Need a laugh? Try the Voters Pamphlet for the August primary

If you’re looking for some light summer reading, look no further than your mail. If you’re a registered voter, by now you’ve received the Voters’ Pamphlet for the Aug. 2 primary election.

It’s a wonderful day when the state of our democracy makes us chuckle, and the Voters’ Pamphlet definitely does.

Besides incumbent U. S. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, and her chief opponent Tiffany Smiley, a Republican, there are an additional 16 candidates for that office. That’s where the fun begins.

Among the 16 candidates’ priorities are:

• “annexing” Weyerhaeuser land to give away 250,000 off-the-grid homesteads;

• defending the Cuban revolution (he doesn’t say why, or from what);

• having the U. S. Congress meet in states by rotation (a bonanza of tourist revenue once every 50 years);

• not allowing tent cities inside city limits (rural residents will welcome them);

• reintroducing the Monarch butterfly in Washington (it’s still here);

• making C-SPAN more interesting (laugh tracks?);

• requiring politicians to wear body cameras (lobbyists too);

• a call for “equanimity in opportunity.”

And the candidates’ descriptions of their qualifications, personal attributes and reasons for running may make you fall off your chair. One claims he has “no vices.”

One lists “watching C-SPAN for 30 years” as professional experience. He’s the same one who wants C-SPAN to be more interesting. Maybe he can’t figure out how to use his remote.

Another lists having “read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” as elected experience. And then there’s the guy who says “from what I understand of the job, it is suited to a person of my caliber. . .” He calls for decriminalizing marijuana, so maybe he smoked too much of it and lost track of about a decade.

One celebrates that this is his 10th year of using the Voters’ Pamphlet to attract more people to his blog. Apparently the filing fee for public office is less than the cost of a conventional advertisement.

It’s oddly comforting to see that grassroots democracy can be so goofy, and that the ballot — and the Voters’ Pamphlet — offer anyone and everyone a public platform to vent, opine, and amuse.

Do we wish they were more experienced, more analytical or more serious? Maybe we should, but we are so in need of levity in our politics, we’re grateful for them just as they are.

When elephants fight, ants get trampled

For months, Thurston County has been in conflict with the Community Action Council of Lewis, Mason and Thurston Counties over its contracts to provide rental assistance and other housing-related services.

A new low in this feud was reached in June when the Community Action Council abruptly announced it would not continue to run two programs for very low income people: Rapid Re-housing and the Housing and Essential Needs Program.

Both of these programs are labor-intensive. They require case managers who work with vulnerable people to develop and implement housing plans, and manage the paperwork requirements and accountability measures that protect the programs’ integrity.

For clients, disrupting the processes to get or keep housing will make them homeless or keep them that way.

Overnight, CAC dumped responsibility for these clients onto county staff, who are now struggling to do the impossible while the county hunts for another organization to manage the programs.

On its Facebook page, the CAC explains that “the actions of Thurston County officials in recent months have demonstrated a misalignment of values — CAC puts the safety, security, and wellness of our clients first, providing services to our community with integrity, honesty, and ethics.”

But this doesn’t feel like CAC is putting their clients first.

We don’t know all that went on between the CAC and the County. Audits, feelings, and organizational cultures clearly clashed. But surely, mediation would have been a better path than this.

This story was originally published July 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.