Easy Sunday: Curt Ankerberg is back

Curt Ankerberg has filed as a candidate for Jackson County commissioner.

I have a quandary. 

Should I give space to a candidate for local office, so that readers can get a better idea of who is on the ballot?

Or should I stay silent about a candidate that many Medford-area voters find dangerous and vile?

Local News KOBI

Curt Ankerberg is a perennial candidate, this time for county commissioner. He is well-informed. Sometimes he makes sharp, insightful observations about local government.

He regularly sends me abusive comments for publication. I delete them. They routinely include sexually explicit accusations of pedophilia and other sex crimes targeting Democrats, local media figures, random strangers, and me. He calls local business leaders and officeholders corrupt and self-dealing. He names names.

He is a vigorous defender of Trump and MAGA policies, including election denialism and opposition to abortion. He nearly won a Republican primary for a state Senate seat against a very strong candidate, technology entrepreneur Jessica Gomez, who outspent him about 50-to-one. I expect him to be more popular now. Ankerberg had been an outlier. He was far too obscene, vicious, and contemptuous of people and norms of behavior to be a plausible candidate. Now he is a mainstream MAGA Republican. Ankerberg hasn't changed.  Republican standards and expectations have. Ankerberg sounds a lot like Trump when he tweets in all caps. Obscenity, viciousness, and contempt are features, not bugs.

Ankerberg is smart and strategic in filing for the partisan county commissioner position. His strongest race is in a GOP primary contest, where he fits his voters. He can prove his connection to voters considering the county commission office by showing that he shares their disdain for Joe Biden and his support for Trump and overturning the 2020 election. He is Mr. Red Meat Republican.

Some readers warn me, "Never feed the troll.” They advise I never mention Ankerberg. He is trouble. They remind me that Ankerberg is a Republican. He is their problem, their potential standard-bearer. Let Republicans buy campaign ads to describe Ankerberg. Let them clean their own house, if, in fact, they want it cleaned. 

The alternative is for me is to continue doing what this blog has done in prior elections, which is to give examples to readers on how Ankerberg comports himself. He may be the change-agent Republicans want, but he comes with baggage. 

I welcome advice from readers. How should I handle this?

Update:  Curt Ankerberg has a comment. Unlike the vast majority of his proposed comments, it does not include obscenities, accusations of sex crimes, repetition of disproved conspiracies, plagiarism, or defamations. I have reservations about publishing it because it gives a false impression of Ankerberg normal behavior, although I am confident this comment is genuinely from Ankerberg. This is him -- on his "best behavior."  He can present this way when he chooses to, and this may be his new "campaign demeanor," which he may be able to sustain. There is another, much darker, side of Ankerberg, displayed in the comments and interactions I can only publish after severe editing. That, too, is him.

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Crazy King Lear Trump

     "Complete and total presidential immunity."

What if Trump is right about something?

What if he is right about the most whacked-out thing he has ever said?

Donald Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social:

A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT 'CROSS THE LINE' MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY.

He is getting more manic. He feels the high of crowd adulation and election victory. He feels the panic of the law closing in. Nikki Haley says it, "Chaos follows him." Of course it does. Trump is a disrupter, shaking up the courts, NATO, taxes, immigration, the federal work force, trade, the GOP, and norms surrounding elections. Chaos is the point. Trump's go-to response to an accusation is to accuse his opponents of the same thing, but worse. His teleprompter speeches added a word: "Bedlam." He repeats the word a dozen times in a single speech. Biden's economic bedlam, his foreign policy bedlam, the urban bedlam. It's a switch from "Sleepy Joe" -- its opposite -- and it's a poker "tell." Trump has become crazy Lear. Trump and his message team know it, so he is accusing Biden of it. Classic Trump.

Trump said the craziest thing of all. Immunity. A president could order the assassination of a political opponent and have immunity. Outrageous!

Tarry a moment. Sometimes even a broken clock is right.

Trump presumes bad faith. Following a term of office, partisans of the other party might -- indeed would -- set about prosecuting the former president. That, too, is a "tell," but it is no secret. Trump says openly and proudly that he would indeed enact retribution. He and his supporters would immediately begin punitive prosecutions. It is contrary to the American tradition of peaceful transfer but previous presidents felt constrained by rules, norms, laws, and opponents. 

Not Trump. He would be elected because enough people want someone to break those restraints. Texas has already announced plans to take Biden off the Texas ballot under the 14th Amendment, saying Biden's border policies are tantamount to allowing a foreign invasion. Biden and the mainstream media would argue that the southern border is a political disagreement, not a crime.  A border mess contrasts with a president-led fake-elector plot. But a partisan DA with a constituency that loathes Biden could make a criminal claim that Biden was an accessory to civic unrest. There may be some lingering Black-Code or Jim Crow-era laws on the books designed to criminalize "outside agitators" that could be read to claim criminality. Make Biden defend against 10 rural county DAs in each of 20 red states. Take that, Joe Biden!

I distinguish between a prosecution for actual crimes and an abusive, dishonest one. Not everyone would draw the same lines. Republicans are busy re-imagining January 6 and the fake elector plan, calling it a misunderstanding and exaggeration, not a crime. GOP leaders are saying that whatever Trump may have done at the transition should be mumbled about, not prosecuted.

Trump is negotiating. Give me immunity, he argues, so that Biden will get immunity, and he will need it. 

I offer this as a heads-up to Democrats. Do not be entirely surprised if a nine-to-zero Supreme Court accepts some version of post-presidential immunity. Trump revealed a great weakness in the structure of American government, and the Supreme Court may feel it needs to repair it. Our republic assumed politicians would admit to facts and would feel shame. The founders recognized that a charismatic autocrat might arise who would not, but they expected others in the Congress and the states to isolate, impeach, and remove that person to protect themselves and the republic. The founders did not anticipate party discipline.

We may need a strong -- if not absolute -- plan of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court may discover it within the penumbras of the Constitution's text. This would be a good time for a unanimous court, not a partisan split. The justices will be thinking ahead to a new MAGA era. Without some kind of presidential immunity, we may get the prosecutorial bedlam we were promised.

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Downsizing: A Second View

Stuff.

Question: How much did the deceased leave behind?

Answer: Everything.

Great social movements are put into practice one person, one factory, one moving van at a time. Individuals in the Baby Boom generation decide to retire, creating a giant turnover in America's workforce. People die and children inherit, one at a time, creating the world's greatest ever transfer of wealth. People who raised families in a home with multiple bedrooms, and space for extended family decide it's time to downsize. They each have their own reasons.

I received a flood of comments from yesterday's Guest Post about downsizing and putting away Christmas decorations. This one is from John Coster, my first cousin. He lives in the Seattle area and has just sold a large home and bought a smaller condo. He is still working, leading design teams doing construction projects for large energy users in the technology industry. He is a Christian. He has done hands-on missionary work in Asia and Africa for decades. Currently he is working with the Seattle-area homeless community. 

Guest Post by John Coster 

We might hold title to something for a time, but we never really own anything. I know it sounds obvious, like the fact that our lives on this Earth are finite, or that our great-grandchildren will neither know us, nor care about us. We know these things, but we are still surprised when we experience them firsthand.

In 1985 I designed and did much of the physical work on our first house. Our children were born there and after 12 years we outgrew it, and it was an easy exit.  We moved to a poorly built 20-year-old fixer that happened to be in a swanky, gated golf-course community. For the next 26 years, it became a labor of love – roof, windows, custom doors, masonry fireplace, remodeled kitchen, baths and laundry, millwork, hardwoods, structural, HVAC, seismic retrofitting, and landscaping that matured from shrubs to trees. Much of it was done with our own sweat.  

 

This was also a gathering place for friends and family with all the familiar mileposts of life. Births, marriages, graduations, birthdays, holidays, music lessons, and saying farewell to loved ones. Photo albums capture the evolution of the house as the seasons of life passed. I never had any romantic notions that this would be one of those Currier and Ives homesteads that would be some sort of enduring family heirloom or legacy.  We just fixed it up to make it nice for us, and perhaps the impulse to leave something better than we found it. Our children moved away and began families of their own – not too far, but far enough away that visits were far less frequent than we imagined. Our daughter regularly sent us real estate listings near her house and encouraged us to move closer. Of course, we no longer needed the big four-bedroom house and large lot, but we weren’t ready to just drop everything and move. When thinking about downsizing, I had always imagined retiring to a beach cottage on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington or a floating home on Lake Union in Seattle.   

 

A few months ago, while visiting my older (and wiser) cousin Peter, he mentioned how quickly our grandchildren were growing and said that if we wanted to be more than a distant fixture in their lives as they grew, then we needed to be closer than the 60-90-minute drive away. My wife and I knew he was right.  

So one Sunday we took a casual drive and toured a couple of places,  and came upon a modest two-bedroom condo about 20 minutes from our grandkids. Thirty days later we moved our essentials from the old house, and began selling or donating 38 years of stuff that simply would not fit in the new place. Did you know you can’t give away a piano? Even a nice one?  Roomfuls went to Goodwill and Habitat, and what they didn’t want went to the landfill. Truckloads of stuff. Stuff we didn’t even know we had, or why we had kept it. We joked that downsizing is the best gift we could ever give our children to save them the trouble.

Stuff other people wanted

 

Keepsakes to go to the landfill

In the last 60 days since we moved, we’ve seen our kids and grandkids more than we’d seen them in the last two years. The trade-off is more than worth it, but it came with a cost. It surprised me how my sense of identity was tied to the old place. I now understand how older people are especially reluctant to move, even when staying in place is completely illogical or unsafe. There is a kind of ambiguous loss that goes with leaving the long-familiar. I’m glad we didn’t wait until we had to. Adjustment like this is easier when you’re younger, I think. 

 

We kept very good records of all the changes and improvements we made at the old place, and I wrote up a sort of owner’s manual for the young buyers.  We never met them, but they wrote to say how much they appreciated the love and care that went into their new (old) house and they were honored to be stewards of it in the next season of its life. I’m glad they don’t plan to demolish it. But it is theirs to demolish if they choose and I needed to let go of my attachment.

 

We are making a few improvements in the new place (as you do), but I am well aware of the temporal nature of these things, and I hold them loosely, and think more about the people and moments I get to savor in this new chapter. It isn’t about stuff. But we knew that.  

 

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No, I am not in New Hampshire

Going to New Hampshire quit making sense.

My flight from Medford to Boston on United Airlines got cancelled at the last minute.

I flew to Portland, Oregon for an alternative flight on Alaska Airlines, a red-eye. That alternative flight also got cancelled at the last minute, after I had waited all day at the Portland Airport. And Alaska Airlines’ substitute flight for their cancelled one was the next day, and they said that even that one was "iffy." This portended a second whole day in airports.

Meanwhile Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Asa Hutchison dropped out and wouldn't be in New Hampshire.

There was still Nikki Haley. But I've seen her give the same speech four times. 

The USA Today reporter was there to take this photo

Well, there is always Trump. But Trump is mostly in New York, not New Hampshire. He is attending the second trial on even more financial damages he owes the woman he sexually assaulted then defamed. His trial is part of his campaign. He is on message, demonstrating that he is fearless and unbowed by normal rules of law and decorum. He is burnishing his brand. He isn't about being good. Or lawful. He is about being defiant. He dares the judge to stop him.

Trump is making news for being told by the judge to stop disrupting the trial. In a tweet Trump called the judge "abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial but that's the way the crooked system works!" In comments to reporters outside the courtroom, Trump said "That's a nasty man. He's a nasty judge. He's a Trump-hating guy."

In a normal world, a defendant would be considered worse for having been found guilty of rape and defamation of his victim, who then acted out at his trial. But in this world, Trump is solidifying support within his MAGA base. 

The blizzard in Des Moines was moving east to New Hampshire and I hate slick roads. The payoff did not seem worth the bother. I managed a flight back out of Portland and came home to Medford, light rain, and temperatures in the 50s.

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Dismantling Christmas decorations.

It's hard to know when to let go.

There's no set time to put away Christmas decorations. At some point it just seems to makes sense.

There's no set time to downsize from the house where one raised a family. But at some point, it just seems to make sense.

Today's Guest Post takes a wistful look at both those problems. Ben and his wife, Carol, put a lot of energy into Christmas decorations. Ben Beach is a college classmate. Those of us who are about 74 years old are thinking about the changes we might make as we stop being "young-old" aged 65-74 and become "middle-old, aged 75-84. Some of us will experience the "old-old" of years 85+, but that is a decade off and something to confront later. But for now, what to do about the house? And what to do with all the Christmas decorations if one moves to a smaller place?

Ben Beach is a mostly-retired writer and editor. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland -- for the moment. He is a lifelong marathon runner. He shares the extraordinary record of having the most consecutive finishes in the Boston Marathon: 54.  

Guest Post by Ben Beach

Exhausted Christmas trees keep landing along the streets of our neighborhood, awaiting pickup by county workers. Ours is still inside, on life support, dropping needles at an increasing rate. I should pull the plug.

I always struggle with this annual exercise. It’s hard for me to admit that the Christmas season has come and gone. The little boy in me wants to hear those reindeer hooves on the roof again.

This time, however, the dismantling of Christmas is freighted with extra melancholy. Carol and I are moving. The stairs in our beloved home of 40 years are out to get us. On top of that, does it make environmental and social sense for a pair of septuagenarians—and their aging yellow lab—to occupy 2,700 square feet and a quarter-acre? Our new home will be a ten-minute drive from our youngest son and his family instead of 35.

If I were married to someone else, this January project might be easier, physically and mentally. But my wife, a/k/a Christmas Carol, creates a very special holiday. If you were to open our front door, pass under the mistletoe, and walk into the living room, you’d see a Dickens Village landscape, a spectacular team of Nutcrackers, and 14 stockings hung by the chimney with care. Draped over two doorways into other rooms are garland strands with our friends’ Christmas cards pinned to them.

Christmas also includes Carol’s Chex Party Mix, her egg nog, an Advent calendar, a crèche from my childhood home, snow globes, Christmas-themed china that comes down from the attic, and more.

The attic. That’s where all of the wonderful decorations hang out for 11 months of the year. We have the room up there. The two-bedroom condo we are headed to lacks that space, and there’s not enough room to display Dickens, the Nutcrackers, etc. That means that when we take down the decorations this one last time, they are not going into an 11-month hibernation; some are leaving us forever. Maybe Evan and our daughter-in-law, both Christmas fans, will have room to display some of this stuff in their house. Maybe.

You’re probably thinking: What a baby! Get over it. Move on.

Good advice. I do remind myself that we’re damn lucky to have had 40 wonderful Christmas seasons in this house and that I should be grateful that I reeled in a partner who could produce such a holiday nest.

O Tannenbaum! How many days until we start snatching those ornaments, many marking our kids’ childhoods and a few from Christmas parties I had during college 55 years ago? Not tomorrow. The next day? No, that’s too soon. Your sweet scent has all but faded, and your branches are drooping. But you are still pretty and lovable.

Christmas Carol and I know that the new owner of this property will tear down our home and build something grander. But our last Christmas here will linger; I plan to put the remnants of Tree Forty all over our quarter acre.

 

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Endorsing Trump, part Two: Falling into line.

Marco Rubio wants a "strong man" dictator after all.

Republican voters got a taste of authoritarianism, and they like it. They want it back, and more this time. 

Trump may be a dangerous, lawbreaking autocrat, but he's their dangerous lawbreaking autocrat.

Marco Rubio described exactly what is taking place now. Eight years ago he said Latin America-style "strong man" politicians were a grave problem. Now he endorses one, saying we need him, only him, so he can do the "extraordinary things" needed to break through the constraints of limited government.

Here is Rubio in March, 2016:

Click: YouTube

 

Here is a transcript.

Tapper:  You compared Donald Trump to a Third World dictator in an interview with The New York Times a last week. How so?

Rubio: Well I don't know about a Third World dictator. I said "strong man." You know he's running for president so he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don't anticipate it will, but yeah here's what happens in many countries around the world. You have a leader that emerges and says, "Don't put your faith in yourselves, don't put your faith in society, I'm a strong leader, and I'm going to make things better, all by myself."  

It's very typical. You see it a lot in the Third World, you see it in Latin America for decades. Basically, the argument he's making is that he, single handedly, is going to turn things around. We've never been that kind of country. We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the Constitution and the powers invested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to himself and what he's going to do. He's going to do this and do that, without regard for whether it's legal or not. 

Look, I think we're going to have to make up our minds. I can tell you this. No matter what happens in this election, for years to come,  there are many people on the right, in the media, in voters at large that are going to have to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump. Because this is not going to end well, one way or the other. He's going to be the nominee and he's going to lose. Or he'll have thrown this party into it's most chaotic and divisive period ever, and that's unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government, free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or it divides or it splits apart, it will be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level, until we can pull the party back together.

That was then. 

This week, just before the Iowa caucuses, Rubio tweeted his endorsement of Trump. 

When Trump was in WH I achieved major policies I had worked on for years (like expanded Child Tax Credit & tough sanctions on regime in Cuba & Venezuela) because we had a President who didn’t cave to special interests or let bureaucrats block us.

 I support Trump because that kind of leadership is the ONLY way we will get the extraordinary actions needed to fix the disaster Biden has created. It’s time to get on with the work of beating Biden & saving America!

Rubio wants a "strong man." Now those constraints of laws and the Constitution are the problem.  And Trump is the all-caps "ONLY" one who can fix things.

Rubio has fallen into the trap he described. An authoritarian dictator isn't so bad after all, he says. If we get through this, Rubio will have some explaining to do. Meanwhile, he doesn't want to get crossways with Trump. Rubio sees what happens to people who stand up to him.

"Little Marco," indeed.

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Fork in the road: Choosing lawbreaking.

   

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done."

         Trump tweet 2:24 p.m. EST, January 6, 2021, during the height of the Capitol riot.

A new norm has taken a foothold in the GOP. Laws are for losers, saps, the weak, and people who lack the courage to seize opportunities.

My U.S. representative just endorsed Donald Trump for president.

Cliff Bentz is joining a crowd of fellow Republicans. As of January 2, 18 U.S. senators and 96 House members have endorsed Trump. The nomination fight is still underway, but they have staked their ground.

There are Republican alternatives to Trump, even after the Iowa vote. Republican voters and officeholders can support one of several conservative, anti-abortion, Democrat-loathing, secure-border-supporting Republican candidates, without endorsing Trump. By endorsing Trump Republican leaders endorse what Trump has done. They are saying lawbreaking doesn't matter. They are normalizing flouting of the justice system. 

Nikki Haley does not dare say outright that Trump did anything wrong. She hides behind the passive voice. 

I believe Donald Trump was the right president at the right time; I agree with a lot of his policies, The truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him. We can’t have a country in disarray in a world on fire, and be dealing with four years of chaos. We won’t survive it.

Rightly or wrongly," she says, making no judgement. He doesn't create chaos and a world on fire by openly and proudly breaking laws, she says. No. Somehow, mysteriously, "it follows him" with a mind of its own. She says she will pardon him if she is elected and he is convicted, and that she will vote for him if he gets the nomination. He is imperfect, but OK.

My U.S. representative, Cliff Bentz, does a version of passive voice blame-shifting. Other Republicans support Trump, and Bentz is looking to them. Others have agency and judgment. He doesn't judge. 

We have a republic, not a democracy, for a reason. Democracies are prone to stampeding. Humans look to leaders, presumably people with information and judgement. We elect representatives. I blame Republican leaders who saw a fork in the political road and chose the Trump road. 

Republican leaders in the states and Congress could have taken the position that lawbreaking matters. It is an honorable position. It probably would have withstood criticism from Trump, especially had multiple political leaders joined in showing a consensus. But instead of isolating Trump, nearly all Republican leaders chose to excuse Trump. That validated him. Trump was OK. 

The MAGA mindset could have incorporated law abidance, and its message would have been differentiated from that of "soft-on-crime" Democrats. They support sanctuary cities, tolerated bad actors who infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests, and failed to keep order on the southern border. Republicans could have held the defensible line that Republicans are the law- and-order party. But no.

Trump and Republican officeholders put their party into the position of condoning a president who attempted to overthrow the government with an openly-acknowledged plan to create fake electors for his vice president to accept as legitimate. Trump doesn't call that a misunderstanding or a mistake. He defends that position. Republican voters got a taste for willful lawbreaking if it helps "us" against "them," and they like it. Trump is a fighter. Not a good man. Not honest. Not respectful of the law and democratic norms. But he is a  brawler and that is even better.. Republican voters got permission from Trump, and then confirmation-permission from Republican leaders, to flout democracy. It's the new norm. So, of course my congressperson goes along. 

The Hill

This is a dark path for American democracy and the rule of law. Republican leaders could have taken a stand that Republicans believe in being faithful to democratic norms. Instead they chose Trump.

Note: Written while stuck at the Portland airport, amid cancelled flights, followed by more cancelled flights. I may need to cancel the trip to New Hampshire.

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