Today’s headline:
Radical Islamist Stages Gun Massacre in LGBT Nightclub!
Caring Progressives Demand that American Citizens be Disarmed!
Author: CS Admin
We are living in what I hope are the latter days of the Watergate Era.
I’m old enough to remember Watergate. The un-making of President Nixon, before our very eyes, informed Americans in a deep and profound way. It led, in part, to the election of Jimmy Carter, often referred to as one of the least effectual presidents. And the Carter presidency led to Ronald Reagan.
While living under Watergate’s dark shadow, not all of us took away the same lesson.
We outsiders learned, once again, that power corrupts.
Insiders, on the other hand, learned something different: never willingly play a part in your side’s unmasking and un-making.
We tend to forget, what with the economic rebound and end of the Cold War, that the Reagan Administration had significant scandals. At the time, Reagan was dubbed the “Teflon President,” because Reagan & Co. figured out how to react: shrug; stall; deny, deny, deny. For this reason, scandal flowed off him, not sticking, as water off a well-oiled duck’s back.
Reagan and the Republicans did not allow what Republicans had allowed in Nixon’s day: there was no turning on one’s own, no (or few) breaking of ranks.
Then, President Bill Clinton took the effrontery of denial and stonewalling to new heights. With great help from fellow Democrats.
And so it goes, even to the present day, with Hillary Clinton carrying on her husband’s tradition. She, the first candidate to run for the presidency while under official investigation by the FBI, just received the current president’s endorsement.
The back-room deal has been made, perhaps? Obama will not allow Hillary to be prosecuted. It would tarnish his legacy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The fight against government theft of private property, through “civil forfeiture,” just got a little harder.
There’s a new technology available: ERAD card scanners.
And the Oklahoma City Police Department’s joint interdiction team has them, and can use the scanners to take money from you without your consent.
What money, in particular? The money you have stored in pre-paid debit cards.
ERAD stands for Electronic Recovery and Access to Data, and the ERAD Group, Inc., stands to make a lot of cash from the technology. Police around the country want to be able to take the funds secured in debit cards. It’s the latest thing in the war against the war against the War on Drugs.
Drug traffickers, we’re told, hide dozens of such cards in vehicles transporting drugs.
It’s not enough that police can, in the course of investigating a crime — without conviction, mind you; indeed, without charges being filed — confiscate the cards themselves.
The police also want to be able to siphon the money out of those cards.
Which leads to corruption. Which is already rife in civil forfeiture usage, as a recent Oklahoma state audit found — missing money, misused funds, that sort of thing.
The cavalier way in which government officials defend expropriation by ERAD scanners is chilling. In an Oklahoma Watch article, reporter Clifford Adcock relates the official explanation: “These cards are cash, not bank accounts. . . . Individuals do not have privacy rights with magnetic stripe cards.” Why not? Because the information on the strip “literally has no purpose other than to be provided to others to read.”
That’s so open to logical criticism you could drive a confiscated truck fleet through it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This weekend, the Swiss people rejected the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with a whopping 77 percent against.
That’s the kind of overwhelming result that one finds in America for, say, term limits. And 23 percent, you might notice, is about the percentage of the population in America of hard-core “liberal” progressives, the kind of people usually in support of such measures.
In Switzerland’s case, it was a measure put on the ballot by one group, Bien-CH. But if you are thinking “socialism,” the group insists that that’s the wrong way to think about the plan. UBI is needed, the group’s website says, “to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies” facing a declining need for workers as a result of technological advance.
Yes, UBI is a policy designed to accommodate the coming horde of robots! How? By “increasing demand” by spreading out wealth from the connected-to-tech few to the witless-about-tech many. (How vulgar Keynesian.)
The Swiss government urged a No vote, fearing a need to raise taxes by fifty percent. Quite a hike.
Meanwhile, the notion garners worldwide interest, and even libertarian social scientist Charles Murray promotes this guaranteed income idea (under a different initialism), mostly to streamline the costly bulk of the welfare state.
I’m dubious.
After all, about our latest industrial revolution, in artificial intelligence and in robotics: I say open up labor and entrepreneurial markets from excessive regulation, and allow networking advances to transform capitalism on its own terms, with person-to-person (P2P) cooperation (think AirBnB and Uber and Lyft) and much more.
The best is coming, I bet. If clunky proposals like UBI don’t get in the way.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“We’re being treated very unfairly.”
I don’t know about you, but this constant complaint from Donald Trump is getting a bit old.
Even if true.
Maybe I lost some patience for this shtick because my side in the political arena — the 85 percent majority for term limits, for example — has constantly had to bear with undue weights from major candidates, public officials, and other political insiders. This week I’m in Arkansas to help put term limits back on the ballot, after politicians lied to the citizenry in a legislatively referred measure, successfully fooling them to substantially weaken the limits.
It turns out that honest people have always been at a disadvantage in politics, because our enemies often feel free to lie, cheat, steal, etc.
My impatience is that, well, coming from a billionaire, the complaint seems . . . hollow. To the extent that wealth and fame lead to an unfair advantage over others, Trump has indeed parlayed both into a shot at the White House.
So to talk about how being treated unfairly smacks of narcissism. It is like going to the funeral of a good friend and having to listen to some whiner take the limelight to complain of his lumbago.
It seems inappropriate, in context.
But mainly it reminds me of Bernie Sanders in particular, and the socialist left in general. “Life [or The System] has treated us unfairly — so give us free stuff!”
Trump is not asking for free stuff. He is merely expecting us to forgive his ugly tirades — as in the current mess about the judge sitting on his Trump University case — and nasty escalations of name-calling.
He expects a free pass. And has so far gotten one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem. With Hillary Clinton.
Asked about the Clinton Foundation, yesterday, by CNN’s Jake Tapper, host of State of the Union, Bernie re-questioned himself:
Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships?
And Bernie answered, “Yeah, I do.”
How many roads must mainstream media reporters walk down before they investigate and report on the myriad of ethical cracks in the Clinton Foundation?
To the most obvious conflict of interest in the history of the human race, add the fact that even after promising President Obama that the Clinton Foundation would at least be totally transparent with an annual report of all donations . . . well, Hillary welched on the deal, not revealing the donors.
While Bernie’s condemnation of Hillary’s ethical shortcomings was big news, less reported were the senator’s comments regarding whether Mrs. Clinton is “too quick on the draw, too eager to use military force.”
Bernie again was clear: “I worry about that. Yeah, I do. Her support for the War in Iraq was not just an aberration.” Sanders went on to cite Secretary of State Clinton’s role in pushing President Obama to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya and to intervene in Syria.
Hillary’s judgment on issues of war and peace is questionable . . . especially when we don’t know whether or not a foreign leader or his cronies have written big checks to the Clinton Foundation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Hillary Clinton came out swinging against Donald Trump yesterday. She said electing the man would be an “historic mistake.”
As opposed to her past career in politics, which I would call an historical mistake.
Mrs. Clinton focused in on Mr. Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements. “She ran through Mr Trump’s foreign policy points and rejected each one,” reported the BBC, “calling him thin-skinned, irrational and unprepared.”
Funny, though: I wouldn’t exactly call Mrs. Clinton the opposite: thick-skinned, rational, or prepared.
Take her main charges, then look at the obvious demerit of each:
“Mrs Clinton said a Trump presidency could start overseas wars and ruin the US economy.” Don’t vote Trump — starting wars and ruining the economy is Clinton’s job!
Trump’s “proposals were vague and often nonsensical.” Unlike Clinton’s, whose murky specifics speak of evasion from a to z — and whose policies in Libya and elsewhere made no sense whatsoever, breeding more conflict and opposition in place of the regimes she helped undermine and remove.
“Questioning his relationship with Russian president Vladmir Putin, she said: ‘I’ll leave it to a psychiatrist to explain his affection for tyrants.’” And speaking of perverse affection, her and her husband’s Clinton Foundation has been milking foreign tyrants for years. All very above-board, I’m sure.
“‘This isn’t reality television, this is actual reality,’ she said.” If you ask me, her reality is just as irreal as Trump’s.
We can do better, America.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Everybody is familiar with the standard theory regarding the Citizens United decision. Former comedian and current earnest socialist Sarah Silverman puts it this way: “Every politician takes money from Big Money, ever since it was made legal with Citizens United.”
Like most folks who talk this way, she doesn’t give a squeak of context. She barely even indicates that it was a Supreme Court case, 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. She does not mention at all that the ruling overturned the FEC’s act of suppressing a political movie.
But there is a much wider context than such bare facts — and if you want a good synopsis, you could hardly do better than read my friend Krist Novoselic’s calm, reasoned “look at the history of attempts to regulate independent campaign expenditures.”
This “modern history” started with what the New York Times called Richard Nixon’s “revolution in political financing.” The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 “required detailed disclosure of campaign contributions; set campaign contribution limits to candidates, parties and committees; set expenditure limits on campaigns, independent groups and individuals and created the first public financing of presidential campaigns and national conventions.”
And almost immediately the law began suppressing political speech and advertising. And led to a long series of court cases.
And decisions.
And revisions.
That define our times.
Krist (with whom I serve on the board of FairVote.org) provides the context you need to see through what he aptly calls “the hype” about “Citizens United,” as well as how the decision correctly removed the license given to the FEC’s role as “state censorship board.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Neoconservative writer Bill Kristol doesn’t like the prospect of Donald Trump running as the Republican presidential candidate this year. And Kristol’s not just going to talk about it. He’s trying to get something done.
But instead of doing the rational thing and lobbying each and every delegate to the Republican convention, pleading with them to vote their consciences, not their fictional primary “commitments,” he’s trying to recruit an independent candidate to run against Hillary and Donald. (Donald isn’t worried.)
At first he mentioned, in fleeting, Mitt Romney as the type of candidate “coming soon.” But in discussing his mission, he kept the candidate’s identity secret. He was trying to create a stir of interest.
Yesterday it was leaked that Kristol’s Great White Hope is . . . David French.
Writer for National Review.
And the American people say, together, Who?
No matter Mr. French’s many virtues, the truth is that he’s the darkest of dark horses.
I’m sure his principles align somehow with Kristol’s. But be realistic: the Libertarian Party ticket sports far more plausibility — two former two-term governors, former Republicans of blue states.
It’s still possible that this newest story is just a leak to get us to a false sense of . . . well, whatever this is.
After all, Kristol is a neoconservative. He has secrets and strategies above us mere mortals. Conspiracy buffs might contend that throwing another “right-wing” candidate into the mix is his way of splitting “the right,” allowing his real (if secret) favorite, Hillary Clinton, to squeak by. She is the one candidate he could count on to keep throwing money at the Pentagon — and dropping bombs overseas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr
Yesterday I asked the question, “Who comes first: the vets or the politicians?”
We all know who should come first. And we all know who actually does come first.
The Is/Ought Dichotomy in full view — the fact/value distinction.
America’s politicians have legislated themselves wonderful healthcare coverage. Meanwhile, they’ve legislated something very different for veterans: a huge, unaccountable bureaucracy.
The federal archipelago of substandard VA clinics and hospitals is so ineffective that vets have died waiting for any medical care at all.
The problem isn’t a lack of public support. Americans obviously want to help take care of veterans. The many charities are just one indicator of this.
Instead, it’s an unmistakable sign of how completely beyond citizen control Washington has wandered.
Heads haven’t rolled in the Veterans Administration bureaucracy. Fact. But why not? Because of insider values. Why should congressmen even worry their pretty, little re-electable heads about it? None of their heads have rolled for their incompetence or indifference.
In a Congress loathed by the people, only one incumbent congressman has been defeated for re-election this year — and he was facing a 29-count felony indictment for racketeering, etc.
One might wonder if anything ever happens in Washington other than waste, fraud and abuse.
For decades, the lack of care for vets has been an ongoing scandal. But it’s merely a symptom of a much bigger scandal: our government is out of our control.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
