Well, I had all the intentions of publishing this video when I first got back from my western states tour in early October.
But life happens. I had a conference to prepare, then we had an election to lose.
This video is an interview with Chris Braun, Chief Technology Officer with the Mountain Regional Water District near Park City Utah. I was there back in August to shoot the video, but they asked me to hold it until after their official launch in September.
I thought you’d be interested in this topic, given the huge number of reservoirs and canals that Arizona uses to keep people alive in the desert. The Gila River Indian Community is building out solar PV on their canals in order to save water, generate energy and be better stewards of the land.
Maybe we could apply some of those lessons in other areas of the state.
On my van tour this summer, I spoke about my struggle with the cancer that is nihilism since 2016. I’ve heard a lot of folks saying that we need to just allow the nation to feel the pain of Trump’s policies, so they will learn their mistakes. So, they say, just sit back and allow Trump to have his way such that people learn.
In my depths of nihilism, I had similar thoughts about climate change. After all, humans won’t seriously change their personal wasteful behavior, nor will they hold politicians accountable until they feel the real pain of global warming.
Library of Congress
One can make the argument that masses of people in Germany and Italy had to feel the full pain of falling in behind fascistic governments in order to see that for the dead end that it is. One can further that point by suggesting that humans, with their myopic views and refusal to study history, will probably advance tyrants about once every 100 years because those who remember the last tyrants are gone and the siren songs of the authoritarians are too strong for those younger generations, who did not experience their poison, to resist.
Only after cataclysmic disaster will power be given back to those with a more tempered world view. To be clear, the theory in both the context of climate change and Trump, that means destruction, pain and even death.
There is a problem with that. Aside from the obvious problem that millions could be displaced, traumatized for generations or killed, accepting that as a reality relegates us to a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.” History shows that there have been many times where people were able to avoid a return to rule under despots. Most notably for us, the American Revolution and President Washington’s decision to leave office rather than become a king provide an example of people choosing human progress over power.
The other problem with this way of thinking is that standing by and allowing Trump’s Christian Theocratic and oligarchic allies to “teach them all a lesson” does not give those people who are being harmed a north star, a way out. Take the person who voted for Trump because they believed the lie that Biden was responsible for inflation loses their job and can’t find a job because Trumps tariffs have tanked the economy. If they don’t hear from Democrats that there is a better way (without shaming them for their vote), then that person may turn to even more extreme politicians with even simpler and just-as-unworkable policy ideas than Trump’s.
I’ve also seen many people talking about how they need to gear up for violence. That is a choice. I lived in Sarajevo for about two years, just as the war was ending. Ask anybody there and every one of them will tell you, they wish they could rewind time and find a way to stop the first shots, to find better ways to communicate with others in their country and to resist the leaders who lead them down that horrible path.
Hoping that things will reach a bottom in order for things to get better is a lazy way out, which will only result in more problems that we could never predict.
On nonviolence
When I was getting my graduate degree from the American University I was getting a mixed degree with two focuses: conflict resolution and US foreign policy.
I had a professor named Professor Aabdul Aziz Said. He had a long career spanning back to the 1950s in which he served as an advisor for government and powerful people all over the world. He told a story of the days during the First Intifada (1987-93) in which he was trying to advise the leadership of the leaders at the time, the Palestinian Leadership Organization (PLO).
He implored them to study and adopt the nonviolent tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others. He made the case to them that, a well-disciplined nonviolent army will gut the power of the narrative from the Israeli government, which had for years by then been forcibly removing people from land their families had occupied legally for generations. If, as they ultimately did, they resort to violence, they are simply providing their foes with the justification they needed to continue what they were doing.
He explained that it was one of the biggest regrets in his career that he could not convince them that they would be better off with a nonviolent strategic approach.
On the issue of Israel, by the way, I firmly believe that you can disagree with the decisions of a government while still agreeing with their right to exist. This is not the topic of this blog series. But it is worth saying. I didn’t disagree with my country’s right to exist, just because I thought the US’s approach to using drones in Afghanistan.
There are several problems with attempting nonviolent protests in our modern world. First, many police authorities have figured out how to disperse nonviolent protests easily. Second, opposition is very good at triggering violent reactions in the crowd in order to justify a response. Third, the “old” tactics that got attention in 1960 illicit nothing more than a yawn today.
But, if you know that Trump is going to do everything he can to undermine voter rights, women’s rights and the entire power structure of our government irreparably before he can be held accountable in 2018, then we have no choice than to gum up the works as quickly and creatively as possible.
However, like with the Frist Intifada, if you choose violence, you are giving Trump, the Proud Boys or whatever paramilitary groups he empowers a reason to blame it all on you.
On our moment
If you read your history books in high school, or watched your period piece drama in the theater, and you thought, “I would have fought on the right side of history,” now is your time.
We already know that the people making excuses for Trump and his band of miscreant leaders would have been the people who were on the wrong side of history in those dramatic movies.
For my part, I’ve been invigorated by this moment. After years of feeling lost, feeling that none of it matters, feeling that I was not part of progress anymore, I can see that I can be. We all can be.
A nihilist will tell you that nothing you do has meaning, so just live for the moment. Every empire will fall. Every person will die. The Earth will fall in to the sun.
But they are giving away agency for their lives to people who will happily take it from them and throw them aside like used tissue. They are making their lives flat, grey and disposable. They will tell you that your government is too corrupt to fix so that you will feel deflated. They will tell you not to trust any information so that the public will look only to them for their information. They will tell you that “other” people are a threat, depriving you of the exquisite bouquet of variety that makes life the most delicious meal anyone could ever eat.
It does not matter whether our country falls apart in 200 year or 100 years. What we know is that the people we value, the ideas we value and the country we value are all here now.
Why would you not want to be in the thick of the fight to save it?
I don’t have all the answers, and perhaps this entire writing exercise has been my way of processing grief. But I hope we can be inspired together to ask the questions, find the best path forward and fight like we know we are on the right side of history.
This old fable may not be the best for our current predicament. After all, in that story, the hare lost because he was too cocky. Trump certainly failed in his first term because of his arrogance and narcissism. He also proved that their propaganda machine was strong enough to right the ship after he tipped it over.
But the difference, as we all know, is that he is surrounding himself with people who will not push back or stop him. If you listen to no other podcast that I share with you today, at least listen to this episode of On the Media. The section on the man-o-sphere is insightful, but what I really want you to hear starts at 28 minutes. Masha Gessen is a journalist with the New York Times who fled Russia as Putin became increasingly autocratic. They cover their rules for surviving autocracy.
Be assured that, just as with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the right will try to change the rules very quickly at the federal level which, even if Democrats take back marginal control, they won’t be able to change back to what we thought of as “normal.” This is final phase toward autocracy is called “autocratic breakthrough.”
So, my friends, we are up against a rabbit that may have learned its lesson from the last race. But, that does not mean that we can’t leverage the pain that his policies will obviously cause –and to the very people who voted for him in this election.
But, it requires that we move quickly and get in place. If we do not, we will see that autocratic breakthrough.
I’m hoping these series of questions can guide us to make certain they can’t recover in the very likely case that Trump’s hand-picked Q-anon staff fall all over themselves trying force their ideological tenants to a real world that will resist.
I’m confident that you will think of questions that I have not.
1. Why did 11 million stay home?
I mentioned this one previously, but I think this is truly our first goal. Everything we choose to do flows from what we learn.
I know some folks are already gearing up to find out. Stay tuned. I’ll report on what I hear.
2. Can we protect and teach without finger wagging?
We have an important job right now. In addition to protecting those who will be most hurt by Trump’s policies, we must become patient teachers. We must observe, record and show the general public (without finger wagging or condescending) how these policies are hurting them as well.
One of the biggest reasons MAGA people ran to him is because they didn’t want to be told how wrong they were. Is that our problem? It shouldn’t be. But it is. We need to be the ones now to help them see their way out of the cult. In fact, in the interview I mentioned above, they made the great point that the phrase “voting against their own interests” is deeply condescending and ignores that people have become so fed up with government not delivering on promises that voters are willing to risk an autocrat in order to shake it up.
Becoming patient teachers does not mean that we should retreating to the cheap seats to watch it all unfold, or accept when people are being particularly terrible. It means active and strategic watching and preparing the disasters that are coming, and being ready to show a better way.
And I want to say this again, because I am just as guilty of this as are most liberals: we have to resist the tendency to scold and talk at people. Now is the time to be patient in the face of ignorance and be persistent in building the trust with those whom we think we can save.
I’ve been disappointed for years in my inability to patiently, dispassionately talk to people on the other side to make the case that they’ve been mislead about so many things, especially the environment and clean energy; especially in my own family. I’m even terrible at simply building trust with the other side so that their defenses don’t go up.
I’d recommend listening to a recent This American Life podcast called “A small thing that gives me a tiny shred of hope” in which one couple that was deeply divided by our media environment was successful in finding some common ground through a news source called Tangle. I’m just getting to know the site myself. But at least this podcast makes the case that this news site has broken through in some ways.
This is not capitulation on the injustices that MAGA world advocates. For sure! But we’ve been missing so many opportunities for human connection and conversation.
I do know one thing, though. We can’t reach people through debates on social media. It requires direct and meaningful connection built on trust.
So, I’m not the one to drive that train. I studied conflict resolution in grad school, but never really applied it after returning from Sarajevo.
But so many great people are doing amazing work on breaking through with trust-building conversations. We should learn from them and elevate them.
Who will be our best teachers? Let’s find them now.
3. Can we exploit Trump’s incompetence?
Yes, project 2025 is scary. But I refuse to believe that they will be able to implement it as easily as they think they will. You can’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime and you can’t dismantle the US government completely before the 2026 midterms.
So, what does “exploit” mean? Based on how we’ve seen MAGA dominate social media “education” and story telling, we need to double, triple, quadruple down on that arena. We need to have just as many influencers that we support. The difference is that where Trump corralled them with fear and lies, we will need to teach while we tell stories.
If we are not taking the time to help people understand how government is designed to work, and how it has worked in the past -and how reasonable reforms can help us all in the future- then we are not repairing the damage. We are just replacing one set of propaganda with another.
Educated people will see his incompetence. They don’t need to be told, “I told you so.” They need to see that there is a better option for almost anything that Trump has told us that he planning.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. The MAGA machine knows that there will be failures and they are already finding ways to convince those young men that it was Joe Biden, rather than Project 2025 that took away their access to Pornhub.
For a population that has lost faith in government, there is nobody left standing but us to empower people to get involved, reform the system and fight back.
Who will be the people on the ground and in social media who will be the first to reach folks when the shit hits the fan?
4. Can Democrats (and the left) regain trust with the working class.
We all know that Biden did more to bring back manufacturing (citation) in his four years than Trump could ever dream of. But after Clinton’s mis-steps and the right wing’s propaganda advantage, we have to catch up. It won’t take two years. It will take 10, assuming we can get back in to power and focus on protecting workers and unions. In the short term, that takes education. In the long term, that takes education.
While I believe that many union Trump voters will see evidence pretty quickly that he never cared about them, they won’t believe it. Can we be there in those moments to help them see that there are many better ways to protect workers and their families than tax cuts for billionaires and tariffs on “Chiiiiinnaaaaa.”
The answer to this question is grander than my little brain. But I do have faith that there are millions of union folks across the country that are just as disgusted as I am, and I know they can help us answer these questions.
What is our process for getting that conversation started? Perhaps we need listening sessions, which will hopefully begin a longer process of dialogue.
5. An army of 10,000 Petes.
What is the plural of Buttigieg? An army of Buttigiegs?
It doesn’t matter. Pete was doing what so many on the left stopped doing. They stopped going on Fox. But for good reason. The interviews were designed to make them look bad. They were talked over. The hosts changed the topics on them last minute in order to throw them off.
What is great about Pete is that he calls them out on their tactics, he does not speak down to people or finger wag, he knows his shit and he helps people understand.
Do you remember that, after Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth, he went out and did training sessions all over the country to help people make the case for positive change on climate? He trained the front line and he “trained the trainers.”
The model works. Apply it to great persuaders. Be like Pete.
It is notable that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. Here’s another article about that, if you don’t pay for the WP anymore.
6. Invest in deep canvassing.
I already said it, but we should dig in on this. Deep canvassing rests on the premise that you will have a greater chance of changing a voter’s mind if you take time to build trust and if you help them see you as human. It got its start during the most intense years of the same-sex marriage rights efforts. It is not a far stretch to see that, given the prominence of Project 2025, we will need this again for that particular issue.
But it can be applied to so many other topics. This should be a year-round, door to door, community to community effort.
When I learned how to market myself as a realtor, they taught us build our our “sphere of influence”, our “SOI” marketing. You touch base with people, even if you are not talking about selling a home that day, you educate them on one valuable thing every time you talk with them and you foster that relationship. You build trust. If you don’t, you won’t be able to have those important conversations later.
It runs contrary to what left-wing funders have been doing. That takes time.
And, just in case you think this idea is pretty out there, see this article from the New York Times from earlier this year which detailed how the right-wing turnout machine Turning Point USA used SOI marketing tactics to build relationships with millions of voters all over the country.
And, of course, we need to apply what we learned from polls and focus groups about why those 11 million did not show up in 2024.
7. Win back at least some men.
I’m not saying that we have to accept their bad behavior (I’m looking at you incels). But people are all the same. They need to feel needed. They need to feel that their lives have a purpose.
Something happened over the last 30 years to convince a whole lot of men that they weren’t needed.
My fellow libs, we are smart. We know that two things can be true at the same time. On one hand, women deserve everything they have fought for (and more) and men can be shitty. On the other hand, we need to help those men who have floundered to find meaning that is positive and constructive. We don’t need to give up ground on women’s inalienable rights in order to do that.
I’m not going to pretend to know how to do that. But we have a huge, robust therapy, social worker and human behavior industry that can guide us.
8. Build a new media reality.
One thing is clear. We must reject the current media landscape, both right and left. Eliminate what does not serve you.
In addition to the toxic media environment, the right wing was able to build a powerful and participatory media environment which told a compelling story to its viewer or listeners, while the left found itself defending a very flawed status quo.
We need to build up influencers, like the right has, but we need to get ahead of them for once. We need influencers who, like Pete, can reach build those relationships I spoke about above. Trump’s influencers, while successful, are capped at how many people they can pull over. What does it look like, what does it take, to start pulling people away from them?
Bryan Tyler Cohen, one of the left’s well-known influencers makes the point that the left should no longer seek the warm embrace of organizations like MSNBC as a refuge from the storm. Their corporate backers are not our friends. Plus, the right fully understood the power of niche marketing. Their information ecosphere is dependent on 30 different hosts representing 30 different niche markets, all sharing variations of the same toxic message.
Let’s do that with a non-toxic vision for the future.
The New Republic‘s today, Michael Tomasky made the case in this article (summarized here) that people supported Trump, not because of inflation or the economy, but by how they perceived those issues, and that makes a difference. The right media machine “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky said. Right-wing media is bigger than traditional media and it speaks with one voice. “…(T)hat voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Perhaps I am a Pollyanna, but I do believe that the left can counter this with true, accurate information. But we need to change from a “big news” model to a niche marketing model.
9. Find the divisions in their coalition.
When I was in the legislature, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate were masters of dividing Democrats against themselves. We need to get better at this. Find the wedge issues. Voters don’t want big government in their lives, but they want protection for air quality, food safety and personal reproductive rights. Republican politicians in urban areas can be pressured to oppose many of the things that rural Republicans want.
Do the polling and focus groups around possible wedge issues. Run the legislation. Use a stronger ecosphere to make people see that the MAGA coalition is getting “regular people” nowhere.
10. Be clear about our new coalition.
I mentioned the Powell memo earlier. When he wrote that, he realized that their strongest coalition was made up of businesses and religious, mostly Christian, Americans.
The coalition that rose up to fight Trump’s fascism is made up of liberals as far left as Bernie Sanders and former Republicans, like those at the Bulwark, who see Trump’s party as a threat to their idea of what makes America great, to personal freedom and to the security given to us through the NATO alliance.
The Powell memo aligned interests that have been very stable overtime. The business leaders could appeal to the fears of Christians to get them in line with what the business leaders wanted. Over time, they tightened that relationship in to what we see now, with its fascistic tendencies, with their social hierarchies, corporate abidance to authoritarian policy in order to protect profits, and fear of the outsiders.
This brief episode of The Daily provides an interview with Reid J. Epstein, who covers politics for the New York Times. In it he mirrors the question that I raise here about what drives and binds each of the competing coalitions.
On the right, there is a general desire to see a specific set of outcomes. The left, however, is an ever-circling and subdividing coalition of smaller groups that must be re-assembled every two or four years in order to win elections. Further, says Epstein, the increasingly small groups within the left coalition have been empowered to demand more attention to their issues, to the point that the entire left coalition is defined by issues that affect a very small fraction of the coalition.
This is an explosive thought for some groups, as Bernie Sanders is finding out right now. How, for instance, can you protect the rights of trans people without allowing the entire coalition to be defined by it –to the detriment of our larger socioeconomic goals? However, we must address this if we are to become a unified and winning coalition.
To dig in further in on that explosive thought, and as a counterfactual example, what would have happened had the GOP of the 1980s centered the demands of the Christian theocrats, who now control the Republican party? Back then the Christian theocrats were a small sub-set of a larger conservative, religious coalition. I am certain that many in that coalition in the 1980s would have bristled at the ideas that are now bantered about by leaders in the GOP.
To illustrate the point, watch this 1986 debate in which Frank Zappa told those assembled that we are heading to a fascist theocracy, to many “tut-tuts” and “harrumphs” from the group from the group of “main stream” conservative.
Let’s be clear, I am in no way equating the fever dreams of the Christian theocrats with the very real needs of trans people, asylum seekers or any number of important groups that make up our coalition. This is a thought experiment about strategy and messaging discipline. Is there a way within our coalition to protect the rights of very, very marginalized people without giving the spinmeisters at the RNC something to scare people so badly that they forget who actually cares about the middle class and the poor?
As a larger question, what stable interests create the glue in our coalition? The other side had a 50-year plan and they stuck to it. What would it look like for us to do that? Is the glue economic? Is it about personal liberty? Is it about protecting people from the corrupting influence of wealthy billionaires. (The progressives of the 1890s were very unified around that one.)
The best way to recover is to build a coalition that has a broadly appealing message while protecting those most marginalized in the coalition with a plan that we all agree to, and stick with it.
11. Can we be the reformers we’ve always professed to be?
Many observers have noted that the reason about 11 million possible Democratic voters stayed home is because they feel the system is not working for them. The tax system is rigged. Congress is rigged. Government is helping more wealthy people than it is people like them. So, why even participate?
We can do all of the other things listed above, building an army of Petes, creating an information ecosphere, talk patiently to people until they leave a cult. But if all we have to offer is a government that feels fundamentally corrupt, what do we have?
Corruption works for the MAGA Republicans. They pay off billionaires with tax breaks, give cushy positions to well-connected society grubs and then use their media power to convince the public that the Democrats are the corrupt ones.
Here’s the thing, they are not completely wrong. Democrats have not stood up to put lobbyists in their place, as they could have, even though the lobbying industry hurts working families more than it does the rich. Democrats embraced dark money, out of necessity at first. But now you’ll have to pry their dark money out of their cold, dead hands. Too many Democrats, like the soon-to-be-gone Kyrsten Sinema worked harder to create safe congressional districts for themselves than to create a greater number of competitive districts.
No wonder nobody trusts them.
In all my years of advocacy and six years in public office, one thing has guided me: election reform. It does not matter which issues you care most about –climate change, human rights, immigration, etc.– we will not make any progress until we make a policymaking system that respects the will of people over monied or connected interests.
People say to me all the time, “Politics has always been corrupt.” Yes. Yes it has. But the question is how well the system creates transparency so you can catch corruption and how well you create a system that shows people that they can have faith in policy outcomes, even if they don’t get their way all the time.
It was sad to see how many efforts at ranked choice voting failed this year. Unfortunately, it is a system of voting that is best experienced, rather than explained. So, I have hope that we can build support for it starting from the local level, one city, one town and one voter at a time.
But there are so many other reforms out there which, if they actually seek to empower regular voters over the powerful, will bring people back to participation in our elections.
Let’s start with a fact that we can all agree to: voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 did not show up in 2024. In 2020, Biden got 81,283,501 votes. Trump got 74,223,975. In 2024, Trump stayed basically at that same level this year with 74,535,879, as of the writing of this post. Harris has 70,858,899 as of this moment. Votes are still being counted, but not much will change.
This is important. Just as he has done in polling for years, Trump was at his ceiling. He just can’t do better that this. But the Dems lost about 11 million voters since 2020. (And, no, conspiracy theorists, they were not just made up votes in 2020. You can say it until you die, but it won’t make it real.)
Were these people simply not as inspired as they were during COVID? Were they not inspired by Harris? If so, why didn’t we see that lack of enthusiasm in polling or focus groups? Were we too blinded to see, cozy in our information bubble watching videos of celebrities supporting Kamala? Or, was the MAGA niche market influencer machine pulling them away? Did some of them fill the hole in Trump’s support left by those evacuating never-Trumpers? Or, did they just decide to stay home?
We need to find this out.
But as we wait for the pollsters and focus group profs to unearth that, we need to understand how the right has been setting up the conditions for this. While we can talk about what Harris or the Democrats may have done wrong in the campaign, I’m of the opinion that, in hindsight, none of the available Democratic presidential options could have overcome the system that the right wing has been putting in place for decades.
The road rules
The rules of the road we drive on today were established over 50 years ago. As prescribed by the Powell Memo, the right has created hundreds of “think tanks” under the cover of very loose tax laws allowing for “charitable giving” to what are essentially propaganda factories. Their jobs have expanded, but they were initially designed to convince the public that economic things like trickle down economics was a real thing that benefited workers.
Read Dark Money, by Jane Mayer on how that world of taxpayer-supported propaganda scams came to be. Many of us have been fighting dark money since the Supreme Court legalized that form of corruption. I’d never be able to run a campaign in this state without APS, for instance coming out hard against me. It might have been that shareholder protest I ran against them to fight their dark money being spent at the Corporation Commission.
But anyway, those “think tanks”, like the Goldwater Institute here in Arizona or the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) nationally, have undermined public education, boosted for-profit religious teaching at taxpayer expense, undermined efforts to get money out of politics and generally held Arizona hostage. Most the iconic Arizona corruption can be traced back to this clown car, one way or another.
Non-economic spin-offs from the “think tank industrial complex” pushed an religious agenda. The marriage of convenience with run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives in the 1970s and 80s metastasized to total control over the Republican party in just the last few years by the most extreme wing of the Christian nationalist theocracy movement.
It further extended to environmental protection, among other areas. The fossil fuel industry buried its own studies showing that climate change was real over 40 years ago, and spun out think tank studies that distracted the public with greenwashing stories about “carbon capture” or “clean coal.” Following the cigarette industry’s model, and with a handy piggy back ride from Fox News, the petrochemical industry was able to delay any meaningful response to global warming by 30 years. Just think about how much further ahead Arizona could have been as the “solar capitol of the country” were it not for Fox.
Sadly, those who will be hurt the most are the same people that Fox and the right wing have been able to convince to think that Democrats abandoned them.
And they are not entirely wrong. After a decade of losses in the 1980s, the left turned to Bill Clinton’s conservative Democrats to find a “third way,” a way out of the hinterlands and back in to power. It came with a price. Supporting NAFTA was a short-term win that eventually drove working class voters away from Democrats and toward Trumps populism. The most stinging element of this topic in this election is that we know that Trump’s tariffs will only hurt workers more.
It is one of many reasons that this election is so painful. Sure, history shows that Trump meets the very definition of a fascist. Definitely, we will watch as people die in the Ukraine at the hands of a despot with a far too cozy relationship to Trump and his growing cadre of oligarchs. You can be sure that, while the Biden approach to finding peace in Israel and Palestine was spineless, so much more suffering and injustice will occur under Trump (if not a regional war). His right wing coalition in America will empower the right wing actors in Israel that have slowly assumed power over the last forty years, with horrendous goals in mind.
There are so many other examples that we all know: the prison industrial complex, “patriotic correctness” which hampers real discussion of military corruption at the cost of our volunteers in uniform and, a greedy health care industry that bleeds people dry of their money, even though we know better models have been working around the world for a century.
What is the unifying theme here?
Education.
We know that much of what has oozed forth from the business-backed right wing is not real education. It is not set in reality. It is propaganda of the most insidious kind. It tells people that we don’t have a shared, common interest in healthy people, educated youth, campaign finance reform, workers’ rights and many other topics that even many in the Trump-supporting working class fundamentally want –though they will find out soon enough that they are not in the cards for them.
Democracies die without accurate information. Just like the other side has built hundreds of think tanks to push faulty information, we need to support more and avenues of education, in addition to truly good journalism. Journalism needs to go nonprofit, become relevant to people’s lives, stop talking down to people, stop confusing infotainment with real journalism, and build trust by being up front when it makes mistakes.
What I advocate here is that we build our plans going forward on long-term, slow, deliberate and one-on-one education, backed by more trusted news sources. It is something I’ve been bringing up in every campaign I’ve worked on since 2004, but big funders can never seem to find their way to do anything other than dump lots of money in ads, GOTV, ground game and pleas for participation in the last nine months of a campaign.
“Deep canvassing” works, but never gets enough funding early enough.
Without going in to tactics or revealing things about recent campaigns that I’ve been involved with, I can tell you that deep canvassing works. Done correctly, it humanizes the conversation. It builds trust around information and it has a more lasting effect on people’s beliefs.
I started this multi-series think piece saying that, if you think you know the answer of what to do, you are wrong. Don’t mistake this advocacy of deep canvassing for a prescription of how the left can rebound. Deep canvassing models are the tactic by which we implement whatever larger coalition plan we get behind.
Thus, in the next installment, I’m laying out some topic areas that I hope we all will build a process of discovery around.
Back to previous article in the series here. On to the next one here.
It feels like there are a lot of people rushing to be the first with prescriptions of what we need to do to dig our way out of this giant festering hole in our democracy.
How many of them are trying to figure out what they personally got wrong?
That’s my goal here. Well, that and maybe if I don’t get these ideas out of my head I’m going to melt like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arch who opened the Arch of the Covenant.
So, do you wanna join me as I try to figure it all out?
Agree. Disagree. But let’s do this together.
I wouldn’t pretend to have the answers. God knows I’ve gotten so many things wrong in my often miscalculated political career. I’ve been in politics and public policy for over a quarter century now. I have some strong opinions on some things, but if there ever was a time to reflect, this is it.
I do know this: we need to take this time to rest in our communities, reflect on what we saw and respond with the largest, most unified coalition that we can imagine.
And, we don’t have long. We need to stop this madness by the next mid-term election and we can’t rely on the other side fumbling the ball.
Our respectful exchange can help us focus on creating a structure in 2025 that will lead us down the best path together, rather than a thousand different influencers giving their individual and contradictory analysis. Eschew internal division, finger pointing and recrimination.
So, what you will see here are some suggestions but also a whole lot of questions that I hope will guide a process, so we are not all over the place. I’m also gonna talk a bit about how I’ve gotten things wrong.
The first sections of the following blog posts are level-setting, at least from my years in politics. The second set of sections is where we get in to the nitty gritty of how we might move forward.
If you are looking for 240 characters and pithy memes, Twitter is still there for you. We’ve done so well with that model of information sharing, after all. For my part, I think our organizing needs to take on a longer format, and I’ve been guilty of letting the social media bubble hold me tightly like a warm blanket on a cold night.
So, grab a glass of wine or tea and settle in.
As I wind down my real estate business, I’m repurposing this website and newsletter for political commentary, historical perspective and catalyzing action. Please sign up for the newsletter here. If I get a positive response, then I may move over to Medium, or some other platform that my deer friends keep pushing me to do.
This isn’t the first time that I totally miscalculated the strength of the Republicans. And it is in no way shocking that it was a similar appeal to populist and short-sighted instincts of the public.
In 1994 I was sitting in a dark room at the Democratic National Committee building in Washington DC, with the east coast November gloom outside. I was with my then-boss, Kitty. She was an impressive person who could remember any phone number you told her, had met everybody you could think of in DC, saw Muhammad Ali levitate three inches above the ground, and was balancing eight precariously stacked piles of documents on her desk at any given time.
We didn’t work for the DNC, but they called her in to help that night and she said I could tag along. Together we squinted at an AP wire computer, with ghostly green lettering scrolling on a infinitely black background. I was not sure what I was looking at. But in just one moment she went quiet and said, “Ken, the Republicans just took over Congress.” We were some of the first people in the country to witness the 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, brought to us by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America.”
We thought what we called the “contract on America” was brutish then. It is a soft white cheese by comparison to the Project 2025 agenda today.
Kitty and I sat in silence, weighted down with the immensity of it all. The feeling of dread pulled on us like a wet wool trench coat. This political shift in congress upset a political reality that had been in place since FDR, and from which the Democrats have never been able to recover.
Three years earlier, when I was an intern for Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, somebody organized a tour of a unassuming little mock TV studio, just across the courtyard from Union Station. There they trained Republican members of Congress how to appear more approachable on the three major networks and the relatively new Cable News Network (CNN). At the time, they had a real problem connecting with audiences because they had not yet learned to use dog whistles as well as they do now. They would say the quiet part out loud and that alienated voters. But they learned.
Of course, now Republicans can say the quiet part out loud because Fox News has conditioned its viewers since 1996 to fear 1,000 different boogymen, as a brilliant way to capture their eyeballs and sell them more products. I’ll never forgive Fox for turning my previously center-right, pro-choice, gun regulation agreeing parents in to talking point-repeating binge watchers.
Fox News founding editor Roger Ailes had pledged during the Nixon impeachments that he would create a “news” source that would prevent any future accountability for any Republican president. As we know now, he succeeded beyond than his wildest dreams.
Democrats were behind the game. Very behind. In the early years Fox built its talk shows in the image of the good versus evil story telling of the then-World Wrestling Federation. They brought liberals and Democrats on to their programs and rigged the game so they could use them as punching bags, to make them look stupid. It was always about showing them as evil. We know this. We’ve seen it ourselves and people over the years who left Fox told us about that secret sauce.
Little did I know, that these early years were really the only opportunity I had to build some suspicion about the Fox machine with my family. To be fair, I didn’t know as much about how government worked in the 1990s as after I started working in it. But I did not have the skills to open a values-based conversation, and avoid it breaking down to an argument.
When MSNBC moved to capture a left-leaning audience during the GW Bush years, they just couldn’t keep up with the growth over at Fox. Two decades of right-wing AM radio prior to Fox’s launch had primed the pump perfectly. Fox had done such a thorough job of blurring the line between straight reporting and right wing commentary “infotainment”. Old school reporters who fought to keep that distinction on MSNBC were eventually drowned out.
And, frankly, did it matter much? Liberals would seek comfort in the “reporting” of Rachel Maddown, Chris Hayes and more recently Jen Psaki. Though I largely agree with them politically, they are just MSNBC’s answer to the Fox infotainment model: tell the audience what they already believe and then sell them whatever the advertisers want.
They are not journalists. We should stop watching them as if they are. Though they may be skilled and experienced people, they are commentators dressed up by their network as journalists. You cannot have served in a political party or an administration and they convince anybody that you are a balanced conveyor of the news. They may have the trust of their tribe, but we’ve all lose through tribalism. I feel we should have fought harder to expect more from our news sources than a copy of the Fox model.
Still, even though they are owned by a huge corporation with its own agenda, MSNBC made liberals feel that they at least had some response to the barrage of half-truths, lies and misdirections (notably on the climate crisis) coming from Fox and AM radio. Liberals sought refuge primarily in MSNBC or the Daily Show, among a few others in the liberal chat-o-sphere.
But the right was already another step ahead. Over the last 10 years, they put money behind a whole list of influencers who, jointly, had tens of millions of loyal followers. These were people who presented the trappings of journalism without the Journalism Code of Ethics and Standards, without editorial oversight, fact checking or retractions. I mean, at least Fox news had editorial oversight, even though it was lax, and the other three items were never taken seriously.
Like Joe Rogan, they didn’t like answering to advertising bosses or editors, and they convinced their audiences that they were more fair than traditional news sources–even though the information they were sharing was often demonstrably false. They were “just asking questions.”
There are easily over 30 right wing influencers on social media, with followings starting at 1 million, and as high as 15 million –each reaching a different niche market that left-leaning cable news or John Stewart, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert can’t reach. Those niche markets include sports-plus-Trump, hunting-plus-Trump, Christians-plus-Trump and probably even vision boarding-plus-Trump.
It was one of the reasons for the rise of the “manosphere”, detailed brilliantly in this Code Switch podcast, which also details the rise of the “black manosphere.” This is an amazing insight in to why so many black men may have voted for Trump. Apply the same formula to Latino men, Asian men, and so on.
Days before the election Joe Rogan unquestioningly listened on as Trump spurted the same set of debunked lies to his 15 million listeners about everything from climate change to telling people that Kamala Harris wanted to turn all illegal immigrants in to immediately-voting Democrats.
People believed it because, despite over 1 billion dollars from the Harris campaign dedicated to ground game, there was not a sufficient way to respond to each of these niche markets.
This leads us to where we are now, and in the next post in the series, I want to talk about the landscape we are fighting in now, and what we liberals contributed to it.
I’ve not put one of my curated reading lists together for a while. So, I figured now would be a good time.
Before I start, though, please make note to follow my YouTube Channel and my Facebook Page. I’ll be rolling out short explainer videos on every one of the 13 ballot measures that will be on the Arizona ballot this November.
For now, check these out.
Energy Efficiency Rebates are Almost Here. We are starting to see the energy efficiency rebates for consumers beginning to roll-out in Arizona. These were part of the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s taken a while for the EPA to get all the rules worked out. In short, you could save thousands on things like hot water heaters, heat pumps and induction stoves. This is a huge benefit for home owners, especially as we have a greater number of hot days in Arizona. Watch this handy website for news of the roll-out in Arizona.
Putting my Realtor Hat On for a Moment. In my mind its never been difficult to connect climate change, clean energy, clean air and water to your investment in your home. But this article is a great summary of how specifically renewable energy is affecting the Arizona housing market.
Sick of Solar Companies Knocking on Your Door? Confused by fly-by-night solar install companies? Please share this with friends in Flagstaff, Sedona and areas in Coconino County. Join Solar United Neighbors’ co-op. You get access to lower install costs for solar + batteries. You can feel safer about the quality of the work because the installers are vetted. Plus, you can learn more about solar and batteries from SUN’s educational briefings. NOTE: SUN creates these co-ops all over the state. So, stay tuned for when they are in your area.
Fighting Misinformation. I’ve been seeing a ton of misinformation and disinformation about renewables recently. What’s new, right? I thought I’d share some of these slides that push back on that madness.
There are a huge number of ballot measures on the ballot this year. So, between sleeping among the redwoods and white water rafting with my dog, I figured it would be fun to do my semi-annual summary of all of them.
Yep. This is what I call “fun.”
The handy way to think of them is that 11 of the 13 were referred from the legislature in an effort to get around a duly elected Democratic governor. As such, you can easily write most of them off as an ideological power play from the MAGA legislature. But, read below for the details before you do that. There are a couple from the legislature that you might like.
Here’s my take on them. I’ll be rolling out short videos on each, which you can follow my YouTube Channel and my Facebook Page. Ballotpedia.org has a list of all 13 ballot measures in Arizona, along with some basic comments from proponents and opponents. For a list with some editorial perspective, see this list of the 13 ballot measures from the New Times. The Copper Courier, a left-leaning independent publication that focuses mostly on capitol issues, shared their list here.
Reminder: Those measures numbered in the hundreds seek to amend the constitution and those numbered in the 300s seek to amend simple statute. All measures, once passed by the voters, are very difficult to amend.
If you consider yourself an independent voter then this is terrible for you. Arizona has one of the largest percentages of independent voters in the country. This is a sneaky, attempt to shut down independent voters, and things like rank choice voting.
The proposition originates from the Republican legislature, which we’ve seen over recent years take more steps to not only entrench themselves, but favor the two-party system over registered Independents.
For example, back in 2015, they passed a law that dramatically increased the number of signatures needed for Independents, Green Party, Libertarians or other third parties to get on the ballot. None of the Democrats voted in favor, just in case you are thinking that both parties are “just as bad as the other.”
Anyway, this piece of cat poop proposition would enshrine partisan primaries into our constitution. This is a constitutional amendment. Let’s also remember that it is very difficult and very expensive to amend our constitution. In addition, it would outlaw open primaries and ranked choice voting.
I worked on a ranked choice voting (RCV) election in Australia in 2006 and the difference was clear — RCV helps pull people away from the tribal identities fostered by the two-party system and allows people to communicate better.
You don’t have to like RCV to know that this proposal is a cynical attempt to hold on to power.
Jeeze! Nothing has changed since the days that I served on the elections committee in the state legislature. Back in those days Republicans made it easier to challenge your signature on a petition for a ballot measure, among other anti-democracy efforts.
This is more of the same. They’re just trying to make it harder for the people to be a check on the power of their radical legislature.
Here’s what this legislative referral would do. Currently if you want to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, you have to get a number equaling 15% of the people who voted in the last governor’s election. If you want to get a statutory initiative on the ballot, you have to get 10%. Those signatures can come from anywhere in the state. This referral from the legislature would require you to get those same percentages from every single one of the 15 counties in Arizona.
(Can you name them all without looking?)
Sounds fair, right? But think about it. It would mean that, even if you reach those numbers in 14 of the 15 counties, but in only one county you don’t reach those signature requirements, that one county could hold up progress for the whole state. It’s an effective veto, or a kind of county filabuster.
A minority of voters could dictate policy for the majority of citizens of the state. If you don’t like the electoral college, you should not like this for the same reason.
Republicans and MAGA conservatives see the writing on the wall and they know that the state is changing. They know that people want better schools, they want clean energy, and they want smart elections reform. These guys are happy to rig the system to stay in power.
This proposal from the legislature really originates from the radical Free Enterprise Club –because they have a huge influence there. The Free Enterprise Club is a bunch of right wing ideologues who spent way too much time reading Ian Rand books under their covers with a flashlight when they were teenagers, thinking it was good literature and smart philosophy.
Hint: It is neither.
This ballot measure is in response to Republican governor Doug Ducey‘s emergency declarations during the Covid response. It requires the Arizona legislature to re-approve every emergency declaration after 30 days, other than war, fire, and flood declarations.
But when you talk to people with experience around emergency declarations and emergencies, they will tell you this is unworkable.
First, such a requirement would put a halt to a lot of federal emergency funding. Most emergency responses last for more than 30 days. Be assured that the federal government will not allow their funding to be left to the whims of our infamously backward legislature.
Second, how could you depend on the legislature to re-approve an emergency decoration when they can barely agree on what time to break for lunch?
In addition, what do you do when the legislature is not in session? They don’t all have to come back to vote if they don’t want to. It makes emergency preparedness fundamentally weaker.
This one falls into the category I described before in which the republican legislature just can’t get their sunbaked brains around the idea that the public has a say and how their constitutional democracy should work. You know, they way it was designed 112 years ago.
Just as they did back when I was in the legislature, they are looking for ways to stop any initiative that they don’t like.
It allows voter-organized constitutional amendments to be challenged in court after the measure is filed with the secretary of state’s office but before ballots are printed. This is designed to give opponents of any measure more opportunities to torpedo the effort before voters have a chance to vote on them
The voters have spoken many times on things that they care about. Everything from legalizing marijuana, to raising teacher pay and making a more fair tax code.
Time and again, this ideological legislature has been able to thwart the public’s effort. This will make that even easier.
It’s like somebody told the Arizona legislature that the US Supreme Court is the most corrupt that it’s ever been. So the Arizona legislature responded, “here, hold my beer.”
If you think that, maybe the US Supreme Court should move toward term limits of some sort, then you should hate this. This is taking a system that has worked well for decades and creates lifetime appointments for Arizona Supreme Court justices.
Not only that, but it does so retroactively in order to protect two particular Arizona Supreme Court justices who are coming up for term renewal. They voted in favor of the 1864 abortion ban. One of those Supreme Court justices is the husband of a legislator who voted in favor of that ban.
Let’s back up and set some context.
In some states, judges are elected. They campaign, raise money and show up on the ballot. That is a terrible idea. It means judges are out raising money sometimes from questionable people and special interests. Further, it means they less likely to stand up to the public when they have taken on a mob mentality.
Other states have only appointments.
The Arizona system for appointing and retaining judges is a really nice hybrid. The judges are appointed for life, but in for four-year terms. Every time their term ends, the voters have a chance to say if they think that Justice should not be retained. Typically, this only occurs when there is some kind of behavioral issues or corruption. It very seldom happens that a judge is removed from the bench. But the option is there. The process of responding to complaints against judges is handled by the Arizona Commission on Judicial Conduct.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have something like the US Supreme Court, with their life appointements they have become seemingly immune to any form of accountability for their behavior.
This ballot measure would make the Arizona court just like the US Supreme Court, which we all know is very problematic.
If you ever wanted evidence that we are living in a George Orwellian dystopian world, be aware that the legislature named this the Judicial Accountability Act of 2024. Creating lifetime appointments for judges, which by definition reduces accountability.
Before I comment on this, I just have to say that this country needs to finally give up this whole tipping system. I love the Australian model the most. In the Land Down Under workers are paid a livable wage, but you can tip them if you want. There is no heavy-handed obligation to tip them so that they can make a living because the restaurant franchise they work for wants to save more money for their shareholders.
In fact, there are moves across the US to force restaurants to skip the tip and pay workers a livable wage. Have a look at this summary video of how we got here, how folks are reforming it and how some in even the restaurant associations are seeing that a flat wage is better for employee retention.
When you understand that tipping in America has its origins in post Civil War attempts to under-pay Black folks, and that it grew in popularity during the Great Depression, and that we are the only country that does it, you can see why we need to change it.
In short, this measure allows the restaurant to pay a worker up to 25% less if their tips reach minimum wage. Here’s a crazy thought. Just pay them a livable wage!
It is particularly cynical that the legislature titled this one, “The Tipped Worker Protection Act.“ When would it actually does is reduce a tip workers income.
Of all of the ballot measures, you’ve probably known about this one for a while. They collected over 800,000 signatures to get on the ballot. I think that might be a new record.
It protects abortions up to fetal viability, which is usually about 23 or 24 weeks. And it prevents the state from enforcing laws that prohibit abortion if the mother’s life is at risk.
This last part of the ballot measure is where the other side pulls a magic rabbit out of their behinds and try to say that people abort children up until they are born.
This is a tall, stinky pile of fear, mongering crap.
The reality is that it is exceedingly rare that a pregnancy has gone so terribly at such a late point in the pregnancy that an abortion has to occur. By then, the baby is often already dead.
What is not rare is the huge number of preventable deaths across the country, post Dobbs decision. These are women who could not gain access for reasonable healthcare services because the government in certain states, including Arizona for now, is involving itself in decisions that they have no justifiable government interest in.
Let’s consider the counter-narrative on this one. If this does not pass, then you can be certain this legislature will pass another draconian, anti-woman, anti-abortion bill, which will probably not even allow for abortions in the cases of rape or incest.
I am a little torn on this one, although I will vote in favor because at least it’s moving things forward. And I believe that voting against it will set back much-needed reforms in Arizona by 10 years. Let me explain what I mean.
There are many of us who have been working on ranked choice voting (RCV) for years. Ranked choice voting is when you get to rank the candidates in the order you would like to see them win. The votes are counted in such a way that the person with the greatest number of votes wins, but you don’t have to have a primary and general election.
It’s very handy because you can have two or three or seven or nine candidates on the ballot for a particular position and still figure out the winner in one vote.
I got to work on a rain choice voting election in Australia in 2006 where they’ve been doing it for decades. It is amazing to see that when you can rank the candidates in the order you like them all this room for conversation. People become less tied to their party identity.
This particular ballot measure eliminates the party primary and creates an open primary system where everybody runs regardless of party.
I’m not a fan of open primaries. Basically they promise to make a more congenial electoral atmosphere, but we already have partisan primaries at the city level and people still know what party their candidates are in.
The drafters of this initiative included rank choice voting in some instances. But what really gets me is that in those instances they leave it to the legislature to decide how many candidates will be listed on that rank choice voting ballot.
After six years in the legislature and many more years working around that dysfunctional temple of egoism, I wouldn’t trust the legislature to choose something as important as this. I know that the Republicans would come up with some genius scheme to undermine the vote. And I know the Democrats would fight amongst themselves in some unnecessary and embarrassing way.
Groups on the far right are opposing this because they think RCV is a scam, and will cause them to lose power. Groups on the left oppose this because of this problem with the legislature. They have justifiable concerns that the legislature can’t be trusted, as do I.
Here’s my thread on Twitter about why I disagree with them. In short, I think they are not accounting for how the legislature will moderate in just a few cycles with open primaries, such that we can pass true RCV.
But I do believe that the open primary system, despite its flaws, will make our very extreme legislature more moderate. Over only two or three election cycles, I believe the legislature will moderate enough that we can either trust them on how they allow for ranked choice voting and/or they will propose a ballot measure to eliminate their role.
In other words, I think the opponents of Prop 140 are thinking two dimensionally, and are not accounting for how time will advance the desire for more voting options, not fewer.
If I had Jeff Bezos money, I would’ve introduced rank choice voting to cities first so people get comfortable with it. I have always said that rank choice voting is “better when experienced than when explained.”
But I don’t have Jeff Bezos money. Hell, I don’t have 1/10th of Jeff Goldblume’s money. So, I’ll take some amount of progress is better than none. Furthermore, I fear that if this loses, it will take the wind out of the sales of elections reform for many years to come.
The system we have now in trenches and ass backward way of governing, it in rewards extremism. And it excludes a third of the population from participating.
This measure does something else that, if you are a registered Independent, you definitely want. If you look up at my description of Prop 133, you’ll see how I described how the Republican legislature in 2015 dramatically increased the number of signatures needed for Independents, Green Party, Libertarians and others to put their names on the ballot.
This measure removes that and equalizes the signatures needed to get on the ballot.
That may be worth the risk of the problematic parts of the measure.
This is one which was referred to the ballot from the legislature, and it amends statute.
I don’t have a problem with this measure in terms of structure. It does not seem to be a “gotcha” measure, infused with MAGA juice.
It adds a $20 fine to all criminal offenses to fund a public life insurance fund for first responders, police officers, and corrections workers who are killed by a criminal act while on the job.
A “yes” vote shall have the effect of requiring the State of Arizona to pay $250,000, which would be referred to as the State Death Benefit, to the surviving spouse or children of a first responder killed in the line of duty; creating a State Supplemental Benefit Fund to pay the State Death Benefit; broadening the definition of aggravated assault; and require a $20 penalty fee be imposed on every fine, penalty and forfeiture for any criminal offense.
My former seat mate and wonderful person, Senator Lela Alston did say “I do have a problem with this bill, and that is that it creates another fine that is disproportionate to certain members of our population. And it would be a preferable option to me if we were to pay that the death benefit directly out of the general fund to the family of the firefighter or police officer who was killed and not do any more fines in our legal system.”
I’ll probably vote against, since I do respect Lela’s opinion on topics such as these.
This one seems to be another MAGA brainchild. It would allow property owners to apply for a tax refund on their city taxes if they feel the city has not upheld public nuisance laws. Read “moved the homeless along.”
The property owner can seek return of taxes up to the amount that they’ve had to spend to try to deal with homelessness issues on their property.
Here’s my problem with this. Rather than fully funding cities to deal with homelessness –a decades-long problem thanks to this legislature– this measure will drain cities of the very resources they need to deal with homelessness. I predict that, not only will people abuse this ability to get a tax refund, but also that we will see the unintended consequences pretty quickly. I think there will be a move to repeal this sometime in the next ten years.
Vote no on Prop 312. There are a myriad of better ways to address homelessness.
Nobody wants to come down on the side of sex traffickers. These folks are the scum of the earth, and they deserve to sit inside a cinder block suite for decades.
Here’s the problem, which we’ve seen with many “tough on crime” laws like this. It forces judges hands. They can only put somebody away for life.
But what this measure does not contemplate is that sometimes the victims of sex trafficking are also brought up on sex trafficking charges. Those folks would have a mandatory life sentence, even if the judge sees the reality of what’s happened and would like to find a better remedy.
I can’t say for sure, but this also feels like a measure that is designed to move a certain kind of voter to the polls.
It’s the Prop1070 call-back that you never wanted or asked for!
If the last one might have been designed to drive some voters to the polls, this one does, for sure.
It creates a list of new crimes for undocumented persons regarding (1) applying for a public benefit by submitting a false document; (2) submitting false information to an employer regarding the person’s authorization; (3) entering Arizona from a foreign country at any location other than a lawful port of entry; (4) remaining in the country if the person has been convicted of certain crimes and a court has ordered them to return to their country of origin or entry. Also creates a new crime of selling fentanyl that causes the death of another person. Requires state courts to issue deportation orders against any person convicted of these crimes and authorizes state and local law enforcement to enforce the deportation orders.
This measure does not provide funding for cities, towns and counties to cover the cost of their newly-deputized local police.
The Copper Courier reports that this creates new warrantless searches, would cost localities $325M more per year, and an additional cost of $50M per year to our prison system.
There are a lot of things that the legislature could do to deal with illegal immigration, even though this is a federal issue. But this one will be challenged in court and much of it probably thrown out.
For me, it is not a serious effort to deal with a very complex problem.
This is another MAGA mind-fart. It would prohibit any state agency from implementing a rule that is estimated to cost more than $500,000 in regulatory costs over 5 years without first going to the legislature for approval. This would not apply to emergency declarations.
Let’s set aside that $100,000 per year becomes amazingly restrictive in just a few years with natural inflation. This referral to the ballot is insanely short-sighted and is designed to throw more sand in the workings of government, just for the sake of it.
There are a whole number of actions that state agencies take, most often after a public rule-making process, which would be interrupted. It could happen at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Department of Environmental Quality. The departments would be tied up and gagged when it comes to issuing reasonable rules, with public input, that protect the public.
Remember, once something is passed by the public, it is really hard to change. If passed, this will certainly become problematic very quickly.
You can not like local government and still see how this will lead to disaster.
An unexpected thing has been happening in the Pacific Northwest in the last decade. People have been removing earth and dams and hydroelectric dams along major waterways.
As my tour looped around, past Portland and as I began to head south along the Oregon and California coasts, I reached out to a group I had learned has successfully removed dams along the Klamath River.
I interviewed Craig Tucker, one of the catalysts of a plan started over 15 years ago, which seemed like a crazy idea at the time.
I imagined Craig and others siting around like the cast of Scooby Doo saying, “It’s so crazy, it just might work!”
When we met in Craig’s office in Arcata California, we discussed why the dams were removed, how the region makes up the difference in hydro power that is lost with the dams are removed and how he learned to be a good ally to local first nations.
For me, this was particularly related to my current van tour and thinking about what is next in my career. Craig and his allies demonstrated patience in the face of massive odds and Craig in particular spoke about how he became a better ally to Tribal advocates over time.
You can see images of the dam removal on the Reconnect Klamath website and learn more. We could only get to so much in 10 minutes. As we know, that’s already like publishing a full length novel in the world of YouTube.
Craig also spoke about the coming massive investments in wind energy from RWE and Vineyard Offshore Wind coming soon off the coast of California, and what that means for the region.
Consider this recent YouTube post from Portland to be a video version of my 2019 blog post on the unknown way to stop the spreading influence of lobbyists.
Or, as they say on all those social media videos when they try to get you to click, “Lobbyists are fuming at this secret method to stop their influence!”
Only in this video, you also get to watch Ellie catch frisbees. It’s glorious! And I’m not at all biased.
I know this issue will not get anywhere near center stage in this presidential election. But I sure wish we could take this opportunity to demand both candidates use this clever and constitutional tactic to restrict the power of lobbyists.
You can’t “drain the swamp” without removing the power of lobbyists, after all.
You can’t really take on corporations unless you defang their paid brokers.
Lobbyists make a 76,000% return on investment for their clients.
