Odds and ends number 122
Since I'm using the concept from monoblogue, I'm keeping the numbering system, too. Here are thinner slices of bloggy goodness.
Back after about a month with some new nuggets as well as good reads from Substack.
Fighting for ballot access
The perception that the duopoly is the uniparty grows stronger every day when you see stories like this.
Regardless of how small a Democrat or Republican party is in an area, they have granted themselves automatic ballot access. But others have to beg, borrow, and plead, even if they make a picayune mistake like this example from North Carolina:
On Wednesday, June 26, the Board of Elections met and refused ballot access because the State Party Chairman's “address” had changed since the start of the 3-1/2 year process.
According to Richard Winger from Ballot Access News, there is no legal precedent to rule in this fashion. For equally ridiculous reasons, the Board of Elections ruled against the “We The People Party” (RFK) and the “Justice for All Party” (Cornel West). There are five members on the board—three Democrats and two Republicans—and you guessed it, the Democrats voted against us.
The Constitution Party of North Carolina, along with these other two parties, decided to team up together and hire a legal team to sue the state to protect our ballot access.
So the Constitution Party (and others) have to spend money that could otherwise be used to convince voters or on GOTV efforts on lawsuits, while the two dominant parties have to worry about no such thing. (In fact, the CP has to have a “ballot access” fund that the uniparty doesn’t have to worry about.)
One thing I like about Delaware’s rules on this matter is that their ballot access isn’t by petition like the North Carolina rule in question. It’s a simple matter of registering 1/10 of 1% of the state’s voters, which works out to 769 voters. In Delaware there are currently seven ballot-eligible parties, although some will not have Presidential candidates this cycle: Conservative, Democrat (Joe Biden), Independent Party of Delaware, or IPoD (Robert Kennedy, Jr.), Libertarian (Chase Oliver), No Labels, Non-Partisan Delaware, and Republican (Donald Trump.) If the Green Party can register 39 people in time, they can be on the Delaware ballot as well - they have been in previous years. Additionally, the Libertarians, IPoD, and Non-Partisan Delaware have run local and statewide candidates in the state.
While these minor parties generally only get a percent or two of the vote, at least people have other choices.
Later, I found out, “The state board of elections did the honorable thing by voting to allow the Constitution Party on the ballot in North Carolina because our petition had more than the required number of verified signatures.” But it was still time and effort they should not have endured.
The numbers on urban violence
I cited a similar study last month, but here’s more proof that those places where guns are supposed to be illegal turn out to be the most violent.
It’s worth the read to see their findings, but my favorite passage is this one:
As with everything in nature, extremes can only be neutralized by extremes. Let’s look at the reactions of local leaders as they relate to the area’s crime rates.
For example, Chicago, IL, consistently has homicide victims every weekend, and local leaders simply respond with, “We need to do better.” On the contrary, Polk County, FL, is much safer, and local leaders respond in kind, “If you kick my door in, in the middle of the night, I will kill you graveyard dead.”
As we saw in the early 1990s, violent crime, and homicide rates plummeted with tough-on-crime policies and leaders willing to stand behind them. In 2018, defunding the police rhetoric and soft-on-crime policies became prevalent in the most dangerous counties.
Ultimately, culture and legislation aren’t the leading causes of high homicide and crime rates, but these factors do tend to be prevalent among the most dangerous areas. Local politicians' unwillingness to directly address criminality and soft-on-crime policies rooted in sympathy for criminals will logically allow crime to take over.
Guns have never been the problem. The issue has always been certain people’s excessive willingness to use them in an aggressive fashion, a trait that means law-abiding citizens are punished by either breaking the law by owning firearms or becoming unarmed victims.
Maybe there is something in the phrase, “an armed society is a polite society.”
Wasting Delaware taxpayers’ money
In the words of David Stevenson:
“Delaware governor's signing of the offshore wind procurement bill is irresponsible. One of his first acts as Governor was to form an Offshore Wind Working Group. Twenty-four people met for a year and made two unanimous recommendations.
The first recommendation was not to procure offshore wind as it was too expensive. Based on the latest New Jersey procurement, prices have doubled since then.
The second recommendation was if a procurement was ever considered, it should be a competitive bidding process with other clean energy sources.” (Emphasis in original.)
As you probably guessed, Delaware went 0-for-2. That’s a bummer night for your favorite shortstop, but when it comes to inexpensive and - more importantly - reliable energy, that’s a real pain in the wallet, if you can find it in the dark of a rolling blackout.
The fatal flaw for Delaware is their insistence on having a renewable energy portfolio. Contrary to popular belief, not every state has saddled itself with these regulations; in fact, two states (Montana and West Virginia) repealed those they had previously passed. Comparing the maps from 2012 to the present day shows this movement has pretty much ceased; unfortunately, the First State isn’t getting the hint.
Good Substack links to read
A lot of the air has been sucked out of the news cycle this month, for obvious reasons. So I have more links than normal. (Maybe we were better writers?)
I bet I read 15-20 Substacks a day, some with multiple articles per diem. There’s a lot of good writing there, but sometimes I come across things worth re-reading, even a couple weeks later. So I saved a few to share here.
If
thought that was “the best news day since the pandemic began,” imagine what a setup we had for the month. It seems like months ago we were talking about how Trump would install himself as a King and how unfair Judge Cannon was in Florida. Yet it was less than four weeks.And did you notice the part about rolling blackouts in my bit about wasting taxpayers’ money? I don’t just pull this stuff out of thin air - Isaac Orr of the
was on this case.
As Mitch and I have detailed in previous articles, EPA’s regulations present a clear and present danger to grid reliability in the United States. These regulations also pose a particular challenge for resource planners in the nation’s 856 electric co-ops because co-ops depended upon coal-fired power plants for 32 percent of their electricity in 2022, and these plants are now squarely in EPA’s crosshairs.
Guess which utility powers where I live? Delaware Electric Co-Op, one of those many rural electric co-ops which is mandated to produce more and more unreliable but “renewable” energy.
You know, I love it when
gnaws on an issue like a dog on a soup bone. And he did a great one at the tail end of last month, enough so that I kept it straight away for this very purpose:
If the Senate’s job is that of advise and consent, they’re really failing at it miserably. We can help take care of that in November, but we can really take care of it by working to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment so that states have a say in the federal government, as they’re supposed to.
The last one hits me where I live. Matt Mayer is
and he’s more bullish on my native state of Ohio than I am. It doesn’t mean the state doesn’t have flaws that need correction, and he looks at them here:
I actually don’t count in this because I left two decades ago this coming October, but his word is true as Ohio had a GOP trifecta when I left, too.
Throughout this decades-long exodus, Ohio has been run by a trifecta Republican government, with supermajorities in the Ohio House and Ohio Senate for large portions of that span. Do policymakers even know this exodus is occurring, or are they so entrenched that they just don’t care? Am I the only one willing to speak on this topic with clarity and force? Will JINOs (journalist in name only) ever ask DeWine or his lapdog #2, Jon Husted, how this data along with the systemic weak jobs data can be viewed positively? Will any elected official in leadership propose even one major reform policy to reverse Ohio’s decline?
I left Ohio for several reasons, one of which was a personal upheaval of going through a divorce. But the main reason was that I got tired of being laid off every four years or so when Detroit sneezed and Toledo, being as auto industry-dependent as it is, caught a cold. People stopped building and Michael had to look for work, again. Add in a moribund city and county government (my first move was to get out of Lucas County, which is mostly the city of Toledo - I still had to pay their ludicrously high and “temporary” income tax that was in force two decades later, though, since I still worked in the city), and you get the gist of Mayer’s complaints.
With the more or less consistently Republican government Ohio has had for decades, one would think they would rival Florida. Okay, we can’t touch their weather but if you like four seasons Ohio has that in spades. (It’s more like about 14 seasons.) But the problem has been that the Ohio GOP is the elitist sort who believes they know best, voters be damned. For the longest time, it seemed like they had the philosophy that primaries were for rubes - they will decide who your candidate is and push everyone else out of the race.
Meyer shares that frustration as he considers the 2026 races. I know right where he’s coming from - the names have changed but the game stays the same.
And those are the odds and ends for the month.
Until my next edition of odds and ends, remember you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.
That is so weird! That shop you pictured looks almost exactly like a shop along Highway 97 between Omak and Wenatchee. Even has the same looking parking lot. Sign is different but in exact same place.
Thanks for the mention Michael.
Thanks for the kind mention, Michael!!!