…idiots.

Don’t get me wrong, even as a singleton, I enjoy a nice, leisurely any Sunday morning waking up. Laying in bed, catching up on news, emails, social media, all the whatnots of life in 21st century America with the secure feeling one’s cozy nest provides.

Now, if only I could train this lil monster to get coffee refills.

Alas.

At least I have the environmental comfort of KINK’s Sunday morning programming – a program called Sunday Brunch – to deliver audible gems like Johnny Cash covering Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus – to offset the assault on intelligence our weekly rag delivered in its daily news brief this morning.

The aforementioned assault on our collective intelligence is linked at the top of this post. To recap for those of you savvy enough to not click on embedded links of a possibly insane distant blogger’s posts, Willamette Week does a video feature called Hot Mic where they send a local film student out to ask people on the streets a question to get a pulse on civic engagement. It can be anything from the Valentine’s Day question about Oregon’s birthday – which I bet my readers could guess using the meager context cues in this very sentence – to who is Oregon’s Governor, which yielded slightly terrifying results.

In an even worse demonstration of the illiteracy of our voting populace, our intrepid student on the streets took off to find out if Portlanders knew who the Oregon Secretary of State was is.

Ok, was.

You see, Willamette Week has a history of taking down politicians with its investigative reporting. Not just state level, either. City, county…school board. Doesn’t matter, it’s the story – and it’s what voters need to know. Not just about the candidates and politicians, either. It’s what they need to understand about the system itself.

In this case, last month, maybe late February, WW began reporting on a local weed company’s unpaid debts. The stakes were <ahem> high in this revelation, too, since they weren’t just stiffing plumbers or electricians, in an impressive display of Trumpian privilege. They were, of course. But they were also stiffing their vendors.

The most egregious offenses – and what initiated the reporting – was the taxes they weren’t paying: state business and weed taxes, federal income taxes, payroll taxes. The owners of the business had accumulated an impressive ~30 liens against them totaling around $7 million in debt.

All while also donating around $200k to political races and candidates during our last election cycle. Including holding two fundraisers for our newly elected and even more recently resigned Secretary of State.

As SOS, the job is to audit state and local agencies, including the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission – which was another, less terrifying Hot Mic demonstration of the general population’s ignorance, failing to define the agency’s acronym. However, ours had recused herself in February from the audit of the OLCC – there’s that acronym – because of the impropriety of a SOS who’d taken donations from the owners of the second largest weed business in the state overseeing that audit.

Seems legit, right? Like, the audit needs to be done, but farm it out to ensure it’s impartial.

Here’s the rub, though, she recused herself a week after the audit was completed. It was a year-long audit. We only found out about the recusal a month later when it was released.

Then we found out – thanks to WW – that the SOS had put the donors in touch with the auditors and had helped define the scope of the audit.

A hot minute later, we found out that WW had received an anonymous tip – gotta love those! – that the SOS had also taken a freelance job for one of this company’s affiliate businesses for a base of $10k/month. That’s more than the monthly SOS salary…not to mention the $30k bonus for additional licenses this business received thanks to the efforts of the SOS.

72 hours after that disclosure, our Secretary of State had orphaned us by resigning.

Crazy shit.

I imagine the story likely earned national coverage – and will probably earn the paper another Pulitzer for investigative journalism – to the point where even someone in Appalachia country could name our Secretary of State. Even if that person might also call one of their cousins “pa”.

She’s Shemia Fagan.

Ok, I overstated their mission earlier. They just sent this film student out to see if people could pronounce her damn name. Surprised, they were, to find out people couldn’t name her at all.

Like I said at the top…idiots.

And they vote.

At least I can take comfort in my assumption that all Stupid Americans are created equal when it comes to elections. At least our ignorant liberal voters are casting their ballots with a sense of social responsibility closer to what Jesus would counsel than their (at best) equally ignorant conservative counterparts in the party of the Religious Right, Christian Nationalists, Proud Boys, Promise Keepers, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

And…with that, I should probably complete my unrelated special election ballot now.

Shemia fucking Fagan…<sigh>.