UPDATE: HOLD OFF FOR A WEEK. (No on Recall, No on Elder, Don’t skip question 2!)

UPDATE September:  Paffrath is a weenie,

and nobody on question 2 is gonna beat Elder.

Just pick Kapelovitz cuz he’s a good guy,

Make SURE you’re NO on 1,

and get it in the mail!!!

UPDATE 8/17:

Democrat candidate Kevin Paffrath is doing better in polls than expected,

despite Democratic Party leadership!

Hold off a week, we may not have to vote for Faulconer!

I’m not gonna say anything critical about Governor Newsom in this piece because I don’t want to send out any mixed messages.  I want the recall to fail.  I am voting NO and hope you vote NO as well.  I don’t want to be stuck with a Republican governor for a year, and you probably don’t either.  It would cause a lot of damage, and it would also be mortifying.

But it is the HEIGHT OF IRRESPONSIBILITY to leave the second question blank, especially when a Trumpy whacko named Larry Elder is the Republican front-runner.  Not all the Republicans are equally bad.  And if things go wrong on the first question and not ENOUGH of us come out to stop the recall, and not enough of us Democrats & Independents also picked someone on the second question who’s not as bad as Elder but is within range of beating him, then LARRY ELDER WILL BE OUR GOVERNOR for all of 2022 and it will be your fault!

And the one Republican who COULD get more votes than Elder and is much less insane and destructive than him is former San Diego Mayor KEVIN FAULCONER.  One year of Governor Faulconer, if we fail and the recall succeeds, would be FAR better than one year of Governor Elder.

NO, picking someone in question 2 does NOT invalidate your NO vote on question 1.

I have checked this, and double-checked this, and triple-checked it.  So stop saying it.

You can check yourself with the Registrar of Voters at 714-567-7600 if you don’t believe me.

Whoever told you this story was, to quote Charles Baudelaire,

“Lying like the man who steals your teeth.”

It’s been so embarrassing lately to watch rank-and-file Democrats on social media saying, “Just skip the second question, that’s what Governor Newsom wants us to do.”  We elected him as California Governor – I didn’t know we had elected him as a “Dear Leader,” to tell us how to think and vote!  You sound like Republicans talking about Trump!

Same with hearing “insiders” from the County and State Party impatiently explaining that it’s “TOO COMPLICATED” for voters to grasp, that maybe if they’re told to vote no on 1 and for someone relatively decent on 2 they’ll get all their wires crossed and do it all upside-down.  You-all sound like a team of sheepdogs keeping sheep in line.

OK, OK, I see you-all are doing a bunch of phone banking to get out the “NO ON RECALL” vote – your concerns might make sense in that context, talking to low-info voters who don’t follow politics much.  But folks who read this blog, or talk about politics on Facebook, are smart enough to hold two ideas in their heads.  And SO ARE YOU – even if you keep it a secret, I hope you vote NO on the Recall, and Faulconer on Question 2.

Let me put it this way – we have the capability here to choose the best outcome and ALSO PREVENT THE WORST OUTCOME.  The worst outcome, which is a real possibility, is:

For twenty years Elder has been a skeptic, nay, cynic, on climate change, calling global warming a “crock” and a “myth.”  (Now that he is running for Governor he’s trying to moderate his tone to “global warming MAY have a little to do with our forest fires.”)

Larry Elder says the medical establishment and “professional victims” exaggerate the dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke.

Larry Elder recently allowed a self-described “doctor” to call his nationally syndicated radio show and claim COVID vaccines are dangerous, and didn’t object, nor did he object when she implied that Bill Gates might have backed the “experimental” immunizations as a form of “population control.”

Radical anti-abortionist Larry Elder has called Roe vs. Wade “one of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court ever handed down,” described abortion as “murder” and said rules governing the procedure should be left to the states.

Larry Elder has threatened to, as Governor, declare a state of emergency in order to fire “bad” teachers, estimating that they make up between 5% and 7% of the state’s public school faculty of about 300,000.

He just might declare another emergency to “suspend” CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which he considers part of a bureaucracy that is “treating contractors and developers like they are criminals.”

Larry Elder promises to repeal all mask and vaccine mandates on his first morning as Governor “and then take a break for breakfast.“

More, more, and more false statements from Larry Elder!

Larry Elder is JUST NOW trying to distance himself from his five-year love affair with Donald Trump, and not too credibly.  See how he’s raved about Trump’s greatness in the past.

Larry Elder tweeted just last week:  “Do I believe there were shenanigans in the 2020 presidential election? Yes. But it’s time to focus on retaking the White House in 2024.”

Larry Elder falsely claims that “police are NOT more likely to use force on black people.”  As the Times shows, “White grievance politics were once the purview of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan… Now, thanks in no small part to Elder and his protégés, the delusion of rampant reverse racism is mainstream in Republican politics and Fox News.”

Proteges?  Like the ghoulish Trump hanger-on Stephen Miller:

Yes, THIS Stephen Miller. The “Separate families, throw the kids in cages, and lose their parents contact info” Stephen Miller.

Elder recalled his mentorship of Miller, the architect of Trump’s cruelest immigration policies. As a Santa Monica teenager, Miller called Elder’s show to complain of left-wing “indoctrination” in his public high school. “I thought he was amazingly articulate,” Elder told me. He invited Miller on as a guest “almost whenever he wanted,” amounting to dozens of times.

While Miller worked for the Trump campaign, Elder told him to make sure that Trump claimed illegal immigration harmed “unskilled, inner city mostly Black and brown workers.” He told him to read up on Hillary Clinton’s “treatment of her husband’s accusers” months before Trump held a press conference featuring Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers to distract from Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” scandal.

“I hope to live to see the day when you become president,” Elder emailed Miller in 2016. “Your kind words are heartening beyond measure,” Miller responded, calling him “the one true guide I’ve always had.”

I hope all of this is enough to convince you to vote TWICE against Governor Larry Elder – once by voting NO on the Recall, and then, on question 2, choosing Kevin Faulconer, a moderate about whom none of the above could be said, nor nothing like it.  Thank you for your time.  Vern out.