On December 24, 1973, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act was passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C., to elect their own local government.
Author: Redactor
We received an early Christmas present from the incoming Trump administration.
The gift? The torpedoing of a continuing resolution (CR) supported by House Speaker Johnson that was full of concessions to the Democrat side of the aisle. Aside from the drunken-sailor spending, the 1,500-plus-page legislation — just something to tide the government over for a few months — contained many other horrific elements that made it worthy of deletion.
Trump, Vance, and Musk are among those who volubly criticized the pork and other bad provisions of the CR.
Senator Rand Paul said: “I had hoped to see @SpeakerJohnson grow a spine, but this bill full of pork shows he is a weak, weak man. The debt will continue to grow. Ultimately the dollar will fail. Democrats are clueless and Big Gov Republicans are complicit.”
Ostensibly designed to continue funding the federal government after the money had run out, the bill’s poisonous elements included a pay increase for members of Congress and a provision to make it almost impossible for the Trump Justice Department to investigate wrongdoing in the House (such as the evidence-destroying way the J6 investigation was conducted).
Another provision would have extended the life of a State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a censorship office that Republicans have been trying to kill for years. Some Republicans, that is. The ones in favor of freedom of speech. The GEC funds efforts to suppress speech.
But the worst of it was stopped. The CR monstrosity became a much more manageable, much smaller CR; “the government was saved” — and, more importantly, we were saved some of the awful things packed into the earlier resolution.
Still, a lot of people (mainly Democrats) didn’t like their Christmas gift.
And dashed were the holiday dreams of members of Congress, stuck another term at current levels of remuneration.
Ho ho ho.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Flux and Firefly
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Edward Bernays
The only difference between “propaganda” and “education,” really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.
Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).
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Kingdom’s End
On December 23, 2007, an agreement was reached for the Kingdom of Nepal to be abolished and the country to become a federal republic with the Prime Minister becoming head of state.
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Drone versus Drone
The Federal Aviation Administration has responded to the drone (UFO/UAP) wave over New Jersey and New York by imposing a ban on citizen deployment of consumer drone technology.
“The FAA temporarily banned drone flights in 22 areas of New Jersey where critical infrastructure is located,” reports News Nation. “FAA officials said the flight restrictions were requested by federal security agencies and are effective through Jan. 17.”
While the “nothing to see here folks” caveats are all in place, with the usual reassurances that there has been “nothing so far to suggest that any drones have posed a national security or public safety threat,” it backs up its new, allegedly temporary, drone restrictions with alarming threats of force, warning “that ‘deadly force’ could be used against the drones if they pose an ‘imminent security threat,’ and that the government is using ‘drone busters’ to take down unauthorized flyers.”
News Nation’s Thursday report ends on the standard ambiguous note: “Speculation has raged online, with some expressing concerns that the drones could be part of a nefarious plot by foreign agents or clandestine operations by the U.S. government.
Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said it’s unlikely the drones are engaged in intelligence gathering, given how loud and bright they are. He reiterated this week that the drones being reported are not being operated by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Kellie Miller, “FAA bans drones in parts of New Jersey,” News Nation (December 19, 2024).
But of course this denial does not say anything about a corporate contractor running the mysterious drone swarms. In a just-updated report also from News Nation, we learn that “Lue [Luis] Elizondo, who led Pentagon investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), aka UFOs, told NewsNation the public messaging surrounding the unexplained drones has been a ‘catastrophe.’”
This is a point Paul Jacob made in his December 12th commentary.
In yet another News Nation report, “U.S. Rep. Chris Smith says he is ‘disturbed’ more isn’t being done by federal officials to bring down even one of the mysterious drones flying over that state in order to get answers.
Smith, a Republican serving New Jersey’s Fourth District, told NewsNation he has been disappointed by the lack of transparency and effort put forth by the Biden administration to quell concerns about who is behind the drone flap.
“Why can’t they bring one of these down?” he asked. “Is our airspace so susceptible and so easily violated that we can’t go and say, ‘OK, here they are, let’s get at least one and find out . . . what’s the origin?”
Smith said many New Jersey residents have been “alarmed” by the flying objects, and all they want is answers and support to handle the air infestation.
Safia Samee Ali, “NJ rep. says it’s alarming Feds can’t bring down one drone,” News Nation (Updated December 21, 2024).
Two obvious thoughts occur to anyone with a suspicious mind, however: Why would we think the Government would tell us if they had shot one down? and Why would the Government shoot down one of its own in-dev military-industrial-complex devices?
Even more suspicious minds would no doubt go much further, wondering if the Drone Mystery is really just a new form of the near-century-old UFO Mystery — or even the Great Airship Mystery of 1896-97! Surely most suspicions do not go quite that far, though.
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Anthony Daniels
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.
Anthony Daniels writing as Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001).
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For a Red Christmas
On December 22, 1989, Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife fled Bucharest with a helicopter as protesters erupted in cheers.
The couple was quickly caught and, on Christmas day, tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad.
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Elon, the CR & the Shutdown
It is the weekend. You have heard rumors of a shutdown in the federal government. What’s going on?
Well, sit back and watch a video. This explains it pretty well:
Kaizen D. Asiedu, the tweeter/video commentator, calls the whole process broken. He is not alone.
He is also not alone in thinking Elon Musk’s influence on the process this time around has been largely beneficial.
But Nick Catoggio, at The Dispatch, does not seem so appreciative. Here is how Catoggio summarized the politics of it all:
What really happened here, in all probability, is exactly what it looks like. Musk wanted to flex his populist muscle by inciting a grassroots rebellion against Johnson’s bill, and he succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard and feared ending up on the wrong side of it. It wasn’t just congressional Republicans this time who were politically intimidated into abandoning a bill they supported. It was Trump himself.
The obsequiousness that some GOP members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader. “My phone was ringing off the hook. The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk,” crowed Rep. Andy Barr. After Musk replied to a Twitter follower who blamed Rep. Dan Crenshaw for the congressional pay raise in the bill, Crenshaw corrected him — while carefully prefacing his response with “I love you Elon.” Sen. Rand Paul proposed formally replacing Johnson with Musk, reminding followers that the speaker needn’t be a member of the House.
Never before in the Trump era has another populist commanded the political and financial capital needed to credibly threaten Republican politicians into doing his bidding. This is entirely new.
“Folie à Deux: President Trump and Speaker Musk,” The Dispatch (December 19, 2023).
Jonah Goldberg, also at The Dispatch, attempted a general overview of the problem with a carnival metaphor (among others), lamenting that “nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom.”
But this read like an attempt to express some alarm about Musk’s role in killing the CR. And Mr Goldberg somehow seemed to suggest that the Republican and Democratic establishment (as the two factions have existed in our lifetime) has earned a reputation as, somehow — just possibly — hard-working and not clownish.
And that is impossible to believe, isn’t it? “Get Us Off This Roller Coaster,” Jonah demands, but it was the establishment that put us on the rickety roller coaster, not Trump and Musk. It was the run of the oh-so-serioso political mill that produced mid-December’s 1547-page Continuing Resolution bill!
Oh, and about that shutdown: with the last vote of the 118th Congress, the much-feared outcome was averted.
Stay tuned….
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Edward Bernays
Domination to-day is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.
Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).
On December 21, 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims landed on the shores of what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. One-hundred twenty-one years later one specific rock was identified as the disembarkation spot, and it became known as Plymouth Rock.
American settlers in Nacogdoches, Mexican Texas, declared their independence on December 21, 1826, starting the Fredonian Rebellion.