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.

DeSantis, Migrants, and Gratuitous Cruelty

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Buffalo is the city of “Good Neighbors.” It’s a sort of marketing tagline. Is Buffalo friendlier than its New York peer cities? Who knows – I doubt such a thing could be quantified. Ultimately, it makes us all feel better about ourselves. We’re not like the other people. We’re not like New York City. We’re more midwestern. We’re nice.

There are plenty of examples of good neighborliness (see, for instance, the outpouring of support for the West Side Bazaar, hit recently by a major fire.)

But there are a slew of examples of ugliness. Consider if you will this letter to the editor of the Buffalo News, penned by one Joseph Fahey of Williamsville.

The hypocrisy of the Democrats is unending. Fifteen thousand illegal aliens showed up in the small community of Del Rio, Texas, in one day, and we barely heard about it. Fifty willing undocumented immigrants are sent to the super-wealthy Martha’s Vineyard, and the elites declare it a humanitarian crisis.

Del Rio Texas is on the US-Mexico border. The Mexican city of Ciudad Acuna lies on the other side of the fence. The 15,000 immigrants Mr. Fahey mentions came mostly from Haiti in September 2021. In order to reach that spot, those brave people had to make their way across the sea to Mexico and then to the US border on a perilous journey. They come to the United States seeking refuge from a failed state, gang violence, and crushing poverty. They come here seeking the same opportunity that your ancestors sought when they came here, no matter when or from where.

Humanitarian crises such as the ones Mr. Fahey mentions in Del Rio are more than just an opportunity for men in Williamsville with Irish surnames to revel in their misfortune and to own the libs. These are human beings and they deserve to be treated with respect.

But what, Mr. Fahey, does a 2021 crisis of Haitian migrants in Texas have to do with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Why would Florida’s governor pay six figures of taxpayer money to fly a handful of Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. While I am old enough to remember when Republicans supported immigrants fleeing failed communist states, Mr. Fahey misstates the facts.

DeSantis retained the services of an unknown vendor to select refugees to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. Plying them with McDonalds coupons and having them sign a waiver written only in English, a woman known only as “Perla” arranged for their transportation. The migrants could not legally work – an idiotic policy that only worsens these refugees’ plight. At a time when there is a supposed labor shortage, certainly work could be found for migrants ready and willing to do work.

Mr. Fahey says the Venezuelan refugees whom DeSantis tricked were “willing”, but the facts say otherwise:

“I don’t like the way they treated us,” said Jose, who made the journey to the border with two stuffed animals given to him as a gift by his 5-year old son, whom he left behind with relatives. “We’re human beings.”

Most of the migrants who seek asylum at the Southern border are released pending a court date. Most of them already have friends or family in the US. The asylum seekers intend to move along to other spots throughout the US. Barring a fundamental change in immigration law and policy, I have no doubt that other states would cooperate with Texas and other border states to facilitate this transportation. Resettlement agencies exist throughout the US to do help new immigrants start their new lives. In Buffalo we have several of them.

But DeSantis is instead kicking off his Presidential campaign by being deliberately cruel to refugees from a communist state and dropping them off on an island off the mainland – not anywhere near where their people are. None of this was done out of compassion or empathy or any sort of earnest desire to help. It was done out of hatred.

What Mr. Fahey is too inarticulate to say is that he supports Republican governors cruelly worsening the suffering of migrants from Venezuela because it’s a good meme.

Mr. Fahey gleefully continues,

NBC News published a statement by a Vineyard resident who said, “Florida Gov. DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard is like ‘me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.’” Other observers perversely compared sending these people to Martha’s Vineyard to the Holocaust.

Well, it is. DeSantis took people from Texas and spent Florida money to send them to a tony island off the coast of Massachusetts, under false pretenses. It was a form of human trafficking and accomplished no positive outcome.`

Because our system deems Martha’s Vineyard residents to be more important than regular Americans, the “crisis” was dealt with in one day. The Massachusetts National Guard was activated, and the migrants were removed to a nearby military base. I wonder what the Democrats’ reaction would be if Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott activated their National Guards and dumped these people off at a military base? I don’t really wonder.

Not sure how “our system” deems people on the Vineyard to be more important, but it is true that Martha’s Vineyard, an island of 15,000 residents, is ill-equipped to properly and adequately handle the resettlement of migrants flown from Texas as part of a meme. To their credit, the people on the Vineyard sprang to action and helped to feed, clothe, and house these migrants until such time as their onward travel could be arranged.

Mr. Fahey sees the quick action put in motion by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor, Charlie Baker to help and accommodate these refugees, whom DeSantis duped, as an indictment. Really, though, it reveals that treating immigrants as worthless cattle is a choice. Republican Governor DeSantis made that choice while Republican Governor Baker did not.

They were not “dumped … off at a military base.” They are not in custody and they have been offered shelter, food, clothing, and services as they plan their next steps with the help of resettlement agencies and immigration attorneys. They are getting the help they need and deserve, without any craven grandstanding Republican using them for a meme.

Unlike the Trump Administration’s behavior, the children were not separated from their parents.

I saw some people on Twitter allege that Martha’s Vineyard “deported” the refugees. One cannot “deport” someone from an island in Barnstable County, Massachusetts to mainland Barnstable County, Massachusetts.

I hope DeSantis and Abbott continue this practice. Perhaps the governors should send more undocumented immigrants to progressive communities in Western New York, such as the Elmwood Village, or tony East Aurora, where I’m sure the reaction would be the same.

Journey’s End, Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, and the International Institute are among the agencies in WNY tasked with helping immigrants start a new life in western New York. Erie County is especially welcoming of migrants, and large communities of people from places like Burma, Somalia, Ukraine, and Yemen have brightened our community.

Whether he realizes it or not, Mr. Fahey is, in effect, paraphrasing Heinrich von Treitschke and Der Sturmer. He sees immigrants as people to be foisted upon his political opponents. They are a scourge to be used primarily to wipe that shit-eating grin off those libs’ faces. The underlying attitude is that immigrants sind unser Unglück.

I wonder where Mr. Fahey lives, but I’m willing to bet that 14222 is more diverse than his zip code, and that the Elmwood Village doesn’t need lectures on inclusion or welcoming of immigrants from the likes of him.

To be fair, it was not very nice sending those people to a community inhabited by hypocritical, elitist snobs.

Perhaps Mr. Fahey should put himself in the shoes of these migrants fleeing poverty and violence and see them as fellow human beings rather than culture war ammunition.

They Plan the End of America

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The fake patriots. (Faketriots?) The phony law-and-order-for-thee-but-not-for-me types. The cretins who think America is about waving flags at overpasses and owning libs rather than representative democracy and the rule of law. We are witnesses to some unique things in the last 18 months.

We have witnessed an attempted coup. Coups d’etat are especially rare in the Anglophone world – countries created through British colonialism, which adhere to common law and rely on some form of parliamentary representative democracy to hold the reins of power.

Did you know there was a “stop the steal” astroturf group ready to accuse a victorious Hillary Clinton of stealing the election? Miracle of miracles, Trump won so that plan was tabled until 2020, when it was revived. The 2020 election was run in the midst of a global pandemic, which resulted in states making temporary changes to make ballot access easier and contact-free. As the in-person vote was tallied, it looked good for Trump. But the absentee and mail-in votes needed to be counted, and the Republicans have pretty uniformly decided that these votes were somehow unworthy and uncountable.

So, “stop the steal” was revived, Trump and his henchmen worked overtime to literally try to steal the election. The Roger Stonification and Steve Bannonization of America They had Republicans in swing states concoct fake, unchosen slates of “electors” in an effort illegally to change results in places like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. They falsely claimed the machines were rigged by faraway Communists. They brought lawsuits – almost all of which were summarily dismissed – trying to change the results of various states’ elections. Trump himself used the power of the Presidential office to demonize and harass innocent civilian election workers. Trump pressured state officials to rig the election in his favor and to overthrow the will of the people – the ballot box.

It culminated with an armed insurrection on January 6th that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the Congress from carrying out the will of the American people, and to force – literally – that Donald Trump be re-elected as President for life. These people are not the principled heirs of our Enlightenment-guided Founding Fathers – they are instead the ignorant offspring of Confederate traitors. Local fool Carl Paladino is their pro-Hitler avatar.

To call the Trump MAGA cult un-American is an understatement. This was a coordinated coup attempt. It was a conspiracy to defraud the United States and to end our system of rules, laws, and elections as we know it. Our republic still hangs by a thread as an entire major political party remains in the thrall of a grifter charlatan who would destroy the country for the sake of vanity and power.

Maybe in addition to vanity and power, it is also a last gasp of good old-fashioned white Christian nationalism as a reaction to societal changes that they fear and reject. It all starts with abortion and it has morphed into equating anything having to do with LGBTQ+ rights as pedophilia and “grooming“. It has to do with terrorizing drag queen library readings and abolishing Pride Month displays at libraries.

I mean – drag queens. They say that this is somehow sexualizing kids. Kids who play dress-up all the time.

Florida banning the mere mention of anything having to do with gender identity, likely unintentionally banning kids playing house.

But it’s not just discriminatory legislation and terroristic action – it is the legitimization of this transformation of this country into a white Christian nationalist authoritarian country by a Supreme Court hand-picked by one trad Catholic man, Leonard Leo. By the time you read this, the Supreme Court will have likely overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1972 SCOTUS opinion, which held that states cannot restrict abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Many Justices likely to vote to do this also told the country and its elected representatives that Roe is “settled law,” lying to convince people they would not do what they have done. To lie to the people to gain a lifetime appointment should be disqualifying in a functioning republic, but it isn’t. The libs will be owned, and this is the primary goal. Doctors, medical providers, and ultimately women will have a medical procedure rendered illegal overnight, and they will all of them face criminal sanctions or perhaps, if the Christian nationalists have their way, involuntary psychiatric committal. This is all an Orwellian nightmare of democratic backsliding – of reactionary authoritarianism, which one can only hope is short-lived.

As usual, Democrats as the sole political organization of sanity and western liberal democratic values are ill-equipped rhetorically to combat this right-wing eruption of sheer insanity.

Western New York, which was recently the target of a racist attack by a white nationalist terrorist from Binghamton, has a disproportionate number of homegrown Trump cult fascists in its midst. WBFO is doing a great job on this front right now, as has Investigative Post. A must-follow is Heidi Jones on Twitter. When you see indicted insurrectionist Pete Harding lead a group of people to wave flags on Walden or on an overpass by the blue water tower, this is not some grassroots outpouring of patriotic love for democracy and the rule of law, but an outspoken effort to end them in favor of right-wing authoritarian hegemony.

The battle isn’t about left-of-center pragmatism versus fiscal conservatism anymore. It is about American democracy versus authoritarianism. It is an existential battle of normalcy against nihilism, and now is the time for choosing.

Chaos in #NY23

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The first and solitary time that coup-plotting Trumper Chris Jacobs displayed some bravery and bucked his party’s diktats on guns, that party went into overdrive to drum him out of office.

The next thing that soon-to-be-former Congressman Chris Jacobs did was withdraw from the race for election to Congress in the newly drawn NY-23.

Almost literally within a week he went from a profile in courage moment to being the third rich guy named Chris to quit Congress over heat he couldn’t handle. Profile in cowardice.

Because New York isn’t a red state and NY-23, despite how rural it is, (but note it includes Jamestown, Elmira, Olean, Hornell, and second-ring Buffalo suburbs), might just be willing to elect a guy with an (R) after his name even if he says sane things about access to assault weapons. At the very least it was worth a shot. It was worth it for Jacobs to take a principled stand and answer for it.

It would be fundamentally irresponsible for any candidate for any office within the Buffalo media market to not – at a bare minimum – advocate for raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21. Jacobs expressed a willingness to do more than that and for that he earned my praise. Almost as quickly, he reveals how empty his “principles” were.

As usual, Democrats – who have nominated someone you’ve never heard of from a place you may vaguely be able to place on a map – have a huge problem with messaging. It’s so easy for Republicans to take literally any effort to prevent mass shootings and scream about how it’s violative of the 2nd Amendment (regardless of whether that’s true). Democrats have to stress that legislation to prevent teenaged psychopaths from easily obtaining weapons of war is consistent with 2nd Amendment protections. Few freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution are absolute – even speech. So, if the government has the power to ban obscene speech, it has a similar power to declare that an 18 year-old cannot possess an AR-15 to shoot up a school, and a 30 year-old cannot open-carry a rocket-launcher at Wendy’s.

Despite all his prior bad acts and omissions, when it came time for Jacobs to choose between the victims and the killers, he chose the victims. This was, for his party, haram.

But Jacobs will be out at the end of the year, so he becomes a premature lame duck. If only he had staked out a brave and correct position and stuck to it, maybe he could have earned himself some kudos for, e.g., being a party maverick who has met the moment and come out on the right side of an issue that deeply wounded his city.

Yet the Republican Party, even in indigo-blue New York State, has become so extreme, nihilistic, and bloodthirsty that it would rather enable the next mass shooting than piss off its base, the people whom talk radio, Fox News, Trump, and Christian nationalism have brainwashed into thinking that mass killings are an acceptable price to pay for whatever they think “freedom” is.

They’ll tell you it’s everything but guns. It’s doors. It’s security. It’s a need to have armed soldiers in every classroom. It’s mental health. It’s video games. It’s rap music. But schools in other countries have more than one door, they have kids with mental health issues, they have the same video games and music that we do, but what they don’t have is a proliferation of guns. This means that other countries have a different calculus of what “freedom” means, and frankly it means that people are reasonably secure in the knowledge that their kids will go to school and come home alive; that the absence of guns obviates the need for TSA-style school security. Of course, most of these countries have stronger, uniform safety nets so that kids with mental health issues get free or affordable access to the care they need. They also restrict firearms in such a way that 18 year-olds have practically no ability to waltz into a local shop, buy a gun made for waging war, and shoot dozens of random, innocent people.

When the time comes for Republicans to stand up and be counted on things like expanding access to free or affordable care in this country, they refuse. The only thing they’re good for nowadays is backsliding our democracy and the culture wars. Just ask Pizza Hut and the Secret Service. That and enabling more maniacs to buy more guns to do more mass shootings.

Freedom to shop at the grocery store or attend school secure in the knowledge that you won’t get shot dead would seem to be worth advocating for, even if you’re a Republican.

With Jacobs’ departure, the Republicans now have a choice between Nick Langworthy, Carl Paladino, and Marc Cenedella. With idiot vote fraud convict Rus Thompson and his execrable wife running things, Paladino’s campaign is certain to make headlines for the dumbest things possible. Things like Carl posting some conspiracy bullshit on his Facebook page calling the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres a false flag, and when exposed does his best Sergeant Schultz impression. Paladino’s presence in the race is quite literally an insult to everyone’s intelligence. The laundry list of reasons not to consider him is long and wildly uncomplicated.

I wish Democratic candidate Max Della Pia best of luck in getting his message out there. Hopefully he’s known in the Southern Tier, but he has a lot of work to do to get some name recognition in Buffalo. Also one has to hope that no former Democratic candidates for Congress pop out of the woodwork to make a big mess of things like they have, say, on multiple previous occasions.

Just when things start looking a little less bleak, we are showered with bleakness galore.

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