Author: Redactor

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Today

Revolution begins with shot heard round the world

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began when the “shot heard around the world” was fired between the 700 British troops on a mission to capture Patriot leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock and to seize a Patriot arsenal and the 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the Lexington town green. The Battle of Lexington ended with eight Americans killed and ten wounded, along with one wounded British soldier.

In Concord, a couple of hours later, British troops were encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. The British commander ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans, but on the 16-mile journey they were constantly attacked by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. By the time the British reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

Categories
Accountability insider corruption responsibility

My Favorite Firing

Hooray for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks! Last season, “we” won 11 games, including the Cotton Bowl. We finished No. 5 in the country, losing only to national champion Alabama and No. 2 LSU.

There were wishful whispers of “next year” and “national championship.”

Then, Coach Bobby Petrino had a motorcycle accident. No life-threatening injuries, mind you, just scraped up a bit. But suddenly some non-physical injuries became, well, job-threatening.

Originally, Coach Petrino told reporters that he was alone on that crashed cycle. Turned out he had a passenger: Jessica Dorrell, the team’s recently hired student-athlete development coordinator.

You guessed it: Petrino, 51, and Dorrell, 25, had carried on an “inappropriate relationship.” Petrino also failed to disclose their relationship when he picked Dorrell over 158 other applicants for the job.

He had also not disclosed his personal “gift” to her of $20,000. Quite a bonus for an employee — or a girlfriend . . . or both.

University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long found that “Coach Petrino abused his authority . . . and . . . jeopardized the integrity of the football program.”

Soon, the hopes of many fans that Coach Petrino, and especially his winning ways, could survive the scandal, were dashed.

“We have high standards,” Long said in a statement announcing Petrino’s termination. “Our expectations of character and integrity in our employees can be no less than what we expect from our students.”

UA student athletes and Razorback fans can’t help but hope things work out on the gridiron. But standing up for principle always works out, one way or another. In this case, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation just announced a $1 million gift to the Razorback athletic program citing Long’s “courageous leadership.”

Woo Pig Sooie!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture tax policy

Unfuzzying Up the Past

We hear a lot of talk about the disappearing middle class. Sometimes this jabber goes so far as to posit that normal folks — say, the “99 percent” — haven’t really experienced any progress since the ’60 or ’70s.

So blame the rich. And their government.

It’s not an implausible case. Wealthy interests do rent politicians at extravagant rates, changing policy in their favor.

But as economist Russ Roberts and Cornell University’s Richard Burkhauser discussed recently, sloppy statistics feed the hand-wringing over middle-class decline. Considering government transfer payments from rich to poor and plotting income by household rather than individually, the basic “stagnation” thesis doesn’t pass the “smell test.”

For the real stink, however, consult the Internet memes, particularly this goofy contention:

In the 1950s and 1960s when the top tax rate was 70-92%, we laid the interstate system, built the Internet, put a man on the moon, defeated Communism, our education system was the envy of the world, our middle class thriving, our economy unparalleled. You want that back? Raise taxes on the rich.

Forget the obvious nonsense (ARPANET was the Internet only in ovo; Communism collapsed in the ’80s), and concentrate on the main points, as Tom Woods has done: tax evasion was rampant back in the alleged “good ol’ days”; public schools have doubled in per capita spending since then, and not improved; and the stagflationary ’70s followed the booming ’60s, almost certainly as a consequence of the policies being touted, here.

Selective memories help in constructing just-so policy “proofs.” The middle class has received some big hits, I grant you. Still, we’ve seen progress, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
Thought

Clarence Darrow – born April 18, 1857 in Trumbull County, Ohio

“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

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Today

1689 Boston revolt, Yankee stadium opens

On April 18, 1689, after news reached Boston that James II of England had been overthrown, the colonists of Boston rose up against the rule of Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros had angered the local populace by enforcing the restrictive Navigation Acts, denying the validity of existing land titles, restricting town meetings, and appointing unpopular regular officers to lead the colonial militia. He also infuriated Puritans by promoting the Church of England. A well-organized “mob” of provincial militia and citizens took over the city and arrested dominion officials, without any casualties. Leaders of the former Massachusetts Bay Colony then reclaimed control of the government.

On April 18, 1775, as British troops leave Boston to confiscate the arsenal in Concord and to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock in Lexington, Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on horseback from the city to warn Adams and Hancock and rouse the Minutemen.

On April 18, 1923, Yankee Stadium, “The House that Ruth Built,” opened in the Bronx.

Categories
ideological culture political challengers

The BWIA Taboo

Last week, a Mommy Maelstrom unleashed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, interviewed as an “expert” on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, charged that Ann Romney, who reared five boys as a stay-at-home mom and continues to be the better half of presidential candidate Mitt, had “never worked a day in her life.”

Super-swaddling mothers of all sorts were outraged. Their husbands, as I can attest, were offended as well.

Stay-at-home mothers work. Hard. Long hours. So, there!

After denouncing Ann Romney’s career status, Rosen added that, “She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and, and, and how do we worry — and, why do we worry about their future.”

So perhaps Rosen wasn’t attacking Mrs. Romney’s decision to stay home and rear her kids, but, instead, Romney’s commission of a more heinous crime: BWIA (Being Wealthy in America). She should be ignored not because she’s a homemaker, but because she’s rich.

That bias against “the rich” is nearly official national policy. Though a devoted and hardworking mother, Ann Romney should be seen and not heard.

What upset Ms. Rosen was not that she might be seen and heard by us, but by her husband, if elected. You see, when we vote for a president we in effect vote for an unofficial advisor. With Bill Clinton we got Hillary; with Mitt we’d get Ann.

By Washington’s standards, Rosen’s worst transgression was to remind voters that Ann Romney exists — for as soon as Ann gets into the picture, Mitt doesn’t look so bad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Richard Allen Epstein (born April 17, 1943) one of the most influential legal thinkers of our time

“Do not get yourself into the illusion that there is something so unique about the question of organ or body parts … that the general rules of economics do not apply.”

Categories
Today

Bay of Pigs, Apollo-13, Khmer Rouge takes over, 335-year War is over

On April 17, 1961, just after midnight, a force of CIA financed and trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. The Cuban armed forces quickly defeated the invading combatants. Several hundred to several thousand people were estimated to have been killed, wounded or missing in the fighting, and more than 1,200 Cuban exiles were captured by Castro. In August, Che Guevara sent a note to President Kennedy, reading, “Thanks for Playa Girón. Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it’s stronger than ever.” Finally, days before Christmas 1962, Castro signed an agreement to exchange 1,113 prisoners with the U.S. for $53 million in food and medicine.

On April 17, 1970, Apollo 13 returned safely back to Earth.

On April 17, 1975, Cambodian government forces surrender to the Khmer Rouge, who capture Phnom Penh, the capital. In the next five years, more than 1 in every 5 Cambodians died of starvation, was worked to death or was executed.

On April 17, 1986, the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly ended. Peace at last!

Categories
First Amendment rights government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

What a Whistle-blower Learned

It can happen to any organization. The original intent — or, at any rate, declared purpose — of the concern gets lost amidst the chaos of hard-to-manage projects and personnel, as individuals re-define their goals at variance with the official end; as corruption sets in; as functions decay into forms persisting out of mere inertia; as institutional memory and learning get short-circuited by broken feedback loops and a culture of silence, secrecy, and hush-hush prudence.We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren

No organization is exempt, but it happens most often, and easiest, in government.

Take the experience of Peter Van Buren, late of two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams, related in The American Conservative:

In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. . . .

What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis. . . .

Van Buren wrote a book on that huge divide between secret truth and public lie, and, of course, got in trouble for it. Folks higher up in government are not renowned for their love of whistle-blowers. Van Buren not unexpectedly finds himself being shown the door on his own career, or, as he puts it, his superiors are preparing to put his “head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees.”

Government may not honor whistle-blowers, but citizens should. After all, it is allegedly for our sake that government does what it does. To discover, as Mr. Van Buren discovered, that “we failed in the [Iraq] reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war,” is news we must incorporate into our storehouse of foreign policy wisdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written on April 16, 1963

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”