Because BIG BROTHER is okay as long as enough people vote for him!
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Gerry Spence
Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority.
Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty! Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century, 1998
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Fifth to Ratify
On January 9, 1788, Connecticut became the fifth state to be admitted to the United States under the new Constitution. Connecticut was one of the first nine states of the original union, under the Articles of Confederation, to accept the Constitution, and thus officially ratify it. All 13 original states had ratified that new compact, officially, by May 29, 1790. The first state to be added to the original 13 was Vermont, in 1791.
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Townhall: ObamaCare, Dead Plan Walking
Just how deep in whose mess are we in?
Click on over to Townhall for an answer. Then come back here.
- Melanie Hunter, CNS — Schumer: GOP Plan to Repeal Obamacare ‘Will Make America Sick Again’
- AM New York — Trump’s Tweets: ObamaCare Was a Lie, Schumer Is Democrats’ Head Clown, and More
- Peter Suderman, Reason — The Republican Plan to Repeal and Replace ObamaCare Will Do Neither
- William Graham Sumner — The Forgotten Man
- Amity Schlaes — The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (which focuses on Sumner’s metaphor and FDR’s expropriation of it)
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State of the Union
On January 8, 1790, George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York, New York.
In 1835, on this date, the United States federal government achieved a zero debt for the first and only time.
In 1867, African-American men were first allowed to vote in Washington, D.C.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
Washington said, in one of his messages to Congress, “We are more enlightened and more powerful than the Indian nations; we are therefore bound in honor to treat them with kindness, and even with generosity.” But this virtuous and high-minded policy has not been followed. The rapacity of the settlers is usually backed by the tyranny of the government.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I (1835; Henry Reeve/Francis Bowen, trans., 1898)
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Greenwald on Fake News @ the Post
Begins with Assange, continues with Greenwald:
https://youtu.be/PJKUnfftsf0
A “rule of law” is based on general principles, and makes room for — or, better yet, is based upon — the protection of individual rights.
It used to be common to say, “a rule of law, not of men”; it was even as common in political oratory as was spouted out over drinks at the Rotary. But as the modern Regulatory State has grown in scope and power, most folks seem to have lost track of the notion. It is now not even a cliché. Few even of our most educated folks can explain this idea. Vast swaths of the mis-educated public appear not to “get” the idea of limiting government to the enforcement of a few general principles; instead, they cry for more “regulations” (along with additional spending and maybe even a whole new division of the executive government) every time a crisis, tragedy or atrocity occurs.
So we are left with a political culture in which the words of Tacitus seem to a majority as implausible at best, evil at worst: “The more the laws, the more corrupt the State.” Contrary to today’s trendy prejudice, we do not need “more laws” — edicts legislated by representatives, or regulations concocted by bureaucracies — we need Law.
As in, “a rule of Law.”
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Winter War
On January 7, 1940, the Finnish 9th Division completely destroyed the much-larger Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi Road, in a crucial battle during Finland’s Winter War.
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Anthony Lewis
There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment. . . . But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.
Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment (New York: Basic Books, 2007)