I’m sitting here two or three days after the election (I’ve lost count). The main issue is still in doubt, so I’m not even going to mention the counting, the Supreme Court, or the fake claims of voter fraud. Just give us a winner so 48% of us can go away pissed off. Wink, wink.
• The state of Oregon passed a measure on Tuesday that basically decriminalizes possession of small amounts of Oxycodone, methamphetamines, cocaine and heroin. Well, that’s great. You can now get legally stoned 19 different ways in Oregon, but you still have to put down a deposit to buy a can of soda.
• Arizona’s Let’s All Get High ballot measure passed by a 60-40 margin. I wouldn’t care at all if people would do that stuff to their damaged heart’s delight and NOT get behind the wheel of a car. Unfortunately, they do that very thing in ridiculously high numbers (unavoidable pun). Alas, that’s not the way that it works.
• We’re now going to have more impaired driver crashes, more injuries, more deaths. That’s because when the stoner decides to drive while stoned, HE’S STONED!! He doesn’t have to worry about getting busted for being high. There’s just that tiny, insignificant matter of perhaps wiping out a family of four.
• Here’s how you know that you’re in The Party of Dumbasses. Armed Republican protesters stormed the vote-counting facility in Phoenix, chanting “Count the votes,” while in other parts of the country, other Trumpists chanted “Stop counting the votes.” All the while, their feckless leader, the Dumbass In Charge, screamed “Stop the voting!”
• Closer to home, Democrat Rex Scott appears to have pulled off a minor upset when he beat Republican Steve Spain in the contest to replace Ally Miller, who is stepping down and heading out on a quest to find her freakin’ mind.
It’s weird, because driving around in Oro Valley and Marana, I saw tons of Spain signs and very few from his opponent. Scott’s signs had his name on them, while Spain’s had a name and the candidate’s picture. I have to wonder whether facial hair on a candidate (like Spain) has a negative impact on some potential voters, especially with a candidate who’s a relative newcomer to the political scene and about whom people don’t know very much.
• Again at press time, the margin in the Arizona Congressional District 6 race is razor thin. Incumbent Republican David Schweikert holds a slim lead over Democratic challenger Dr. Hiral Tipirneni. Schweikert is in a very-safe Republican district, but he found himself in a dogfight after the House of Representatives released a 2,900-page report detailing Schweikert’s financial misdeeds, campaign-finance law violations, and ethics violations. (In the current political climate, you really have to screw up bad to get hit with an ethics violation charge.)
The House Ethics Committee found that Schweikert had more than $300,000 in erroneous or undisclosed transactions and had illegally used campaign funds for everything from meals to babysitting.
The House panel said “Representative Schweikert made vague and misleading statements that allowed him to evade the statute of limitations for the most egregious violations of campaign finance laws. Efforts like the ones that Representative Schweikert undertook to delay and impede the…investigation were not only highly detrimental to the Committee’s work and reputation of the House, they were themselves sanctionable misconduct.”
Since this is Congress, the committee came down hard. They sent Schweikert to bed without supper and then let him keep his seat.
One might think that such conduct would prompt the voters in his neglected district to throw the bum out. But this is Scottsdale; Schweikert is white and Tiperneni isn’t. Advantage: Crooked Bum.
• Former Somebody Martha McSally is the living example of Steve Martin’s fictional book, How I Turned a Million in Real Estate Into $100 Cash. The war hero/fighter pilot/trailblazer had found a nice safe Congressional District in Southern Arizona, one that she probably could have represented for as long as she felt like being in Congress. But she got greedy (or overly ambitious), hitched her wagon to the wrong whores (I’m sorry, horse), and within a span of two short years, lost to not one, but two, Democrats! In statewide races! In Arizona! That should be hard to do, but she made it look easy.
• One last thing: The weekend before the election, several hundred cars were gathered at the Tucson Mall for a pro-Trump rally. The tRump-licker on the radio said, “Nine hundred cars gather at the Tucson Mall. The media ignores it, but what does it mean?”
I’m sorry, it really should be noteworthy, but because of the boorish and sometimes racist way these people act, all it means to me is that the Clampetts have finally figured out how to use the internet.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2020.
I know i’s highly unusual, but there are a couple pearls of wisdom in the rant today!!!!
“Fake claims of voter fraud…”
How do you know they are fake? We can absolutely get a count of the number of dead people and non-residents who voted. You don’t have that count yet. Pretty poor journalist who doesn’t even have the facts to be making declarations.
The number of dead people and non-residents who voted is just the tip of the ice-berg.
We have a pretty good idea that initiative companies forged over 70% of their signatures to get their issues on the ballot in the Covid era. In order to do that, they need a massive database of signatures. With the tens of millions to be made from the Democrat party, it is almost a certainty that they turned that database to work at forging voter registrations, requests for early ballots and votes.
With so much money flowing, it is very possible that they penetrated security in Maricopa County and Pima county acquiring copies of their signature databases.
Simple way to determine the degree to which this happened: pull a random sample of 9000 early ballot Democrat voters, call them, see if they exist at the address registered and ask them if they voted.
One person can forge a signature every ten seconds, that’s over 3,000 forgeries in one day’s shift, 60,000 votes in twenty days of the early voting period. This wasn’t a big operation to steal a presidential election decided by less than 200,000 votes in six swing states.
It very likely happened and you are just one of the sheep bleating a refrain designed to prevent it from being uncovered or even determined. Why? Because you know it happened, you are part of the intellectual corruption.
Drunk drivers are a far bigger problem.
In 2019, the legalized sale of marijuana provided $2 billion dollars in taxes in 6 states. Follow the money. The revenue infusions will continue to skyrocket as good business sense trumps puritanism with more states rushing to legalization.
Danehy’s woes about stoned drivers are belied by research showing:
“We conclude that 3 years after recreational marijuana legalization in Washington and Colorado, the changes in motor vehicle crash fatality rates observed in those 2 states do not significantly differ from rate changes in similar states without recreational marijuana legalization.”
US National Library of Medicine – National Institutes of Health
Moral: with the economy on the precipice, everybody must get stoned. It’s a great way to keep local and state governments solvent.
There may be little reason for anyone with half a green thumb to buy taxed product, since the new law allows as many as six plants to be grown at home. Well, not everyone can be counted on to wait until harvest-time, so, yes, there will be sales, at least in the first year of the law, before first harvest.
Hey Rick,
Don’t bother Uncle Tom with actual facts and data. His paranoid fantasies and irrational fear and hatred of marijuana derive from an ignorant bias, not from an informed conclusion grounded in reality.
My take on McSally running for Senate in 2018 was and remains, despite Danehy’s calling CD 2 safe forever for Martha, that she and her advisors saw the district as up for grab and the state pretty safe for a Republican. She won by 161 votes vs. a less-than-inspired campaign in 2014 and handily against a weak opponent in 2016. And the state had been more safely Republican than the district forever. So she ran and lost and ran again and Counterfeit Kelly clobbered Malicious McSally.
Language note on paragraph 5: The armed protestors had not “stormed the vote-counting facility”–The fear [from sane people] was that that they would try it–to force their way inside.
The protestors, even armed, fortunately were deterred either by some sense of good behavior–and the cops who faced them down, or by being weak, not even up to the standards of of European soccer hooligans, who would not have needed firearms to feel bold.
And this is why I cancelled this stupid newsletter, right now
I suspect Steve Spain’s ignorant comment about mask wearing was a more significant factor in his losing than his facial hair.
He may not have to worry about getting busted for being high, but he or she will need to worry about getting busted for being high while operating a motor vehicle.
The real tragedy in this election was the reelection of genuinely crazy legislators and the continuation of the 30 year one party dictatorship on West Washington in Phoenix. And Schweikert, my gosh, what a crooked jerk, are people absolutely blind deaf and dumb? Can you imagine the foaming at the mouths, if Schweikert was a Democrat and did the same things?
I’m reminded of a recent NYT election editorial…Yeah, we won..but, but, but….we should have won by more…welcome to future media responses, including Tommy’s, when Joe and shortly thereafter Kama take office.
What kind of miserable person uses the Clampetts as an insult ?!? A pox on your house good sir! Jed deserves better then to be slandered by you as a comparison to fools following an idiot sore loser. The rest of the piece was a fun read otherwise.
To: “jhuppent”-
When one is incapable of correctly naming the largest political organization in the United States (Hint: It’s the Democratic Party. Note the spelling.), people have a tendency to assume that person is just another Fox “News” watching fool who fails to recognize how ignorant he or she sounds.
South Jersey Doc
Any incorrect layout is the fault of either my computer of that of the TW. I tried.
Politics as usual, they’re ALL liars! TERM LIMITS are the answer for ALL elected offices!