History

Sometime today, the 7 billionth person will be born, so expect:

And so it begins:

New street lights that include “Homeland Security” applications including speaker systems, motion sensors and video surveillance are now being rolled out with the aid of government funding.

Jimmy Carter, 1979:

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Barack Obama, 2011

We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.

It's been 235 years, and the British still aren't over the Declaration of Independence. A bunch of American and British lawyers had a debate in Philadelphia recently over whether the declaration was "legal." The British viewpoint:

The Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to. What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union?

Somebody is unclear on the concept:

Here's a nice, long article that ably presents the other side of the argument from what you'll usually read here. Say what you will about the New Deal, writes Michael Hiltzik, but American gained a great many benefits from it, and how many Americans would really want to do without them?

A couple of points on federalism, if I may. The first comes courtesy of Romneycare:

Newly obtained White House records provide fresh details on how senior Obama administration officials used Mitt Romney's landmark health-care law in Massachusetts as a model for the new federal law, including recruiting some of Romney's own health care advisers and experts to help craft the act now derided by Republicans as “Obamacare.”

Did you happen to see this at one of the Occupy Space rallies recently?

Yes, I know, drawing conclusions from a one-time event can be dangerous; it could be a statistical blip. But at the very least, this should earn us a moment of silence or two from the people who always predict a bloodbath when gun laws are relaxed:

Oh, swell, this will instill faith in the criminal justice system, won't it?

The government mental hospital where John Hinckley Jr. has spent most of the last 30 years since he shot and tried to kill President Ronald Reagan is asking a federal court to allow Hinckley's eventual release to live with or near his aging mother in Williamsburg, Virginia.