Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Prosecutorial Shell Game?

The Department of Justice’s case against the egregious former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, is as weak a case as he could hope.

Comey had shared an image on social media — a photo of shells on a beach gathered together to markout “86 47” — and, when people interpreted it as a possible threat, he deleted it. “He said he thought it was a political message, not a threat,” an NPR story summarizes, “but now a grand jury in North Carolina has made a federal case out of this. It’s charged Comey with two felonies, including allegedly threatening the life of the president.”

So why do I call it weak? While “86” may have originally meant “kill” or “delete,” amongst gangsters, real or Hollywood, it’s often used colloquially to mean “get rid of.” And though “47” is the number of Trump’s second administration, it’s possible — indeed likely — that Comey didn’t mean “Kill Trump.” He could have meant “impeach Trump” or “prosecute Trump” or any other politically acceptable way to force the president out of office. 

Don’t get me wrong. Was it a dumb thing for the disgraced former government official to share? Sure. But even outstandingly horrible former FBI heads have freedom of silly speech.

This is not the first time Comey’s been prosecuted by the Trump DOJ. The last time it fizzled. And, considering the First Amendment, this one will fizzle.

Bringing forward dumb charges looks bad, like Democrats looked prosecuting Trump. The political persecution of enemies is not all that popular. 

And in a country filled with political corruption, it sets the cause of “draining the swamp” back, not forward.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 


PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

James Mill

The distinction, between what is done by labour, and what is done by nature, is not always observed. 
Labour produces its effects only by conspiring with the laws of nature. 
It is found that the agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He does nothing but produce motion. He can move things towards one another, and he can separate them from one another. The properties of matter perform the rest.

James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (1821; 1844), Chapter 1, “Production.”
Categories
Today

Axis in Africa

On May 12, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.

Categories
election law initiative, referendum, and recall

Democracy, Democrats & the Constitution 

Do senior Democrats not understand how our government is designed?

“Today the Supreme Court of Virginia has chosen to put politics over the rule of law by issuing a ruling that overturns the April 21st special election on redistricting,” Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said last week.

“What Jones didn’t say in his statement,” explained a Washington Post editorial, “is that he is the one who insisted the court wait until after the election to judge the merits of the challenge, over the objections of those who sued.”

“If the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots,” U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) declared. “But the Court let the process move forward, and Virginians sent a message loud and clear. . . .”

Come now, Senator, courts act only when a case comes before them that is ripe for adjudication. In my experience, courts rarely rule on the constitutionality of a ballot measure until after voters pass it. 

Moreover, under our system, when something violates the constitution it matters not at all whether it passed with 99.9 percent support or the slightest majority. For the record, the redistricting referendum passed “loud and clear” with 51.7 percent of the vote. That was after national Democratic groups splurged $64 million to drown out opponents. And with an “intentionally misleading” ballot title officially informing voters it would “restore fairness.”

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also entered the fray, arguing that the “decision to overturn an entire election is an unprecedented and undemocratic action that cannot stand.”

Hard to be wrong that many times in such a short sentence. The ruling will stand and is not “unprecedented”: it did what courts have always done. 

Moreover, the democratic vote on the referendum was set aside by the constraints of Virginia’s democratically enacted constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously:

Un-Redistricting Virginia / April 23, 2026
(On a constitutional monkey wrench thrown into the Democratic Party’s latest scheme to out-trump Trump.)

Against Fairness? / April 2, 2026
(On a dishonest ballot title being foisted on Virginia voters.)

Immoderate Bullets / Oct. 6, 2025
(On the man who should most definitely not be attorney general.)


PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Barack Hussein Obama

For those of you who still think that we’ve gotten little green men underground somewhere, one of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets. This idea of conspiracy theories — if there were aliens or alien spaceships or anything under the control of the United States government that we knew about, seen, photographs, what have you . . . I promise you some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress her. There would be leaks.

Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, in conversation with Stephen Colbert, CBS (May 5, 2026).

Categories
Today

Union, disunion

On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. State.

Nine years later, to the day, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s independence and neutrality were affirmed in the Second Treaty of London.

Categories
Update

They Knew

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) says that “American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke . . . well before they alerted the American public,” summarizes The Epoch Times.

Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records.

From the subpoenaed data — enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages — Johnson’s team found that the CDC was well aware of the myocarditis risk even in early 2021. Yet they downplayed it instead of alerting the public, Johnson said.

Johnson’s team also found that the White House modified wording about a safety signal for ischemic stroke with the bivalent booster for people over 65, changing “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated,” according to records

Sen. Ron Johnson: Here’s What We Found in 11 Million Pages of COVID Records,” The Epoch Times (April 23, 2026).

The risk of myocarditis in young men was known by May 2021, says Senator Johnson.

Specifically referring to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA therapeutic injections (popularly called “vaccines”), Johnson notes that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) results quickly signaled the danger. “All of a sudden, in 2021, it just spikes. I didn’t need a proportional reporting ratio analysis. I didn’t need empirical Bayesian analysis to tell me there was something seriously wrong here. I remember publishing my VAERS charts where there were a couple thousand deaths, then more thousand deaths, then 10,000, 20,000. We’re up to about 39,000 deaths.

Early on, there were 46 percent of those deaths occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. Now we’re about 24 percent. Of the 39,000 deaths reported worldwide on VAERS, 24 percent are occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. And they say, well, you know, VAERS doesn’t prove causation. I mean, that’s a heck of a correlation.

Ibid.

Internal communications at the CDC, seen in the data Johnson’s team went through, was a repeated fear: telling the American people that deaths were associated with the jabs the government was promoting and even mandating would “encourage vaccine hesitancy.”

Johnson notes that this vaccine hesitancy has jumped the corral and now extends far beyond COVID to vaccines on the official childhood vaccine schedule.

Categories
Thought

Sen. Ron Johnson

Science is all about taking a look at the consensus and poking a hole in it and testing it and going, “I’m not quite sure of that.”

Ron Johnson, M.D., in an April 23, 2026, interview in The Epoch Times.

Categories
Today

Rioting for John Wilkes

On May 10, 1768, riots broke out in London after John Wilkes was imprisoned for writing an article for The North Briton severely criticizing King George III.

Categories
Update

Tranche No. 1

“The Pentagon on Friday unsealed the first tranche of what it described as ‘new, never-before-seen’ files related to otherworldly encounters,” reports The Military Times, just a few “months after President Donald Trump directed the government to begin disclosing intelligence related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, characterized the dissemination of the archives as an effort to achieve “complete and maximum transparency.”

“With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’” the president wrote, adding, “Have Fun and Enjoy!”

The Department of Defense — in coordination with the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, NASA and the FBI — disclosed 162 files on its newly launched “UFO” website. Additional batches are expected to be released on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified.

The website is not on the much-ballyooed, newly registered domains of alien.gov and aliens.gov. It is, as linked above, war.gov/ufo.

There has been much commentary, no little amount of hype, and a sizable amount of frustration: this was a carefully curated conglomeration of arcana. Not a full disclosure of everything some people in the government know. For instance, the FBI was never a leader in accumulating UFO information, but FBI files lead this “tranche.”

Highly recommended, though, are the files from NASA on what astronauts saw in lunar missions Apollo 11, 12, and 17. Check them out.

Paul Jacob has been covering the UFO disclosure movement for several years now. Use the search bar, above, to put keywords “UFO” or “UAP” through the paces. Or just click on the category “government transparency.”

Video of a strange cross-shaped UFO is likely an artifact of a telemetry overload: the object being tracked was hotter than those rockets and jets for which the instruments had been designed.