On May 24, 1775, John Hancock was elected president of the Second Continental Congress. Hancock’s involvement with Samuel Adams and his radical group, the Sons of Liberty, won the wealthy merchant the dubious distinction of being one of only two Patriots (the other being Sam Adams) that the Redcoats marching to Lexington in April 1775 to confiscate Patriot arms were ordered to arrest. When British General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to the colonists holding Boston under siege, he excluded those same two men from his offer.
Author: Redactor
Tim Jacob talks about the current term limit situation in his home state of Arkansas:
On May 23, 1788, South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
Other May 23 events include:
* 1813: South American independence leader Simón Bolívar entered Mérida, where he was proclaimed El Libertador (“The Liberator”), leading the invasion of Venezuela.
* 1900: Sergeant William Harvey Carney became the first African American to be awarded the Medal of Honor, for his heroism in a Civil War battle fought 37 years prior, in 1863.
* 1958: Birthday of American comedian and game show host Drew Carey.
It was merely an “administrative error.”
Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System Director Sharon Helman was awarded an $8,500 bonus, even while her operation was under investigation for falsifying patient wait times and possibly causing the deaths of 40 veterans.
The bonus has now, after much publicity, been rescinded.
Sadly, the veterans who died in a fraudulently inefficient system cannot be brought back to life.
The hefty bonus money adds cruel insult on top of a much more serious injury — one we now know extends far beyond Phoenix. The investigation has spread to 26 facilities.
Major veterans organizations demand that Veterans Affairs Secretary Shinseki resign, or that the president (who once again discovered the crisis from media reports) replace him. That’d be a logical first step, signaling in deeds, not just words, that folks will be held accountable.
The personnel changes shouldn’t stop there. And those guilty of fraud should also face criminal charges.
Still, some gloss over this scandal. Montana Senator Jon Tester says Shinseki should stay and that the VA has done a “remarkable” and “a pretty darn good job.”
A Washington Post editorial played down the scandal, noting that “Delayed treatment has been an issue for decades.”
The Post is half-right. The problem of this federal healthcare bureaucracy shortchanging vets is certainly not new.
But Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) is 100 percent right. The Navy vet and doctor, with years of VA experience, wants to offer vets a choice between the VA or a voucher to pay for their private care.
It’s a solution aimed at protecting the vets who need care, rather than the VA bureaucracy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This is a story about how technology is making things better. About 840 times better.
What’s represented by that multiple is price — the far lower price of a machine that 53-year-old Jose Delgado Jr. uses instead of the left hand he was born without.
For three years he had used a prosthesis costing $42,000. Its myoelectric technology detects electrical signals in muscle tissue in order to operate prosthetic fingers.
But the gadget’s capacity to grip? Rudimentary.
Now Delgado has a more capable prosthesis, the result of the latest technological breakthrough.
And it costs just 50 bucks.
3D printing has been advancing rapidly, sometimes controversially. It is now possible to produce a working metal gun with the technology.
It’s hard to see what can be controversial about Delgado’s new 3D-printed prosthesis, though.
Is the price for real? Perhaps the $50 incorporates only immediate production costs, and that other factors involved in developing and marketing the Cyborg Beast could make it pricier. But given what’s been demonstrated, even its most expensive incarnations would have to be orders of magnitude cheaper than earlier prosthetic tech.
It also does the job better.
The Beast’s mechanical plastic fingers are much better articulated than those of its predecessor. It grips objects more firmly and precisely, manipulates them more dexterously. Delgado dramatically demonstrates the superiority in a YouTube video produced by 3D Universe.
Such products of human ingenuity are stunning. Yet soon we’ll take for granted what they now make possible for the first time. And there’s a lot more to come. We live in interesting times.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thomas Jefferson
The ordinary affairs of a nation offer little difficulty to a person of any experience.
Beware of politicians bearing gifts.
The titans on the Metro Nashville Charter Revision Commission voted, last week, to recommend that a charter amendment be placed on the ballot, weakening term limits for the Metro Council and reducing representation on it.
“Taken together,” reports The Tennessean, “the proposed changes could throw the 2015 council elections into upheaval by eliminating one of every three seats while offering new political life to more than half of the current council.”
The amendment now goes to the council, needing 27 of 40 members to vote yes. Almost that many are term-limited next year, so the measure may go on the ballot as early as August.
A former Metro law director on the Charter Revision Commission argued there shouldn’t be any term limits at all, but Councilwoman Emily Evans, the amendment’s sponsor, admitted to reporters that reducing the size of the council was likely the only way to get voters to agree to a weakening of term limits. She noted, “You have to give the public something.”
While voters tend to favor reducing legislative bodies, perhaps to save on costs and unnecessary drama, the other direction makes more sense: smaller districts, where each citizen is more important to his or her representative and that representative can accumulate less power.
A 2005 attempt to cut the size of the council was blocked by strong public opposition, so that may not be the sweetener the politicians think.
As for term limits, voters passed them in 1994 and have three times blocked council attempts to weaken or kill the limits.
Nashville voters know a Trojan Horse when they see it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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P. J. Proudhon
If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him.
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Portugal, Timor, May 20
French economist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Frédéric Passy was born on May 20, 1822. English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.
On May 20, 2002, Portugal recognized the independence of East Timor, formally ending 23 years of Indonesian rule and three years of provisional UN administration. Portugal was the former colonizer of East Timor until 1976.
In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, “It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts and no cop-outs.”
Yes. He said that. But in reality, the handouts and cop-outs have kept on coming, like the solar wind.
A Washington Examiner editorial notes that while “Obama blasted the influence of insurance lobbyists and vowed to take on the industry … as president, he passed a health care law that funnels more than $1 trillion in subsidies to insurers, and fines Americans who do not purchase their products.”
Go ahead: call that a handout.
But what about bailouts?
While newspapers like The Washington Post insist that Obamacare is exempt from such an eventuality, there remains the part of the Affordable Care Act known as the risk corridor programs. These reimburse “insurance plans for claims that cost significantly more than premiums that new subscribers paid in,” according to The Post’s Wonkblog. The goal is to protect health insurance companies from the risks they face in the new Obamacare exchange.
Companies that make money will pay into a fund that will be used to bail out companies that lose money. But, after obvious complaints about limits, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pushed a mandate that the program be revenue neutral, that the money paid out not exceed that paid in.
Last Friday, in 435 pages of regulations, CMS abandoned this call for budget neutrality. Instead, the regulation states, “In the unlikely event of a shortfall for the 2015 program year, HHS recognizes that the Affordable Care Act requires the secretary to make full payments to issuers.”
A taxpayer bailout: fully in place.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.