There needs to be a new face on Mount Rushmore
There needs to be a new face on Mount Rushmore
NCPR: Warrensburg communties still cleaning up from July's torndado
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There needs to be a fifth face on Mount Rushmore.
Just not another president.
This one needs to represent "We the people."
Rusty Bowers, an aging Republican politician from Arizona, deserves to be the fifth face representing the spirit of citizenry, of doing the right thing and preserving democracy.
You should know where this is going now.
Yes, it is about the 2020 election and Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the presidential election results.
HBO's documentary Stopping the Steal is the rare documentary that left me boiling with anger four years after the fact.
Watch All the President's Men today and I'm inspired by the journalists.
Watch any footage of the 9/11 attacks and there is a sense of anguish and despair about the depravity in the world.
But what director Dan Reed accomplishes again - he did the same in the documentary The truth vs. Alex Jones - is to connect all the dots from the end of the election through January 6 and leave the viewer enraged after hearing from a litany of Republicans who were loyal to Donald Trump, who were there in the White House, who witnessed the scam first hand.
They were Republicans.
His people.
But not everyone went along. Thank goodness there were people like Rusty Bowers.
Bowers, a lifetime conservative Arizona Republican, was speaker of the Arizona house of representatives and when there were accusations the votes were not all counted in the state, Bowers gathered a group of trusted lawyers and investigated the counting process personally.
"I saw incredible amounts of protocols that were followed and signed off on by volunteers - Democrats, Republicans, independents. Yes, Republicans for crying out loud! And they did it by the book," Bowers told The Guardian newspaper in August 2022.
Three weeks after the 2000 election, Bowers got a call from President Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
They told him that 200,000 illegal immigrants had voted in Arizona.
They told him that 6,000 dead people voted in Arizona.
Bowers asked if they had the names of those people, if they had tangible evidence they could show him.
Giuliani said they did.
Bowers told them he was not going to do anything until he saw the evidence.
He never saw the evidence.
Instead, Giuliani told Bowers of an arcane Arizona law that gave him the power to throw out the Biden electors and send Trump electors to Congress in their place. He was pressured to do that by the president of the United States.
"I'm not a professor of constitutional law, but I get the idea," Bowers told The Guardian. "They want me to throw out the vote of my own people. I said, `Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. So now, you're asking me to overthrow the vote of the people of Arizona?"
On the eve of January 6, Bowers received a call from another Trump lawyer, John Eastman, who asked Bowers to "decertify" the electors. "Just do it and let the courts figure it out," Eastman said.
Bowers said, "No."
Eastman went to jail.
Bowers' rural ranch in Mesa, Arizona is about a 90-minute drive from Phoenix and rests at the end of five miles of snaking dirt road.
As January 6 approached, what The Guardian described as a "Trump train" of angry fanatics made the trip repeatedly up Bowers' five-mile long driveway blaring their horns in pickup trucks with MAGA flags. They began screaming that he was a pedophile while approaching his house.
Video of the encounter is shown in the HBO film with Bowers confronting the protesters and demanding they do not take another step toward his home.
In response to Bowers doing the right thing, the executive committee of the Arizona Republicans censured him in July 2021.
In February 2022 an "election integrity" bill was introduced into the Arizona legislature. House bill 2596 proposed giving the Republican-controlled legislature the power to reject any election result the majority group didn't like.
It would make elections in Arizona obsolete.
As speaker, Bowers responded by sending the bill, not only back to one committee, but 12 different committees where it would be unable to move forward.
"I was trying to send a definitive message: This is hogwash," Bowers told The Guardian. "Taking away the fundamental right to vote, the idea that the legislature could nullify your election, that's not conservative. That's fascist. And I'm not a fascist."
In August 2022, Bowers lost a primary to a man named David Farnsworth, who not only believed the election was stolen from Trump, but that it was done by the "devil himself." Trump endorsed Farnsworth.
Bowers' resolve is inspirational even four years later.
How the fanatics tried to ruin his life is unconscionable and un-American.
"I never had the thought of giving up," he said. "No way. I don't like bullies. That's one constant in my life. I. Do. Not. Like. Bullies."
In 2022, Rusty Bowers was given the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
The citation reads:
Following the 2020 presidential election, Rusty Bowers, a pro-Trump Republican, resisted intense pressure from Trump and Rudy Giuliani and refused to go along with an illegal scheme to replace Arizona’s legal slate of electors with a false slate of electors who would elect Trump. “As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” Bowers said. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.” For his decision of conscience, Bowers endured persistent harassment and intimidation tactics from Trump supporters, and later survived an attempt to recall him from the legislature. In January 2022, Bowers again acted to protect the integrity of Arizona elections by stopping a Republican-sponsored bill that would have allowed the legislature to overturn the results of an election. He remains a target for pro-Trump partisans.
"The constitution is hanging by a thread," Bowers lamented to The Guardian. "The funny thing is I always thought it would be the other guys. And it's my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind."
There is a sign on Aviation Road in Queensbury that has been there for four years and is showing its age.
The red white and blue colors are faded and during the summer months, the surrounding bushes partially obscure the message "STILL OUR PRESIDENT."
The sign is about five or six-feet wide, attached to a wooden fence and seems to be in violation of town ordinance against displaying political signs year-round.
Yet, it remains.
I still notice it every time I drive pass.
I wonder why it is still there considering all we know now about January 6 and the former president's attempt to subvert the election results.
I wonder what Rusty Bowers would think of the sign.
I wonder what the folks on Aviation Road think of Rusty Bowers' actions.
I'd like to think that the former president is like that sign - frayed and fading away.
But I don't believe that for a second.
"“I think January 6 is like the trailer to a movie,” former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says in the documentary. “That’s the one thing with Donald Trump that I’ve learned. You think he’ll just go this far and there’s not more. There’s always more. He takes it as far as it will go.”
So none of us are done yet.
Moving on
While the closure of the College of Saint Rose has been a blow to its students and faculty, Times Union reporter Kathleen Moore reported this week that it has been a boon to other Capital District colleges.
Russell Sage College reported an increase of 649 students this fall - a 32 percent increase - of which 402 were former Saint Rose students.
University at Albany accommodated 181 Saint Rose students by expediting their admission into its education program.
Siena College also included a 2 percent increase in students this fall.
The Albany College of Pharmacy hired eight former Saint Rose professors this fall, but with enrollment dropping for 12 straight years, it refused to say what its' numbers were this year.
Old Republicans
There are old Republicans and new Republicans these days.
The great columnist Heather Cox Richardson reported this week that there are a lot of old Republicans who refuse to support their current nominee for president.
She wrote:
George W. Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting (Kamala) Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
They can't all be RINOs, can they?
Tornado follow-up
North Country Public Radio did a great follow-up on the tornado that touched down in the Warrensburg area on July 16.
Assemblyman Matt Simpson reported that many residents are facing big cleanup bills.
Warrensburg Supervisor Kevin Geraghty said that National Grid has spent an entire month in the region trying to clear around power lines and the town crew has spent the past several months working on the problem as well.
"We had never seen anything like that in my tenure here. I've never seen a tornado come through here," Geraghty told NCPR reporter Amy Feiereisel. "I mean, this is a once-in-a-lifetime, or once-in-one hundred years storm."
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” - George Orwell
And here we are.
Our condo community in Chestertown (Green Mansions), was hammered by the tornado and sustained several million dollars worth of damage, never saw so many downed trees. Multiple insurance adjusters were out there; they had to kick it up to some kind of catastrophic loss adjuster. Our house was fine but without power for a while.. The road crews did a fabulous job clearing the roads in just a few days (I thought it would be weeks) and we got power back in three days (and Spectrum a couple of days after). My only beef is that I had to toss a freezer full of meat out because my power outage was just a couple hours short of the 72 hours minimum National Grid was requiring for reimbursement. Also really annoyed that Elise Stefanik was completely missing in action; she pulled a Ted Cruz and left town but had time to post regular political statements about everything but our natural disaster. This is not me being partisan, this is me thinking the one thing local politicians have to be around for are disasters- even if they are not particularly helpful, they could at least give out ice or something. Anyway, the rebuilding is still ongoing chez moi, but it definitely moved quickly.