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 The Sports Desk's Election-Day Analysis. By Tom Danehy LISTEN UP, SPORTS fans. (And, according to a recent survey, there are at least seven of you out there who read The Weekly. Of course, while beggars can't be choosers, I continue to take exception to bridge, chess and soccer being listed as sports.) Anyway, we've got a job to do. It's important to the success of our country. Sorta like two-a-days in August. We have to vote next Tuesday. Not enough people vote and those who do are usually the wrong kind--home-schoolers, neo-feminists, and the most dangerous of all, the people who don't have enough sense to realize the importance of publicly financed sports stadiums.
Boy, let's hope we never get to that awful place. It used to be that you just voted for people (or, if you went to Stanford in the late '60s/early '70s, you could vote for livestock and/or trees). You still get to vote for people, but now the ballot has become much more complex, because you also get to make the laws right in your own crowded voting booth. This has made the voting-for-people part less important. For example, in the governor's race, your vote really doesn't matter all that much. Incumbent Jane Dee Hull, running on the "I'm-Not-Fife Symington" ticket, has already won. According to the Phoenix papers, which, unlike our local dailies, actually cover politics, Hull has the support of every organization in the state, from the Arizona Educational Association to the Zouth Zide Crips. I'm really surprised that the AEA supports her. I guess her hair dye has blinded everybody to the fact that back in her legislative days, she used to be an incredible tight-ass when it came to education spending. If you had put a piece of chalk up her butt, it would have come back down a diamond. Meanwhile, her opponent, Paul Something, can't get arrested. And apparently he has tried. He keeps going around the state, taking people's jobs for an hour. Hey Buddy, I know it's a right-to-work state, but we've still got some union rules around here. Poor dude--he spent four years as mayor of Phoenix and he's going to spend the next 47 as the former mayor of Phoenix. We've got an interesting congressional race up where I live. It's a four-way contest, although one candidate represents a party that is so poorly-run and ill-defined, he doesn't stand a chance. Who knows, though? Maybe someday a Democrat might win something. Phil Murphy represents the Libertarian Party in the District 5 congressional race. I'm not really sure what a Libertarian is. Best I can figure is that a Libertarian is a Republican who likes to smoke dope. I don't think my friend Phil does that stuff; he's too busy sniffing gunpowder. See, Phil's a gun-nut conspiracy theorist, but I really like him anyway. He once told me that he had seen a videotape of federal agents walking through the Waco Branch Davidian flames and machine-gunning women and children to death. I tried to tell him that scene was part of the "Black-oil" arc on The X-Files, but he wouldn't listen. The Democratic candidate is former Tucson Mayor Tom Volgy, who apparently is still wearing the same sweater he wore to his first Peter, Paul and Mary concert. Meanwhile, the incumbent, Republican Jim Kolbe, wants to save your Social Security by giving it to Wall Street to invest. Yeah, that's real sound thinking. "Oops, sorry, retired Baby Boomers. Genentech is down an eighth. You're back on cat food." The scary things are the propositions. These are actual laws written by the people because the Legislature refused to do so, or written by the Legislature so they could say the people passed them and thereby avoid taking the blame for the insanity. The bad part is that many are written like laws, meaning normal, intelligent people can't make any sense of them. They're written by lawyers, who went several extra years of college to learn how to speak in a language which others can't understand. Most of this year's ballot propositions are stupid. They deal with legislative salaries or lame attempts to repeal the Legislature's repeal of a ballot proposition which shouldn't have been passed in the first place. There are only three really important ones. They are:
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The importance of voting can't be overstated. Just think if we
were the kind of country where only one-third of the people voted.
It'd be awful. We'd have a society where a handful of people held
most of the wealth, where schools would be over-crowded and under-funded,
where giant corporations, through campaign contributions, could
pretty much pick and choose our legislatures for us.