Author: Redactor

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Update

Big Story: Body Cam

Since Paul Jacob’s Wednesday column, “Unburdened by the Leftism,” in which he mentioned the big story sidelined by the Democrats and media, more information about the July 13th attempted assassination of Donald John Trump — said “big story” — has come out.

One significant revelation has been the body cam footage of the local police who had encountered someone “on the roof” that the head of the Secret Service was “too steep” to place a sniper upon. The policeman caught on vidcam complains that he had warned the Secret Service before the event that the building should have been protected by a sniper:

“I (expletive) told them they need to post the guys (expletive) over here. I told them,” one video records a local police officer saying. “The Secret Service. I told them that (expletive) Tuesday.”

“Body cam footage from Trump assassination attempt: ‘I told them … Tuesday,’ says police officer,” Deseret News, August 9, 2024.

Paul has advocated for body cam usage since the Ferguson shooting, and this footage from the local police may be crucial to unraveling the mysteries of July 13th.

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Today

Independence

On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.

Independence was finally achieved in 1822.

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Thought

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage. 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934).
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Today

Gandhi & Yeltsin

On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.

In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.

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First Amendment rights

Campaign Finance Folly Foiled

campaign finance law speech first ammendment free speech

The Institute for Free Speech and its clients, Connecticut State Senator Rob Sampson and former Connecticut State Senator Joe Markley, have won a long-awaited judicial victory.

The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed that it was okay for the senators to criticize the state’s governor at the time, Dannel Malloy, in a campaign mailer. The State Election Enforcement Commission had contended otherwise.

In 2014, Markley and Sampson had collaborated on a mailer to defend their anti-big-spending, anti-big-taxing views against those of the governor. According to the Commission, the mailer thereby violated the state’s campaign finance law. The reason: it benefited the governor’s political opponent. 

That opponent supposedly should have paid a third of the cost of the mailer.

By the agency’s anti-speech reasoning, any statements in any campaign mailer that might somehow benefit some political candidate in the state — even a citation of the Declaration of Independence or a logic- (as opposed to fact-) check — would violate campaign finance law. 

Certainly, were the principles of logic widely disseminated in the state, this would pose a grave danger to a huge majority of candidates.

The SEEC fined Sampson and Markley. 

Now the state supreme court has ruled that doing so violated the First Amendment; “candidates must be able to communicate where they stand on issues in relation to other candidates and public officials. . . .”

Good. But couldn’t the judgment have come quicker? The same court issued an interim ruling back in 2021. The justices could have clobbered the SEEC’s lunatic presumption back then.

Freedom of speech delayed is freedom of speech denied. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

“Johnny Nolan”

I wonder what people did before they invented coffee.

Johnny Nolan, a character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, directed by Elia Kazan, written by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, performed by James Dunn); based on the novel of the same name by Betty Smith (1943).
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Today

Born & Died

Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.

Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.

On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

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ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

Unburdened by the Leftism

Kamala Harris, commie, communist, left, progressive

Democrats have effectively sidelined the biggest story of this election year — the assassination attempt upon the candidate the party has sought to destroy since 2015 — with a brazen switcheroo-coup from presidential candidate Sleepy Joe to the once-widely disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was all done unceremoniously and undemocratically in a breathtakingly daring backroom duress deal, detailed by Seymour Hersh.

Also itemized last week? The cover-up of Kamala Harris’s record. In “Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history,” Jim Bovard informs New York Post readers about the media’s memory-holing. 

“In 2019, GovTrack labeled Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator — further to the left than even Bernie Sanders — but this month deleted the webpage that said so,” explains Mr. Bovard.

So, what’s to the left of a “democratic socialist”?

Maybe the Vice President was channeling her father, a Post Keynesian (far, far left if not exactly Marxist) economist, when she pushed the progressives’ beloved “equity” theory of equality, which she explicitly construed as equality of outcomes. 

If you wonder how far to the left she has gone, consider her work to help BLM-associated rioters. “In 2020, as looters and arsonists ravaged Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, then-Sen. Harris urged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund ‘to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’” 

Bovard says this appeal “effectively exonerated anyone committing violence or other crimes, portraying them as worthy of speedy release from jail — but the bail fund paid to release rapists and child molesters and future murderers, not just looters.”

Now, fittingly, Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the man who in 2020 “allowed rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis.”

Would a Democratic president want to burn down half of America?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Purple Heart

On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”

Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.

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national politics & policies partisanship

Repeal Obamacare

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, MAGA, socialism, debt, lizard

Oy vey! Given the alternative of Donald Trump on the one hand and — now that Biden has bailed — a bad-as-Biden Biden-substitute on the other, Americans must re-level their look at the lesser of two evils.

It may be difficult to resist hoping that Trump gets elected this November to allow many of the Democrats’ worst initiatives be left to die on a withering vine. (Examples of the worst: Congress-bypassing regulations designed to penalize production of gas-powered cars and outlaw certain freelance or contract work.)

Still, the candidate and his party have many flaws.

We cannot forget that. Indeed, with their abandonment of the tiniest desire to reduce the size of the federal leviathan, remembrance should be easy. 

Shrink government? Radically reduce spending? Reduce debt? No such goal was seriously pursued in the first Trump administration, and no such goal is mentioned in the twenty-point Trump-Republican Party platform.

There’s talk of tax cuts, ending inflation (somehow), diverting spending from Democratic projects. Sure. But the platform insists that Social Security and Medicare programs not be modified in any way. 

In any way!

And about Obamacare — the biggest expansion of the medical state in recent years, which Republicans had once pledged to repeal — the platform is mute.

The 2016 platform said that improving healthcare “must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare,” a declaration retained in 2020. Now it’s gone. Republicans seem to have succumbed to the strategy of turning Obamacare into yet another supposedly unassailable, supposedly inextirpable entitlement program.

Unfortunately, you don’t recover or expand liberty by accepting every expansion of serfdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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