History & Comment for November 6, 2024

A look at historical and current events on this day, comment and a wee bit of humor.

Transcript

This is History and Comment for Wednesday the 6th of November 2024. It is the 310th day of the year.   

The leaves are fighting a loosing battle.    As I wandered Indiana this past weekend, we are well past the peak and many areas are down to just the oak trees with their deep subtle reds hanging on.    A couple of periods of rain, have speed the process along.   The near record high temperatures have been nice though.   

Unless you are living under a rock, you know the outcome of the Presidential Race.  Maybe the largest sigh of relief has come from the fact that there are no questions about the outcome.   A nice change from several past elections.    Besides the win in the Electoral College, Mr. Trump carried the popular vote by a significant margin.   

There is some debate mostly from the left,  that the electoral college needs to go away.  There are factions trying to implement plans to make it ineffective.  Do not forget that each State has the right to decide how their electors are divided up.   Most states give all electors to the person winning the popular vote in their state.   A couple do divide them up.   Maine and Nebraska come to mind here.    A friend posted an interesting idea.  How would recent elections change if all states divided them up, base on the popular vote in each congressional district? Recall the number of electoral votes is based on the number of congressional seats. So even the states with the lowest population gets three.    This does give the smaller states a bit of extra leverage.    

At first glance the idea might appear to give a slight edge to Republicans as nearly all maps show Democrat support focused in the metropolitan areas.   But then that plan would mirror the balance in Congress and that is very close also. 

Maybe someday I will sit down and see how that would have affected the last couple of elections. 

Maybe one extra bright spot was the Texas Senate race.   Leftist out spent Ted Cruz on the order of five to one, in a massive spending spree to oust the outspoken senator.   One source claimed there was about $50 per person in the United States spent on this presidential election.     If nothing else there is a lot of money flowing.  And a large portion from nefarious sources.   

A bit over 800 years ago, England is having a bit of a reform.    Over an extended period of time and a number of monarchs.   Commoners had lost access to what we would call public lands.   Covering nearly 1/3 of Southern England.  This prevented them from hunting  or farming the land they lived on.   They did not own the land, the Crown did and often severely limited their access.    One clause repealed the death penaltiy for poaching one of the Kings deer.   They were serious about it.  However a person could be imprisoned still.    The document called the Charter of the Forest and along with the Grand Charter are considered major changes in English law.     You might know the Grand Charter by its latin name the Magna Carta.  

Charles Dow is born in 1851. Dow established the concept of stock market analysis.   He is the Dow in the Dow Jones industrial Average.   The Jones was Edward Jones, a name that is still promiante in investing.    Dow also was a co-founder of the Wall Street Journal. 

Known for his march music John Phillips Sousa was born in 1854. 

I want to move beyond the election, but a couple of others come up on this day.   In 1860,  Abraham Lincoln is elected to his first term, with just below 40% of the popular vote.    We disdain our two party system. The 1860 election was a four-way race between Lincoln, John C. Breckinridge, John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas.     Douglas was a Democrat from Illinois and earned 20% of the popular vote but only carried one State.    Breckinridge was a Southern Democrat that carried most of the Southern states but their population was low and they had fewer electoral votes.   He had 12% of the popular vote.     Bell was the moderate candidate trying to bridge between the two polar views on Slavery.   He carried three states, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and had 15% of the popular vote.   

The point is multiple parties tend to divide the vote more and produce strange outcomes.   We could also discuss the Ross Peroit  effect, but I tire of the subject. 

Texas Songwriter Guy Clark,  was born in 1941.   Clark penned songs include:  Johnny Cash’s ‘The last Gunfighter Ballad”, Bobby Bare’s “New Cut Road”.   Ricky Skaggs “Heartbroke” and the Highway Men’s, "Desperados Waiting for a Train".

NBCs Meet the Press program debut in 1947, making it the longest running television program in history.   The distinction is difficult to quantify as there are several factors.  Was the show scripted or not.   Prime Time or Day Time and are we looking at seasons or episodes.   The trend for shorter “seasons”  is becoming a thing.  Traditionally, a season was 20 episodes that ran between September and May.    Now it might be just four to six shows. 

In any list there are a number of Daytime soap operas.   And a few popular kids shows like  Sesame Street often float toward the top of the list.    The upside to kids shows are the audience changes every few years, where adult shows they last much longer.    Sesame Street could pull much of the script from ten years ago and it would seem fresh. 

Glen Frey of the Eagles was born in 1948. 

The Cleveland Browns move to Baltimore in 1995.   The Maryland city was still not happy over the nighttime move of the Colts out of their city.    The Browns move is also an unhappy time at least for Cleveland.   The Season ticket holders and the City sued the NFL to retain the name, history and records of the Brown in Cleveland.   The NFL relented, provided the City build a state of the art stadium. They granted the team owner a new franchise for Baltimore.    

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