I love to vote. I have voted in every election, including off-off year school board elections. And I have been an early voter since it became a possibility. Yet despite its liberal reputation, California’s early vote arrangements are atrocious and I am a vote by mailer now.

So today I drove myself to the local post office and put my ballot in the mail receptacle inside the lobby, as I have since the pandemic began.

No muss. No fuss.

Not so in my state’s immediate neighbor to the east. In Arizona, specifically Maricopa County (home of the Cyber Ninja “forensic audit”), there are armed, masked and bullet-proof vested individuals making sure that the right sorts of people are voting, as they record videos of voters inserting their supposedly secret ballots into official ballot drop boxes. They also video the license plates of vehicles that the voters arrive in.

So if you were curious what voting in a police state was going to be like if TFG has his way, look no further than Maricopa County, Arizona.

Well, come to find out, Louie Gohmert is going out with a whimper.

James Cowart is a CPA and tax preparer in Tyler, Texas, Louie’s home town.

Now why would Louie, after all these years of having a friend file his finance reports, would he go out and hire a professional just as he is leaving?

I dunno, but if I was a betting chick, I’d say — Unless, of course, he was under investigation. Like for moving money through his campaign account to pay for the January 6^th Insurrection.

Anybody who knows Louie knows he was somedamnhow involved in January 6th.

Republican politics is just a more tightly wound ecosystem than anything on the left. There are a couple of things you can expect from Republicans during election season. They will complain about how extreme Democrats are on gun control. They will complain about how much Democrats spend with the added benefit of blaming inflation on them. However, one thing you can count on is the fact that high crime rates are the fault of the Democrats and being soft on crime.

So, let’s talk about crime. First, let’s take a look at national trends in crime. From 1990 to 2020, the crime rate went down and went down considerably. The two biggest dips in crime occurred during Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. Does this mean they were responsible? What we know is that crime remained fairly flat under George W. Bush overall and went up under Donald Trump.

If we focus on Texas we would see that Texas ranks 11th in the nation in terms of being dangerous on a per capita basis. Republicans have controlled both chambers in the Texas Legislature, the governor’s chair, and the lieutenant governor’s chair for nearly 20 years now. However, this hasn’t stopped them from blaming the Democrats for crime.

The big target in Texas are undocumented immigrants. Naturally, that might be something we would want to study. Sure enough, undocumented immigrants actually committed less crime than their native counterparts. In fact, it’s not particularly close. However, that just doesn’t feel like it’s true. The fact that red states are more dangerous than blue states doesn’t feel like it’s true. After all, isn’t New York, Portland, and Chicago a war zone? In actuality, when you look at crime rates (and not total crimes) the exact opposite is true.

Are Republicans to blame for crime? I’m not necessarily going there. I do think we need to start acknowledging some common sense facts about crime before we lose our collective heads. First, does anyone think real hardened criminals really think about sentencing before committing a crime? I was going to rob that store, but this Republican judge would give me 20 years instead of 10. Does anyone really believe that criminals actually think that way?

So, if harsher penalties don’t deter crime then what can we attribute an increase of crime to? Obviously, the first thing we need to do is acknowledge whether there is an increase in the first place and what that increase means in context with the data over a longer period of time. Is it statistically significant?

However, statistical significance and other high brow terms like that obviously confuses people. Their eyes glaze over. So, let’s set that aside and assume it is happening. Why? There are more Republican judges nationwide and in Texas than Democratic judges. It’s not sentencing. Our police departments have actually expanded during that time as well. Sure, we could double the police force, but I suspect that isn’t it either.

One thing conservatives seem to think is that allowing everyone unfettered access to guns will lower crime rates. Ask yourself this question: does that make any logical sense? However, I would suggest something else. People commit crimes when they are angry or anxious. They commit crimes when they think they need something they don’t have. They commit crimes because they are desperate. That points to the economy more than values, stiffer penalties, and even easy access to guns. Maybe that’s why crime goes down under Democrats. Maybe that’s why we saw a spike at the end of the last presidency. Of course, all of that doesn’t fit into a 30 second or 60 second television commercial. So, just be afraid. Very afraid.

Some people are more fascinated with evil than others. The biggest rage in the office is the series “Dahmer” on Netflix. Everyone has been trying to get me to watch, but I’d be watching solo at home. I don’t necessarily want to see evil or watch it described, but the idea of sociopaths and psychopaths interests me as someone that has a masters in counseling and has dabbled in some abnormal psychology.

I picked up a book at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and was finally able to crack it open. Mind you, I haven’t finished it but I found Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen to be a fascinating read so far. The biggest breakthrough was in the terminology itself. He doesn’t use terms like good and evil. Instead he talked about empathy. Some people have a lot of it and some people have a little or zero real empathy.

As someone interested in mental health, this revelation brings a number of questions that I hope he has answers for. For instance, is empathy something innate that some people simply lack or is it something learned from our environment? For instance, he was able to show different parts of the brain and explain what was happening on a physiological level when someone’s empathy was impaired. Can we successfully teach empathy? Can we develop an empathy pill for those that have biological reasons for a lack of empathy?

What strikes me most of all is that terms like “good” and “evil” come with significant value judgments attached. Empathy can be measured. We may not have a perfect measurement, but we can certainly do better than “evil”. One can say that they are doing something for the good of mankind and yet conduct themselves without a shred of human empathy.

Cohen described it like a spotlight. Those that have empathy have two or more spotlights. One is on them and their thoughts and needs. The other spotlight(s) are on others and their thoughts and needs. Those with zero to no empathy have only one spotlight. There are times in all of our lives when we are down to one spotlight. It happens. Something horrible happens or we feel more vulnerable for one reason or another. However, that condition is just temporary. When our lives stabilize or the crisis abates then our empathy returns to normal.

Yet, what we are seeing is an increasing amount of people that are stuck on one spotlight. Again, I wish I knew whether this was learned behavior or somehow organic. What I do know is that this is a more substantial description of potentially dangerous people than simply calling them evil. After all, a person with a single spotlight can seem good as long as their ends seem in line with everyone else’s. When their interests and the interests of others collide then watch out. Until we can get a pill at the local pharmacy we need to make sure we don’t give those folks too much power.

Here on the Left Coast, in the California “Fighting 41st”, we have a congressional race between Ken Calvert, a Trump-endorsed 30-year Republican veteran, and Will Rollins, a young, energetic former federal prosecutor of 1/6 insurgents. And a Democrat.

You already know this because I have previously requested donations from the Juanita Jean reader community to promote the Will Rollins “Visibility Campaign” to purchase 50 4′ X 8′ campaign signs.

I kicked in a few dead presidents toward the signage, and several of Juanita’s readers have responded to my shameless begging. So here are some of the fruits of our donations.

Thank you!

Okay, so as I was getting ready for the hearing, my eye captured this on the CNN website.

Last month, they stuffed their fish with weights to win a prize of about $20,000.  Big scandal. Really big.

Last time I checked, Trump sits at his golf resort reading classified documents. Or having someone read them to him just for the helluva it.

God bless America.