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.
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.
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:
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.
A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.
“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.
On March 11, 1936, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was born.
It is one of the unhappy incidents of the federal system that a self-righteous Supreme Court, acting on its Members’ personal view of what would make a “more perfect Union” (a criterion only slightly more restrictive than a “more perfect world”) can impose its own favored social and economic dispositions nationwide.
He who rejects liberty has no faith in human nature.
March 10, 1762: Jean Calas, a Huguenot, died after torture, after having been wrongly convicted of killing his son; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
Newly elected New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made waves, recently. He nixed the establishment of two new charter schools and halted the expansion of another.
Widespread protest followed, with over ten thousand people showing up to express their frustration and ire. The charter chain under de Blasio attack, Success Academy, has been very successful increasing student test scores, and can boast a waiting list of five applicants for every school opening.
So why would the mayor be against them? What would make him so against this non-radical form of education reform?
Well, de Blasio received the overwhelming support of teachers’ unions during his campaign for office. Teachers’ unions are no fans of charter schools, which gain some of their advantages by not being hampered by union contracts.
Sure, the mayor’s heavy-handed slap at charter schools may simply be a political payoff to the teachers’ unions, but couldn’t there be something more to it?
Last May he directed his metaphorical guns at the head of the Success Academy, former New York councilwoman Eva Mosokowitz. “It’s time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place,” he promised the United Federation of Teachers at a mayoral candidates forum. “She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”
Knee-capping the less politically muscular charter school folks to please the immensely powerful public education unions is indeed classic patronage politics. But maybe de Blasio’s personal animus also shows his true colors, his commitment to undercut any successful competition to the governmental way of doing things.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.