Categories
ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Sketchiest Etching

term limits, Michigan, hourglass, sand

State legislators placed Proposal 1 on the Michigan ballot to weaken their own term limits. It would let current incumbents stay up to twice as long in a single office and allow termed-out former legislators to return. 

Nonetheless, its elite backers insist that it makes term limits tougher.

To give proponents something to talk about other than this term limits scam, Proposal 1 also adds weak financial disclosure requirements for legislators — similar to (but weaker than) the rules that keep the U.S. Congress . . . so clean and honest.

“Never have so few applied so much lipstick to such a pig,” is how one Michigan term limits activist describes it.

That’s big lie #1 on the Great Lakes State ballot. 

Big lie #2 is Proposal 2, leftists’ feel-good voting rights measure funded by $10 million (and counting) in outside dark money (which I thought they abhorred). It guarantees stuff like a ballot dropbox on every corner and free postage for mailing back absentee ballots, etc., etc., etc.

Its real purpose is to place a new right into the Michigan Constitution: The right to vote WITHOUT showing any official photo identification. In fact, no ID whatsoever. Instead, the amendment establishes that simply signing a statement that, aw shucks, you are who you say you are, is all that can be required.

With Proposal 2 making any actual voter ID requirement unconstitutional, what’s their pitch to Michiganders?

“Proposal 2 etches voter ID into our state constitution,” declares one television spot.

Another proclaims Proposal 2 puts “voter ID requirements” into “our constitution” to make elections “safe and secure.”

Michigan’s Etch-a-Sketchiest insiders are actually promoting a prohibition of voter I.D. as a demand for that very thing. That’s the audacity of . . . fraud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

William Penn

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too.

William Penn, Frames of Government (1682).
Categories
Today

Albert Jay Nock

On October 13, 1870, American social critic and education theorist Albert Jay Nock was born. Nock was the author of a number of books, including Jefferson, the Man and Our Enemy, The State, but was probably most famous for his intellectual autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which was widely read and admired amongst conservatives in the 1950s and ’60s.

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies

The Middle of the Beginning of the End

Presidential powers, pardons, marijuana

President Biden’s decision to pardon everyone federally convicted for a simple marijuana possession is not the true beginning of the end of the federal war on drug-taking people.

In 2018, the federal government legalized certain products with cannabinoids derived from hemp. That’s something, even if the feds still ban buying and selling marijuana.

On the other hand, for years many states have been legalizing pot, inspiring the federal government to somewhat slacken enforcement of its own pot ban — sometimes.

These developments constitute the beginning of the end for the federal war on drug-taking people.

Call Biden’s gesture the middle of the beginning. That it won’t be rapidly followed by full federal legalization of unapproved drugs or even marijuana is shown by the objections of other politicians.

Senator Tom Cotton laments that Biden is “giving blanket pardons to pot heads — many of whom pled down from more serious charges.”*

The argument would be equally valid if it were illegal to blow soap bubbles and some people had pled down from a charge of smashing windows to a charge of blowing soap bubbles. Granted, plea deals are often horrible, wrongly abetting the guilty and hurting the innocent. So reform the plea-deal regime. 

But don’t criminalize non-crimes.

The real impact? The White House admits that “while no-one is currently in prison for ‘simple possession,’ a pardon for those who have convictions could allow better access to housing or employment.”

Call it a half-start at the middle of the beginning of the end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Another lament is that Biden’s pardon is just cynical election-eve politics. Well . . . let’s have more such pandering to the people; it seems the only way to get good policy from bad politicians. 

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Albert Jay Nock

The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.

Albert Jay Nock, “On Doing the Right Thing,” The American Mercury (1925).
Categories
Today

The New World

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached “the Indies.”

Exactly two hundred years later, a letter from Massachusetts Governor William Phips ended the Salem Witch Trials.

On this date in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance was first recited by students in many U.S. public schools, as part of a celebration marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.

The Pledge had been composed that year by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist minister, and was first published in Youth’s Companion magazine, September 8, 1892. The recital was accompanied with a salute to the flag known as the Bellamy salute. During World War II, the salute was replaced with a hand-over-heart gesture because the original form (described in detail by Bellamy) involved stretching the arm out towards the flag in a manner that resembled the later Nazi salute. The original form of the Pledge was somewhat less involved than later versions:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

In October an editorial addition occurred, the word “to” prefixing “the republic.”

Categories
general freedom insider corruption international affairs

Musk Gone Mad?

China, Taiwan, authoritarianism

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has often been lauded in this commentary — regarding SpaceX and the growth of private space travel, and recently for providing crucial internet access through his company’s Starlink satellites first to Ukraine and now for Iranian protesters.

I like that.

But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doesn’t like it at all. As Musk acknowledged last week in an interview with the Financial Times (FT), explaining that Chinese rulers wanted “assurances” he would not provide Starlink internet to the 1.4 billion people they actively repress.

With a Tesla plant in Shanghai, Musk is much more vulnerable to the dictates of Xi Jinping and the CCP than he is to Vladimir Putin or Iran’s Ayatollah. 

“Tesla, though headquartered in the U.S.,” Forbes notes, “made about half of its cars last year in mainland China, the world’s largest auto market.” 

Which amounts to an awful lot of leverage.

In that same FT interview, Musk floated a “solution” to the tensions between China, which threatens a military attack that might kill millions, and its target Taiwan, which overwhelmingly favors a war of resistance to CCP takeover and threatened re-education.

“My recommendation,” the usually innovative businessman told FT, “would be to figure out a special administrative zone for Taiwan [under China’s authority] that is reasonably palatable,” adding, “it’s possible, and I think probably, in fact, that they could have an arrangement that’s more lenient than Hong Kong.”

While the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. thanked Elon Musk for his idea, a senior Taiwanese official reminded, “The world has seen clearly what happened to Hong Kong.”

Does this brilliant businessman really think that the promise of a more “lenient” totalitarianism is any kind of solution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.

Vladimir Nabokov, published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967.
Categories
Today

The Revolution Remembered

October 11, 1890, marks the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

On the same date in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford approved a congressional joint resolution Public Law 94–479 to appoint, posthumously, George Washington to the grade of General of the Armies of the United States, as part of the bicentennial celebrations.

John J. Pershing (1860 – 1948) is the only other American to attain this high title, and the only one to achieve it while alive.

Categories
defense & war general freedom international affairs

Armageddon, Anyone?

war, Russia, nuclear bomb

Ah, the things one hears at high-dollar Democratic Party fundraisers!

Like declaring Russia’s threat to unleash nuclear weapons against Ukraine as the most serious “prospect of Armageddon in 60 years.”

Last week, Sleepy Joe “startled many Americans” with those remarks at a closed-door meeting of big donors.

Backpedaling on Friday, “U.S. officials stressed . . . that the United States has no reason to change its nuclear posture.” No reason? We’re backing one side in a war in which nukes are on the table!

Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, didn’t defend Biden’s “Armageddon” terminology but offered that it was “useful for the president and the administration to be having a conversation with the public about the risk.”

Of course, the president gave this frank evaluation to his party’s top check-writers, not the public. And that’s the second biggest problem with U.S. foreign policy: it’s totally divorced from the people. 

The biggest? Headin’ towards Armageddon. If Mr. Biden is serious about slouching towards the End Times, he should do more than make it the subject of political locker-room talk. 

Like what? How about:

  1. Seek to reduce tensions, wherever possible, and help Mr. Putin find an off ramp from his war in Ukraine; 
  2. Double- and triple-down on technologically defending the American people from the threat posed by nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; and  
  3. Speak to the people about these threats and the U.S. response.

While security concerns may dictate that information not be shared publicly, if it’s good enough to share on the rubber-chicken circuit, it good enough for ‘We the People.’

We pay the highest prices; we deserve to hear the sales pitch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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