On March 7, 1644, Massachusetts established the first two-chamber legislature in the American colonies.
One hundred thirty years later, to the day, British forces closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
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Author: Redactor
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Townhall: Grandmother of Us All
The Bill and Hillary Show has never stopped playing in America. Click on over to Townhall, for this weekend’s expansion of Friday’s Common Sense. Then come back here for a walk down Memory Lane — and don’t be fooled, at this point, it still makes a difference!
- Of the original Teflon charge: “Nothing stuck to ‘Teflon President,’” by Patricia Schroeder, in USA Today.
- Clintonian Ontology: Timothy Noah commemorates Slick Willie’s best evasion, on Slate.
- Distraction: The historic bombing of an aspirin plant, mimicking film fiction (Wag the Dog, 1997).
- Judge Napolitano on the latest scandal to affect a Clinton’s electoral chances: “Hillary Should be Terrified that Ex-Staffer Was Granted Immunity.”
- What is an “ad hominem” argument, really?
- Remember the “Vast Right-wing Conspiracy“? Hillary does.
- Hillary Clinton’s mind virus, “What Difference Does It Make?”:
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Lana Peters
On March 6, 1967, Soviet Premiere Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the United States. (She later took the name Lana Peters, upon marriage to William Wesley Peters. The marriage was short-lived.)
| The March 6 date also marks term limits advocate and initiative organizer Paul Jacob’s birthday. He was born on the anniversary of the births of Michaelangelo, Cryano de Bergerac, and Alan Greenspan. He is also, obviously, the reason this site, ThisIsCommonSense.com, exists. (It continues, however, only through the continued support of readers like you.)
| On this day in 1820, the Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
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Video: Hurting Those We Aim To Aid
Fascinating topic . . . how well-intended programs backfire.
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Tom Lehrer
Things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.
Tom Lehrer, Tom Lehrer, People (1982).
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A Banned Book
On March 5, 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. This censorship notwithstanding, the Earth continued to revolve around the Sun. The book had been first published in 1543 in Nuremberg.
| In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place on March 5.
| March 5 is magician Penn Jillette’s birthday. He turns 61 today, beginning his 62nd year of life.
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Deirdre N. McCloskey
The vices of modernism come from the master vice of Pride, the vice so characteristic of an actual or wannabe aristocracy. It is prideful overreaching to think that social engineering can work, that a smart lad at a blackboard can outwit the wisdom of the world or the ages, that a piece of machinery like statistical significance can tell you how big or small a number is.
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The Constitutional Congress
On March 4, 1789, the first bicameral Congress of the United States met in New York, New York, in accordance with the new Constitution.
Two years later on the same date, Vermont was admitted as the fourteenth state of the union.
In a twist in World War II allegiances, Finland declared war on Nazi Germany on March 4, 1945, beginning the Lapland War.
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Abraham Lincoln
When men take it in their heads to-day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.
Abraham Lincoln, address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838).
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25th Anniversary
On March 3, 1991, an amateur videographer captured the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, thus ushering in the age of citizen surveillance of the state.