Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States, in his book Real Peace (1983).
Jessica Tarlov’s encomium for President Joe Biden is curious. “Joe Biden bows out of the 2024 race — we lost a good president and a good man,” ran the whole Fox News headline, but it’s second part, after the dash, that is curious. To the best of our knowledge, Sleepy Joe Biden did not resign the presidency.
Ms. Tarlov has been a contributor to Fox for many years. She is a well-known “liberal Democrat.” The article’s praise for the Biden Administration is clear in the blurb: “American Rescue Plan, infrastructure funding and gun safety are all things Joe Biden can be proud about.” Uh, OK.
“Biden just announced that he won’t be seeking re-election this November. And even though I knew it was coming, it feels profoundly sad to me,” wrote Ms. Tarlov below the headline.
Sad on a human level. Joe Biden is a fundamentally good man who did not want this outcome. He believes he can win, even if the data doesn’t say so. And sad on a political level. Biden was an incredible president with a record to be enormously proud of. Whoever is at the top of our ticket will no doubt celebrate his accomplishments – and him! – but there’s a joy to how he talks about what the Biden-Harris administration has gotten done that I’ll really miss.
“I know that I speak for regular Democrats in thanking Joe Biden for an incredible four years and saying that we’re really, really sad. Father Time came for a really good one,” concluded Tarlov.
Chad Pergram, reporting on Fox, claimed that White House insiders had called Biden’s debate performance in late June evidence that his campaign was “unsustainable.” Since that June 27th night, and usually with a pretense of shock at Biden’s decline, major Democratic Party bigwigs, from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to a huge cadre of billionaire donors, had been calling on him to give up the campaign.
But, oddly, not to resign the presidency. Apparently running the country is no biggie; running a winnable campaign is.
Does the lack of curiosity by the press seem natural? Has the stone-walling by government officials effectively squelched profitable discussion of last Saturday’s shooting of former president and current candidate Donald John Trump? Brett Weinstein notes the general lack of interest in facts by the “news media”:
Am I missing something, or has the usual series of post-shooting press conferences simply not materialized? It seems we don’t even know the basics. How many of these questions have a satisfactory/confirmed answer? Beyond ‘AR-15’ what weapon, exactly? How was it equipped? What type of ammunition, exactly? How many shots? How many unfired rounds left in the magazine? In the backpack? How many people were hit/grazed? Who are they and what are their injuries. What are President Trump’s injuries? How many fired rounds have been recovered? From where? Is the venue still an active crime scene, and if so, why was the roof being washed? What was the presumptive shooter doing over the several days prior? What was the transmitter for? What else was in the car? Was the shooter in contact with anyone by phone or other device while at the rally? Was the water tower covered? If so, how? If not, why not? Feel free to provide any answers you think we have official confirmation of. And please suggest other questions that should be readily answerable.
Brett Weinstein, X.com, July 19, 2024.
Speaking of the water tower, as Dr. Weinstein was, a mobile something/someone was caught on video on said tower:
Despite so many questions unasked and unanswered, revelations are bursting forth. According to Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), we have learned something about the make-up of Trump’s security team in Butler: it wasn’t really filled to the brim with trained Secret Service agents!
“Whistleblowers who have direct knowledge of the event have approached my office. According to the allegations, the July 13 rally was considered to be a ‘loose’ security event. For example, detection canines were not used to monitor entry and detect threats in the usual manner. Individuals without proper designations were able to gain access to backstage areas. Department personnel did not appropriately police the security buffer around the podium and were also not stationed at regular intervals around the event’s security perimeter,” Hawley wrote in a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“In addition, whistleblower allegations suggest the majority of DHS officials were not in fact USSS agents but instead drawn from the department’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). This is especially concerning given that HSI agents were unfamiliar with standard protocols typically used at these types of events, according to the allegations.”
Michael Flores, “Whistleblowers Bombshell! Untrained Security weren’t even Secret Service!” Substack, July 19, 2024.
On Monday, Paul Jacob concluded his column on the assassination attempt with these words:
Heads must roll at Secret Service. (Figuratively.) A new and beefed-up detail should be protecting Trump. And it is past time for RFK, Jr., to be granted Secret Service protection as well.
I don’t say this often but … spend the money!
Paul Jacob, “Serious Times,” July 15, 2024.
Well, Biden did finally grant RFK, Jr., a Secret Service detail, almost immediately after the Butler, Pennsylvania, event. But is there cooperation with the congressional investigation also immediately started?
Rep. James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has issued a subpoena to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle compelling her to appear before the committee on Monday for what is scheduled to be the first congressional hearing into the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Comer said initially that the Secret Service committed to her attendance but that Homeland Security officials appear to have intervened and there has been no “meaningful updates or information” shared with the committee.
Comer said the “lack of transparency and failure to cooperate” with the committee called into question Cheatle’s ability to lead the Secret Service and necessitates the subpoena.
Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, “House committee subpoenas Secret Service director to testify on Trump assassination attempt,” PBS News, July 17, 2024.
Multiple investigations have been started, but how much investigating will actually go on, and what the purpose of these investigations really is, could be open to questioning:
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general also said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at his Pennsylvania rally.
In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”
There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.
Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.
Ibid.
Notice two things about that last paragraph.
‘DO NOT GOVERN TOO MUCH,’ is a maxim which should be placed in large letters over the speaker’s chair in all legislative bodies. The old proverb, ‘too much of a good thing is good for nothing,’ is most especially applicable to the present time, when it would appear, from the course of our legislation, that common sense, common experience, and the instinct of self-preservation, are utterly insufficient for the ordinary purposes of life; that the people of the United States are not only incapable of self-government, but of taking cognizance of their individual affairs; that industry requires protection, enterprize bounties, and that no man can possibly find his way in broad day light without being tied to the apron-string of a legislative dry-nurse. The present system of our legislation seems founded on the total incapacity of mankind to take care of themselves or to exist without legislative enactment.
William Leggett, in an editorial in the Evening Post, March 11, 1835 — republished in A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett (1840) and titled “The Legislation of Congress”).
Well, it’s good in one way — great to torpedo the incentives and capital of owners while reducing the supply of rental units and further eroding property rights.
All of which is bad.
Very bad.
A few details of the economic principles being blithely ignored by Biden and/or his handlers are explained by The Wall Street Journal (“another classic White House policy contradiction: Subsidize housing, then discourage its development”), Mises.org, and Breitbart Business, among other places.
What are the chances that this pot shot at the economy will become law in the near future: slim or none?
Slim.
Not none, unfortunately — we’ve seen too many unthwarted federal attacks on the property rights of landlords and owners, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The chances are considerably more than slim if there’s a Biden Simulacrum 2 administration.
The goal of Biden and/or his handlers is to make clear to persons who want something for nothing — a goodly percentage of Biden’s constituency — that even a near-brain-dead party leader or his puppeteers can come up with scads of new schemes to loot fellow Americans as long as Biden or a Biden-type is at least nominally in office.
So if you want more pelf, along with an expiring economy with a war of all against all, vote for Biden!
Or whoever replaces him at the Democratic convention.
If you want freedom, prosperity, respect for property rights and each other, don’t.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On July 19, 1848, a two-day Women’s Rights Convention opened in Seneca Falls, New York.
Echoes of political events past:
Second Declaration of Independence, Or Grand Loco Foco Federal Glorification! To Come Off at the Court House, in the Village of Syracuse, on Saturday, the 18th Day of July, A.D. 1840.
A “Loco Foco” event in New York, five years after an advertisement for a new form of matchstick, the “Loco Foco” (see image above). The “Loco-Focos” is what the establishment press of New York derisively dubbed members of the Equal Rights Party in 1835, after the insiders turned off the gas, sending Tammany Hall into darkness, and the upstart libertarians lit candles with their new Loco Foco matches and proceeded with electing a new slate of Democratic Party officers.
That was before I stumbled upon Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle explaining to ABC News the strategic situational thinking employed by the agency in determining not to place agents on top of the roof of a building where the assassin fired multiple rounds, hitting former President Trump in the ear, killing a man attending the rally with his family and seriously wounding two others.
Director Cheatle offered that “the Secret Service was aware of the security vulnerabilities presented by the building Crooks took a sniper’s position on to aim at Trump,” Fox News reported. “However, a decision was made not to place any personnel on the roof.”
So much for “awareness.” And why was this
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” she pointed out. “And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”
Competing safety factors, eh? The former president’s and that of novice roof-climbers in the Secret Service.
Instead, three local law enforcement sharpshooters were stationed inside the building as the shooter easily climbed up onto that ever-so-dangerously slanted roof and opened fire.
The finger-pointing at local police by Secret Service officials, who claimed that securing that building was a local law enforcement responsibility, is simply passing the buck.
Cheatle acknowledged that her agency “is responsible for the protection of the former president,” adding “the buck stops with me.”
Good, I’m looking for immediate change.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On July 17, 1938, pioneer aviator Donald Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn — New York City’s first municipal airport — with a flight plan for a return trip to his previous disembarkation point, Long Beach, California. His official story was that he got confused after ten (or 26) hours in flight, and wound up the next day in Ireland. Most folks judged his “error” as deliberate, but he never publicly admitted to anything but error. He was nicknamed “‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan,” an affectionate moniker, and received a 14-day suspension of his pilot’s license as punishment for his breaking of many, many regulations.
One occasionally hears the epithet “Wrong Way Corrigan” applied to anyone who similarly takes a slight liberty, skirting official rules or practices — or simply goes the wrong direction.
July 17, 1975, had a very different kind of aviation event, one well-planned: Apollo 18 and Soyuz 19 made the first US/USSR linkup in space.
A daring bit of pressure from insiders whom Biden now calls, without hint of irony, “the elites.”
“A leaked poll from a group closely linked with Future Forward after the debate showed that the super PAC had tested the strength of potential Biden alternatives, including Ms. Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary,” The Times elaborated. “The poll showed that Mr. Biden had a worse overall favorability rating than all the alternatives.”
Forbes identified the skeptical billionaires as including Mark Pincus, Christy Walton, Michael Novogratz, Reed Hastings and Mark Cuban. Biden, refusing to bow out, “has attempted to undo the debate damage by rallying his allies in Congress, sitting for a series of media interviews and holding his first post-debate press conference Thursday. The interviews and Thursday’s presser are widely viewed to have gone better than the debate, but not well enough to reverse the backlash.”
“Everything is frozen because no one knows what’s going to happen,” explained one Democratic strategist to CNN. “Everyone is in wait-and-see mode.”
Well, that mode did not last long.
On Saturday their bête noir Donald Trump was shot. The whole question of winning the race got infinitely harder, for the still-alive former president looked heroic after the bullet, especially contrasted with a feeble Biden. Used to plying an insider advantage, “the elites” now have almost no advantage to ply. They might as well unfreeze their $90 million.
Or keep it, instead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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