This afternoon, in Texas, I'm feeling like I have been teleported back to a stereotypical Pacific Northwest winter day.
I was all suited up and ready to take off for a salubrious hour of Tandy Hills hiking, around noon, when a hellacious downpour, with lightning aftershocks, put an end to that plan.
So, I quickly switched to Plan B. Go vote and then go push a cart around inside Sam's Club. In the picture you are looking out my windshield at Sam's Club and a downpour.
There was no line to vote, but it was busy.
I don't know why, but this time you had the option of voting with a paper ballot. Or use the video game-like voting machine I've gotten used to using. The polling place I voted at had only one of the video game voting machines.
I was confused as soon as I signed in and was pointed to the paper ballot. I asked where was the code I needed to enter in the video game voting machine? Oh, you want to vote that way? We can do that. Some scrambling took place to find me the code. When I realized what the deal was, I said I can just use the paper ballot and vote the old-fashioned way.
Only it really was not like the old-fashioned way, except you did mark off your votes with a penned checkmark in a box. When done you inserted your ballot into a machine that scanned it. And I assumed tallied the votes.
I never did trust those video game voting machines, due to there being no hard copy record of the vote. Video game machines are known to malfunction at times.
I tell you, voting in Texas is so not what I was used to in Washington.
Today in Washington there are 2 Initiatives on the ballot to take the state out of the liquor selling business, those Initiatives being I-1100 and I-1105. I-1098 is for a state income tax. I-1053 would require a two-thirds super-majority vote for any new tax, or tax loophole removal. I-1082 would privatize the state's worker compensation system. Various counties, including King, have Propositions on the ballot to increase the sales tax.
In California the voters are deciding whether to make California the first state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Proposition 19, titled the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act would permit adults over 21 to buy up to an ounce of marijuana, to be consumed in private places, where no children are present. Oh, and Californians would be allowed to grow pot in small private gardens.
Meanwhile, today in Texas, I had nothing to vote on except people, state officials, like the governor, a whole lot of judges and other people about whom I knew nothing and who mattered to me not in the slightest.
In Washington if some bonehead came up with a boneheaded plan to take down levees, that have prevented flooding for decades, in order to build a teeny lake and 3 bridges across an un-needed flood diversion channel.
And somehow put this Boneheaded Boondoggle in motion without the citizens having a vote on the matter.
Well, when the Boneheaded Boondoggle began to spin noticeably out of control, with exposes of drunken junkets to inspect other town's rivers and lakes, with building goofy things like the World's Premiere Wake Boarding Lake, well, I can tell you what would happen.
A pissed of Washingtonian would get enough signatures on a petition to put the issue of the Boneheaded Boondoggle on the ballot.
But, here in Texas that sort of thing just does not take place. It is not the Fort Worth Way.
I have come to think that what the Fort Worth Way means is to emulate the daily herding of the longhorns in the Stockyards, just march along, following orders, going one direction in the morning, another in the afternoon, never questioning if this really is the direction you want to be going. And never getting anywhere good.
