Intentionally confusing the ballot

My Sunday movie was Being 17, the English title to a 2016 French film. The setting is the Pyrenees Mountains near the border with Spain. Damien lives in town with his mother the doctor. Thomas is biracial and adopted and lives on a farm in the mountains. Getting to school is a 90 minute trek by foot and bus each way. Tom and Damien hate each other and frequently fight. Tom later says his hatred is because he thinks Damien is stuck up. Then life gets in the way. Tom’s mother is ill and Mom the doctor invites Tom to live with her and Damien to make his commute to school easier in the winter. One has a pretty good idea where this is going. But, thankfully, not quite. There’s schoolwork to complete, some growing up to do, and life to live. Metacritic gives this one a score of 83/100. Both young men were nominated for various acting awards, and the film won for best international narrative feature at the LA Outfest. I enjoyed it and recommend it. I had wanted to see a play this weekend. It’s titled Perfect Arrangement, written by Topher Payne, about a gay couple and a lesbian couple in the 1950s at the height of the Lavender Scare, when LGBTQ people were driven from government jobs because they were considered blackmail targets and thus security risks. They attempt to get around that by the gays faking being married to the lesbians and living in adjacent houses. This sounds like a play worth seeing. Alas, violent storms swept through the region Thursday evening – about the time the play let out. I’m glad I didn’t go. The storms knocked out the power, which made the rest of the show’s run impossible. The utility outage map suggests they might have gotten their power back today. David Nir and David Beard are hosts of The Downballot on Daily Kos. In this episode (transcript included) they talked to Kari Chisholm on his experience in working on drawing voting districts for the city of Portland, Oregon. This discussion is the second half of the episode, so perhaps search for the name. This is the first time Portland needed districts drawn. Before now the city council was four people, each elected by the entire city. They are moving to a council of twelve from four districts each supplying three. They hope this will broaden the representation on the council – the eastern quarter rarely got a seat and the western quarter almost always got a seat. Now both will have three seats. And those three seats will be chosen by ranked choice. Chisholm describes some of what the districting commission did. They talked about: What makes a good district? What does “community of interest” mean? How do they boost the representation of renters to be on par with homeowners? They talked to neighborhood organizations both before they drew maps and after. I had helped to get Michigan’s districting commission passed and attended some of their meetings. So I am quite interested in what it was like for a commissioner. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that backers of abortion rights are furious with the way their proposal will be summarized on the ballot. Their fury is, of course, directed at a Republican, this one Secretary of State Frank LaRose. An example of the switch: The original says “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability” and the replacement says “always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability if, in the treating physician's determination.” Laura Blauvelt of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights calls this substitute summary “propaganda.” LaRose also, quite intentionally, labeled it “Issue 1,” the same as the ballot question earlier this month. Yup, let’s get as much confusion in the mix there as possible. The people that voted no on that Issue 1 will want, just three months later, to vote yes on this Issue 1. All the yard signs and other campaign documents will have to warn of the reversal. A week ago I wrote about the discussion of using the 14th Amendment to disqualify the nasty guy from the ballot. That’s the place in the Constitution that says someone who committed insurrection shall not be allowed to hold government office. Last week the discussion was how to trigger its use. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported Lawrence Caplan, an attorney in Florida, has brought a suit in a federal court to disqualify the nasty guy. Pennyfarthing then reviewed a few legal scholars, both liberal and conservative, who concur that the nasty guy is not eligible to run and serve as president. Perhaps instead of lawsuits secretaries of state should act on their own. But no matter how it is done it will be litigated. This could be fun. Kenneth Chesebro, one of the 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case about attempts to overturn the election, asked for a speedy trial. The prosecuting attorney requested a trial in March 2024. All the other defendants, particularly the guy at the top, want to delay the case as long as possible and certainly after the 2024 election. In response to Chesebro’s request the court granted him a date – October 23, as in just under two months from now. Now most of the other defendants are (or will soon be) clamoring that the whole group not be tried together. Sure, let Chesebro go first, but please delay my case. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos are a series of cartoons by Ann Telnaes. The nasty guy had posted last week “The public knows who I am.” That prompted Telnaes to show the ways the public knows him – “Narcissist, liar, instigator, phony, con man, thief, and a little, little man. In the comments of another roundup Rick McKee drew a cartoon of the nasty guy under arrest as the ghost of John McCain tosses words back at him saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that Russian propagandists have been quite busy claiming the plane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, was not caused by Putin. Must have been someone else that did it. Even Belarus strongman Lukashenko declared Putin didn’t do it. In an update Jay added that the Russian Investigative Committee had completed “molecular genetic examinations” of the bodies recovered from the crash and have confirmed they are Prigozhin, a few leaders in the Wagner group, and the others stated on the passenger list. Is “molecular genetic examinations” another name for DNA testing? Or is the RIC claiming some sort of scientific cover for their claim that Prigozhin is dead? Kos of Kos reported there is an emerging pro-Putin talking point coming from Republicans. The claim is that the US needs to “pivot to China” and to do that we have to drop our support of Ukraine. Kos then explains how silly and stupid that claim is. His major points: While China may not overtly support Russia’s war in Ukraine, they are allies and both are part of the growing BRICS movement. If China attacked Taiwan Russia and its Pacific fleet would support China. Allowing Russia to win in Ukraine would tie up NATO forces in Eastern Europe and hamper the US ability to focus on China. And if the US abandons its European allies, Asian allies would notice. So the US must fully support defeating Russia before it pivots to Asia.