On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
From the people who brought you “Defund the Police,” prepare yourself for . . . “Throw Billions at the Police!”
“The Capitol Police on Monday announced a multi-pronged plan to expand its operations,” journalist Glenn Greenwald informs, highlighting that “the force intends for the first time to create a permanent presence outside of the Capitol.”
Instead of police defending the national Capitol, the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) goes national.
“The Department is also in the process of opening Regional Field Offices in California and Florida,” announced the USCP news release, “with additional regions in the near future to investigate threats to Members of Congress.”
Plus, USCP declared it is “moving forward along a new path towards an intelligence based protective agency.” After being unprepared to defend capitol doors from a mob back in January, the force now morphs into yet another “intelligence” agency.
Does that make it the 18th such agency? 19th? Umpteenth?
USCP’s spread throughout the country is made possible by $2 billion in additional funding passed two months ago by the very narrowest of House margins, 213 to 212.
But what about 2020’s Democratic push to “defund the police”?
Three Democratic members of “The Squad” did vote with all Republicans against this expansion of the Capitol Police. Yet, three other Squad members — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — simply voted “present.”
Had even one said “no,” super-sizing the budget and role of the Capitol Police would have failed.
“No more policing, incarceration, and militarization,” Rep. Tlaib tweeted last year. But she was “present” for $2 billion more.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” Ocasio-Cortez once declared. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”
What about funny voting?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“We are all, regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum,” Dr. Jonathan Holloway wrote in The New York Times last week, “caught in a vortex of intoxication.”
Holloway, president of Rutgers University as well as an author and historian, blames social media for encouraging us not “to see and respect one another.” But have no fear, he offers a solution to all or most of our nation’s problems.
“The time has come,” he argues, “for compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.”*
He references FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, LBJ’s Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and today’s “domestic civilian service” programs such as AmeriCorps, asserting, sans evidence, that these “have been enormously successful.”
Effectiveness aside, does this academician see no significant difference between the programs mentioned, which were offered freely to young people who wanted to participate, and a program forced upon young people against their will?
Regardless, Dr. Holloway declares “it is easy to imagine” this one-year governmental control and use of millions of young people as “a vehicle to provide necessary support to underserved urban and rural communities, help eliminate food deserts, contribute to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, enrich our arts and culture, and bolster our community health clinics, classrooms and preschools.”
In his utopia, mandatory national service would also
Ah, the Rutgers president: terminally delusional . . . or only temporarily “caught in a vortex of intoxication”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The “no exceptions” stance is designed to silence questions of fairness and “equity” . . . even though just a few moments of thought will convince anyone that exceptions must and will be made.
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“[P]arents are fighting with school boards in cities and towns across the country,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid informed her audience, “over curricula that they believe teaches white kids that they are racist.”
Reid asserted that “none of this is actually happening,”
She spoke with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Crenshaw invented the term “Critical Race Theory” and told Reid that CRT was merely a “boogey-man,” adding: “I think I would know if we were being taught in K-12.”
The “GOP freak-out over Critical Race Theory,” offered Reid, was a “highly manufactured strategy created by seasoned political operatives looking for the perfect wedge issue.”
Reid ignores parents across the country actively encountering this racist anti-racism. Back in April, parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, documented half a million tax dollars going to programs titled “critical race theory.” After being told there was no such thing. It’s happening all across the country.
But fear not: the National Education Association to the rescue!
A few days ago, the nation’s most powerful teachers union cleared it all up by passing New Business Item 39 to defend the use of CRT in K-12 public schools, including by providing “an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.”
The NEA may be on the wrong side, but nevertheless buries the disingenuous psy-op of the left intelligentsia, for whom no lie is too big to push.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Some people say we will never know, not until China confesses, or unless there’s a whistle blower — but, well, we have a whistle blower: it was the virus itself. It came here; it came out of China; and it carried [to] us genetic information. . . . Yes, it was a laboratory leak.
Dr. Richard Muller, after discussing how China blacklists scientists who would gather and publish evidence for a laboratory leak hypothesis for origins of the CCP virus, before the GOP House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis hearing, June 29, 2021. “China has managed to interfere, to break, United States’ freedom of expression freedom of investigation, freedom of thought.” He advanced five facts to show the gain-of-function origin of SARS-CoV-2: (1) Lack of pre-pandemic infections; (2) absence of a host animal; (3) unprecedented genetic purity; (4) no known way for the spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory; (5) optimized to attack humans, “again something that had never happened in … natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”
Note: the bracketed word is in place of a sic notice. Dr. Muller misspoke and said “with us” instead of what he obviously intended, “to us” or, perhaps, “with itself.”
Is Google working for the Chinese government?
The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.
Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.
On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.
On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.
“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”
LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.
The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“How would you characterize this moment?” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian (and occasional Biden advisor) Jon Meacham.
“I think you have a dedicated minority of the population — it was the secessionist slave-holding interests in the 1850s,” responded Meacham. “Today, it is this vast swath of people who have found a home in the Republican Party, who are no longer part of a coherent and constructive and good-intentioned conversation about the future of the country.”
Meacham then posited that “a democracy fundamentally depends on our capacity to see each other not as adversaries — or heathen — but as neighbors.”
Wait . . . did the tenured television expert say our whole system relies on not considering those you disagree with politically as “the other,” just mere seconds after comparing a “vast swath” of Republicans to slaveholders and essentially accusing them of being incoherent, destructive, and evil?
While Meacham bemoaned “these” otherwise undefined Republicans, CNN flashed pictures of the January 6th rioters on the screen. Hmmm. Obviously with the best of intentions.
Next, Zakaria sought the input of another Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin . . . also a well-known plagiarist.
“The answer” to seeing folks as this “other,” according to Goodwin? “I believe it’s national service,” she argued. “You get people from the city to the country, country to the city, you begin to create a new generation that has shared values.”
She’s delusional, but serious.*
Notice that her Pulitzer Prize-winning psychopathy would force millions of young (read: less powerful) citizens into government make-work, to be directed and “re-educated” by Washington-based experts . . . like Goodwin (and Meacham).
The other thing? Ironically, the program aired on Independence Day.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Last week, in a New York Times op-ed, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway urged “compulsory national service for all young people — with no exceptions.” He contends forcing young people out of their chosen life paths will “build bridges between people” and “shore up our fragile communities.”
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The Liberty Bell left Philadelphia by special train on its way to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, on July 5, 1915 — the last trip outside Philadelphia that the custodians of the bell intend to permit.
In 1937 on this date, Spam, the luncheon meat, was introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation.
The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, was formally certified by President Richard Nixon on July 5, 1971.
On July 5, 1995, Armenia (flag, above) adopted its constitution, four years after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.
Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (1978)
July Fourth events include:
1054 – A supernova was spotted by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri, remaining, for several months, bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1776 — The Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, thus formalizing its policy of secession from the rule of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1803 — The Louisiana Purchase was announced to the American people.
1804 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American author of The Scarlet Letter, House of Seven Gables, The Blithesdale Romance, and other classics, was born. Hawthorne became part of the Young America literary movement spawned by Loco-Foco political activism in New England.
1826 – Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, died a few hours before John Adams, second president of the United States, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
1826 – Stephen Foster, composer of “Old Black Joe,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and many other classic American songs, was born.
1827 – Slavery was abolished in New York State.
1831 – Samuel Francis Smith wrote “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” for Boston’s July 4th festivities, set to the tune of Great Britain’s national anthem, “God Save the King/Queen.”
2009 – The Statue of Liberty’s crown re-opened to the public after eight years of closure that resulted from security concerns following the September 11, 2001, attacks.