A house in Martinsville, Indiana, via my colleague Marty Kady.
Another reminder of how complicated this race stuff is.
By Ben Smith 10:26 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Starting next year, there will be four new pennies to collect, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
The obverse (or heads) part of the coin will stay the same, showing the 16th president facing to the right.
But the reverse (tails) part of the coin will show different times in the life of Lincoln, who is widely considered to be one of the country’s greatest leaders for freeing the slaves and saving the Union during the Civil War.
The designs for the new pennies were shown for the first time yesterday near the Lincoln Memorial.
The first new penny will be available Feb. 12, Lincoln’s 200th birthday. It will show a log cabin to honor his birth and childhood in Kentucky.
The others will show his life as a young man in Indiana, his professional life in Illinois and his presidential years in Washington (when the U.S. Capitol was being built).
The other side of the penny will continue to show the likeness of Lincoln designed by Victor David Brennan. It was introduced on the Lincoln penny 100 years ago.
A Lincoln commemorative silver dollar also will be issued next year.
Abraham Lincoln did not really free the slaves. The 13th Amendment did. The Emancipation Proclamation said “all persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Only those slaves captured by the North by that point were set free. Maryland and Delaware were both slave states and not on of the supposed rebel states. While not recognized by any other government the Confederate States of America was a separate nation with it’s own government defined by their own (though heavily borrowed from the USA) constitution. Therefore from their perspective the Emancipation Proclamation meant as much as if it had come from England. Lincoln also said this of the Corwin Amendment, “[H]olding such a provision to now be implied Constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” which read:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
As for saving the Union… a highly questionable action. Even if ruled unconstitutional there is plenty of evidence that such a claim is incorrect from a legal standpoint. For example: When ratifying the new constitution, Virginia (1788), New York (1788), and Rhode Island (1790) included clauses indicating they were free to leave the new federal government confederation should it become oppressive. It seems obvious that they would not have joined if they believed it was a one way trip. From a moral standpoint its reprehensible. The Declaration of Independence clearly says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Lincoln was in no way a great leader but a statist who put his beliefs in keeping together a union of people who did not wish to be under the same government umbrella above the lives of over 600,000 individuals.
For more information read Thomas DiLorenzo’s books Lincoln Unmasked and The Real Lincoln. Many complain his views are one sided but given the works written in excess of Lincoln’s greatness I think that’s excusable. You can also find a decent interview with DiLorenzo on CSPAN’s Q&A at Google video.
Not everyone is upset about this though:
From Answers.com:
bailout: n. A rescue from financial difficulties: corporate bailouts.
Any profit the government would make on this is going to be completely negated by price inflation and interest on the debt accumulated. There is no money to perform this bailout. The money will be borrowed or printed. If the market was allowed to unwind this those issues would not occur and recovery would be far faster. Malinvestment needs to be liquidated and prices recalculated… not arbitrarily inflated.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…
It was supposed to be just another federal drug prosecution. The federal prosecutors introduced evidence that the man on trial was involved in the black market drug trade. The defense attorney said the government agents entrapped his client. And then the twelve citizen-jurors retired to deliberate the outcome of the case.
But then something unusual happened. The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”
That’s a fair question. It is a point that has been made in Cato’s publications ( go here (pdf) and here (pdf)) and a point that has been made by Justice Clarence Thomas, among many others. Federal District Court Judge William Young was startled. He says he has been on the bench for 30 years and has never faced a situation where a juror was challenging the legitimacy of a criminal law. Young tried to assure the jury that the federal drug laws are constitutional because the Supreme Court has interpreted the commerce clause quite expansively. When the jury sent out more notes about a juror that wasn’t going to sign off on an unconstitutional prosecution, Young halted the proceedings to identify the ”problem juror.” Once discovered, that juror was replaced with an alternate–over the objections of defense counsel. Shortly thereafter, the new jury returned with guilty verdicts on several cocaine-related charges.
It is an extraordinary thing for a judge to meddle with the jury in the middle of its deliberations. So, to justify his removal of the “problem juror,” a man named Thomas Eddlem, Judge Young issued a 40-page memorandum of law (pdf). I happen to know and respect Judge Young. I invited him to speak here at Cato about the awful federal sentencing guidelines, but his legal memorandum in this case is remarkably thin. I will briefly respond to his substantive arguments below.
1. Court precedents say jurors have no right to nullify. Well, yes, that is undeniable. But that’s like someone saying in 1950 that court precedents tell us that ”separate, but equal” is the law of the land–go read Plessy v. Ferguson. The real question is whether those court rulings are truly consistent with the Constitution. I would also point out that even though many modern court rulings express hostility toward jury nullification, no court has yet dared try to reverse a not guilty verdict or attempt to punish any juror who cast a not guilty vote in a jury room where the result was deadlock (not an untoward outcome, by the way). Judges do remove jurors from time to time, but there is no punishment. At least not yet.
2. Judge Young writes, “The impropriety of nullification emanates from the notion that ours is ‘a government of laws and not of men,’” and he attributes that proposition to our second president, John Adams, who also authored the Massachusetts Constitution. The quote is accurate, but Young is mixing up legal principles and does not know Adams well enough. Like so many of America’s early leaders, John Adams was a strong proponent of jury nullification. Here’s Adams: “It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” C.F. Adams, “The Works of John Adams,” 253-255 (1856)(emphasis added).
3. Jury nullification undermines the rule of law. This is simply another variation of objection #2 above. There is a logical fallacy to this objection. Jury nullification is assumed to be improper–so it undermines “the law.” It is like saying a presidential pardon undermines the “rule of law.” But if the president has the power to pardon, and he does, he can exercise it (though we may or may not like the result in particular cases). This is the way in which to understand jury nullification. The framers of the American Constitution considered it to be part and parcel of what a criminal jury trial was all about. Some state constitutions, such as Indiana, Maryland and Oregon, explicitly provide that juries have the power to judge the law and the facts in criminal cases. Judges are the ones that have undermined the “rule of law” by pretending those provisions mean the opposite of what they say.
Judge Young expressed alarm about the recent Time magazine article by David Simon and his The Wire colleagues that calls for jury nullification in drug cases. But that article has revived a debate that we should all welcome. For much more on this subject, go here, here, here, and here.
Some other jury nullification quotes:
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts. -Samuel Chase, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1796
The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1920
The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy. -John Jay, U.S. Supreme Court Justice / 1794
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution. -Thomas Jefferson / 1789
The Church of Universal Coverage Becomes Self-Aware
I have blogged before about the “Church of Universal Coverage,” my affectionate term for those whose support for universal health insurance coverage is impervious to reason — or would be, were they to subject it to reason. I read something today that has me wondering whether the Church might be waking up to the fact that it is indeed a religion.
The July/August 2008 issue of the journal Health Affairs contains a letter from Mitch Roob, the Indiana official who oversees Gov. Mitch Daniels’ (R) health care agenda. Roob writes:
Like other advocates for children’s health, I have an almost religious conviction that the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is effective public policy . . . Although I have no empirical evidence to support the assertion that SCHIP is a beneficial and effective way to invest in children’s health, I worked to expand the program . . . I was not able to base this expansion on empirical evidence because their is none . . . The lack of actual evidence of the benefits for children is simply damning to the program . . . Public policymakers need more than just a conviction that SCHIP works and is worthy of public investment. We need facts. [Emphasis added.]
Wow. I mean, wow.
I see three possible outcomes. One, all that cognitive dissonance causes Roob’s head to explode. Two, the Church hierarchy dispatches its goons to burn this heretic at the stake for noticing that their god has no clothes. Three, the Left decides “to hell with it,” admits that it has a religion, and files for tax-exempt status.
Still Don’t Think Universal Coverage Is a Religion?
In case my last post didn’t convince you that universal coverage is a religion, here is its apostle’s creed:
To believe in universal health care is to believe that we can do more and do better, all at once - that it is possible to have hospitals full of high technology and emergency departments with room for all comers; that it is possible for people to choose their doctors and have a say in their treatments; that it is possible to make the economy more free and more efficient; and that it is possible to do all of this for everybody, not just an economically or medically privileged few, in a way we can all find affordable. [Emphasis added.]
(As delivered by Church of Universal Coverage high priest Jonathan Cohn and chronicled in the book Sick, chapter 9, p. 231.)
I may think that government often serves the few at the expense of the many, that people respond to incentives, that tradeoffs are unavoidable, that there may be better ways to promote health, and that introducing coercion into human affairs creates more problems than it solves.
But just try telling that to someone who believes.
Creepy. No wonder economics doesn’t have an effect on these people.
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