Some Sundry Final Day Election-Related Tidbits

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You can stick an almost fork in it, because it’s almost done!

This piece is a grab bag of tidbits, mostly sorted by location if you want to glance through, of what in a less crowded final week might have become their own stories.  Note: stopping at 7:20 because I’m calculating Presidential voting trends, which are in a separate post.  As I write, Democrats have a net 0-seat turnover in the Senate.  That bodes ill.  Go vote, if you haven’t — you know where to find our recommendations.  Add whatever you’d like in comments.

(1) CD-48 (Gold Coast)

Gina Clayton-Tarvin shares a video that gives us a small taste of how huge a bigot and homophone Michelle Steel is.

(2) Huntington Beach

What the hell was going on with the Huntington Beach Police Officers PAC endorsing, and putting out big flyers for, the strange pairing of Dan Kalmick and Tito Ortiz?  I see four possibilities:

1. That it was an attempt to hitch Ortiz onto Kalmick’s star so that he, not  Natalie Moser, would get HB’s third seat.  (Why not tie him to the even more popular Oscar Rodriguez?  Maybe that would be dismissed as aimed only at Latinos.)
2. That is was an attempt to tarnish Kalmick’s reputation by linking him in voters’ minds to anti-mask Trumpian Ortiz.
3. That they were trying to curry favor with Kalmick while pushing for the pro-cop candidate they really wanted.
4. That Kalmick is considered safe and pushing him allows them to assign him half of the cost.  (But it’s an IE, so why?)

(3) Everywhere (and example from Brea)

You should consider voting for the candidate who:

• sent you less mail — including IEs for them
• was not endorsed by the Police Association, to cancel out the vote of someone who fell for that endorsement
• has not had their signs knocked down, mangled, or obscured by another sign right in from of them

Here are two examples of the last of these from the North OC Community College District campaign between incumbent Ryan Bent and challenger Keri Kropke:

It looks better when it hasn’t been mangled, torn, and left as trash.

There were actually several signs in this stack. Three, including the one right behind the Bent sign, were Kropke signs It looked like someone had stacked together about 8-10 signs from the clearing here and stacked them all together, with the Gent one in front.

I was voting for Kropke in this race for many reasons — but had I been undecided, this would have decided it for me in her favor.

4. Orange

I’ve noted that the decision between Angie Schlueter-Rumsey and Carrie Lundell was one of those with the starkest difference between the candidates — as Angie said that she’s taught high school for decades but never said that it was a parochial rather than a public school.  (Why run for a public school board, then?  Probably not to strengthen it!)

What I didn’t know is that this race is for control of the School Board!  John Ortega, Alexia Deligianni, and Rick Ledesma have endorsed Angie, while Kathy Moffet, Kris Erickson, and Andrea Yamasaki support Carrie for the sole vacant seat!

(5) The Frozen North

One would think that, as a registered Democrat, I’d be getting text-slammed by attack ads against Rep. Gil Cisneros, State Senate candidate Josh Newman, and Assembly candidate Andrew Rodriguez — and they’re all nutty.  I’ll come back to this as time permits.

(6) Everywhere

And lastly: if you believe, as I will here pretend to do for purposes of this entry, that we live in a simulated Matrix-style universe — but one where our creators and maintenance staff enjoy messing with us to keep them from being bored — it has occurred to me that a horrifying message prophesying a Trump victory has been woven into time itself.

We all know that 2020 was famous even last century because it could be rendered as 20/20, the opticians’ description of perfect vision (before things got complicated later, just like televisions), but there’s another deeper message embedded there, twice! — which could even be taken to prophesy a Trump dynasty lasting past the end of the decade.  Can you see it?

2-0 2-0

In other words, Trump retires with a perfect two-term record — and maybe his successor (Pence, Dom Jr., Ivanka?) does too, taking us to 2032.  Yikes!  It’s best that we nip this in the bud!

[Note to whoever controls the Matrix: Stop messing with us!  It isn’t funny anymore!]