From the headlines to your YouTube viewing screen:
From the headlines to your YouTube viewing screen:
Paul Jacob on what most politicians, bureaucrats, and major news “journalists” have in common: they are not on our side.
A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.
Associate Justice George Sutherland, Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 251 (1936).
The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.
The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.
There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.
Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.
Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.
Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.
This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
If the provisions of the constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.
Associate Justice George Sutherland, Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398, 483 (1934).
Paul Jacob feels a disturbance in the Force:
For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.
Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland, Associated Press v. National Labor Relations Board, 301 U.S. 103, 141 (1937) (dissenting).
Paul Jacob just heard terrible news:
On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention instructed its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States’ Declaration of Independence.