On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain, a little less than two years and three months before Kamala Harris, the most famous Jamaican-American, was born.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
Well, 51 Democratic state legislators have run past the border, all to prevent a redistricting scheme. They constitute a minority in the House, but without them a quorum cannot be reached.
Think of it as a form of filibuster.
Or “voting with their feet.”
“Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced that a quorum had not been met after roll call,” an Epoch Times article tells us, going on to say that “House members then approved a motion for the speaker to sign warrants ‘for the civil arrest’ of the members who said they would not be there.”
Since the fleeing pols are in other states, I don’t see how that can work out.
Meanwhile, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has taken her fellow Democrats’ side and said that she would re-district New York in favor of Democrats. “We’re not going to tolerate our democracy being stolen in a modern-day stagecoach heist,” she said, using a colorful metaphor.
Other Democratic states have fallen in line, upgrading the gerrymandering crisis from heist to feud.
Twenty-five years ago I wrote that “courts have struck down districts drawn to get a certain racial outcome, but have turned a blind eye to districts that arbitrarily favor one party over another. The solution to incumbents monopolizing our elections is term limits. But another key factor in promoting democracy is to stop the politicians from drawing rigged districts that squelch competition.”
Term limits sure would help, by de-stabilizing the “property rights” the two parties feel in their favored districts with old hands firmly tied to their estates.
It’s the wild, wild worst out there.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.
Alfred Hitchcock, as quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1985) by François Truffaut, p. 109.
On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.
The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.
The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”
What activity?
Not hang gliding.
The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.
Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.
Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.
Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use. . . .”
Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ideas are more important than battles.
The Radical Republican senator and lawyer Charles Sumner, as quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen.
On August 4, 1701, the Great Peace of Montreal was signed. The dispute was between the French and their native allies, on the one side, and the Iroquois Confederacy on the other. Well over a thousand representatives of forty nations from the Great Lakes to the Maritimes and from southern Illinois to James Bay gathered to meet the French at Montreal. Month-long ceremonies concluded with the signing of the treaty, putting an end to the Iroquois Wars.
Did you know that “the federal debt is expected to grow from 124 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025 to 135 percent in 2035”? Yes or no, from this fact you probably can guess what the consequence of this sad fact of rising government debt is: “the federal government will absorb an increasingly larger share of the economy and capital markets.”
The quotations are from an article in Reason magazine by Mariana Trujillo, “The National Debt Is Becoming Your Local Problem.” It is well worth reading, for this discussion of an ever-growing problem is distinct from most others, in that it focuses on the effects of said problem on the governments closest to you.
The $29 trillion federal debt held by the public is becoming an increasingly local problem. Washington’s fiscal challenges have led to increased borrowing costs as well as reduced federal aid to states, cities, and other local governments — who may soon have to reconsider their budgets as they face a difficult choice: cut services, raise taxes, dip into reserves, or incur further debt.
Curiously for a “libertarian” magazine, the general tenor of the challenge local governments now face — increasingly — is not depicted as an opportunity. Less government, libertarians are wont to say, is better. Being forced to economize should be a welcomed thing. Look on the bright side.
Well, OK — Ms. Trujillo does conclude with a hint of that perspective:
As federal support dries up from many ends, and its return becomes not only politically but economically less feasible, state and local governments should resist the temptation to push costs to an indefinite future and drive down precious savings to fund permanent programs — precisely the approach that has led to the status quo — and opt instead for a serious, responsible reorganization of their finances.
It just doesn’t seem very upbeat. None of that old-fashioned, Robert Poole-style “Cutting Back City Hall” enthusiasm.
Still, the article is well worth reading. Though not long, it contains some interesting facts.
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
Friedrich von Schlegel, “Selected Aphorisms from The Athenæum” (80), from Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 1797–1800, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (1968), translators.
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, testifying under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused United Nations bigwig Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.