You got the MAGA bubble, you got this bubble, that bubble — but the thickest bubble of all is inside Washington. . . . Challenging power is heresy inside Washington.
Cenk Uygur, “Top Biden Aide Breaks Silence on Mental Decline,” The Young Turks (May 18, 2025).
On May 21, 1851, the Colombian Congress passed a law to free the country’s slaves as of January 1, 1852, compensating slave masters with bonds. The decree itself was insufficient to abolish the practice, however, with masters refusing, in many locales, to let the slaves go in a peaceful way. This led to the Civil War of 1851, which began with an insurrection in Cauca and Pasto headed by Manuel Ibáñez and Julio Arboleda — with the support of the Ecuadorian government. In Antioquia the rebellion broke out led by Eusebio Berrero. The war would end in four months with a liberal victory and the final liberation of the slaves.
Yes, the problem is those darn Republicans wanting too much election security too fast, doncha know.
“Michigan Democrats’ election proposals sidestep the noncitizen-voting issue for now,” was how the Michigan Advance headlined the article, in which Harding explains that “the package of bills under the Michigan Election Security Act won’t close the voter registration loopholes that may have allowed at least one noncitizen to cast a ballot that counted last year.”
Oops! That one University of Michigan student, Haoxiang Gao, is a Chinese national, who didn’t show up for court; whereabouts currently unknown.
Since that bombshell, another 15 cases have surfaced of noncitizens voting illegally last November. Nonetheless, Harding informs us that “the bills omit the measures Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson suggested in February as a way to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots in Michigan’s elections.”
Back then Benson “didn’t provide details of her proposal,” noted Harding, but mentioned “policies that enable us to track and retrieve” those votes “cast by voters who registered the same day as the election.”
“It could be provisional ballots, it could be additional verification or residency requirements in that moment,” the Secretary of State, now a candidate for governor (whose recent campaign announcement on state government property violated state law) offered reporters.
Sure, her proposal could have been a lot of things.
Now we see, however, that it is nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April 1946).
French economist and co-winner of the first (1901) Nobel Prize for Peace, Frédéric Passy, was born on May 20, 1822.
English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was born exactly 16 years earlier.
“And so was the world,” he continues. “And that wasn’t the first time [Biden] was in that condition; the book makes it very, very clear.”
The book noted above being Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, written by host Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios.
“There are people who knew and said nothing and that is a crime against this Republic,” argues Jones, “and I think the Democrats are gonna pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover up.”
“It was obvious to the American people before the debate,” former Obama strategist David Axelrod offers. Obvious to politicians, too, but not “politically wise to speak out.”
“[T]his is The Emperor’s New Clothes playing itself out in real time,” Jones elaborates. “Everybody knew but everyone was afraid to say.”
Later in the program, still pitching his book, Tapper blames a “small, secretive group of advisors” as the culprits, clarifying that “the original sin of the 2024 election” was “President Biden’s decision to run for reelection, even though he would be theoretically 86 years old at the end of his second term and was showing every day of it.”
One can only wonder how Mr. Tapper and so many other journalists missed in real time what a president of these United States was “showing.”
Democrats remain focused on the disaster of losing the election, but the real disgrace? After the June 27, 2024, debate non-performance, they and their fawning media allowed a person clearly not up to the job to remain in this most incredibly powerful position for another seven months.
Silly me, I’m focused on the presidency and the job he’s supposed to do for Americans. Not just wielding political power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book II, “The Golden Thread”; Chapter I: “Five Years Later.”
On May 19, 1897, Irish author, playwright, and poet Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was released from Reading Prison, where he had finished, in ill health, his hard labor sentence for “gross indecency.” His “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” first published pseudonymously in a periodical with wide circulation amongst criminals, quickly achieved the status of a
He died less than three years later, in exile in Europe. His most famous works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the fascinating essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”
Yesterday, the federal debt was seen on USDebtClock.org as quickly and inexorably inching towards $36.9 trillion. The official budget deficit is over $2 trillion. And Moody’s made, on Friday, an adjustment in its ratings, stripping “the US of its top-notch triple-A credit rating as it warned about rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit in the world’s biggest economy.”
Now, none of the major ratings agencies bestows upon the federal government the top rating. “For the first time in history, the US does not hold a triple-A credit rating from at least one of the three big agencies. S&P in 2011 was the first to strip the country of its pristine rating, while Fitch took the move in 2023.”
Meanwhile, the president boasts of a record one trillion dollar military budget.
And Congress’s DOGE caucus, formed to back up DOGE cuts, is apparently dead.
Insolvency brinksmanship seems to be going gung ho ahead.
The anxiety that afflicts Americans comes from the gnawing, inchoate sensation that we are all at the mercy of a society driven by emotional decisions, personalized actions, and subjective thought processes.
Florence King, National Review (May 17, 1999), in STET, Damnit! The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991-2002 (2003), p. 303.