I got the news while desperately looking for respite from the unusually steamy Southern California afternoon.
Outside was better than inside, so I sat on the terrace under an umbrella, periodically spraying myself with the “mist” setting on the hose. Inside, there was an unofficial no-air-conditioning policy. California’s expensive green energy policies make staying cool during a heatwave a choice between sanity and sleep or doing laundry and eating chips and salsa for dinner again. Windmills are very expensive so insanity, chips, salsa, and clean underwear were winning.
The forcefield of bug spray for the inevitable phalanx of mosquitos that would feast on my sweet blood out here was now deployed. Now I was hot, sweaty, and sticky.
I sipped my late afternoon gin and tonic made with the Bombay Sapphire we’d paid $20 per gallon for at Costco. Distilled spirits are the only things in California that are cheaper than most places in the country. What California needs is the wine and distilled spirits lobbyists to take over advocating for lower energy and housing taxes. Can taxpayers hire lobbyists? They seem to be getting the job done better than those people elected to “represent” taxpayers.
Day after day of this. It felt like New Orleans in July, St. Louis in August, and North Carolina in September. I didn’t know how much longer I could take it.
I was staying with my daughter and son-in-law to await the birth of their first child. When she experienced some complications, I parachuted in early to make sure my baby was OK.
The complications passed. The sticky weather stayed. The mom-to-be was weathering the heat better than I was.
We waited.
It was almost H hour.
Our family had moved back and forth between the Pacific Northwest and California over our married years and I’d never lived more than a mile from the coast. It was more expensive, but I couldn’t take the heat. Now here I was, just a few miles inland, and sweating it.
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Then I got the call.
It was my husband reporting that he’d received an email showing we’d gotten our California recall ballots.
Is it creepy that the post office sends photos of the mail in your PO box? In this case, I put aside my general mistrust and welcomed the news. “I knew it. Goodbye, Gavin Newsom!” I thought.
We’d moved back to the Pacific Northwest for good more than a year ago and were in the groove. Despite the pandemic, talentless leadership, and the moronic shutdowns, we were meeting people, hanging with family, riding the ferries, hosting parties, welcoming house guests, being civic-minded, voting, visiting a variety of churches. I applied for and received my concealed pistol license. I was filling in on local radio and continuing my work here at PJ Media, producing a podcast, and doing my audiobook work. We were rooted.
And now here I was, five miles from our former home in Orange County, where, I might add, it was 9 degrees cooler with no humidity, waiting for our little bundle and wondering what would happen if I committed a felony and voted my ballot.
It was a moot point. My ballot was sitting in our PO box and I was in California awaiting our little burrito. I didn’t vote it, but I did take photos of the ballots, podcasted about them, and am writing now about them. It will likely be to no avail.
But there are more than 400,000 people dead and alive who received those ballots. Newsom changed the rules of the election to flood the “registered voters” with waves of ballots. It didn’t matter if that registered voter died, move five years ago, or had a new life in a new place.
California has lost so much population due to the oppressive policies that it lost a congressional seat. I’d love to know how many of those disaffected people voted the ballots they inevitably received in Tennessee, Florida, Idaho, or Washington.
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The state was swimming in ballots.
Pay no attention to that crackhead with the 300 ballots in his trunk.
So dangerous was voting in person that officials weren’t checking signatures or the social security list for dead people. Nor were they checking for multiples of the same people voting in different counties as has happened in LA County for decades and which we learn happened in Arizona (another reason why audits are a good idea). Voter impersonation, the nice term for voter fraud, was rife in California under the old laws. They were changed recently to the satisfaction of many voter integrity folks I know and then were quickly tossed because of the “emergency” of Covid.
Of course, the glitterati were able to go to the Emmys, football fans were allowed to budge up at the stadia, and Pitbull played the Fairplex.
People aren’t dumb. A Rasmussen poll recently showed that 79% of Americans think cheating is a problem in U.S. elections, while the same number believe we should show ID to vote. Most European countries outlaw voting by mail.
Now I’ll make a prediction: California finally will go after vote cheaters. But only the ones that escaped the gulag.
Oh, and our baby, Vera (pronounced Verra, thank you very much), whose name stands for virtue, light, and truth, is here.
Let us hope that the politicians making decisions over her life will be worthy of her name.
