Podcasts about jeffersonian republicans

This Day in Legal History: Jay Treaty SignedOn November 19, 1794, the United States and Great Britain signed the Jay Treaty, formally titled the “Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation.” Negotiated by U.S. Chief Justice John Jay and British Foreign Secretary Lord Grenville, the treaty sought to resolve lingering tensions between the two nations following the American Revolutionary War. At its core, the agreement facilitated the withdrawal of British troops from forts in the Northwest Territory, a region that was still contested despite American sovereignty being recognized in the Treaty of Paris (1783).The treaty also addressed contentious issues such as British seizure of American ships and the debts owed by American citizens to British creditors. While the agreement provided for limited American trade rights in the British West Indies and a framework for resolving disputes over the U.S.-Canada border, it failed to stop British impressment of American sailors or guarantee broader trading rights. Domestically, the treaty sparked fierce political debate, with Federalists supporting it as a means of preserving peace and economic stability, while Jeffersonian Republicans decried it as overly conciliatory to British interests.The Jay Treaty is historically significant for establishing a precedent for diplomatic negotiation and emphasizing the importance of peaceful dispute resolution. While controversial at the time, it ultimately helped avert war with Britain and allowed the young United States to stabilize its economy and focus on internal growth. Its ratification in 1795 marked an important step in shaping U.S. foreign policy during its formative years. The treaty's mixed reception underscored the deepening political divisions in the United States, foreshadowing the partisan struggles that would define early American governance.Big Law firms are poised to see significant lobbying revenue gains under anticipated Republican control of the White House and Congress, as the GOP aims to advance a pro-business, “America First” agenda. Key areas of focus for lobbyists include revisiting elements of the 2017 tax law, reversing restrictions on fossil fuel development imposed by the Biden administration, and assisting with the confirmation of cabinet nominees. The Supreme Court's recent Loper Bright decision, which limits federal agencies' ability to interpret vague laws, adds another layer of legislative complexity, increasing demand for legal expertise in technical drafting.The potential uptick in lobbying activity echoes patterns seen in prior shifts of political power. Lobbying revenue rose sharply in 2017 and 2021 during transitions to unified party control. Firms like Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Akin Gump, Squire Patton Boggs, and K&L Gates are particularly well-positioned, with some deriving significant portions of their income from federal lobbying efforts. Brownstein Hyatt leads the pack, earning $50.9 million in lobbying revenue through the first three quarters of 2024.Major firms are already representing high-profile clients. For instance, Brownstein Hyatt has advocated for Apollo Global Management on portfolio-related issues, while Squire Patton Boggs has worked on food regulation for Mars Inc. Energy-related lobbying, such as advocating for liquefied natural gas export permits, is also expected to surge as Republicans aim to repeal Biden-era restrictions. Appropriations negotiations may further boost lobbying opportunities, as delayed bills give the GOP more leverage.Big Law Lobbyists See GOP Trifecta Haul Including Tax, EnergyThe State Bar of California has approved a proposal to expunge attorney discipline records from public view after eight years, provided the attorney has not faced subsequent disciplinary action during that time. This measure, which excludes cases of disbarment, aims to address racial disparities in the attorney discipline system. A 2019 study revealed that Black male attorneys in California were over three times more likely than their white counterparts to face probation, prompting a 2023 review committee to recommend changes to the system. The proposal now awaits approval from the California Supreme Court.The expungement policy is intended to balance accountability, transparency, and redemption opportunities, aligning California's attorney discipline practices with those in other states and professions like medicine and real estate. Critics, however, argue it could undermine transparency and public trust, with 74% of public comments opposing the plan. In contrast, a majority of attorney comments—69%—supported the change, noting it incentivizes maintaining clean records. If implemented, an estimated 2,353 attorneys would be immediately eligible for expungement. California, the second-largest state bar by membership, projects that this policy will reduce the long-term stigma attached to past disciplinary actions.California Bar aims to expunge attorney discipline records after 8 years | ReutersThe losing bidder for Alex Jones' bankrupt Infowars empire is challenging The Onion's winning bid, arguing it offered less cash and relied on questionable claim waivers. First United American Companies LLC (FUAC), which bid $3.5 million in cash, claims its offer was superior to The Onion parent company Global Tetrahedron LLC's $1.75 million bid. FUAC accuses The Onion of colluding with Sandy Hook families who supported the bid by waiving part of their claims against Jones.The bankruptcy trustee overseeing the sale, Christopher Murray, defended the auction as transparent and noted that the Sandy Hook families' waiver improved the overall value of The Onion's bid. The waiver was key in positioning The Onion's bid as the best-value offer, despite its lower cash amount. FUAC countered that these waivers are speculative and provide no real value to the bankruptcy estate, calling them akin to “monopoly” money.Judge Christopher M. Lopez, who previously raised concerns about the auction's transparency, is now considering the motion to disqualify The Onion's bid. The sale is part of an effort to liquidate Jones' estate and pay down the $1.5 billion in defamation judgments against him for spreading false claims about the Sandy Hook shooting. The trustee dismissed FUAC's accusations as baseless and an attempt to mislead the court.In case you haven't figured it out already, FUAC is a company affiliated with Alex Jones' snake oil sales. Obviously, Jones has an interest in seeing his assets purchased by a friendly company rather than The Onion which … is not friendly to Jones' interests. Infowars Bidder Moves to Disqualify The Onion's Winning OfferThe 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared likely to dismiss appeals by Amazon and SpaceX challenging the structure of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), arguing the companies acted prematurely. Both companies sought to block NLRB cases alleging labor violations, with Amazon opposing a unionization case and SpaceX contesting claims of retaliatory firings. However, the appeals panel suggested that Amazon and SpaceX did not give lower court judges enough time to rule before filing their appeals.  Amazon's case, initially in Texas, was transferred to Washington, D.C., and SpaceX's to California, though these transfers are on hold pending appeals. The judges questioned whether the delays cited by Amazon and SpaceX constituted "effective denials," a standard necessary for appeals. Judge James Graves noted Amazon's unrealistic deadline demands, while Judge Irma Ramirez questioned SpaceX's assertion of deliberate judicial delay.  The NLRB argued that the companies imposed arbitrary deadlines to expedite decisions and delayed proceedings by resisting case transfers. Both companies face significant underlying NLRB cases, with Amazon fighting unionization at a New York warehouse and SpaceX denying allegations of retaliatory firings. If the appeals are dismissed, the companies could request a review by the full 5th Circuit, known for its conservative leanings.Amazon, SpaceX challenges to NLRB may be thrown out of appeals court | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Historical Background and Constitutional Convention. As we embark on this journey, it's crucial to understand the historical context in which the U.S. Constitution was conceived. In the late 18th century, the young United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation, a document that provided a loose alliance of the states but lacked a strong central government. This arrangement proved ineffective in addressing national issues like interstate commerce, defense, and debt management. The need for a more robust federal structure led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. This gathering was a remarkable assembly of statesmen, including figures like George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. Their diverse backgrounds and perspectives fostered vigorous debates on how to balance federal and state powers and protect individual rights. The resulting Constitution was a masterful compromise between different interests. It created a federal system with a stronger central government while ensuring that states retained significant autonomy. This balance is a key feature of the Constitution and a recurring theme in constitutional law. The Structure of the Constitution. The Constitution is elegantly structured, yet comprehensive. It begins with the Preamble, a statement of purpose that underscores the values of unity, justice, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty. Article I establishes the legislative branch (Congress), detailing its powers and limitations. It sets forth the bicameral legislature, with representation based on population in the House of Representatives and equal state representation in the Senate. Article II defines the executive branch, outlining the President's roles, including serving as the commander-in-chief, making treaties (with Senate approval), and appointing federal officers and judges. Article III establishes the judiciary, creating the Supreme Court and allowing Congress to establish lower federal courts. It defines judicial powers and outlines the case types under federal jurisdiction. Articles IV to VII cover various issues like state interactions, the amendment process, federal supremacy, and the ratification process. The Constitution's amendability is crucial. The first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were quickly added to guarantee fundamental freedoms and rights. Subsequent amendments have addressed issues like slavery (13th Amendment), voting rights (15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments), and presidential terms (22nd Amendment). Principles of Judicial Review (Marbury v Madison). The case of Marbury v Madison (1803) is a cornerstone of American constitutional law. It emerged amid political conflict between the outgoing Federalist administration and the incoming Jeffersonian Republicans. William Marbury, appointed as a justice of the peace by President John Adams, sued Secretary of State James Madison for not delivering his commission. Chief Justice John Marshall, in a stroke of judicial statesmanship, ruled that while Marbury had a right to his commission, the Supreme Court lacked the authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to issue a writ of mandamus (a court order compelling a government official to act) to deliver it. This ruling cleverly avoided a political confrontation while establishing a key principle: the power of the courts to review and nullify acts of Congress that conflict with the Constitution. This principle of judicial review is not explicitly stated in the Constitution but has become a fundamental aspect of its operation. Methods of Constitutional Interpretation. Interpreting the Constitution is a complex endeavor, involving various methodologies that reflect different views of the Constitution's nature and purpose. Textualism focuses strictly on the text's plain meaning. Textualists argue that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the ordinary meaning of its words at the time of its drafting. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

On November 30, 1804, a significant event in the history of the United States judiciary unfolded when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase went on trial before the U.S. Senate. This marked a pivotal moment in American legal history, as Chase was the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice to be impeached. His impeachment was called for by the House of Representatives, led by the Jeffersonian Republicans, who accused him of "arbitrary and oppressive conduct of trials.”The charges against Chase were politically motivated, stemming from his Federalist leanings and his conduct in politically sensitive trials. The Jeffersonians, led by President Thomas Jefferson, were seeking to reduce Federalist influence in the judiciary, and Chase's impeachment was part of this broader political struggle.Chase's trial in the Senate was a landmark event, emphasizing the tension between the judiciary and the other branches of government. It raised fundamental questions about judicial independence and the role of impeachment as a tool for addressing judicial misconduct. The trial proceedings were detailed in an 1805 publication, providing a thorough account of this important moment in U.S. legal history.Ultimately, in March 1805, Chase was acquitted by the Senate. His acquittal set an important precedent for the independence of the judiciary and limited the use of impeachment against judges for political purposes. The trial and acquittal of Samuel Chase remains a significant chapter in the story of American jurisprudence and the balance of powers in the U.S. government. In the intervening years, all impeachments of federal judges have been for misconduct, not a perceived incorrect outcome in any one or set of cases. In this way, the impeachment of Samuel Chase set the tone for what does and does not constitute a dereliction of duty in the federal judiciary. Henry Kissinger, who yesterday died at the age of 100, oversaw policies resulting in the deaths of millions during his tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford. His strategies contributed to mass casualties in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, Bangladesh, and the Kurdish regions. Particularly notorious were his actions in Cambodia, leading to widespread destruction and the subsequent Cambodian genocide, and in Chile, where he supported the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Despite these war crimes, or perhaps because of them, Kissinger was revered by many in the American ruling class. The fact that he outlived at least 3 million of his victims, without facing any significant consequences for his actions, raises profound questions about accountability and justice. His death should not overshadow the immense human suffering his policies caused.Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally DiesHenry Kissinger, Top U.S. Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths, Dies at 100U.S. law firms are experiencing a second consecutive year of pay raises for associates, following Cravath, Swaine & Moore's announcement of increased salaries, leading other firms to follow suit. Major firms like Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton; Baker McKenzie; and Dechert have introduced new salary scales, starting at $225,000 for first-year lawyers and up to $435,000 for senior associates. This move aligns with the base salary scale set by Cravath. Earlier, Milbank was the first to unveil higher salaries in 2023, but the recent hikes by other firms have matched or exceeded Milbank's for more junior and senior associates, respectively.This increase in salaries is notable because it comes at a time when there isn't high demand for associates, with many firms having excess capacity. Peter Zeughauser of Zeughauser Group highlighted the unusual nature of these raises, given the current market conditions. Some less profitable firms might choose not to match these new salary standards. This trend of increasing associate pay, which began last year, is adding stress to many law firms, and the recent raises are expected to exacerbate this situation.Despite slower growth in average revenues among the country's largest law firms, as reported by Wells Fargo, and a decline in mergers and acquisitions activity, the need to maintain competitive reputations and meet the perceived prestige requirement of matching salary scales compels many firms to increase pay. Firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Hogan Lovells also raised salaries on Wednesday. Furthermore, Proskauer Rose reportedly increased salaries too.These salary hikes are accompanied by year-end bonus announcements, with figures ranging from $15,000 to $115,000 based on class year. Additionally, some firms are offering extra bonuses based on work or hours billed. This trend reflects the evolving business dynamics within the legal industry, emphasizing the importance of maintaining competitive pay scales in a changing economic landscape.US law firm pay raises spread for second year in a row | ReutersCravath Announces Raises - Comes Over The Top Of Milbank Scale (For Some Associates) - Above the LawCravath Salary Increases Pressure Rivals Who Can't Afford MatchAn Illinois firearms retailer and the National Association for Gun Rights have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block Illinois' ban on assault-style rifles and large capacity magazines. This request follows a previous denial by the Supreme Court in May and comes after a lower court also rejected their bid for a preliminary injunction against the bans in both the state and the Chicago suburb of Naperville.The Illinois ban, known as the Protect Illinois Communities Act, was enacted in response to a 2022 mass shooting during an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, which resulted in seven deaths and numerous injuries. Signed into law in January by Governor J.B. Pritzker, the Act prohibits the sale and distribution of various high-powered semiautomatic firearms, including AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, and limits magazine capacities.The plaintiffs argue that these bans violate the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which protects the right to "keep and bear" arms. However, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld the bans, ruling that they are likely lawful. The court's reasoning was that the Second Amendment applies to weapons intended for individual self-defense, not military-grade weapons like assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.This legal challenge is part of several ongoing cases against the state's ban. The issue of assault-style rifles remains a divisive topic in the U.S., particularly in the context of addressing frequent mass shootings and firearms violence. The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, has historically expanded gun rights in landmark rulings, including a 2022 decision recognizing a constitutional right to publicly carry a handgun for self-defense and stipulating that gun restrictions must align with historical firearm regulation traditions.US Supreme Court is again asked to block Illinois assault weapons ban | ReutersTexas has urged a U.S. appeals court to reinstate a state law that bans sexually explicit books from public school libraries, arguing that this does not infringe on booksellers' free speech rights. The law, which was blocked by a federal judge, requires vendors to review books for sexual content before selling them to schools, a process that has been criticized for its subjectivity and potential for politically-driven censorship.During the hearing, Circuit Judges Don Willett and Dana Douglas of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals raised concerns about the broad definition of "sexually explicit" content and the challenges booksellers outside of Texas face in complying with the law's requirement to align with "current community standards of decency." The Texas Attorney General's Office, represented by Kateland Jackson, argued that Texas could be viewed as a single community despite its size and diversity.The law empowers the Texas Education Agency to review book ratings, barring explicit material from public schools and requiring their removal from libraries. Critics, including the plaintiffs represented by Laura Prather of Haynes and Boone, argue that the law compels speech from booksellers and imposes vague standards, essentially amounting to censorship.Republican Governor Greg Abbott has defended the law, stating it protects children by removing inappropriate material from schools. However, U.S. District Judge Alan Albright blocked the rating requirements in September, siding with the plaintiffs that the law violates the 1st Amendment.This Texas case is part of a broader trend in Republican-controlled states seeking to restrict school materials on sensitive topics like sex, LGBTQ issues, and race. The American Library Association reported a significant increase in attempts to censor library books in 2022, indicating a rising national debate over the availability of certain materials in public schools.Texas urges appeals court to revive public school book ban | ReutersThe Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a significant update to the Lead and Copper Rule, aiming to replace the "vast majority" of lead drinking water pipes in the United States within 10 years. This new proposal, expected to be finalized in 2024, marks a substantial increase from the Trump-era rule established in 2021, which reduced the annual replacement requirement to 3% from the original 7% set in 1991. Under the updated rule, water systems would need to replace at least 10% of their lead pipes annually, with the goal of achieving complete replacement nationwide in a decade.Radhika Fox, EPA's assistant administrator for the Office of Water, highlighted the flexibility of the proposal, allowing states to require communities to expedite replacements if possible. The proposal also mandates water systems to maintain updated lead pipe inventories, develop replacement plans, and track pipe materials.A significant aspect of the proposal is the reduction of the lead action level in drinking water from 15 to 10 micrograms per liter, requiring water utilities to notify the public when lead levels exceed this new threshold. This lowered action level is expected to bring substantial public health improvements by compelling more water systems to implement interim measures like corrosion control.The draft rule also emphasizes the need for better communication between drinking water systems and residents regarding plans to replace lead service lines. The public will have a 60-day period to comment on the proposal once it is published in the Federal Register.Funding for these replacements will be supported by the $15 billion allocated by Congress in the 2021 infrastructure law and the EPA's Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. The urgency of this proposal is underscored by the public health crisis highlighted by the Flint, Michigan incident in 2014, where lead contamination in drinking water led to widespread health issues.Despite the ambitious goals, challenges such as increasing costs, supply chain disruptions, and staffing shortages have been identified by the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) as barriers to the successful replacement of lead service lines. AMWA CEO Tom Dobbins emphasizes the need for the EPA to provide necessary resources and tools to overcome these barriers and achieve the goal of eliminating lead pipes.All Lead Water Pipes to be Replaced Under Proposed EPA Rule Get full access to Minimum Competence - Daily Legal News Podcast at www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

It's finally here: the first episode of Conversations, Season 4 of The Past, The Promise, The Presidency! As you may have learned from previous seasons, when we at the Center for Presidential History talk about “presidential history,” we're thinking deep and wide. And our conversations this season will be no different. The postal system, Mormons, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Charlie Brown: you'll hear about all of them as presidential history this season! But this week, we're diving straight into a topic that obviously intersects with the presidency: partisan politics. Since independence, the U.S. has seen a host of political parties. Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, Whigs, Democrats, Anti-Masons, Populists, and more. Throughout those same decades, intra-party politics have undergone their own changes, and the Republican Party of the last three decades is no exception. This episode, we are exploring the rise of the new Republican conservatism beginning in the 1990s and tracing its evolution through the Trump presidency to today. And we're doing that with one of the premier historians of the era: Dr. Nicole Hemmer. Hemmer is a historian and Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She specializes in the history of American media, conservatism, and the presidency, and explores all of these topics and more in her book Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.  

Discover what was taking place in 1799 that gave Thomas Jefferson more hope as 1800 loomed around the corner. Learn which state had laid foundation come Spring 1800 for undergoing radical political transformation. Find out how Aaron Burr became useful in regards to campaigning. Discover what John Adams did between May 5-7, 1800. Learn how many government departments existed during time of John Adams's Presidency. Learn about the route Adams took en route to nations new capital including what he had done behind the scenes. Find out whether or not Alexander Hamilton campaigned on John Adams's behalf. Learn what most Federalists including all Jeffersonian Republicans truly felt about Alexander Hamilton. Find out if there were more Republican Newspapers versus Federalist ones come 1800. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kirk-monroe/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kirk-monroe/support

John Leland (1754-1841) was one of the most influential and entertaining religious figures in early America. As an itinerant revivalist, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to connect with a popular audience, and contributed to the rise of a "democratized" Christianity in America. A tireless activist for the rights of conscience, Leland also waged a decades-long war for disestablishment, first in Virginia and then in New England. Leland advocated for full religious freedom for all-not merely Baptists and Protestants-and reportedly negotiated a deal with James Madison to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Leland developed a reputation for being "mad for politics" in early America, delivering political orations, publishing tracts, and mobilizing New England's Baptists on behalf of the Jeffersonian Republicans. He crowned his political activity by famously delivering a 1,200-pound cheese to Thomas Jefferson's White House. Leland also stood among eighteenth-century Virginia's most powerful anti-slavery advocates, and convinced one wealthy planter to emancipate over 400 of his slaves. Though among the most popular Baptists in America, Leland's fierce individualism and personal eccentricity often placed him at odds with other Baptist leaders. He refused ordination, abstained from the Lord's Supper, and violently opposed the rise of Baptist denominationalism. In the first-ever biography of Leland, Eric C. Smith recounts the story of this pivotal figure from American Religious History, whose long and eventful life provides a unique window into the remarkable transformations that swept American society from 1760 to 1840.-Eric C. Smith is the Senior Pastor of Sharon Baptist Church in Savannah, Tennessee, and a historian of American Baptists and early American religion. He is also the author of Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America (OUP, 2020) and Order & Ardor: The Revival Spirituality of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists of Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (USC Press, 2018). He and his wife, Candace, have three children.

Dr. Patrick Newman is a Fellow at the Mises Institute, he is also an assistant professor of economics at Florida Southern College. He completed his PhD in economics at George Mason University. This week were excited to speak with him about his new book "Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607-1849," which hit #1 on the Amazon political history chart. We discuss why cronyism increased and declined throughout American history, what party was the most irresponsible with lobbying, the history of lobbying, how to source accurate historical documents, misinformation regarding regulations, what mainstream economics gets right and wrong, the benefits of revisionist history, the differences between Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats and why research is one of our most valuable tools. (Length: 53:09) Follow Dr. Newman On Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrPatrickNewman  Follow Dr Newman On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.newman.9404  Buy His New Book On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610167422    

Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in America 1607-1849 describes the evolution of political favor seeking in early American history, from the colonial era to the Mexican War. Newman argues that cronyism emerged from the perennial clash between the forces of liberty and power. When the interventionist Federalists, National Republicans, and Whigs controlled the government, special-interest policies—central banking, protective tariffs, businesses subsidies, territorial expansion, and so on—drastically increased. However, after the libertarian Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats assumed the command posts, cronyism only moderately declined before resuming its upward march. “Power,” Lord Acton teaches us, “tends to corrupt,” and slowly but surely the proponents of limited government turned into the privilege granting parties they previously despised.-Patrick is Assistant Professor of Economics at Florida Southern College. He completed his PhD in the Department of Economics at George Mason University.

Not(PolicyWTF): Reforming Procurement (Sanjeev Kumar Must Be Smiling)  Pleasant surprises in policymaking in India— RSJSince we take great pleasure in highlighting policy screw-ups around here, it is only fair we appreciate measures that aren’t PolicyWTFs when they make an occasional appearance on our landscape like rare migratory birds. Last week we had one such sighting. (Deep breath). The Procurement Policy Division (PPD) in the Department of Expenditure (DoE) under the Ministry of Finance (MoF), Government of India (GoI) released the ‘General Instructions on Procurement and Project Management’. The press release reads:“These guidelines attempt to incorporate into the realm of Public Procurement in India, innovative rules for faster, efficient and transparent execution of projects and to empower executing agencies to take quicker and more efficient decisions in public interest. Some of the improvements include prescribing strict timelines for payments when due. Timely release of ad hoc payments (70% or more of bills raised) is expected to improve liquidity with the contractors especially Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).”Importantly, it has this line too:“Alternative methods for selection of contractors have been permitted, which can improve speed and efficiency in execution of projects. In appropriate cases, quality parameters can be given weightage during evaluation of the proposal in a transparent and fair manner, through a Quality cum Cost Based Selection (QCBS), as an alternative to the traditional L1 system.”  This is critical. In ‘appropriate cases’, from now on, quality of service will also be given weightage during evaluation of projects. It sounds absurd but it’s true. Quality wasn’t an explicit parameter for choosing suppliers in government contracts so far. So, yes, this is a reform. Bravo!Puraane Paap I have written about the tyranny of the L1 system and its pernicious effects before. From our edition #22 (Trishul: Ek ‘Tender’ Prem Katha):“The procurement of goods and services by the Government of India is still largely governed by the Contract Act 1872 and Sale of Goods Act, 1930 and General Financial Rules (GFR) that are amended periodically. The most prevalent mechanism of awarding a contract in government departments and PSUs over the last century has been the L1 system, also called the Least Cost Selection Method. There is a bit of history to this. The colonial government wasn’t too keen on spending a lot on projects in India. A minimal threshold of quality was all that was needed at the lowest cost. Though alternatives like the Quality and Cost Based System (QCBS) and Quality Based System (QBS) are being gradually adopted, the L1 system still holds sway after seven decades. Yes, we love our colonial past a lot that way. So, you could lie your way through the technical bid claiming excellent capabilities. Once you crossed that threshold, all you needed was some friendly insider who helped you price your bid lower than your rivals only marginally. Voila, you’re in business.Three problems arose out of this. First, since technical bids didn’t have a weightage, the projects were often won by less competent firms who ended up either not completing the project or did a shoddy job. Examples of this are visible all around us in government infrastructure projects. Second, it encouraged rent-seeking behaviour among public servants who had the information about rival bids. In that cult classic, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, municipal commissioner D’mello was playing two builders (Ahuja and Tarneja) to maximise his benefits till one of them bumps him off. Third, it led to crowding out of honest, competent players from the government tender market because they wouldn’t play ball.”   What’s Changed?Anyway, I went through this 22-page document released by the department and a few things stand out. First, there are concrete measures identified to make it easy for suppliers dealing with the government. The guidelines suggest 75 per cent of payment due must be paid within 10 working days of the submission of the bill and the remaining within 28 working days. Beyond this, penal interest would apply. There’s also guidance on how government entities should operate when they get into legal disputes with their suppliers. The entities should not appeal against judgments of lower courts in routine matters and decision to appeal should be reviewed by a special committee that should consider both legal merits and the practical chances of success after doing a cost-benefit analysis. This will encourage those suppliers who have stayed away from government contracts because of the jhanjhat they entail.   Second, a few other common bugbears of the government procurement process have been eliminated. For instance, the single bidder scenario in an open tender. Earlier the tender would be scrapped and a new one floated if there was only one bidder. This is no longer a necessary requirement and if the single bidder checks all the boxes, the process can continue with them to its conclusion. Also, the government entities can now quote a fixed budget for a project in the tender itself for the bidders to apply. This will take away the guesswork and protracted negotiations to get a bid under a budget that the government has in mind for specific time-bound projects. Finally, we have the Quality-cum-Cost Based Selection (QCBS) now allowed for procurement of works and non-consultancy service where the procurement has been declared Quality Oriented Procurement (QOP) by the competent authority and where the estimated value of the tender does not exceed Rs.10 crore. Even here, the weightage of non-financial parameters cannot exceed 30 per cent. This isn’t wholesale dumping of the L1 procurement system as it is made out to be but it is a continuation of the changes in the procurement process that started in 2017. And I hope as the confidence in this grows, we will phase out the L1 system completely and have a procurement framework that’s modern, not a colonial relic.p.s: There’s always a lot of life lessons to learn from any government gazette and this time I learnt the difference between ‘may’, ‘should’, ‘shall’ and ‘allowed’. I have reproduced it below for your enlightenment:“(i) Instructions containing ‘may’ are to be considered desirable or good practices which procuring entities/ project executing agencies are encouraged to implement but not mandatory. (ii) Instructions containing ‘should’ are required to be followed in general. However, there may be circumstances where it may not be practical/ desirable to implement them. In such cases, the concerned officer / agency may deviate by recording reasons in writing for not implementing the same(iii) Instructions containing ‘shall’ are mandatory; any deviation shall require (our take: note the meta level usage of shall here) relaxation of rules from the DoE (iv) Instructions containing ‘allowed’ indicate an optional course of action to be decided upon on merits” Aur kahan milega itna content!A Framework a Week: What’s a Policy Success? Tools for thinking public policy— Pranay KotasthaneWhatay coincidence! I also have something not-so-terrible to discuss. Rarer than sighting rare migratory birds. Anyways, it’s always fun to identify a policyWTF. The gotcha feeling is unmistakable. Policy watchers like us experience immense satisfaction in identifying governments’ stupidities. Moreover, limited state capacity in India means that policyWTFs surface at a daily cadence. Ideas that seemed great on paper regularly morph into egregious policies. As important as exposing government incompetence is in a democracy, we also realise the limits of analyses focusing on policy failures alone. The dominance of the language of incompetence and disillusionment with the State can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Fed only on a diet of policy failures, those of us who can afford, give up entirely on the State. Those who can’t afford, resign themselves to a State that can give occasional handouts and provide short-term benefits. To escape this narrative of cynicism and despair, we need to systematically understand policy successes in India. The caricature that India progresses despite its governments, not because of it, surely can’t be true. There are plenty of examples where government policies effectively resolved the biggest challenges of the day. The Green Revolution, the 1991 reforms, the National Pension System (NPS) reform, Fiscal Budget Responsibility and Budget Management Act, and the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) are just some candidates for successful policy measures that come to mind.But identifying isolated successes doesn’t go far enough. We need frameworks that can help understand what a policy success really entails. We need to understand the elements that are more likely to make policies successful in the Indian context. A search on these lines led me to this book Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand, which has a good review of literature on this topic. Let’s discuss a few of them.Framework 1: Programmatic-Political AxesThe first framework assesses success on two parameters - programmatic efficiency and effectiveness on one hand, and political coalition building and communication on the other. My illustration of this framework is below.This framework helps explain why the farm laws cannot be classified as a policy success or why this government doesn’t project demonetisation as a terrific policy reform anymore. Stories, Stories, StoriesThe crucial point is that calling a policy successful is at its core an intensely political claim. Apart from good “craft work”, it involves shaping the narrative so that it is widely seen as a success. As the authors write:“Policy successes, like policy failures, are in the eye of the beholder. They are not mere facts but stories. Undoubtedly, ‘events’—real impacts on real people—are a necessary condition for their occurrence. But, in the end, policy successes do not so much occur; they are made. To claim that X—a public policy, program or project—is a ‘success’ is effectively an act of interpretation, indeed of framing. To say this in a public capacity and in a public forum makes it an inherently political act. It amounts to giving a strong vote of confidence to certain acts and practices of governance. In effect, it singles them out, elevates them and validates them. For such an act to be consequential it needs to stick; others need to become convinced of its truth and need to emulate it. The claim ‘X is a success needs to become a more widely accepted and shared narrative. When it does, it becomes performative: X looks better and better because so many say so, so often. When the narrative endures, X becomes enshrined in collective memory through repeated retelling and other rituals. Examples of the latter include the conferral of awards on people or organisations associated with X, who then subsequently receive invitations to come before captive audiences to spread the word; the high place that X occupies in rankings; and the favourable judgements of X by official arbiters of public value in a society, such as audit agencies or watchdog bodies, not to mention the court of public opinion. Once they have achieved iconic status, success tales—no matter how selective and biased certain critics and soft voices may claim them to be (see, for example, Schram and Soss 2001)—serve as important artefacts in the construction of the self-images and reputational claims of the policymakers, governments, agencies and societal stakeholders that credibly claim authorship of their making and preservation (Van Assche et al. 2011)” —[Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand]Given the importance of narratives, objective classification of policies into successes or failures becomes difficult. Framework 2: A Fourfold MeasureBuilding on the previous framework, the editors develop a four-fold assessment in order to eliminate getting swayed by narratives alone. Broadly speaking, programmatic assessment measures effectiveness and efficiency, process assessment indicates implementation capability, and political assessment measures narrative power. I quite liked the fourth dimension. The temporal assessment, in the authors’ words, looks at the policy ‘not as a snapshot but as a film’. Policies with desirable effects almost always need regular software updates to account for unintended and unanticipated consequences. Take the case of Minimum Support Pricing policies in the context of food shortage in India. It did achieve the programmatic, process, and political goals but failed the temporal test because it evergreened the subsidies for a few crops. I recommend the book to anyone interested in policy engineering. I hope to do something similar in the Indian context to get out of a declinist policy discourse. Do you have any policy candidates in mind that meet the criteria outlined above? India Policy Watch: Charging For Sedition Is Our Parampara Insights on burning policy issues in India— RSJAnother week and another demand for a sedition case. This time it is from the left or the liberal wing. And their target is the eminent public intellectual Kangana Ranaut who in a discussion with another formidable intellect on Times Now claimed that India got her real azaadi in 2014 and what happened in 1947 was but a ‘bheekh’ (alms) that our generous colonial overlords had given us. This was enough. Demand for sedition charges poured in. Is this sedition? In the world of social media whataboutery, all kinds of parallels were drawn with other cases where this government has filed charges of sedition. It is useful to go back into history a bit to understand sedition in India (Section 124-A of the IPC) and how it has evolved to become the ogre it is today. A Brief History Of Sedition The first documented case of sedition was back in 1891. In the Queen Empress v. Jogendra Chunder Bose case, the proprietor of a weekly Bangla newspaper Bangobasi was charged for articles that appeared in it. What sort of articles? Well, the colonial government was considering passing the Age of Consent Bill which sought to raise the age of consent for Indian girls to be subject to sexual intercourse from ten to twelve. Bangobasi saw this as an unnecessary intervention of the state into the customs of Hindu society and severely criticised it. This would have made an interesting case even today on how much the state should intervene in the traditions of a society. The jury was unable to reach a consensus and Justice W. Comer Petheram discharged the case and let out the accused on bail.It is the next case that set the definition for sedition in colonial India whose imprint hasn’t vanished yet. This was Queen Empress v. Bal Gangadhar Tilak case where Tilak in his newspaper Kesari had carried an article titled ‘Shivaji’s Utterances’ that exhorted Indians to wake up to the foreign debasement of their culture. Tilak had sought for swarajya in his pages using Shivaji’s ghost in heaven as the medium. The article had no direct call for action or incitement to disorder. The case came up before Justice Arthur Strachey of the Bombay High Court and he defined sedition in such broad and blatantly partisan strokes that it was almost impossible for the jury to return any other verdict than guilty. Tilak was sentenced to 18 months of rigorous imprisonment and a precedent was set. Puraane Paap Once MoreSo, what were these broad strokes that Justice Strachey applied on sedition that continue to haunt us in independent India? First, it was not necessary for the speaker (or writer) to incite people to commit acts of violence or insurrection against the state for it to be considered sedition. Just the intention to arouse negative feelings about the government was good enough. Mind you, this almost replaced the state with the government. Abusive language against the government, portraying it as corrupt or hostile to its own people or calling it partial could all be considered sedition. The presumed intention itself going literally by the words of the speaker could be considered seditious. It didn’t matter if they were being used for irony or for satire. The real intent was irrelevant. Second, the judgment introduced a new element in free speech debates. Who is the intended audience and what’s their character? In Tilak’s case, the Bombay High Court was convinced that since Tilak wrote in Marathi, he was talking to an ignorant and gullible class of people who could be easily swayed by the impassioned texts asking them to rise in revolt against the government. So, not only the presumed intent of the speaker was to be judged but also the intellectual abilities of the audience to decide on the seditious nature of a speech or a column. Third, and quite incredibly, it didn’t matter what the consequence of the speech or text was in deciding on sedition charges. The accused couldn’t plead that no one actually developed any negative feelings against the government because of their speech. Nor was the truth relevant. The accused couldn’t argue that what she was saying was the truth. What mattered was presumed intent and the possibility of an impact. Quite honestly, this wasn’t any longer in the realm of law. This was metaphysics. Yet, a large part of this interpretation of sedition is what remains with us till today. By the mid 19th century, sedition was a minor offence (“misdemeanour”) in England and at its worst could attract a few years in prison. It was a bailable offence and there were rarely any convictions on charges of sedition in England by the time it was introduced as Section 124-A of IPC in 1870 in India. However, as we saw in Tilak’s case, the colonial government interpreted this section in the most illiberal way possible. And the tone was set. In the debates at the Constituent Assembly, the speakers who were victims of sedition law under British rule, drafted Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) to take the sting out of sedition charges. After 1947, few of our Courts ruled against sedition charges that were brought up against the leaders of Hindu Mahasabha or the Communist Party for making inflammatory speeches against the state or against other communities that could lead to violence. These judgments spooked Nehru and others in his cabinet. The wounds of partition were fresh and the spectre of violence was all around. Nehru blinked and the First Amendment to the Constitution that curbed freedom of speech was passed in June 1951. This has been chronicled in Tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days - The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India.But this wasn’t all. In the Code of Criminal Procedure that came into force in 1974, Indira Gandhi made sedition a cognisable offence for the first time in our history. Now, police could make an arrest on charges of sedition without a warrant. Sedition thus became a non-bailable, cognisable and non-compoundable offence in India. A triple whammy that both sides of the political divide are happy to apply to the other. And in last five years things seemed to have gotten worse. Because in India, allegiance to free speech isn’t about conviction. It’s about convenience.p.s: Contrast the 1951 buckling of the Indian government to what happened to the Sedition Act of 1798 that was passed in the US House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt from the House History website:“In one of the first tests of freedom of speech, the House passed the Sedition Act, permitting the deportation, fine, or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or publishing “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the government of the United States. The 5th Congress (1797–1799), narrowly divided between the majority Federalists and minority Jeffersonian Republicans, voted 44 to 41 in favor of the Senate-passed bill. Federalists championed the legislation fearing impending war with France and out of the desire to hold the majority in Congress and to retain the White House, then occupied by Federalist John Adams. In an era when newspapers served as political parties' chief organs, the Republican press was particularly vicious in its attacks on Federalists and the Adams administration. “Liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man,” noted one of the bill’s supporters, John Allen of Connecticut. “It leads to the dissolution of every bond of union.” Republicans defended the First Amendment protecting free speech and press. “What will be the situation of the people?” James Madison of Virginia demanded. “Not free: because they will be compelled to make their election between competitors whose pretensions they are not permitted by act equally to examine, to discuss and to ascertain.” Signed into law by Adams on July 14, the law proved immensely unpopular with the public and the President lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Under the incoming Republican administration, the Sedition Act eventually expired on March 3, 1801; however, arguments made for and against it shaped subsequent debate about constitutional protections of free speech.” PS: Read more on sedition in edition #115.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Article] Sedition in India: Colonial Legacy, Misuse and Effect on Free Speech from EPW.[Framework] BCG’s Public Impact Diagnostic Tool provides another way to measure policy success. [Note] A Guide for starting a low-cost, primarily remote setup podcast. Subscribe at publicpolicy.substack.com

Packing and unpacking the Supreme Court is nothing new. But why now? It's all in the details, as we discover. Steve jumps back into history and into the Judiciary Act of 1801. Passed by Congress and signed into law during a lame-duck legislative session after the electoral defeat of John Adams, the nation’s second president, and his Federalist party. The law doubled the number of circuits from three to six, and created 16 circuit court judgeships to staff them. It was, in effect, a post-election circuit court-packing plan, and the incoming Jeffersonian Republicans saw it as such.  From a legal perspective, changing the number of justices on the Supreme Court is an easy thing to do. All that it takes is a majority in both houses of Congress to pass legislation to that effect, and the president’s signature (or a veto override, if the president resists). It has been done seven times in the nation’s history, each time for partisan political purposes. Although the practice has come to be known as “court-packing,” Congress has twice lowered the number of justices to deprive a rival party of appointments to the high court. As a brief historical review reveals, the politics of court-packing, and its unpacking, is literally as old as the republic itself. And so much more, including legal questions from The Blitz listeners. Submit your questions to http://www.lawyertalkpodcast.com/ (www.lawyertalkpodcast.com). Recorded at Channel 511, a production of 511 South High Media LLC. Stephen E. Palmer, Esq. has been practicing criminal defense almost exclusively since 1995. He has represented people in federal, state, and local courts in Ohio and elsewhere. Though he focuses on all areas of criminal defense, he particularly enjoys complex cases in state and federal courts. He has unique experience handling and assembling top defense teams of attorneys and experts in cases involving allegations of child abuse (false sexual allegations, false physical abuse allegations), complex scientific cases involving allegations of DUI and vehicle homicide cases with blood alcohol tests, and any other criminal cases that demand jury trial experience. Steve has unique experience handling numerous high publicity cases that have garnered national attention. For more information about Steve and his law firm, visit https://www.ohiolegaldefense.com/ (Yavitch & Palmer Co., L.P.A.)  Support this podcast

Welcome to the history of computing podcast. Today we're going to talk about the use of big data in elections. But first, let's start with a disclaimer. I believe that these problems outlined in this episode are apolitical. Given the chance to do so I believe most politicians (or marketers), despite their party, would have jumped on what happened with what is outlined in this podcast. Just as most marketers are more than happy to buy data, even when not knowing the underlying source of that data. No offense to the parties but marketing is marketing. Just as it is in companies. Data will be used to gain an advantage in the market. Understanding the impacts of our decisions and the values of others is an ongoing area of growth for all of us. Even when we have quotas on sales qualified leads to be delivered.  Now let's talk about data sovereignty. Someone pays for everything. The bigger and more lucrative the business, the more that has to be paid to keep organizations necessarily formed to support an innovation alive. If you aren't paying for a good or service, then you yourself are the commodity. In social media, this is represented in the form of a company making their money from data about you and from the ads you see. The only other viable business model used is to charge for the service, like a Premium LinkedIn account as opposed to the ones used by us proletariat.   Our devices can see so much about us. They know our financial transactions, where we go, what we buy, what content we consume, and apparently what our opinions and triggers are. Sometimes, that data can be harnessed to show us ads. Ads about things to buy. Ads about apps to install. Ads about elections. My crazy uncle Billy sends me routine invitations to take personality quizzes. No thanks. Never done one. Why? I worked on one of the first dozen Facebook apps. A simple rock, paper, scissors game. At the time, it didn't at all seem weird to me as a developer that there was an API endpoint to get a list of friends from within my app. It's how we had a player challenge other players in a game. It didn't seem weird that I could also get a list of their friends. And it didn't seem weird that I could get a lot of personal data on people through that app. I mean I had to display their names and photos when they played a game, right? I just wanted to build a screen to invite friends to play the app. I had to show a photo so you could see who you were playing. And to make the game more responsive I needed to store the data in my own SQL tables. It didn't seem weird then. I guess it didn't seem weird until it did.  What made it weird was the introduction of highly targeted analytics and retargeting. I have paid for these services. I have benefited from these services in my professional life and to some degree I have helped develop some. I've watched the rise of large data warehouses. I've helped buy phone numbers and other personally identifiable information of humans and managed teams of sellers to email and call those humans. Ad targeting, drip campaigns, lead scoring, and providing very specific messages based on attributes you know about a person are all a part of the modern sales and marketing machine at any successful company.  And at some point, it went from being crazy how much information we had about people to being - well, just a part of doing business. The former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix once said “From Mad Men in the day to Math Men today.” From Don Draper to Betty's next husband Henry (a politician) there are informal ties between advertising, marketing and politics. Just as one of the founders of SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica had ties with royals having dated one and gone to school with others in political power. But there have also always been formal ties. Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick was the first colonial newspaper in America and was formally suppressed after its first edition in 1690. But the Boston News-Letter was formally subsidized in 1704. Media and propaganda. Most newspapers were just straight up sponsoring or sponsored by a political platform in the US until the 1830s. To some degree, that began with Ben Franklin's big brother James Franklin in the early 1700s with the New England Courant. Franklin would create partnerships for content distribution throughout the colonies, spreading his brand of moral virtue. And the papers were stoking the colonies into revolution. And after the revolution Hamilton instigated American Minerva as the first daily paper in New York - to be a Federalist paper. Of course, the Jeffersonian Republicans called him an “incurable lunatic.” And yet they still guaranteed us the freedom of press.  And that freedom grew to investigative reporting, especially during the Progressive Era, from the tail end of the 19th century up until the start of the roaring twenties. While Teddy Roosevelt would call them Muckrakers, their tradition extends from Nellie Bly and Fremont Older to Seymour Hersch, Kwitny, even the most modern Woodward and Bernstein. They led to stock reform, civic reforms, uncovering corruption, exposing crime in labor unions, laying bare monopolistic behaviors, improving sanitation and forcing us to confront racial injustices. They have been independent of party affiliation and yet constantly accused over the last hundred years of being against whomever is in power at the time. Their journalism extended to radio and then to television. I think the founders would be proud of how journalism evolved and also unsurprised as to some of the ways it has devolved. But let's get back to someone is always paying. The people can subscribe to a newspaper but the advertising is a huge source of revenue. With radio and television flying across airwaves and free, advertising exclusively became what paid for content and the ensuing decades became the golden age of that industry. And politicians bought ads. If there is zero chance a politician can win a state, why bother buying ads in that state. That's a form of targeting with a pretty simple set of data.  In Mad Men, Don is sent to pitch the Nixon campaign. There has always been a connection between disruptive new mediums and politics. Offices have been won by politicians able to gain access to early printing presses to spread their messages to the masses, those connected to print media to get articles and advertising, by great orators at the advent of the radio, and by good-looking charismatic politicians first able to harness television - especially in the Mad Men fueled ad exec inspired era that saw the Nixon campaigns in the 60s. The platforms to advertise become ubiquitous, they get abused, and then they become regulated. After television came news networks specifically meant to prop up an agenda, although unable to be directly owned by a party. None are “fake news” per se, but once abused by any they can all be cast in doubt, even if most especially done by the abuser.  The Internet was no different. The Obama campaign was really the first that leveraged social media and great data analytics to orchestrate what can be considered to really be the first big data campaign. And after his campaign carried him to a first term the opposition was able to make great strides in countering that. Progress is often followed by lagerts who seek to subvert the innovations of an era. And they often hire the teams who helped with previous implementations.  Obama had a chief data scientist, Rayid Ghani. And a chief analytics officer. They put apps in the hands of canvassers and they mined Facebook data from Facebook networks of friends to try and persuade voters. They scored voters and figured out how to influence votes for certain segments. That was supplemented by thousands of interviews and thousands of hours building algorithms. By 2012 they were pretty confident they knew which of the nearly 70 million Americans that put him in the White House. And that gave the Obama campaign the confidence to spend $52 million in online ads against Romney's $26 million to bring home the win. And through all that the Democratic National Committee ended up with information on 180 million voters. That campaign would prove the hypothesis that big data could win big elections. Then comes the 2016 election. Donald Trump came from behind, out of a crowded field of potential Republican nominees, to not only secure the Republican nomination for president but then to win that election. He won the votes to be elected in the electoral college while losing the popular vote. That had happened when John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in 1824, although it took a vote in the House of Representatives to settle that election. Rutherford B Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden in 1876 in the electoral college but lost the popular vote. And it happened again when Grover Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. And in 2000 when Bush beat Gore. And again when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. And he solidly defeated her in the electoral college with 304 to her 227 votes.  Every time it happens, there seems to be plenty of rhetoric about changing the process. But keep in mind the framers built the system for a reason: to give the constituents of every state a minimum amount of power to elect officials that represent them. Those two represent the number of senators for the state and then the state receives one for each member of the house of representatives. States can choose how the electors are instructed to vote. Most states (except Maine and Nebraska) have all of their electors vote for a single ticket, the one that won the state. Most of the states instruct their elector to vote based on who won the popular vote for their state. Once all the electors cast their votes, Congress counts the votes and the winner of the election is declared.  So how did he come from behind? One easy place to blame is data. I mean, we can blame data for putting Obama into the White House, or we can accept a message of hope and change that resonated with the people. Just as we can blame data for Trump or accept a message that government wasn't effective for the people. Since this is a podcast on technology, let's focus on data for a bit. And more specifically let's look at the source of one trove of data used for micro-targeting, because data is a central strategy for most companies today. And it was a central part of the past four elections.  We see the ads on our phones so we know that companies have this kind of data about us. Machine learning had been on the rise for decades. But a little company called SCL was started In 1990 as the Behavioral Dynamics Institute by a British ad man named Nigel Oakes after leaving Saatchi & Saatchi. Something dangerous is when you have someone like him make this kind of comparison “We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler.” Behavioural Dynamics studied how to change mass behavior through strategic communication - which US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Hastings described in 2008 as the “synchronization of images, actions, and words to achieve a desired effect.” Sounds a lot like state conducted advertising to me. And sure, reminiscent of Nazi tactics. You might also think of it as propaganda. Or “pay ops” in the Vietnam era. And they were involved in elections in the developing world. In places like the Ukraine, Italy, South Africa, Albania, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, even India. And of course in the UK. Or at least on behalf of the UK and whether directly or indirectly, the US.  After Obama won his second term, SCL started Cambridge Analytica to go after American elections. They began to assemble a similar big data warehouse. They hired people like Brittany Kaiser who'd volunteered for Obama and would become director of Business Development.  Ted Cruz used them in 2016 but it was the Trump campaign that was really able to harness their intelligence. Their principal investor was Robert Mercer, former CEO of huge fund Renaissance Technologies. He'd gotten his start at IBM Research working on statistical machine translation and was recruited in the 90s to apply data modeling and computing resources to financial analysis. This allowed them to earn nearly 40% per year on investments. An American success story. He was key in the Brexit vote, donating analytics to Nigel Farage and an early supporter of Breitbart News.  Cambridge Analytica would get involved in 44 races in the 2014 midterm elections. By 2016, Project Alamo was running at a million bucks a day in Facebook advertising. In the documentary The Great Hack, they claim this was to harvest fear. And Cambridge Analytica allowed the Trump campaign to get really specific with targeting. So specific that they were able to claim to have 5,000 pieces of data per person.  Enter whistleblower Christopher Wylie who claims over a quarter million people took a quick called “This is Your Digital Life” which exposed the data of around 50 million users. That data was moved off Facebook servers and stored in a warehouse where it could be analyzed and fields merged with other data sources without the consent of the people who played the game or the people who were in their friend networks. Dirty tactics.  Alexander Nix admitted to using bribery stings and prostitutes to influence politicians. So it should be as no surprise that they stole information on well over 50 million Facebook users in the US alone. And of course then they lied about it when being investigated by the UK for Russian interference and fake news in the lead to the Brexit referendum. Investigations go on.  After investigations started piling up, some details started to emerge. This is Your Digital Life was written by Dr Spectre. It gets better. That's actually Alexandr Kogan for Cambridge Analytica. He had received research funding from the University of St Petersburg and was then lecturing at the Psychology department at the University of Cambridge. It would be easy to make a jump that he was working for the Russkies but here's the thing, he also got research funding from Canada, China, the UK, and the US. He claimed he didn't know what the app would be used for. That's crap. When I got a list of friends and friends friends who I could spider through, I parsed the data and displayed it on a screen as a pick list. He piped it out to a data warehouse. When you do that you know exactly what's happening with it.  So the election comes and goes. Trump wins. And people start asking questions. As they do when one party wins the popular vote and not the electoral college. People misunderstand and think you can win a district due to redistricting in most states and carry the state without realizing most are straight majority. Other Muckraker reporters from around the world start looking into Brexit and US elections and asking questions.  Enter Paul-Olivier Dehaye. While an assistant professor at the University of Zurich he was working on Coursera. He started asking about the data collection. The word spread slowly but surely. Then enter American professor David Carroll, who sued Cambridge Analytica to see what data they had on him. Dehaye contributed to his Subject Access request and suddenly the connections between Cambridge Analytica and Brexit started to surface, as did the connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, including photos of the team working with key members of the campaign. And ultimately of the checks cut.  Cause there's always a money trail.  I've heard people claim that there was no interference in the 2016 elections, in Brexit, or in other elections. Now, if you think the American taxpayer didn't contribute to some of the antics by Cambridge Analytica before they turned their attention to the US, I think we're all kidding ourselves. And there was Russian meddling in US elections and illegally obtained materials were used, whether that's emails on servers then leaked to WikiLeaks or stolen Facebook data troves. Those same tactics were used in Brexit. And here's the thing, it's been this way for a long, long time - it's just so much more powerful today than ever before. And given how fast data can travel, every time it happens, unless done in a walled garden, the truth will come to light.  Cambridge Analytica kinda' shut down in 2017 after all of this came to light. What do I mean by kinda? Well, former employees setup a company called Emerdata Limited who then bought the SCL companies. Why? There were contracts and data. They brought on the founder of Blackwater, Mercer's daughter Rebekah, and others to serve on the board of directors and she was suddenly the “First Lady of the Alt-Right.” Whether Emerdata got all of the company, they got some of the scraped data from 87 million users. No company with the revenues they had goes away quietly or immediately.  Robert Mercer donated the fourth largest amount in the 2016 presenting race. He was also the one who supposedly introduced Trump to Steve Bannon. In the fallout of the scandals if you want to call them that, Mercer stepped down from Renaissance and sold his shares of Breitbart to his daughters. Today, he's a benefactor of the Make America Number 1 Super PAC and remains one of the top donors to conservative causes.  After leaving Cambridge Analytica, Nix was under investigations for a few years before settling with the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to delete illegally obtained data and settled with the UK Secretary of State that he had offered unethical services and agreed to not act as a director of another company for at least 7 years.  Brittany Kaiser flees to Thailand and is now a proponent of banning political advertising on Facebook and being able to own your own data.  Facebook paid a $5 billion fine for data privacy violations and have overhauled their APIs and privacy options. It's better but not great. I feel like they're doing as well as they can and they've been accused of tampering with feeds by conservative and liberal media outlets alike. To me, if they all hate you, you're probably either doing a lot right, or basically screwing all of it up. I wouldn't be surprised to see fines continue piling up.  Kogan left the University of Cambridge in 2018. He founded Philometrics, a firm applying big data and AI to surveys. Their website isn't up as of the recording of this episode. His Tumblr seems to be full of talk about acne and trying to buy cheat codes for video games these days.  Many, including Kogan, have claimed that micro-targeting (or psychographic modeling techniques) against large enhanced sets of data isn't effective. If you search for wedding rings and I show you ads for wedding rings then maybe you'll buy my wedding rings. If I see you bought a wedding ring, I can start showing you ads for wedding photographers and bourbon instead. Hey dummy, advertising works. Disinformation works. Analyzing and forecasting and modeling with machine learning works. Sure, some is snake oil. But early adopters made billions off it. Problem is, like that perfect gambling system, you wouldn't tell people about something if it means you lost your edge. Sell a book about how to weaponize a secret and suddenly you probably are selling snake oil.   As for regulatory reactions, can you say GDPR and all of the other privacy regulations that have come about since? Much as Sarbanes-Oxley introduced regulatory controls for corporate auditing and transparency, we regulated the crap out of privacy. And by regulated I mean a bunch of people that didn't understand the way data is stored and disseminated over APIs made policy to govern it. But that's another episode waiting to happen. Suffice it to say the lasting impact to the history of computing is both the regulations on privacy and the impact to identity providers and other API endpoints, were we needed to lock down entitlements to access various pieces of information due to rampant abuses.  So here's the key question in all of this: did the data help Obama and Trump win their elections? It might have moved a few points here and there. But it was death by a thousand cuts. Mis-steps by the other campaigns, political tides, segments of American populations desperately looking for change and feeling left behind while other segments of the population got all the attention, foreign intervention, voting machine tampering, not having a cohesive Opponent Party and so many other aspects of those elections also played a part. And as Hari Seldon-esque George Friedman called it in his book, it's just the Storm Before the Calm.  So whether the data did or did not help the Trump campaign, the next question is whether using the Cambridge Analytica data was wrong? This is murky. The data was illegally obtained. The Trump campaign was playing catchup with the maturity of the data held by the opposition. But the campaign can claim they didn't know that the data was illegally obtained. It is illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns and Bannon was warned about that. And then-CEO Nix was warned. But they were looking to instigate a culture war according to Christopher Wylie who helped found Cambridge Analytica. And look around, did they?  Getting data models to a point where they have a high enough confidence interval that they are weaponizable takes years. Machine learning projects are very complicated, very challenging, and very expensive. And they are being used by every political campaign now insofar as the law allows. To be honest though, troll farms of cheap labor are cheaper and faster. Which is why three more got taken down just a month before the recording of this episode. But AI doesn't do pillow talk, so eventually it will displace even the troll farm worker if only ‘cause the muckrakers can't interview the AI.  So where does this leave us today? Nearly every time I open Facebook, I see an ad to vote for Biden or an ad to vote for Trump. The US Director of National Intelligence recently claimed the Russians and Iranians were interfering with US elections. To do their part, Facebook will ban political ads indefinitely after the polls close on Nov. 3. They and Twitter are taking proactive steps to stop disinformation on their networks, including by actual politicians. And Twitter has actually just outright banned political ads.  People don't usually want regulations. But just as political ads in print, on the radio, and on television are regulated - they will need to be regulated online as well. As will the use of big data. The difference is the rich metadata collected in micro-targeting, the expansive comments areas, and the anonymity of those commenters. But I trust that a bunch of people who've never written a line of code in their life will do a solid job handing down those regulations. Actually, the FEC probably never built a radio - so maybe they will. So as the election season comes to a close, think about this. Any data from large brokers about you is fair game. What you're seeing in Facebook and even the ads you see on popular websites are being formed by that data. Without it, you'll see ads for things you don't want. Like the Golden Girls Season 4 boxed set. Because you already have it. But with it, you'll get crazy uncle Billy at the top of your feed talking about how the earth is flat. Leave it or delete it, just ask for a copy of it so you know what's out there. You might be surprised, delighted, or even a little disgusted by that site uncle Billy was looking at that one night you went to bed early. But don't, don't, don't think that any of this should impact your vote. Conservative, green, liberal, progressive, communist, social democrats, or whatever you ascribe to. In whatever elections in your country or state or province or municipality. Go vote. Don't be intimated. Don't let fear stand in the way of your civic duty. Don't block your friends with contrary opinions. If nothing else listen to them. They need to be heard. Even if uncle Billy just can't be convinced the world is round. I mean, he's been to the beach. He's been on an airplane. He has GPS on his phone… And that site. Gross. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so, so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

In this lecture, Dr. Totten argues George Washington's administration set many important precedents that continue in the United States to this day. Washington new he needed experts around him and established the cabinet to help him govern the new nation. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson enunciated two rival visions for the future of the country, with Hamilton enacting numerous policies to stabilize the nation's economy. The battle between Hamilton and Jefferson led to the creation of the proto-political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, also called Jeffersonian Republicans. These parties were further solidified as Americans disagreed over foreign policy, as France and Great Britain were locked in battle over the French Revolution. Washington's administration attempted to negotiate the Jay Treaty with Great Britain, which did not solve the immediate problems of impressment that ultimately led to the War of 1812. While Americans were fearful that the Haitian Revolution might spread to America, Washington illustrated one more weakness of his character, when he attempted to recapture an escaped slave, Ona Judge, who had escaped to freedom. In the end, Washington continued his proclivity for giving up power when he could have been president for life. Thus, Washington is a flawed founder who provided a stable foundation for the Early American Republic.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/history-of-the-american-people-to-1877/donations

In December 1799, George Washington died after a short illness. His body and his legacy quickly became fodder for nineteenth century Americans – free and enslaved – who were struggling to make sense of what it meant to be an American as well as the nation's identity. Americans across the divide used Washington and his memory to advance various political and economic interests. Some, like Federalists, yoked their political fortunes and their belief in a strong central government to Washington's legacy, much to the abhorrence of Jeffersonian Republicans, who championed the yeoman farmer and a smaller federal state. Enslaved people at Mount Vernon who never knew Washington in life used their fictive attachment to him to sell goods and services to the hundreds of Americans who made a civic pilgrimage to the Virginia plantation each year. And all the while, Washington's heirs dealt with a constant stream of visitors, trying to balance their private property interests against the idea that Washington was the “property of the nation.” On today's episode, Matthew Costello joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his aptly titled book, Property of the Nation: George Washington's Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President. About Our Guest:  Matthew Costello is Vice President of the David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History at the White House Historical Association. He received his Ph.D. in history from Marquette University. Costello has published articles in The Journal of History and Cultures, Essays in History, The Dome, and White House History. His book, The Property of the Nation: George Washington's Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President was published by University Press of Kansas in fall 2019. About Our Host: Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

In December 1799, George Washington died after a short illness. His body and his legacy quickly became fodder for nineteenth century Americans – free and enslaved – who were struggling to make sense of what it meant to be an American as well as the nation’s identity. Americans across the divide used Washington and his memory to advance various political and economic interests. Some, like Federalists, yoked their political fortunes and their belief in a strong central government to Washington’s legacy, much to the abhorrence of Jeffersonian Republicans, who championed the yeoman farmer and a smaller federal state. Enslaved people at Mount Vernon who never knew Washington in life used their fictive attachment to him to sell goods and services to the hundreds of Americans who made a civic pilgrimage to the Virginia plantation each year. And all the while, Washington’s heirs dealt with a constant stream of visitors, trying to balance their private property interests against the idea that Washington was the “property of the nation.” On today’s episode, Matthew Costello joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his aptly titled book, Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President. About Our Guest: Matthew Costello is Vice President of the David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History at the White House Historical Association. He received his Ph.D. in history from Marquette University. Costello has published articles in The Journal of History and Cultures, Essays in History, The Dome, and White House History. His book, The Property of the Nation: George Washington’s Tomb, Mount Vernon, and the Memory of the First President was published by University Press of Kansas in fall 2019. About Our Host: Jim Ambuske leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2016 with a focus on Scotland and America in an Age of War and Revolution. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project. Ambuske is currently at work on a book entitled Emigration and Empire: America and Scotland in the Revolutionary Era, as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mountvernon/message

Foreign policy became a key divide between Federalists and the emerging Jeffersonian Republicans, all the more so as Britain and France escalated a rolling series of continental wars. At the same time, domestic polarization around Hamilton's plan of public finance and its successor policies, contributed to a roiling base of political support for Jefferson's growing opposition. Despite Washington's unanimous reelection to the presidency, the divisions between Federalists and Republicans that would eventually doom the former were already at work.

Regis Philbin was on the David Letterman Show 136 times.  Pete Neild has 133 more to tie the record.  Yesterday I enjoyed having Poway City Council Candidate for District 1, Pete Neild, join me for the third time on the John Riley Project. Pete Neild is a scientist and he has been very diligent gathering data from citizens in District 1 surveying them on key issues in this race.  He has reached 1200 people in District 1 just by driving his beautiful Corvette, Calypso, around town and chatting up people on the street walking their dogs and working in their yard or garage.  This is remarkable particularly since he is not knocking on doors.  This personal connection with voters has resulted in him getting votes simply because he was the only candidate to talk to that voter.  Pete came prepared with a treasure trove of data that he gathered from voters along with accompanying charts and graphics.  His analysis included survey data about the Poway Road plan and how voters wanted "slow growth" and "small growth".  We also discussed the data he collected from voters about the future of the Poway Senior Center/Community Center. One of the key features of Pete's campaign and which separates him from his competitors is his enthusiastic support of the district voting plan for Poway.  Pete is a big supporter of council representatives connecting with their constituents, listening and then representing their interests to the council.  Pete has a great innovative idea to create his own "Pete Neild Council" consisting of representatives of individual neighborhoods that he would meet with regularly so he can listen to the people's needs and better represent his district.  Pete broke down the demographics of the different Poway voting districts. We zeroed in on individual neighborhoods and his Google Time Line driving routes through the "Land of a 1000 Cul-de-Sacs". We also broke down the campaign finances of Pete's competitors and then all candidates running for Mayor or City Council.  His competitors have raised approx $3000 from donors.  Pete, however, believes that money is a corrupting influence in politics and has vowed to refuse all donations and only spend $200 or less on his campaign.  By remaining under the $200 spending limit, he is not required to file campaign finance paperwork with the Registrar of Voters. I enjoyed discussing political parties with him.  In a non-partisan race we hope political parties would not be an issue, but in reality they are. Pete considers himself to be a Jeffersonian Republican which means he is "middle of the road".  However, he did register as a Democrat specifically to take a humorous dig at his father.  He was able to parlay that into an endorsement from the San Diego County Democratic Party.  But the reality is his political sensibilities are not traditional Democrat or traditional Republican at all.  We gained agreement on the importance of constitutional limits of government authority and protection of our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We touched on numerous other issues including Pete Babich, his first visit to Poway in 1970, population growth in Poway, the revolutionary founding fathers of Poway, WalMart, the importance of developers speaking to neighbors to get their input on new housing projects, Donald Trump and the 14th amendment, birthright citizenship, Pete's Calypso experience from dreaming to ordering to buying and now to owning (future podcast!), Lucy, submarine special operations, going under the ice, sonar and asking his colleagues and superiors for their political endorsement. Link to Pete Neild's PowerPoint presentation can be found here:  https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.138/n0p.486.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Pete-Neild-Poway-PowerPoint-JRP-Round-Three.ppt John Riley Project Info: Bookings? Inquiries? Contact me at https://johnrileyproject.com/Donations: https://www.patreon.com/johnrileyprojectSponsorship Inquiries: https://johnrileyp...

On this date in 1884, the Washington Monument was completed. Here are some things you may not have known about the memorial to the first American President. Proposals for a monument to George Washington started at the end of the Revolutionary War. However, Congress didn’t act until after his death in 1799, when it authorized a memorial in the national capital, which was under construction at the time. However, this decision was overturned by the Jeffersonian Republicans who didn’t want to build a monument to any man, much less one that was the hero of the opposition Federalist Party. It took until 1832 for any legitimate progress toward a monument to be made. That year marked the 100th anniversary of Washington’s birth, which was used by a group called the Washington National Monument Society as a rallying point for a fundraising campaign. Over the course of three years, they raised $28,000, which is the equivalent to more than $17 million today. A contest was held to choose the best design, which was submitted by Robert Mills, who was the Architect for Public Buildings in Washington, D.C. His design featured a flat-topped obelisk, which is a four-sided pillar that tapers as it rises, with a circular colonnade at the base. Picture a combination of a flat-topped Washington Monument atop a circular Lincoln Memorial. The proposal had an estimated price tag of $1 million, or more than $620 million today. The society decided to start construction, hopeful that the progress would lead to further donations to allow it to be completed. It was originally intended to be located at the intersection of perpendicular lines running from the U.S. Capitol and the White House. However, the ground at that location was not stable enough to support such a large building and it was instead built about 400 feet east south east. The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848. Construction continued until 1854, when the money ran out. At the time, the monument was 152 feet tall. Construction wouldn’t resume until 1879, using stone from a different quarry, leading to the difference in color that exists to this day. With sufficient funding, construction moved swiftly. It was completed on December 6, 1884 with the placement of an aluminum cap at the point. At the time, aluminum was rare and as valuable as silver. The Washington Monument is 554 feet 7-11/32 inches tall. At completion it was the tallest building in the world, passing the Cologne Cathedral. It held the title until the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889. It remains the tallest stone structure in the world, and, by law, the tallest building in Washington, D.C. Our question: Had the Washington Monument been constructed where it was intended, it would have formed the center of a cross. The White House and the Capitol are on two ends of the cross, what buildings are on the opposite ends? Today is Constitution Day in Spain, Independence Day in Finland, and Armed Forces Day in Ukraine. It’s unofficially National Gazpacho Day, National Microwave Oven Day, and National Pawnbrokers Day. It’s the birthday of songwriter Ira Gershwin, who was born in 1896; musician Dave Brubeck, who was born in 1920; and animator Nick Park, who is 58. Because our topic happened before 1960, we’ll spin the wheel to pick a year at random. This week in 1969, the top song in the U.S. was “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam. The No. 1 movie was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” while the novel “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo topped the New York Times Bestsellers list. Weekly question What two states were the sources of the marble used in construction of the Washington Monument? Links Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or our website. Also, if you’re enjoying the show, please consider supporting it through Patreon.com Please rate the show on iTunes by clicking here. Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington https://www.checkiday.com/12/06/2016 http://www.biography.com/people/groups/born-on-december-06 http://www.bobborst.com/popculture/numberonesongs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1969_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Fiction_Best_Sellers_of_1969

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew's Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour's service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour’s service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour’s service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour’s service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though not a household name today, Philip Pendleton Barbour was a leading political and judicial figure in antebellum America. In Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (U. of Alabama Press, 2016), William S. Belko uses his career as an example of the political transformations of the second generation of American politicians. Born the year that America attained its independence, Barbour entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican, championing the principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Though out of step with the economic nationalism that predominated in the aftermath of the War of 1812, Barbour found an ally for his cause of a limited federal government in Andrew Jackson, and by the end of the 1820s he became a leader in the fight against the Bank of the United States. Though Jackson sought twice to appoint him as his attorney general, Barbour preferred a position on the federal bench, and was ultimately nominated to the Supreme Court in 1835. As Belko shows, Barbour’s service on the Court contributed to the advancement of the Jacksonian economic vision in American jurisprudence, though his premature death in 1841 came before he would have had to face as a justice the increasingly contentious issue of slavery that would shortly dominate the national discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cases might be at the root of something bigger. Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) explores two New England accusations of bestiality crimes, the trials, and the death sentences imposed upon the defendants. In post-revolutionary America, in the Age of Reason, how could two old men face the gallows on charges that seemed more appropriate to the early 1640s? Ben-Atar and Brown unravel the personal, political, and religious entanglements that the cases represent. They provide a history of bestiality and its connection to sodomy or “crimes against nature,” and show the consequences of keeping laws on the books that may have outlived the culture that introduced them. Ben-Atar and Brown examine a struggle between Federalists and evangelicals, on the one hand, against Jeffersonian Republicans and rational religionists on the other, to define morality in the emerging new republic. The book puts the accusation of bestiality squarely in the midst of a cultural cataclysm in America. Taming Lust combines riveting historical narrative with a compelling analysis. Even the footnotes are not to be missed. These two isolated cases help us understand not only the local history of western New England, but the national political struggles, the evangelical movement that bridged the New Divinity with the Second Great Awakening, and the transatlantic influences from England and France that so affected the lives of Americans in the 1790s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cases might be at the root of something bigger. Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) explores two New England accusations of bestiality crimes, the trials, and the death sentences imposed upon the defendants. In post-revolutionary America, in the Age of Reason, how could two old men face the gallows on charges that seemed more appropriate to the early 1640s? Ben-Atar and Brown unravel the personal, political, and religious entanglements that the cases represent. They provide a history of bestiality and its connection to sodomy or “crimes against nature,” and show the consequences of keeping laws on the books that may have outlived the culture that introduced them. Ben-Atar and Brown examine a struggle between Federalists and evangelicals, on the one hand, against Jeffersonian Republicans and rational religionists on the other, to define morality in the emerging new republic. The book puts the accusation of bestiality squarely in the midst of a cultural cataclysm in America. Taming Lust combines riveting historical narrative with a compelling analysis. Even the footnotes are not to be missed. These two isolated cases help us understand not only the local history of western New England, but the national political struggles, the evangelical movement that bridged the New Divinity with the Second Great Awakening, and the transatlantic influences from England and France that so affected the lives of Americans in the 1790s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cases might be at the root of something bigger. Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) explores two New England accusations of bestiality crimes, the trials, and the death sentences imposed upon the defendants. In post-revolutionary America, in the Age of Reason, how could two old men face the gallows on charges that seemed more appropriate to the early 1640s? Ben-Atar and Brown unravel the personal, political, and religious entanglements that the cases represent. They provide a history of bestiality and its connection to sodomy or “crimes against nature,” and show the consequences of keeping laws on the books that may have outlived the culture that introduced them. Ben-Atar and Brown examine a struggle between Federalists and evangelicals, on the one hand, against Jeffersonian Republicans and rational religionists on the other, to define morality in the emerging new republic. The book puts the accusation of bestiality squarely in the midst of a cultural cataclysm in America. Taming Lust combines riveting historical narrative with a compelling analysis. Even the footnotes are not to be missed. These two isolated cases help us understand not only the local history of western New England, but the national political struggles, the evangelical movement that bridged the New Divinity with the Second Great Awakening, and the transatlantic influences from England and France that so affected the lives of Americans in the 1790s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cases might be at the root of something bigger. Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) explores two New England accusations of bestiality crimes, the trials, and the death sentences imposed upon the defendants. In post-revolutionary America, in the Age of Reason, how could two old men face the gallows on charges that seemed more appropriate to the early 1640s? Ben-Atar and Brown unravel the personal, political, and religious entanglements that the cases represent. They provide a history of bestiality and its connection to sodomy or “crimes against nature,” and show the consequences of keeping laws on the books that may have outlived the culture that introduced them. Ben-Atar and Brown examine a struggle between Federalists and evangelicals, on the one hand, against Jeffersonian Republicans and rational religionists on the other, to define morality in the emerging new republic. The book puts the accusation of bestiality squarely in the midst of a cultural cataclysm in America. Taming Lust combines riveting historical narrative with a compelling analysis. Even the footnotes are not to be missed. These two isolated cases help us understand not only the local history of western New England, but the national political struggles, the evangelical movement that bridged the New Divinity with the Second Great Awakening, and the transatlantic influences from England and France that so affected the lives of Americans in the 1790s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bestiality is more often the subject of jokes than legal cases nowadays, and so it was in late eighteenth-century western New England, when, strangely, two octogenarians were accused in separate towns in the space of a few years. Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown each discovered one case while they were researching other books, but when they began talking to one another, they realized the cases might be at the root of something bigger. Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) explores two New England accusations of bestiality crimes, the trials, and the death sentences imposed upon the defendants. In post-revolutionary America, in the Age of Reason, how could two old men face the gallows on charges that seemed more appropriate to the early 1640s? Ben-Atar and Brown unravel the personal, political, and religious entanglements that the cases represent. They provide a history of bestiality and its connection to sodomy or “crimes against nature,” and show the consequences of keeping laws on the books that may have outlived the culture that introduced them. Ben-Atar and Brown examine a struggle between Federalists and evangelicals, on the one hand, against Jeffersonian Republicans and rational religionists on the other, to define morality in the emerging new republic. The book puts the accusation of bestiality squarely in the midst of a cultural cataclysm in America. Taming Lust combines riveting historical narrative with a compelling analysis. Even the footnotes are not to be missed. These two isolated cases help us understand not only the local history of western New England, but the national political struggles, the evangelical movement that bridged the New Divinity with the Second Great Awakening, and the transatlantic influences from England and France that so affected the lives of Americans in the 1790s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices