On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.
Categories
Mountaintop
Author: Redactor
Categories
AOC Right, DCCC Wrong
“AOC is right as rain here,” I re-tweeted Sunday.
And what was the usually all-wet U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) right about?
“By stymieing primaries,” the freshman representative had tweeted at her own party’s congressional leaders and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), “you deny most voters their best chance at choosing their representative.”
On purpose.
Ocasio-Cortez refers to the recent DCCC announcement, first reported by The Intercept, that “warned political strategists and vendors . . . that if they support candidates mounting primary challenges against incumbent House Democrats, the party will cut them off from business.”
Isn’t the goal of the DCCC to elect as many Democrats to Congress as possible?
No.
“The core mission of the DCCC is electing House Democrats, which includes supporting and protecting incumbents,” reads a new form for party political consultants. “To that end, the DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus.”
In short, if you want to make money, and most political professionals do, don’t dare work for a Democratic challenger against a Democratic incumbent.
“If the DCCC enacts this policy to blacklist vendors who work with challengers, we risk undermining an entire universe of potential candidates and vendors — especially women and people of color,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, another Democratic freshman who defeated an incumbent Democrat, tweeted on Saturday.
The policy has been enacted and is in full effect.
Among Washington Democrats, incumbency trumps everything . . . even diversity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
N.B. The National Republican Congressional Committee has long had this same total fixation — mutatis mutandis — on re-electing incumbents. In fact, the newsworthiness of this latest DCCC strong-arming of consultants seems to be only that the insider power-play is more “open” than ever before.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
George Santayana
It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation. . . .
Reason in Society, Chapter IV (The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906)
Categories
Camille Paglia
American author, art critic, and commentator Camille Paglia was born April 2, 1947.
Categories
Kiss Biden Goodbye?
Lucy Flores was standing in front of the twice-elected Vice President of these United States at a 2014 campaign rally when, “unexpectedly and out of nowhere,” she recounts, she felt “Joe Biden put his hands on my shoulders, get up very close to me from behind, lean in, smell my hair and then plant a slow kiss on the top of my head.
“You don’t expect that kind of intimacy from someone so powerful,” she said yesterday — or to be publicly fondled by “someone who you just have no relationship whatsoever.”
Flores is not alleging sexual assault, and certainly no ongoing harassment. But the former Nevada State Assemblywoman certainly does object to Biden’s “completely inappropriate” behavior. And she believes it “should” be considered in judging a presidential candidate.
“In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life,” responded Biden in a statement, “I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately.”
Not buying this at all, Flores links (in her article for The Cut) to numerous “stories that were written” of “creepy” behavior by Biden, noting she came forward in large part because that evidence had been “dismissed by the media and not taken seriously.”
“It’s apparently a Senate rite of passage,” comedian Jon Stewart explained in a 2015 Daily Show segment entitled, The Audacity of Grope, “you’re not actually sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family.”
As the chortling subsides, the Biden presidential bid may be over before it begins.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Benjamin Franklin
The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one’s self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1744)
Categories
April Fool’s Day
On April Fools’ Day, 1957, the BBC offered for viewers of the current affairs program “Panorama” the infamous spaghetti harvest report hoax.
By sheer coincidence, one definition of “noodle” is “fool.”
Categories
Charity vs. Gum-Flapping
This weekend at Townhall: real help as more meaningful than political posturing. Click on over, to read Paul’s Sunday column, if you haven’t already. But make sure to come back here, to donate (see below)!
- “DeVos Defends Plan to Eliminate Special Olympics Funding,” Washington Post (March 27, 2019)
- “Betsy DeVos is still struggling to explain cuts to Special Olympics funding,” Vox (March 28, 2019)
- “Special Olympics chairman responds to DeVos, says DOE-funded work ‘critical’ to education,” USA Today (March 28, 2019)
- “Dick Durbin, Betsy DeVos get in heated exchange over Special Olympics funding,” CBS News (YouTube, March 28, 2019)
- “After Trump Casts Blame for a Special Olympics Cut, Betsy DeVos Flashes Pique,” New York Times (March 29, 2019)
- “Elisabeth Dee DeVos,” Wikipedia
- “Profile: Richard DeVos,” Forbes
- “The New Forbes 400 Self-Made Score: From Silver Spooners To Bootstrappers,” Forbes (October 2, 2014)
And speaking of real help: you can give, too. Do not let the President’s caving to political bullying dissuade you from contributing to a good cause. Special Olympics is mostly funded voluntarily, by people like me and you.
Picture credit: ‘One of my all-time favorite drawings. It is a cherished gift from artist Reginald Coates. I met him doing my “community service” with mentally disabled adults at Arkansas Easter Seals.’ — Paul Jacob
Categories
Utnapishtim
Punish the one who commits the crime;
Ea to Enlil, as related by Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sîn-leqi-unninnī version by John Gardner and John Maier (1984), Tablet XI, Column iv.
Punish the evildoer alone.
Pictured above: Babylonian Gilgamesh Tablet, British Museum
Categories
Bangorian Controversy
On March 31, 1717, a sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ,” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.
The sermon’s text was John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced — supposedly at the request of King George I himself, who was present in the assembly — that there was no Biblical justification for any church government. Hoadly identified the church with the kingdom of Heaven, noting that Christ had not delegated His authority to any representative.
King George’s preference for the Whig Party, and for latitudinarianism in ecclesiastical policy, is widely thought to have been a strategic maneuver to degrade church power in political government.