On February 28, 1646, Roger Scott, of Lynn, Massachusetts, was tried for sleeping in church. Awakened in church by a tithingman’s long, knobbed staff hitting him on the head, he struck back at the man, and garnered a whipping as punishment, as well as the dark designation as “a common sleeper at the publick exercise.”
Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women and why do you call me to teach the court?
Anne Hutchinson, testimony in her trial for teaching women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony church (1637)
At my advancing age, I couldn’t stay up late enough to watch Hollywood’s winners grab their Oscars and punctuate their rambling, teary-eyed acceptance speeches by hurling brickbats at President Trump.
The Donald will have to defend himself for perverse statements such as heard on the Access Hollywood tape: “[W]hen you’re a star . . . You can do anything.” Live by the stars, die by the stars.
Still, consider: how much more effective would those Hollywood (snoozed-through) scoldings be had these cultural “icons” voiced similar disfavor against President Bill Clinton’s similar actions.
Regardless of the precise Clintonian “is”-ness of “is,” clearly “hypocrisy” is up in lights in Tinseltown.
Another seeming Hollywood double-standard strolls down the red carpet unimpeded: the gender pay gap. “Compared to men, in most professions, women make 80 cents to the dollar,” actress Natalie Portman said last month. “In Hollywood, we are making 30 cents to the dollar.”
Much ballyhooed and largely erroneous, the national gender wage gap compares the median male income against the median female income out of hundreds of millions of workers, without regard to jobs done, hours worked, or levels of experience. Conversely, leading roles in a movie can more fairly be compared.
The North Korean hack of Sony Pictures revealed numerous cases where female stars were paid far less than their male counterparts. For instance, in the film No Strings Attached, Ashton Kutcher, Portman’s male co-star, received compensation three times greater.
Yesterday, at Townhall, I asked a simple question: Wouldn’t it better serve the interests of fairness and equality were actors to muster whatever truth to be had directly at the Hollywood power structure . . . sitting before them in the ballroom?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Neither government nor municipal monopolies are novelties; they are antiques. To represent them in the light of consequences of modern economic changes is to commit a solecism. They are not indicative of evolution, but of retrogression.
Yves Guyot, Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed, Book IV: Political and Social Consequences of Public Operation, Chapter I, Socialist Programs and the Facts” (American edition, 1913).
On February 27, 1830, American economist and free trade advocate Arthur Latham Perry was born.
The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states on February 27, 1951.
Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.
On behalf of the Academy of Motions Pictures Arts and Sciences, we’d like to extend a little advice to Hollywood’s best and brightest. Click to Townhall; come back for more abuse.
February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915).
The replacement for ObamaCare that Rand Paul is pushing looks a lot better than his previous statements had led some of us* … to fear:
It is mainly a freeing up of the system. Mainly. It is government getting out of the way. Of course, it is packaged so to sound like a “plan” — politics is still politics.
The good part is that, yes, we consumers of medical care are going to be more in charge of spending our own dollars. And thus controlling more of our own care.
* Well, “suggested” to some of us on the skeptical side of the political debate.
February 25, 1805, saw the birth of Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, American abolitionist and feminist. She was the younger sister of the equally famed Sarah Moore Grimké.
On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate. Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. He was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.
In Law #46 of February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council formally proclaimed the dissolution of Prussia.