On November 9, 1960, Robert McNamara was named president of the Ford Motor Company, becoming the first non-Ford family member to serve in that post — only to resign a month later to join the newly elected John F. Kennedy administration.
Lately, Americans have been distracted by a federal-level election. But we’ve also had important state-level matters to attend to during the recent election cycle, including some legislatively referred questions about citizen initiative rights.
In my experience, whenever many politicians push for a ballot measure in order to supposedly “fix” an already-established right of citizen initiative, the goal is usually to make it harder for people to get a question onto the ballot.
Three questions on state ballots this November exemplify the pattern. Fortunately, voters have rejected the sly politicians’ gambit in each case.
In Arizona, Proposition 136 would have let opponents of a ballot question force a doubt about its constitutionality to be adjudicated before the measure can be placed on the ballot. (Nothing prevents a measure from being challenged in court after passage.) Of course, sometimes litigation, whether sincere or not, can’t be entirely resolved before proposed urgent deadlines, like the deadline for submitting signatures to place a question on the ballot.
Arizona voters clobbered Prop 136 with about 64 percent of the vote.
In North Dakota, voters had to again defeat a lawmaker-referred measure to weaken citizen initiative rights. Among other arbitrary burdens, Measure 2 would have increased the number of signatures required to send a question to ballot.
Voters killed it by about 56 to 44 percent.
Lastly, Colorado’s Amendment K sought to impose an earlier deadline for submitting initiative signatures. This, too, voters declined by about a ten point margin.
Good results. Voters tend to see the elite’s designs and react appropriately.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part V: “Negative Beneficence” (1893), Chapter 1: “The Kinds of Altruism.”
The mental action by which from moment to moment we thus, in ways commonly too rapid to observe, class the objects and acts around, and regulate our conduct accordingly, has been otherwise named by some, and especially by Professor Bain, ‘discrimination.’ Intelligence is, in its every act, carried on by discrimination; and has advanced from its lowest stages to its highest by increasing powers of discrimination. It has done this for the sufficient reason that during the evolution of life under all its forms, increase of it has been furthered by practice or habit as well as by survival of the fittest; since good discrimination has been a means of saving life, and lack of it a cause of losing life.
Montana was admitted into the United States federal union as the 41st state on November 8, 1889. On the same date in 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century, becoming the 35th president of the United States.
“Reconsider Any Belief In Innate American Goodness,” Ken White advises at the Popehat Report. “A country that votes for Trump is broken in very complicated and daunting ways,” informs the attorney and podcaster.
“Fuck Civility,” he declares, and for good measure, “Stay Tuned For Violence.”
They do sorta go together, eh?
“Debate is preferable,” he notes for the record, “[b]ut most Americans would agree with what Thomas Jefferson said about the blood of patriots and tyrants. At some point violence is morally justified and even necessary. Americans will disagree on when.”
Though, let’s all agree, not now.
My thinking the day after takes a different route.
First, the lawfare unleashed on Mr. Trump helped him more than it hurt. A majority of the public did not suddenly become enamored with the idea of 34 felony convictions but stuck by the former president, now president-elect, because of their contempt for the New York Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice, seen as rogue players in partisan politics.
America had come to look like Egypt.
Second, the establishment media’s years-long campaign against Trump, hyperbolic and often dishonest (see Charlottesville narrative) failed miserably. Arguably, like lawfare, it was counterproductive.
“Americans don’t trust the news media,” asserted Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, explaining his paper’s 2024 A.D. non-endorsement for president.
In the aftermath of Mr. Trump being declared the winner, Matt Walsh offered on X: “Legacy media is officially dead.”
Not dead. Just in need of rebirth. Like Democratic Party leaders, news media professionals face a choice, either (a) blame the public for not being more appreciative or (b) reflect upon its own principles and performance.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Will Rogers
There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
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Rock, Return, Release, Rocked
1492: The oldest meteorite with a known date of impact struck a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1504: Christopher Columbus returned from his fourth and final voyage.
1775: John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, started the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by offering freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters to fight on the British side during the Revolution.
1940: The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in a windstorm a mere four months after completion.
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Don’t Kill Yourself
As Donald Trump appeared to be winning last night, the number of Twitterers who proclaimed a hankering or a design to kill themselves rose dramatically. Michael Malice and others found humor in it, but it’s a super-saddening development, if you ask me.
These Kamala Harris voters are not really going to kill themselves. It is just something to say on Twitter.
I really hope I’m not wrong about this.
I’ll leave to others the counsel of life. That is the job of friends and family and emergency hotline dispatchers. My counsel is different: talking about suicide because your candidate lost is undemocratic. If the authoritarian pronouncements of both major candidates alarmed you about the danger of anti-democratic trend, this fad should raise the alarm several decibels.
The whole point of democracy is to allow a transition of power sans bloodshed. And that requires both contenders and supporters not to shed each other’s blood . . . or their own. When they fail.
It’s a requirement. Not to over-react.
The losers have to accept the loss, and the winners have to refrain from using the state to punish the losers further.
It’s sort of that simple.
Resignation is key, as scientist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) indicated: “Going to bed, reasonably resigned to Trump win at this point as it seemed to me from a distance for some time. He may be a nut, a liar, and a crook, but the bright side is a likely boost free speech and due process at unis and bump in tech sector, if we survive the rest.”
We will survive. If Trump wins the Electoral Vote (I’m going to bed, too, before a final determination), or if Harris does.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer, “The New Toryism,” The Man Versus the State (1884).
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves?
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Gandhi Arrested
On November 6, 1913, Mohandes K. Gandhi was arrested for participating in a march of Indian miners in South Africa.