Birthright citizenship

After the Civil War three amendments were adopted.  The 13th ended slavery.  The 15th said that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race.  The 14th was a long one.  It contains a clause that said states can’t make or enforce laws that abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the U.S.  That was later used by the Supreme Court (not the current one) to apply most of the Bill of Rights to the states.

The 14th also contained a definition of citizenship.  It’s the first sentence.  “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

President Andrew Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment.  He said that if it were adopted, even Chinese could become citizens.  Right he was.  The 14th says if you are born here, you are one of us.  Doesn’t matter where you came from.  Doesn’t matter who your parents were.  Doesn’t matter if you are Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or atheist.  You are one of us.

It’s called “birthright citizenship.”  Trump and many in the Republican Party have pledged to get rid of it.  

Linda buys a VW Beetle

It’s a 1962 model, light green, 55,000 miles, and in great shape.  I have a feeling we won’t drive it to California, and we will have to relearn what was once called “standard shift,” but we can drive it in Halloween parades or to Weissport for ice cream.  It doesn’t have seat belts or a radio or a port to charge a cell phone, but it does run and it has air conditioning.  (You roll down the window.)  It also will have an antique license plate.  It arrives on Thursday.  

I am not a car guy, but the whole thing is interesting.  We can practice shifting gears in one our fields.  

Songs from the Great Depression

Tonight, in a depressed mood, I listened to an album entitled “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime:  American Song During the Great Depression.”  The album included songs like “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore” by Woody Guthrie, “Fifteen Miles from Birmingham” by the Delmore Brothers, and “All In Down and Out Blues” song by Uncle David Macon.  

Yesterday the Times published an article about all the rich people who had backed Trump in the belief that he would make them richer.  Case in point–Elon Musk.  And he probably will.

I’ve read so many articles that said that the Democrats should appeal more to the working class, to people who haven’t made it and aren’t about to.  That should be easy for me.  I have never liked rich people.  Most of them seem to be parasites.  Hedge fund managers, CEOs who never set foot in a distribution center or a production line or used a wrench or loaded a truck, financiers, crypto bros, guys who make a living moving money around, Harvard-trained attorneys...I dislike that whole crowd.  It’s almost visceral.

Congratulations to Senator-elect Andy Kim

The U.S. has a Korean-American population of about 1.8 million.  Not a huge number; most of them live in California, New York, and New Jersey.  Now New Jersey voters have elected the first Korean-American to serve in the U.S. Senate.  

Some voters still do the right thing.  It should be noted that New Jersey voters also supported Kamala Harris over Don Trump.  People in eastern PA often look down on our New Jersey neighbors, but I really like them.

Buyer's Remorse

Quite a few Muslim and Arab voters sided with Trump as a rebuke to the Biden Administration’s siding with Israel in its war in Gaza.  A guy named Rabiul Chowdhury, a founder of Muslims for Trump, thought that a former ambassador to Germany would be made Secretary of State.  Samraa Luqman of Dearborn and a co-chair of the Abandon Harris campaign, said she thought anything was better than Biden officials.  Whoops.

Trump’s picks include Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the  UN, Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and a pro-Israeli golfing buddy Steven Witkoff as special envoy to the Middle East.  All are hawks who completely back Israel.

In fact Huckabee says there is no such thing as the West Bank.  It is Judea and Samaria, names used by right wing Israelis.  He says there is no occupation; the West Bank simply belongs to Israel.

Evidently the Muslims in Michigan who voted for Trump hadn’t done their homework.  

Some of the info for this post is from Jonathan Weisman, “Israeli Right Likes Trump’s Team; Many U.S. Muslims and Jews Don’t,” New York Times (15 November 2024), p. A9. 

Dead bear in our driveway

Last night our next door neighbor phoned and said there was a dead bear in our driveway.  We grabbed a flashlight and ran out, and there was a dead bear in our driveway.  Our neighbor was also there; she said a guy had stopped at her house and said he hit a deer.  His truck was damaged, but he thought he could drive to his home about a mile away.  She came out to see if the deer was still there and found the bear.  

Linda thought it weighed between 400 and 500 pounds.  It certainly looked big.  It had no evident wounds.  Our neighbor said she had already called the Game Commission, and they were sending someone out to pick it up.  This morning it was gone.

We like bears.  We don’t even care that our suet feeder and seed feeders are occasionally damaged by bears.  They aren’t dangerous, and they are magnificent animals.  It was a sad occasion. 

Does canvassing do any good?

I was part of a team of five people who canvassed Summit Hill.  All of it.  Canvassing is not easy.  You run into unfriendly dogs and people, you are up and down porch steps, people don’t answer the door, and in Summit Hill it is colder and more windy than most of Carbon County.  I often wondered if any of it did any good.  The problem was that we didn’t have a control group.  

Or so I thought.  It turns out we did.  It was called New Jersey and New York.  Trump improved his performance by more than ten percentage points in those two states.  In Pennsylvania, where a small army of canvassers worked [two of the members on our team were from California; one from New York], Trump did three points better.  

Canvassers can move the needle a few percentage points.  That’s what we were attempting to do.  We evidently did that.  The problem was that the voters cared more about inflation and immigrants than they did about electing an obviously criminal incompetent and unqualified candidate.

Info on the statistics was taken from Campbell Robertson, “Ground Game in Pennsylvania Was No Match for Groundswell of Grievances,” New York Times (14 Nov. 2024), p. A17.