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Election Day 2020: Notes
I voted in person yesterday at 9:35. The line was out the door, but not very far, and I slid my ballot into the scanner and was finished in 20 minutes. The other, larger precinct that votes at the same church had a line across the parking lot, but I...
Cornhill Magazine and the Internet Archive's time machine
My trouble has always been that I find too many different things interesting. The vast collection of printed material in the public domain and available on the internet is like a time machine that beckons one to enter and explore. A Pocket article (originally from Narratively), advertised on a new...
2019 Census estimate changes congressional reapportionment projections
New population estimates indicate that Texas may gain three seats and Florida two seats in the US House of Representatives after next year's US Census, while New York and California may lose a seat each. A handful of other states, mainly in the West and Sun Belt are projected to...
Pearl District detention pond public meeting, Monday, October 14, 2019
Tulsa District 4 City Councilor Kara Joy McKee is hosting a public meeting on Monday, October 14, 2019, at the Central Center at Centennial Park, 1028 E 6th St, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74120, from 6 pm to 8 pm, to discuss the planned Elm Creek West stormwater detention pond. The City...
Hostile reaction to DOJ religious liberty task force
Today Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a press conference announcing the Justice Department's religious liberty task force. The summary of Sessions's statement provided on Good Morning America's Facebook page did not seem at all alarming -- in fact it seemed welcome and overdue: Sessions says the task force will "help...
Is Kevin Hern "deceptively liberal"?
Did Kevin Hern really give $17,000 to a PAC that donates to far-left Democrats? Here's the rest of the story.
David Rollo, RIP; memorial service Saturday, June 24, 2017
David Marshall Rollo, a leader in Tulsa choral music for over a half-century, a friend and mentor to many, passed away on April 25, 2017, at the age of 74, of complications from pneumonia. I was blessed to know David for 40 years as his student at Holland Hall, as...
Rick Steves needs to tour his own country "through the back door"
For many Americans, Rick Steves is the guru of European travel, specifically of an approach to travel he calls "through the back door" -- skipping the high-priced hotels, chain restaurants, and tourist traps which insulate you in an American bubble, and instead encountering authentic local culture, staying at B&Bs, hostels,...
GOP electors ought to pick someone besides Trump, but they won't
Republican presidential electors have been deluged with pleas to vote for someone other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is still unfit to be President of the United States (as is Hillary Clinton, as is Gary Johnson, each in their own way). I wish that, when the Electoral College meets tomorrow...
Oklahoma SQ 792: Alcohol sales
Oklahoma State Question 792 is a legislative referendum to amend the State Constitution. It would repeal almost all of Article XXVIII (all but the section that repealed article XXVII) and replace it with a new and much longer Article XXVIII A. Click the link to read the complete text of...
The fake REAL ID panic
UPDATE 2016/10/14: Oklahoma, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maine, and South Carolina have been reclassified as non-compliant and have been granted a grace period only until January 15, 2017. Alaska, California, Oregon, and Virginia have a limited extension until June 6, 2017, and American Samoa, Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Northern Marianas,...
Ted Cruz's 51% path to first-ballot nomination
UPDATED: Added a new tab to the spreadsheet to game out an alternative scenario: Cruz 45, Trump 40, Kasich 15 in remaining contests. Despite the near-sweep last night for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz still has a plausible path to arriving at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland with enough...
Jonathan Gruber? Never heard of him
Jonathan Gruber is the MIT economics professor, often called the "architect of Obamacare," who has said publicly that Obamacare's passage owed much to the "stupidity of the American people" and that its authors necessarily obfuscated the impacts on taxpayers in order to get the bill passed. "Lack of transparency is...
QuikTrip favorite convenience store chain, Wawa tops in coffee
Market Force Information polled over 5,000 consumers for a study of convenience store preferences. Tulsa-based QuikTrip had the highest "Composite Loyalty Score" at 79%, followed closely at 74% by Wawa, a 645-store chain founded 50 years ago in the Pennsylvania township of the same name and dominant in the mid-Atlantic...
Stanislawski recants National Popular Vote support
Oklahoma State Senator Gary Stanislawski (R-Tulsa) has issued a statement recanting his support for SB 906, and expressing regret for his vote for the bill that would add Oklahoma to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The last several years I have always been against the National Popular Vote. This...
Name that party: Randy Baldridge
A lurid story involving a disgraced former elected official is all over the local news. Randy Baldridge, who served as a Rogers County, Oklahoma, Commissioner, and then served a term in a federal penitentiary for "conspiracy, fraud and misapplication of funds by a local government official, mail fraud, money laundering,...
How integrated is Tulsa? A 2010 update
An interactive demographic map -- called the "Racial Dot Map" -- is making the rounds. The map is by Dustin A. Cable, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. Each dot on the map represents one person from the 2010 U. S. Census, located within the...
C. Everett Koop, RIP, father of the evangelical pro-life movement
Former U. S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop died Monday at the age of 96. Many of the headlines about his death have focused on his time as a member of President Reagan's cabinet and his breaks with conservative allies on government policies regarding tobacco and AIDS. Evangelicals of a...
Happy Gun Appreciation Day!
Yesterday was Gun Appreciation Day, with huge rallies at state capitols across the nation to remind officials that millions of Americans are determined to protect their right to keep and bear arms, a right with roots in the English Common Law long before the passage of the 2nd Amendment that...
Remembering 9/11 and the enemy that still hates us and our freedom
I don't remember exactly what I was doing this morning at 7:46 a.m. Central time, eleven years to the minute after Islamic radicals flew a large commercial jetliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, but I was probably scrambling to find a working copier to copy the...
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