Categories
Today

KS enters Union as free state, Dr. Strangelove opens

On Jan. 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as the 34th state and as “free state.” The struggle between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in Kansas was a preview to the bloodshed of the Civil War. In 1854, Kansas was organized as a territory with popular sovereignty to decide the issue of slavery. Both sides drafted constitutions and the political battle erupted in massive violence that earned the area the name “Bleeding Kansas.” The violence continued through the Civil War. In 1863, pro-slavery forces burned Lawrence to the ground, murdering nearly 200 men.

On Jan. 29, 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” opened in theaters to both critical and popular acclaim. The movie’s popularity was evidence of changing attitudes toward the concept of nuclear deterrence. And it was very funny.

Categories
Today

Reagan lifts domestic oil controls

On Jan. 28, 1981, President Ronald Reagan lifted the federal government’s remaining domestic petroleum price and allocation controls in the United States, helping to end the 1979 energy crisis and begin the 1980s oil glut.

Categories
Thought

Thomas Jefferson

“If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread.”

Categories
Thought

Ronald Reagan

“The draft or draft registration destroys the very values our society is committed to defending.”

Categories
Today

Draft ends

On Jan. 27, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, announced an end to the military draft in favor of a system of voluntary enlistment. Since 1973, the United States armed forces have been known as the All-Volunteer Force. However, the Selective Service System, the federal agency that would administer a military draft, continues to be funded and American males continue to be forced to register for the draft.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Constitutional Coup d’état?

Last November, Marylanders went to the polls. In addition to choosing candidates to administer their government as well as delegates to legislate for them, there was a ballot question on whether to call a constitutional convention, which, if voters so chose, would provide an opportunity to propose fundamental reforms.

Well, voters so chose. A solid majority — 54.4 percent — voted Yea.

But the Maryland Legislature isn’t setting up the convention.

In a Baltimore Sun op-ed, J.H. Snider, president of iSolon.org, tells the history of the constitutional convention provision in Maryland’s 1851 Constitution: “From 1851 until 1930, the majority required to convene a con-con was interpreted and implemented to mean an ordinary majority.”

But in 1930, when a majority said yes to a convention, the legislature balked, claiming that a convention required a supermajority of all citizens voting in the election. In other words, those not voting on the convention issue were counted as Nay votes.

A legal challenge was brought, but failed, because the counsel to the General Assembly provided, according to Snider, “a remarkably selective and biased interpretation of the con-con debates” for the court. In 1950, again a simple majority called a convention, again legislators shut their ears and, this time, a federal court case failed to decide the matter.

Snider supports a convention as the “best hope for fixing Maryland’s democratic deficits, including its inherently corrupt redistricting system and its legislators’ defiance of popular sentiment on legislative term limits.”

So, he’s suing the Old Line State government “to force it to convene the con-con a majority of Marylanders voted for on Nov. 2, 2010.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access

Answering Liberty’s Call

Our rights are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. But words alone don’t defend those rights; people do.

Every day our First Amendment rights to speak out and to petition are put to the test.

A little over a week ago, Dave Roland, the Director of Litigation for the Freedom Center of Missouri, got a phone call at 1:00 am. Two volunteers circulating a petition on a public street in St. Charles had been detained by police, cited for “soliciting without a permit.” The ballot measure they were petitioning for was to legalize marijuana — and tax and regulate it like alcohol and tobacco. Some of their petitions were confiscated.Dave Roland fields a question.

Roland and his wife Jenifer Ziegler Roland, the center’s executive director, went to bat for these two citizens and their constitutional rights, contacting St. Charles City Attorney Mike Valenti.

Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit, Valenti quickly dismissed the charge against the two petitioners.

“Police officers should know that this right may be freely exercised on public sidewalks,” said Mrs. Roland, “but if the police make a mistake, municipal attorneys ought to follow Mr. Valenti’s lead and correct the constitutional violation as quickly as possible.”

When a woman outside Philadelphia’s Constitutional Convention asked Ben Franklin what kind of government had been created, Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, madam, if we can keep it.”

We can keep it. Thanks to people such as the Rolands at Missouri’s Freedom Center.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Albert Einstein

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

Categories
Today

Soviets liberate Auschwitz

On Jan. 26, 1945, Soviets troops entered the network of Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz, Poland, freeing the survivors and revealing to the world the horrors perpetrated there. Auschwitz was a group of three major camps and 40 smaller “satellite” camps. At Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, established in October 1941, the SS created a complex of 300 prison barracks, four “bathhouses” where prisoners were gassed, and cremating ovens. When the Red Army arrived, they found 648 corpses and more than 7,000 starving survivors, as well as storehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of women’s dresses, men’s suits, and shoes that the Germans did not have time to burn.

Categories
Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration . . . for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-obsessed Rand Paul makes a statementgovernments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists . . . without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.