Daily Archives: September 2, 2021

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Instruction

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Nearly 15,000 Nevadans register to vote in August - FOX5 Las Vegas

Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance was already some way along a journey when he took the stage at the first "National Conservatism Conference" in July 2019.

In the runup to 2016, he had been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump's candidacy. "I find him reprehensible," he tweeted a month before the election. "Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man."

Within three years, his views had evolved sufficiently to put him on the program of an event widely viewed as an attempt by right-wing pundits and scholars to erect an institutional structureor at least some intellectual scaffoldingaround the Trump phenomenon.

Earlier this year, just after announcing a run for U.S. Senate, he apologized to Ohio voters for having been "wrong about the guy."

But only last week did the full force of Vance's spiritual reversal become apparent: "I think our people hate the right people," he told The American Conservative magazine.

"Our people" might be understood broadly as the Republican base, while those he sees as worthy of contempt might be understood broadly as leftists and members of the coastal elite. Reached for comment, his campaign press secretary affirmed that "JD Vance strongly believes that the political, financial and Big Tech elitesdeserve nothing but our scorn and hatred."

By suggesting that antipathy toward the correct out-group is itself a moral imperative, Vance was engaging a powerful political current that has recently resurfaced within the conservative movement. He is not the first to be swept up in it.

In 2016 and 2017, New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote a pair of long magazine articles sounding the alarm to people of faith about rising illiberalism at home and abroad. "Simply put," he said in the second piece for Commentary magazine, "in the real-world experience of the 20th century, the Church, tradition, and religious minorities fared far better under liberal-democratic regimes than they did under illiberal alternatives."

Two years later, Ahmari had had enough of all that. In a now-infamous broadside in the Christian journal First Things, he insisted that conservatives learn to see "politics as war and enmity," that they shed their "great horror" of "the use of the public power to advance the common good," and that they be willing "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils."

At the very core of the new illiberal conservatism is a yenfor powerand an unabashed willingness to use it to destroy one's political opponents. Summing up the problem with libertarians and "establishment" conservatives in an essay last year, Hillsdale College's David Azerrad assailed "the cowardice and accommodation in the face of leftist hegemony" exhibited by the "long list of enemies to the Right." The more "manly" and "combative" conservatism that Azerrad claimed to speak for "understands not just ideas," he said, "but power."

Demands of this sort can be plausibly justified only if one's adversaries are irredeemable and one's life itself is at stake. Listen to the new conservatives' online chatter and you'll hear just such claims: that the left wishes to "subjugate" or "exterminate" them; that progressives have no qualms about using state power to accomplish their ends; that to do anything less than respond "in kind" amounts to "unilateral disarmament"; that this is a "war" in which the only choices are "suicide" or victory at any cost.

And these sentiments are not limited to anonymous accounts on the dark edges of social media. In July, former Trump official (and "Flight 93 Election" essayist) Michael Anton lambasted conservatives for not responding appropriately to the "proto-genocidal rhetoric" of the left. In February 2020, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule stepped into hot water by tweeting that the anti-Trump attendees of a center-right conference would be "the very first group for the camps." (He meant that their opposition to Trump will not be able to save them from the "gulags" when the "extremist left" takes over, he later clarified.) As talk radio provocateur Jesse Kelly put it this spring, "The Left and the Right have existed in a System where only the Left plays offense and the Right plays defense. They've existed in this System so long, both sides think it's normal. And permanent. It's not."

A couple of things should be clear at this point. For one, this is not a left-right schism. For those I call "Will-to-Power Conservatives," the fusionistright is no less an enemy than is the progressive-identitarian left. (Now would be a good moment to acknowledge that the politics of hate are not exactly foreign to segments of the progressive movement, either. Neither side has a monopoly on illiberalism.)

Second, this divide is not primarily about technocratic policy.

Consider that the same nationalist conference at which Vance spoke in 2019 featured a debate. On one side, representing the MAGA faction, former Mitt Romey adviser Oren Cass argued that Washington should use its powers of taxation and regulation to prop up American manufacturing against foreign competition. On the other, Richard Reinsch, an editor at the libertarian publisher Liberty Fund, made the case for free markets and against attempts by the state to choose winners and losers.

It can seem like this type of studious wrangling over the proper size and scope of government is the main rift on the right today. It's not. Cass' top-down industrial planning is about as far from my free trade libertarianism as a political agenda can be. But as a dispositional liberal, Cass recognizes, just as Reinsch and I do, that people can disagree without despising one another.

The same, I fear, cannot be said of Vance and his compatriots. And once hate becomes a virtue to be celebrated and opponents become enemies to be destroyed, before long, no response is off the table.

Students of intellectual history may be picking up a hair-raising resonance. The new illiberal conservatives have (sometimes quite explicitly) taken a page out of the book of Carl Schmitt, an anti-modernist, pro-authoritarian German political philosopher known for insisting that the core distinction of politics "is that between friend and enemy."

It's occasionally said that Schmitt's ideas were meant to be descriptive, not normative. Yet he plainly believed that blowing up constitutional limitations on the executive and withholding mercy from the out-group were the legitimate province of a sovereign state. Democracy, he once wrote, "necessarily involves first homogeneity and secondlyif necessarythe elimination or annihilation of heterogeneity."

As if to prove how strong the current of hate-based politics can be, Schmitt's beliefs would lead him to a stint as the "crown jurist of the Third Reich." Though he eventually left the Nazi Party, he refused to renounce the worldview that had made him one of Hitler's most prominent apologists.

With their talk of enemies and enmity and civilizational war, it seems the new illiberal conservatives have tapped into something that isn't so new after all.

Continued here:
JD Vance Surrenders to the Politics of Hate - Reason

Its often said that Wario is an enigma. Who says that? Thats not one of the questions were here to answer.

Its Wario Month here at Wariogon, and there are some burning questions out there about Wario. While hes certainly the loudest and proudest of the overall-wearing citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom, there are some common misconceptions about him.

Lets dive into the things you need to know ahead of our month celebrating the gold and garlic-loving prince of video games (and farts).

Warios first appearance was Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins on the Game Boy. He served as the games primary antagonist, and he was reportedly born out of one Nintendo teams frustration over making a game based on a different teams protagonist.

Thus Wario, envisioned by creator Hiroji Kiyotake as the Bluto to Mario's Popeye, was born. Wario went on to take over the Land series, dubbing it Wario Land. Most notably, Wario joined the ever-growing roster of Mushroom Kingdom denizens to golf, kart, and party with Mario and his friends. He eventually opened WarioWare to make his own video games, and he even starred in his own 3D platform on the Nintendo GameCube, Wario World, but we dont talk about that.

Growing up, I remember hearing playground rumors about Wario. (Clearly, I had a lot going on during second grade.) The most popular one was that Wario and Mario were cousins. But thats not the case. Wario and Mario were actually just childhood rivals, and the two share no blood relation.

So, Mario and Wario arent cousins, but surely Waluigi is Warios brother? No, thank god.

Wario was the original Wa inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom, showing up as a villain for Mario in 1992. Waluigi, on the other hand, is an absolute creep who only exists so Wario could have a duos partner in tennis. None of that is a joke.

An issue of Nintendo Power cataloged last year on Twitter revealed that Waluigi is just some goober that Wario hired. Waluigi isnt even his real name. Wario apparently searched an internet actor pool and hired Jimmy Poppadopolos to act like his duo partner and be a foil for Luigi. Waluigi has since legally changed his name. Seriously.

This question has a pretty complex answer. Wario isnt the main villain of the series, to be sure. But even Bowser, who trumps Wario in sheer villainy, is more of an antagonist than a villain. Bowser is a good dad who even occasionally acts in a more comedic role for story-based Mario titles like the Mario & Luigi games or Paper Mario. In many cases, Bowser is more of a frenemy than an antagonist. And with how much Bowser, Wario, Mario, and the rest of the gang hang out while playing sports and driving, Im not sure you could even call Bowser a bad guy.

With Wario clearly in a lower bad guy tier than Bowser, I think its safe to downgrade him from villain to jerk.

Youd think so, but Id guess no.

Youll find surprisingly little if you type Wario and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) into Google, so Ill just say this from the heart: Warios farts are weaponized and on demand. It is, in fact, crueler if he doesnt have IBS and has instead just cultivated his body to be an unnatural fart machine. A weapon of gas destruction, if you will.

Another question thats surprisingly complex to answer.

Wario is Italian now, but he wasnt always. Warios original voice actor was German translator Thomas Spindler, and his line that sounds like oh, I missed! is actually So ein Mist! which is German for oh crap! On brand for Wario. Spindler said Wario was always envisioned as German.

However, outside of his Mario Strikers Charged theme song which has a German folk song vibe Wario is largely viewed as Italian. The shift seems to have happened as soon as Charles Martinet, Marios voice actor, took over the role. The Wario we hear today speaks more than any of Martinets other characters and in an even thicker Italian accent than Mario.

Maybe?

In a Nintendo Power issue from 2000, the magazine asked producer Hiroyuki Takahashi if Wario had his own partner the way Mario and Luigi have Peach and Daisy. Marios creator, Shigeru Miyamoto told the producer that he didnt want to see whatever girlfriends Wario and Waluigi would find for themselves.

However, the same Nintendo Power blog that outs Waluigi as Jimmy Poppadopolos also suggests that Wario and Waluigi may have had a budding romance. The article does say that as of Mario Kart Double Dash the two have parted ways physically, which is perhaps the worst imaginable way to put that.

So, if Wario does fuck, he probably fucks Waluigi. Do with that information what you will.

If you google Wario, as I often do, youve probably run into this auto-complete, asking if Wario considers himself a member of the Libertarian political party.

This is actually not a sincere question, but instead an old school Twitter meme from 2011.

But in service of this FAQ: No, Wario is not a Libertarian. Wario clearly doesnt believe in or understand government, otherwise he would have run for office at this point.

Read the rest here:
Everything you need to know about Wario - Polygon

Democrats in Congress are considering a policy that was long unthinkable: a federal requirement that every American show identification before casting a ballot. But as the party tries to pass voting-rights legislation before the next election, it is ignoring a companion proposal that could ensure that a voter-ID law leaves no one behindan idea that is as obvious as it is historically controversial. What if the government simply gave an ID card to every voting-age citizen in the country?

Voter-ID requirements are the norm in many countries, as Republicans are fond of pointing out. But so are national ID cards. In places such as France and Germany, citizens pick up their identity card when they turn 16 and present it once theyre eligible to vote. Out of nearly 200 countries across the world, at least 170 have some form of national ID or are implementing one, according to the political scientist Magdalena Krajewska.

In the American psyche, however, a national ID card conjures images of an all-knowing government, its agents stopping people on the street and demanding to see their papers. Or at least thats what leaders of both parties believe. The idea is presumed to be so toxic that not a single member of Congress is currently carrying its banner. Even those advocates who like the concept in theory will discuss its political prospects only with a knowing chuckle, the kind that signals that the questioner is a bit crazy. There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it, says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Admittedly, this is probably not the best time to propose a new national ID. A large minority of the country is rebelling against vaccine passports as a form of government coercion. Yet public opposition to a national ID has never been as strong as political leaders assume. The idea has won majority support in polls for much of the past 40 years and spiked to nearly 70 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In a nationwide survey conducted this summer by Leger for The Atlantic, 51 percent of respondents favored a national ID that could be used for voting, while 49 percent agreed with an opposing statement that a national ID would represent an unnecessary expansion of government power and would be misused to infringe on Americans privacy and personal freedoms. Support was far higher63 percentamong respondents who said they had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than it was among those who said they had voted for Donald Trump (39 percent).

The best argument for a national ID is that the nations current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised. Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65. The Atlantic poll suggests that the gap remains: 9 percent of respondents said they lacked a government-issued ID, although a much smaller share (2 percent) said that was the reason they did not vote in 2020. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans do have IDs, we dont realize theres this whole other side of the country thats facing this massive crisis, says Kat Calvin, who launched the nonprofit Spread the Vote, which helps people obtain IDs.

Read: How voter-ID laws discriminate

The United States gives every citizen a Social Security card with a unique nine-digit number, but the paper cards lack a photograph. Passports have photos, but barely more than one-third of Americans currently have one thats not expired. By far the most common form of photo ID is a state-issued drivers license, but many elderly and poor citizens dont drive, nor do a significant number of Americans who live in large cities and rely on mass transit.

Opposition to national ID remains among groups on the libertarian right, such as the Cato Institute, as well as civil-liberties advocates on the left, such as the ACLU. But even they acknowledge that the fears of an all-knowing government sound a bit ridiculous in an era when Americans freely hand over so much of themselves to companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. We do have a national ID, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, told me. Its operated by giant tech companies, where every place you are, everything you do, everything you search for is recorded in some fashion and integrated as a matter of managing your data. Were locking the window, and weve got the front door wide open.

The idea of linking voting to a single ID card was not always so far-fetched. In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker endorsed a federal voter-ID requirement. The panel recommended that the emerging Real ID, a product of one of many security reforms Congress passed after September 11, be used for voting. The Real ID Act set minimum security standards for drivers licenses and other IDs that are used to board flights and enter federal buildings. It wasand is, as the federal government makes clear 16 years laterexplicitly not a national ID. Even in the security-at-any-cost posture of the years following 9/11, there was a general recognition that there was an allergy to a national ID, Chertoff told me.

Some of the Democrats on the commission believed that a national ID was inevitable. The United States is moving toward a national ID, for reasons of homeland security, Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana representative and a member of the commission, wrote to his colleagues in a memo obtained by The Atlantic. That moment was the closest the two parties have come to a consensus on voter ID in the past 20 years. But despite a push by Carter for a unanimous endorsement, three Democrats on the commissionincluding former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschledissented from its headline recommendation.

Democrats in Congress ensured that the idea went nowhere. The day after the commission released its recommendations, Barack Obama, then in his ninth month as a senator, stood alongside Representative John Lewis of Georgia to denounce the ID proposal as a mistake and a solution in search of a problem. The commission had called for voter ID even as it acknowledged within its report that the issue the requirement purports to solvevoter fraudwas extremely rare. Carter defended the proposal as a corrective to the restrictive ID laws that Republican-led states had already begun to pass. Other Democrats, though, now see a damaging legacy for the Carter-Baker commission: It coated the idea of voter-ID laws with a bipartisan gloss, allowing Republican-led states to justify unnecessary restrictions on the liberty of many Americans to cast a ballot, Spencer Overton, one of the panels Democratic dissenters, told me.

The goal of the Carter-Baker commissions recommendation was to endorse a federal ID standard for voting while requiring statesand perhaps, eventually, the federal governmentto make secure IDs available to every citizen free of charge. But thats not what happened. In 2001, just 11 states required ID to vote. The movement has exploded in the two decades since, aided by a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 upholding a voter-ID law in Indiana, the 2010 wave election that empowered Republicans across the country, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now 36 states have voter-ID laws on the books.

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. Calvins staff and volunteers work with peoplemany of whom are homeless or were recently incarceratedto assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

Read: How the government learned to waste your time

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOPs insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. Its hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes, Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

The Democratic Party is taking a new look at a federal ID standard this year out of desperation. Democrats in the Senate need Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support their push for voting-rights legislation, and in June, he circulated a set of policies he wanted to see in a revised bill. One would require voter ID with allowable alternatives (utility bill, e.g.) to prove identity to vote. His single-line proposal makes no mention of requiring a photo. Many states, including Texas, already allow alternatives to presenting a photo ID, although the exceptions vary widely.

Read: The strange elegance of Joe Manchins voter-ID deal

The most surprising aspect of Manchins floated idea was the reaction of Democratic leaders. None of them shot it down. Stacey Abrams, who has fought restrictive voting laws nationwide since narrowly losing her 2018 bid to become Georgias governor, said she could absolutely support that provision. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Houses third-ranking Democrat and a close ally of President Joe Biden, was also okay with it. Ive never, ever said I was opposed to voters IDing themselves, Clyburn told me. A guy cant just walk off an airplane from a foreign country and walk into a voting booth and say, I want to vote. You have to ID yourself. Clyburn said an ID law just has to be equitable: The government cant, as some red states do, accept a hunting license as a form of ID for voting but not a student ID.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment, she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. My whole job is helping people who dont have utility bills get IDs, she said. What they were saying is: If you dont have a home or an apartment or if your name isnt on the lease on that home or apartment, you dont deserve to vote, you dont deserve to participate in democracy.

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, with a plan and a budget to implement it. She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. Its a pipe dream, she said. Calvins right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

After Clyburn spent several minutes explaining the kind of ID law he could support, I asked him whether the solution was simply to create an ID for everyone. The lawmaker responsible for counting votes in the House stopped me immediately. Im not into that, he said. I pressed him, bringing up the Carter-Baker commission, the use of national ID in other countries. I know where youre going with this, Clyburn replied. Im not there.

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Voter ID: Why Doesn't America Have a National ID Card? - The Atlantic

By James Kaufman

Updated: 21 hours ago Published: 21 hours ago

Rep. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage, speaks on the opening day of the Alaska Legislature's third special session of 2021 on Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (James Brooks / ADN)

As an elected state representative who has been in the middle of the big debate about the fiscal policy of the state of Alaska, including the Permanent Fund dividend and how we fund our state government, I thought I should provide some context to my recent votes on House Bill 3003, which included this years PFD and other spending items.

I am a Republican, with a bit of libertarian in me. I have looked at the PFD issue closely and seriously. In doing so, I have determined that the future of larger-than-recent PFDs would require the creation of new bureaucracy and new taxes.

This creates a challenge, because during my campaign, anyone who met me at their door, my events or heard me on television, radio, Zoom meetings, etc., knew that my beliefs were and still are as follows:

I am not anti-PFD, but the states ability to pay according to the historical formula has been diminished by shifting and declining revenue, combined with a government that needs reformation to provide a higher quality product at a more reasonable cost.

Without reductions in total cost of government, PFDs larger than those recently issued will require new taxes.

I am not yet in favor of ramping up taxes to feed a government that has not implemented a coherent set of improvement initiatives to get more value out of the cash being burned.

We need to build consensus and fix the conflicting statutes.

I developed my positions by paying attention to the voices of my constituents and the past decisions that led us here. I was honored to have won without promising anything specific about PFD amounts, but rather that I would approach problems methodically while trying to drive our state government toward higher efficiency, better results and more accountability.

During the Aug. 30 House floor session, I voted to support an $1,100 dividend as opposed to larger dividends, including the $2,350 amount calculated by the governors proposed 5% percent-of-market-value 50-50 plan and the original statutory amount, which would have yielded more than $3,700.

I voted the way I did because we have not yet resolved the source of the conflict, our structural fiscal imbalance. I feel that I would be breaking a campaign promise if I were to support an unbalanced budget or new broad-based taxation to close the gap. However, even with these constraints, we can still have a dividend that is above recent status quo, at about $1,100 and growing into the future.

We have the recommendations of the latest Fiscal Policy Work Group, but those recommendations have not been completely agreed upon, and none of the recommendations have been implemented. Larger dividends have not been paired with possible new sources of revenue, who would pay and how tax collection would be administered. There has been talk of cost reductions, but realizing those reductions will be painful and hard to achieve unless we can learn how to improve our management systems and rethink some of our processes and assumptions.

I am not in favor of new or increased taxes if we dont first improve how the state manages spending during periods where revenue increases. I believe that the most important and first steps are to establish a functional limit on government spending and then begin implementing improvement projects to drive out waste and increase performance.

HJR 301/HB 3001 are my proposed policy solutions for implementing cost control by linking appropriation limits to our private sector performance. I will continue to introduce other legislation aimed squarely at my core policy focus of improving operational and quality management systems and practices within the executive branch of the state of Alaska.

In making these suggestions to avoid new taxes until we cap spending and improve government operations, I have not moved away from my conservative roots or my campaign promises, which guide me toward trying to build our private sector, promoting responsible fiscal policies, and seeking to continuously improve the quality of Alaskas government.

Rep. James Kaufman, R-Anchorage, represents House District 28 in the Alaska Legislature, encompassing southeast Anchorage, Turnagain Arm and Girdwood.

The views expressed here are the writers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

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My recent votes on the PFD - Anchorage Daily News