Categories
insider corruption too much government

Gov’t Pushing Gov’t

Wisconsin, taxes, lobbying, government

Why, asks the MacIver Institute, “is the government lobbying the government?”

MacIver calls itself Wisconsin’s “free-market voice.” It is a privately funded outfit that makes the case for less government in the Badger State. It has to earn its funds from donors who can, at any moment, stop donating money.

One of the things the MacIver Institute found itself up against are other think-tanks and apparently donor-funded organizations advocating for more government in the state, for more programs, bigger programs, and more taxes to feed all the great new stuff.

And it turns out that several of these advocacy organizations are themselves funded by government! I mean, taxpayers.

I know, it’s not unheard of. It’s too common, existing in probably every state of the union.

And it is thoroughly corrupt.

The MacIver Institute identifies three outfits that receive tax money to promote more tax-funded programs: the Wisconsin Counties Association, the Wisconsin Towns Association and the Wisconsin League of Municipalities. These outfits promote more transportation funding and higher taxes. Comparing these outfits’ core pitch to “a swindler selling gullible buyers submerged swampland,” MacIver makes it quite clear how easily local leaders are bamboozled: “Your supervisors — at least many of them — are clueless that they are being used as patsies in a coordinated scheme by a taxpayer-funded lobbying machine, one that exists not to represent the public, but to represent government itself.”

People who want fewer government services and a smaller tax burden often wonder why government size always ratchets up, never down. Well, this is one reason: the government takes your money to give to groups that will push for more government.

Sadly, this ratchet racket is a part of government that works too well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Heinlein

Imperialism degrades both oppressor and oppressed.

Robert A. Heinlein, “Solution Unsatisfactory,” Off the Main Sequence (2005), p. 98.

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Today

Good Friday Agreement

On April 10, 1998, the Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic agreement, dubbed the Belfast, or Good Friday Agreement. The accord was reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict.

The agreement was approved by voters across the island of Ireland in two referendums held on May 22, 1998. The agreement came into force on December 2, 1999. 

Categories
election law U.S. Constitution Voting

Noncitizen Voting Q&A

California, voting, democracy, elections, citizenship, ID, voter identification

Question: What stops the California Assembly from allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections?

Answer: Nothing. 

Noncitizens are now voting in two major California cities: San Francisco and Oakland. Legally. Including those in the country illegally.

And California courts have upheld the constitutionality, after San Francisco’s law was challenged. 

Voting in the Golden State doesn’t have to be limited to U.S. citizens.

So, it’s not all that far-fetched to think California’s legislature might one day pass a statute allowing noncitizens to vote in state legislative elections. Maybe in Maryland, too, where 16 cities now have legal and illegal aliens voting. Or Vermont, where a legislative supermajority overrode the governor to say yes to three cities giving the vote to noncitizens. Legislation has been introduced in both New York and Connecticut, in recent years, to give noncitizens the vote in those states’ legislative elections.  

“The Constitution is clear,” law professor Bradley Smith wrote Monday in The Wall Street Journal, “Under Article I and the 17th Amendment, any person who is allowed to vote in a state legislative election is automatically also allowed to vote for members of Congress.” 

In other words, the federal statute that purports to ban noncitizen voting in federal elections has a hole in it big enough to drive, say, the state of California through. 

“A federal statute can’t trump the Constitution’s explicit, exclusive grant of power to each state to determine who is eligible to vote,” explained the professor. 

. . . “even if the SAVE America Act were passed. . . .

“Although no state allows noncitizens to vote for its legislature,” Smith said, “that could change.” 

We need a constitutional amendment in this 250th year of our Republic because only citizens of the United States should vote in federal elections. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) just introduced it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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William Hamilton

Truth like a torch, the more ’tis shook, it shines.

Sir William Hamilton, Ninth Baronet, as quoted by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 573.

Categories
Today

Näfels

Despite being outnumbered 16 to one, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.

On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

Categories
international affairs

Posting Past Armageddon 

Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, madman theory, madman strategy

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” President Richard M. Nixon told his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. 

“I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

It’s not a theory, of course. It’s a ploy — and one that did not work out great for Nixon.*

So how’s it working for Donald Trump?

Buried in his book about being a wheeler-dealer, Mr. Trump notoriously advances a notion eerily similar to Nixon’s Madman strategy. Trump likes to keep those with whom he is negotiating “guessing.”

He says this often. We cannot be shocked, then, if we’re all kept guessing about his Iran strategy.

His litany of flip-flops from early March to the present day has been breathtaking, even for Trump. “We won the war.”; “We defeated Iran”; “You never like to say too early you won. We won. In the first hour it was over.”; “If NATO doesn’t help, they will suffer something very bad.”; “We neither need nor want NATO’s help.”; “I don’t need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO.”; “The Strait of Hormuz must be protected by the countries that use it. We don’t use it, we don’t need to open it.”; “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Upping the ante on Tuesday, Trump posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he agreed, a few hours later, to “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.”

Did the madman ploy work?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* When Nixon and Trump corresponded years ago, Dick told Donald that Mrs. Nixon thought Trump would win if he ran for office. Did Pat sniff another practitioner of her husband’s infamous ploy?

NOTE: See H.R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978), p. 122.

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Lafferty

Science Fiction has long been babbling about cosmic destructions and the ending of either physical or civilized worlds, but it has all been displaced babble. SF has been carrying on about near-future or far-future destructions and its mind-set will not allow it to realize that the destruction of our world has already happened in the quite recent past, that today is “The Day After The World Ended.” . . . I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as “Western Civilization” or “Modern Civilization,” happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was “The World” for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general.

R.A. Lafferty, from “The Day After the World Ended,” notes for a speech at DeepSouthCon’79, New Orleans (July 21, 1979), later published in It’s Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (1995).
Categories
Today

The 17th Amendment

On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.

Prior to this, senators had been appointed by state legislatures. It was John Dickinson of Delaware who suggested that the Senate be selected by state legislatures. “The combination of the state governments with the national government was as politic as it was unavoidable,” he argued. But as early as 1826, resolutions calling for direct popular election of senators appeared in the House of Representatives, but none succeeded. Following the Civil War, disputes among state legislators over Senate elections resulted in deadlocks, leaving some Senate seats vacant for long periods — Delaware remained without representation in the U.S. Senate for two years. In light of such problems, reformers in many states began calling for a change to the system of electing senators. In 1906, publisher William Randolph Hearst, a proponent of direct election, hired novelist David Graham Phillips to write a number of articles on the subject. Phillips’ series, “The Treason of the Senate,” portrayed senators as pawns of industrialists and financiers — with no small amount of hyperbole (to put it politely). The articles further galvanized public support for reform. 

Senator Joseph Bristow of Kansas offered, in 1911, a Senate resolution to amend the Constitution. In two years the Constitution was amended.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall partisanship

Gerrymandered Hypocrisy 

Virginia, referendum, fairness, voting, democracy

“Gerrymandering is detrimental to our democracy,” declared Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger . . . back in 2019.

“Let voters decide, not politicians,” former President Barack Obama offered just last month. 

The problem? They’re correct!

And Republicans are now sharing the statements by these two high-ranking Democrats with Virginia voters. Why? They oppose the April 21 constitutional referendum that, if passed, would allow the legislature to gerrymander the state’s congressional district lines to likely turn the federal delegation from its current six- to five-seat Democratic majority into a ten to one Democratic majority.

How dare opponents repeat the precise words previously uttered by Spanberger and Obama as Virginians go to the polls!

WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C., headlined its report: “Anti-redistricting mailers in Virginia are misleading, critics warn.”

“This has been misconstrued,” explained Gaylene Kanoyton, the Political Action Chair for the Virginia NAACP. “This does not pertain to these unusual, unprecedented times that we are in right now.”

“It is true they made these statements years ago,” a fellow from my hometown was quoted, “but the situation has changed.”

“They don’t like it because we’re exposing their leaders for their hypocrisy,” argues former Republican Delegate A.C. Cordoza with Justice for Democracy PAC. 

Democrats can of course blame Republican gerrymandering efforts in other states to justify their own, but it is a race to the bottom for voters. 

But, as I pointed out last week, Democrats deserve all the blame. The language on the ballot is completely slanted, telling voters the measure will “restore fairness.” This is so outrageous that even the liberal Washington Post editorialized last month that “Democratic politicians are presenting the proposed amendment to voters in the most brazenly dishonest way imaginable.”

Partisans will always be self-serving. But can’t they even try not to appear blatantly hypocritical?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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