Don's Tuesday Column

             THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/29/2018

              The tributes, the election, the scandal

Writing at dawn on Memorial Day induces a reverence, heightened by the ritual of lowering my flag to half-staff, which permeates all non-sports, non-picnic/recreational activities of the day. Even the NASCAR race in Charlottesville, recorded and watched at 20 times regular speed—because, well, it’s obvious if you think about it—managed to impress upon me the reason for the day. Each driver had the name of a fallen military hero on their windshield and a story of their noble service and sacrifice. Local commemorations reverently say: “Some gave all.”

Our votes in elections can seem both a cipher as well as a solemn act of participatory, representative democracy. They are often mirror images of our liberal relatives’ votes in Indiana, where the preferences of Democrats are literally unimportant. For us, it seems that a vote cast for a Republican candidate for Governor and other state-wide offices, as well as United States Senator, is closer to a leap of faith than a practical expectation of results. Nonetheless, with a repeal of Governor “Moonbeam” Brown’s gas tax expected on the ballot in November, Republicans may find Independents joining them to check some “R” boxes.

The way it looks to me, it would be foolish to not vote for Doug LaMalfa for Congress, Jim Nielsen for State Senator and James Gallagher for State Assembly. They’ve done well or better representing our priorities in their respective legislative bodies and deserve to be reelected. It is also beyond dispute that a perennial loser, Jim Reed, should not be rewarded for his “Don Quixote” act every election with, in this case, a judicial seat. Laura Woods has my vote. I also gladly cast my local vote for Dennis Garton, Supervisor 3^rd District.

In the District Attorney race, I find much to recommend both Carolyn Walker and Matthew Rogers. They both impressed the Republican Central Committee members when appearing to make their case for office. The Committee makes no recommendations. I find it a bit off-putting for someone who was in the District Attorney’s office to be unable to definitively state what should have been done to prevent the Rancho Tehama mass murder from happening. Perhaps it’s delicate to critically analyze while the legal situation is unfolding and responsibility, within the D.A.’s office leading up to the killings, involves a lot of CYA, shall we say.

Likewise, Sheriff Dave Hencratt has his record to run on with much to be proud of aside from, again, that unpleasant incident in RT. I get that law enforcement’s hands are tied but I still yearn to know how it could be stopped in the future. I stand for the right, under the 2^nd Amendment, to self-defense; the earliest violent threats from the killer should have been met with justified lethal force. Get a gun, get trained and carry it, the way I see it.

Prop 68-NO; it’s more debt for no new water storage. Prop 69-NO; it’s just more state spending and allows gas tax funds to pay for bond debt rather than fixing roads. Prop 70-NO; it places “Cap and Trade” into the state constitution and “was a fig leaf to get legislators to vote for Cap and Trade and increase your taxes.”

Props 71 and 72 deserve “YES” votes. 71 mandates the effective date for ballot measures to take effect; 72 excludes rainwater capture systems from property tax assessments—there is no reason to pay taxes on collecting your own rain water.

Additional recommendations: Governor, John Cox; Attorney General, Judge Steven Bailey; Lt. Governor, Cole Harris; Secretary of State, Mark Meuser; State Treasurer, Greg Conlon; State Insurance Commissioner, Steve Poizner; State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Marshall Tuck; Board of Equalization, District 1, Ted Gaines (all taken from a LaMalfa email).

Last week’s brief analysis of the “Spy-gate” scandal—so tagged by President Trump over the now confirmed placement of at least one “intelligence asset” or confidential informant into the orbit of several low-level campaign staff—ran out of space just as the New York Times and Washington Post revealed the name of said informant. It was a thinly veiled secret as they had, through leaks from the agencies involved, previously published sufficient descriptors as to facilitate a Google search result. A domestic political spy deserves to be known to Americans.

The elderly, portly professor at Cambridge had contacted the three Trump people separately in an effort to surreptitiously implicate them in some level of the supposed theft of Hillary Clinton’s emails by Russians. The identity being now public, Stefan Halper represents the refutation of the argument that disclosure threatened “sources and methods,” even someone’s life. Obviously not in this case. The only thing exposed was what The Hill’s legal analyst Jonathan Turley (hardly a Trump guy) wrote about in “FBI source in Russia probe raises alarms over political surveillance.” Like the un-redactions in documents provided Congressional investigators, protests over disclosures were nothing more than attempts to avoid embarrassment.

I can only begin to address all of the phony, disingenuous narratives peddled by Trump-deranged news media (“It’s just Trump deflecting attention from his own corrupt scandals”), Trump haters like James (then: "CIA not equipped to say Russia elected Trump"; now: "Russia elected Trump") Clapper, and Nancy “run/don’t run on impeaching Trump” Pelosi.

I’ll continue this story because it will develop and evolve. When politicians and operatives like Obama, Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Clapper et al set into motion all that’s being revealed in “Spy-gate,” they do it with the knowledge that if they win, it gets “memory holed,” but if they lose it can be obfuscated and covered up, taking years to unravel. Look up “Cambridge Professor Spied On Trump Campaign Advisers” by Chuck Ross, and “8 signs pointing to a counterintelligence operation deployed against Trump’s campaign,” by Sharyl Attkisson.