Erie County Priorities

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When not offering up epochal cultural changes or international implementation of transit pipe dreams for his future as County Executive, Nate has really drilled down to the important priorities:

Buffalo doesn’t have a Costco. But one is coming to Amherst soon. We also have at least a couple of Sam’s Clubs and a handful of BJ’s clubs. Suffice it to say, there is no shortage of places to get your fleet of candy bars or platoon of cheese snacks.

Buffalo doesn’t, indeed, have an IKEA, but shouldn’t Mr. Binational here know of the one in Burlington, and the ones farther away in Vaughan or Etobicoke? Also, we’re getting a pickup shop in Cheektowaga.

We do not, alas, have a “real Nike store.” There’s an outlet in the Falls, and another in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Last time I checked, they sell Nikes at Laux and Dicks. Also, y’know, the internet.

There’s a Tops we all know on Jefferson, but there’s also an Aldi and a couple of Sav-a-Lots. Obviously, this is not ideal, but it’s hardly a County Executive’s job to do site selection for supermarkets.

But the best response of all is this:

Thinking Deep with Nate McMurray

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Nate McMurray has packed up his grievance and delusions and decided to run against one of the most competent technocratic politicians we have enjoyed in countywide government in WNY. Mark Poloncarz is an easy target for the anti-mask, anti-vaxx ignorance brigade, but now he is facing a challenge from young Master Nate from the nominal “left.”

Unsatisfied with having lost elections against an indictee and an insurrectionist, McMurray is going after a guy who actually managed to defeat Chris Collins.

In the coming weeks, we will parse and Fisk Nate’s online ramblings and pronouncements because it is amusing.

Here’s one to start:

Ah, yes. refurbishing the Central Terminal so as to welcome the five people from Seoul who might give enough of a shit to attend a Bills game.

This post scratches two of Nate’s itches at once – that the Bills stadium should be in downtown Buffalo, and that we need some sort of enhanced rail service to Canada. Witness,

So, we actually have rail service to Toronto. The Maple Leaf Express runs from downtown Buffalo, Depew, and Niagara Falls to Toronto. If you’re more adventurous, you can take the Go Train (or Bus with connection in Burlington) from Niagara Falls, ON to Union Station in Toronto. Admittedly, the rail services in this area are somewhat antiquated and slow, but Amtrak has already announced a modernization of its entire fleet.

More to the point, in order for there to be the sort of economic integration that McMurray envisions, you cannot rely simply on free trade but also on free movement of people. You would need a North American Schengen with customs and passport controls harmonized between Canadian and American authorities. (Where have I heard this before?) You would need buy-in from political leaders to assent to what would amount to a dramatic shift in what we understand to be national sovereignty, and the ability of people in Canada and the United States to live and/or work in either country without precondition, emigration, or visa.

The likelihood of this happening is zero.

So, instead, one would reckon that Canadian rail would focus on the introduction of high-speed rail along the Windsor – Quebec City corridor, to incorporate the most populated region in that country. The fact that our more European neighbor has yet to introduce such service is significant. On our side of the border, one would suppose that we might someday see a regional high speed rail system that connects to Acela at Boston and New York, using Albany as a hub. It could extend north to Montreal and west through Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls. There, one might someday connect to a Canadian high-speed rail system.

But none of this is within the purview of an Erie County Executive.

Finally, our young propagandist queries,

Mark Poloncarz has been County Executive since 2012. I make that to be 11 years. He was County Comptroller before that, taking office in January 2006. I reckon that to be six years. So, to me, you’re conning people if you’re starting off with exaggerations and lies.

What I can say about Erie County since Poloncarz has been its County Executive is that the population grew for the first time in some 40 years according to the 2020 census. The job market has palpably and objectively improved, and we have a 3.2% unemployment rate, which is not at all bad, historically speaking. Roads have absolutely improved, and ECMC has definitely been improved since the times of Giambra and Collins. Ask the culturals whether their lot has improved since Giambra and Collins.

In the last several years, the housing situation has improved and childhood poverty is down. I don’t know what “we got to lose” but what we stand to lose is a competent, compassionate, and professional executive.

Farewell to Bob

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So, Bob McCarthy – a longtime target of my ire and occasional appreciation – is leaving the Buffalo News. I can’t say I am sad about it because I thought that he was too often little more than a willing stenographer of politicians’ petty accusations and prevarications. He relied too much on sources who were obvious (Illuzzi, Pigeon, Lorigo) if not completely disgraced. But what I really disliked was McCarthy’s relentless focus on the horserace aspect of politics – who had more cash on hand, who was ahead in polls. He seldom called out politicians who broke campaign finance laws or tried to promote push polls. Illuzzi’s death definitely dealt a blow to his reporting but the last nail in the coffin was Pigeon’s long-coming descent into criminality and disgrace.

There does not exist even one thing I have ever written about, or one story I “broke” in all of my time doing this, that shouldn’t first have been covered by the Buffalo News’ political reporter and commentator.

I started blogging in 2003, and a lot of changes have happened, but a lot remains the same – so many of our acute and chronic problems in WNY come down to bad, lazy, corrupt leadership. It’s like we live in this corner of the country that is somehow insulated from everyone else and immune to good ideas. Sure, there are some exceptions but just look at Byron Brown clinging to office for 16 years and his city unable to handle a gentle snowstorm, never mind a blizzard. Buffalo is too good of a place to deserve that sort of “leadership.” Buffalonians are too good of a group of people to deserve the sort of sleepy one-step-forward-two-steps-back political leadership they too often get.

Just the other day I was thinking about Canalside and Bass Pro. That was a lifetime ago – it is an issue that dates back 15 – 20 years and as it stands now the only retail that exists within the Canalside area is two museum giftshops. There isn’t so much as a permanent toilet.

Artvoice is gone. The Public is gone. Alt-weeklies are basically dead. Print is dead. Investigative Post does good work most of the time, but we deserve more than that.

So, I wish Bob good luck and Godspeed in his retirement, secure in the knowledge that the new owners of the Buffalo News – an entity that had 15 years to adapt to the death of print and the rise of digital – will undoubtedly not replace him and instead rely on wire services and contractors to do the work. The politicians – the elites who relied upon McCarthy to give their bullshit a boost – will only benefit from the diminished threat of scrutiny, to everyone’s detriment.

Performative Culture War Takes A Village

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Go ahead and tell me what an American small-c conservative stands for nowadays. Better yet, tell me one concrete policy that is a Republican Party priority.

You can’t. There is no idea or ideology there anymore. In the long ago, when politics was fun and made a modicum of sense, you could say that Republicans and conservatives were for a strong military, low taxes, minimizing public spending, and generally limiting the scope of public involvement in the economy.

Then came the 90s and Newt Gingrich. The internet. Drudge. Lewinski. Bush. 9/11. War in Iraq. Katrina. 2008 financial crisis. Obama.

Gingrich was a demagogue who lay the foundation for today’s excuse for conservatism. Bush weakened America through his ill-advised adventurism in Iraq. He showed that a poorly managed government generates poor results with Katrina. The 2008 crisis really underscored how it seemed as if Republican governance exists for the sole purpose of ruining the economy and leaving it to Democrats to repair. Hence, the Keynesian responses to that 2008 meltdown.

Obama broke a lot of right-wing brains and led to idiocy like the birther debacle, which led ultimately to the election of an ignorant empty-vessel culture warrior in 2016, Donald Trump. Trump is now the leader of a cult that still idolizes him as the anti-Obama who unironically called his ideology “America First” as he further weakened and divided America. Every accusation is a confession – from “snowflake” on down.

Covid came along and, ultimately it became Republican dogma to reject vaccination, reject masks, and reject pretty much even the gentlest public health measures that were put in place to mandate that people give a shit about each other, since there is clearly no way in hell that such a thing would happen in this country voluntarily. It’s why professional assholes like Ben Carlisle don’t think people should have a choice to wear a mask to protect themselves from disease – he thinks those people should be mocked.

Now, the Republican Party doesn’t even have a platform anymore, really. It was supposed to have dominated the midterms, but didn’t. Its biggest and brightest stars are walking, talking culture war memes who rail against Ukraine, masks, Covid, vaccines, etc. ad infinitum.

It is this descent into neofascist anti-democratic hero-worship of Trump that results in people such as “Mayor Deb” in Williamsville. She isn’t the first weird right-winger to run for office in the town of Amherst, but boy did she make a splash by drawing attention to herself and her town with things that really were beside the point of running a village.

The thing that people tend to forget is that while these culture war people who, e.g., get upset that M&Ms aren’t sexually attractive enough for them anymore and whose existence and political ethos can be summed up as “owning the libs” make up a small percentage of self-identified Republicans. No matter what happens, this country will continue for the foreseeable future to have about 30 – 35% of its population in the thrall of a right-wing populist like Trump. Now, I happen to think that right-wing populism is a bad thing and objectively so.

Mayor Deb shows what the vast majority of regular people – “normies” think of her idiocy. When no one was paying attention, she won election. When people paid attention, she lost in a landslide. Like her buddy, Ben.

These culture warriors may win the occasional cancellation of M&Ms characters and the firings of hospital administrators over their Facebook posts, but luckily America isn’t quite stupid enough to keep them around elected office.

“Libs of TikTok” and the Right’s Hysterics over Drag Shows

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Incidentally, Twitter is dead. It is now a private company owned by a right-wing narcissist who behaves there like a 13 year-old incel reply guy. He has reinstated Trump and Kanye West, he pushes right wing dogma and memes, and he is a completely toxic personality who has done real harm to his personal brand. Not just that, but his repugnant antics now render Tesla and his other brands unappealing and something I won’t support, ever, as long as he is still at the helm.

Musk’s solar roof tile business in South Buffalo was supposed to be cruising right along by now, producing a revolutionary product that would expand solar use at a cost equivalent to that of a conventional roof. How is that working out? How many properties in WNY, for example, sport a solar roof?

With that out of the way, the right wing – nationally and locally – are in a constant state of vitriol and panic over – of all things – drag shows. Among the usual suspects on the right, drag queens are all pedophiles and “groomers” and drag shows are tantamount to the peep shows that used to line the streets in and around Times Square before the 90s.

What do these people like Chaya Raichik and Matt Walsh and local malcontents think goes on at drag shows? Obviously, some are NSFW and adult-themed through language and sexual content, but what are these people so threatened by if a man dresses flamboyantly to read stories to children at a library? How is “dress-up” not age-appropriate?

Their rhetoric now comes dripping with the blood of innocent people who were minding their own business. They don’t care.

Elon Musk’s Twitter

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I was an early user of Twitter – May 2007. It is not as fun as it used to be and there is a tremendous amount of noise, but it is a useful medium especially for news and commentary. Back during 2015 – 2016 during the explosion of popularity of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi Charlottesville-type accounts, it was heartening that Twitter began to moderate its platform to prevent threats of violence, m/disinformation and hate speech. While it was flawed and pockmarked with loopholes and poor enforcement, at least it existed.

Conservatives, whose current political ethos is partly reliant on feigned victimhood and grievance, naturally saw themselves as somehow a target of bans on hate speech, violent rhetoric, and other platform rules. Ordinarily, they would have relished the opportunity to prove how well markets work and set up a competing platform that did everything Twitter does, but with – I don’t know, more Nazis? First came Gab, the virulently anti-Semitic home of the Pittsburgh Synagogue mass murder. Then came Parler, which couldn’t figure out its own tech. Then came Gettr, which is a nothing, and then Truth Social, which Trump owns and is his platform of choice.

Shockingly, none of these Twitter alternatives ever caught fire and conservatives continue to whine incessantly about Twitter bans that they earned or “shadowbans” and other nonsense.

I harbor no illusions that the people who owned Twitter in the past were somehow paragons of virtue, or that the people who own any tech platform are better than anyone else, but I think that Elon Musk is nothing more than a modern-day Barnum. He’s invented very little but gotten very rich off of others’ work. He is a rich techbro who just wants to be loved and to be thought of as funny. He’s a fraud. His gigafactory in South Buffalo makes practically nothing and has done little except redistribute NY tax money to a private corporation. His cars may have done a lot to help usher in consumer acceptance of EVs, but because of his public antics I would never want to buy one. His repetition of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda has eclipsed whatever good he did giving UA access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet service.

I realize that people are usually more complicated than some binary “good” or “evil”, but to the extent that my consumer choice and my dollar mirrors my values, I do not choose to give Elon Musk my money, no matter how good his product.

Turning then to Twitter, it is driven by advertisements, and the content is the product. That means every Twitter user was a @Jack product once, then a $TWTR product, but now is an Elon Musk product.

I didn’t feel strongly about Jack Dorsey or the Twitter board. But I don’t really want to be an Elon Musk product.

I’m sure he’s going to un-ban all the toxic banned accounts, and that will cause Twitter to devolve into something nastier than it already is or was. I don’t hold out a lot of hope about what it will become as a platform – whether it was fun or informative or intellectually interesting.

So, I probably won’t delete my account, per se – I’ve deleted all my old Tweets, however. I may delete the app from my devices. I had already greatly reduced my presence there over the last 2 years but I really don’t want to be Elon Musk’s product or part of some unfunny experiment of his. I do not see him as a force for good in the world any more than Peter Thiel or any other reflexively anti-woke, right-wing character. They’re all trying to out-Joe Rogan or out-Jordan Petersen each other.

A long time ago, I made the conscious decision to avoid talking-head cable news like I was allergic to it. News should be news and not a few think tankers and ex-pols yelling talking points at an anchor. I don’t care if it’s Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson – it is uninteresting to me. The local paper is a shadow of its former self. Twitter had been a good substitute for gaining information from myriad sources as it happened, and completely supplanted blogs and RSS feeds for me by about a decade ago.

I’m interested to find out what the next thing will be. More cat videos, I suppose.

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