Don's Tuesday Column

                THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/05/2018

                      Elections and not accepting results

Today, as you read your paper, the primary vote is occurring; we can respect all who are putting their name on the ballot and vying for an elective office. I made some observations and recommendations on local candidates but most voters have availed themselves of campaign materials, personal interaction and their own gut feeling about for whom they wish to cast a vote.

Here is what I wrote about the propositions, based on Doug LaMalfa’s emailed positions that made sense to me: 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.

It was with some chagrin that I read another columnist’s take on President Trump; it was a rather jaundiced, cynical and snark-filled rant at our elected leader. Trump would probably have to admit that, while he seeks the support, and acts in the interest, of all Americans, he must resign himself to having little to no support from much of the electorate. I see it as a necessary byproduct of setting about—from the beginning of his candidacy through his first 500 days in office—to undo and reverse the legacy and “accomplishments” of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Could that possibly have been accomplished without alienating the committed Democrat left in the urban strongholds, the academy, the lockstep liberal news media and the permanent federal bureaucracy that support and contribute to Democrats by about 9 to 1? Frankly, I don’t see that it’s any more possible to reach a “can’t we all just get along” rapprochement with the liberal, Obama-and-Clinton devoted progressives than it is to satisfy both the gay marriage proponents and the Christian cake bakers. They were just handed a 7 to 2 Supreme Court decision affirming their right to not be forced to create a cake celebrating a homosexual marriage.

Sure, the gays, or the LGBT acronym they prefer, could have taken the legal and social acceptance of their ceremonies as a monumental step toward what they consider their “right.” They could have adhered to the time-honored principle of “live and let live,” “to each their own” and marched to their own drummer, as it were, because “it’s a free country.” But no, they had to push the issue, “jump the shark,” and seek out Christian bakers, florists, photographers and wedding planners for the sole purpose of dragging (tongue-in-cheek) said businesses through legal wringers seeking to force compliance, not with any law or reasonable principle, but with the LGBT-perceived mandate to force all to participate in their rites.

I digressed a bit because the bakers wished simply to follow their own moral compass; there were other bakers willing to provide the requested service. They would have sold a cake off their shelf to gay customers to decorate as they wished. The obsession witnessed in the gay rights left to force agreement and participation by others encapsulates the nearly-vengeful pursuit of dominance that has shown itself in the legal warfare inflicted on Republicans, conservatives, Tea Party adherents and traditional marriage supporters. Trump supporters? Fair game for their ire.

Look up the “John Doe warrant” persecution of Gov. Scott Walker’s supporters in Wisconsin by a Democrat state Attorney General. We witnessed the harassment visited upon Prop 8 contributors by gay marriage fanatics in California, satisfied with nothing less than economic, personal and social destruction of conservatives. The illegal, abominable singling out of Tea Party and constitutional activists—over their rightful acquisition of tax-exempt status to “assemble” and “petition the government for redress of grievances”—by Obama’s IRS was an evil beyond anything Nixon ever dreamed. It all stems from the Democrat left refusing to accept the results of elections that don’t go their way.

For that matter, Nixon’s perfidy, his stymied attempts to “politicize” the Justice Department, pales when compared to the actual and successful “politicization” of the DOJ by Barack Obama, Eric Holder and James Comey. Those clamoring for “evidence” and “proof” of spying by Obama et al on the Trump campaign, including candidate Donald Trump, should bear in mind that the same skeptics derided Trump when he talked of being “wire tapped.”

Then, when radio host Mark Levin assembled a dozen news reports that cited “sources” that quoted things overheard from the Trump campaign, he was castigated as a “conspiracy theorist.” Now we know that “electronic surveillance” (aka “wire tapping”) was authorized on Trump’s staffer Carter Page, which would have necessarily picked up Trump’s communications.

We come back full circle to the current media hysteria over a supposed lack of evidence or proof of spying, by “confidential informants” sent to and placed in the orbit of three low level Trump staffers in 2016. The facile standard being used is situational in that the partisan doubters reserve their prerogative to accept or reject said “evidence” based on whether it leads to conclusions they prefer to disbelieve. Even the estimable former prosecutor and Congressional Republican Trey Gowdy wrongly defended the FBI’s use of spying on Trump’s campaign.

Andrew McCarthy: “The back and forth about whether it was a spy or an informant is beside the point…They’re government-controlled covert operatives who you send in to get information regardless of what you call them…” Documents and testimony exist to answer “Who assigned them? Who ran them? What crimes were they investigating, if any?” We must know.