I’d just about given up on football last season after the kneeling and sideline protests became the norm.
The analysts talked as much about who would or wouldn’t kneel, as who was playing, hurt, keys to the game, and all the other useless pre-game drama they talk about.
I never really understood all the pre-game blather and predictions either… I just liked watching the actual game.
But as football became more political, I found I just didn’t really care if I watched it anymore. I can get politics and drama 24-7. Football had been relief from that.
While some said player kneeling was none of the owner’s business — first amendment and all — I believe that while on the payroll and at work, it is their business. Every employer I worked for had some say in employees behavior while on the job (and in some cases off the job too) and the owner of a team who’s paying (and paying a lot) should too.
But for the most part they didn’t or didn’t try to and it hurt ratings.
So this year, the league created a new policy, requiring the player to either appear and stand appropriately on the sideline for the National Anthem, or stay in the locker room and kneel there if they want.
Hopefully this will end the pre-game drama and we can go back to simply watching the endless pre-game blather and the actual football game again.
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For years … literally lots of them, we managed to vote without a pre-paid ballot return envelope. And much if that time we were actually expected to go somewhere to vote.
But that was too hard I guess, plus eating cookies and donuts at the polling place wasn’t healthy.
So to make it easier, we went to all mail-in ballots. That way, a voter could sit at their kitchen table, read the voter’s pamphlet carefully, try to understand the legalese describing a ballot measure, and decide whether yes means no, or yes?
But now that’s not easy enough either. Apparently it’s the cost of a stamp that has voters not voting these days; it just too expensive to mail the ballot back, so the state wants to pay for that too.
Pretty soon just to make it even easier, they’ll just vote for us.
But this isn’t really about that, it’s about what constitutes an “emergency” in state government.
Secretary of State Wyman claims this issue is an emergency and wants a couple million dollars from the governor to pay the postage for the next election.
Because King County voted recently to pay for their ballots to be returned, (concluding a 47-cent stamp was just too much of a burden on their citizens) our Secretary of State has asked Governor “I can’t spend enough” Inslee to do the same as an emergency expenditure.
So this is what constitutes an “emergency” these days? No wonder 911 operators get a boat-load of non-emergency calls on their 911 lines.
We just finished a legislative session, and will go through another before you can say “grab your wallet” so why can’t this wait until then?
It should easily go through the normal hearings process; liberal spenders control all the levers of power in the state.
To be fair to Wyman, she tried to get King County to wait on passing their local pre-paid measure until the state could address the issue but they didn’t.
And she reasoned they might have an unfair advantage over smaller counties who can’t afford to pay return postage and their rates would suffer as a result.
But let’s be honest…regardless of how the return ballots are funded, King County and the region will always control the elections in our state. They already find bags of ballots in all the wrong places and count them anyway so regardless of the postage — what difference will this make?
Time will tell if the governor will grant the “emergency” request but I can comfortably predict the following; if it’s to his party’s advantage, he’ll find a way.
It sounds like to me like Secretary Wyman already knows the answer to that.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis, and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@yahoo.com.
