Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

The CBS News analysis of the 2022 elections still have the GOP picking up the House, but by a narrower margin than ever, just 10 seats.

The Republicans have a lead. But it keeps shrinking.

While they're still in a very good position to capture a House majority, that majority looks narrower today than it ever has, having ticked down for the second straight month to 223 seats in our model estimate. Republicans were at 226 in August and 230 in July.

Voters are engaged because they think the stakes are so high — for many, bigger than just affecting their pocketbooks.

Two-thirds of voters feel their rights and freedoms are very much at stake in this election — more so even than say their financial well being is.

And each side feels if the opposition gained control of Congress, people like them would have fewer rights and freedoms than they do now.

Voters believe by two to one that a Republican Congress would lead to women getting fewer rights and freedoms than they have now, rather than more rights.

By more than four to one, if Republicans win, voters think any change in rights for LGBTQ people would see them getting fewer rights, not more.

Voters feel that on balance, men and people of faith are more apt to gain rights rather than lose them if Republicans win — but many also feel things would stay the same.

Democrats' lead on the abortion issue is a little bigger now, while Republicans haven't grown their support among voters prioritizing the economy since last month.

Republicans have the same lead they did in August among voters who say the economy and inflation are "very important" to their vote.

Democrats now have a slightly larger lead among those saying abortion is very important than they did in August.

Why? One possible reason: people who say abortion is very important to their vote tend to think Democrats are talking about the issue — more so than other topics. That may be satisfying their need to hear about it.

 

The main differences between the parties right now are that Republicans don't see civil rights as rights, whereas Democrats do. Republicans feel that women's rights to their own bodies and LGBTQ+ rights somehow infringe upon their freedom, and must be ended. They feel the same way about anti-discrimination rights for Black and brown and Asian folk, as well as adherents of the Jewish and Muslim faiths.

Civil rights are a positive addition for Democrats, and they are a negative subtraction for Republicans.

That's really the core of it.

Pick a side.

Sunday Long Read: A Zodiac Thriller

This week's Sunday Long Read is Aaron Gell's tale in LA Magazine about the 53-year-old Zodiac Killer mystery, with a dogged amateur sleuth's evidence pointing to a new suspect, and the woman who discovered her father may not have been the man she thought he was.

 

The Hawaiian rainforest where Gloria Doerr has lived since 2017 is a sort of magnet, she says, for people who are running away from something. But even there, in the shadow of an active volcano, sometimes things catch up with you.

For Doerr, 70, it happened this past April. She was spending a tranquil afternoon at home when she learned that her late father, Paul Alfred Doerr, had been linked to one of the most notorious murder sprees of the twentieth century. Her son had stumbled on a podcast interview with Paul’s accuser, Jarett Kobek. An internationally best-selling novelist based in Los Angeles, Kobek had written a whole book, How to Find Zodiac, about how her Dad might just have been the maniac who more than fifty years earlier had terrorized the Bay Area with a string of cold-blooded and seemingly random killings.

By the time she’d finished listening to the podcast, Doerr, a retired real estate agent, was in shock. If this writer had only bothered to pick up the phone and call her before lodging his accusation, she would happily have told him that her father, who died of a heart attack in 2007, while far from perfect, to put it mildly, could be a charming, quirky, and voraciously curious man—a member of Mensa and an early proponent of organic foods.

In the following days, Gloria mentioned the situation to a few close friends, who thought she might have a libel case. She even reached out to an attorney. Though she was reluctant to pay $17.95 for the book, a friend ordered her a copy.

Paul Doerr is hardly the only suspect in the case—far from it. Among the rogue’s gallery of other presumptive Zodiacs are a house painter, a former schoolteacher, a sports car dealer, a theater operator, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. “There are probably 50 or 100 suspects named every year,” sighs Richard Grinell, the former postman who runs the website Zodiac Ciphers and has been following the case for a decade. In October, a self-described “national task force of seasoned investigators” called the Case Breakers pointed to a brand new Zodiac suspect. Their theory was quickly debunked, but not before Fox News picked up the story, leading to hundreds of credulous media reports.

Gloria’s father, in other words, was in good company.

The killer, who is linked to a series of late-1960s attacks in the Bay Area, employed a shifting MO: Often he shot his victims, but on one especially macabre occasion, clad in an executioner’s hood, he tied them up and used a knife. Though he mostly attacked young couples around Vallejo, he also murdered a cab driver in San Francisco. Officially, he is believed to have killed just five and severely injured two, but his modest body count has been far outstripped by his well-tended mystique, bolstered by a sinister handle and a practice of firing off letters to the media and other authorities, often including mysterious ciphers and signed with a crosshairs logo.

Perhaps his greatest cultural contribution, if one can call it that, is having popularized a tone of smug superiority that attention-hungry outcasts, both fictional and real—from Hannibal Lecter and the Riddler to the aforementioned Ted Kaczynski and a substantial subset of 4Chan dwellers—have sought to emulate ever since. Meanwhile, his cryptic puzzles brought a seductive element of interactivity to crime-solving (a married couple decoded his first cipher over breakfast in 1969) and prefigured the citizen-sleuth movement along with its twisted progeny, 9/11 trutherism and QAnon. That might explain why his modest murder spree managed to inspire so much media coverage, including documentaries, a David Fincher film, a bottomless podcast playlist, an array of websites and forums, and enough paperbacks to stock a small, very grisly library.

And now, a new book had been added to the shelf, and Gloria’s father was the main character.

 

Gell covers the tale of how Jared Kobek and Gloria Doerr met and a lot more. It's a solid true crime read.

And maybe a mystery solved at last.