Government shuts down over policy, not money

The longest federal government shutdown on record is over, but another shutdown appears possible, even likely, in less than a month.

The December-January shutdown ended with President Trump announcing he would sign a bill reopening the government after 35 days and two federal paydays that didn't pay off. He agreed to a deal that he could have had 35 days earlier, but he thought it advantageous to play brinkmanship with federal agencies and employees.

What is confounding about this shutdown is that it wasn't about debt limits or federal budget deficits or excessive spending, all of which were at the heart of earlier shutdowns. Conservatives have decried the economic stupidity of spending more money than you take in, year after year after year since before Ronald Reagan decried socialism. A government shutdown over excessive spending at least reduced spending for the period of the shutdown.

But this latest shutdown, which Trump said he would proudly take responsibility for, had nothing to do with federal spending or the deficit. It wasn't about money, although Trump was insisting on $5.7 billion for a border wall or else! It was about policy, the policy of building walls to keep people out of the United States. Trump had led cheers of "Build That Wall" at his campaign rallies and had insisted that Mexico would pay for the wall. No payments came from Mexico, and Democrats in the House also refused to insert payments for a physical wall into pending budget bills.

Both sides of this debate have some reasonable points. Trump says there is a crisis on the southern border with Mexico; flows of immigrants, most of them crossing in violation of federal laws, are overwhelming federal border security. He wants a solid wall to halt the "invasion."

Democrats point out that any wall can climbed over, tunneled over or blown up by determined migrants. They are willing to increase border security spending on enforcement and surveillance. More border patrolmen and immigration judges can expedite the refugee and asylum backlog and make immigration more manageable. They will give Trump the money he wants, but not for a solid wall that doesn't really address the problem.

A congressional committee will look for a compromise that will keep the government open after the mid-month deadline, but Trump might reject their proposal. A long-term solution to the immigration problem has to involve improvements in Central American economies and law enforcement in order to give desperate citizens opportunities and hope in their native countries rather than north of the border. Combined with better U.S. border security and crackdowns on corruption south of the border, the "crisis" at the border will be resolved without a solid wall.

 

Integration, civil rights came slowly to South

In last week’s column I wrote about Federal District Court Judge Waites Waring and his efforts to bring justice to African-American teachers and students in South Carolina from the 1940s to the 1960s.

            The book set me to thinking about the history I remember from that era as the South dealt with the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate schools. That mandate took decades to take full effect, and some would say that racial segregation still exists in public schools.

            When my classmates and I entered the N.C. public school system in 1955, we did not think there was anything unusual in the existence of some public schools being designated for white children and some being designated for black children. It was simply how the world existed. But in 1954 the Supreme Court had found school segregation to be unconstitutional, and gradual movements toward desegregation began (not with the court’s requirement for “all deliberate speed”). I was in high school, in a consolidated, countywide high school, when African-American students and teachers first appeared in my classrooms.

            Southerners determined to keep school segregation in place declared “massive resistance” to any effort to force full integration. Anson County, where I grew up, saw a mandate to make schools for black students better, at least on a par with the white schools, so county officials built a new, consolidated black high school that was to open the year after I graduated from the white high school that was only six years old. Federal officials declared the two segregated high schools illegal. Local officials countered with a plan to send all male students to one high school and all girls to the other school. The feds rejected that plan, too, and my younger sister graduated from the new, fully integrated high school.

            When my family moved to Wilson in 1980, we were impressed with the desegregation solution that was in place here. Former white schools were paired with former black schools so that all students, black and white, would spend four years in their “home school” and then be bused to the paired school outside their racially identifiable neighborhoods.

            This plan gave Wilson a great advantage compared to neighboring Nash and Wayne counties, which still had separate city and county school systems with obvious racial imbalances. Wilson County, thanks to young attorney Jim Hunt and others, had merged city and county schools in the 1970s. This single system made Wilson more attractive for industry.

            Wilson’s desegregation solution did not last very long. Changing residential patterns created school populations with large black majorities in several schools.

          A 50-member citizen task force was ordered to come up with a new, practical and federally acceptable integration plan. The task force worked hard for two years, trying to find a way to evenly balance racial populations in all schools. In a county with a few densely populated areas and some very rural areas, it was extremely difficult to bring about the preferred balance at all schools. Then the Board of Education threw out both plans the task force had recommended. Meanwhile, the federal court that had been overseeing the school system’s compliance with integration law decided the system had attained “unitary” status and ended its oversight.

            When the school board adopted a new neighborhood-based school attendance plan, some black members of the board voted for the plan, even though the plan made no effort to racially balance school populations. Most parents, black and white, have quietly accepted the neighborhood plan.

            The latest concern for public schools and their students is competition from private and charter schools, as well as home schools. Public school systems are losing students and money to the new options, as this newspaper has reported. Change is nothing new for school systems that have been reforming for more than 70 years.

This column first appeared in The Wilson Times.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

           

           

Missed calls help set stage for Super Bowl

It's Super Bowl Week (which lasts two weeks to fully aggrandize a game), so indulge me another post about football. 

The hot news this week, much to the chagrin on National Football League executives, is all about badly missed calls in the NFC and AFC Championship games last Sunday. Fans of the New Orleans Saints and the Kansas City Chiefs think their teams were robbed of Super Bowl slots because of bad officiating.

Gripes about the officiating are common in all sports that leave some key penalties and declarations in the hands of referees, umpires and officials. Most of these calls involve some human judgment, which is fallible. What makes last Sunday's gripes a little different is that the faulty judgment was displayed in slow motion and seemed clearly mistaken. The Saints complained vociferously about a pass interference incident that was not called. The game officials did not see a violation of the rules and made no call. In the AFC game, the Chiefs complained that game officials' quickness to call penalties that were not flagrant or obvious — no harm, no foul, play-on situations — or a game-changing call that was simply mistaken. These calls were made in the crucial final minutes of the close game. The most egregious was a roughing-the-passer call (15-yard penalty) that replay showed didn't happen. The defensive lineman's swipe at Patriots' QB Tom Brady missed him entirely.

In nearly every game played there are missed calls, sins of commission or sins of omission by the officials. Most of the time, these missed calls balance out, and both teams have some justification for their grievances. But these were division championship games, and the missed calls were more obvious than is usual.

The NFL has tried to reduce game-changing mistakes by incorporating reviews of instant replays that frequently overturn the instantaneous opinions of the referees. But instant replay reviews take time and are frustrating for fans and teams. Neither of the key penalties in the division championships were reviewable under current rules. Those rules might change, but don't expect changes that second-guesses every call on the field. That would be chaotic.

Fans and teams will have to accept that calling penalties on the football field is an inexact science hindered by human frailty. Instant replay can only do so much, and videos can be as misleading and as misjudged as live action.

Enjoy the game on Feb. 3 and hope for fewer controversial calls.

Living in the middle of a spy novel

Here's the plot: a foreign power, a rival or enemy of the United States, finds a way to infiltrate a "mole" or spy into America's government. This is a long-term strategy, and its implementation consumes years of grooming and training the "plant" and prepping the political system and the public for the plant, so that he/she can win the public's trust while keeping his/her loyalty to the foreign power secret.

Sounds far-fetched but barely plausible. As the plot for a mystery/thriller novel, it could sell well. As a thriller movie, it could go gangbusters at the box office. The novel would be like John Le Carre's or Tom Clancy's best. As a movie, well, think of "The Manchurian Candidate."

That's the basic plot, but here's the scary part: The plot may be playing out in real time. The New York Times has revealed that the FBI began an investigation to determine whether President Donald Trump was actually working for the Russian government. Trump's inexplicable cozying up to foreign dictators, his praise of Vladimir Putin (a former KGB agent and current dictator of Russia) raised questions about Trump's loyalty to the United States. 

Adding to these odd behaviors, The Washington Post has reported that Trump went to extraordinary lengths to keep secret, even from his closest aides, the content of talks he engaged in during a meeting in Hamburg in 2017. First, he met with Putin with no advisers present. The only people in the room were translators, and Trump made sure that the translators' notes were destroyed. So no one — not top administration staff and advisers, not members of Congress and not the American people — knows what went on behind closed doors with Putin. It's not that the notes were classified and unavailable to those without clearance; the notes do not exist at all! We do know that Trump was just as effusive as ever in praising Putin after their secret conversation. Trump has not denied the report about the meeting notes.

These strange events come in the wake of a widely reported campaign by Russia to sow distrust among American voters and to help elect in 2016. Putin has fairly proudly admitted that he favored Trump in the 2016 campaign. Almost daily, Trump attacks the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is charged with investigating links between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia.

No one has proven that a duly elected president of the United States is a Russian agent, but suspicions are piling up. 

 

I used to know how to do this ...

 This first appeared in The Wilson Times Jan. 12, 2018.

           OK, I’m back. After writing a weekly column in this publication for nearly 30 years, it looks like I’m back in print following a 10-year hiatus. The old column aimed to be a personal conversation with readers on topics ranging from the newspaper’s editorial decisions to commentary on area politics and other news to personal observations of life in Wilson. This new incarnation will likely offer fewer insights on the news (because my field of contacts and my association with news and newsworthy people are far less). But the Wilson Times offered me this opportunity, and my 18-month-old retirement allows me the time to take on another task.

             Retirement is something my wife and I had looked forward to for years, seeing this new transition as one that would allow us to read, travel, visit relatives and old friends, be creative, and enjoy leisure to an extent that was impossible with the stress and the time demands of full-time jobs.

            Our attitude about retirement is far different from the attitude of many of my age group, who are not just not looking forward to retirement but are seriously opposed to the whole idea. “I’m not going to retire,” Fred Hight told me when the topic came up in a brief roadside conversation. He left no wiggle room in that decision. Other people approaching retirement age have expressed concern about what they would do with their free time. I’ve asked those who fear twiddling their thumbs for years on end, “Do you own a house?” They all said they did. “Then you have plenty to do,” I told them. “There’s always something that needs to be done on a house.”

            Other people retire without slowing down. In fact, many actually speed up in retirement. Ken Jones, who ran the Wilson Merck plant before retiring, says he’s busier now as a volunteer in a double-handful of organizations than he was in his career. Barton College, the Chamber of Commerce, Habitat for Humanity and others have recognized Ken for his untiring work for those organizations. He shows no sign of slowing down. Jack Saylor, who died recently at age 98, followed the same retirement plan. He stayed busy in numerous pursuits, including teaching exercise classes at the Wilson Y while in his 90s. People like these epitomize the old advice that “it’s better to wear out than to rust out.”

            My wife, who joined me in retirement four months ago, and I have taken a moderate stance on the topic. We set aside an hour or so every day to read, and we try to exercise often enough to stay healthy. We pay attention to advice columns recommending various ways to remain active, socially involved and cognitively sharp. Whenever we can, we follow the advice of the late Sam Ruth, who retired to Wilson decades ago. After a meeting we both attended years ago, he announced he was going home to take a nap. “It’s the best part of retirement,” he said.

              Dreams of a healthy, happy retirement depend upon the same factor that shaped our working lives: money. Save all the money you can, and then save some more. If you want to do things in retirement, you’ll need that money. Live frugally during your working years in order to splurge in retirement. When people ask me how my retirement is going, I tell them, “We haven’t run out of money … yet.” With luck and some good financial planning advice, our savings might last through our remaining years, but that is possible only because we drove cheap cars, never took lavish vacations, required our children to work their way through college, lived in modest homes (23 years at one humble address), and took advantage of the Wilson Daily Times’ 401(k) retirement savings plan (with a partial match by the company) during my 29 years of working there.

            One reason retirement is not eagerly anticipated by many of my peers is the disappearance of defined benefit pension plans. Defined contribution plans are not as reliable as old-style pension plans, which require greater investment from employers. Few employers outside of government and unionized corporations offer defined benefit pensions today. Social Security is a sort of mandated defined benefit plan. You and your employer contribute to Social Security for as long as you work, and your and your employer’s total contributions determine what your fixed SS benefit will be.

            This new gig as author of a raised-from-the-dead weekly column fits well in my retirement thinking. It gives me an opportunity to exercise my mind and stay involved, and it pays me a stipend sufficient to take my retiree wife out to dinner occasionally. It also provides a deadline, and “everyone needs a deadline,” my new boss reminded me. Yes, we do, especially those of us who spent 33 years with deadlines hanging over their heads.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor at The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. He then worked as the manager of Wilson offices for Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity.

-->

2018 College football season ends

Monday night's national championship game marked the official end of the 2018 college football season. It's over, and, as with every other ending like this one, I am a bit saddened. I can't help it. I love college football. More than any other sport, collegiate or professional, college football is spectacular, filled with surprises, and exciting. It is surrounded by the perfection of an autumn day with glistening skies, beautiful cheerleaders, fanatical followers, student bodies that are caught up in the rapture of the perfect afternoon and the knowledge that you will never be this young or this excited again.

I'm not a season ticket holder. I seldom attend games at my alma mater, relying on the generosity of people who have an extra ticket or two. I watch the games on television, which, thanks to multiple cameras and the astounding detail of modern televisions, gives better views of the games than the most expensive game ticket. Television also allows you to see plays again and again. Astute fans might save time by waiting until there's a lot of cheering, and then looking at the replay showing what all the cheering is about. Smartphone Apps will replay videos of the big plays for the next 24 hours.

Monday's game testifies to the excitement and entertainment college football provides. One Clemson wide receiver caught two passe with just one hand. Twice, he managed to collect the well-thrown ball in one hand and pull it into his body while a defensive back slapped at the ball and his arms. Running backs tore through defensive lines populated by giants. At one point, the Clemson kicker "donked" the football off the goal post upright on a field goal attempt, providing the unexpected element most games have. This "donk" ended up not mattering in the long run, but a "double donk" by the NFL Chicago Bears field goal kicker Sunday afternoon eliminated the surging Bears from the NFL playoffs. You never know which play is going to bring a surprise or a spectacular play.

Football is a far more complicated and safer sport than it was when I played football in high school and diligently followed NFL games each Sunday in my twenties. It remains a violent sport, but better equipment and rule changes designed to protect the players have made it better, not worse.

Even with the changes, though, players know their bodies and especially their brains can be damaged beyond repair in today's game. The danger of dementia caused by repeated hits to the head by very large men has caused many young men and parents to decide football is just too hazardous.

Big-time football (like that played by Clemson and Alabama and other elite schools) is sometimes seen as an extension of the universities the teams represent, to the consternation of critics who say the millions of dollars paid annually to coaches and the multi-millions colleges invest in football scholarships, practice facilities and stadiums could be better invested in academic pursuits.

Health concerns or academic critics could one day put an end to college football's dominance, but until then, I will watch with amazement what top college athletes are able to do and how much excitement a football game can generate, even if you're not there in person. My television will get far less use until the next fall when the blue skies, cool breezes, cheering fans and anticipation announce the return of college football.

Donald Trump, the Great Negotiator

The federal government is in the midst of another partial government shutdown, but this one could be longer lasting than previous shutdowns. Each of these shutdowns is evidence of a failing, inept, incompetent government. It doesn't seem to matter whether Democrats are in charge or Republicans are in charge, whether there is divided government or one-party rule in Washington. From Capitol Hill to sixteen blocks away at the White House, the government can't get the simplest, most important things done, such as passing a comprehensive budget on time.

What might make this shutdown different is the man in the Oval Office. President Trump fancies himself a shrewd businessman and "stable genius." Democrats have a lesser assessment of the president's skills and character.

Trump has said he welcomes a government shutdown (just as he welcomes trade wars). He markets himself as a great negotiator and frequently touts his great breakthroughs in negotiations with foreign leaders, but those breakthroughs have a habit of breaking down once Trump has finished tweeting.

Trump has demanded that Congress approve a budget that includes $5 billion for the wall along the southern border that he promised in his 2016 campaign, leading chants of "Build that Wall!" But Democrats, who offered five times as much for his wall if Trump would only agree to changes in immigration rules and a chance at full citizenship for immigrants who came here as children. Trump, the great negotiator, turned that deal down.

The president's behavior in this and in past talks contradicts his claims of skill as a negotiator. He has failed to deliver in most negotiations, despite his bragging.

Trump's problem likely is rooted in his background. He grew up as the anointed son of a real estate mogul, who started at (or near) the top. He could run the family business according to his own whims. He didn't have to ask advice. He didn't have to answer to anyone. He was the boss, the king, the emperor, the ruler of all he surveyed.

When he negotiated, he could look out only for his own interests. There were no co-equal parties to the negotiations, only subordinates, "losers" in his vocabulary. If he wanted to refuse payments to a subcontractor, he could get away with it. He could offer them low offer or nothing else. It was his way or the highway. If worse came to worst, he could declare bankruptcy and leave the creditors to plead for pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court.

Trump would like to negotiate the way he did as a private businessman, but he can't. Congress is equally as powerful as the executive branch, and the judicial branch is equal to the other two branches. Trump cannot bully Congress the way he bullied subcontractors. He cannot expend money on his centerpiece border wall without an appropriation from Congress. He will have to learn to negotiate in good faith and to compromise if he wants more end this shutdown.