Posts Tagged → Governor Tom Ridge
RIP my friend Nevin Mindlin
Nevin Mindlin was probably an annoying precocious kid. He was probably one of those kids in school who at a young age would constantly raise his hand to answer questions posed by the teachers, because he actually knew the correct answer and he also probably knew a great deal more about whatever the subject was. Although I did not know Nevin at the tender age of eight, I am certain this lovingly annoying ability of his was probably becoming pronounced right about then. And it never stopped and it served him well all the way up until his death this morning in south Florida.
I will miss Nevin, for a lot of reasons. A good friend is always tough to find, and human chemistry is always a mystery. Opposites attract is an old saying, and as opposite as Nevin and I were from one another, we always enjoyed one another’s company. Maybe it was because I, too, was the annoying kid in grade school, but without Nevin’s intelligence. Probably I secretly admired him and I also wanted to be like him.
Nevin went to college, not just anywhere, but at Goddard College, a hippie freak school in the 1970s. Which must have been an interesting experience for all involved, because Nevin was a conservative Republican. He got his MBA from Lehigh University. He served in the US Navy and learned to take apart radios and fix complicated things. This ability to deconstruct and reconstruct complex bits of wires and capacitors became one of his annoying habits as an adult, when he would describe whatever public policy we were grappling with as a radio or electronic array. Nevin could diagram a public policy like no one else, and as he drew on the blackboard in his mind he saw electric wires, capacitors, and other radio components. Maybe he was just overthinking stuff, but it was impossible to refute him on his own terms. He would stop explaining and ask for questions, and the people in the room would just sit there staring, unable to conjure the right response. He should have been a salesman.
After working in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for a long time, where he was the executive director of the House Labor & Industry Committee, Nevin went on to be the policy director at the PA Department of Labor & Industry under Governor Tom Ridge in the 1990s. Of course Nevin was smarter and more experienced than most of the other appointees (except fellow appointee Tom Armstrong, whom he admired), and he always struggled with reconciling his clear headed and deeply held principles with impolite political necessity. This business of trading off principle for necessity would plague Nevin his entire life, and I don’t think he ever felt good about it. Maybe he should have been a philosopher. If he had been a salesman, he probably would not have been a rich one.
Nevin retired a bunch of years ago and ran for mayor of Harrisburg. As a candidate, he was very popular, especially among the Black population, even as a conservative Republican, and he scared the pants off the political establishment. I was in the courtroom when a now departed county judge held that Nevin’s reliance upon the official opinion of the county elections department was Nevin’s mistake, and not the mistake of the paid professionals who advised him, and thus was he disqualified from running for mayor at the last minute. It was a disgraceful moment in the history of human self-rule. Even the judge found his moment of political necessity distasteful, and his shame at having to remove this pure hearted, well meaning, popular man from the ballot and from threatening the political establishment was written all over his own unhappy face. I will never forget it.
Nevin served the Harrisburg Jewish community in a number of roles, including president of the Silver Academy Yeshiva. He never stopped dabbling in local politics, until he moved to southwest Florida a few years ago and said “What the hell, I think I’ll just go fishing from now on.” I always felt proud of having taught Nevin to fish, because it brought him great pleasure. We used to fish the Susquehanna River here in Harrisburg, back in the early 2000s, when a guy could catch 100-150 smallmouth bass in a day, and have a real shot at the huge muskellunge we had back then. Those were real good times together. He also enjoyed splitting wood with me, and fishing Pine Creek.
One Fall night on our way up Pine Creek Valley, probably twenty years ago, we encountered a wrecked SUV sideways in the road, the driver injured and hanging out her window. An enormous buck lay alive panting on the other side of the road. Despite having all four of its legs cleanly removed from its body due to the collision with the front of the SUV, and despite being hardly able to move more than a couple of feet at a time on its bloody stumps, the buck was full of fierce fight and aggressive lunges toward anyone who approached him. I was trying to maneuver into a safe angle where I could dispatch the suffering animal when the driver’s husband showed up. He barely noticed his wife in the driver’s seat of the steaming, crumpled SUV, and walked over to the buck. The man clearly admired the buck’s huge rack (I’m guessing it was in the 140s-150s) and tried to get ahold of it to twist and break the animal’s neck. That was a mistake, as the buck quickly lunged and speared the guy squarely in the gut with its long tines, drawing blood. The man was filled with rage, and I handed him my 9mm pistol that I had been prepared to dispatch the animal with. He damn near emptied that entire clip into the buck before he handed the gun back to me.
We left the dark wreck scene with its gory buck, steaming disabled vehicle, and the injured woman with her uninterested husband running his hands over the deceased buck’s rack, and Nevin said “You deer hunters are a really weird bunch of people.” He really should have been a philosopher.
Nevin was married twice. First to Gail, who gave him three great sons he was crazy about, Joshua, Avi, and Hillel, and then to Jean, who was with him when he died today. Nevin leaves a legacy of clear headed public policy, of absolutely beautiful principles based on America’s founding documents and the Torah, which he tried to follow, and memories among his friends of his explosive, joyous, easy laugh and always happy demeanor. I will miss my friend Nevin so very much. Godspeed, old friend. I hope you get to fish on your journey.
He will be buried this Sunday in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.
Nevin Mindlin fishing in south Florida, looking like an Amishman who had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up in Heaven
“Ridgie” no more
In 1998 I joined the Governor Tom Ridge administration in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, fresh off of a solid seven years of DC Swamp. Coming from the Washington, DC, federal bureaucracy, I was considered a professional insider and policy whiz. My own view was that I was a refugee from the anti-citizen, anti-taxpayer, anti-America administrative state that was so crazily overboard that I could no longer work inside of it. My job in the Ridge Administration was as Director of Education & Information on the executive staff at the PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR).
The state civil service bureaucrats in Harrisburg had a name for people like me. We were called “Ridgies,” because we were so dedicated to the unique Tom Ridge way of doing things. And what was that unique way of doing things? What was it about being dedicated to Governor Ridge that earned us this almost mocking sobriquet?
In a word, Ridge was honest. He brought a refreshing honesty and down-home common sense to running government that had not been seen in decades. So different and refreshing was this bright light being shone on The People’s business, that it left those of us who were implementing it with almost Moses-like beams of light emanating from our faces. You could say we were bright eyed and bushy tailed, excited to do our work. We humored the staid bureaucrats, but we meant it and we persevered.
I was proud to be a Ridgie, because Tom Ridge represented almost everything that was good and necessary in government doing the taxpayer’s work.
Fast forward 25 years and holy moley, what has happened…. Governor Tom Ridge has endorsed senile, corrupt, pedophile, racist failed liberal career politician Joe Biden over President Donald Trump. Trump being the Tom Ridge of today, Biden being everything that everyone hates about corrupt career politicians.
All that Ridge’s bizarre endorsement did for me was make me realize that unlike when he was governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge now values the permanent and unaccountable administrative state over the interests of the citizenry. When Ridge was governor, he confronted Pennsylvania’s hide-bound bureaucracies and forced them to serve The People, the forgotten taxpayers who underwrite all of government. Now, Ridge is on the side of that administrative state, a complete 180 degree flip from where he was.
What can account for this change of philosophy? Probably that Ridge Global, Ridge’s lobbying and consulting firm, is so closely tied to that same big government administrative state. He certainly is not advocating for good policy, because President Trump is implementing everything that Ridge used to say that he believed in, and here Ridge is opposing it.
I feel badly that such a good man as Ridge has been flipped by filthy lucre. It is painful to see someone whose good citizen name inspired us, his staff, to be proud “Ridgies,” to now renounce and stand against all he once stood for. The person in whom I put my trust to implement citizenry-saving policies is now an open and proud tool for anti-America forces and activists.
Contrary to what Ridge claimed in his Atlantic article earlier this year, he is definitely not a conservative. Because his policy views are very liberal. And based on the things he routinely says in public, and his consistent support for an obviously corrupt Joe Biden, Ridge can in no way claim to be a Republican any longer. Yet he is using his claim as a “conservative Republican” to advance anti-conservative, anti-Republican ideas and people. This is not honest behavior.
Sadly, Ridge is just as much a part of the fake news as all the other fake news people. In turn, I must now say that I am no longer a “Ridgie.”
Unlike Governor Tom Ridge, I remain on the side of The People. I am still, however, a Trumpie, loud and proud.
USA! USA! USA!
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!
Response to PA Gov. Tom Ridge on Conservatives & the Environment
On April 22nd this year, Earth Day, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, about conservatives and the environment (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/environment-gop-out-touch/610333/). The Atlantic solicited responses to Ridge’s essay, and so I submitted one to them, but received back no indication they would publish it. They did not publish it, because liberals like those at The Atlantic accept and publish only liberals, and reject conservatives. So here it is, my response to Governor Ridge’s essay about conservatives and the environment.
I felt compelled to respond to Governor Ridge’s essay, in part because I worked in his administration, and in part because I have met few Republicans who can articulate a truly conservative view of environmental policy, which Governor Ridge failed to do. I was also afraid of being seen as attacking someone I hold in high esteem, and I need to say that while I may disagree with Governor Ridge’s essay and some of his recent public stances, like supporting PA governor Tom Wolf’s covid19 lockdown, I remain impressed by Governor Ridge’s high character. I am proud to have served in his distinctively excellent administration.
Governor Ridge’s essay slightly opens a doorway that I am both pleased and also reluctant to push all the way open. But it needs to be opened, all the way, because for far too long establishment Republicans have claimed to be conservatives, while acting like liberals.
Governor Ridge writes his essay “as a conservative,” and despite boldly leading by example in placing highly competent gays, women, and minorities in senior government positions literally decades ago, long before most Democrats followed suit, Governor Ridge was, in fact, a true conservative. His achievements in conservative policy are legion, including Pennsylvania becoming a shall-issue concealed firearm carry state and his administration’s brownfield land recycling program.
Nonetheless, the emphasis today is on he “was.”
Governor Ridge was a conservative, and by today’s standard, he is not. This is not because Governor Ridge has changed, but because what now defines a conservative has changed so dramatically since the time he was governor. The same holds true for liberals, by the way, in their own way (we see the Democrat Party now a totally, openly, violent, racist, anti-America Marxist organization).
And like so many, if not all other political elites, especially Republicans, and most especially establishment Republicans from the hide-bound, bunker-mentality Pennsylvania GOP, Governor Ridge has not changed with the times. Governor Ridge was a conservative, and today he often speaks like a liberal, and sides with liberals on policy disputes. He is not alone in this, but each Republican who does so still causes pain to us conservatives in the political trenches. It is frustrating as hell to experience a former Republican appointee or elected official try to speak with authority as some sort of representative of conservativism, when in fact, they are simply liberals. Or RINOs for short (Republican In Name Only – not conservative).
Probably the biggest indication that Governor Ridge is out of synch with today’s conservatives is how he encourages us to adopt a laundry list of liberal environmental policies in his The Atlantic essay. This means that his solution for conservatives to succeed is for us to adopt liberalism. Even though most of the “environmental” groups are simply employment offices for Democrat Party operatives pushing Marxist, partisan policies. Very few environmental groups today are even seeking solutions, because they are busy dreaming up new problems.
Most of the policies pushed by environmental groups today are by definition Big Coercive Government, Small Defenseless Citizen, anti-Constitution, disregard for private property rights, mountains out of mole hills, and so on. These groups are not about the environment, they simply use the subject of the environment as another avenue to push Marxism and the Big Government necessary to force it down our throats. Governor Ridge should know this, of all people.
What Governor Ridge failed to address is: How can we conservatives embrace the very same failed and inferior liberal policies that drove us to becoming conservatives in the first place? If we adopt liberalism, then we are abandoning conservativism, and failing as conservatives.
Every single environmental policy recommendation that Governor Ridge lists in his essay directly contradicts core conservative principles, like small government, less intrusive government, less spendy government, less activist government, less regulatory government, accountable government and accountable taxpayer-funded government employees. Literally every single policy he lists requires the government to intervene in a big, coercive way, often over trifling differences or demonstrably false premises.
Governor Ridge’s environmental ideas are not conservativism; they are quintessential big government liberalism.
Perhaps the centerpiece of his essay is that conservatives must concede at least a bit on “climate change.” Yet, for conservatives, this particular issue, more than any other, highlights the distinction between us and liberals. For conservatives to agree with the Marxist, disproven, and notoriously phony climate change religion would be to abandon basic, solid, conservative principles altogether….like Capitalism 101, solid math and science, and transparency. Again, we are unpersuaded the climate warming-cooling-change-whatever issue even exists, let alone that a government solution consistent with America’s Constitution could be found.
Governor Ridge writes “The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues.” To which I and a host of other conservatives would respond, No, but many Republicans have abandoned the citizen voters and the forgotten taxpayers of America. Many careerist Republicans have embraced popular culture and its feel-good-now bubblegum policies. For Republicans to respect openly partisan “environmental” groups and embrace liberal nonsense like so-called ‘climate change’ and similar policies would only be one more betrayal in a long line of policy and political betrayals committed by the Republican establishment. Conservatives have perfectly sound environmental policies based on perfectly sound, all-American principles. If you but ask us, we will explain them. We conservatives didn’t abandon environmental issues, nor did we leave the Republican Party. The Republican establishment abandoned us.
Josh First is president of Appalachian Land & Conservation Services, LLC. He has worked at the US EPA in Washington, DC, The Conservation Fund, the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy, and was Director of Environmental Education and Information at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources in the Governor Tom Ridge administration.
Despite digital technology advances, actual humans are necessary
Digital technology is amazing, no doubt about it.
Yes, it enables all kinds of speed in research and communications.
But the internet has also inspired a “digital wall” response to basic inquiries that used to be handled by people answering phones. You cannot just pick up a phone and ask someone a question, any longer. Instead, you must navigate a maze of circular questions and answers and phone tree options, long before you get to hit the star key or number one and talk to a person.
eBay is the prime example of the digital wall. You cannot get real customer service at eBay. eBay’s digital artificial intelligence is supposed to satisfactorily respond to all customer issues, but it doesn’t. It is a failure.
One online commenter says “It is easier to talk with the Pope than to actually speak with a person at eBay,” a sad but true fact that I myself have learned the hard way.
Here in Pennsylvania, the Tom Ridge Revolution for responsive government is looong over.
Remember how back in the 1990s, Governor Tom Ridge opened up Pennsylvania state government with a crowbar and a box of dynamite, and got the scurrying inhabitants of the many faceless concrete government buildings in downtown Harrisburg to actually view taxpayers as “customers”?
Maybe you don’t recall that time, but it was refreshing. Suddenly, state workers at most agencies were required to actually answer the calls of the taxpayers they serve, and to act professionally, and to help resolve problems.
PennDOT was at that time a notoriously labyrinthine experience, kind of like the Vatican, one might guess, in that if a taxpayer was fortunate enough to find an IN door, they might spend a day shambling down shuttered halls with closed doors with jargon printed on them, searching yet more for the answer to their government-inspired problem.
The workers there at that time could not have cared less for serving the public, and no one took any initiative to make them serve the public, until the Ridge Administration arrived.
Then, PennDOT was required to post phone numbers, email addresses, have customer service representatives on call, so that no citizen had to waste their time trying to make sense of the bureaucratic maze while to trying to meet some official mandate.
After all, if the government is going to require something, then the government absolutely must provide the means to achieve that.
Well, now PennDOT is back to its bad old ways. The foolish young punks running the disastrous Corbett Administration into the ground at Mach 4 wouldn’t know a damned thing about customer service or taxpayers, for that matter. PennDOT has been allowed to crawl back under a heavy cloak of secrecy and impenetrable darkness. Go ahead, call PennDOT. Try to reach a human being through their main portal:
“Call 1-800-932-4600 (from within PA) or 717-412-5300 (from out of state). You can also send an email through our Driver and Vehicle Services Customer Call Center, or write to the following address:
Riverfront Office Center (Driver and Vehicle Services)
1101 South Front Street
Harrisburg, PA 17104-2516
1-800-932-4600”
Oh, you will hear a human voice, which right off the bat asks you that if you want to continue in English, “Press One.” Imagine my surprise when I just held the line, did not press one, and was shuttled off into yet another maze of foreign languages, as if just wanting to encounter my own government in our native language was something we should have to ask for.
Anyhow, the phone options in English are another maze of options and circular loops. One answer gives the locations of service centers, but saves providing you with the hours for each one until the very end, as if you might actually recall which service center was “one,” “two,” or “three.”
This is the very essence of Bad Government.
Government absolutely must be responsive, open, transparent, or it is illegitimate. If it cannot serve its citizens and taxpayers, then government has failed. Once government has failed, it cannot hold citizens to a higher standard.
Governor-elect Tom Wolf faces a Republican legislature, which is not likely to go along with his tax-and-spend approach to government.
Well, here is an opportunity that is guaranteed to make Wolf a hero among all citizens: Force government to open up again; get our taxpayer-funded bureaucrats to be responsive, or get out. No more digital walls for the people who pay the bills.
And maybe Wolf can talk to the owners of eBay, and persuade them to provide real customer service, too.