According to the Roman calendar, today is the Ides of March. Toga parties on this date? Not advised.
On March 15, 1820, Maine became the 23rd U.S. state.
In 1990 on this date, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the first President of the Soviet Union, a position he did not long hold — the government was pulled out from under him in late 1991.
By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, placing United States currency on a gold standard. Thus ended the country’s weird experiments in bimetallism, established in 1792 when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton urged Congress to fix the ratio of gold and silver at 15:1.
The gold standard itself ended on April 25, 1933, and its last vestiges were scrapped when President Richard Nixon closed the foreign gold exchange window in 1971, thereby ending the Bretton-Woods international monetary system.
One prerequisite of solving problems is having problems to solve. That is, first you must realize that there is a problem — an inconvenience or difficulty that you no longer accept as inevitable. Then you can ask questions and try to find answers.
Suppose the problem is that (a) you have imperfect eyesight, and (b) you’re lazy, busy, a shut-in, a cheapskate, or all four. You want to update your prescription without spending the time and money to visit an optometrist. Questions: Any way you can just do this at home for, say, $35? How about over the Internet?
If we ask Mr. Google about “online eye exams,” we find several sites offering tests that aim only to tell you whether it’s time for a visit to the eye doctor. Not good enough! But we also learn from TechCrunch.com about Opternative, a company co-founded by optometrist Steven Lee. Opternative plans to offer professional-grade online eye exams.
“Doing eye testing day in and day out, I thought ‘there has to be a better way to do this,’” Lee says.
Lee still faces regulatory and other hurdles. But I appreciate the ambition — also that we still have enough capitalism in our quasi-capitalist system to make a venture like this potentially profitable. And if Opternative succeeds, we’ll be able to take its prescription to another website and order an inexpensive pair of glasses or contact lenses over the Internet.
I like that vision.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The first instinct of power is the retention of power, and under a Constitution that requires periodic elections, that is best achieved by the suppression of election-time speech.…
Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.
Boo hoo.
Thirty-three hifalutin members of Colorado’s political elite — state legislators, former legislators, board of education officials, city and county politicians, and assorted insiders — are whining as plaintiffs in what’s called a federal case.
Why? They lost an election … in 1992! Now, as the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals put it, “Plaintiffs claim that they have been deprived of their power over taxation and revenue.”
Over 22 years ago, Coloradans petitioned the Taxpayer Bill of Rights onto the ballot and voters passed it. Known as TABOR, the constitutional amendment limits the growth of government spending, unless voters approve higher spending levels. It also requires voter approval for tax increases, except in an emergency. The politicians objected at the time, but have since lacked both the courage and the democratic sensibility to take the issue back to the people.
Instead, they’re suing to overturn the result.
The legal theory behind the lawsuit? That TABOR limits the legislature’s ability to unilaterally raise taxes or spend money as it pleases, thus denying the state a “fully effective legislature” — thus TABOR violates the federal constitution’s guarantee that each state have a republican form of government.
Last week, the 10th Circuit ruled the state legislators have standing to sue the people of Colorado over the legislators’ right to tax and spend without a bunch of pesky voters getting in the way.
Those who founded our republican form of government would be absolutely astounded … if they could only be stopped, first, from spinning at such high rates of speed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On March 13, 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the United States Senate. It is the first impeachment of a U.S. president in the nation’s history.
“Uncle Sam” made his debut as a cartoon character, sixteen years earlier, in the New York Lantern.
On March 12, 1776, a public notice appeared in Baltimore newspapers recognizing the sacrifice of women to the cause of the revolution.
On March 12, 1930, in a bold act of civil disobedience against British rule in India, independence leader Mohandas Gandhi began a 241-mile march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt. Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy salt from the British, who heavily taxed the mineral in addition to holding a monopoly over its manufacture and sale. Gandhi was arrested in May and served in prison until January of the following year, but the protests continued throughout India.
Jason Harrington is a former Transportation Security Administration agent who spent years doing stupid, degrading things to passengers because his superiors demanded it. He deserves credit for blogging about his experiences even before leaving TSA, and for eventually coming clean under a byline.
You can read Harrington’s lengthy account for Politico of how TSA agents routinely behave:
All this by routine.
When the multi-million-dollar, ineffectual body scanners were in regular use, agents laughed it up over bodily defects exposed by the scans that they review in a separate room. These scanners weren’t even good at detecting guns or plastic explosives. The problems with them were known even as they were being installed.
All history attests that when people are given petty power to abuse others as “part of the job,” they use that power (and virtually every ordinary use of power in such a context must also be an abuse of it). Employees who refrain are, obviously, “not doing their jobs,” and get fired. So who’s left?
Those who enjoy that sort of thing, or at least assent to it.
So let’s not give anybody this kind of power. We can start by shutting down the TSA.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.