Dear Mother, please don’t worry . . .
Today is the day
That I protect you for a change.
From “Island’s Sunrise,” an alternative rock anthem of the Sunflower Student Movement.
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Island’s Sunrise
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Sunflower & Hawaii
March 18 marks the 7th anniversary of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, wherein students occupied the Taiwanese legislature to block a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, which the public came to believe gave too much economic leverage to China, a power that regularly threatens to invade the free and democratic island nation.
The event awakened a deep concern about China’s dangerous encroachment as well as further impressing a “Taiwanese identity.” The protest also is believed to have influenced the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong as well as leading to electoral victories in Taiwan for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 and again in 2020, This website salutes the Sunflower Student Movement and hopes this date may be long remembered as the day the modern world first stood up and said “No” to totalitarian China.
On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
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Another Comedian Breaks Free
Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has famously lent no small part of her cachet to the progressive cause, supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in both of his Democratic presidential runs, is now ditching the Democratic Party.
Her complaint isn’t that the party stiffed her candidate twice, first when the Democratic National Committee stabbed Bernie in the back for Hillary and next when it orchestrated ingenious maneuvers to gain the nomination (and then the presidency) for the tepid (and tepidly supported) Joe Biden.
I have argued before that Democrat insiders’ treatment of Sanders was deeply anti-democratic. But no, Ms. Silverman directs her ire against “the absolutist-ness of the party,” as she put it the other day on Instagram. “It’s so . . . elitist. You know, for something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress.”* Telling, perhaps, that Ms. Silverman emphasizes “progressive” and not “democratic,” as if it were named “The Progressive Party.”
Silverman specifically called attention not only to progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, but also to the it-takes-two-to-tango divide: “You know, Republicans might hear an idea that they would totally agree with, but, if it comes from AOC then they hate it.” She admitted that the same thing applied to her.
No wonder, then, that she does not “want to be associated with any party anymore,” complaining about “too much baggage.”
But she’s objecting to her fellow progressives’ anti-free speech agenda, too, characterizing it as “righteousness porn.”
Silverman, who has a special named Jesus Is Magic and is famous for her rape jokes, has herself felt the sting of cancel culture and would be a natural proponent of principled free speech.
But that is not a progressive cause, it is a very old-fashioned liberal one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* An f-bomb has been elided in the quotation from Ms. Silverman.
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John Stuart Mill
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter Two: “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”
On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”
On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)
“There’s nothing that shortening the period by which people can vote early does to combat any perceived fraud,” Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s really just a cover for what they’re really trying to do, which is to make it harder to vote.”
At issue is a new law courtesy of Iowa Republicans, along with numerous bills pending in other states, addressing what Republicans call “election integrity” and Democrats call “voter suppression.”
Host Chuck Todd informed viewers that a poll found two-thirds of Floridians wanted more early voting days. Not fewer.
Hardly surprising, since that’s easiest for voters. And while voting should be easy, ease is not the only consideration.
The Iowa “law shortens the early voting period to 20 days from the current 29,” the Associated Press reported, “just three years after Republicans reduced the period from 40 days.”
Here’s why I support that change, though it would be better even shorter*:
- We should vote together. Not weeks apart. With three, four, six weeks of early voting, election day ballots can be cast with a different set of facts than those cast so many weeks earlier.
- The longer the time during which ballots are cast, the greater the expense in running for office. Candidates must be in touch when voters make their decisions. Since incumbents hold an average four-to-one spending advantage over challengers, more expensive campaigns give incumbents an even greater advantage.
So, while early voting doesn’t cause fraud, by making elections more expensive it fosters what we might call “the incumbency fraud.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* One provision in H.R. 1, which passed the U.S. House on a party-line vote, requires that states allow at least 15 days of early voting. The overall bill is terrible; plus, we are better off with the states as laboratories of democracy, rather than marionettes of Washington. But my preference would be not more than 15 days.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
AFTER the general idea of virtue, I know no higher principle than that of right; or rather these two ideas are united in one. The idea of right is simply that of virtue introduced into the political world. It was the idea of right that enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny, and that taught them how to be independent without arrogance, and to obey without servility. The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he submits to that right of authority that he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who gives the command.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1.
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Madison and Freeing the Slaves
On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.
James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.
“When will the check arrive?”
That’s what “voters want to know,” former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace yesterday.
Not whether President Joe Biden is dodging the media’s questions, as Wallace had inquired of his panel of Washington experts, after explaining that Biden now holds the modern record for longest time as president without facing reporters in a news conference.
“Well, it’s no surprise,” offered Jonathan Swan, national political correspondent for Axios. “It’s an extension of what he basically did throughout the campaign, which was very minimal — he basically didn’t subject himself to extended, tough questioning.”
GOP strategist Karl Rove went further, arguing, “he’s just not up to it . . . at the age of 78 he’s lost a few steps and he’s not going to look good in a news conference.”
But Brazile was having none of it. Citizens are laser-focused, she contends, on being shown the money . . . and really aren’t too concerned as to whether their commander-in-chief, the sleepy fellow in possession of the nuclear codes, might be suffering something approaching early dementia.
People do like money. But to what degree is she really correct? With palms greased will the public look the other way? How many votes have Democrats bought?*
Don’t think Brazile is alone, either; as I pointed out recently (“Big Bucks Buy Votes”), too much of Washington actually thinks purchasing apathy, support, votes is how Washington should work.
They marvel as modern political statecraft transcends the hubbub of bread and circuses with electronic direct deposits of spendable cash into bank accounts. But with the same hoped-for result.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And ask the same question of Republicans who voted for sending similar checks to everyone when they controlled the Senate and the White House last year.
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Aldous Huxley
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as I think it was Metternich said many years ago, ‘you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.’ If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, its exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy (who have always existed and presumably will always exist) to get people to love their servitude. This is the . . . ultimate in malevolent revolutions….
Aldous Huxley, speech,“The Ultimate Revolution,” March 20, 1962.