CSotD: Here’s the News Across the Nation
Skip to comments
Might as well lead off with the one in dubious taste. Jones doesn’t mind pushing things and I agree with his premise that only crooks wear masks. He’s not the first person to point out that all sorts of law officers manage to get through their workday without hiding their identities and there’s no reason ICE agents should be in any greater danger.
Well, except if they behave unprofessionally. Bad cops used to put tape over their badge numbers so they could beat people up and act like bullies without getting reported for it. Funny thing is that the same people who support random stops and searches and who say “If you have nothing to hide …” now argue that ICE thugs should be anonymous.
Tying it into the Nancy Guthrie search is edgy, but what’s also edgy is suggesting that if she weren’t semi-famous, her abduction wouldn’t be getting the wall-to-wall coverage it has been. I hope they find her and that she’s okay, but I hope they find all the missing women, even the obscure, unknown ones.
But what I really wish is that we could preserve the spirit of Norman Rockwell’s original illustration, in which a friendly cop is befriending a runaway kid at the local diner before taking him home.
When I was a kid, one of our two State Troopers was married to my second-grade teacher’s daughter, who was a dental hygienist at our school, and the other one went on to become a somewhat legendary trainer at their division’s headquarters. Sheriff Andy Taylor was more realistic than you might think, if you didn’t grow up with community policing as a given.
And not everyone has. I was walking through a desperately poor neighborhood in Chicago one summer when I came on a dogcatcher loading a dog into his van while two or three little Black kids stood on the crumbling sidewalk crying. Their mother said, “Don’t cry. He’s just going to jail for a few days.”
Nobody should have that as their normal.
When Dick Gregory ran for president in ’68, he released a book explaining his proposals. It included this:
Instead, we’re working to find ways to undo all the efforts of voter registration and passage of laws protecting the franchise. Those kids would be 60 or so now, and I’ll bet they don’t have passports. They may not have birth certificates, but if they were girls who changed their names when they got married, that won’t help a whole lot under the Republican plan.
Sorensen states the women’s case in this transparent farce. I’m more concerned with people who live in rural America, far from any place that might have their birth certificate on file, assuming they weren’t born at home, which was the case for some of my classmates. Not everyone belongs to a country club, not everyone goes to Italy for vacations, not everybody has a birth certificate.
And if you don’t have a car, you’re not going 40 miles to retrieve your birth certificate because there are no buses running from town to town out in the sticks.
Meanwhile, as noted before, a passport is just a poll tax priced at over a hundred bucks. Don’t pretend otherwise.
And don’t play that game where you pretend the SAVE Act is about showing ID when you vote. The Senate version requires proof of citizenship not just to register but whenever you go to the polls.
Though I’ve got to say, suggesting that Democrats want to reduce the inclusion of eligible voters is a heretofore unheard argument.
More than half the states already require ID at the polls. That still requires people to get something like a driver’s license, and not every town has a DMV, but purposefully melding that barrier with the much higher barriers of the SAVE act is dishonest and, alas, unsurprising.
Dear Leader wants to nationalize the elections, which is (A) fascistic and (B) clearly unconstitutional. He’d like our elections to be like the ones in Russia and Iran, where the ballot count is confirmed before the votes are cast, or like his new pals in Venezuela, whose government announces the results it wants, however the people voted.
However, he’d need an amendment to take voting away from the states, unless Mitch McConnell’s SCOTUS appointees decide that the Constitution doesn’t mean what the words say.
One issue is that the Founders assumed a literate electorate. Jefferson famously said he’d prefer newspapers without government to government without newspapers, but he followed that with “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” And then he founded the University of Virginia.
And it should be noted that the Constitution (which, BTW, Jefferson had little to do with) never limited the vote to white land-owning men. The limitations on voting were put in by individual states, which is why we needed amendments to forbid them to keep African-Americans and women away from the polls.
And we’d need one to force them to demand proof of citizenship, which would be our second amendment restricting, rather than expanding, freedom. The first was Prohibition. How’d that one work out?
The states, meanwhile, have the option of installing rightwing social clubs in schools, and that movement is not just in Nebraska. But Fell is right in suggesting that high school kids aren’t necessarily looking to have Mrs. Charlie Kirk tell them what to think. In fact, I’d wager that most high schools contain more Bad Bunny fans than Kid Rock fans.
Just setting up a Turning Point USA club won’t do more than reinforce the divisions that are already obvious to them, if not to you. Then somebody’s gonna want to start a MoveOn.org group with equal access and support. What are you going to tell them?
Maybe skip trying to convert them to partisan politics and focus on teaching them to read, write and cipher.
If nothing else, teach them the difference between “may have” and “might have,” so they don’t spark rumors of babies who rose from the dead but can’t be found.
And otherwise let them march to the beat of their own drums.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 16
Comments are closed.