study the consequences we face from projections that predict over 18 million square feet of new offices, labs and residences in the city. Which, according to Cambridge’s own published numbers, breaks down to over 50,000 new car trips daily, plus a similar number of additional commuter trips.

Forget the fact that MIT wants to build a skyscraper in our city, a 300 foot demonstration of their importance. Perhaps an easy way for pro-development votes on the Council to create a precedent for buildings significantly higher than our zoning has allowed to date. Forget the fact that MIT fails to address the problem of its grad student housing shortages, which seriously impacts the availability of affordable housing in Cambridge. Forget the fact that MIT operates like it can get what it wants just because it wants it.

Why would our City Council agree to such massive upzoning when they cannot imagine the consequences of such a decision? Nor can they understand the context of over-development in which they’ll be making their decision. Denise Simmons has commented on the fact that listening to presentations, citizen opinions and opposing viewpoints in a single evening doesn’t lend itself well to making informed decisions.

With the massive impacts that come with massive upzoning petitions, the City Council, as the stewards charged with protecting and guiding our city, need to do their homework. They need to find out how many thousands of car trips and transit trips this level of development would bring? They need to know how many millions of square feet of development the City is facing down the road, so we can sensibly prepare for whatever is coming.

To vote on the MIT petition, or the K2C2 recommendations without looking seriously at the future is like continuing to set the table for dinner even though your senses tell you the house is on fire.

It’s time to stop and think; to slow the rush to development and to rethink dotting the landscape with towers. It’s time to stop and study the future, before we rush headlong into it.

It’s time to say no to mindless development.

Then let’s see what develops.

NRA FIGHTS DRONE CONTROL

Washington, D.C.—Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association lashed out at critics of the NRA’s lobbying efforts to protect private ownership of drones and drone NRAmissiles.

Mr. LaPierre was speaking before a small gathering of armament manufacturing CEO’s here in the nation’s capital. They had come to lobby their Republican congressmen and senators to resist attempts by bleeding heart liberals to curb sales of any weaponry that could potentially be manufactured in the U.S.A.

Pointing at the screen behind him where a video was playing without sound, LaPierre explained, “Here you see Sarah Palin, one of the first hunters to use drone missiles. Notice, Sarah no longer needs to use a helicopter to shoot and kill moose. These days she sits at her computer piloting her hunting drone across the Alaska wilderness. Now watch this! As you can see from this Fox News documentary, Sarah was able to successfully bring down an entire herd of moose with a single hellfire drone missile.”

“Pow!,” he exclaimed triumphantly, as the missile hit the quietly grazing herd. “Good shot Sarah. Bad news mooses!”

Waiting for the spontaneous burst of applause to die down, LaPierre continued, “Hell, why is everyone in such a damn rush to limit the sale of drones? If the U.S. Government has drones, how long will it be before the drug dealer on the corner has drones? Assuming they don’t already have them!”

The question of school safety, still on everyone’s mind in the aftermath of the Newtown school shootings,  came up quickly in a question from the audience.

“But how can we keep our grandchildren safe?” one elderly CEO asked. “You called for an armed security guard in every school, but what good is that if everyone can now purchase drones with missiles?”

“Excellent question!” Mr. LaPierre replied, spinning on his feet and pulling out his gun finger to shoot at the inquiring CEO. “Thought you had me there!” he joked, blowing off the imaginary smoke from his recently fired gun finger.

Mr. LaPierre turned to face the blank screen behind him, raised a remote control and clicked it at the screen.

“Anti-missile missiles!” he exclaimed excitedly as a photo of a school-mounted anti-missile artillery battery came up on the screen. “One battery per school should do it; maybe two for schools located in ethnic neighborhoods.”

When asked if owning missile-carrying drones was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States, Mr.LaPierre answered tersely, “It is in my copy.”

Offering a wink and a smile, he added, “Right after assault weapons!”