SQ 845 is a half-measure, but this half-measure is better than none. The Oklahoma Constitution grants a formal role to the Oklahoma Bar Association, a left-leaning private cartel, in filtering appellate court nominees in Oklahoma, unelected and unaccountable figures restricting the choices available to the duly elected governor. State Question 845, one of two statewide referenda on the Oklahoma November 3, 2026, general election ballot, doesn't eliminate that filter or the cartel's involvement, but it does make it possible for conservative lawyers to be involved in the nomination process, something effectively impossible under current law. SQ 845 would make minor changes to the membership of the board that provides the governor with his options for filling judicial vacancies. It would not correct two very big problems with the judicial nominating process and the private, left-wing organization embedded in that process. SQ 845 was proposed by the legislature as HJR 1024. (I discussed the problems with the current judicial nomination process in this 2024 article in support of reform.) On July 11, 1967, Oklahoma voters narrowly approved SQ 447, which added a new Article 7B to the Oklahoma Constitution, completely revamping the method of selecting appellate judges, creating a Judicial Nominating Commission (JNC) to nominate appointees for the Court of Civil Appeals, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court and to fill vacancies in District Courts between elections. (The vote was Yes 86,183, 52.1%; No 79,280, 47.9%) This was a reaction to the 1965 revelation that multiple Oklahoma Supreme Court justices had received bribes over more than two decades. In 2010, voters approved SQ 752 (Yes 606,805, 62.8%; No 358,925, 37.2%), which tweaked the composition of the JNC to include two additional non-lawyer, at-large members and to ban relatives of attorneys from serving in the "lay member" seats on the JNC. The "professionalization" of the judiciary replaced partisan direct election of appellate judges and justices with appointments made through a complex process involving the Oklahoma Bar Association, even though none of the reforms directly addressed the causes of the scandal. A commission, composed of non-lawyers appointed by the Governor and lawyers appointed by the Oklahoma Bar Association, chooses three nominees to place before the Governor, who may appoint one of those three. The voters don't get to weigh in on the new appellate judge or justice until the next general election, when they have an up-or-down vote to retain or dismiss the new judge. (District and Associate District Judge appointees serve until the next judicial election, when they file and run as normal and may face opponents.) Voters have voted against retention only once, dismissing Supreme Court Justice Yvonne Kauger in the 2024 election. Here is the text of Article VII-B, Section 3, as it would be amended by SQ 845, with additions shown as underlined text and deletions as strikethrough:

Section 3. (a) There is established as a part of the Judicial Department a Judicial Nominating Commission of fifteen (15) members, to consist of: (1) six members to be appointed by the Governor, which shall include at least one from each congressional district established by the Statutes of Oklahoma and existing at the date of the adoption of this Article, none of whom shall be admitted to practice law in the State of Oklahoma or have any immediate family member who has been admitted to the practice of law in the State of Oklahoma or any other state as such congressional districts exist as of the date of the appointment. Each member appointed pursuant to the provisions of this paragraph shall serve a term of six (6) years; (2) six members, which shall include at least one from each congressional district established by the Statutes of Oklahoma and existing at the date of the adoption of this Article as such congressional districts exist as of the date of the selection who are, however, members of the Oklahoma Bar Association and who have been elected by the other active members of their district under procedures adopted by the Board of Governors of the Oklahoma Bar Association, until changed by statute. Each member appointed pursuant to the provisions of this paragraph shall serve a term of six (6) years; and (3) three members at large who shall not have been admitted to the practice of law in the State of Oklahoma or any other state or have any immediate family member who has been admitted to the practice of law in the State of Oklahoma or any other state but who each of whom shall be a resident of the State of Oklahoma, one to be selected by not less than eight members of the Nominating Commission. In the event eight members of the Commission cannot agree upon the member at large within thirty (30) days of the initial organization of the Commission or within thirty (30) days of a vacancy in the member at large position, the Governor shall make the appointment of the member at large; one to be selected by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate; and one to be selected by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. No more than two members at large shall belong to any one political party. Each member appointed pursuant to the provisions of this paragraph shall serve a term of two (2) years. (b) The Commission shall elect one of its members to serve as chair for a term of one (1) year. (c) The six lay members of the Commission who are appointed by the Governor shall be appointed within ninety (90) days from the date that this Article becomes effective. Two members shall be appointed for a term of two (2) years, two members for a term of four (4) years, and two members for a term of six (6) years. The Oklahoma Bar Association shall hold its election and certify to the Secretary of State its members within ninety (90) days from the effective date of this Article, two of whom shall be elected for a term of two (2) years, two for a term of four (4) years, and two for a term of six (6) years. Thereafter all All of the members of the Commission, whether elected or appointed, shall serve for a term of six (6) years, except that the member at large shall serve for a term of two (2) years. (b) (d) Vacancies arising during the term of any lay commissioner, other than the member at large, shall be filled by appointment by the Governor for the remainder of his or her term. Vacancies of any lawyer commissioner in positions elected pursuant to the procedures established by the Oklahoma Bar Association shall be filled by the Board of Governors of the Oklahoma Bar Association for the remainder of his or her the applicable term. (c) (e) In the event of vacancy in any of the member at large position positions, the said vacancy shall be filled in the same manner as the original selection. (d) Of those Commissioners named by the Governor, not more than three shall belong to any one political party. (e) (f) The concurrence of the majority of Commissioners in office at the time shall be sufficient to decide any question, unless otherwise provided herein. The Commission shall have jurisdiction to determine whether the qualifications of nominees to hold Judicial Office have been met and to determine the existence of vacancies on the Commission. (f) (g) No Commissioner, while a member of the Commission, shall hold any other public office by election or appointment or any official position in a political party and he or she shall not be eligible, while a member of the Commission and for five (5) years thereafter, for nomination as a Judicial Officer. (g) (h) Commissioners shall serve without compensation but the Legislature shall provide funds to reimburse them for their necessary travel and lodging expenses while performing their duties as such Commissioners. (h) No Commissioner shall be permitted to succeed himself or herself serve more than twelve (12) consecutive years, whether elected or appointed. (i) As used herein, the words "Oklahoma Bar Association" shall include any successor thereof and any future form of the organized Bar of this state. (j) The modifications to the provisions of this section pursuant to Enrolled House Joint Resolution No. 1024 of the 2nd Session of the 60th Oklahoma Legislature shall be applicable to any position on the Judicial Nominating Commission that ends by expiration of the term of office or by vacancy.

The gist that will appear on the ballot:

This measure amends Section 3 of Article 7-B of the Oklahoma Constitution. It changes provisions related to the Judicial Nominating Commission. It updates references so appointments made by certain persons based on the congressional districts would be made using the current congressional districts instead of the districts as the districts were constituted when this section of the Constitution was originally adopted in 1967. It removes a prohibition on certain members of the Commission so that the person could be a licensed attorney. It allows a person to serve on the Commission even if they have a member of their family who is a licensed attorney. It changes the terms so that with the exception of at-large members, the term would be for six (6) years. The at-large members would serve a two-year term. It removes restrictions based on political party membership. It removes a provision that prohibits a Commission member from succeeding himself or herself on the Commission. It provides that the changes in the way people are appointed or selected for membership on the Judicial Nominating Commission will apply to positions as they become vacant because an existing term of office expires or because of a vacancy.

The big win here is that our conservative governor will be able to appoint six conservative attorneys to serve on the JNC. Currently, the Governor has to split his precious appointments between Republicans and non-Republicans, and they all have to be non-attorneys and unrelated to any attorneys. If you assume that the liberal OBA membership will choose liberals for their six slots, and that the consensus choices for the at-large seats are unlikely to be conservatives, the best we can hope for are 3 conservatives amongst 15 JNC members. Although only six of the 15 members of the JNC are lawyers, it's easy to imagine that they would dominate the deliberations over the lay members of the commission. You may argue that law and the courts shouldn't be ideological, and I wish that could be so, but the leftist Long March through the Institutions has infected the legal profession and the judiciary in the form of Critical Legal Studies and judicial activism. To illustrate the absurdity of the situation: Former Attorney General John O'Connor would be someone I would trust to vet nominees from both a conservative legal perspective and the perspective of good judgment and judicial temperament. (I had the privilege of working closely with John during my six years of service, now concluded, on the Tulsa Classical Academy board, where John serves as the school's counsel.) Under current laws, John O'Connor would never be appointed to the JNC: The left-leaning OBA would not appoint a conservative, and the governor's nominees are not allowed to be attorneys. One more win in SQ 845 is that the process will no longer use 1967 congressional district boundaries to ensure geographical balance. Oklahoma hasn't had six congressional districts since the 2000 census, and the population has shifted substantially toward the metro areas in the intervening 59 years. Two years ago, there was a better approach to judicial nomination reform up for debate. SJR 34 (2024) would have replaced the JNC with an analogue of the system we use at the Federal level: Nomination by the Governor with the advice and consent of the State Senate and State House. That would put the process entirely in the hands of people who are directly accountable to the voters. Sadly, House RINOs linked arms with House Democrats to defeat SJR 34 by a vote of 36-60. Ultimately, conservative Oklahomans need to remove liberal private cartels like the Oklahoma Bar Association from any role as gatekeepers to the legal profession. We need JNC removal, but for now, the best we can do is JNC reform, this minor improvement to the commission's composition which should allow for stronger conservative voices in the room when the qualifications of judicial candidates are being debated. SQ 845 is worth a YES vote. MORE: OCPA offers a summary of SQ 845 and SQ 847.
- October 6, 2026 at 10:25PM
YES on SQ 845: Judicial Nominating Commission reform
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BBC Radio 4's long wave (LW) service, which reaches the British Isles and much of northern Europe from a 500,000 Watt transmitter on 198 kHz (and two supplemental 50 kW transmitters in Scotland), was discontinued earlier this year, on June 27, 2026. Radio 4 is the BBC's spoken-word service, which features news, literature, drama, and comedy. It may be the only station in the world that still produces content for the Theater of the Mind. The end of LW radio had been anticipated for many years. The massive vacuum tubes (called glass valves in the UK) required for broadcasting at this power and frequency have not been manufactured for decades; only a few remain. The difficulty and cost of manufacturing new tubes or building a new transmitter from scratch coupled with a shift of listeners to other mediums combine to make the case for switching off.

A handful of specially crafted glass valves each measuring one metre high are all that is stopping the historic home of Test Match Special, Yesterday in Parliament and the Daily Service going suddenly and permanently off air. BBC Radio 4 long wave, which transmits on the 198 kilohertz frequency, relies on ageing transmitter equipment that uses a pair of the valves - no longer manufactured - to function. The valves, at Droitwich in Worcestershire, are so rare that engineers say there are fewer than 10 in the world, and the BBC has been forced to buy up the entire global supply. Each lasts anywhere between one and 10 years, and when one of the last two blows the service will go quiet.

When they say long wave, they mean it. The wave length of a 198 kHz signal is 1515 meters, or just shy of a mile. By comparison, the signal of KRMG's FM signal at 96.5 MHz is 3.1 meters. (Divide the speed of light in meters per second -- about 300,000,000 -- by frequency in Hertz to get wavelength in meters.) Most UK listeners hear Radio 4 these days on FM or on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), both of which use frequencies in the VHF band and are therefore line-of-sight. There are 443 DAB transmitters across Britain. BBC multiplexes its national radio stations on 225.648 MHz. Rather than tuning a frequency, the listener chooses a station from a menu. A significant audience now listens via the BBC Sounds app, receiving the signal as mobile phone data. Nevertheless, the long-wave transmitter reached audiences well beyond the reach of mobile phone towers and VHF signals. Oil platforms, freighters, and fishermen in the North Sea could hear the Shipping Forecast loud and clear over long wave from Droitwich. British expats and English-language learners across Europe could pick up the signal as well. In 2019, Richard Mudhar wrote of the value of AM radio during his hikes in remote parts of Wales, near Mt. Snowdon:

Since longwave and medium-wave coverage is almost universal in the UK, it can be heard by anyone anywhere. There are still regions where other types of radio broadcast cannot reach, making it an important lifeline. AM radio doesn't require an internet connection or 'phone signal, both of which can be unreliable. It can even be used by fisherman across the waters surrounding the British Isles to get all-important updates via the Shipping Forecast. In times of local power cuts, national crises and internet outages, AM radio remains resolute where other options fail. It is therefore a vital lifeline to bring news during crises.

198 kHz served other purposes. Millions of home electric meters listened for the daily signals to switch between low and high tariff rates, and appliances could listen to switch on and off to take advantage of the lower raes. Nuclear submarines could receive the signal without surfacing and thus could confirm that the UK had not been destroyed by a Soviet first-strike:

Because long-wave signals can penetrate seawater to a depth of several meters, Vanguard-class submarine commanders would regularly tune into the Today program on Radio 4 to make sure the country was still there. If the BBC and regular military channels went dead for more than 48 hours, the sub commander was authorized to open their sealed "Letters of Last Resort" from the Prime Minister.

Supporters of retaining (and now, reinstating) LW service argue that the technology is energy-efficient and inclusive:

Longwave's unique feature is its ability to travel large distances, owing to the size of the radio waves that it broadcasts. That means that a single transmitter can be used to serve an entire country and beyond - a remarkably efficient way to broadcast. This makes it the medium of choice for a climate-conscious age. Medium-wave cannot travel so far, and so requires more transmitters, but is still much more efficient than FM and DAB in this regard. To get the same coverage requires 100s of digital radio (DAB) or FM transmitters, which means a much greater cost of materials and energy required to make those broadcasts. AM (LW and MW) receivers use a fraction of the energy used by smartphones, computers, smart speakers and many DAB radios to receive the same programme. Since longwave and medium-wave coverage is almost universal in the UK, it can be heard by anyone anywhere. There are still regions where other types of radio broadcast cannot reach, making it an important lifeline. AM radio doesn't require an internet connection or 'phone signal, both of which can be unreliable. It can even be used by fisherman across the waters surrounding the British Isles to get all-important updates via the Shipping Forecast. In times of local power cuts, national crises and internet outages, AM radio remains resolute where other options fail. It is therefore a vital lifeline to bring news during crises.

The same groups are pushing to keep the BBC's remaining medium-wave (MW) transmitters on the air. 693 and 909 kHz broadcast BBC 5 Live, a talk-format station. The magic of analog radio is that it doesn't require CPUs or specialized software or chips to encode, multiplex, demultiplex, and decode the signal. A simple, unpowered, crystal radio could pick up the long-wave signal and convert it back to sound waves. This is another example of Bates's Law of Creeping Technoslavery: A simple and robust technology is displaced by a more convenient but also more fragile system, to the point that it is no longer deemed cost-efficient to maintain the hardier fallback. The handful of users and use cases who aren't served by the new technology are lost in the transition. Hillwalker Richard Mudhar expresses the problem concisely -- "driv[ing] innovation forward [while] driv[ing] resilience out":

More widely, market forces drive innovation forward but they also drive resilience out, concentrating things towards using the Internet for information delivery. I do wonder how well we would recover from a modern-day Carrington event, needing to black start a damaged Internet with a lot of satellite communications fried and limited power.

In the face of ridicule from know-nothings, the US House of Representatives did the right thing in passing the AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act last month. (Mandating NOAA weather radio would be another step forward.) The ubiquity of receivers makes it more reasonable for AM broadcasts to continue. Congress could do even better if they ensured that disused signals are available for members of the public to acquire for use. Clearing the former clear-channel frequencies for high-powered regional signals would be another favor to listeners in remote areas. MORE: Some good comments on Richard Mudhar's essay and on Digital Spy about AM radio generally and LW in particular. One commenter mentions listening to NFL games in the UK over US Armed Forces Radio, broadcast on AM transmitters in West Germany during the Cold War. Those stations were taken off air in 2013 and the antenna masts demolished in 2015. Another commenter worries: "lf the internet were to go down due to war or other catastrophic events, we'd all be in the dark. No option to turn on a radio and keep in touch." The Valve Museum has photos and diagrams of the earlier generation of glass valves used for LW transmission.
- October 6, 2026 at 12:01PM
BBC long-wave radio service goes dark after 102 years
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A friend recently posted a photo showing a large and longstanding pothole, aka chuckhole, aka chughole, that had been declared Lake DOT, with waterfront property for sale: It's almost certainly an AI-enhanced photo, but it's funny, and it reminded me of the real-world, light-hearted things KOTV (Tulsa channel 6) would put in and around chugholes in the 1970s to dramatize the terrible state of Tulsa streets. Back in 2012, when KOTV was moving from the 3rd and Frankfort farm equipment showroom it had been occupying since 1949 to the new Griffin Media HQ, the station posted a lot of video from their video archives. This web article features 13 different examples of KOTV's long-running "Chughole of the Week" series, a regular feature on mid-1970s Friday night news broadcasts:

Time to take a peek into the video vault, back to the mid 1970s. Back then, viewers consistently called and complained about the condition of the streets, so we developed a Friday feature called "Chughole of the Week. Viewers nominated them, then one was selected to be featured on Friday. Reporters could be as creative as they wanted to be, so they took the opportunity to relax a bit, and have a little fun.... There was another chughole in April of 1975 they called the Academy-award winning chughole. They awarded a trophy - actually a basketball trophy, but you get the idea. From Christmas Day of 1975, the Chughole of the Week came complete with wrapped gifts for "driving through a chughole wonderland." Told you reporters could let their creative imaginations run free. Rex Daugherty was the face of chughole of the week lots of times. One week he interviewed a guy they called the "chughole watcher."... In 1979, Daugherty likened a street full of chugholes to a football defense beating up on the neighborhood kids. He even had cheerleaders cheering the city on to chughole repair.

Over the years, many KOTV veterans wrote about the Chughole of the Week on TulsaTVMemories.com. In May 1999, John Hillis wrote:

Somebody asked about "The Chughole of the Week," a feature that was well-established by the time I arrived at KOTV, but was one of those things born out of desparation to fill that 60 minute newscast. You found a large hole in the street, and figured out a set-up to feature it. One gem that was before my time (which Doug Dodd told me about when I was there for my job interview) involved having the T-U men's chorus in full tuxes standing in a pothole on S. Yale, singing "The Whiffenpoof Song." Yale...get it? Another was to use commercial spokesmen to do chughole pitches. I can still hear John F. Lawhon saying, "If you're looking for the best chughole buy in Oklahoma..." We also did holes with (I think) the Guy Henshall Shadetree Mechanic and the jeweler whose name escapes me, but we filled the hole with rhinestones for his thing and shot it with a star filter. It was in retrospect a kinda dumb feature, and we probably milked the situations too many times before we all finally ran out of ideas and variations (in short, a lot like TV today!), but it was uniquely Tulsa. I remember the consultants from McHugh and Hoffman visiting, watching it, and being puzzled, like it was in French or something. Like a lot of the back half of the 6 newscast, it was both deadpan, and ironic, (and a little weird) all at once. The deadpan and irony had a lot to do with Clayton, and obviously, the "Letters" segment he closed with was the primary example.

Rex Daugherty followed up:

Clayton Vaughn let me do absolutely ANYTHING for a chughole of the week. Being a big goof, I thought it was great --- a chance to be silly in front of 100-thousand people every week. One week I got little toy wind up Godzillas and let them churn around in a chug hole -- I got some neighborhood girls to stand way down the street and run around screaming .... it was, how you say, "forced perspective."... Once Clayton let me spend a hundred bucks to haul the KOTV grand piano out to a street off Admiral and Sheridan ... I hired a TU pianist, rented a tuxedo and bought "Mendelson's Spring Song" from Saied's music company. However, first -- and I never told Clayton this ... I wasted half a day seeing I could figure out how to play the song myself -- finally I called this guy I knew at TU to come do the deal. It worked. The piano was kind of cockeyed in the chug - chuck hole ... and Dave played away. Clayton loved it.

The public disgust with the state of Tulsa streets led to the failure of a street-improvement bond issue in December 1975 and the decision of Sid Patterson, Commissioner of Streets and Public Property, not to seek a third two-year term in 1976:

Patterson said he has been ambivalent in recent weeks about whether to seek election to his third consecutive term as street commissioner, a post he called Monday a "no-win job." "I want to get out from under this 'chughole joke," Patterson said. "I think there's been a character assassination that's made my image a joke in the community." His official announcement mentioned frustrations and gratifications of the past four years. Patterson said he's pleased to have been part of the start of programs such as a systematic street maintenance program, a tree-planting effort, and the upsurge in efforts to solve flooding and drainage problems.... Patterson showed disappointment with the recent defeat of his second proposed street bond issue. He said he is "discouraged with the rumors ... the old myths and the old lies such as 'I'm against voting money for new streets until they fix the old ones.' Shortly after Patterson was elected in 1972, an administrative reorganization of the street commissioner's departments placed virtually all units under control of City Engineer Harold Miller. A strain between Patterson and Miller has been openly discussed at City Hall since.

Chugholes were also a topic of contention during the 1976 mayoral debate, in which incumbent Mayor Bob LaFortune took flack from his primary opponent Mary "Sunshine" Watson and Democrat challenger Betsy Horowitz:

Both feminine candidates got some licks in at the mayor before he arrived. LaFortune explained he thought the meeting, which began at 10 a.m., was scheduled for 10:30. Mrs. Horowitz leveled her guns at chugholes and flood control programs as well as the city's crime problem. "Where has your money gone?" she asked. "Why has our administration spent money on studies and statues in front of fire stations when there was not enough to repair the city's streets? I warned of floods in 1970, but in 1974, people were sitting on their roofs while the city was spending money on Riverpark and $26 million to build a 200. "I like animals and pretty parks as well as anyone, but I think our priorities are out of order. I have made bureaucracy work from the outside. Think what I could do from the inside." Mrs. Horowitz said she would publish city financial reports quarterly, install a suggestion box for citizens and operate one day a week from a mobile office "that would go where the people are."

Looking back, the dire state of the streets in the mid-1970s might reflect the costs the city imposed on itself after the massive 1966 annexation, which tripled Tulsa's area overnight. Tulsa leaders continued to push for expressway construction, River Parks, and a new 71st Street bridge over the Arkansas River, instead of focusing on basic needs. EDITOR'S NOTE 2026/09/20: Four nights ago, as I was nearly done editing this entry, my hosting provider decided it was time to upgrade the server, including a new version of the language on which the content management system for this blog depends. Features that had been deprecated but legal were suddenly illegal. While the site itself remained in operation (thanks to my stubborn insistence on static pages and a minimum of dynamic content), I could neither add new content or edit existing content. There wasn't a coherent list of problematic syntax, so there was a lot of trial and error. Four days later (amidst many other responsiblities and problems), as of a few minutes ago (approximately 11:15 pm, 2026/09/20), I managed to fix the last of the newly-illegal syntax, and the login prompt has returned. Praise the Lord!
- September 16, 2026 at 08:55PM
From the 1970s: KOTV's Chughole of the Week
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Today was the 25th anniversary of the Islamic attacks on America. We pause to remember the husbands and wives, sons and daughters who died that day and in the years since in the pursuit of the evil ideology that inspired and motivated the attacks. Tonight over dinner, I shared my memories of 9/11 with my younger two children, who are among the third of the American population today who are not old enough to have any memory of the events. I brought to the table a commemorative model of the World Trade Center that was given to our family as a memorial and a token of appreciation from the family of Jayesh Shah. Jay Shah was a Memorial High School and University of Tulsa alumnus who had only earlier that year moved from Houston to New York City to take the post as vice president for technology for Cantor Fitzgerald's eSpeed division in the upper floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Please take a moment to say a prayer for Jay's family, who still deeply miss their brother, son, husband, and father. About 30 members of the Shah family returned to the National 9/11 Memorial, participating once again in the reading of the names of the dead. In 2022, Jay's daughter Nikita told the Associated Press that the family comes back for the annual commemorations to be "around people who kind of experienced the same type of grief and the same feelings after 9/11." The town of Edgewater, New Jersey, where the Shah family lived in 2001, was to hold a 25th anniversary commemoration in memory of Jay and two other Edgewater residents who perished in the attack. This 2002 story from the Houston Chronicle tells about Jay's family and their desperate search through the streets of New York for hopeful news that never came. In 2006, the Shah family presented a memorial flag, made up of the names of those who died, to the children's elementary school in Katy, Texas. In 2016, Jay's daughter Sonia, then a senior at Baylor University, spoke to the Associated Press about how the death of her father has motivated her to serve refugees. I've come across many thoughtful essays and remembrances this past week: Julie Neidlinger boarded a westbound train on September 10, 2001, and she ponders the contrast between all the good of the day before and the day of the disaster.

The tenth is always good. It is the day before. The day before someone you loved died. The day before you lost your job. The day before the accident. The day before the assault. The day before you get the diagnosis. The day before the bad news, the truth revealed, the hopes crushed. The day before your entire life collapses. The tenth was good, but I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know the eleventh was coming, so I wasted the value of the tenth. The tenth is worth more than all the gold in the world once you find yourself in the eleventh.

But, Julie notes, the eleventh is not the end of the story, just as Good Friday was not the end of that story. Mary Katherine Ham remembers the children on the planes who died on 9/11, including preschoolers heading to Disneyland and three eleven-year-olds who had won a trip with National Geographic to the National Marine Sanctuary near Santa Barbara. She writes:

The hijackers of both planes would have seen these children in the waiting area and in their seats. Neither flight was full and it would have been obvious. But to them, the sacrifice of toddlers was part of a pious religious observance, by which they would go to paradise for the punch they landed against Western Civilization by blowing up children going to Disneyland. In a final act of anti-Western, anti-Semitic, Islamist fanaticism, they bathed ritually, read the Qur'an, prayed together, and murdered these babies.

(Thread captured here.) She also calls attention to comments made by Ramzi Kassem, blaming American foreign policy for the attack less than a week after it happened. Today Kassem is chief counsel to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Ham comments:

The intellectual father of radical Islam and [Al-Qaeda] was inspired by what he considered the grotesque green lawns, attractive women, and "tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists" of the scandalous sock hops of Greeley, CO in 1949, but go on, counselor.

She quotes Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian who called for violent jihad against modernity and the West. Qutb was a graduate student in the United States in the 1940s. He was scandalized by a sock hop at a church in Greeley, Colorado:

The dance floor was lit with red and yellow and blue lights, and with a few white lamps. And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.

David von Drehle, writing in the Smithsonian magazine, traces the influence of Qutb on Osama bin Laden. Gerald Posner, author of Why America Slept, has published a "9/11 Conspiracy Debunker's Guide," in which he summarizes the evidence rebutting the various claims that 9/11 was a false flag attack, that the World Trade Center was felled by a controlled demolition, that the Pentagon wasn't hit by an aircraft, that Jews were warned to stay away from the World Trade Center, among other claims.

So here is the short pocket guide I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time. It is not a comprehensive long-form refutation of each theory and nuance raised in the past quarter century but is instead a primer that will hopefully serve as a starting point for rational debate about what happened on 9/11. Also, it is not a defense of the government's account. I have spent a career criticizing that, and I'll get to where it fails later. First, however, I want to provide a method for sorting the claims.

If you'd prefer a video version, Posner was interviewed last week on PragerU's The Brief. Posner also delves into the open questions concerning the involvement of Saudi royals in supporting the attacks.

There is a real, documented, evidentiary case about foreign government involvement in 9/11. It is not on YouTube. It is in a federal courthouse in Manhattan.... In Why America Slept, the final chapter is about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be one of al-Qaeda's most senior figures. He was captured wounded in Faisalabad in March 2002, and I broke the story in my book about his questioning under a false-flag operation in which American personnel posed as Saudi security officers. Instead of being afraid of being in "Saudi" custody, he was relieved and asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. He gave them a private home number and a cell number from memory. That was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, King Fahd's nephew and the head of the Kingdom's largest media company. The telephone numbers were real. Pressed further, Zubaydah named two more Saudi princes and the chief of Pakistan's air force as his high-level contacts. He again gave their telephone numbers from memory and said that two of the men had known that a major operation was coming against America. One investigator told me that Zubaydah's monologue was the Rosetta Stone of 9/11. Within roughly a year all four were dead....

Posner posted a clip from today's reading of the names of the dead. 9/11 widow Terry Strada "called out Saudi Arabia's role, the broken promises, and a string of administrations that protected the Kingdom instead of helping to deliver justice for the families." Somewhat related, Steve Sailer posted excerpts from articles he wrote during the 2000 presidential election about pledges both George W. Bush and Al Gore made to eliminate ethnic profiling of air travelers, a gesture to appease Arab Americans who were, at that time, majority Christian. At 3 pm on 9/11/2001, President Bush was due to meet at the White House with representatives of Arab-American and Muslim organizations to discuss this and related policies involving deportation. Waller, who was working in an office sublet from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, gives his eyewitness account that the meeting went ahead without Bush, who had taken refuge at Barksdale AFB. The meeting was moved to Grover Norquist's conference room, and attendees included members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sami al-Arian of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who "was later tried and convicted of terrorism-related charges, served some prison time, and was deported." Waller says that Norquist credited al-Arian for turning out the votes in Tampa's Muslim community to give Bush a narrow win in Florida. The staff of Legal Insurrection remembers where they were on 9/11. Jane Coleman recalls a visit to the World Trade Center with her husband Ron Coleman and their sons just two months earlier, where she was haunted by fears of a recurrence of the 1993 attack. Ron Coleman has re-posted on X his memories of being in midtown Manhattan during the attack, the confusion of the day, the parade of refugees walking north from the zone of destruction, and the journey to get back to his car, across the river in New Jersey, and atop the Palisades. (Ten years ago Ron published his memories in five parts on his blog, Likelihood of Success. Part 1: When the planes hit; Part 2: The confusion of the day; Part 3: Starting the journey home; Part 4: The walk to the river and Part 5: The ferry, the stairs, and home.) Some items from past anniversaries worth revisiting: Jennifer Senior published a moving feature story in the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic: "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind." McIlvaine was her brother's roommate in college and apartment-mate on September 11, 2001. She traces the way his mother, father, brother, and fiancee have each dealt with their grief and with the notes and ephemera he left behind. Tom Junod's story in Esquire from 2016 is worth re-reading: "The Falling Man: An unforgettable story." It is the story of the famous photograph of a man who has jumped or fallen from the World Trade Center, plunging headlong, vertically through the air, paralleling the vertical lines of the two towers. Junod pursues the photographer (who also photographed the dying Robert F. Kennedy, the photographs, and the mystery of the identity of the man in the photograph.

...the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky--falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame--the Falling Man--became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment. That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

Bookworm Room remembers Rick Rescorla, head of security of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who anticipated another attack after the 1993 bombing, relentlessly drilled employees in evacuation procedures, and on the day, guided the 2,700 workers to safety, losing only six, including himself and two members of his team, who went back in the building one last time to make sure they had everyone out. Powerline has a tribute to Rick Rescorla, with more about his earlier life as a soldier in Vietnam and links to other tributes. I learned today from Parker Thune that Rescorla, originally from Cornwall, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oklahoma. A commenter said that Rescorla was in the Oklahoma National Guard and was a tough TAC officer when the commenter's father attended Officer Candidate School there. Does OU have any memorial honoring Rescorla? In 2017, Yahya Cholil Staquf, the head of the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia, the country with the largest population of Muslims, told an interviewer that the West needs to acknowledge the connection between orthodox Islam and violence:

Western politicians should stop pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy. So long as we lack consensus regarding this matter, we cannot gain victory over fundamentalist violence within Islam. Radical Islamic movements are nothing new. They've appeared again and again throughout our own history in Indonesia. The West must stop ascribing any and all discussion of these issues to "Islamophobia." Or do people want to accuse me -- an Islamic scholar -- of being an Islamophobe too?... Too many Muslims view civilization, and the peaceful co-existence of people of different faiths, as something they must combat. Many Europeans can sense this attitude among Muslims. There's a growing dissatisfaction in the West with respect to Muslim minorities, a growing fear of Islam. In this sense, some Western friends of mine are "Islamophobic." They're afraid of Islam. To be honest, I understand their fear ... The West cannot force Muslims to adopt a moderate interpretation of Islam. But Western politicians should stop telling us that fundamentalism and violence have nothing to do with traditional Islam. That is simply wrong.

- September 11, 2026 at 11:19PM
9/11: Twenty-five years
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Article XXIV, Section 2, of the Oklahoma Constitution states (emphasis added):

No convention shall be called by the Legislature to propose alterations, revisions, or amendments to this Constitution, or to propose a new Constitution, unless the law providing for such convention shall first be approved by the people on a referendum vote at a regular or special election, and any amendments, alterations, revisions, or new Constitution, proposed by such convention, shall be submitted to the electors of the State at a general or special election and be approved by a majority of the electors voting thereon, before the same shall become effective: Provided, That the question of such proposed convention shall be submitted to the people at least once in every twenty years.

This language has not changed since the Constitution was approved in 1907. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has issued an executive order calling for a referendum on April 6, 2027, to ask the voters, for the first time since 1970, whether or not a Constitutional Convention should be called:

Oklahoma City (August 26, 2026) - Governor Stitt yesterday took action to comply with the Oklahoma Constitution and send to a vote of the people the question of whether the legislature shall call a constitutional convention, as required by Article XXIV, Section 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution. Article XXIV, Section 2 requires that the people of Oklahoma be given the opportunity at least once every twenty years to decide whether or not to move forward with a constitutional convention. The question was last presented to Oklahomans in 1970, depriving Oklahomans of this constitutional right. "The Oklahoma Constitution is clear. At least every 20 years, Oklahomans have the right to decide whether it's time to call a constitutional convention," said Governor Stitt. "It's been 56 years since the question was sent to the people. This action puts the question to the people and ensures Oklahomans finally get the opportunity their Constitution guarantees." The Executive Proclamation sets a special election for April 6, 2027, and was accompanied by Executive Order 2026-30, which instructs the Secretary of State to take any action necessary to submit the question to the people and creates the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention Commission. The Commission is tasked with studying the Oklahoma Constitution and other state constitutional conventions, then making recommendations about the procedures and rules that would govern a state constitutional convention, should the state question be approved. The Commission will also consider necessary safeguards and proposed legislation needed to implement a convention. The report will be due no later than December 31, 2026. "Oklahomans have the right to review our Constitution and determine whether it's time to consider changes," continued Gov. Stitt. "It is time to honor that right and give Oklahomans the choice our state founding fathers guaranteed to them." The executive proclamation setting the special election can be found here: https://www.sos.ok.gov/documents/filelog/98225.pdf [NOTE: There was a typo in the URL in the press release, which I have corrected.] The executive order creating the commission can be found here: https://www.sos.ok.gov/documents/executive/2203.pdf

Here is the question that would be put before the voters, as State Question 848:

Shall the Legislature call a Constitutional Convention which shall be authorized to propose alterations, revisions, or amendments to the Constitution, or to propose a new Constitution for the State of Oklahoma?

In his executive order, Gov. Stitt quotes Robert L. Williams, the first Chief Justice of Oklahoma and a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, who wrote in his commentary on the Oklahoma Constitution regarding Article XXIV, Section 2: "Being self-executing, it is the duty of the Secretary of State, without any additional legislation, to submit this question every 20 years to the electors of the state." Williams says, "This section was patterned after Oregon (1857) 17, 1 and 2, as amended," and also makes reference to "Md. (1867) 14, 2; Mich. (1850) 20, 2 [now in Article XII, Section 3]; N. Y. (1894) 14, 2 [now in Article XIX, Section 2]; Ohio (1851) 16, 3; S. C. (1895) 16, 3; and Utah (1895) 23, 2 and 3." Michigan, New York, Ohio, and South Carolina have a requirement to put the question of a constitutional convention before the voters at regular intervals. New York has held six constitutional conventions, with the 1938 convention producing a new constitution that was ratified by the voters, while the propositions submitted by the 1967 convention were rejected by the voters.
- September 10, 2026 at 08:49AM
Will Oklahoma call a constitutional convention?
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That was a nail-biter! The margin of victory for Mike Mazzei was just over 2000 votes. At the Mazzei watch party at the Renaissance Hotel, the screens alternated between the official state election board results and Jason Murphey's spectacular statewide precinct map, which displayed the official results as they arrived. Isn't that division interesting? Indian Territory, eastern and south central Oklahoma, the part of the state affected by the McGirt ruling, went for Mazzei, old Oklahoma Territory went for Drummond, with the exception of the counties around Inola. Years ago, local TV stations would have offered continuous coverage of an election this significant, and watch parties would have had one or more TVs tuned to their coverage. TV stations used to send out runners to get the results posted on precinct doors to tabulate results ahead of the official tally. When I worked out of KOTV's newsroom on election night 2008, doing cut-ins on KRMG, runners brought in tally sheets from the precincts, which I added into a database to give me an early picture of key local races, like the County Commission race between Sally Bell and Karen Keith. The media was there, standing on risers in the middle of the room, waiting for Mazzei to speak, but they seemed to be a sideshow. We were getting unmediated access to results displayed geographically. We watched as the number of precincts reporting approached 100%. With only a few dozen remaining, you could zoom in on Tulsa County in Murphey's map and see that about the same number of outstanding precincts in Drummond territory -- midtown Tulsa -- as in Mazzei territory -- south Tulsa and the suburbs, and it seemed likely that Mazzei's narrow margin would hold. (This map is from the Oklahoma State Election Board website. Drummond's precincts are olive, Mazzei's are beige. Not exactly a high contrast. Drummond's strength was in the Money Belt and Midtown, I-244 to 71st, the Arkansas River to Memorial.) The Mazzei watch party was different than most I've attended: The lights stayed on. The music was kept quiet enough for conversation, but the level of conversation sometimes made it hard to hear. I had a great time catching up with old friends from my decades around Republican politics -- legislators past and present, activists, party leaders -- and making some new acquaintances. Sometime after Mazzei's victory speech, after an hour or so of Mazzei taking photos with well-wishers, after the nominee had retreated to the campaign's private meeting room, a new group showed up, freshly arrived from Oklahoma City. I was told they flew up after the result was confirmed. At the time, I happened to be speaking to term-limited Sen. Shane Jett, leader of the Oklahoma Freedom Caucus and nemesis of the Capitol lobbyist claque, who pointed them out to me: Speaker Kyle Hilbert, the executive director of the State Chamber, the Hilliary brothers, various and sundry lobbyists. All these men, who had either openly or quietly opposed Mike Mazzei's candidacy, who were waiting in Oklahoma City to hail Gentner Drummond's triumph, now came to Tulsa to pay their respects to the victor. It didn't look like they got their hoped for audience. Vae victis! It was not a great night down-ballot. Conservative James Taylor's $7,000, seat-of-the-pants solo primary campaign was enough to get a ticket to the runoff in an evenly split field, but Franklin's allies defined Taylor as Walters 2.0 while portraying liberal, recently-Democrat Franklin as a competent, experienced, and moderate administrator. To counter that message with the truth, you need enough money and you need to use it strategically to reach persuadable voters. (Note to Jake Merrick fans: Merrick would have run into the same buzzsaw if he had managed to get into the runoff.) Trial lawyer-backed Bob Sullivan beat former State Sen. Marty Quinn by 10 points; a friend who knows the Insurance Commission says that permanent staff there dread the thought of working for Sullivan. The strongest statewide win of the night, however, belonged to Kevin West, the conservative candidate in the Labor Commissioner race, with 58% of the vote over his CAMP opponent. The Freedom Caucus lost a stalwart in District 34 State Sen. Dana Prieto. He was targeted by heavy "independent expenditures" (dark money). Overall, my picks won 3 of 6 State Senate seats, 7 of 8 State House seats. SQ 844 (property tax exemption reimbursement) went down in flames, with three No votes for every Yes. SQ 846 (constitutional voter ID) won with 55%, passing in every county except Tulsa, Oklahoma, Payne (home to OSU), and Cleveland (home to OU). Dennis McCollough has been elected Wagoner County Commissioner in District 3. He won the runoff with 65% of the vote, and no Democrat filed for either Wagoner County Commission seat. The Tulsa City Council races were an expected disappointment, although one of the Mean Girls, District 1's Vanessa Hall-Harper, winning 46% of the vote, has been forced into a November runoff against Corinice Wilson, who got 37%. Supporters of Reggie Williams and Mareo Johnson seem to be coalescing behind Wilson; they just want Vanessa out. In District 2, Anthony Archie won his rematch with Aaron Bisogno by a 3-to-1 margin. Mean Girl Jackie Dutton survived in District 3, 56%-44%. Incumbent Karen Gilbert won another term in District 5, 58%-42%. Pete Regan's $180,000 in campaign cash bought him 6,337 votes, 69% of the total in District 9. District 7's result makes me wonder what might have been had Dave Perry gotten started sooner with his campaign. Mean Girl Lori Decter Wright was re-elected with 57% of the vote. Dave Perry got 36%, having only started to campaign in earnest about a week before the election. I saw yard signs for Perry around several neighborhood entrances on election day. District 6 Councilor Christian Bengel held a fundraiser for his "campaign" on August 20 at El Patron. Josh McFarland and Casey Robinson hosted the event, with State Rep. and Republican nominee for Congress Mark Tedford as honorary guest. The weird thing about that is that Bengel doesn't have an election this year. He won two years ago with 70% of the vote. The City of Tulsa ONG 20-year franchise renewal passed 63%-37%, but it failed in nearly all precincts north of I-244. 49,762 votes were cast for or against that proposition, but the total number of votes for the six council races added up only to 28,969. Bartlesville approved its ONG franchise renewal. Bixby approved all four bond issues, but Prop 1 ($16,650,000 for public safety buildings) and Prop 3 ($850,000 for parks) were close, with a less than 200 vote margin. Many school bond issues failed: Dale (Pottawatomie County), Hulbert (Cherokee County), Little Axe (Cleveland County), Newcastle (McClain County), Sallisaw (Sequoyah County), Savanna (Pittsburg County), South Coffeyville (Nowata County). In Westville (Adair County), one bond issue barely cleared the 60% threshold and the other fell short. The tiny turnout award goes to the Town of St. Louis in Pottawatomie County, which voted 7 to 3 to extend OG+E's electric franchise for another 25 years. The bedsheet ballot award goes to City of The Village, an enclave surrounded by Oklahoma City and Nichols Hills, who voted on 13 propositions: 9% hotel/motel tax (failed), ONG franchise renewal (passed), and 11 charter amendments (8 passed, 3 failed). The three failed charter amendments would have allowed the city manager to live outside the city limits (failed 33% to 67%), would have increased the dollar threshold requiring a public vote to sell high-value city property from $25,000 to $300,000, and would have made it quicker to pass an ordinance and have it go into effect. Democrats had only two runoffs: Socialist N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas won the U. S. Senate nomination over attorney Jim Priest, and Herschel Brown won the nomination in House 99 in Oklahoma City. Kevin Hern should have no problem holding the Senate seat for the GOP in November.
- August 26, 2026 at 11:12PM
2026 Oklahoma runoff recap
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The primary preferences of Oklahoma conservatives were scattered among numerous candidates in the long list of open-seat statewide offices, but in the runoff Oklahoma conservatives have united around a single slate for the four offices remaining on the ballot: Mike Mazzei for Governor, James Taylor for State Superintendent, Kevin West for Commissioner of Labor, Marty Quinn for Insurance Commissioner. The conservative slate has been endorsed by OCPAC founder Charlie Meadows, Jamison Faught of Muskogee Politico, former State Sen. Jake Merrick, former State Rep. Jason Murphey, Make Oklahoma Healthy Again, Oklahoma Second Amendment Association (OK2A), and many more conservative leaders. The opposing slate, consisting of Gentner Drummond, Robert Franklin, John Pfeiffer, and Bob Sullivan, are all clients of CAMP, a political consulting firm known for attacking real conservatives and backing big-government, high-tax RINOs in Republican primaries. CAMP's founder, Fount Holland, was charged with illegal collusion in the 2014 campaign to win the Republican nomination for State Superintendent for stealth Democrat Joy Hofmeister. In the most recent Tulsa mayor's race, CAMP worked to elect Democrat County Commissioner Karen Keith. If there's a vote in Oklahoma to raise your taxes, CAMP is likely to be running the Vote Yes campaign. The CAMP slate's contribution reports include lots of typically Democrat donors, lobbyists, special interest PACs, people who want to misuse state government's power and money for their own benefit, not for the general good of the people of Oklahoma. For the first time in my memory, the State Committee of the Oklahoma Republican Party has endorsed candidates in a statewide runoff, endorsing Mazzei for Governor, James Taylor for State Superintendent, and Kevin West for Labor Commissioner. The State Committee serves as the governing body of the Oklahoma Republican Party in between conventions, and it consists of four committee members from each county, who were elected by grassroots delegates at their local county conventions in odd-numbered years. The state GOP endorsements are an outgrowth of the OKGOP Certified program. Candidates could apply for the list if they met five simple criteria:

• Has not been registered with any other party for the last five years.
• Has not donated to a Democratic candidate in the last five years.
• Has not supported abortion
• Protected Second Amendment Rights (and has not participated in efforts to infringe on them)
• Agrees with at least 80% of the OKGOP Platform

Now that liberals have figured out they can't win as Democrats in Oklahoma, they're trying to win in GOP primaries. This is precisely the kind of gatekeeping a party ought to be doing. It wasn't a high bar. Five of the eight statewide runoff candidates -- Mazzei, Taylor, West, Quinn, and Sullivan -- met the standard; Drummond, Franklin, and Pfeiffer did not. The OKGOP is right to alert GOP voters to fake Republican candidates. The state party endorsed only in races where only one of the candidates was OKGOP Certified; both candidates for Insurance Commissioner are OKGOP Certified, so neither was endorsed. Here are a few quick notes on the reasons behind each of my picks:
- August 25, 2026 at 12:18AM
2026 Oklahoma statewide runoff
Click the headline to read the full story.

Earlier this month, I was a guest on David McLain's Truth in Focus Media podcast (TIFMedia on Rumble) to discuss the August 25, 2026, runoff, state questions, and a few other articles here on BatesLine. The episode was recorded on August 6, before many of the developments in the last weeks of the campaign.
- August 23, 2026 at 09:50AM
BatesLine August update on Truth in Focus Media
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This Saturday I was on Tulsa Beacon Weekend on KCFO AM 970 with Jeff Brucculeri to preview the August 25, 2026, runoff and City of Tulsa general election. In addition to the four statewide Republican runoff elections and the six Tulsa City Council seats, we covered the two state questions, SQ 844 and SQ 846, and the Senate 34 runoff. The hour-long interview show, sponsored by the weekly Tulsa Beacon newspaper, airs live each week at noon Saturday on AM 970 and streaming online. You can always find the latest episode of Tulsa Beacon Weekend at this link. I've made a Wayback Machine capture of this week's episode at this permalink. The Tulsa Beacon newspaper is available by mail subscription, at Wild Birds Unlimited at 61st and Yale, and at the Minute Stop at 131st Street and Aspen in Broken Arrow.
- August 23, 2026 at 01:08AM
Tulsa Beacon Weekend: Runoff, Tulsa election preview
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It's disheartening just to watch what's been happening at Tulsa City Hall, and even more disheartening to write about it. There was a time when I relished digging into the latest issue before the Council, but that was back when we managed to get some good councilors elected on a regular basis, people with integrity and a backbone. It felt possible to make a difference. It hasn't felt like that since the big changes to the election system before 2016. I appreciate those who continue to post about Tulsa politics on social media, people like RealitySnark (formerly Snarkio) on X, RobertDInTulsa, who monitors the scanner and covers local crime news on X, and This Is Tulsa Too on Facebook. Restaurant reviewer and restaurateur Steve Pisonero recently launched a Facebook group about the homeless blight in Tulsa; all the politically correct folks are appalled, but the people who participate in the discussion are genuinely trying to grapple with real causes and real solutions, not the expensive and unrealistic approaches that keep gender-studies majors employed at non-profits in the Homeless-Industrial Complex. Tuesday, August 25, 2026, is the City of Tulsa general election. Six of the nine City Council seats are contested; City Auditor Nathan Pickard and Councilors Laura Bellis (District 4), Christian Bengel (District 6), and Phil Lakin (District 8) were re-elected without opposition. A candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote on August 25 has been elected. If no candidate gets more than 50%, there will be a runoff on November 3 between the top candidates whose votes total more than 50%. This is slightly different from a traditional two-candidate runoff in that, if there are more than four candidates and the vote is evenly split (e.g. 24%, 23%, 20%, 18%, 15%), there may be a three-candidate runoff. Unlikely, but possible this year in District 1. I am not thrilled with our choices. I can only surmise that fewer and fewer Tulsans think the city is worth fighting for, that anything can be done to stop the slide. Many of the challengers look like they jumped in last minute, which is honorable -- I filed for my first council race at 4 p.m. the last day of filing -- and think campaigning consists of nothing more than a website and forum appearances, which is ineffective. The lack of enthusiasm is evident as you drive around Tulsa. In Council Districts 3 and 7, I saw no indication that a campaign was underway. There were a few yard signs for candidates in the Republican runoff, a few for statewide Democrat candidates, but there were no signs for either the incumbent councilor or challengers. I saw exactly one sign in District 5, supporting incumbent Karen Gilbert. All three candidates are active in District 9, an open seat. Things have been just as quiet on social media. The most energy and enthusiasm has been in District 1 where four candidates are challenging the incumbent. I saw signs around the district for all but one of the five candidates in roughly equal numbers. If we're to have any hope of returning Tulsa city government to sanity, the first step is to break up the Mean Girl Clique on the City Council. At a recent City Council meeting, while a citizen spoke about the need for independent ethics oversight of the Council, Councilors Vanessa Hall Harper, Jackie Dutton, Lori Decter Wright, Laura Bellis, and one redacted non-councilor engaged in ridicule of the speaker over a group chat, giggling and trading looks. Their behavior appalls former councilors across the political spectrum. This isn't the first time they've been caught in this childish behavior. They're on the record labeling conservative Tulsans as "actual fascists," but Bellis, Hall Harper, and Decter Wright teamed up with GT Bynum to keep one of their council colleagues from working for a living because he dared to oppose a tax increase. That seems pretty fascistic to me. If Hall Harper, Dutton, Decter Wright, and Bellis lack the impulse control to wait until after the meeting to share their snarky comments, they don't belong on the City Council. Bellis, alas, is unopposed, but defeating the other three would be a good start. The second priority -- and this aligns with the first one -- is to replace as many philanthropocrats and non-profiteers as possible with people who work for a living. If it seems like I'm grasping at straws in these recommendations, it's because I am. There's not a single candidate running this year that ticks all the boxes -- or even most of the boxes. If we want high-quality candidates to run for council there needs to be a high-quality organization recruiting them a year ahead of time, preparing them to run, marshalling resources to support their campaigns, and continuing to provide support once they're elected. With those qualifications in mind, let's look at each race in turn:
- August 22, 2026 at 10:06PM
2026 Tulsa City Council election
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