"Why real leadership is not a thing I'm really into" - How CE McMahon made 2024's funniest ad

It is very depressing to watch television during election season. It's always sort of been so, but it was only maybe 15 years ago when everyone generally agreed that the Willie Horton ad had been gross. Now, every commercial break I'm treated to scaremongering about how some Mexican cartel member is going to cross the borders so that he can do murders and join my daughter's basketball team. It's nonsensical and it's mean and it's tiresome. Thankfully the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series happened to sweep away some of the negativity, but it remains a very sour feeling. 

So, in between all of the garbage coming out of AmericaCarnagePAC and the like, I want to personally thank Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon for the funniest commercial of the 2024 campaign cycle:

pic.twitter.com/YeXWMlzRWs

— Brandon Williams (@Brandon4ny22) October 23, 2024

A transcript, in case the Tweety gets taken down:

Blue suit guy: The future of Central New York is bright. As County Executive, I have proudly worked with Republicans and Democrats **awkward pause** to deliver for our community. Real leaders don't care about political labels. That's why I'm **awkward pause** voting for Brandon Williams. From supporting local law enforcement to securing critical funding to modernize our local infrastructure (oops) and housing and we prepare for historic economic growth **waves arm in awkward circular motion**. Brandon Williams is working with ME to deliver real results for Central New York.

"Real leaders don't care about political labels."

One thing that has struck me since moving to Central New York is how much those in the political and media circle love to talk about bipartisanship as a goal, rather than as a means to good policy. In fact, schoolchildren have told me that if you look in the mirror and say bipartisanship three times, the Syracuse Post-Standard will appear and endorse you. I am not a superstitious man, but I am far too scared to try this. 

This setup, with McMahon talking about how and what real leadership looks like, seems like it would lead to him endorsing someone he doesn't share a label with but works hard to get results for our community despite their differences. But that doesn't happen. No, reader, it does not happen. The first half of the ad is McMahon patting himself on the back for what "real leaders" would do, and then the second half is him not doing that at all. He endorses the do-nothing clown currently in office because it's the person who his party nominated. He's set up a scenario in which the only logical conclusion is "here is what real leaders do... and you ain't getting that from me!"

What makes it so funny is that nobody is expecting him to endorse someone outside of his own party. He could've just made a generic ad about endorsing Williams talking about issues he agrees with Williams on, probably some nonsense about "Albany bail reform" which, you know, has nothing to do with the United States House of Representatives. No, McMahon can't do that because he so loves the smell of what a leader he, himself, is that he has to tout his own leadership even in a spot when he's not doing the thing he says a real leader does. He centers himself and his esteem of his own leadership but in the most awkward and self-owning way possible. 

I'm Jim Dunne, and I approved this message. 

Find somebody who looks at you the way the Syracuse Post-Standard looks at a scrap metal dealer

If you are one of the eight other readers of Syracuse's semi-daily newspaper and affiliated clickbait-machine website you may have noticed a bearded man in a black t-shirt standing in front of piles of metal. Scrap-metal magnate, philanthropist, political megadonor, and wannabe bitcoiner Adam Weitsman has gone from minor local celebrity with front-row seats at The Dome to object of the P-S's undivided lust. No longer satisfied with unrequited, departed loves like Syracuse Native Tom Cruise or Syracuse Native Post Malone, our local scribes have gone on an aggressive public communications campaign for the multi-millionaire. 

A google search of syracuse dot com and  "Adam Weitsman" will return dozens of articles on his various Skaneateles real estate transactions and affiliation with Jim Boeheim over the past several years, but have turned up the full-court press recently, with seven featured articles headlining the site in just three months.

10/26/2021: Adam Weitsman tore down a Skaneateles Lake home to build a pool worth 20 times more than most houses 

10/15/2021: Sale price revealed for Adam Weitsman’s newest Skaneateles Lake estate, and it sets a record

9/29/2021: Adam Weitsman’s new venture: Scrap king wants to power up a cryptocurrency mine

8/10/21: Adam Weitsman starts giving away $1 million to charities for Boeheim’s Army’s win. Here’s how to apply

8/5/2021: Inside Boeheim’s Army: How Adam Weitsman and Kevin Belbey conspired to win a TBT title for Eric Devendorf

8/3/2021: Adam Weitsman: I’ll give $1M to charities if Boeheim’s Army wins TBT championship

7/29/2021: Adam Weitsman is buying another mansion on Skaneateles Lake, and he won’t even be living there

Now, I shan't fault our local scribes for their celebrity crush. My old friends in Boston always seemed to have a place in the names section for Maria Menounos or whichever Wahlberg was on television that week.  However, I have some worries about the objectivity here. When one of Weitsman's subsidiary companies, Ben Weitsman & Son, was sued by the Sierra Club in May for inadequately protecting against pollutants in stormwater runoff, the Post-Standard showed remarkable restraint. While their standard practice has been to have a staff reporter covering Weitsman's various adventures, this time they chose to run a syndicated news story written by Rick Karlin of the Albany Times-Union. Not the full, article, though: while the Times-Union article mentions Adam Weitsman as the proprietor, the Post-Standard one conspicuously fails to mention him by name.

This is not to begrudge Weitsman's success nor to devalue his many charitable contributions. The problem becomes when the fawning coverage of his infinity pool comes isn't balanced by merited criticism. It also seems to come at the expense of local coverage of actual issues that these staff writers could be assigned; the paper has devoted one (1) article to the candidates running for the Syracuse school board. Its coverage of the Onondaga County Legislature elections has been almost entirely horse-race driven, talking in sports terms about both parties trying to make gains with just a single article discussion the individual candidates. As the region's main newspaper, a modicum of commitment to news would be appreciated. 

Your Friday Pearl Jam

 This week's offering comes from the Fenway Park show, August 5, 2016. 

Your Friday Pearl Jam

We start our series with a special for the folks who ask "when did Pearl Jam get so political"?

Have a good weekend.

Concerned about mental health? Then commit to fighting for it after schools reopen

 “Actually, it’s about mental health.”

The ongoing discussions over when and how to reopen schools have seemingly reached a boiling point recently. Parents are understandably frustrated, as children have now been home for nearly a year with little-to-no in-person instruction as other, clearly less vital operations are back up and running. It makes sense that one would see gyms, pool halls, and amusement parks operating and conclude that our education system should be held in similar import. Teachers are frustrated and fearful, as government entities at the local, state, and federal levels have prioritized economic reopening and failed to create conditions where the virus could be kept at bay. 

The merits and conditions of school reopenings are a topic for another day, but I think it’s important to address one of the leading talking points those pushing for reopening have been repeating—the mental health of our children. While I welcome any new allies into the fight for improved services, the rhetoric has an uncomfortable familiarity to anyone who has been following the news for the past several years. In the wake of another mass shooting, we hear the cynical deflection: “There is no gun problem! What we really have is a mental health problem.” It echoes from those who have little to say about mental health services when there isn’t a body count, from those who take advantage of every opportunity in between these mental health episodes doing everything possible to cut funding for those vital services. It’s clear that these people don’t have any interest in addressing mental health beyond making sure it’s used as a dodge when discussing gun regulation. It’s hard to miss that it’s many of the same people, from Ron DeSantis on down to the facebook comment nitwits who again seem to suddenly be concerned about the mental state of children.

It is important to note that this is not an across-the-board condemnation. Many people who are legitimately concerned about our children and their health are pushing for fair, sensible reopening guidelines. These are teachers, librarians, parents, and other community leaders whose commitment to mental health has been ongoing and unflinching, and they should be commended for it. I would ask that these people keep up the fight for fairness, but also to be wary of these newfound allies on the right who seem to have taken up their cause. 

An example here in Onondaga County shines a light on the lack of priority these newfound mental-health advocates are actually placing on trying to help. A distressing story was published by The Newshouse detailing the draconian cuts to the Department of Children and Family Services in the 2021 county budget. An excerpt: 

Employees say that years of cuts in staffing in DCFS have resulted in a situation where an investigator may be tasked with investigating three to five child abuse reports per week. The state recommends investigators receive three. In the office of permanency, which handles long term child removals and foster care, case workers could be looking after 25 or more children, according to multiple employees in the department. The state recommends 12.

 

As President Biden famously said, “Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” In words, the county’s GOP leadership is valiantly fighting for our children. Unfortunately, they have found more room in their pocketbooks to try to buy out Burnet Road residents and raze their neighborhood in order to give a tax break to an unnamed out-of-state semi-conductor company. 

What is the goal, then? For some, the primacy of economic growth trumps all other considerations. School has long served as a holding station for children so that parents can do their parts as cogs in the machine. (Funny that the same commitment never extends to a school day that actually works for families, to funding before-school and after-school programming that is both valuable to our young minds and flexible for their working caregivers). In August, County Executive McMahon was critical of hybrid learning schemes that enabled safe distancing in classrooms because it made caregiving - and returning to work - all the more difficult. An alternative approach of paying parents to stay home to deal with the specific circumstances presented by the pandemic was never mentioned. In the world of economic growth people need to work, and people with kids need to be able to put those kids somewhere while they do it. 

For others, it has presented a grand opportunity to indulge the time-honored tradition of union-busting (non-police edition, naturally). Our friends at the New York Post have a screed against the teachers in San Francisco, a place where the Post is obviously very concerned about positive outcomes and is totally not concern-trolling. Schoolyard bully Donald Trump Jr. is conveniently connecting all the ways conservative blowhards pretend to care about mental health, blathering about teachers union whilst sitting in front of his wall o’ guns. 

Again, many of the fiercest advocates for school reopening do not fall into these categories. As this outstanding piece by Marnie Eisenstadt in the Syracuse Post-Standard illustrates, the mental health problems coming from lack of in-person schooling are very real and very serious. So, how to tell those who genuinely care about our students with the ones who are cynically using them to dodge more important issues and get the outcome they want? It’s actually fairly simple to tell the difference- find out their action plans for how to get schools open and how to address mental health once school is back in session. Are you prioritizing vaccinating teachers? (In New York, yes! My friends in Massachusetts? Not so much!) Are you willing to pay for upgraded air filtration and purification systems? Will there be increased support staff to assist children as they transition back? What off-hours resources will be put in place? If an advocate for school reopenings has an answer to these questions, work with them. If not, if they start grumbling about unions or socialism or manning up, it is a sign that their argument is being made in bad faith. If their chosen motif for talking about supporting children going back into a small space is a wall of weapons used to terrorize them in those spaces, they are not on our children's side.

Unions are not infallible. Some make short-sighted decisions for reasons that may or may not be clear. CSEA Local 834, the union that represents the aforementioned Department of Children and Family Services, endorsed County Executive McMahon in the 2019 election. It did them little good, as McMahon and the Republincan-held county legislature went on to make those drastic cuts anyway. Being critical of the school reopening process is entirely fair. But in a choice between our teachers and anti-worker, anti-government forces like the Post and the Trumps, there is little question who better will represent our children and their mental health. 

By way of introduction

Greetings! Welcome to my new blog, a thing people definitely create in 2021. I've recently been inspired to try to write more, so thank you for reading. I will go ahead and guess that anyone reading this knows me fairly well, but I'd like to introduce myself anyway because that's what people did when they started blogs in 2004. 

My name is Jim Dunne. I am a Boston ex-pat who has been living in Syracuse since September 2014. Syracuse is a lovely place that sometimes makes it hard to love. I love the neighborhoods, parks, the distinct seasons, the food and beverage scene, and walking around. I am frustrated by local leadership that seems intent that people will only come to live here because it's where their job is, rather than emphasizing and nurturing our many advantages as a region to make it an area where people want to live. I am (or at least I try to be) an advocate for voting rights, democracy and representation, transportation justice, workers' rights, and our wonderful and unfairly maligned public schools. 

In my personal life, I am the lucky husband of a wonderful, supportive, and extraordinarily patient wife, and the father to three amazing kids. I like baseball, Pearl Jam, and beer. This blog will be mostly focused on local advocacy and interest. There is a very good chance I will give this up in a week, but humor me for now, huh?

I chose the name Connecting Syracuse because I have found that, for a region that sells itself as a place where you can get anywhere in 15 minutes, the city and region are often frustratingly disconnected. Disconnected politically, disconnected economically, disconnected in terms of representation, disconnected in how easily and quickly you can get from one place to another without access to a car. It's also an attempt to better connect myself to the place. Though I've lived here a number of years, I still often feel like an outsider, and the provinciality of the local political institutions are a constant source of frustration to me. So I decided to write about it.