Obama has put “boots on the ground” in Syria after promising 16 times that he would not put “boots on the ground” in Syria. Our Nobel Peace Prize winner seems to have trouble staying out of wars.
U.S. Sends Ground Troops to Syria. Here Are 3 Reasons Why That’s Bad.
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We have nothing to fear from BIG GOVERNMENT!
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In the words of Yogi Berra, the recently deceased baseball great: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
We’ve followed the incredible case of Dr. Annette Bosworth extensively this year. She was convicted of twelve felony counts of petition fraud for circulating petitions that were signed at her medical office by patients (and her sister), while the doctor was in the Philippines on a medical mercy mission.
I don’t defend Dr. Bosworth signing that affidavit, stating that she witnessed those signatures, but I also don’t see criminal intent. Her attorney advised her it was lawful and all the signers were legitimate voters who truly wanted her to run for the U.S. Senate. Talking about felony fraud in such a case seriously misses the forest for the trees.
Bosworth wasn’t sentenced to prison time, thankfully.
But she lost her medical license.
Let’s hold people accountable, but not with an over-the-top vengeance likely to scare the average citizen away from political participation altogether. That’s been my message to South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley.
What about déjà vu?
Today, in a Pierre courtroom, Annette’s husband, Chad Haber, will be arraigned on felony charges for signing as the circulator on a petition with two signatures affixed when he was with his wife on that medical trip.
AG Jackley loudly proclaims that this is not his indictment; it was filed by a county prosecutor. But anyone who didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday knows how these things tend to work.
Haber challenged Jackley last election and the feud is well known and long-running. Being a prosecutor requires judgment, something Jackley lacks . . . as he will no doubt prove in court.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Congo-Brazzaville’s president, Denis Sassou Nguesso, is quite the statesman.
He’s actually done what many an illustrious American pol with an obsession about “campaign finance” would merely like to do, but cannot (that darn First Amendment!): prohibited all talk about politics prior to the next election.
Indeed, the government has shut down the Internet and cellular SMS services, simply to prevent undue influence prior to the upcoming votes. Democracy requires a veil of ignorance, we’re told, and Nguesso’s taken that august philosophical scheme to its logical conclusion: no information running through the information superhighway of the modern age . . . at gunpoint.
And like many a long-term American insider, he’s balking at term limits, too. He has served his legally limited two terms. So he and his fellow statesmen put a referendum onto the upcoming ballot to overthrow them.
Just so he can serve longer.
Think of the sacrifice! He really must be looking out for his earnest and ardent supporters.
But he didn’t stop there. To fulfill his mandate, and continue in office, he has to entreat the people to overturn Congo’s mandated retirement age. At 71, he’s now too old to legally run, even if he were a first-termer.
Trifecta! — a pol so insistent at continuing his life of never-ending public service that he fights against ageism, term limits, and the corrupting influence of free speech!
I’m sure he has many, many secret sympathizers in our Congress, and in the legislatures of our several states.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Don’t worry comrades!
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Vice-President Joe Biden announced, yesterday, that he will not run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, ending many weeks of speculation.
The Veep’s exit from a race he never entered benefits Mrs. Clinton, who in those same polls has a larger lead head-to-head against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Much of “Middle-Class” Joe’s speech was the usual laundry list of progressive pie-in-the-sky, money-can-too-buy-us-love shibboleths:
Still, Joe voiced something other candidates fail to emphasize:
[W]e have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart. . . . I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.
That hasn’t been Hillary Clinton’s approach, having compared conservative Republicans to terrorist groups. Plus, to the question “Which enemy that you made during your political career are you most proud of?” she answered, “Republicans.”
“Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take,” Joe Biden added.
I guess Joe’s not for Hillary.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank is panicked about the “chaos on Capitol Hill.”
He hyperventilated, in a recent column, concerning the difficulty Republicans are having in choosing a new Speaker of the House, after the announced resignation of current Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), then the sudden withdrawal from the race by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and now the reluctance of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to seek the post.
We’re informed of the speaker’s importance — “second in line to the presidency” and “key to national security and domestic tranquility” — as if Milbank, alone, has access to a Constitution.
Yet, is it really “chaos” or continued gridlock that’s bothering our company-town columnist?
If it were, Milbank wouldn’t focus his attacks solely on conservative Republicans for their unwillingness to “compromise” (read: surrender). Both Democrats and so-called establishment Republicans seem equally adamantine.
According to Milbank, these conservative “hardliners” and “zealots” constitute “a rough crowd” who employ “thuggish tactics.” Why, they have “hijacked the chamber”!
How so?
They had the audacity to not always vote lockstep with Speaker Boehner; they balked at supporting the Speakership for Rep. McCarthy; and (heavens!), they even dared communicate their viewpoint to voters in McCarthy’s home district.
Could free political speech still be allowed by law?
Milbank reviles the “efforts by conservative groups to depose [McCarthy] before he ever took the throne.”
Depose? Throne?
Milbank even laments that Eric Cantor “would have been speaker today” had only voters in his district not voted for somebody else. Pesky voters!
Methinks Mr. Milbank has been lounging around the halls of power a tad too long.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In Tuesday night’s debate, Democrats put all their egos in one ideological basket: progressivism. Even Jim Webb managed to sound progressive . . . until he identified his prime personal enemy — the man he shot in wartime.
Bernie Sanders once again insisted on lecturing Americans on what it means to be a “democratic socialist.” Martin O’Malley relentlessly pursued an impossible dream, 100 percent carbon-free electric production by 2050 — far enough off to avoid any possible accountability. And Hillary Clinton said that, sure, she’s a progressive, “a progressive who likes to get things done!”
But what has she “got done,” ever?
It was her secrecy regarding the initial health care reforms back in her husband’s first term that helped spark the firestorm of opposition that led to the Revolution of ’94, and to the triangulating successes of the master of manipulative compromise, Bill Clinton. His was not a “progressive era,” though Democrats still use the 1990s as proof that their (“our”) policies “work.”
With exception of Bernie on gun control and Hillary on foreign policy and spying (Snowden gave out secrets to the enemy: traitor; she gave out who-knows-what via her insecure email server: blankout), the spend-spend-spend mantra of progressivism, mixed with “fair taxes” (higher tax rates) on the top 1 percent, was not challenged on the stage.
How far would they go to close ranks? Bernie sided with her regarding “your damned e-mails.” That’s so ideological as to eschew any consideration of character or loyalty or trust.
Quite a revolution . . . in the party.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The headline? Gaspworthy: “World’s First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, To Install Muslim Prayer Space.”
Are we being punked? Onion–ized?
I checked: apparently not.
The place is the Seamen’s mission church in the eastern docks of Stockholm. The Church of Sweden’s local bishop challenged the mission’s priest with a what-if: Suppose a Muslim came off the boats and wanted a place to pray?
Had the encounter been just a one-off, we could shrug it off. But this is one latitudinarian cleric, and she didn’t let it go:
Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels,” the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths.”
Generosity über alles strikes again!
I’ve long wondered about radicals who infiltrate religions. If you don’t like Catholicism, join or start something else; if you find the Baptist Conventions opprobrious, check out the Methodism, Greek Orthodoxy, or . . . Thelema. Why horn in on someone else’s religion?
But there is a reason it’s happening in the city that gave us “Stockholm Syndrome.” The Church of Sweden’s a state institution, while Scandinavia’s real religion is secular progressivism. You need no gift of prophecy to see where that’s bound to go.
Separation of church and state just makes sense. To each religion its own. There need be no fighting for adherents, or laying down of one’s own beliefs merely to appeal to “inclusion.”
Unless or until you get the government involved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
We live in a time when intelligent people expend vital brain power concocting explanations for war that weigh drought as a more significant cause than . . . previous tyranny and warfare.
Yes, the President’s friends and acolytes defend the notion, in all seriousness, that it is unregulated capitalism leading to global warming and Levantine droughts that made Syrians all unruly. This explains everything!
Just blame Islamic State violence on the weather and not on . . . the murderous dictator willing to kill masses of his own people, the intoxicating ideology of jihad, and (definitely not!) on Barack Obama’s Mideast policies.
I emphasized the Syrian dictator’s acts last Sunday. But surely American foreign policy — going back to Bush, at least — destabilized the region, and constitutes a major cause of the violence.
A far greater cause than our car-driving addiction! And coal!
And flatulent cows . . .
Blame shifting is not just a foreign policy vice, though. My Townhall column began not with the nascent Caliphate’s droughts, but California’s. And there’s more than just a few syllables of pronunciation similarity. People are assigning the wrong causes in both regions.
When California’s government-run water system subsidizes almond growing in a near desert, of course there is going to be waste. And yet politicians focus on home water use, scolding folks for taking long showers.
Yet, who sets the price of the water homeowners buy? Who, then, is responsible for the incentives to which consumers react?
The State of California. Suffering no drought of disastrous dictates by politicians in over their heads.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
