Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

Airplane

Combat! blog’s New York residency comes to an end today, having proven enjoyable as always. I’m not saying I’ve been living high on the hog, but I did spend much of yesterday afternoon in the Russian and Turkish baths. I will spend today afternoon on an airplane, less relaxed but similarly confined. While I indulge the conversation of strangers, how about you read this sobering, insightful assessment of why Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination for president. We’re a little more than three months out from the Iowa primary, with a cascade of less evangelical, more Trump-dominated states to follow. What starts as comedy ends as tragedy, or at least schadenfreude. We’ll back tomorrow with a real blog from our Montana home, watched by our Montana goldfish.

Costa articulates Carson/Trump “nightmare scenario” for GOP

Images into which dicks must be Photoshopped immediately

Images into which dicks must be Photoshopped immediately

Beware the autoplay video with sound on the other end of this link, but a new CBS News poll finds that Ben Carson has pulled even with Donald Trump in Iowa, and that Trump holds big leads in New Hampshire and South Carolina. In case a part of you still hopes, third place in Iowa and South Carolina is Ted Cruz. Those numbers are interesting, but the kicker is various other candidates’ satisfaction ratings: about half of Iowa Republicans say they would not be satisfied with Bush, Chris Christie, or Rand Paul as the eventual nominee. Of course, they feel that way about Trump, too. The GOP is fractious as a sack of wine glasses right now, and its two most ridiculous candidates are surging forward apace.

Continue reading

Friday links! Slow train to Washington edition

Old smokey

Get along, old smokey.

Combat! blog continues its mad peregrinations today with a quick trip to Washington DC, where I will visit my brother and see my friend Curt in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. I assume he plays the beautiful Carole King, and if I see anyone else in that role, I intend to boo loudly. For now, though, I ride the train. I’m like a hobo of old, eating canned beans (kale chips) and sleeping under the stars (roof of train.) Today is Friday, and the modern world is safer and more comfortable than the old one. Won’t you learn to play the harmonica (iPod) with me?

Continue reading

Of human bondage

Not the good kind

Not the good kind

Remember when I told you that Montana politics is really interesting and you should follow it even if you don’t live there? They can’t all be gems. Even Batman has to sit at his desk and sign papers from time to time, and all the exciting projects of municipal government are funded by tedious financial instruments. This week’s column in the Missoula Independent is about one such tedious instrument, bond issues. As readers across the country know, Missoula passed a $42 million parks and trails bond last year. Right now, the electorate is voting on a $158 million bond to improve the public schools, which is a damn sight more important than lighted softball fields. Next year, we’ll probably vote on another bond issue to renovate the public library, which falls somewhere between parks and schools in its value to the public.

These bonds originated from different sources, but they all get paid for by the same property taxes. It so happens that Missoula has been spending a lot of money lately, not just with bond issues but also with settlements to various employees. The county risk fund is currently running an $800,000 deficit, which doesn’t come out of the same kitty as schools, parks, or libraries but still gets paid by the same tax base. And the city is about to pay anywhere from $50 million to $150 million to buy Mountain Water—a cost that will be underwritten by ratepayers, not property taxes, but will fall on homeowners and renters alike.

The upshot of all this money spent is that taxpayers perceive The Government—multifarious in its structures but uniform in its source of revenue—as an out-of-control money vacuum. The good people of Missoula are in danger of bond fatigue, which is a problem. It puts projects like school infrastructure and ritzy parks in the same race to voters’ wallets, rushing to get funded before people shut down and stop paying for anything. There’s got to be a better way, and with all these leaders running around, thinking up citizen’s initiatives and five-year plans and whatnot, we should be able to come up with something. Somebody else think of a good way to organize bonding programs. I just point out these problems; I don’t solve ’em. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Errata

Erotica

Erotica

Last night I dreamed I was on a basketball team with John Stockton, Reggie Miller, Shaq, and Jared from Subway. Whenever Jared had the ball, the crowd booed him wildly. In this dream, I did not play basketball any better than I do in real life—terribly—but I assumed they would cheer for me, since I didn’t touch any kids. I was disappointed, however, and they only liked the pro basketball players.

Today is the day that Marty McFly visits in Back to the Future Part II: October 21, 2015. If you haven’t watched the original Back to the Future lately, I strongly recommend revisiting it. It’s pretty much a perfect adventure movie, and one that contains remarkably little violence by the standards of what stories we tell today. Plus there’s a DeLorean. That car was kind of a joke in the eighties, but now it’s remembered as the car from Back to the Future. In that sense, at least, John DeLorean’s letter to the film’s producers was oddly prescient.

Today I am in New York. I got in to LaGuardia around eleven last night and made great time into Manhattan, right up until we got to the FDR, which had been blocked by an accident. I spent the next 40 minutes or so driving down Second Avenue from 125th to 6th Street. It was a good way to come back to the city, since it amounted to a slow parade of buildings I remember with different things inside them. It’s been 14 months since I was here last, which is the longest I’ve gone without setting foot in New York City since 1999. We ate tacos at midnight, and I wondered why I ever left. Then a siren woke up me and the fire escape pigeons at 5am, and I remembered. It’s still pretty great, though.