Politics mostly social commentary.
Tim Brown, Dan Coons and Cassie Rochholz bested the field of seven candidates for directors of the Solon School Board. Here are the unofficial results from the Johnson and Linn County auditors.
I congratulate everyone who ran for school board and wish the winners good luck in their upcoming terms. Thank you readers for following my coverage. God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll do it again in 2023.
I was invested in Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for president and attended some events about which she wrote in Persist, her memoir published this year.
Like tens of thousands of others I waited in a selfie line and got my moment. I don’t recall what we talked about. Of all the things I thought about Warren during the campaign and afterward, the book is about something I hadn’t considered much: she’s a woman living in what largely was and remains a patriarchy.
The book is worth reading whether you are a fan or not. It explains some of her major policies in a way only a teacher could: clearly and rationally. For example, I didn’t understand the importance of child care to society until I read her explanation in Persist. When talking with friends and Democratic acquaintances during the run up to the Iowa caucuses, I heard the discussions about whether we should run another woman for president, whether a woman could win against Donald Trump. Those questions weren’t asked of men. Warren recounts these attitudes and what they meant in detail. I knew there would be wonkish policy stuff yet I didn’t expect the book to be as good as it was.
I couldn’t live the kind of life Warren does, mostly because I’m not as smart and don’t have the same kind of drive she does. The book serves as an example of a life worth living, an example of how to deal with prejudice, sexism, racism, economic injustice and more. It inspires us to dream big, fight hard and be better citizens.
We’ll never know what the United States would have been like with President Elizabeth Warren. For the time being we can be glad she’s in it with a position of power. We can also follow her suggestion and persist.
Inch by inch, row by row. That’s how a gardener builds a life. I need a couple of days away from the blog after 97 daily posts in a row. While I’m gone, here’s Arlo Guthrie teaching us how to sing a song. Hope you have a happy time zone!
On Friday, Oct. 22, 263 voters cast a ballot at the Solon High School satellite voting site hosted by the county auditor. Most were locals. According to John Deeth from the auditor’s office, the party breakdown was 63 Democrats, 121 Republicans, and 79 No Party. School board is supposedly a non-partisan election yet we obsess over party affiliation. In 2019, 1,225 voters (24.3 percent of those registered) cast a ballot and two Republicans won. This cycle voter turnout is expected to be high yet about the same.
That Republicans were the largest group of voters is not surprising. Something that attracts new people to the Solon Community School District is how K-12 schools are run. The community made significant investments in school infrastructure, an attractive feature of the district. Before the coronavirus pandemic, school infrastructure was a main focus of the school board. This is both an adjustment to population growth and feeding it. When I review voter registrations of people living in newly constructed subdivisions, there are plenty of Republicans. Newcomers seem to favor Republican voter registration although I’d like to see a formal study.
We are a community where some voters cling to the Trump administration. If he ran for president in 2024 many would vote for him again. I avoid political conversations unless I know to whom I am speaking, which is typical for many. As a community we get worn out by political talk and seek to avoid it when going about our lives. When I posted a selfie wearing a Biden-Harris t-shirt on social media, a neighbor who planned to vote for them told me they couldn’t do something like that because of social connections at church, work and the schools. The new buzzwords in the community are about running the schools “for the benefit of all students.” This is code for white privilege, increasing insularity of our lives in an age of mass media, and personal disagreements with neighbors and area residents about politics.
Since the 2011 political redistricting, the northeast corner of Iowa’s most liberal county has been turning conservative. In 2012, voters in House District 73 chose a Republican state representative and reelected him four times. In my precinct 2020 voters picked the Republican congressional candidate over the Democrat for the first time since Dave Loebsack first ran for office in 2006. When we moved here there were more Democrats, yet political considerations mattered less than being some distance from work with access to good roads to get there. Good schools were also important. If I were to move again, it would be to a place where being a Democrat would be more accepted.
A local group formed a political action committee to advertise three Democratic candidates for the school board as a change slate supporting school safety during the pandemic. The satellite voting statistics can be understood as a referendum of how well that is going. The low Democratic numbers do not bode well for the Nov. 2 election. There has been a lot of Facebook activity on school board candidate campaign pages, but actual voter turnout among Democrats is lagging expectations.
Despite community uproar about changes in collective bargaining for district employees before the 2019 school board election, voters chose incumbency over change. We’ll see if that’s still the case on election day.
Editor’s note: There were two home football games at 4:30 p.m. (freshmen) and 7:30 p.m. (varsity) the day of satellite voting. The first was not well attended (it was raining). The hope was holding satellite voting at the high school during the Friday games would increase turnout. It is difficult to draw a correlation between the satellite and the games. During the 2020 election cycle, satellite voting at the public library was also well-attended with no such event correlation. I believe increased turnout at the satellite has more to do with promotion during the week immediately prior, combined with high interest in this election.
Click here for all of my coverage of the Solon School Board Election.
Early Friday morning I swept around the furnace so the technician arriving in the afternoon had a clean workspace. Most autumns we have the same company who installed our furnace in 1993 inspect and clean it before winter. It is a good idea.
The technician and I chatted outdoors near the garage door. Having chats like this is becoming a thing for me. I learned about the heating and air conditioning trade in the area: which companies worked on what brands of equipment, which were acquired by a larger company. We talked about how smaller companies maintain parts inventory with so many different brands of furnaces and air conditioners. Some companies will work only on brands in which they specialize. As our furnace ages, it will get increasingly difficult to get it serviced. There will be pressure to upgrade to new equipment. Like with anything in the economy the heating and air conditioning business is in transition.
We talked about electrification of homes and he knew few people who did not use natural gas for heating. If we are to get to a decarbonized economy, natural gas, a fossil fuel, will have to go. The conversation illustrated how far we have to go to leave fossil fuels in the ground and get to zero emissions by mid-century..
MidAmerican Energy supplies our home with natural gas for the furnace and water heater. On Oct. 12, they said, “Based on the market prices for natural gas over the last month, residential customers in MidAmerican’s service area can likely expect their total bills to increase by 46-96%.” We keep the thermostat low already, so we’re looking for ways to stay warm and run the furnace less this winter. We’re not sure what to do differently.
I recently fixed the smoke and CO detector on the lower level, replacing the one that stays plugged in with a new one with a ten-year lithium battery. If I’m still living in 2031, I need to remember to change it out. I should be testing it weekly as well.
Thursday afternoon I checked the garden. Weather forecasts were for a first frost that didn’t actually arrive by Friday morning. I gleaned jalapenos, bell peppers and a head of radicchio. The refrigerator is jammed with jalapenos wanting a dish. It will be some form of jalapeno sauce for use in cooking or maybe as salsa on tacos.
I went outside Saturday morning and frost is in the air. A month into autumn, winter will soon be here. We are ready.
Since we became a one-car family in August the extra garage space filled the way water seeks its own level. Garden stuff, tools and equipment were scattered in every available space. I spent a couple of hours cleaning up and organizing on Saturday. It was a mess, and now is less so.
When I began having larger garlic harvests I cut two by fours to make temporary sawhorses for a drying rack. “Temporary” because I didn’t nail them together so they could be disassembled and easily stored once the garlic cured. In my large panel storage rack I had the remnant of the four foot by eight foot by three quarter inch plywood left from making the platform for our daughter’s loft bed in college. I spread four two by fours across the span of sawhorses and put the plywood on top, finished side up. It made a sturdy table.
I used this surface to clean up the stairway where many cups, COVID-19 test kits, picture frames, and other detritus of living were camped. I also cleared the other sawhorse table near my writing table of its contents. Now I have two transitional surfaces to go through stuff. Three if I can clear the folding table I brought with me from Germany.
In a home, space tends to get used. While approaching septuagenarian status the goal is to clear that space and dispose of old printers and computers, countless electrical cords, and everything not needed for living out the rest of my days. I don’t need one hundred coffee cups. To live a life less on a life expectancy of 15.4 more years (figured using the Social Security online calculator) and more on being here now. That means stop talking about getting rid of stuff and actually do it. No more delays!
Once space was cleared, my daily task list quickly filled with activities related to the disposition of things. I’m a bit excited about the prospect of owning less. We also have plans for new space created. That is, plans other than filling it with more stuff.
The Solon Economist hosted a school board candidate forum at the Solon Center for the Arts on Oct. 20. About 80 people were present at the beginning and more than 100 by its end. A majority of seats in the large auditorium were empty.
The winning candidates of the 2019 school board election, Adam Haluska and Jami Wolf, received 447 and 444 votes respectively. Based on last night’s attendance, the 2021 election will be decided by voters who were not at the forum. People appeared to arrange themselves in clusters according to for whom they planned to vote. I doubt many minds were changed by the forum.
Solon Economist editor Margaret Stevens opened the event with remarks. Dean Martin, a former school board member, moderated the event and asked the questions. I counted eight questions in addition to opening and closing remarks by all the candidates. No candidate made any major mistakes and each one demonstrated something positive. Stevens said the forum was being recorded and would be posted on YouTube. Here is the link. I do not plan to get into question by question analysis since voters can look at the hour and a half video for themselves.
This post is biased, as has been all my coverage. My main discussion of the forum was at home with my spouse and will remain between us. My goals in writing in public about the election were stated in my first post:
Overall, the forum did little to change my view that this election will pivot on whether or not voters want change on the school board. A mailer from a group called Solon Parents and Teachers to Keep SCSD Safe arrived at home yesterday. Erika Billerbeck, Kelly Edmonds and Michael Neuerburg were advertised as change candidates. Without the mailer or inside information, a voter wouldn’t know they are on a slate. Tim Brown and Dan Coons are incumbents and their re-election would indicate voters are happy with the way things are going. Who is the third no change candidate? There may not be one as the incumbents are strong enough to stand on their own. It is possible voters will pick who they believe is the strongest from the remaining five candidates. A prominent Republican in the district, who was active in the previous elections of Brown and Coons, is displaying a Rochholz sign in their yard. That may be a sign (pun intended).
The county auditor is providing satellite voting at the High School from 2:30 until 8:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 22. I intend to vote then because if we don’t turn out, it may be less likely the auditor will hold satellite voting here in the future. Whatever you do, if you live in the Solon Community School District, get yourself to the polls on Oct. 22 or Nov. 2 and vote.
Click here to read all of my coverage of the 2021 Solon School Board Election.
This post first ran on June 4, 2010. It was a relatively small gathering and I had a chance to shake Powell’s hand. Powell’s view of the Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement was illustrative of his mainstream political and economic values. Powell died yesterday of complications from COVID-19 at age 84.
Colin Powell and Free Trade in Iowa
This week former Secretary of State Colin Powell came to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to dedicate a memorial to 507 Iowans who died during the Korean War. It is past time for such a memorial, and the event brought out Korean War Veterans, legionnaires, politicians and citizens of every stripe. While I was walking from the parking lot at Veteran’s Memorial Park to the seating area, an old van pulled up, windows open and Aaron Tippin’s song about eagles, the flag and “if that bothers you, well that’s too bad” booming into the air, shaking the pavement. A parking lot attendant in a military uniform told the driver, “Don’t turn that off.” It typified the gathering as predominantly working class, veteran and plain folks like us.
PMX Industries, Inc. was the host and funding source for the memorial. PMX is headquartered in Cedar Rapids and is an affiliate of the South Korea based Poongsan Corporation, whose tagline is, “Poongsan Corporation can, and will, contribute to human progress through our superior products.” PMX makes the copper and brass alloys that go into things we use every day, such as coinage, ammunition casings, electrical connectors and lock sets. Poongsan’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Jin Roy Ryu, was present for the dedication, posing for photos with dignitaries and assisting with the unveiling of the memorial. Chairman Ryu is politically well connected in the United States. He translated and published a Korean edition of Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey. The author believes most in the audience had not heard of him. It also seems likely Ryu’s long standing relationship with Colin Powell brought him to Cedar Rapids for the ceremony.
Sid Morris, President of the Korean War Association Iowa Chapter, spoke and PMX President, S. G. Kim, gave a well written speech to mark the occasion. Many of us had come to hear Colin Powell speak.
In a world where cynicism is commonplace, when Powell advocated for ratification of the Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), it was unsettling. It was unsettling partly because of the potential for additional off-shoring of jobs a free trade agreement with South Korea would represent. According to the Office of the U. S. Trade representative, the treaty is signed but not ratified, with the status, “the Obama Administration will seek to promptly and effectively address the issues surrounding the KORUS FTA, including concerns that have been expressed regarding automotive trade.” The author is not the first to be concerned about the treaty’s encouragement of off shoring jobs to South Korea.
More than this reaction, what was bothersome was the way this advocacy was raised in the context of recognition of our Korean War Veterans. Why does there have to be a political agenda behind everything? When I look at the people sitting next to the podium, Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett, S.G. Kim, Colin Powell and Chairman Ryu, I believe all of them to be decent people. At the same time, in an economy where increasing the number of jobs has proven to be difficult at best, why politicize this dedication to fallen soldiers?
Powell’s assertion was that Korean investments in the United States have created jobs, like the ones at PMX Industries. His reasoning is that presumably there would be more investment by Korean companies in the US with a Free Trade Agreement. No guarantees of that. There would also be a trickle down of jobs related to new access to South Korean markets by U.S. companies. With U.S. productivity on the skids, some of these sales could be serviced through increases in productivity more than through expansion. In any case, the benefits of a Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement cannot be easily reduced to something that would fit in an Aaron Tippin song.
I am thankful that PMX Industries donated the funds for the Korean War memorial. At the same time, the interconnectedness of local politics, jobs and foreign affairs, as represented by the relationship between Jin Roy Ryu, Colin Powell and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, indicate again that the powerful influences at work in our lives have their own agenda. That agenda does not always fit the needs of working people.
Long after the applause at their private luncheon at the country club is forgotten, we’ll continue to be here, living our middle class lives in the post-Reagan era.
It was another day of rain on Wednesday. We need rain yet I’m getting a bit tired of being cooped up.
We ate the last of the acorn squash I grew for dinner. We are down to the yellow and red storage onions, 27 garlic heads, and about ten pounds of potatoes. There is garden gleaning to do and the first frost has not been forecast. We have a glut of apples and deer are not making enough progress eating fallen ones under the tree, even if they all know the smorgasbord is open.
I bought two boxes of packets of USDA organic gummy bears for any trick or treaters this year. I haven’t decided whether or not to turn on the front door light because of the recent outbreak of COVID-19 in the schools. I want to be ready because of supply chain issues much publicized in the media. Only regret is the gummies have gelatin, so are not a vegetarian option for the kiddos, as parents today call their children.
I wonder how my mental capacity is changing with age. I wonder if I will be able to tell it changed… probably not. I’m not ready to kick back and work on my reading pile for the rest of my days. God help me if I connect a new television to the cable. There are more gardens to grow and a house to fix up, all with the limited resources of a pensioner. I’m ready to retire, but not sure what that means in 2021.
Meanwhile it rains, rains, rains.
On July 1, 1971, the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, lowering the voting age to 18 years. I was eligible to vote in the 1972 general election yet I have no memory of doing so. There was little guidance and I recall confusion about whether to register in Iowa City where I attended university, or where I grew up in Davenport. Absent guidance, it was one less vote for George McGovern. I figured I’d vote in the next election.
On Oct. 26, 1972, McGovern gave a speech at a rally in Iowa City on the steps of Old Capitol. His motorcade of small-sized vehicles arrived late. This first paragraph from the New York Times coverage captured the subject and mood of the speech.
IOWA CITY., Oct. 26—Senator George McGovern expressed hope here today that the Nixon Administration’s confidence of an imminent cease‐fire in the Vietnam war was well founded. But he refused, in a carefully worded speech to 15,000 people on the campus of the University of Iowa, to credit the Nixon Administration for the prospect of peace, saying that those who had opposed the war deserved “much of the credit.”
New York Times, Oct. 27, 1972.
We were an anti-war crowd and McGovern was just what we wanted to hear. Many of us had protested the war in 1970 after Kent State and on campus in 1971 where we encountered the Scott County sheriff’s posse, tear gas, and more. I wasn’t worried about using my newly granted voting rights. We were involved in something bigger than one person. I remember this part of the speech.
“The question that haunts my mind this afternoon,” he told the cheering audience “is this: Why, Mr. Nixon, did you take another four more years’ to put an end to this tragic war?
“What did either we or the rest of the world gain by the killing of another 20,000 young Americans these past four years?.
“What did we get from the terrible unprecedented bombardment that has gone on these last four years—bombardment and artillery attacks that we are told have either killed or maimed or driven out of their homes some six million people, most of them in South Vietnam?”
New York Times, Oct. 27, 1972.
As we now know, Richard Nixon won the presidency then resigned in disgrace, making Gerald Ford president.
In 1976, I was serving in the U.S. military and unavailable to attend caucus. After getting rid of Nixon, I didn’t care who was the next president. Anyone would have been better. I was in transit from Fort Benning, Georgia to Mainz, Germany during the general election and did not vote. To be honest, I didn’t think much about voting and was ready to accept whoever was chosen by the electorate. Jimmy Carter was nominated by Democrats and won the general election.
The rest of my Iowa caucus life is as follows:
Going forward, I don’t care what the Democratic National Committee does about the nominating calendar. Unless the state party uses the caucus experience for party building, what’s the point? David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register was a peddler of the party building myth. I doubt Democratic activists are willing to swallow that any more. In the meanwhile, Republicans gained hegemony in Iowa.
Who knows if there will be a presidential preference poll at the 2024 Iowa caucuses? More importantly, who cares?
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