There cannot, I conceive, be any question that to the assumption of a Law Natural we owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human beings. That ‘all men are equal’ is one of a large number of legal propositions which, in progress of time, have become political.
On April 7, 1933, Prohibition in the United States was repealed for beer of no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight, eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment.
According to organizers of the “March for Our lives,” the National Rifle Association is wholly evil, a corrupter of democracy, a malign presence straight out of Mordor, bent upon murder — a monolithic influence responsible for every mass shooting event.
The clearest expression of this is by young David Hogg, who figured that the NRA’s sum of contributions to Sen. Marco Rubio, when divided not by the number slain in the recent Parkland shooting but instead by the total number of students throughout Florida, came out to $1.05 per student.
Forget the computation — think nasty imputation.
What Hogg and his friends in the media elide is a simple little fact: the NRA is a membership organization. When critics of the Second Amendment point at the NRA and shout “evil!” they are really pointing at the organization’s millions of members.
People, not malign institutions.
Also neglected? The fact that, as near as I can make out, not one NRA member has mown down students in any school or church in America. Instead, at least one civilian NRA member took out his AR-15 to bring down one such mass-murdering shooter.
“Evil NRA” talk is misdirection and slander.
Also not a monolith? Students. Christian Britschgi, writing at Reason, notes that teenagers made up only 10 percent of marchers at the recent rally, and, catching a whiff of astroturf, cites a poll that found less than a majority of Millenials favoring an “assault rifle” ban.
Citizens of all ages disagree. Pretending that all kids are against guns, or that the NRA is anything other than a citizen advocacy group, distorts reality.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
When I look at this poor, bleeding, wounded World, this world that has suffered so long, struggled so much, been scourged so fiercely, thorn-pierced so deeply, crucified so cruelly, I can only shake my head and remember: The giant is blind, but he’s thinking: and his locks are growing, fast.
On April 6, 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi raised a lump of mud and salt, declaring, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”
Thus began the Salt Satyagraha.
If government were reality TV — and it is — this current administration would obviously be The Apprentice.
Who do you most want fired?
Last week, President Trump gave Veterans Administration Secretary Dr. David Shulkin the heave-ho, after a “damning” Inspector General’s report not only charged Shulkin with misusing tax dollars but also detailed myriad problems at the VA that continue to “put patients at risk.”
In a New York Times op-ed, the former Secretary defended his “tenure at the department,” arguing that he had “expanded access to health care by reducing wait times, increasing productivity and working more closely with the private sector.”
Speaking of the private sector, however, Shulkin suggested his firing was orchestrated by those favoring privatization — and that “privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea.”
Last April, President Trump signed the Veterans Choice Improvement Act, expanding the ability of vets to access private medical care outside the confines of the VA system. Why? Because IG investigations discovered that wait times were actually killing veterans — and the VA bureaucracy was actively covering up the problem.
“Critics have questioned whether increasing veterans’ reliance on private doctors might move the VA toward privatization,” the Washington Examiner noted at the time, “while proponents of such efforts have accused the VA of resisting steps to implement the program in order to protect the status quo.”
Vets deserve a choice, not a bureaucracy. After failing veterans for decades, Status Quo, you’re fired!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles,” Ch. 7, Section 3 (1992), p. 190
On April 5, 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto of a congressional bill, a new plan for dividing seats in the House of Representatives, which would have increased the number of seats for northern states. Washington vetoed only one other bill during his two terms in office, an act that would have reduced the number of cavalry units in the army.
On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington, American educator, first leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, author of 14 books, including his autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was born a slave in southwestern Virginia. Though Washington faced criticism from leaders of the new NAACP, especially W. E. B. Du Bois, for not protesting the lack of civil rights more strongly, he secretly funded litigation for civil rights cases, such as challenges to southern constitutions and laws that disfranchised blacks.
If we are entering a new Golden Age of television, it is for the most part passing the legacy TV networks by.
So, Roseanne Barr to the rescue!
The reboot of ABC’s Roseanne — a hit situation comedy of the late 1980s and much of the 1990s — should put the network and the art form back in the spotlight.
But though it is very popular, the show is not without . . . its political controversy. You see, funny-woman Roseanne plays Roseanne Conner, and she . . . (drum roll) . . . voted for Trump.*
Horrors!
Predictably, our modal mainstream media cultural mavens are not on board. Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, complains that Roseanne’s views are “muddled and incoherent.”
Roseanne to Roxanne, hello-o-o: the character is fictional. Who said characters in a comedy should have coherent views? One would think the point of comedy would require the opposite.
Jezebel provides another fine example of this. In “What’s Up, Deplorable; Roseanne Is Back,” Rich Juzwiak opines that “[n]ever discussed was the laundry list of hateful, stupid, and wrong things Trump said, nor their even more nefarious implications.” On Twitter, Professor Jared Yates Sexton calls the character’s perspective “a cleaned-up lie,” and amounts to a turning a “blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.”
Neither Juzwiak nor Sexton mentions any problem with the main alternative to the president in the last election — something Roseanne does in the show itself.
It’s almost as if what these (and many similar) critics want is a tidy propaganda piece for their opinions; it’s almost as if their objection is to the show’s realism.
Now that’s comedy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In the season opener, Roseanne defends the president from her dippy Democrat sister, whom she had not been speaking with since the election. Her sister, Jackie (played hilariously by Laurie Metcalf), enters the tenth season wearing a red pro-Hillary t-shirt and one of those grab-em-by-the-x pink hats. Their reconciliation is a hoot.
One of the rarest qualities of national character is the capacity for applying and working out the law, as such, at the cost of constant miscarriages of abstract justice, without at the same time losing the hope or the wish that law may be conformed to a higher ideal.