Here on the Left Coast, we Californians love our initiative and referendum rights. In years past we’ve had some doozies to energize base voters that enhanced voter turnout.

Take Prop. 13. In 1978 California’s property owners gave themselves a break from punishing yearly property reassessment by limiting property reassessment only at the time of sale of the property, limiting the assessment rate to 1%, and allowing only a 1% adjustment per year. People liked that. It won in a landslide, and voter turnout in that off-year election was the largest in state history.

In advance of the 2016 election, California saw record voter registration among Millenial voters who signed up to vote for AUMA, the ballot measure to legalize recreational use of cannabis.

This year, we will see Prop. 1 on the November ballot. Prop 1 was placed on the ballot in reaction to the Roe v. Wade SCOTUS news leak last May. Prop. 1 will constitutionally protect abortion and contraception rights in California.

This is a guaranteed voter turnout booster that is bound to flip a few toss-up districts at least. Polls show California voters heavily favor a Yes vote in numbers that exceed 70%.

Ironically, had the May leak not occurred, it might have been too late to get Prop 1 on the ballot by the June 30th deadline as SCOTUS released the decision only 6 days before.

That’s going to be problematic for David Valadao (R) CD 22, Mike Garcia (R) CD 27 and Ken Calvert (R) CD 41. Toss-up districts all.

The late 1990s were difficult times for Democrats and progressives. It was soul searching time for me in those days. The president of the United States became only the second president to ever be impeached. There were numerous defenses for the president and his behavior. Most of those defenses were permutations of the same defense. Essentially they said that what a man (or woman) does in their personal life does not impact them in their professional life. As long as Bill Clinton was a good president from nine to five then what does matter that he isn’t a good man after those hours?

French president Jacques Chirac famously had multiple affairs. The joke was that he kept replacing each significant other with the same woman ten years younger. If the French people accepted him as their leader then we should have accepted Clinton as our leader. As we know, that argument won out. Except, it really didn’t win out. It helped Bush win the election over Al Gore. I ended up voting for Gore because he was a different man and an infinitely better one than Clinton. However, there were millions that punished him for the mistakes of his former boss.

We often have difficulty separating a message from the messenger. It’s one of the important things I point out when teaching Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. One of the steps he mentions before a direct action campaign is self-purification. It’s a challenging concept for students. Yet, it is absolutely crucial. Listening to someone like Newt Gingrich (at the time) prattle on about character is hilarious. However, it doesn’t mean the point is wrong.

If we have learned anything over the last seven or eight years it is that personal character is absolutely a big deal. We just endured a presidency of someone that has no character. We saw what happened. We saw how that spilled into everything. We saw the abject cruelty. We saw the inhumanity and indifference. We saw the lack of a fundamental understanding and empathy.

Whether this inhumanity is merely a reflection of the people that supported him or whether his inhumanity rubbed off on them is hard to parse. His grotesque existence brings forth any number of questions. However, the most important one is whether those that support him really reflect his inhumanity or if they support him simply because that inhumanity bothers us. Either is equally likely. One might ask what the difference is and I suppose it is a minor detail, but it tells me that in one case there are millions of sociopaths/psychopaths out there. In the other case, they have human empathy, sympathy, and concern in most situations, but just enjoy the political nihilism.

Humanity itself is a fragile thing. Everyone we encounter in our lives is flawed. Look at us in the perfect angle and we can be angels or demons. Both of things make us human. We are walking contradictions and so choosing any one to lead us can seem like an impossible task. The former guy may be human in the purest scientific sense, but lacks any redeeming human traits. Such a statement seems impossible and yet objectively true. There isn’t a positive human trait there. Some of us thought those things weren’t necessary to lead. They were absolutely wrong.

Okay, okay, with the help of Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen we have undercovered some of the nastiest scam PAC whatnots happening right here in the good ole USA.

This one is kinda “hey, come over here and let me punch you in the face” scam.  These guys are pretending to be raising money to fight for veterans in congress. They even have the nerve to put this manner of crapola on the internet.  It’s called the American Coalition for Crisis Relief PAC and they ask for your help.

They have raised $3.5 million dollars to lobby for veteran issues.

Let’s look at the second quarter of this year to see their latest filing with the FEC.

The scam PAC raised over $500,000 in the second quarter and spent $0 on candidates. All of the money it raised went to “operating expenditures.”

Oh, and there’s more. They have paid themselves nicely for running the PAC.

And they also paid consultants at this place.

Let me save you the trouble of looking up the address — it’s something called Lashed and Laced, and it looks legitimate.

It’s on the end there.  I thought it was a hair salon and Lord knows I trust hair salons with political activism, but Thelma informed me that Lashed and Laced is most likely a line of ladies basement boudoir accessories and corsets. So, it’s probably an S&M shop, which, even if you don’t think too hard about it, might actually be the best place to hire congressional lobbyist.

So, I dunno.

Reminder:  do not give money to any PAC unless you are very sure who runs that sucker.

Okay, this is a long You Tube and really not really worth your time except that it shows a West Virginia Circuit Court Judge pulling a handgun in a menacing manner while in the middle of a damn hearing. He points it toward the ceiling and then puts it down on his edge bench pointing in the direction of the lawyer he pissed at.

I would like to let this judge know that Texas holds the distributorship on crap like that. If a judge pulls something like that in a courtroom outside of Texas, they have to pay Texas a licensing fee.

It’s the law. Look it up.

And for the of you keeping score, Florida is working hard to fill the quack gap forced upon the country by the departure of Louie Gohmert from congress.

Martin Hyde (R), who is running for Congress in Florida’s 16th congressional district, “says he would have killed the FBI agents who searched…  Trump’s property if they tried to do the same thing to his home,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports.

Once that line was crossed, there’s no going back and competition immediately clawed its way upward.

Florida state House candidate Luis Miguel (R) “was suspended from Twitter after a tweet advocating that Floridians should be able to shoot federal agents on sight,” Florida Politics reports.

So, Florida, that was a twofer day? Keep it up, you can win this thing at Mar a Lago alone.

Joe Manchin has become a thorn in the side of our Democratic-led government. We felt it acutely when he finally agreed to pass the anti-inflation bill that has both short- and long-term benefits. Hopefully it’ll do some good.

That bill was as dead as a door nail. But like Lazarus, it rose again, and when Manchin added his 50th vote, we cried in exultation. But this reminded us, again, how this one Senator can muck up the works.

And now I am wondering if we aren’t going to see more of this in the future.

Axios is carrying this news item today that reports on a Republican state Senator in Colorado.

From Axios:

“A state senator in Colorado is resigning from the Republican Party and becoming a Democrat, citing the party’s complicity in the Jan. 6 insurrection and 2020 election denial as the reason.”

This would be Colorado Sen. Kevin Priola. Like Senator Manchin, Priola is a moderate that has voted on a bipartisan basis but has also voted with Republicans 90% of the time. He has said that he will not alter the way he votes despite his new party affiliation.

Since January 6, there have been several of these defections, all in response to the insurgency and to the continued lying about a stolen election. I like to call these defectors “Mini Manchins”.

So 1/6 has become a Manchin-creating machine. More and more people are changing their party affiliations but not their minds.

I know most of you are going to miss Louie Gohmert.  In case you were distracted, Louie left his congressional seat to run for Texas Attorney General against Texas felony indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Out of four candidates, Louie came in fifth. Okay, okay, almost fifth.

I don’t know diddle-squat about the new guy who will surely win that seat except that he admires Gohmert. That could mean that we move from dumb to big dumb. Our fear is that he’s just like Gohmert except effective.

You see, over Louie’s time in congress, he didn’t have a sterling record in effectiveness.

He exits office as Texas’ ninth most senior member of Congress, having made a mark — but not legislatively. In nine congressional terms, he’s passed just one bill into law, a measure in 2017 that simplified the process for calling 911.

We are worried that the new guy can get something passed. As far as we know so far, he may not cast a reflection in a mirror.