Posts Tagged → process
Pitfalls and pratfalls of primary elections for candidates and volunteers alike
While digging through old stuff in my office recently, I encountered a bag in a corner with a bunch of campaign tee shirts made for volunteers who had helped me run in the 2010 primary race for congress here in central PA. Seeing the pinned-on names on each shirt, I felt embarrassed that somehow I had neglected to get these tokens of appreciation into the hands of those dedicated volunteers. They had donated their time to me, to a campaign they believed in, and it is absolutely incumbent upon all candidates to express appreciation, and show it if they can, to their volunteers, win or lose. Here was evidence that I had failed to do that fully with these several people whose names appeared on the tee shirts, and it made me feel badly.
Fast forward fourteen years, and I have just learned by doing an internet search that a political candidate I had contributed real time and effort to had dropped out of the race last Thursday. This person and I had exchanged many emails and texts for the past month, I had drafted a press release for her, and gotten her about forty ballot petition signatures to help get her on the April 23 ballot. Despite all my time and effort on her behalf, I did not qualify for the email the media says she sent to her supporters, announcing her bowing out of the race. I felt like all my time and effort dedicated to this person was not appreciated or valued, which makes one feel badly.
Dear political candidates, you have to express your appreciation to your volunteers! Volunteers are how every campaign runs, whether it succeeds or fails, and showing your appreciation to the people who make up the campaign is your duty to those people who take time away from their families, their businesses, jobs, etc to help you get ahead. Failing to express appreciation hurts not just your own reputation, but it also leaves your volunteers wondering if they should ever volunteer on a campaign again for anyone else.
I have seen other candidates cold-drop their volunteers when the campaign ends, and even drop their campaign staff. This is usually due to the exhaustion a candidate feels at the end of the race. Campaigns are all brutal exercises, all-out sprints over a relatively short amount of time, and at their end usually everyone involved is feeling tapped out and emotionally drained. It is tough to sustain that high energy after the race ends, but again, dear candidates, you absolutely owe it to your volunteers to say Thank You. An email, some text messages, some cards to the people who put in the most work and hours. Tee shirts if you made them.
What took out this latest candidate I was helping was Pennsylvania’s archaic ballot petition process. Depending upon the office sought (state house, dog catcher, US senate, congress etc) candidates for office in Pennsylvania are required to collect hundreds or even thousands of registered voter signatures on complicated forms where the slightest mistake, mis-spelling, or poorly written word can result in a disqualification. There is an entire arcane process surrounding the screening, challenging, and defending of the ballot petition signatures. The only people who benefit from this are the attorneys who specialize in this arcana, and the two main political parties.
If enough of the candidate’s ballot signatures get disqualified, then the candidate does not achieve the minimal threshold of signatures, and does not qualify to be on the ballot. A lot of hard work and volunteer hours can get flushed down the drain if insufficient signatures are obtained to keep the candidate on the ballot.
PA’s complicated ballot petition process is designed by and for the political parties, which have the experienced volunteers, lawyers, and updated voter lists necessary to get far more signatures than are needed. It is designed to keep political outsiders out of office, and political insiders in.
According to this now un-candidate’s statement in the news article, the attorney who challenged her ballot petition signatures had also threatened to bury her campaign in a pile of legal costs if she tried to fight her way through all the nit-picky challenges. All indications are that US Senate candidate David McCormick is behind this challenge and threat. This is really about a billionaire bully booting pesky candidates out of his way on his path to self-serving elected office.
Yuck.
Pennsylvania voters want choice, and we do not benefit from the current ballot petition process, which was once described to me by a Dauphin County Republican Committee Woman as a necessary precaution to prevent “unqualified people” from running for office.
Said I, “Why don’t we just let anyone run who wants to run? Shouldn’t all citizens have a right to run, aren’t we all qualified? Isn’t that the heart and soul of the democratic process, to keep it as open and accessible to The People as possible?”
Said she, “That sounds like too much democracy to me.”
And so we see yet another victim of this ridiculous gatekeeper process, which both political parties can agree must be kept intact so they can retain maximum control of who gets to run, and who does not. It is really about control, not democracy.
Yuck.
These are some of the pitfalls of running for political office here in Pennsylvania, and while some are unavoidable, it is best to work hard to avoid the pratfalls: Campaign volunteers and supporters will always appreciate and fondly remember a kind word, a nice email or text message saying thanks. And also will they remember that their hard work went unnoticed and unremarked in the end, and so they will feel used.
Double yuck.
Impeach, impeach, impeach
Impeachment is a powerful tool provided in the US Constitution as well as in every state constitution. Over the past 100 years, America and American citizens have enjoyed a historically unprecedented veritable explosion in food security, home security, financial security, and almost endless creature comforts that just a couple decades ago were considered unimaginable luxuries. And so in the past 100 years of increasingly corpulent self-satisfied hourly comfort, Americans have lost their sense of purpose, necessity, hunger, their edge. And so the use of impeachment has pretty much died, as few people saw or sensed the need to use such a drastic tool in such comfortable times.
Americans now view political corruption and official abuse of the law as a cost of doing business, a cost of having such a luxurious lifestyle available to so many of us.
Why rock the boat with something like impeachment when everything is going so great? President Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment for behavior that by today’s standard was positively Girl Scout level, and President Bill Clinton was understandably impeached for having brazenly lied under oath. There have been only a small handful of state level impeachments over the decades, usually against aberrant judges whose behavior is so brazenly corrupt that people overwhelmingly agreed that removing them from office was an obvious necessity.
Then President Donald Trump was supposedly impeached in a process without any procedural integrity, without the right to call witnesses in defense, without the right to file motions or submit evidence. His first “impeachment” was a political circus, not a real court proceeding with all the seriousness the dignity of all the offices involved require.
The second so-called impeachment of President Trump was even more procedurally flawed than the first attempt, including the absence of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, whose daily presence is constitutionally required for an impeachment to go forward. Chief Justice Roberts’ absence did not hinder the lawless circus from continuing, though, so it was not really an impeachment. This process was in fact just the mis-use and mis-appropriation of the impeachment name applied to a set of theatrical political activities.
You would think with all this one-sided impeachment-lite activity that the “other side of the aisle” would be ready to apply the same medicine now that they have the power to do so. And you would be wrong. The elected eunuchs have no intention of fighting back at all.
And so we now find America in the throes of widespread lawlessness by one political party, whose judges behave like theatrical political tyrants while ignoring all legal precedent and legal process requirements of their court rooms. For example, this week Federal Judge Chuktan scolded the Trump legal team in DC that they should have spent the prior year reading through the 12,000,000 pages of discovery material in preparation for a defense they only found out about a few weeks ago, and whose access to the related documents only began a week ago. This is absolute lawlessness by Judge Chuktan, whose lawlessness makes an absolute mockery of the very idea of a legal process.
In case you are not understanding this, the judge refused to allow the Trump defense attorneys adequate time to read through and use in court over twelve million pages of material being used to falsely prosecute President Trump for his mere political speech. Nope, Trump’s team is expected to arrive in court fully prepared within a couple months. This is a grotesque and corrupt abuse of the federal judge’s powers and discretion.
Another example is the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court majority that – crazily, corruptly, partisanly – held that unilateral last-second changes to Pennsylvania election law, right before the 2020 general election, by unelected people in the executive branch, and in open defiance of the Pennsylvania constitution which places all election law only in the hands of the legislature, were just fine and would stand. These state supreme court judges were wildly abusing their authority and discretion to implement a plainly flawed election process that defied Pennsylvania’s legal process for establishing election law, and which subsequently allowed a huge amount of voting fraud to occur in the 2020 election.
Other examples of grotesque courtroom malfeasance by politicized judges can be found ad nauseum in the federal courtrooms in Washington, DC, where jurisprudence and respect for the rule of law have been thrown away in the interest of obtaining patently illegal political outcomes that benefit one political party and that are designed to hurt President Trump and anyone around him. Tainted jurors, tainted judges, conflicts of interest, abuses of courtroom decorum and legal procedural law, the list of malfeasance there is incredible.
The one answer to all of these politically active judges is impeachment. Real, honest-to-goodness impeachment that includes all the bells, whistles, and fixins of a gen-u-ine courtroom hearing. Just like the US Constitution and state constitutions have a process for fraudulent elections to be challenged, so they also provide for impeachments.
And while one political party is riding the impeachment horse all over the place, the other political party wants nothing to do with impeachment. Why that would upset the apple cart, or some such nonsense, is what we hear from elected Republicans across America. Most of the federal judges involved in the January 6th cases have abused their positions and should be impeached. More than half of the Pennsylvania state supreme court members deserved impeachment and should have been impeached. What was lacking in the political process was the political willpower from among the “other” political party to mount a response, to resist the lawlessness.
The response of impeachment that should have met every single one of these lawless judges was taken off the table before any real discussion of it began. The co-equal branch of government that is by design supposed to be able to impeach and then remove aberrant officials is completely out of this fight, and so the official lawlessness continues.
As in any fight, if one side is throwing haymaker punches and the other side is simply standing there taking all of the punishment, eventually the guy standing there taking all the punches is going to lose the fight. There is only so much abuse that any person or body can take before it breaks, and in the case of America, the abuse of lawlessness being inflicted on our body politic is beginning to crush our nation. Our political and professional institutions are collapsing under the onslaught. American citizens are beginning to lose trust in their official institutions.
The natural answer that is hard-wired into our various constitutions is impeach, impeach, impeach, and thereby hold lawless officials accountable and restore balance to our crumbling political system.
I do not know why in 2020 and 2021 former state senator and president pro tem of the Pennsylvania Senate, Jake-The-Snake Corman, and PA House leaders Kerry Benninghoff and Bryan Cutler, refused to even consider impeachment of the lawless PA state supreme court members who threw the rule of law out the window to immediately benefit one political party. It made no sense from a political perspective or from a let’s-uphold-the-basic-law perspective. Their impotence simply made no sense.
Nor does it make sense why US House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan refuse now to impeach the lawless federal judges and bribe-taking Joe Biden, the lying-before-Congress FBI Chris Wray, the endlessly lying and obviously lawless chief law enforcement officer US AG Merrick Garland, and a whole host of other corrupt federal employees whose job #1 is to uphold The Law.
Isn’t it curious that the people who are supposedly standing on “the other side” of the lawless people are unwilling to take a stand, to implement those impeachment processes that are spelled out in our various constitutions? By their unwillingness to fight back, every one of these politicians – Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Bryan Cutler, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan etc et al – is enabling and abetting their supposed opponents. By refusing to fight back in any meaningful way, these elected officials are actually allowing America to descend into not just lawlessness, but one party domination and the destruction of America as a political entity that naturally follows.
Only one explanation for GOP weakness makes any sense: How many pieces of silver have these elected officials taken to have their loyalties swayed away from their oath of office? How many elected Republicans across America are owned by China?
Trump not legally impeached, but wear it with pride anyhow
Trump was not legally impeached, but he should wear it with pride anyhow…
Because the US House has failed to deliver the phony “Articles of Impeachment” to the US Senate, as required by the US Constitution, there is no actual impeachment. President Trump has NOT been impeached by the US House. Not yet, anyhow. So all those wahoo-for-political-chaos partiers and “Merry Impeachmas” fake news reporters/ partisan political activists will just have to put off their foolish celebration until the process moves to the US Senate. If it ever goes there.
The reason the Founders of America structured the impeachment process this way was to give everyone a bite at the apple, both accuser and defendant. This simple structure is the heart of America’s due process found at every level of our legal system. If either half of the process is procedurally deficient or missing, then it does not exist. The impeachment process is a whole, not two separate halves existing by themselves.
This is because America’s Founders did not want an accused president guilty by accusation only, without the ability to defend himself. Just like you and I would not want that situation to exist. Would any of us want such a deficient process to exist in America, at any level? For example, would you yourself want to walk into a local magistrate’s court to defend yourself against a speeding ticket, and have the cop simply tell the judge that you are guilty because he says so, and have the process end there, with no opportunity for you to defend yourself?
That would not be a fair or balanced process, would it? Well, without the impeachment articles being delivered to the US Senate, it is not a fair or legal process.
But this deficient process does fit in with the entire previous false accusations against President Trump, starting with the Russia collusion hoax, and when that failed, jumping seamlessly over to yet another hoax, this time Ukraine. Ukraine is where the entire Democrat Party is running interference on behalf of corrupt criminal Joe Biden. Biden used his position as Vice President of the USA to illegally enrich himself and his son, Hunter Biden. President Trump tried to get to the bottom of it, and was falsely accused of exactly that which Biden had done.
And this un-American process also fits in with the Democrat Party’s novel and un-American approach to criminal charges: To them, you are guilty until proven innocent, contrary to the US Constitution’s guarantee that all defendants are innocent until proven guilty. That is, the burden of proof is on the accuser, not on the accused. If the accuser cannot make their case, then the accused goes free. No matter how empty the accusations against President Trump have been, the Democrat Party and their mainstream media propaganda arm have said “We don’t have the evidence yet, but we know it is there, and the evidence we have we can’t share with you, and you are guilty.”
Dear Democrat Party members: Are you truly proud of this un-American farce? Are you really OK with an entire American political party devoting itself to the destruction of the core rights and procedures that make America so much better than every other country? Would you ever tolerate this happening in your own life? If you are OK with this, then shame on you! Shame Shame Shame on you!
To be a true American, your love of America must be greater than your willingness to sacrifice America and all things American for your own personal goals or feelings. This feeling has always defined Americans, and yet the Democrat Party has one-two-three thrown it overboard.
What has actually (legally) happened in all of this is the US House has in effect censured President Trump, though once again without following correct procedures. In any event, the Democrat members of the US House are now on record as not liking the president. Are any of us surprised? The Democrat Party has not gotten over their 2016 loss to Donald John Trump, and they have allowed raw hatred, disdain for the US Constitution, and rejection of basic American civil rights to define them ever since. We know this already, but what the heck, make it official.
So, Mister president Trump, I encourage you to wear this fake “impeachment” with pride. Wear it as a badge of honor. The people who have put you and the rest of America through this destructive process are not true Americans, and if they say they don’t like you, that is to your credit. Keep doing what you are doing, Mister President.
Home is Where the Heart Is
Home is where the heart is, goes the old and proven adage.
Home is that place you love, where you feel safe, loved, comfortable, surrounded by the fruits of your labors, like a flower garden behind a hand-laid stone wall, a manicured lawn, a bird bath or bird feeder, a porch for sitting on after a day of work. Maybe you raised a family in the home, and on bedroom walls in a couple places hidden from paint touch-ups there are some old finger prints from children who are now with families of their own. After putting so much work and love into your home, you naturally feel love for it. Just the memories alone inspire you!
So yes, your heart resides there, in your home, the ultimate symbol of all your efforts, the fruits of all your labors.
And so this is all true for those of us who have worked in and paid taxes here in America, our home, our house. Our Social Security payments, mine since I was fourteen years old, our volunteering for charitable organizations and Little League, our playing by the rules and laws of America, being good citizens. Always building the country up, making it a cozy and safe home for those who live here, who contribute to it, who will move here with the intention of participating in it.
And yet, unbelievably, America now houses people like US Reps Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and other elected representatives, who are actually openly advocating for tearing down the national house, our home, America. These people are openly working every day to destroy the home that you and I have built. Along with “free” healthcare, income, education, and even a “free” home for people who have come here illegally, never paid anything into Social Security, and who themselves fly the flags of the other nations from which they come, where their hearts remain.
None of us lifelong taxpayers will ever get any of this “free” stuff, even though it is our tax money that creates it in the first place!
Can you imagine if some stranger walked into your house and began tearing the place apart, and offering to hand out your furniture, clothing, your food to passersby on the street outside? It would be even worse if it was someone you had invited in, so they could participate in all of the wonderful opportunities America offers to anyone willing to work hard. Well, this all is exactly what is happening with Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and all of their supporters and enablers.
So it is a natural thing, an understandable and totally human thing, for our elected President to say “If you don’t like America, then go home to your parent countries.” He is definitely speaking for a majority of Americans. This should be no surprise to anyone. Every other country does the same. In every other country what Omar, Tlaib and their political party are doing would correctly be seen as treason and an intolerable act of war against the nation.
Like a lot of Americans, I applaud President Trump for writing this in one of his public messages the other day. Good for him. He understands that this current illegal invader situation is not sustainable. Not financially, not economically, not legally, not socially, and not politically. It is a testament to how good we Americans are at heart that this has been allowed to go on at all. We have such a strong generosity, even if we can’t always afford it. Americans are a giving people. Very few other nations, if any, will allow foreigners to literally walk into their nation and begin demanding free this and free that, tear down the border so anyone can literally walk in; it is quite insane. In most other countries, you would either be killed outright, or jailed, or expelled. Understandably.
Yes, we understand that there is a political party that has turned this illegal, lawless, anti-human, anti-America behavior into a business model, a way to gain political power. But just because that one political party is using and abusing the democratic process to achieve non-democratic results does not make this situation acceptable.
So I applaud President Trump for speaking out on behalf of the nation he was elected to lead, the home he was sworn to protect. He is doing what any American president is supposed to do. Anyone now opposing his standing up for America and our rule of law is openly a declared enemy of America.
America: Love it as it is, or leave it, as it is. And no, you cannot take our stuff with you. We worked for it, we built it, it is ours. It is not yours.
I love the smell of brown sludge in the morning
When I get a snoot full of that brown sludge in the morning, it brings back warm memories. Doesn’t happen all the time. Not as often as I would like. The period for brown sludge is often almost over as soon as it begins, though when I was a kid at Stone Valley Lake, the period lasted for a good eight weeks.
Memories of cold mornings, even cold nights, sometimes lugging a sloshing bucket by headlamp, stumbling through the brush, tripping over vines and branches, picking bugs out of the buckets. Sometimes the bugs concentrate in the buckets, drawn by the smell, and the taste. Trying not to spill it, good God don’t spill it! And then the long nights. Yes, you might start in the daylight, but at six the next morning you were up all night, running for the bucket every ten minutes, tired out, cramping, sleepy.
You see, modern maple syrup is nothing like it was. It is now a victim of technology. Where maybe just five years ago maple syrup producers used fire to boil maple sap down, now they have reverse osmosis machines, and spectrometers and spectrographs that tell the syrup maker how concentrated the sap sugars are, and thus when to start and when to wait longer. When to keep adding to the huge coolers, and freezers, and when to begin condensing.
In the big maple syrup production outfits today, the sap collection is mechanized, run through a spider web of tubing across the sugar bush. The sap is pumped, and gathered in big tanks, then stilled, separated, distilled, purified, filtered over and over, sterilized and then jugged. This is maple syrup today. How it is created looks nothing like how it was made for the past 15,000 years until very recently.
And frankly, as a result of this industrial processing, it no longer tastes like maple syrup. It tastes bland.
Sure, you can try to buy the old Grade B dark brown maple syrup. You remember, surely, the maple syrup that puts the phrase “maple flavor” in maple syrup? You can try to buy it, and some sellers will try to sell it to you. And it will indeed look amber-ish, with a hint of brown. Now they will disclaim it, or add some caveats, or sheepishly try to explain that it is dark for maple syrup “these days,” but it is not quite like what you remember from just a half dozen years ago, let alone your childhood.
And you will taste it, this modern creation, and you will not taste maple syrup. Instead you will taste Maple Product.
Maple Product is the result of the industrialization of even hand-crafted specialties like maple syrup. It is mechanized, industrialized, and heavily filtered, and it has very little real taste. No rich taste, for sure, not the unique and authentic maple taste you came for in the first place.
That is why we have been making our own maple syrup. It started out really small, like when I was a kid using plastic milk jugs hung on string from hand- cut wood spiles. Maybe a couple cups of syrup, and it lasted one day. A treat from Mother Nature, the whole family enjoying it, gathered round like families have over nature’s bounty since time immemorial. A natural and innately healthy moment.
Then I ordered a bunch of old maple buckets with metal spiles, and boiled lots of sap on the stove top. That was a bad idea because the whole house steamed up and smelled vaguely of damp earth. The small amounts of sugar in the steam hardened to a clear armor on everything in the kitchen, and cleaning with water just made it sticky. Getting closer!
Then I ordered a stainless steel evaporator pan from a young guy in the Midwest. Couple hundred bucks and worth every penny. With a threaded spigot and a valve on the end, it can release as much boiled down sap as I want to take to the next stage of boiling. The only filtering we do is from the big sap collection tank in the back of the pickup, through an old cotton tee shirt, and some skimming in the evaporator. Bits of bark, the occasional rogue ant, “stuff” from inside the maple trees is all skimmed off. But what we do not do is filter out the taste.
We gently and carefully finish off the concentrated brown sap inside on the stove top, and then pour the finished syrup into old whisky bottles with cork stoppers. This is real maple syrup, and it is so rich tasting it knocks your socks off. This is what maple syrup used to taste like, and it is what maple syrup is supposed to taste like.
So when I hit the bottom of one of those old whisky bottles because the syrup was mostly poured out over pancakes or hot cereal, then all that remains is the thick brown sludge. This is the stuff you could make maple candy from. My son and I pour cold milk into the bottle, swill it around until the brown sludge has turned the milk brown and slightly viscous, and we heartily quaff it down.
You just can’t beat it.
p.s. sorry we make just enough for our own family use, and we do not sell it. But you can make your own, and because you worked so hard to make it, you will truly enjoy every drop, every molecule, every rich taste you take.