Posts Tagged ‘voting’
Politispam Inundation
Our poor phones and the mailbox have been working overtime lately due to a spring election in the state of Wisconsin. Apparently, the safety and sanctity of the entire country hinges on our votes for the next judge added to our state supreme court. It’s not just our friends and neighbors weighing in on what would be good for the state; it is a variety of national political endorsing organizations that fervently need their patsy to gain a position of power to swing this state and thus the entire country in the direction they need to further their agendas.
Man, I miss the days when judges’ biases were just a little bit harder to discern. There’s probably an argument for the exposure being more valuable to help us make our decisions when it comes time to elect a judge. However, when needing to hide their bias, it was harder to make obvious judgments that would out them.
In this day and age, it seems hiding misbehaviors is no longer necessary. If a judge were to accept expensive trips on yachts and any other number of special favors, you’d expect there to be consequences. Hello, Clarence Thomas. How are things working out for you? No problem.
According to the voice and text messages popping on my phone by the hour and the flyers coming by snail mail, I should be very afraid.
I am afraid. I’m afraid it’s too late. We’ll vote, but I believe it’s too little, too late. In all honestly, I don’t feel surviving for four years of the current President and his minions will bring us out of the current disaster unfolding.
What little hope I hold is that we can continue to maintain our little sanctuary space on 20 small acres of beautiful land where I will continue to welcome anyone who suffers oppression from the current regime a chance to hide and cope.
They may not get a chance to enjoy Paddock Lake during dry spells, though. That last snowstorm that passed south of us and left us high and dry has contributed to the disappearance of water in the lake today. It is becoming a reasonable gauge I will refer to in determining how dry the land around here has become.
I guess I will welcome the rain that is forecast for overnight tonight.
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Election Again
Every four years, whether people like it or not, our country holds an election for a President. Today, if you are a US citizen and haven’t already, VOTE!
Thinking about the last time the bum, whose name I don’t even like to mention, stumbled into an election win, I looked up my previous posts from November 2016 to see my reactions. I was too upset for words and simply posted an image two days in a row.
Reading old posts from 8 years ago, I was also reminded that that was when we transplanted the tree to the center of the labyrinth and finished building the chicken coop. At least I had good distractions back then.
Today, I am ready for a landslide victory for sanity and our democracy. Let the lying cease. Put an end to the political ambitions of the worst version of a candidate I’ve ever seen garner public support in my lifetime.
Cyndie and I plan to wait for the crowd of people voting before they go to work to thin out before we head to our polling place to join the crowd of retired folks showing up to beat the crowd that will show up over the lunch hour.
If the mean guy loses, he has prepared his followers for the old lie that the election was stolen from him. I’m busy trying to wrap my head around the inexplicability of him not being incarcerated for even one of his many crimes.
May today be the beginning of my phone no longer pinging relentlessly with desperate campaign pleas.
May the United States of America accomplish the milestone of electing the first woman President in our history.
May all the exaggerated fears of the cultish followers and spineless Republican politicians who have kowtowed to the mean guy for the last 8 years be swiftly proven unrealistic and overblown.
Most of all, may the outcome of the vote tally be so obvious that little delay is needed for the results to be made official.
Let’s do this thing.
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We Voted
**Firstly, I apologize to anyone who tried to follow my link to the James Lilek column at the StarTribune site yesterday and got blocked by a paywall. I was under the naive impression that a minimum page view was available before the subscription requirement would be triggered.**
Now, on to today’s post…
I do not profess to be politically active beyond making reasonable attempts to vote in November every two years. Yesterday was the first time I ever voted on a day in February. How and why did that happen?
I credit the site vote.org for emailing to alert me of a spring primary election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice “in what’s turned into an expensive and high-stakes battle for control of the state Supreme Court in a key political battleground where power is divided between a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.” (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-election/index.html)
There are mentions of the outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice election potentially rippling all the way to having an influence on the 2024 Presidential election. That comes across as being a little overly dramatic to me but if my participation yesterday does anything to help offset extremist views and potential outcomes then the short drive to our town hall before the snow started to fly was a small cost of contribution.
I’d be even more thrilled if anything I could do would magically change Putin in Russia into a peaceful leader who immediately ended his wars of aggression. If that happened, I’d immediately seek to turn that magic power toward every corporation and their boards of directors to instantly change every greedy decision that was contributing to cooking the planet into oblivion. Really.
Our votes yesterday were to narrow the selection down to two candidates for the general election in April for a seat on the court. It’s pretty special to be able to participate in our democracy. Now I am returning my attention to our life on the land where our focus is to give four horses a happy home and be good stewards of the fields and trees.
Weather has a way of dominating our activities, especially weather in the extremes, like blizzards that threaten to reach historic proportions.
Guess who will be plowing and shoveling our driveway and walkways for a couple of days in a row?
I vote that we receive the lower end of the snow depth range predicted. Seriously, that would be more than enough for anyone’s favorite winter snow sport. Can we vote more than once?
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Good Citizenship
Neither wind, clouds, nor a barely attached foot kept Cyndie from fulfilling her goal of voting in person yesterday in the 2022 mid-term U.S. election.
It wasn’t a sure thing for a while there. As we were driving home from the lake last Friday, Cyndie was on her phone trying to find somewhere she could get in for surgery right away. Not sure when she might end up being anesthetized, Cyndie called our town clerk to find out her options for voting in a situation like hers.
She broke her leg after the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot, so she was told that her only option would be to make it to the polling location for our township on election day between the hours it would be open. If surgery was going to happen on Tuesday (yesterday), the clerk said she could try to show up just as they open at 7:00 a.m. and someone could bring a ballot out to our car for her to fill out.
There were no other options for voting if emergency situations arise close to election day. It seems like a strong case for requesting an absentee ballot whether or not it is known to be needed. Vote at your convenience and no waiting.
Luckily, our Tuesday schedule was wide open. We were busy on Monday and surgery is happening today.
We chose to head out after an assumed morning rush of people voting on their way to work and before a possible lunch rush. Living in a rural area, it’s not really an issue. There were two electronic voting machines and three booths for manually filling out a ballot. Two people were signing in before us and several people were voting.
Cyndie picked an electric option and since they were then both occupied, I selected manual. I fed my completed ballot into a machine reader and then Cyndie came with a printout of her votes from the electronic ballot device and fed it into the reader as well.
It seems the only thing their electronic device does is color in the selections for you. The choices from both methods were ultimately recorded by one machine.
The flow of voters was consistent while we were there such that the poll workers were kept constantly busy but the waiting was a mere matter of seconds for our township neighbors fulfilling their civic responsibility of voting for our representatives in local and national government.
I didn’t watch the news last night and avoided any hype about results. Regardless of the outcomes, we will continue to put our shoulders to the wheel of healthy progress and send love out into the world.
I read an interesting perspective on navigating the election storm written by Dahlia Lithwick. Think about the weather and the stars. The weather can get rough and the direction we are going can be obscured by clouds. Hang on long enough and the stars will be visible again to guide us toward our goals.
I vote for love. Follow the stars in the sky.
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RS Interview
Relative Something just landed a scoop interview with *the* John W. Hays delving into a variety of topics he was willing to discuss with us. Out of respect for his personal privacy, we are leaving out the questions he declined to answer. Here are some selected excerpts where we talked about the pandemic…
RS: How are you holding up under the stresses brought on by the coronavirus pandemic?
JWH: Hanging on by a thread? I say that as a question because, even though I am coping rather well, it feels a bit shaky much of the time. I am acutely aware of a diminished buffer between my sensible self and my flip-my-lid self as I go about my days. A total meltdown looms large on the fringes of every day. It’s just grace that has allowed me to keep from blowing a gasket over the simplest of foibles, like a napkin slipping from my lap or inadvertently catching my toe on a perfectly flat floor surface and suffering that universal “D’oh!” feeling.
RS: Have you heard of anyone in your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances who have tested positive for COVID-19 since the virus began impacting the United States?
JWH: Not at the closest level, despite several reported situations and symptoms that triggered reasons to be tested. None of those have become known positives that caused me concern about a need I should self-quarantine as a precaution. There have been some reports of second-person or third-person cases, and just recently dear friends in another part of the world who have the virus, so it doesn’t feel very far away from me. I still take my temperature every morning and log how I’m feeling on the COVID Near You site. So far, so lucky, is the way I interpret my days of being spared.
John & Mike socially distanced in the great outdoors, autumn forest bathing.
RS: Do you ever think about how the last seven months might have been different if there hadn’t been this global pandemic?
JWH: Maybe in a few fleeting retrospective moments, but really, that’s a luxury that serves no purpose. The harsh realities we are coping with every day leave little space in my head to go there. Equally, it has sapped much of my energy toward looking ahead to plan anything in the future. Despite my attempts to remain as positive as possible, I all too easily fall into a “what’s the point” despondency about making any plans until the virus is under control.
Luckily, I have Cyndie’s precious energies enriching my life with her willingness to make some things happen. With masks on our faces, we have achieved several socially distanced get-togethers with some key people who have helped to keep me from becoming a complete shut-in hermit on days I’m not at the day-job.
RS: Will the pandemic affect how you vote this year?
JWH: We already voted! So, no. For the previous election, Cyndie was going to be out of town, so she requested an absentee ballot. It was so flippin’ convenient that I ordered one for myself. It was a no-brainer for us to go that route again for this election, except, with the very noticeable disruptions in our Postal Service recently –including delaying the delivery of our chicks, which cost the life of one of them– Cyndie chose to drive to the home of our township clerk to hand-deliver our ballots.
I don’t know that they’ll be properly counted, but I’m satisfied that we did our part to get them there. We’ve been reciting a mantra of “Fifty-Blue-States” to envision a landslide so obvious that a certain person finally gets the message he has to accept the results. However, just last night it occurred to me that 50 blue states would be so unbelievable it would serve as a justifiable reason to question the results.
I just hope the popular vote is what determines the outcome and not an electoral college or the Supreme Court.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Supreme Court could put an end to the pandemic? Declare the coronavirus unconstitutional!
RS: Hard to object to that.
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File Transfered
Without further delay, I now present the first recorded audio of one of Rocky’s early crowing practices:
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Cyndie reported that this was his third of three calls he made on Tuesday morning.
You gotta agree, that sounds pretty cute, eh?
It’s going to be interesting getting used to having a rooster for the first time. Seems like not a day goes by that we don’t learn something new living in the country.
Yesterday, Cyndie reported that she hand-delivered our completed ballots for the November election to our town clerk at her home. We have successfully voted! Glad to have that civic duty completed early. In so doing, Cyndie met our town clerk for the first time. It’s only been 8-years since we moved here.
I guess it could be seen in a good light that we haven’t had much need to be interacting with local officials for any reasons.
With the pandemic looming large throughout the entire summer, we have seen very little of any nearby neighbors.
Wintervale Ranch may not be receiving a lot of visitors lately but soon the neighbors will be hearing a lot of crowing coming from our little patch of paradise.
I look forward to learning what winter has in store for us. I suspect many hours will be spent sheltering in place.
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Relative Something 