Author: Redactor

Destroying What Has Been

Let’s assume that chief executives responsible for major appointments know something about whom they’re appointing.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president, was fine with the appointment of an associate professor “of urban and multicultural education,” Brian Lozenski, to help write the state’s “ethnic studies” standards. Those were supposed to have been released for public comment in August but being kept under wraps.

Lozenski’s left-wing ideas are notorious in Minnesota. For instance, he has advocated overthrowing the United States — not to be replaced by an Elysium of reason and freedom, we can be sure.

Let’s also assume that someone running for president of the United States is familiar with his or her own views and agenda.

One thing we should know about his running mate, the current Vice President Kamala Harris, is that in 2020 she asked people to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In jail for unpeacefully destroying the property of others.

A couple of years later, she denied making the appeal . . . but her tweet doing so remained up on the platform and, regardless, had been screenshot.

Commentators sometimes suggest that the future policies of Kamala Harris are mysterious, since she has said or half-said so many different things.

What mystery?

All of her left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-First Amendment, anti-Second Amendment statements and actions express her true impulses. All her blarney about how she’s now a big fan of fracking or a gun owner who’d drop any intruder, etc., are attempts to fool voters who’d be appalled by her actual agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bail, Kamala Harris, riots, tweets

Thought

Bliss Perry

Wherever a mob can gather, there are still the dangers of the old demagogic vocabulary and rhetoric. The mob state of mind is lurking still in the excitable American temperament.

The intellectual temptations of that temperament are revealed no less in our popular journalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last degree. The extravagance of its head-lines and the over-statements of its news columns are direct sources of profit, since they increase the circulation and it is circulation which wins advertising space. I think it is fair to say that the American people, as a whole, like precisely the sort of journalism which they get. The tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more and more, the character of our newspapers.
Bliss Perry, The American Mind (1912), p. 67.

Today

Model T

On October 1, 1908, Ford produced the first Model T at a plant in Detroit. The auto could travel 40 miles per hour and ran on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (As oil prices fell, Ford phased out the hemp option.) The Model T was the first car designed for a mass market, rather than as a luxury item. By 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model T cars — the longest production run of any car model until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.

On October 1, 1918, Lawrence of Arabia (T. E. Lawrence) helped lead a combined Arab and British force that captured Damascus from the Turks during World War I.

election law general freedom Voting

Strange Standard

voting, illegal immigration, elections, democracy, cheating, citizenship

Last week, an audit found that Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles staff had erroneously forwarded the registrations of 1,259 people who had not provided necessary citizenship documents on to the Secretary of State, and — voilà! — they appeared on the voter rolls.

“None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday,” reports Oregon Capitol Chronicle.

Is that the new standard? Don’t fret about a system that automatically registers people who are noncitizens . . . because the number of likely noncitizens who appear to have illegally voted was not enough to have changed the outcome.

The Democrats running the Oregon Legislature were reluctant to hold a hearing; House Majority Leader Ben Bowman opened by warning that “scoring political points” or “attacks or accusations against election staff” or saying anything “that could incite any violence of any kind against any immigrants or any communities in the state” would not be tolerated.

That’s a dodge — hiding behind concern for immigrants when the issue is a faulty election system.

Besides, we don’t serve immigrants by placing them on voters’ lists without their knowledge, then sending them flyers urging them to vote, when, if they follow all the prompts sent their way and cast a ballot, they can lose their chance to become an American citizen.

And even be deported.

Simple, straightforward solutions exist: End these automatic voter registration regimes, require proof of citizenship for new folks registering to vote, and make it clear at all levels that voting is for citizens only.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags cheating, citizenship, democracy, elections, illegal immigration, voting

Common Sense

The African

The best manure for the land is the foot of the owner.
Quoted by Aristotle, who cites this saying to “The African,” whose words were cribbed by Benjamin Franklin — all explained by Arthur Latham Perry in Principles of Political Economy (1891).

Today

Edison’s Hydro

Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on September 30, 1882. Dubbed the Vulcan Street Plant, it was established on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, and was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891.

Update

They Assure Us

The story led with an assurance, an oddly worded one: “None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday.”

The Oregon Capital Chronicle assured us that the automatically registered voters who were not eligible to vote participated in elections where, in the number investigated, they couldn’t’ve made a difference.

In Oregon, as in every state except for Arizona, voters only need to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens and eligible to vote when they proactively register to vote. Since 2016, the state has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards if they present documents that prove citizenship, like a U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate.

But an audit completed this week found that DMV staff had erroneously marked 1,259 people who didn’t provide those documents as U.S. citizens and forwarded their information to the Secretary of State’s Office, resulting in them being registered to vote. Ten of those individuals voted, though election officials learned that one of those 10 is a citizen who has voted for decades and just didn’t bring documentation to prove citizenship when renewing a license.
Julia Shumway, “Suspect votes didn’t affect election results, state officials say,” September 25, 2024.

A pattern can be observed. They used to tell us that “no illegals vote in our elections, which are pristine.” Now they say “sure some undocumented aliens vote, but their votes do not change elections.”

Next? “Undocumented aliens voting for our candidates ‘saved our democracy.’”

Paul Jacob has been writing about noncitizen voting for some time.

Thought

Arthur Latham Perry

By far the most important of all the conditions, under which the production of material commodities goes broadly forward, is liberty of action on the part of the individual; because, wherever such liberty is conceded, association and invention and all other needful conditions follow right along by laws of natural sequence.
Arthur Latham Perry, Principles of Political Economy, 1891.

Today

First Congress Finalized

On September 29, 1789, the first Congress of the United States under the new Constitution adjourned.

On the same date in 1881, economist Ludwig von Mises was born in Lemberg, Galicia, of the Austria-Hungary Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine).

Update

Instead of Reparations!

California’s commission on reparations — covered by Paul Jacob here in the past — recommended a huge reparations bill. But of course the State cannot afford it. So Governor Newsome made some hoopla over the issue of slavery, intoning the least sincere apology in recent history. “As part of a California reparations package, Gov. Newsom signs a bill to officially apologize for slavery,” explains CalMatters. “But he vetoed others sought by reparations supporters.”

“This signing event marks a significant milestone in California’s ongoing efforts to promote healing and advance justice,” explains a document from the governor’s office. “The legislation includes critical measures that tackle a wide range of issues affecting Black Californians, from criminal justice reforms to civil rights and education.”

But a less deceptive appraisal can be found from Scott Adams: