On May 17, 1973, televised hearings regarding the Watergate scandal began in the United States Senate. Sen. Sam Ervin chaired.
Little did participants know that the name of the hotel in which the White House-arranged break-ins occurred would provide a template for most future political scandals: “-gate” would be suffixed to nearly every other possible designator of scandal. The current Democratic vendetta against Republican Donald Trump for winning the 2016 election has been called “Russiagate,” for example.
This could be called a suffixmeme. Or insufferable meme, if you prefer.
One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self. . . . All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.
Rose Wilder Lane, Journal entry (April 15, 1937), as quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 14, by William V. Holtz (1993)
That is the dollar amount of “financial errors” that North Dakota State Auditor Joshua Gallion discovered in the last year, after launching performance audits at twice the rate of his predecessor.*
So, uncork the champagne! Huzzahs all around! Back slaps.
But the back-slappers in the state legislature took a much different tack.
In the waning days of this year’s now-adjourned legislative session, in the opacity of a conference committee, a change somehow slipped into a bill. No future audits without legislative approval.
As news hit of this handcuffing of the elected watchdog, taxpayers turned livid. And legislators started tap-dancing, claiming that “the legislation had nothing to do with the new aggressiveness Gallion brought to the job.”
Finally, Rep. Keith Kempenich, the author of the change, confessed: “A lot of legislators started having some issues with the way things were going and wanted to reel him in.”
Kempenich added that the auditor’s work “isn’t supposed to embarrass people.” At his Minuteman Blog, Arthur Mason countered that such financial mismanagement is “worthy of embarrassment.”
Governor Doug Burgum, who has “felt the sting of a Gallion audit,” signed the bill; calls for the legislature to reverse their gutting of accountability have fallen on deaf ears.
Concerned citizens were already organizing to defeat the legislature’s proposed constitutional amendment giving themselves a veto on voter-initiated amendments, requiring a re-vote if politicians don’t like the people’s first vote. Now an additional effort is forming to petition a referendum or new initiative onto the ballot to stop the power-mad politicians from neutering the state auditor.
Who do these legislators think they are?
Seems North Dakota’s solons are in desperate need of still another reform measure: term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Prior to Gallion’s 2016 election, the state auditor post had for 44 years been a hereditary fiefdom, held by Republican Robert Peterson for 20 years and, before that, for 24 years by Peterson’s father.
Trump impeachment? Financial collapse? War with Iran? — each is all-too-likely, none desirable. But I am referring to space.
In The Economist, May 14th, we read of Jeff Bezos’s itch to live off-planet.
The article is “Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2,” which tells us that on “May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon,’ as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements.”
And then comes the obvious literary-cultural reference: “It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.”
Can we dismiss it as space opera, though? A number of major figures, not least of whom is Elon Musk (whose Space X has often been mentioned here), are talking seriously about near-term orbital, lunar, and Martian habitation.
It is hard to wrap my head around an imminent private space colony project. It has always been something for the indefinite future, not something I expected to see.
There remain scoffers, of course (and they may well be right), as well as more paranoid speculations — are the higher-ups, the most insidery of insiders, tipping their hand to a “breakaway civilization” event, perhaps to avoid worldwidecatastrophe?
“People now have more information” than in the past, wrote Thomas M. Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), “and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.”
I am keeping an open mind on whether Bezos’s proposed lunar colony is dumb or genius.
On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
Illiteracy, innumeracy, low standards, grade inflation — signs of a general failure of education, sure, and of public schooling in particular. But for the worst failing, look no further than Harvard University.
The Ivy League school just caved to a student mob.
“Harvard said on Saturday that a law professor who has represented Harvey Weinstein would not continue as faculty dean of an undergraduate house after his term ends on June 30,” explains Kate Taylor at the New York Times, “bowing to months of pressure from students.”
The lawyer in question, Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., has served with his wife, law school lecturer Stephanie Robinson, at one of Harvard’s residential houses for undergraduate students.
Now, the African-American couple has not been fired from faculty. Just as deans. No great tragedy, if the official Harvard statement be true — that there were multiple reasons for not renewing their contracts.
But the context: pressure from students who expressed horror — “trauma-inducing”! — at Sullivan’s legal defense of the former Mirimax mogul accused of numerous sex crimes.
We expect lawyers to defend even the worst criminals. Everyone is entitled to a legal defense. It’s sad that not only do some students fail to accept this but also that this crimson-colored college plays along with their uncivilized complaint. Harvard has, in effect, denied one legal foundation of a free society.
Remember that the “common school movement” for government schools was started to inculcate republican values. Horace Mann’s great big excuse for government control and taxpayer funding of schools was to promote civilized American liberties.
Schools, generally, have failed. And Harvard has just accepted their worst failure as the new passing grade.
On May 14, 1787, delegates convened a Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to write a new Constitution for the United States. George Washington presided over the convention.
On the same day a century later, Lysander Spooner — author of an infamous pamphlet titled “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority” — died.
