The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
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Jan 5 ford motor hours
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
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George Washington
The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
Yesterday, NBC’s Chuck Todd opened a “Meet the Press” segment by calling U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq “wars now without an end.”
“The U.S. now seems to be in a semi-permanent state of war,” added Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel.
“Right now, we’re just in damage control,” explained Lt. General Dan Bolger, Retired, the author of Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. “Our enemies, the Taliban and ISIS, are talking about winning.”
Mr. Todd asked, “Why do we have this incredible military that can’t win these wars?”
“The military can give you a quick victory over a conventional army. It cannot deliver a rebuilt country in the place you go,” replied the general. “That takes an effort of the entire U.S. population and government. And moreover, it takes the commitment of the American people for the long term.”
And then Baghdad and Kabul will look a lot like Chicago or Boston?
“At what point do we walk away?” Todd wanted to know. Never?
“It becomes difficult to walk away, because these situations are spinning quite badly out of control,” offered Sarah Chayes, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and formerly an assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “And it’s spreading.”
Our decade-plus in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost us greatly and accomplished little good, if any.
Even a century of Americans fighting and occupying and pacifying these countries will not succeed. The cost, not just in billions of tax dollars, but also in thousands of our countrymen dead and maimed, is unacceptable.
It’s time to really end the “endless” wars.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. On Jan. 30, 1649, he was executed.
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Townhall: The Unconstitutional State
Ah, Connecticut! The state in which eminent domain became eminently crazy, in the infamous Kelo case. In that case they targeted private homes to put in . . . a vacant lot? Now bus routes are target.
Click on over to Townhall, for the meat of the story. Come back here for some background, why don’t you?
- Hartford Courant: “A New Legal Weapon For State DOT: Condemnation of ‘Intangible Property’”
- CT News Junkie: “Malloy Believes Busway Will Be A Success”
- “Mobilizing the Region: Connecticut Breaks Ground on Busway”
- CT fastrak [official website]
- National Review: “Nine Years after Kelo, the Seized Land Is Empty”
- Common Sense: “Apologies to Ms. Kelo,” by Paul Jacob
- Wikipedia: Kelo v. City of New London
- Wikipedia: Fifth Amendment (text)
- Connecticut Nicknames
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J. W. von Goethe
If you treat an individual… as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
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January 3, Minnie Craig
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States. On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” Both were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
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Video: 2014’s Top Stories
Ms. Julie Borowski highlights 2014 in its top stories:
President Calvin Coolidge looks more like a sage every day. Confucius would’ve been proud of Silent Cal. Today’s top politicians might take a cue from the man: When you don’t have much to say, say nothing.
President Barack Obama, whose popularity in America up until recently rested, in part, on his sounding more intelligent than his predecessor in office, had the reckless temerity — the audacity of dope, perhaps — to float the notion, in an interview the other day, that Russia’s top banana Vladimir Putin had made a “strategic mistake” by annexing Crimea, and said the latter-day Tsar was “not so smart”:
Those thinking his Russian counterpart was a “genius” had been proven wrong by Russia’s economic crisis, he said.
For my part, I hope that a collapsed economy in Russia is the least we have to fear. The story isn’t over, and I wouldn’t be gloating over a half-hatched batch of eggs just yet.
Which brings to mind the title cliché: pot and kettle, each calling the other black. Here we have a world leader with a horrible economic track record, in addition to a chaotic diplomatic strategy, calling his chief competitor for public adoration (yes, Putin’s acolytes are just as besotted as Obama’s) something of a fool.
Well, the man so involved with a disaster to have it named after him, Obamacare, and who hailed extravagant “stimulus” as a cure for a depression that still lingers — reminding us again of the longest Depression, the Great, and the wrong-headed policies of Hoover and FDR — should know when to keep mum.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.