June 24 birthdays include Henry Ward Beecher, clergyman and reformer (1813); Ambrose Bierce [pictured], author of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Devil’s Dictionary — his dark, cynical wit earned him the epithet “Bitter Bierce” (1842); Karin Pilsäter, Swedish politician of the Liberal People’s Party (1960).
“Prominent Democrats have increasingly softened their opposition to voter identification requirements in recent days,” informs The Washington Post, “signaling a new openness to measures that activists have long vilified as an insidious method of keeping minorities from the ballot box.”
Yesterday, when Republicans backed the idea, it was racist and supposedly so were they for supporting it. Not anymore. Now, Democrats favor Voter ID.
What changed?
Not racism. And certainly not racially exploitative demagoguery.
The catalyst may be a new Monmouth University poll showing fully 80 percent of Americans favor a photo ID requirement for voting, with support “at 62% among Democrats, 87% among independents, and 91% among Republicans.”
These progressive mutations take place as Senate Bill 1, the companion to H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act,” failed to break the GOP filibuster yesterday, blocked 50 votes to 50 votes along strictly partisan lines.
While Democrats scramble for a way out, some — Stacy Abrams, notably — suggest they have always been for voter ID.
Funny, the Democrats’ legislation would have effectively gutted the 35 state voter ID laws now on the books. “But HR-1 does not ‘ban’ voter identification laws,” lectures Newsweek’s fact-checker. “Instead, it offers a workaround” — that does not require showing an ID.
Just the sort of requirement Democrats now insist upon?
Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the real problem with Democrats dictating election policy from Washington is the rottenness of those policies, which include:
Congressional Democrats have plenty more bad policies where those came from.
And a legislative majority.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* If you can’t pack the Supreme Court, packing the FEC is the next best thing.
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If I had not quit TV news before COVID, it’s highly likely I would have quit during COVID. ’Cause I would have had a really hard time. TV news, and just news in general, (a) went bonkers under Trump and then [b] went like double bonkers under COVID.
Alison Morrow, on her YouTube interview with Bill Dorris, “‘I was wrong about Ivory Hecker,’ says former TV news journalist,” discussing the case of a TV journalist who ran afoul of her TV news station for her covering of HCQ (June 20, 2021).
Today is Estonia’s Victory Day, which has been celebrated on June 23 every year since 1934. The date recalls the victory in the 1919 Battle of Vonnu of the Estonian military forces (and Latvian North brigade) and their allies over German forces (Baltische Landeswehr) who sought to re-assert Baltic-German control over the region. The battle was part of the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, where the main adversary of the newly independent Estonia was Communist Russia.
Today, Victory Day also marks the contributions of all Estonians in their fight to regain and retain their independence. Estonian celebration of June 23 is ceremonially tied to the following Midsummer Day celebrations on June 24.
According to Estonian laws, the state flags are not to be lowered during the night between days.
“In recent years, there’s been a push to move zoning decisions further from the local level,” writes Matt Ray for Mises Wire — engaging in no small understatement.
“In 2019, Oregon passed House Bill 2001, making it the first statewide law to abolish single-family zoning in many areas. By expanding the state government’s jurisdiction to include zoning decisions previously handled by local agencies, the law entails an alarming centralization of state power.”
This trend is old, going back at least to the Progressive Era.
But the trend continues — “progresses” — and Oregon’s centralizing law has been “quickly followed by the introduction of similar bills in Virginia, Washington, Minnesota, and North Carolina,” Matt Ray explains. “Now President Biden is attempting to increase federal influence over local zoning.”
The problem should be obvious. Government land-use regulation by “zoning” is an awesome expression of rights-abridging power, usually becoming nothing more than what most regulations are: special-interest protection schemes, helping the in-crowd at the expense of “outsiders” (you and me, actually).
Most savvy people understand this in specific instances, but not generally, so when they see zoning they don’t like, they might leap to the notion that bad local regulations should be replaced by good state or federal regulators.
Trouble is, we have less ability to ensure that regulators in distant political centers aren’t captured by special interests or malign ideologues.
The only way out is a general rule-of-law approach, limiting all zoning powers. Barring that? Well, no matter how bad your city’s zoning, I wouldn’t trade it for zoning decisions from Washington.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Sometime ideas, like men, jump up and say ‘hello.’ They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely. All that we see in this world is based on someone’s ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream.
Log Lady (played by Margaret Lanterman, née Coulson), in “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer” (Twin Peaks, Episode Two), written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, premiering April 19, 1990 (ABC).
On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.
Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon, a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discovers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.
When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.
Remembering my dad and father-in-law, who both passed away several years ago; being with my adult children, and two grandchildren, who were all pretty nice to me; and seeing friends and relatives celebrate their dads — Father’s Day was wonderful.
In the real world, folks know how precious and important fathers are.
But yesterday morning, I was instead torturing myself with The Washington Post. Adorning the top half and more of the front-page of the Sunday “Outlook” section was a drawing of a kids’ party with a man delivering the birthday cake while a woman looks on from outside.
Beneath the artwork, the headline reads: “Fatherhood reimagined.”
Why “reimagined”?
Well, the paper offered two opinion columns under that banner. One, entitled, “Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are,” noted that “40 million at-home DNA tests have been sold, and hundreds of thousands of people . . . have gotten the news that the man they thought of as Dad is not their genetic father.”
I moved on to the second essay. “I wanted to be a better husband. So I planned my kid’s birthday party,” read the headline, the bad news in the sub-title: “As a psychologist, I knew men did less ‘mental labor,’ but I didn’t see my own shortcomings.”
I suppose fathers have ample room for improvement, but cannot we celebrate, or merely discuss, even for a day, the positive side of fatherhood? The relentless carping suggests not a penchant for improvement but something approaching an anti-fatherhood narrative.
Searching The Post for more on “fatherhood reimagined,” the second item is Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father.’” Back in 2017, I addressed Smith’s misguided argument that, essentially, in a super-charged government-welfare state, absent dads would not really be missed.
I miss my dad. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Thankfully, late in the day, The Post reported, “D.C. motorcade celebrates role of Black fathers on Father’s Day.” Hope!
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Un bon mot ne prouve rien.
A witty saying proves nothing.
Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien.
On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.