The pathos of the Oakland Fire Department struggling with 30-year old equipment is indeed disconcerting. Oaklanders love their fire department, and would make almost any sacrifice to help it.

The laws concerning placing tax propositions on the ballot in California are complex. The original idea stemmed from California’s ballot proposition 13, in June, 1978, when voters approved establishing a 2/3 majority for tax increases. This, however, severely prevented jurisdictions from raising the property taxes they had long depended on, and so legislators immediately began looking for ways to get around Prop 13.

I am grateful to the voters of Oakland, who frequently vote for stupid things, for having the intelligence to reject Measure E. It used to be said that Oaklanders never saw a new tax they didn’t approve. Well, now they have. With 100% of votes counted, E went down by 46% to 54%. The radical redistributionists have been given a resounding punch in the gut. It was meant to hurt, and I hope it does.

Democrats are afraid of woke reaction syndrome. Over the last five years, public reaction against wokeism has grown so severe that most Democrats now claim to have seen nothing, heard nothing that could possibly connect them to it.

“Peak woke” is a phrase I hadn’t heard until James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for Senate, allegedly remarked that “Peak Woke got weird” in explaining why he backed off from woke’s more extreme utterances, such as “God is non-binary.”