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February 13, 2024, Oklahoma school primary
ELECTION RESULTS: Tulsa County school district bond issues all passed by a wide margin, each proposition exceeding 80% in favor. School bond issues fell short of the 60% threshold in Canute, Krebs, Silo, and Tupelo. In Boswell, Tuttle, and Weleetka school districts, a majority of voters voted against the bond...
No on SQ 820 marijuana: More voices
More commentary opposed to SQ 820, on the ballot this Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (My earlier SQ 820 blog post covers campaign finances, the actual text of the proposition, and more voices against the proposition.) Twitter user Chels (@ChesterTweet) has a link-rich thread "explaining why every Oklahoman should vote...
Oklahoma SQ 805: Lighter sentences for career criminals
Oklahoma State Question 805 would insert a new article into the Oklahoma Constitution to ban longer sentences for repeat felony offenders. The question arises from an initiative petition. (UPDATE: On October 30, 2020, I spoke with Jeremie Poplin, filling in for Pat Campbell on Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ, about both...
Tulsa Election 2020: Ty Walker for Mayor
What looked like a sleepy re-election run, for Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum IV as recently as the beginning of May, with one declared opponent and a perennial candidate in jail, turned into a free-for-all. As soon as he had some tough decisions to make, the smiley guy that everyone...
Tulsa Election 2020, District 4: Kathryn Lyons questionnaire
Back on August 12, I sent the three eligible candidates for City Council District 4 a questionnaire using the email addresses provided in their declarations of candidacy or on their websites. The questionnaire included the 18 questions I asked the mayoral candidates, plus a question about neighborhood conservation districts and...
Tulsa Election 2020: Mayoral candidate questionnaire
Last Wednesday, BatesLine sent a questionnaire to the six serious candidates for Mayor of Tulsa, using the email addresses provided in their declarations of candidacy or on their websites. We sent two reminders. We received replies from three candidates: Craig Immel, Ken Reddick, and Ty Walker. The survey consists of...
2020 Oklahoma Retail Theft Survey
The Oklahoma Retail Crime Association issued its annual retail theft survey today, noting "massive spikes in both the numbers of losses due to theft and the amounts taken" for Oklahoma retailers. Already hard-hit by the growth of online sales and the (hopefully temporary) impact of coronavirus, retailers don't need...
Is SQ 780 enabling your neighborhood thief?
In 2016, Oklahoma voters approved SQ 780, which extensively amended the criminal code to reclassify some felonies as misdemeanors and to eliminate stricter penalties for repeat offenders for certain crimes. Earlier in 2016, the Legislature had made changes to the criminal code with the same aim -- control costs by...
Oklahoma 2016 judicial retention
Two State Supreme Court justices, two judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals, and three judges on the Court of Civil Appeals are before the voters for retention. If any of the judges get more no votes than yes votes, he or she will be out of office, and a...
SQ 780 & 781: Kunzweiler vs. Steele
Recently on Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ, Pat Campbell hosted a discussion on Oklahoma State Questions 780 and 781 with former State House Speaker Kris Steele, a proponent of the propositions, and Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler, who opposes them. The more I listened to Steele's arguments in favor, the...
2016 Oklahoma state question summary
For your convenience, here is a summary of my recommendations for the seven state questions on the 2016 Oklahoma general election ballot. The descriptions are not meant to make my entire argument in three words; they simply serve as a reminder of the topic of the question. The right-hand...
Oklahoma SQ 781: County Community Safety Investment Fund
Oklahoma SQ 781 is a companion to SQ 780, proposed by the same people. It will not go into effect unless SQ 780 is passed. Like SQ 780, SQ 781 is statutory. The proposal creates new law in Title 57. It establishes a revolving fund called the County Community Safety...
Oklahoma SQ 780: Decriminalization of drug possession
UPDATED 2016/11/02: Having completed my analysis of all 23 sections of the SQ 780 legislation, I have revised the introductory text below to provide a better summary of the effect of passing the state question. Oklahoma State Question 780 began life as an initiative petition. Unlike most state questions, its...
Election 2014: Random thoughts
Dear James Lankford, your scaremongering about a runoff to raise money is shameful. Unless the nominee is caught in a Minneapolis airport restroom with a wide stance, there is no way the GOP will lose Tom Coburn's seat. Your November opponent will either be a very liberal pro-abortion state senator...
Wendy Davis myths busted by Dallas paper
Interesting story in the Dallas Morning News, examining the reality behind the claims Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis has made about the challenges she has faced in life. Davis, a statuesque blonde nicknamed "Abortion Barbie" for her filibuster defending the abortion industry against a bill protecting women's health, is a...
Iowa caucuses: In defense of "arcane rules"
BatesLine photo of a front porch with bunting in Clear Lake, Iowa, September, 2008 Smitty at The Other McCain links to a Buzzfeed story about Ron Paul's strategy to dominate caucus states: Paul is following the roadmap set by Barack Obama's 2008 strategy: Start early, learn the rules, and...
2011 Oklahoma Republican Convention tweets and retweets
Technical note: Copying and pasting tweets into this post was a very frustrating and time-consuming process. In the end, I had to paste the HTML into an Emacs buffer, use a series of regex replacements to clean the text up enough so everything would post without messing up everything else...
CAIR's sharia lawsuit and Miles-LaGrange's injunction
Federal Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange, a Clinton appointee to the Western District of Oklahoma and former Democrat legislator from Oklahoma City, blocked the Oklahoma State Election Board from certifying the landslide passage of SQ 755. SQ 755 forbids Oklahoma courts from looking to "the legal precepts of other nations or cultures....
Links elsewhere 2010/08/01
Busy weekend -- no time to do much more than to pass along some interesting links: Ace of Spades HQ: Hoyer: Expiration of Bush Tax Cuts = "Republican Tax Increase": The House Majority (not for long) Leader tries to sell the idea that its the Republicans' fault that their tax...
Money Belt is mega-wet
It's always interesting to see the Money Belt make an appearance in unexpected ways. The latest manifestation is in a map of water usage by neighborhood generated by the Tulsa World from city utility records. The neighborhoods with heaviest usage -- an average of 125,000 gallons per year and up...
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