Over at Townhall.com, find a longer report on the Maryland referendum hearing, briefly addressed here on Friday. And then come back here to check out these links:
Sen. Rand Paul puts the hoopla and angst about the sequester into perspective:
“Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.”
We suffer for our art. Yesterday, I sat through four excruciating hours of legislative hearings before the Ways and Means Committee of Maryland’s House of Delegates. I was waiting to testify on behalf of Citizens in Charge against House Bill 493.
For 20 years before last November, not a single referendum made it onto the Maryland ballot. Why? The state has the country’s most draconian rules for verifying petition signatures. An attorney running his own petition effort had his signature disallowed because he did not sign one of his two middle names or write the initial.
Most states use the standard of “substantial compliance” — if they can tell it is the signature of the registered voter, they count it, even if it doesn’t appear exactly as written on the voter registration record. Maryland’s strict compliance, on the other hand, disallows the signature of “Joe” rather than “Joseph.”
But you can’t keep good people down. A group called MDPetitions.com, led by Delegate Neil Parrott and April Parrott, his wife, found a way to provide online help in filling out the petition correctly, so that people’s signatures could count. They petitioned three separate bills to referendums last November by working both online and on the streets.
They lost all three, but in the process they brought the right to referendum back to life in Maryland.
Which brings me back to House Bill 493, against which I finally got to speak for five minutes. Among its myriad provisions to knee-cap petition efforts, most distressing is the one making it illegal to provide citizens with their voter registration information to help them fill out a referendum petition online.
Yes, the legislature is in session.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On February 22, 1632, Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was published, to the vexation of the Inquisition, which convicted him the next year of “grave suspcision of heresy.” This work subtly promoted the Copernican explanation of the relationship between the Earth, the sun, and the planets. It was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Catholic Church, and not removed until 1835.
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written.
In the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.
On February 21, 1975, former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were sentenced to prison.
Guilty. That’s what Jesse Jackson, Jr., former congressman, pleaded in court yesterday.
Fraud. That’s the name of his crime, though it was a particular kind of fraud, the taking of campaign contributions for personal use.
Partnered. The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s famous son was not alone, nor did he merely “fall into” crime out of lax record-keeping. His wife was also involved in the pattern of embezzlement and tax fraud, and the level of their misappropriations was not trifling.
Sandra Jackson admitted to not reporting $600,000 of income, and the couple confessed to using re-election campaign funds to
This is corruption, the most obvious kind to which a democratic republic is susceptible.
It is only made more frequent and more expensive in our modern times by the enormous power a congressman can hold over Washington’s tossing about of billions and trillions of dollars.
Who even notices the millions?
Jesse Jackson, Jr., isn’t alone in wanting a piece of the Washington action. Nor is he alone in thinking about himself first, and . . . well, not having time to think about anything second.
I’ve even seen this happen to minor-party candidates. It’s too easy to see a political campaign as about the candidate and not the principles — about personal advancement, not representation.
We’ll never have perfect people in public office, but we can do a whole lot better. And it’s good to see the guilty caught and prosecuted.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On February 20, 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution (to end alcohol Prohibition in the United States) was proposed in Congress.