[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation.
On February 20, 1991, in the Albanian capital Tirana, a gigantic statue of Albania’s long-time leader, Enver Hoxha, was brought down by mobs of angry protesters.
“Congress is about to bring back its secret weapon,” CNN headlined a column yesterday.
Congress? Weapon?
Be afraid.
Be very afraid.
“Earmarks are back,” Chris Cillizza immediately informs readers . . . you know, “what is technically known as ‘member-directed funding.’”
Before you can say “terrible idea,” the cable channel’s editor-at-large does admit that “members securing money for pet projects in their districts could go wrong.”
Yeah. Right. Has gone wrong. Will go wrong. Is wrong.
“This is a sneaky big deal,” offers Cillizza nonetheless. “And a massive win for party leaders of both parties.”
Cillizza argues that it was a big mistake for Speaker John Boehner and the GOP leadership in Congress to take away their ability to reward individual congresspeople by stuffing a couple multi-million-dollar pet projects into the budget. What’s not to like for an incumbent politician? They get to hand out money right in their districts, with their name attached to it.
As long as a member of Congress plays ball.
The way the party bosses say.
In return, that incumbent can likely stay in this nation’s heralded leadership for years, decades.
When “you realize that in taking away earmarks,” explains Cillizza, “Boehner robbed party leaders of their most potent weapon to keep their rank-and-file in line on key votes.”
Is it even plausible for the functioning of our democratic republic that “party leaders” — nowhere mentioned or given any power in our Constitution — leverage our tax dollars to essentially buy off our representatives in order to keep our representatives “in line” on other important votes?
No.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws.
February 19, 1942, was a sad day for constitutional rights, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas of the country as military zones. These zones were used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in internment camps.
In reporting Rush Limbaugh’s passing, yesterday, from lung cancer at age 70, the Associated Press dubbed Limbaugh a “bombastic talk radio host and voice of American conservatism.”
The latter, yes; but if you think Rush was “bombastic,” you missed the joke. Sure, he spoke of “talent on loan from God” and of “flawlessly” running the “Excellence in Broadcasting Network . . . with zero mistakes.” But bombastic means “high-sounding but with little meaning; inflated.”
Washington, D.C., in other words.
Decidedly not Rush.
Rush was both communicator and political force. When Republicans took the House in 1994 on a promise to vote on term limits, Limbaugh strongly supported the strict term limits passed by the states, challenging congressional Republicans for playing games on the issue.
Later, in 2007, Rush also gave this program a boost by reading my column, “The Two Americas,” on the air, calling it “a great way of restating the ideological arguments that exist in the country today.”
Rush stood for “the America of ever-increasing wealth, innovation, creativity. . . . The abundant work product of freedom.” And not “the politician’s America: The regulated America, the subsidized America, the earmarked America.”
Unlike so many seemingly angry shock jocks in talk radio, Mr. Limbaugh was actually nice to callers — even those who disagreed with him — and thoughtful, intelligent, and polite.
While on the hot seat speaking live for three hours each weekday to the nation’s largest radio audience (upwards of 15 million people a show) Mr. Limbaugh was one of the most transparent personalities of the age. “Dittoheads” could feel like they really knew precisely who and what they were ditto-ing.
Now, they ditto their respect. As do I.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One of the chief objects of medicine is to save us from the natural consequences of our vices and follies. The moment it becomes moral it becomes quackery. A scientific physician should have no opinions about the ethical standards and deserts of his patient.
H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956), p. 7.
On Feb. 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, were arrested at the University of Munich for secretly (or not so secretly) putting out leaflets calling on Germans to revolt against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
In the previous year Hans had founded a group of students, who called themselves “The White Rose.” The group wrote and distributed six leaflets aimed at educated Germans. The leaflets made their way across Germany and to several other occupied countries. The Allies later dropped them all over the Third Reich.
When I was young, some folks worried about a return to Ice Age conditions. The climate alarm, in the decades since, prophesies hotter conditions, not colder.
So, with this cold snap hitting North America — ice storms from Washington State to Texas and now heading east by northeast — climate change has emerged in the back (or even front) of our minds.
It’s just not necessarily Fire we fret about. It’s Ice. (Cue recitation of the great Robert Frost poem, now.)
“The arctic air that poured into Texas resulted in a record-breaking demand for power that caused the state’s electric grid to fail,” the Weather Channel reports. “Suppliers had planned to use rolling blackouts, but the system was overwhelmed” — effecting an “estimated 75% of Texas power generation capacity.”
Millions in Mexico are also without power, because natural gas pipelines from Texas froze.
The main hit to the electric grid sure looks like it has been directly* to the distribution — if what I glean from Georgetown’s electric outage page is a good indication.
But that town went heavy into alternative forms of energy production (as has the whole of the state, along with many others). Did that investment help them when the cold came? Former Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette says the problem is that alternative energy sources are not “base load electricity” but “intermittant and sometimes unreliable.”
Just as batteries under-perform in the cold, windmills don’t turn well when covered in ice. When we really need power, energy production that flakes out is not an energy alternative at all — it’s non-energy.
And if an Ice Age does come back, we’ll need more energy, not less than were global warming to remain the trend.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The reason there was no weekend podcast from me is that my partner in podcasting was without power simply because an ice storm brought down trees on multiple power lines in his area.
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We can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for.
Thomas Mackay, Methods of Social Reform (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 210.