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).
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.
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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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).
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.
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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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.
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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Unreason is at all times one of the happier privileges of patriotism.
Branch Cabell, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Parcel of Reconsiderations (1934), p. 274.
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain, a little less than two years and three months before Kamala Harris, the most famous Jamaican-American, was born.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
