The Arkansas legislature is on track to receive a massive pay hike. You can stop it.
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Antonin Scalia
The first instinct of power is the retention of power, and under a Constitution that requires periodic elections, that is best achieved by the suppression of election-time speech.…
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Antonin Scalia
Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.
Boo hoo.
Thirty-three hifalutin members of Colorado’s political elite — state legislators, former legislators, board of education officials, city and county politicians, and assorted insiders — are whining as plaintiffs in what’s called a federal case.
Why? They lost an election … in 1992! Now, as the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals put it, “Plaintiffs claim that they have been deprived of their power over taxation and revenue.”
Over 22 years ago, Coloradans petitioned the Taxpayer Bill of Rights onto the ballot and voters passed it. Known as TABOR, the constitutional amendment limits the growth of government spending, unless voters approve higher spending levels. It also requires voter approval for tax increases, except in an emergency. The politicians objected at the time, but have since lacked both the courage and the democratic sensibility to take the issue back to the people.
Instead, they’re suing to overturn the result.
The legal theory behind the lawsuit? That TABOR limits the legislature’s ability to unilaterally raise taxes or spend money as it pleases, thus denying the state a “fully effective legislature” — thus TABOR violates the federal constitution’s guarantee that each state have a republican form of government.
Last week, the 10th Circuit ruled the state legislators have standing to sue the people of Colorado over the legislators’ right to tax and spend without a bunch of pesky voters getting in the way.
Those who founded our republican form of government would be absolutely astounded … if they could only be stopped, first, from spinning at such high rates of speed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Johnson impeachment: Mar 13
On March 13, 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the United States Senate. It is the first impeachment of a U.S. president in the nation’s history.
“Uncle Sam” made his debut as a cartoon character, sixteen years earlier, in the New York Lantern.
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Gandhi Protest
On March 12, 1776, a public notice appeared in Baltimore newspapers recognizing the sacrifice of women to the cause of the revolution.
On March 12, 1930, in a bold act of civil disobedience against British rule in India, independence leader Mohandas Gandhi began a 241-mile march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt. Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy salt from the British, who heavily taxed the mineral in addition to holding a monopoly over its manufacture and sale. Gandhi was arrested in May and served in prison until January of the following year, but the protests continued throughout India.
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TSA Follies Exposed
Jason Harrington is a former Transportation Security Administration agent who spent years doing stupid, degrading things to passengers because his superiors demanded it. He deserves credit for blogging about his experiences even before leaving TSA, and for eventually coming clean under a byline.
You can read Harrington’s lengthy account for Politico of how TSA agents routinely behave:
- They target beautiful women for pat-downs.
- They target passengers for “random” security checks not because they manifest themselves as security risks but merely for saying something that rubs them the wrong way.
- They perform all kinds of often humiliating “security” measures that they know are pointless.
All this by routine.
When the multi-million-dollar, ineffectual body scanners were in regular use, agents laughed it up over bodily defects exposed by the scans that they review in a separate room. These scanners weren’t even good at detecting guns or plastic explosives. The problems with them were known even as they were being installed.
All history attests that when people are given petty power to abuse others as “part of the job,” they use that power (and virtually every ordinary use of power in such a context must also be an abuse of it). Employees who refrain are, obviously, “not doing their jobs,” and get fired. So who’s left?
Those who enjoy that sort of thing, or at least assent to it.
So let’s not give anybody this kind of power. We can start by shutting down the TSA.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Antonin Scalia
A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
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Five Senators for Death
“Beware: Second-hand stupidity kills.”
That’s just one of the killer lines from Greg Gutfeld’s rant against the five Democratic senators who introduced a bill to ban marketing e-cigarettes to teenagers. (It’s from The Five’s e-cig segment I linked to on Saturday.) Gutfeld called the e-cig “the greatest medical device since The Clapper,” arguing that it signifies the “first real progress for ending smoking . . . for good.”
To Barbara Boxer’s claim that there is no way of knowing whether e-cigs are harmful, Gutfeld responded: “Science, you bozo.”
Boxer and her comrades are, by my lights, far worse than bozos.
They fixate — like the puritanical Nanny State thugs they are — on the “Ooh, bad people get addicted to bad substances” aspect of the issue, rather than on the tremendous leap forward the new technology provides existing smokers. They fear, they say, kids starting with e-cigs and then taking up smoking tobacco. An unlikely scenario. Nicotine via water vapor is not a likely “gateway” to nicotine-with-deadly-tars via smoke.
E-cigs aren’t for everyone. The guy who puts these Common Sense episodes up online for me has tried it, and failed. Not a smoker, he wanted to see if he could swap some caffeine over-use with some controlled nicotine use. But he could not breathe the hot steam in.
The gateway was closed.
For smokers, however, the device serves as a wonderful substitution, swapping deadly tar-producing smoke sticks with a much cleaner nicotine rush. It will save lives.
Regulating it, taxing it — discouraging its use — would, as Gutfeld says, “make Death smile.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Antonin Scalia: Mar 11
On March 11, 1936, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was born.