League of Woodstock Hippies Hosts ‘Nonpartisan’ Forum Where Candidates Promise to Fix California by Doing the Exact Same Stupid Stuff

Greetings, Sierra Thread comrades! Your old pal Rusty Dankbud here, fresh off a long trip to Amsterdam, chiefing a bowl of something so dank it could make Nancy Pelosi do the Macarena. Last week those patchouli-soaked, tie-dye-wearing Bay Area hippies who’ve been “nonpartisan” since the Summer of Love, known as the Nevada County League of Women Voters, dragged seven congressional hopefuls into the Eric Rood Administrative Building for what they called a “forum.”

Bay Area Hippies Pretend To Be Neutral

A room full of graying flower children in Birkenstocks and faded “Coexist” bumper-sticker vibes, still convinced that if we just pass one more resolution and burn enough sage, the government will finally deliver utopia. These are the same folks who spent the ’60s dropping acid and now drop tax increases like it’s free love at a Haight-Ashbury drum circle. If the League ran a dispensary, they’d call every strain “Equity Blend,” charge you a 400% “social justice surcharge,” and lecture you about “harm reduction” while the product still doesn’t work. Voter education? More like Voter Lobotomy with a side of organic kale chips and mandatory wealth redistribution. Comrades, these Bay Area relics are so committed to neutrality they’d hand out participation trophies at a knife fight and call it “lively civic engagement.”

Hall & Bera Get Absolutely Baked on Failed Ideas

And what a cosmic joke! Heidi Hall and Ami Bera floated in higher than a kite on three decades of federal-grade progressive ditch weed—Medicare for All, wealth taxes, green mandates, universal childcare, reinsurance blah-blah, the whole tie-dyed rainbow of recycled failure. These two were so baked on government expansion they were seeing “free stuff” unicorns prancing across the ceiling while the rest of us choke on the contact high. Meanwhile, Robb Tucker sat there like the only sober guy at a Grateful Dead concert—the lone voice of actual, no-kidding common sense, boots on the ground, eyes clear as a Sierra morning, reminding everyone that gravity still exists even when the whole room is spinning on purple haze and bad policy.

Healthcare: More Government = Magical Healing, Apparently

Hall, the self-anointed climate queen who spent thirty years at the EPA (the agency that’s been “protecting” forests by turning them into Roman candles), blazed straight into “Medicare for All on day one!” She swore it’ll magically slash prices while she funnels your tax dollars to rural hospitals hanging by a thread thinner than Jerry Garcia’s last guitar string. Bera, not to be outdone, rolled up his “basic policy for every age” like it was a fresh pre-roll—preventive care, yank the profit out, federal blunt-force trauma for all! Comrades, we’ve been smoking this exact peace pipe since Obamacare was just a twinkle in Biden’s aviators. Record spending, flat outcomes, sustainability circling the drain like a half-burnt roach at Woodstock ’99. California already spends more per kid on schools than anywhere and gets test scores lower than my motivation after a three-day autumn weed harvest. But sure, let’s expand the bankrupt-and-baked system because “profit” is the villain, not the red-tape monster Hall and Bera keep feeding like it’s their emotional support goldfish. Tucker looked ’em dead in the eye and said, “Folks, this is chronic failure, not chronic relief.” The Bay Area hippies nearly dropped their dream catchers.

Economy: Tax The Rich, Watch Everyone Flee

Then came the economy hit, bro. Hall wants to repeal the “billionaires tax cut” (whatever that mythical creature is this week) and slap on a wealth tax so she can sprinkle fairy dust on “working people” and universal childcare. Bera laser-focused on “the basics—food, shelter, gas!” like he just invented breathing while the rest of us float away on California’s cost-of-living cumulus cloud. We’ve tried this trip before: Prop 30, cap-and-trade, endless regs. Result? Highest gas prices, worst affordability, homelessness crisis that laughs at every billion we throw at it like it’s a bad acid trip. Tucker, still clear-eyed and unflinching, brought it back to earth. More spending doesn’t fix outcomes; it just grows the blob bigger than my backyard grow tent. Schools? Highest per-pupil spending in the nation, results in the toilet. Yet Hall and Bera keep hitting replay until the middle class ghosts us for Texas or Ohio faster than you can say “contact high.”

Environment: Save The Planet by Burning It Down

Environment time—same hazy playlist on endless loop. Hall wants us off fossil fuels yesterday—solar, wind, electric everything—while “investing” in forest management that somehow never happens under the same crew that’s been torching the Sierra since the first Woodstock. Bera bragged about the Inflation Reduction Act (the one Trump impounded like yesterday’s roach) and a mix of small hydro, nuclear (not ready), geothermal, and EVs. Tucker reminded everyone that energy is national security. We could be self-sufficient in food and fuel—the only country that can—but instead we’re hamstringing ourselves with green mandates while the forests burn because actual thinning got sacrificed on the altar of environmental theater. Wildfire insurance? Not fixed by reinsurance markets. Fixed by logging and management—the stuff Hall’s own agencies have blocked since forever.

Housing, education, wildfires—everywhere you look, Hall and Bera are rolling out expansions of the same soggy, moldy playbook: more “investment,” more mandates, more bureaucracy baked right into the atomic hash brownie. Tucker kept it real: cut the waste, focus on outcomes, stop pretending another government blunt will solve problems we created ourselves. No unicorns, no free lunch, just efficiency and accountability so regular folks can live here without selling a kidney for rent.

Look, I’m just a scruffy legend from the Ridge, tending my medicinal herb patch with Sir Clucks-a-Lot on guard duty. But even I can see Hall and Bera aren’t offering ideas—they’re selling the same purple-haze fever dream that turned California into the most expensive, least functional tent-city circus in the union. Robb Tucker was the only grown-up in that room, talking numbers instead of fundraising fairy tales, while the League of Bay Area Hippies played Summer of Love hostess like the apocalypse was just another polite disagreement over who brought the better kombucha.

Nevada County deserves better than this contact-high comedy hour. Until next time, Sierra Thread. Rusty out. puff puff pass

[Rusty Dankbud’s my name, puffing out parody—every word’s a silly puff of fun!]