West of the Rotunda

When I was young, in my grade school days, my parents brought me and my sisters to the very western edge of this state. My grandfather’s ranch was just one ridge over from the Snake River, along the Wildhorse River. It is mountainous terrain, just south of the Seven Devils, all up and down. But there were benches here or there where they could put up a haystack or two of loose hay to sustain their small cattle herd through the winters. They made enough to pay off the property. I didn’t know how hard the existence was at that young age, but I do now. No one works that hard anymore. I don’t.

I came back to Idaho to live in 1977, though I didn’t know it at that time. I came to help my step grandmother survive on her parents’ homestead. Grandpa Henry had died from a stroke. It was a 110 acre “retirement” ranch with a half dozen horses, five or six cows, too many chickens. It had good water, no phone, no electricity, and a 3 and a half mile “driveway” that climbed 2000 feet from the end of the county road in the canyon below.

But I couldn’t live like that. I learned, painfully, that I needed to be around people. If I had been a true survivalist, a real “prepper” for the coming apocalypse, I might have relished that setting and its isolation.

So, I made the investment to be a small-town doctor, where I could tend to people’s ailments, their worries, their pains and maybe even their death, or the death of a loved one. And by joining a community, hearing their stories and their suffering, I found the heart of this state.

In those days I had no idea how big Idaho is. I thought the 3 ½ hour drive to the town of 500 where we got Jeep parts was big enough. But in my years since I have learned there are homesteads and canyons like Wildhorse throughout this leftover landscape.

So, when folks argue we need less of each other and more of just ourselves, I understand and agree with the sentiment, to an extent. But we still need each other. I thought I could do it all too, for a while. I figured out how to replace the clutch on the TD9 before there was a YouTube video for that. But when I popped the track off the crawler on the steep sidehill above the barn, I needed help.

Gerald came up from Midvale. After a hearty lunch that ended with cream and raspberries, he sidled up and told me how to get that track back on. Then he drove it down to level ground and showed me how to adjust the tension so it wouldn’t pop off again.

There is no doubt we humans need each other. Sure, we could all do better doing for ourselves, but we are here to help each other.

Government should not usurp self-reliance. I’m not sure it can. I hear from farmers getting government checks how folks need to pay their own way. University professors, with government grants, think they know all the answers. But that farmer and that professor both saw problems and looked around for a solution. The government aid they got hadn’t crippled them.

I saw a 47-year-old sheet rocker in the clinic today. He came to see me because a year ago I said I thought I could help him with his drinking. He can’t sleep at night now. He wakes up at 2AM thinking of the 11 relatives he has lost in the last year to Covid. His health insurance, Medicaid, paid the cost of the visit.

We need to help each other. In whatever way we can.

I spent seven years trying to learn how to treat individual patients. The first few years were devoted to learning the anatomy, the pharmacology, the body systems, and their intimate connections. Then I got to work with patients. As a medical student, I was usually the fourth or fifth person to ask this poor wretch their history, their symptoms and then the last to ineptly examine their body and try to make my own conclusions about what was wrong and what needed to be done. Three more years of residency taught me to sleep when I could and manage my time while honing these patient evaluation and treatment skills.

Then, when I went out into the real world of clinic, community hospital and billing insurance the real education began.

All this training was focused on my individual treatment of the individual patient. I learned to do my best for my patient.

Something drew me (it’s a long and funny story) to be a county coroner. My training of anatomy, pathology and human behavior helped me a lot, but the deceased was not my patient (though sometimes they had been). I was working for the county, the public, the voters since I sought to be elected to this position. But those many investigations: the suicides, young and old, the poverty, the isolated mentally ill, the child deaths pulled me to look at the bigger picture of health.

I asked for some research from the state to understand where people in my county were dying. It turned out about 25% died in the hospital, about 25% at home or on a highway and about half the deaths in our county occurred in nursing homes. This was at a time (twenty years ago) when 80% of deaths nationally were in a hospital. It has now dropped to about 60%, yet almost 80% of people, when asked, say they would rather die at home.

I asked our hospital to study the deaths that occurred there. Of the deaths that were in the hospital, most came in with an acute event (stroke, heart attack, pneumonia) and were made better in a day or two, but then declined. Most the deaths had family in attendance and were accepted, supported.

These questions, and the answers I got made me feel pretty comfortable with our community care. All doctors want to reduce deaths, but we all know it is inevitable. When I was in training there was no such field as Palliative Care, though Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ book, On Death and Dying had been published many years before.

In the first three years in the coroner job, I had three dead children, killed by one of their parents. I spent a few years studying child abuse and how to prevent it. We instituted universal child death investigations and reviews for our county, back when Idaho was the only state that did not have such a policy. We developed a program to help new moms who might feel overwhelmed.

When a doctor sees a patient in the office, there is a clear expectation that the doctor is treating the patient. But the home (or lack of it); the family and friends (or their absence) often become part of the treatment concern. The circle of care often must be broadened to better understand the disease, and the treatment.

So, when public health departments started getting flak from the state legislature this last session, I wondered, just who the heck were they mad at? Who do you want making recommendations to policy makers about public health decisions?

I got my answer when The Ada County Commissioners chose their doctor for their public health board.

If you want some crazy treatment for what ails you, you have the freedom to shop around and find some doctor to support your whims. But public health is for everybody, not just those that agree with you.

It seems the immunity provided by the Covid immunization diminishes over time. Now we are talking boosters.

So, does this mean the immunization is worthless? No, but that’s beside the point for vaccine deniers. The freedom to choose trumps consideration of risk, for themselves or their neighbors.

The vaccines greatly diminish the risk of hospitalization and death. In Idaho, in the last 6 months approximately 90% of hospitalized patients have been unimmunized. Similarly, the folks dead from this illness are mostly unimmunized. But as we are seeing that protection wanes.

So, the proudly immunized may soon be humbled by this painful biology. The arrogant unimmunized soon may be dead and not around to gloat over their “victory”.  What a silly fight.

This waning immunity makes sense if you’ve ever had a cold. Covid, the disease caused by the Corona SARS 2 virus is not just a cold, but it is from the category of viruses that cause colds, Corona viruses. Colds affect the upper respiratory tract, runny nose, cough, congestion, feel lousy for a few days, then go back to work. Covid can quickly get down into the lower respiratory tract, the lungs, and when they fill with fluid, you won’t be getting the oxygen you need to keep your organs alive. These are very different diseases even though from similar viruses.

Ingenious, huh? Makes you think…

So now that this virus is amongst us, we are trying to figure out how to prompt our immune systems to respond. That’s where immunizations come to play. Oh, and the mask mandates and isolation techniques are a part of figuring this out too.

We are also figuring out how to work these problems through politically and culturally. That might be the true test of our species, not our immune responses.

The fact that this virus usually just makes us mildly sick has trained our immune systems to lose their awareness for it over time. It is a perfect medium for now slowly killing a lot of us. And it is. About one in a thousand who contract the virus die from it.

Idaho, this great, wide, tall oddly shaped state has seen just that in the last year. Idaho deaths are 20% above what would be expected on “normal” years. Our death rate from Covid is a little above the one in a thousand, but not a lot.

None of you would spend much at the casino on 1:1000 odds. Does that mean you should walk around unimmunized? Only if you don’t trust the shot. And many in Idaho don’t.

So, the virus isn’t winning, it’s just making a dent. A twenty percent bump in death rate is acceptable, isn’t it? Since we have seen such a growth in statewide population, this just means there might be a parking space available, right?

Some are happy to gamble their 1:1000 odds and see no need to immunize. They mock the mask wearers and rail against any mandates. Those that have immunized resent the choice of the unimmunized and blame them for the ongoing waves of infection. Is this the way we are going to see our neighbors now?

The winning and losing question will be decided not by the death toll, but in what we as a community learn from this. The virus obviously learned, either in a bat or in a Chinese virology laboratory, how to make us sick and some of us die. And the virus is now learning how to infect faster and spread its genes farther.

If we as a country learn from this to distrust our neighbors and resent the choices they make, we soon won’t need a virus to be killing us.

I remember my high school football days fondly. I remember that first freshman football touchdown I made and as I circled across the endzone I flipped the ball to the back judge who had both hands in the air and the whistle in his mouth. He had to interrupt what he was doing to catch it. I apologized, then lined up for the extra point.

Nobody spiked the ball back then. We didn’t have dancing in the endzone or sack celebrations or first down jubilations. Any such demonstration would have been considered unseemly if not unsportsmanlike. It was about moving the football down the field with force and humility. I assure you we wore helmets, but it was 50 years ago.

But football and politics have changed over the years. We indeed did have a movie star as our governor in California then. And he went on to be a US President. Reagan really could deliver a line. I thought the Republican party brilliant for embracing his skills.

But politics and governing, though hopelessly entwined are separate skills. The brash word or offensive remark can harm one’s credibility in negotiations that are based on trust.

So, you just have to wonder whether our Idaho elected leaders are trying to govern or grandstand this week in Boise.

The legislature has its own style for endzone celebration. First, they made sure the game wasn’t over last spring, at the end of the longest session in their history when the House refused to adjourn and instead “recessed”. The Senate did adjourn, but they are taking the lead from the House, I guess since they are returning to Boise this week too. Whether any of this conforms with the Idaho Constitution is questionable but spiking the ball in the endzone wasn’t illegal until it was.

For what purpose do these prima donnas gather to spend our money at Boise watering holes? Er, I mean, convene at our Capitol?

The Senate says they want to make sure they are putting money into a legal fund to fight President Biden’s dubious vaccine mandates. It doesn’t matter I guess that the Idaho Attorney General has already joined many other states in such a lawsuit and that a federal judge has placed a stay on Biden’s executive order. They want to put taxpayer money into a fund to pay private attorneys. They must feel some sense of urgency since they actually could be doing this in January.

But the House (who never adjourned) are the ones calling the Senate back to do their bidding. Usually, the Idaho Senate doesn’t take orders from the House, but I guess times have changed. The even conservative and reserved Idaho House has teed up some thirty bills. And they could be about anything. We’ll find out as the week goes on.

If they chose to vote on anything, pass anything, and if our governor chooses to sign it, they will all be on shaky ground. As I said, they aren’t following the rules for their conduct laid out in the Idaho Constitution.

But grandstanding on the taxpayer dime is not the sole province of the legislative branch. Our executives, both the Governor and his Lieutenant, have reached into public coffers to fund trips where they hoped they could spike the ball. Both went to Mar A Lago to kiss the ring of our former President, hoping for his endorsement. Only the Lieutenant got the ball; Brad came up empty. And we get to pay for this.

I vote for people to represent me and work to make our state healthy. We got no real property tax relief last session, just a last-minute casserole that has crippled rapidly growing cities and not eased the annual tax bill from the county.

Next time you go to the polls, consider voting for an offensive lineman. They do the work and don’t dance in the end zone.

I grew up in a small town that exploded, faster than Meridian or Caldwell has, and that experience shaped me. I decided I wanted to raise my children in a town that didn’t suffer from such booms. But neither did I want to have them feel the busts.

Idaho is booming now, and it has been for a while. Booms bring burdens. I was amazed to hear a Republican colleague stand up and say on the Idaho Senate floor what I had been thinking for quite a while. We had debated and passed quite a few probusiness and development tax schemes right after the 2008 economic collapse. The goal was to bring jobs and business to our state. Idaho had just cut school funding for the first time in its history and our reserve accounts were depleted. I felt that pain. Growth could solve this. But he stood up and said, “We are promoting growth in this state. I have plenty of constituents who like things just the way they are. What should I be saying to them?”

This last legislative session the senior Representative from the legislative district that has had the most growth proposed and got passed a property tax “solution” that tried to balance this growth conundrum.

House Bill 389 put a cap on what cities could raise their budgets at 8%, and only 5% from new construction. But what if a small city with 300 homes on the edge of Boise wants to add a development of 100 homes? This is happening right now. Housing down there is booming, and some folks have designed ideas that fit their needs and will serve the market. Believe me, the local folks who have worked on this development who now find it unsupportable by these legislative constraints are not happy.

And it’s happening in my town. A new manufacturing business with good jobs and great history will be looking for new employees, so three new 50 home developments are platted and scraping the soil.

We don’t have unlimited water up here on the Palouse. Don’t get me started on the traffic.

But the idea that the Idaho legislature has the solution for local growth problems is hubris. They might as well be suggesting we build a wall.

Growth happens, just as long as more humans are on this planet. It becomes a question of how and whether we should plan for it or not, since the planet won’t be getting any bigger. It should be up to local municipalities to manage their growth, not the whiz kids in the statehouse.

Many small Idaho towns right now are struggling with their infrastructure needs. Some have had to ship water in, others are seeing sewage plants condemned. And most of these small towns haven’t had growth. They drilled their wells and dug their sewage settlement ponds 50 years ago, paying for the expense with a bond. The interest on that loan was added to their monthly fees. They laid the pipes and charged their rates based on the maintenance and debt service, but with little account for eventual replacement. Now, the worn-out plant needs replacement, and the townspeople wonder why they should pay. They won’t get use of a plant after they die or move on.

We are not planning for sustainable growth.

A student in England’s old New College (est. 1379) was sitting around with his buddies in their eating hall and one commented on the old oak beams. “I’ll bet they’re rotten.” A penknife proved it. Where can you get 30-foot oak beams? Another thought of the campus forester.

The old lumberman puffed on his pipe and squinted. “Eating hall? Them oaks are out east.” And he led them to a grove planted and preserved for 300 years.

Boom and bust is no way to lead a state into the future, though, lord knows it’s sure our history.

I first ran for the Idaho legislature in 2010. If you can take your memory back to those times you might remember the Tea Party angry crowds that were so outraged at Obama. They made their move to change our country through the electoral process. Indeed, that election they did dramatically change the House of Representatives.

I really didn’t understand it, maybe because I wasn’t a Republican and most of those angry folks were. I thought their discontent was out of proportion with the problems before us.

And nowadays, the Trump Republicans similarly have me perplexed. Maybe I just don’t see the possibilities.

Our founder’s some 200+ years ago thought they were creating a form of government that could, through a stable and predictable process, allow for dramatic change. Only, there wasn’t mass or social media in the late 1700’s. Their time frame was different than ours today.

Just what is the problem we must rebel against?

Go out on a corner in whatever town you live on. See the nice new pickups, the all-wheel drive rigs going by and the folks chatting on their cell phones or snapping pictures of everything that catches their eye so they can post and share. We live in a time of comfort and wealth. But that does not mean we are free of injustice or oppression.

 We see revolutions these days in third world countries with corrupt dictators, grinding poverty and huge wealth gaps and their attempts to overthrow their oppressors makes sense. But revolution when we all have streaming Netflix on our cell phones? Why rebel when we have comfort?

But, according to historian David McCullough, so did the American revolutionaries. He stated in his book 1776, that the standard of living for the American colonists was the highest in the world at that time. We were quickly populating a land taken from the natives and applying our agricultural and industrial technologies to create a wealthy society. And the call for “Liberty” from an oppressor king garnered many to take up arms.

So why not today?  

My reluctance might be based in my faith in our founders’ vision. They believed that we could be a nation of laws, and that these laws could be changed to match our changing cultural needs. I believe they had great misgivings about the institution of slavery that fueled their economic wealth. I doubt they thought we would need to have a civil war to change such an institution. But they did avoid the subject when drafting our Declaration of Independence. Remember, “Life Liberty and Property” got changed to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to avoid that discussion.

The war was fought, and the laws changed. Most other countries abolished slavery without a civil war. But 100 years after our revolution, we could not reconcile our differences without bloodshed.

So here we are, almost 250 years after this representative democracy was crafted and just what oppression are we moved to shed blood over?

I think of those who stormed our Capitol on January 6^th, 2021. They were not the oppressed poor, or the disenfranchised minorities. They were the, by in large, angry white middle class who wanted a different president than the Congress was about to ratify. They felt oppressed by our system. Representative democracy is not a king, born to rule. It is merely a system of government devised by some wealthy, learned, white men 250 years ago. Many were slave holders, owning land claimed from displaced native populations who did not share the concept of owning the land they walked upon. Does their vision now oppress?

Should we now take up arms and rebel and drive off this government that oppresses us? Or should we work to make this government serve us, as was the concept of our founders? The latter, believe it or not, is the truly conservative value. Conservatives embrace conservation; radicals choose rebellion.

The top of the ticket seems to drive our political conversations, indeed, our political manners, when it really shouldn’t. Politics really is, despite what Facebook or Fox News tries to sell us, local. And the local folks we elect are heroes.

Those elections are coming up soon enough. Maybe you have already voted. Good for you. Those who represents us in our city, our county, our school, or highway district deserves our attention come election time. We are asking them to do the difficult work of representing us, let us honor their task with an informed vote. And then, we should be paying attention to the work they are doing. They deserve our attention.

I am very happy with the number of folks who have turned up asking for my vote locally. That’s a good sign this representative government experiment might work. I looked through some of the other city and school board races in this North Idaho neck of the woods, and we shouldn’t be griping about a lack of choices.

I am just happy folks are willing to do this work, given the animosity addressed their way these days. I thought County Coroner was a pretty thankless position, but school board members are getting threatened, screamed at, called names. But that’s what the top of the ticket “leaders” we elect emulate, so it’s acceptable behavior for some, I guess. I can’t imagine those parents would tolerate such behavior around the dinner table.

Don’t think this running for office thing is easy. There’s a lot of forms to fill out about the money you raise, who gives it to you and how you spend it. The legislature decided this was important public information back in 2015, so anybody running for school board in a district with more than 500 students must file such reports. Let me know if you find any dirty politics.

But even if the legislature has made it a little harder for folks to run for school board, after you get elected, our leaders in Boise haven’t made serving any easier either. The funds sent out from their overfull coffers are meager, so school boards across the state have to decide whether to run supplemental levies.

Most district do go, hat in hand, and ask their neighbors to pony up so the teachers can be paid, and the heat stays on. The legislature is proud they have pushed this job downstream. They like to keep politics local.

And our governor and legislature don’t want to make any Covid decisions easier for the locals either. No direction about masks or shots from Boise, you guys decide. Those wily legislators and Boise Bureaucrats know who can take getting yelled at. I guess local yelling is better in their mind.

City councilors might have it easier that school board members. They get all the glory of raising sewer rates or passing a bond when the treatment plant fails. But God forbid they try to institute any restrictive measures about this pandemic. Those mad-as-a-hornet Freedom anti-maskers know where they live.

For representative government to work well, it’s best if the representative is approachable, knowable. If you live in a town of 1000 and you have 4 city council members, that’s a 250:1 ratio. Odds are, you would know one of those councilpersons. Same with school boards, it’s a similar ratio. You could, at any time you chose, make a phone call, and get an answer to your question. Or you could instead go to their home about dinner time with a tiki torch and burn them in effigy. Each of us has different methods of dealing with our elected representatives.

These representatives we elect are heroes, folks. Sure, they don’t always make decisions we agree with, but neither do our spouses. But please, don’t burn any effigies of the old man on your front porch.

The Idaho Medical Association has asked the Idaho Board of Medicine to look into sanctioning Dr. Ryan Cole. He is a dermatopathologist who was recently appointed to the Ada County Public Health Board by Ada County Commissioners. The IMA’s gripe against Dr. Cole is based in their reading of the statutes that prescribe lawful patient care. But the gripe is also based on the public claims Dr. Cole has made, that he has treated patients “from California to Florida” with the questionable Covid drug, Ivermetin. So, their point: if he’s being honest, he has violated the lawful standards for Idaho physicians. It’s up to you, The Idaho Board of Medicine to investigate and determine if he has in fact broken the law, or he’s just a braggart.

I wish the IMA good luck. I also wish the best to Dr. Cole, though I disagree with his self-proclaimed actions. How can you treat such a wide expanse of patients and have a relationship with them? And just how does a pathologist, with no training in patient care have that skill? Is it any different than selling drugs online? Oh yeah, that’s mostly legal too.

But that equivocation I voiced right there is what makes policing myself and my colleagues in the medical profession so difficult for the Idaho Board of Medicine. We rarely confront each other when we see a fellow colleague straying from the “Community Standard” of medicine.

Maybe that’s because we physicians don’t spend much time establishing or reviewing that peer standard anymore. I’m pretty long in the tooth and I can’t say I have ever seen that practice in the community. It should be.

We did it in medical school and residency. We presented our “cases” (sick people) to each other with an older doc in attendance and we critiqued our diagnoses, our care decisions. I had thought this was how the medical culture would be once I got out into the community practicing. But it just didn’t happen. I wish it would.

I have some real community experience with this. I was the Chief of Staff for our local hospital. Any doctor who practiced in the hospital came under the review of the medical staff. But now a days, with the proliferation of “hospitalists”, employed by the hospitals, many doctors never see their patients in the hospital. And the possibility of reviewing their level of care is lost.

But the clinic, the office practice of medicine has never been subject to much scrutiny. The main driver of sanctions has been malpractice suits, civil litigations usually brought by patients unhappy with their treatment. You can see the pressure on physicians to make the patient happy. And then opioids became widespread and “nonaddictive” and doctors made many demanding patients happy; and some dead.

So, the Idaho Board of Medicine is in a difficult position here. They can investigate Dr. Cole, but I’ll bet those “thousands” of patients he has written Ivermectin prescriptions for are pretty happy with his “care”. At least those that are alive will swear by the treatment. Those who succumbed may think the mask-wearing nurses and doctors in the crowded hospitals didn’t give them enough hydroxychloroquine. Can you see the bind our profession has created for ourselves? And for you?

I doubt Dr. Cole has clinical partners who he presents his “cases” to. Remember, he’s a pathologist who is in the business of running lab tests, vials of blood, serum, or urine. There are few colleagues to review one’s care in that setting.

Idaho’s medical practice “Community Standard” is a sham. The medical profession loves it because it makes doctors harder to sue. Idaho’s medical malpractice premiums are very low. To prove negligence the plaintiff must get some other local doc to testify against the defendant.  So, like some Idahoans prefer, we are the medical wild west.

There have been recent calls from Idaho Republicans asking Idaho Democrats to cross over and register Republican for the May primary to “save Idaho Republicans”. It seems Idaho Republicans are afraid of being run over by Idaho Freedom Foundation Republicans.

I’m not sure what to call these two groups, since they haven’t picked names for themselves. But they do call each other names. The slur I hear most commonly addressed to mainstream Idaho Republicans from the Freedom Foundation faction is “Rhinos”. And the backatcha from the mainstream Republicans toward the IFF R’s might be “wacko” Republicans.

Usually there are no quotations marks around wacko: I just put those there for the sake of politeness. As an Idaho Democrat commenting publicly on the Idaho Republican landscape, I feel like I’m walking on thin ice. But polite behavior in politics rarely wins any votes these days. Like I said, I’m an Idaho Democrat.

Both former Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones and former BSU President Bob Kustra have publicly made the pleas to the dozen or so Idaho Democrats remaining in the state. It was quite an honor to be recognized as living humans, since most learned individuals have accepted that Idaho Democrats are an extinct species. Like Sockeye Salmon, Chinook and Steelhead, some species just have to fade away, dwindle to nothing for our state to progress as the majority see progress in this very odd state.

I am so glad this is now a subject we can openly discuss. Like our nephew’s sexuality or our own gambling addiction, it’s best to get all these perplexing positions out in the open. Code words just confuse. Honesty and openness are always the best policy.

But let’s just start with what we call ourselves. If you want the dozen or two Idaho Democrats to help you out, could you fellow Idahoans asking for our votes please identify yourselves?

In the old days, political parties organized and took a name. The Bull Moose faction was a split from Republicans to support Teddy Roosevelt. They made bull moose signs and campaign pins.

Southern Dixiecrats were racist Democrats opposing civil rights. They were Democrats only because Lincoln was a Republican. They didn’t ditch racism to make Democrats look better.

At least we had a name for who we supported, who we opposed.

It’s time for Idaho Republicans to choose a name for themselves.  The wackos and the Rhinos must be different since they hate each other so much.  Quit hiding under the big tent. I’m not sure I want in if I can’t tell who is in there and you are fighting so bitterly. What is the difference between you since you all voted for Trump?

Let me know your name! I’ll consider it. But honestly, when I register with your “normal = rhino” group (Pro Trump with a wink) , I’ll be signing up with the “wacko” group (Pro Trump with a roar) too. Or should I just ignore that? Jeez, you guys are confusing.

It would be strategic for the 10 or 11 other Idaho Democrats out there to act in unison and throw our weight all in one direction in an organized fashion. Wouldn’t that be the best way to have some influence in this unbalanced state?

But the 5 or 6 Bernie Idaho Democrats hate the 6 or 7 Biden Idaho Democrats. Believe me, I know. I get their emails.

It truly is an honor that the Idaho “Not Crazy” (I think that’s a great label by the way) Republicans want my vote. I might love to support your needs with my vote. But can we negotiate? Since you need my vote so desperately, can we talk about some other issues? Like all-day kindergarten, or funding public schools?

Oh, I’m sorry. Was that impolite? I thought we were negotiating.