Author: jxindivisible

A Opportunity to Meet an Outstanding Candidate for this Open Seat in 2024

On Monday, October 2nd, from 11AM to 1:00PM the Spokane County Democrats will host Washington State Senator and candidate for Washington State Insurance Commissioner Patty Kuderer at a buffet luncheon at the Longhorn Barbecue West at 7611 W Sunset Hwy. I spoke with her for nearly an hour in preparing this post. She is an impressive candidate with a compelling personal history. I urge those of my readers who can to sign up to meet with her over lunch. Click here to sign up and get a ticket.

Patty Kuderer was a practicing trial attorney specializing in consumer advocacy in the Seattle area for more than a decade when she, somewhat reluctantly, accepted an appointment to the Washington State House from the 48th Legislative District (Bellevue more or less) in 2015. Two years later she accepted an appointment to the Washington State Senate from the same district. She has served in the Washington State Senate since then, holding her seat in the 2018 and 2022 elections with 60 and then 70 percent of the vote, respectively. After talking with her, those sorts of margins are easy to understand. 

Senator Kuderer signed up with the Public Disclosure Commission in May of 2023 as a candidate for Insurance Commissioner. A Republican opponent,Michele A Forgues Lackie” signed up in July. One must expect that the insurance industry will field and lavishly fund this or another opponent before the 2024 election. 

Senator Kuderer’s tenure in the Washington State Senate demonstrates that she doesn’t just cast a vote, she does the real work of legislating. It was her bill, Senate Bill 5082, signed into law in April of this year, that finally rid us of the taxpayer-funded, wasteful Republican anti-tax propaganda of advisory votes, those puzzling, non-binding, useless choices that took up at least a page or two of every ballot we have filled out in this state for the last sixteen years. These advisory votes are just one of the products of the despicable Republican operative, Tim Eyman’s, efforts to subvert the initiative process in Washington State in the service of Republican propaganda. Senator Kuderer deserves high praise for her years-long effort to clean up Eyman’s tracks. If you have a few minutes I highly recommend watching Senator Kuderer’s presentation of her Bill to the Senate State Government & Elections Committee on January 10, 2023. Here’s the link. Slide the cursor to 33:00 minutes to witness the elegance of her presentation.

Getting rid of advisory is just one striking example (and obviously a favorite of mine) of legislation Senator Kuderer has toiled away on in the State Legislature. Come have with her on October 2nd to hear more. Again, here’s the link to sign up for lunch.

Senator Kuderer would make a superb Insurance Commissioner. She deserves our early support. 

What Does the Insurance Commissioner Do? — Read On

According to Wikipedia only twelve states in the union elect a state insurance commissioner. The job of insurance commissioner in the State of Washington is an important one:

“The Washington State Insurance Commissioner is a public official responsible for overseeing and regulating the insurance industry within the state of Washington. This includes all types of insurance, ranging from home and automobile all the way to insurance for people’s pets. The Insurance Commissioner’s job also is to be the consumer advocate for the people of Washington state, protecting their interests and ensuring (no pun intended) insurance companies operating within the state comply with relevant laws and regulations.”

We ought to want an insurance commissioner equipped to strongly advocate for consumers in dealing with the morass that is health insurance in our state, to say nothing of the difficulties people are facing with some insurance companies in claims around loss of homes in climate driven disasters like our recent wildfires.

Current Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, now age 79, has announced that he will retire at the end of his term in 2024 after 24 years. An optometrist by training, Kreidler’s path to insurance commissioner included stints in both the Washington State House and Senate (and a degree as Master of Public Health [MPH]). 

I hope to see you on October 2 at the Longhorn barbecue. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

A Week From Today–A Spokane Gathering and Fundraiser

This just in from Jim Dawson, Eastern Washington Director for Fuse Washington, the people and organization who bring you the highly recommended Progressive Voter’s Guide:

Subject: Raise a toast to Mayor Woodward’s early retirement

Thursday, Sept. 28th from 5-7pm at Champagne for Change, with Governor Inslee,  in the Common House at the Haystack Heights CoHousing Community on the lower South Hill.(See below for more details and a ticket link.) I hope to see you there.

Dear Friends, 

Having a MAGA Mayor running the City of Spokane has been a disaster. Mayor Woodward’s recent embrace of known domestic terrorist Matt Shea at a Christian Nationalist political event to receive his endorsement is only the latest example. She has also politicized the houseless crisis by slowing down the closure of Camp Hope and gave one of her biggest political donors a sweetheart contract for a homeless shelter at a warehouse with inhumane conditions including no indoor plumbing. 

Join us on Sept. 28th from 5-7pm at Champagne for Change with Governor Inslee to support Fuse’s work in Spokane to send Mayor Woodward into an early retirement by electing progressive champion Lisa Brown! It’s our best chance to win back the Mayor’s office in over a decade and to protect the progressive majority on the City Council. 

Can we count on you to attend Champagne for Change?

Click HERE:  Buy your tickets today!

Event Details: 
What: Champagne for Change, includes hors d’oeuvres, drinks, and a champagne toast
Where: September 28th from 5-7 PM
Where: Haystack Heights Common House 731 S. Garfield St. Spokane, WA 99202

We know wealthy corporate developers and their big business allies will spend record amounts to elect their conservative puppets who will put their profits before the good of our community. Only with your support can we stop them by mobilizing thousands of voters to elect progressive leaders who will stand up for our community. 

Can’t attend the event? You can still make a donation to support our local organizing! 

Get updates about the event and invite your friends on Facebook:

Check out the Facebook event

Thanks for all that you do, 
Jim and the entire team at Fuse

Celebrating 11 Years of Mobilizing Heroes and Organizing Resistance

Follow us: Facebook  | Twitter  |  fusewashington.org
Fuse is the state’s largest progressive organization — people creating change online, on the ground, and on issues that matter. 

Together for Progress 

Join us at
fusewashington.org

The Sixtieth Anniversary of the Birmingham Church Bombing

As a white teenager in a white suburb of Milwaukee my original experience the civil rights movement of the 1960s one television news article at a time. Memory of that era—at least for me—was one of fragmented events that I did not initially understand or fully appreciate. Last Friday as I read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s story centered on the sixtieth anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, those fragments again came into vivid focus. The events that led up to and followed the race-inspired murder of four girls—people I see as innocent fellow humans—the memory of the contorted faces of hate borne by white men and women alike screaming at black children, cheering on Bull Connor’s policemen training firehoses and billy clubs on unarmed protestors—those vivid memories of news stories of the 1960s came flooding back. I wept. Still more poignant was the reminder that such twisted hate in varied forms lives on in the hearts of some people today, including increasing numbers who veil their hate in a malignant form of religion they claim as true Christianity—a Christianity I find unrecognizable. It doesn’t ever go away. It just lies quietly waiting for some demagogue to give it voice—in an era like the one in which we now live. 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

September 15, 2023 (Friday)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

At 10:22 this morning, a Jewish temple in Birmingham, Alabama, blew the shofar, and churches rang their bells four times. 

It was at that moment, sixty years ago, that a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Youth Day in the historic brick church on Sunday, September 15, 1963, and five young girls dressed in their Sunday best were in the ladies’ lounge getting ready for their part in the Sunday service that was about to start. As Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins were chatting and adjusting their dresses, a charge of dynamite stashed under the steps that led to the church sanctuary blasted into the ladies lounge, killing the four girls instantly. Standing at the sink in the back of the room, Addie’s sister Sarah survived with serious injuries. 

Just five days before, Black children had entered formerly all-white schools after an August court order required an end to segregation in Birmingham’s public schools. This decision capped a fight over integration that had begun just after the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional. 

In that same year, in the wake of the successful 381-day Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to protest that city’s segregated bus system, Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and strategist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to challenge segregation through nonviolent protest, rather than trusting the work to the courts alone. 

On September 9, 1957, Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby, along with other Black parents, tried to enroll their children in the city’s all-white flagship John Herbert Phillips High School. A mob of white Ku Klux Klansmen met them at the school, attacking them with chains and bats; someone stabbed Ruby Shuttlesworth in the hip with a pocketknife, and an amateur videographer captured a man named Bobby Frank Cherry on video reaching for brass knuckles before diving back into the attack on Shuttlesworth. 

Cherry had no children at the school.

Over the next several years, the Ku Klux Klan lost the political struggle over civil rights, and its members increasingly turned to public violence. There were so many bombings of civil rights leaders’ homes and churches that the city became known as “Bombingham.” When the Freedom Riders, civil rights workers who rode interstate buses in mixed-race groups to challenge segregation, came through Birmingham, police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor looked the other way as KKK members beat the riders with baseball bats, chains, rocks, and lead pipes. 

Connor was a perfect foil for civil rights organizers, who began a campaign of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation in Birmingham. One of the organizers’ tactics was to attract national attention by provoking Connor, and participants in the movement began sit-ins at libraries, kneel-ins at white churches, and voter registration drives. Shuttlesworth invited King to Birmingham to help. 

In April 1963, Connor got an injunction barring the protests, and promised to fill the jails. He did. King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a product of Connor’s vow, smuggled out of jail on bits of paper given to him by a sympathetic inmate. In the letter, King responded to those who opposed the civil rights protests and, claiming to support civil rights, said that the courts were the proper venue to address social injustice. King agreed that the protests created tension, but he explained that such tension was constructive: it would force the city’s leaders to negotiate. “‘Wait,’” he reminded them, “has almost always meant ‘never.’”

But Connor’s tactics had the chilling effect he intended, as demonstrators shied away from being arrested out of fear of losing their jobs and being unable to provide for their families. So organizers decided to invite children to join a march to the downtown area. When the children agreed, the SCLC held workshops on the techniques of nonviolence and warned them of the danger they would be facing. 

On May 2, 1963, they gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, just blocks away from Birmingham’s City Hall. As students moved toward City Hall in waves, singing “We Shall Overcome,” police officers arrested more than 600 of them and blocked the streets with fire trucks. The national news covered the story.

The next day, Bull Connor tried another tactic to keep the young protesters out of the downtown: fire hoses set to the highest pressure. When observers started to throw rocks and bottles at the police with the fire hoses, Connor told police officers to use German shepherd dogs to stop them. Images from the day made the national news and began to galvanize support for the protesters.

By May 6, Connor had turned the state fairgrounds into a makeshift jail to hold the overflow of protesters he was arresting, and national media figures, musicians, and civil rights activists were arriving in Birmingham. By May 7 the downtown was shut down while Connor arrested more people and used fire hoses again. The events in Birmingham were headline news. 

By May 10, local politicians under pressure from businessmen had agreed to release the people who had been arrested; to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, and bathrooms; and to hire Black people in a few staff jobs. 

After Connor’s insistence that he would never permit desegregation, white supremacists in Birmingham felt betrayed by the new deal, basic though it was. Violence escalated over the summer, even as King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was widely published and praised and as civil rights activists, fresh from the Birmingham campaign, on August 28 held the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., where King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. 

For white supremacists in Birmingham, the children and the 16th Street Baptist Church where they had organized were the symbols of the movement that had beaten them. 

Their fury escalated in summer 1963 when a lawsuit the Reverend Shuttlesworth had filed to challenge segregation in public schools ended in August with a judge ordering Birmingham public schools to desegregate. 

Five days after the first Black children entered a white school as students, four members of the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they didn’t think it was aggressive enough, took action. Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry—the same man who in 1957 had beaten the Reverend Shuttlesworth with brass knuckles for trying to enroll his children in school—bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. “Just wait until Sunday morning and they’ll beg us to let them segregate,” Chambliss had told his niece. 

The death of innocent children—on a Sunday morning, in a house of God—at the hands of white supremacists drew national attention. It woke up white people who had previously been leery of civil rights protests, making them confront the horror of racial violence in the South. Support for civil rights legislation grew, and in 1964 that support helped legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act. 

Still, it seemed as if the individual bombers would get away with their crimes. In 1968, the FBI investigation ended without indictments.

But it turned out the story wasn’t over. Bill Baxley, a young law student at the University of Alabama in 1963, was so profoundly outraged by the bombing that he vowed someday he would do something about it. In 1970, voters elected Baxley to be Alabama’s attorney general. He reopened the case, famously responding to a Ku Klux Klan threat by responding on official state letterhead: “kiss my *ss.” 

The reluctance of the FBI to share its evidence meant that Baxley charged and convicted only Robert Chambliss—whose nickname in 1963 was “Dynamite Bob”—for the murder of Denise McNair. 

But still the story wasn’t over. Another young lawyer named Doug Jones was in the courtroom during that trial, and in 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Jones pursued the case, uncovering old evidence and finding new witnesses. Herman Cash had died, but in 2001 and 2002, representing the state of Alabama, Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for first-degree murder. 

Chambliss, Cherry, and Blanton all died in prison: Chambliss in 1985, Cherry in 2004. Blanton died in 2020.

—

Notes:

If you’re interested in this history, this is a must-watch:

https://www.al.com/news/2023/09/16th-street-baptist-church-bombing-60th-anniversary-birmingham-church-bells-will-sound-at-1022-am.html

https://www.nps.gov/articles/sclc.htm

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/fred-shuttlesworth.html

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=187704

https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf

https://www.nps.gov/articles/16thstreetbaptist.htm

https://www.apr.org/arts-life/2013-08-01/no-remorse-prison-letters-of-klansman-convicted-in-63-birmingham-church-bombing

https://lettersofnote.com/2012/11/26/kiss-my-ass/

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/25/us/church-bombing-trial-begins-birmingham-city-s-past-very-much-present.html

Richland Washington Recalls Three School Board Members

In the Washington State Primary Election held this last August 1 the voters of the Richland School District in south central Washington, one of the Tri Cities in Benton County, were offered the opportunity to recall three members of the five member school board, [Misipati] Semi Bird, Audra Byrd, and Kari Williams. In that election each of them lost their seat with between 53.3 and 54.5% of the votes cast in favor of recall out of roughly 19,700 . (Nearly 700 more Richland School District voters turned in ballots in this 2023 August Primary election than did in the electorally comparable 2021 August Primary—an increase of 3.7%. Voter motivation to actually cast a ballot can be critical in a society where voting isn’t mandatory.)

The same recall charges appeared on the ballot for each of the three trustees:

The charges that [insert name], Richland School Board, Position [insert number], committed misfeasance, malfeasance, and/or violated his oath of office allege that he: 

1. Violated the Open Public Meetings Act by voting at a special meeting taking final action on a matter, to wit: masking optional, that had not been included in the published public meeting agenda. 

2. Voted to make masks at schools optional, in knowing violation of the law and in excess of the powers of a school board, even after warnings from the State and from legal counsel. 

3. Violated District Policies and Procedures by failing to assure compliance with law and policy.

In other words, these three, Bird, Byrd, and Williams, knowingly overstepped the legal authority granted a school board in the State of Washington in order to express their right wing anti-mask zealotry. Worse, they had conspiratorially violated Washington State’s Open Public Meetings Act and regulations regarding special meetings in order to take their vote without a proper community airing.

The wording that appeared on the ballot on August 1 failed to fully capture the controversy Bird, Byrd, and Williams stirred up in the Richland community, much of which has centered around Misipati Semi Bird, a self-described “constitutional Christian conservative” and one of the last two of the three person voting bloc elected to the Richland School District board.

Here’s the background: Kari Williams was the “sleeper” on the board. She was elected in 2019, pre-pandemic, with 53% of the votes cast in the November General Election by 18,820 voters. Semi Bird and Audra Byrd were elected to the board in the 2021 November General Election (in the midst of the pandemic) by the same percentage of votes, but in an off year General election in which, somehow, roughly 2,400 more voters were motivated to turn in ballots than in 2019. 

With the leadership of Semi Bird and the votes of Audra Byrd and the previously elected Kari Williams the three were off and running with their right wing agenda within six weeks of Bird and Byrd taking office. The Recall effortsoon followed:

This recall is not about masks nor is it a partisan issue. The recall is about elected officials being held responsible for unlawful actions they took while in office.

On Tuesday, February 15, 2022, Richland School Board Directors Semi Bird, Audra Byrd, and Kari Williams participated in a special meeting, held a vote that was not included on the meeting agenda, and took the final action of making masks optional in Richland Schools, effective immediately. In doing so, they broke several Washington State laws and violated their oaths of office.

In addition, there is evidence that the three collaborated before the meeting to plan for taking the vote, which is in violation of RCW 42.30, the Open Public Meetings Act.^[11]

It was a year and a half and a huge amount of effort to finally get the Recall on a ballot. The Washington State Constitution and the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) requires specifically stated grounds and judicial review of those grounds even before signature gathering can begin. In this Richland School Board the Recall effort passed through two rulings by the Benton County Superior Court and an appeal by the School Board to the Washington State Supreme Court before the ballot language quoted above was settled on and signature gathering could commence. Those legal maneuverings weren’t final until almost a year following the February 2022 initiation of the Recall effort. Meanwhile, because Bird, Byrd, and Williams held a majority position on the Richland School Board, one must presume that the Richland School District (i.e. the taxpaying public) was in the position of protecting these three from the Recall and covering the legal bill for their defense. 

If the extremist culture-warrior identity of Bird, Byrd, and Williams wasn’t already obvious it became so immediately following the successful recall:

The [Tri Cities] Herald also asked Audra Byrd by email Thursday for her response to the latest vote count, as well as about a Facebook post with her name telling Richland parents to pull their children out of Richland schools.

The post read in part, “This is heartbreaking news for our schools and our community children. … This will absolutely embolden our many indoctrinating teachers who already have been pushing inappropriate content on our students in secret ways. Now they have nothing to hold them back. Please do not naively keep your children in Richland School District. It will be to the destruction of their testimonies in Jesus Christ and any moral values you are teaching them in the home.”

Wow. These “indoctrinating” teachers pushing “inappropriate content” with the evil intent of destroying “testimonies in Jesus Christ” and “moral values”! 

But even that isn’t the end of the story. Seven months into the controversy of the Recall effort, while the Recall wording was still the subject of litigation, Misipati Semi Bird declared his candidacy (as a Republican) for governor of the State of Washington in 2024. As of September 16, 2023, Bird has gathered (and spent) one hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars as a gubernatorial candidate in the 2024 election, according to the Public Disclosure Commission. Mr. Bird possesses significant skills as an orator and uses those skills to sound much more reasonable than his tenure on the Richland School District School Board and his alliance with the above-quoted former fellow board member Audra Byrd would suggest. Bird carries all the credentials of a Fundamentalist Christian culture warrior. 

Where does he derive support? You ought not be surprised. This is the same Semi Bird who gave an hour and half long speech in Spokane on March 23, 2023, “in a room full of Activist PCOs”. One must presume these are the same “Activist PCOs” who took over the Spokane County Republican Party and elected Pastor Noble as the Party chairman in December of 2022. The video (also posted on Rumble) is featured on the website of the Spokane County Republican Party chaired by Pastor Brian Noble. Noble offers a half-hearted disclaimer, but also says that “Many PCOs have been asking for this video”. (Faintly branded in the lower right hand corner of the early frames of the video is “Northwest Grassroots”, the white supremacist, local, far right wing group that hosted James Allsup some years ago, resulting in the then chairwoman, Cecily Wright, stepping down from her position as chair of the SpokaneGOP.)

The moral of this story? Be sure to vote, but take care, look around, do some digging, before you vote in school board elections. You could wind up with your taxpayer dollars defending a right wing Fundamentalist ideologue whom your vote (or lack of voting) helped lodge in a seat of government. 

Before you leave, re-read and contemplate the words of the Facebook post of Audra Byrd pasted above. Remember the unveiling of those words as you research candidates in local school board races in which you will have a chance to cast a ballot starting next month.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. In a curious twist, the third recalled Richland School District board member, Kari Williams appeared on the August 1 Primary ballot both as a potential recall and as a primary contender for a second term in office. On the same ballot on which Ms. Williams was recalled she also garnered enough votes (but only 28% to the first place person’s 47%) to gain a position on the November General Election ballot this fall.

Republicans trashing potentially life-saving research in the name of short term cost savings

In their Project 2025, national Republicans have shed any pretense of acknowledging human-caused global heating (aka “climate change”). Project 2025 is the Republican game plan for the first hundred days of a Republican presidency. It proposes to dismantle the climate strategies of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and green light drilling and digging fossil fuels. Project 2025 is full-on denial, an ambitious plan for a race to the bottom.

Some local Republican are slightly more subtle, showing their colors in more clever ways, often with short-sighted arguments that center on the idea of cost savings. Such is the argument presented by Sue Lani Madsen in her Thursday, September 7th column, “Focusing the agenda on recovery instead of politics” in the Spokesman. Madsen seeks aid for county residents burned out of their homes by the recent Gray and Oregon Road wildfires in the form of freedom from regulation in their quest to rebuild. She casts the State Building Code Council as the boogeyman from whom relief must be sought. 

It isn’t exactly the State Building Code Council as an institution to which Ms. Madsen objects, but rather to the “progressive majority” on the Building Code Council, people purposefully selected and appointed by Governor Inslee to enact“his extreme climate-focused agenda”. 

What’s her beef with the State Building Code Council? It’s new regulations enacted by the Council (with a lot of research and public input) that “include eliminating natural gas in favor of electric heat pumps, requiring preparation for EV charging, and tighter air leakage requirements”. She tosses out numbers for the additional home replacement costs that start at $24,000. Then, tellingly, to emphasize the imposition, she goes on, “Added costs may be over $55,000 in wildland-urban interface areas.” Wait a minute. Why does a re-build location at the “woodland-urban interface” more than double the originally quoted added cost to rebuild? The mandate for heat pumps, EV charging preparation, and air leakage requirements is already in that $24,000. Ms. Madsen conveniently avoids discussing the State Building Code regulations that would help fireproof a re-built home against the next wildfire—logical regulations she cannot tar by including them under the “extreme climate-focused agenda”. 

Ms. Madsen’s white knight in all this is Spokane County Commissioner Al French. Commissioner French, a developer by trade, also sits on the State Building Code Council—where he opposed the new regulations. His underlying reasons for opposition most likely stem from some combination of climate science denial, Republican orthodoxy against “regulation”, and concern that these regulations might cut into profits in the building trade. In her opinion piece Ms. Madsen wishes to re-cast Commissioner French as the staunch defender of the poor and beleaguered against an onerous, misguided regime of climate-science-motivated regulation. 

Like most economic arguments, Ms. Madsen’s is easy to turn on its head. The added cost associated with fireproofing a home at the “woodland-urban interface” might well be amortized through reduced home insurance costs. Certainly fireproofing add-ons in such locations should add to the re-sale value of the home, reduce the likelihood of another loss, and, importantly, reduce the cost to taxpayers of defending such a home in the next wildfire. Heat pump heating and tighter air leakage requirements are more expensive up front but will save money in the long run thanks to greater heating and cooling efficiency—while, at the same time, reducing the need to burn fossil fuels—but for Ms. Madsen and Mr. French reducing the burning of carbon is a bug, not a feature.

If Ms. Madsen and Mr. French’s true concern is to offer economic aid to those faced with rebuilding costs, they might consider supporting, as one quick example, the provision of low cost loans to families faced with rebuilding, loans that would align the time frame of the added costs with time frame of the amortization of those costs—rather than condemning the beleaguered to re-building sub-standard, vulnerable housing by assailing sensible regulation. 

As it stands, Sue Lani Madsen’s Thursday, September 7th column, “Focusing the agenda on recovery instead of politics” is, ironically, all about focusing on the politics of her denial of climate science, not on community recovery. Remember the disingenuous Republican media campaign “They’re coming for your gas stove!”?Madsen’s opinion piece is cut from the same climate-reality-denying cloth.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry 

P.S. As owners and tenants of housing we rarely give more than a passing thought to fire safety or home heating and cooling efficiency—at least until disaster is upon us or our energy bills get out of control. We passively relegate those safety and energy savings concerns to the experts who serve in agencies like the State Building Code Council. Here’s just one example that stands out for me in the meticulous research being done and rarely seen, research that is then expressed in the sort of sensible regulations that Ms. Madsen and Mr. French oppose:

Click on “Ember Entry: Vents”. Watch the video then click on and skim the article “Vulnerability of Vents to Wind-Blown Embers”. Why wouldn’t you want to have the insights gained in research like this incorporated into your re-built home?

A Lesson For Voters–Why we need to pay attention

The takeover of the West Bonner County (Idaho) School District (WBCSD) got under way in the off-year general election in November of 2021. In Zone 2 of the WBCSD voter engagement was particularly dismal. Candidate Susan Brown won a seat on the WBCSD school board over two other candidates with 176 votes out of just 349 cast. Well over a thousand registered voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot.*

That year the story was the same in Zone 4 of WBCSD. Keith Rutledge won another of the five school board seats with just 244 votes, only 7 more votes than the other candidate, in a race with similarly dismal voter turnout.*

The WBCSD is geographically large. The district is centered on Priest River and includes the communities of Laclede, Oldtown, Blanchard, and Coolin. (See map.) It serves just under a thousand students. (For contrast, Spokane Public Schools student population is nearly 30 times that.) The WBCSD is divided into five zones (similar to Central Valley School District in Spokane valley). Each zone of WBCSD elects a member to the board. (In contrast, Spokane Public Schools elects board members district-wide.)

Mr. Rutledge (Zone 4) and Ms. Brown (Zone 2) took office on the WBCSD school board in 2022. By August they began showing their ideological colors. That month, in an action that produced only a little news, Brown, Rutledge were joined by Trustee Reinbold (elected in 2019) and voted to revoke the previous approval of the district’s English language arts curriculum. They cited “liberal indoctrination” as the boogeyman of the rejected curriculum. The move cost the district at least ten thousand dollars, contributed to the resignation of Superintendent of Schools Jackie Branum, and left the curriculum in disarray with no replacement. (Tellingly, some community members recommended adoption of a curriculum developed by the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, a curriculum not listed among the Idaho State Department of Education’s approved curricular materials.) 

In the May 2023 primary election Rutledge and Brown publicly refused to support a replacement school levy for the district. The levy failed district-wide on a vote of 1595 for and 1700 against, leaving the district with a loss of a third of its budget. 

In June of 2023 during a raucous meeting Rutledge and Brown were again joined by Mr. Reinbold, in voting 3-2 to hire a controversial figure, Branden Durst, an education policy analyst for the ultra-conservative, “free market” Idaho Freedom Foundation, as the new Superintendent of Schools for WBCSD. Durst, although he lacked the credentials required for the position, was elected by the board over the highly qualified interim Superintendent, Susan Luckey. Alarm bells started to ring. The Idaho Freedom Foundation is a staunch antagonist of public schooling. 

The Coeur d’Alene Press published this bizarre justification by Rutledge of the choice of Durst for superintendent:

“At this day, at this time, I think Susie Luckey is an excellent superintendent for a school district that was highly functioning and is running smoothly,” board chairman Keith Rutledge said. “At this point, I think that change needs to happen. And I think Branden is the guy to do that.”

Could the not-so-smooth functioning have to do with losing a third of the budget?

Durst wasted no time in stirring up controversy by firing district office staff and calling for a “forensic audit”. Since the levy failure, 31 teachers left the district. School board meetings over the summer were heated. To many it seemed that Durst, along with Trustees Rutledge, Brown, and Reinbold were taking a wrecking ball to the school district. 

The electorate finally, belatedly, woke up to this insanity. In a campaign titled Recall, Replace, Rebuild a group self-identified as Idaho Moms 7b collected signatures from the respective school board zones to hold a recall election of Rutledge and Brown. 

If there were any question as to the far right Republican culture warrior credentials of these two, Susan Brown was open about dispelling that doubt:

“I led the investigation into the Wonders K-12 curriculum recommended by Susie Luckey which was riddled with (critical race theory) derived teaching methods and was 20% over budget. When we found out that the (social emotional learning) being pushed by the recall organizers was a backdoor through Idaho law to promote CRT and LGBTQ+/- agendas, I led the effort to send it right back to its publishers,” Brown said.

The special election (with the recalls as the sole ballot item) was held on August 29. Thanks to the effort of many concerned voters the result was overwhelming. The special election produced a “presidential election turnout” with 61% of voters on average in the two Zones casting a ballot. The tallies were decisive, Brown was recalled 624 to 322 votes, Rutledge by 762 to 454. (Contrast that to the 176 and 244 that elected the two, respectively, in 2021.) 

But the drama was still not over. The recall wouldn’t be final until certified in the “official canvass” by the Bonner County Board of Commissioners on September 7th, nine days after the election. In that gap, the WBCSD Board, led by Rutledge and Brown, despite the slap down of the recall election, sought to hold a special lame duck meeting in which they planned to firm up Durst’s contract, presumably in the hope that the new board would be unable to remove him. In addition they were prepared to vote on an item that would have required the district to pay [Durst’s] full salary if he was terminated for any reason. This from two board members, Rutledge and Brown, who pretended to be fiscal conservatives. 

Fortunately, members of the group that pushed for the recall were vigilant. Having gotten wind of the meeting, they successfully appealed to a local judge for a temporary restraining order “prohibiting the board from taking any action that would financially or contractually obligate the district until the recall was certified.”

So much for any notion of democracy and “the will of the people” from these two right wing culture warriors. 

The lesson: If you don’t pay attention to who’s running—even among school board candidates—and vote accordingly—you risk ceding governance—and public education—to a minority of determined extremists. 

It will take time for the dust settle after this controversy in West Bonner County, Idaho, but the electorate has awakened to the threat and is newly empowered. 

It would have required a whole lot less sweat and tears if more voters had paid attention in 2021. Let that be a lesson for the upcoming November election here in eastern Washington.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

*Exact numbers are hard to come by for 2021. The West Priest River precinct (with 691 registered voters) is split between Zone 2 and Zone 4 of the WBCSD.

P.S. For more on this story (but without the late twist of the Temporary Restraining Order) I recommend RANGEmedia.co’s coverage: 

https://rangemedia.co/wbcsd-west-bonner-school-district-recall-board/

and Ballotpedia’s details at:

https://ballotpedia.org/Keith_Rutledge_and_Susan_Brown_recall,_West_Bonner_County_School_District,_Idaho_(2023)

P.P.S. Take note that all this occurred in a Bonner County, a county in which two thirds of the voters in the 2020 election marked their ballot for Donald Trump. Clearly, many of those in the two zones of the WBCSD board who voted to recall Rutledge and Brown, the two public school trashing ideologues, were folks in the habit of voting for Republicans. It is heartening to see that many Republicans, even in Idaho, value public education.

Back on Wednesday

I’m on the road. Back on Wednesday.