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CAVEAT EMPTOR

The town supervisor where I live suffered a tizzy recently.

His name is George Hoehmann and he, of course, is a Republican. He won election in 2015 supporting, among other things, a limit of two terms in office. He is currently serving his sixth two-year term.

Hypocritical or not, the small percentage of Clarkstown, New York’s population that votes in local elections believe he’s doing a good job. So it’s hard to begrudge him.

Recently, Hoehmann got upset about something he saw online. The post, according to Hoehmann, called for a boycott of local businesses whose proprietors ally themselves politically. 

Given his penchant for flouting supposed rules, I’m going to make the assumption that Hoehmann is upset with the boycotters because they’re not enamored with his party or the felon in the White House who leads it. 

Hoehmann responded with a social media post.

“Clarkstown small businesses are the backbone of our community. Today, I saw a partisan political activist social media post targeting many of our local small businesses for a boycott due to the alleged partisan affiliation of their owners.”

“This is an affront to our community and way of life in Clarkstown.”

“These businesses provide many varying services to our community. They employ our family members. They donate to our local student groups, sports teams and community organizations. These businesses feed our families, cloth our kids, fix our homes, and go above and beyond for our residents every day of the year.”

“I call on all elected officials and candidates for public office to join me in reaffirming our support for all local small businesses and reject this unacceptable assault on our Clarkstown small businesses.”

Now, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the posts about which Hoehmann is spewing. Unfortunately, for two reasons. One is that it would help me write more knowlngly about what exactly he’s talking about. 

And two because I would like to know who not to do business with.

Hoehmann – who I equate with Rolf in my Trump-era “Sound of Music” because our congressman, Mike Lawler, is more like Herr Zeller – has more problems than just being a lousy writer. (Note: Maybe before writing screeds he should learn the difference between cloth, the noun, and clothe, the verb.)

He seems to believe that I and anyone seeking to combat the effort to subvert American democracy should overlook that when it comes to getting our gutters cleaned.

Because it comes down to a simple question: Why should I give my money to someone who’s going to take that money and give it to Donald Trump?

I’m retired. I’m fortunate to have a modest amount of money to live on for the rest of my life – a sum recently made more modest by the wackadoodle economic and military craziness of Trump and his Little Rascals.

It is my prerogative to spend my money as benefits me. And it benefits me not to see that money used to support people who bomb Iranian schoolgirls, raise prices through reckless tariffs, and shoot people protesting their terrorizing anti-immigrant policy.

Last year, I was going to a medical practice in New Jersey to treat the arthritis in my knees. I had undergone surgery on the left knee with the doctor in charge of the practice and wanted help mitigating the ongoing pain.

I was about to begin therapy on the knee – with the same practice – when I decided to check out the Federal Election Commission website’s database of political contributors.

It was there I learned that the doctor donated more than $30,000 in the 2024 cycle to Trump and various PACs supporting him.

He is no longer my doctor. I found someone who didn’t have any political affiliation I could determine on the FEC database, And I got better treatment at a better price.

I will not eat at a pizza place or shop at a meat market that shows Fox News. I avoided the locksmith who put Trump signs all over his yard. 

I have the right – and, in my mind, the obligation – to do that. It’s my money. I was the one who got up at 3 a.m. to work early shifts for almost 40 years to earn it – and I’ll be damned if some Rolf thinks I should be supporting a Trump enabler because he coaches girls’ softball.

Or “cloth”s my kids – who I believe don’t want anything to do with him, either.

I understand the risk. If everything is political then there’s no respite from it. It adds to the constant anxiety that permeates this country in 2026. And it puts businesses I support at risk of being avoided by Trump sycophants.

But Hoehmann helped deliver this atmosphere. And just like term limits, it’s easy for him to say ignore what those MAGA types do with your money.

The only unacceptable assault is his on American independence.

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THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL

Republican Matt Van Epps will end up winning the special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District by about 9 percentage points.

That might sound like a solid win. Except that Tennessee-7 is a solidly Republican district. Both Donald Trump and the representative whose resignation triggered the election carried the 7th by more than 20 percentage points.

Some polls close to the vote indicated that the Democrat, Aftyn Behn, was within 3 points of Van Epps. So those of you who read that – and little else – might believe that she didn’t do well.

Baloney. Behn took a cue from Zohran Mamdani in New York and ran on the affordability issue. It helped her wipe out more than half the usual margin in the district.

A district, I might add, that was totally rigged against her.

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I don’t remember Ken Burns’ outstanding “The American Revolution” series mentioning Founding Father Elbridge Gerry. He merely signed the Declaration of Independence and then helped supply the Patriot armies.

Unfortunately, in his old age, he became a staunch partisan. As governor of Massachusetts, he approved legislative boundaries that showed favoritism to his Democratic-Republican Party, leading to the term “gerrymandering.”

So Gerry figures prominently in the politics of the nation he helped create more than two centuries later.

Because Tennessee – once home to such noted Democrats as Estes Kefauver and the Gore family – is now a solid red state. And the reactionaries who funded the long game that is Republican politics have ensured the party’s success by making it almost impossible for Democrats to win Congressional seats. Thank you, Mr. Gerry.

So Behn’s 9-point loss, while not a win for the Democrats, is likely to make Republicans very nervous. If the Democrats wipe 12 points off Republican margins around the country next year, the House will almost certainly flip – and the Senate might as well.

That’s why you’re seeing all this nonsense with creating more Republican districts in states like Texas, Indiana and Missouri – and why California countered with Prop. 50, Gavin Newsome’s so-far successful effort to bolster Democrats.

As a believer in democracy, I think gerrymandering sucks. As President Obama often says, voters should pick legislators and not the other way around.

But unilateral disarmament is a problem. So, yeah, while it goes against my core belief, I think New York, Virginia and Illinois need to join California in reshaping legislative maps. I’ve given up on the idea of expecting Republicans to ever do what’s right.

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Gerrymandering isn’t the only way the Republicans will try to hold onto power. They might also plan to give you money.

I think that sometime before November 3, 2026, the Republicans will try to buy your love with something they’ll call a tariff dividend – the money collected by tacking these ridiculous surcharges onto things we buy from countries that don’t kiss Trump’s butt.

Maybe it will be about $2,000. It will be a check and the biggest letters on it won’t be your name. They will be PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.

If you don’t throw it out thinking it’s a campaign mailing, make sure you cash it. But don’t, for a moment, think that you’re coming out ahead.

The tariffs and the inflation they’ve triggered have already cost you way more than whatever amount these putzes are going to send you.

Unfortunately, it will work somewhat. In 2024, many voters remembered those checks aimed at stemming economic disaster during COVID – checked they thought originated with Trump because he insisted that his name be put on them, even though the idea came from Democrats in the House.

You always think fondly of people who give you money. I wish I could say I’m going to take the money and put it toward an organization whose mission has suffered from the devastation Trump and his sycophants have wreaked on our country. 

But, like you, I’m going to be hurting financially. I’m a senior citizen, living on a fixed income. So I’ll cash the check. And I won’t forget why I’m in the spot I’ll be in.

I thank Aftyn Behn for running a strong, positive campaign. Some of the ideas she offered might not have been well received by Tennesseans a year ago. But now, with the real economy faltering and our country becoming a hermit, they got a fair hearing from those not completely swallowed up by MAGAdumb.

Maybe, in November, no amount of Republican connivance can change what will happen. That won’t be easy to achieve.

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SAY “AAAH!”

This government shutdown droning on for most of the past month focuses on healthcare.

Democrats say the budget outline bill passed by Republicans earlier this year supercharges price increases for insurance. The Republicans say they are cutting waste and showing that the Affordable Care Act – what everyone knows as Obamacare – is a failure.

Many of us have already received the proposed monthly rates for 2026 coverage. They aren’t pretty. I’m on Medicare, with much lower costs than people below age 65, and my rates are doubling – with less overall coverage. 

If I’m a younger person paying multiples of what I do, I imagine being terrified by what I’m looking at. To the extent that it might cross my mind to forego coverage – a disaster in the making if something terrible happens, as it does too often.

What makes the Republican stance particularly intriguing is that, by all indications, the clamoring for repealing Obamacare that immediately followed its enactment has just about vanished. It was unpopular at first due largely to a mistake Obama made in selling the program – that nothing about your healthcare would change and that you could keep the doctors you wanted.

But there were doctors and insurers who didn’t want to go along. And a lot of people did – and continue to need to – change doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals.

We’ve gotten used to that. In the end, being able to afford being well supersedes whether or not you can talk to your doctor about how the Mets did this year.

In the process, millions of people who didn’t have healthcare got it. Obamacare’s popularity has soared in the 15 years it has been in existence. So much so that John McCain might have been trying to save his own party when he did his famous thumbs-down that stymied one of umpteen Republican efforts to kill the ACA.

One funny thing about Obamacare is that its origin story is Republican. It’s fairly similar to the healthcare program in Massachusetts shepherded by Mitt Romney when he was governor. The ideas of using the existing insurance market and mandating coverage came from him.

But here’s where this all gets weird if you look at it from a less-partisan point of view. Did Republicans turn vehemently against Obamacare because they seriously don’t believe in providing protection against rising healthcare costs, or did they do so because Obama adopted their idea?

What they’ve said is that they want to “repeal and replace” the ACA. They have never, in 15 years, told us what they would replace it with, only that “repeal” would come before “replace.”

It’s reached the point of laughable – in the debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said he had “concepts” of a plan.

You would think, after 15 years, if Obamacare was so godawful terrible, that plan would be beautifully fine turned, with input from conservative thinktanks that would address the supposed flaws.

And then, if Democrats were true to their mission of providing quality healthcare at lower costs, they would seriously consider the GOP plan and adopt those parts that they believe would work.

It’s just that the Republicans don’t have that plan. They haven’t told us what Trump’s “concepts” are.

Instead, they’ve blamed all the problems facing America’s middle and working classes on desperate people fleeing economic and/or political terror in countries throughout the world. Also known as: They’re coming here to take our jobs and get stuff for nothing.

In a way, I hope these premium hikes people are getting in the mail or online might help put this problem into real perspective. The government shutdown is already bringing pain to the nation and its economy – and that’s only going to get worse as it drags on.

But, as Jon Stewart pointed out on his show last week, fighting to keep healthcare affordable is the very least an out-of-power Democratic Party can do for its constituents – actually, given how Trump voters will be disproportionately hurt by this, what it can do for the whole country.

It would be nice if the United States had a political system that worked to solve real problems, not manufactured ones. 

But instead, we fight viciously over what is actually a problem – and that’s a disaster in the making. And we get caught up in nonsense – did Katie Porter yell at an interviewer in California, is Bad Bunny really an American, will Zohran Mamdani impose Sharia law on Brooklyn?

When the healthcare debates started, I was on board with a single-payer system. I would be willing to pay more in taxes if it meant I never had to worry about getting sick and going into deep debt. Obamacare was a way to get some of what I wanted and, as its namesake likes to say, good is not the enemy of perfect. 

If some principled conservative has a way to make healthcare more available and cheaper, I’m ready to listen.

Otherwise, leave what’s working alone, rescind the tax cuts that wipe out healthcare subsidies, and get this country open again.

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