Searchable News & Info From Reliable Online Sources.
- Secrets of a Radical Duke
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. In the summer of 2016, my family flew ahead of me to England for a vacation. Their taxi driver from the airport to London was chatty, and somehow the conversation drifted to the fact that he was from Lewes, in Sussex. This led to a bit of trivia about his hometown that the driver thought would be of interest to visitors from America: Thomas Paine, the Englishman turned American whose Common Sense would become the best-selling political pamphlet of the 18th century—and tilt America toward independence—had lived in Lewes for six years, working as a tax collector. When my husband relayed this to me by phone that evening, I sat up. I hadn’t known that detail of Paine’s biography but immediately saw its possible relevance to a historical puzzle I was… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Whose Independence?
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. When Thomas Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence, he had an exceedingly difficult task ahead of him. The 33-year-old planter, who had left law practice just before Britain’s imperial crisis began in earnest, needed to do nothing short of lay the groundwork for a new nation. He had to explain in both philosophical and legal terms the Second Continental Congress’s decision to break away from Great Britain, provide a list of grievances against the Crown that justified complete separation as a remedy, and plant the seeds of diplomacy for the fledgling country. His job was to place the newly formed United States of America among “the powers of the earth.”In the course of writing a document capacious enough to do all of that, Jefferson formulated the Declaration’s second… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The Moral Foundation of America
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. For thousands of years, the view that only rulers conferred rights or privileges on everyone else was taken for granted in traditional societies around the world. In the ancient empires of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, only those whom rulers regarded as their peers had value, or what the Romans called dignitas. Hindu societies enshrined the ruler as one who embodies the divine order of the gods, and established a hierarchical rank for everyone else. The caste system even defined some people as “outcaste,” with no right to move freely and little recourse from lifelong servitude.The anonymous Babylonian scribes who wrote the legal code of Hammurabi some 4,000 years ago seem to have regarded human value as a quality that the king could grant to certain people and deny to others.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The Nightmare of DespotismEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Shays’s Rebellion filled Alexander Hamilton with dread. In 1786, armed men shut down courts in five counties across Massachusetts and, early the next year, marched on the federal armory in Springfield. The mobs included debtors trying to prevent the courts from foreclosing on their farms, and opponents of centralized government. The insurrectionists believed that the newly adopted Massachusetts Constitution, drafted in 1779 by John Adams, would shift power from the poor to the rich, from the many to the few, from the backcountry to Boston, from democracy to aristocracy. They were led by Daniel Shays, a dashing Revolutionary War veteran who’d had to sell a sword given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette to pay his debts.Observing the rebellion from New York, Hamilton worried that civil unrest in Massachusetts could… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- Retribution Is HereIf the secret to understanding a strongman is to identify his greatest weakness, one place to start with Donald Trump is his obsession with his own eventual obituaries. Trump knows that they will mention his history-making presidencies, his ostentatious wealth, and his unusual charisma—but he also is aware that when he dies, people will remember his conviction on 34 felony counts, and that there is nothing he can do about it. Even now, White House officials have told me, Trump rages about how his guilty verdict is sure to be mentioned way up high in his obituaries.Trump’s fixation on all of this leapt to mind today when I heard that he’d called for the arrests of the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago—not just because it explains Trump’s psychology, but also because this obsession is one of the driving motivations of his revenge crusade, which is now escalating… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- This Is the Week the Government Shutdown Gets RealAs far as government shutdowns go, this one has so far lacked the round-the-clock chaos of its predecessors. There have been no dramatic late-night clashes on the floors of Congress, no steep stock-market plunges driven by panicked investors, no prime-time presidential addresses from the Oval Office. Even the running clocks on cable-news chyrons have disappeared.But in the reality show that has replaced a properly functioning system of democratic governance, we are fast approaching the moment when a shutdown stops being a subject of political bluster and starts hurting Americans. And as much as President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to direct the damage from what he derisively calls “the Radical Left Democrat shutdown” toward “Democrat things,” the pain will soon be felt just as acutely in MAGA country as in liberal areas.Over the next week, a series of wires in the federal bureaucracy and broader U.S. economy will… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
The Searchable USWebDaily.com and TheTopNews NewsBank Helps You Be Better Informed, Faster! Spread The Word.
