On October 19, 1781, representatives of British commander Lord Cornwallis handed over Cornwallis’ sword and formally surrendered to George Washington and the comte de Rochambeau, at Yorktown, Virginia. The Revolutionary War (or War for Independence, or Colonial Rebellion, or whatever you wish to call it) was over. In 1918 on this date, conservative writer Russell Kirk was born.
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
Will the Decepticons transform Arkansas? Not if the truth gets out to the people in time.
Click on over to Townhall.com. Read. Enjoy. Then come back here for the necessary R&D.
And then: contact your friends and family in Arkansas. There is no reason to let the Decepticons win.
Who gets the A’s, who gets the F’s:
On October 18, 1775, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery, upon the death of her master. Widely appreciated in her day, she was the first African-American to publish a book.
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
Many politicians serve as powerful arguments for term limits. Arkansas State Senator Jon Woods rivals the best.
Sen. Woods (R-Springdale) and State Rep. Warwick Sabin (D-Little Rock) authored a 22-page, 7,000-word constitutional amendment on this November’s ballot. They say Issue 3 is about ethics and transparency.
You decide.
Woods and Sabin threw together various ethics provisions and then stuck in a gutting of term limits. Their ballot title reads it is “establishing term limits” — without bothering to inform voters that it doubles how long legislators can stay in the Senate and more than doubles the House limit — to a whopping 16 years!
This week, Arkansas Term Limits debuted TV ads alerting the public to the scam, charging that legislators have “pursued a campaign of silence . . . letting the deceptive ballot title do their work,” so that “when Arkansas voters go to the polls there will be no mention of the doubling of term[s].”
The unrepentant Sen. Woods says that it is “misleading” to call his Issue 3 deceptive. Meanwhile, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports that, after asking if Woods’s ballot language wasn’t indeed deceptive: “Woods said he doesn’t know.”
The senator’s response to the Arkansas GOP Convention’s nearly unanimous resolution against Issue 3? “You just have a couple of nuts that got together on a Saturday that were out of touch with Arkansans and passed a silly resolution that in no way reflects the point of view of all Republicans in Arkansas.”
Perhaps Democratic politicians are smarter. Democratic co-author Sabin is nowhere to be found in news coverage of Issue 3, likely hiding under his bed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On October 17, 1933, Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany for the United States.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.