Category: insider corruption

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crime and punishment insider corruption

The Quanta of Corruption

Michael Madigan, Illinois, corruption

The first initiative petition drive I ever ran was the Tax Accountability Amendment in Illinois in 1990. I remember canvassing Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives Michael Madigan’s district. 

He was a problem way back then. It was as if everything he worked for I worked against! The Democrat really knew how to wield power: going on to become the longest-serving leader of any state or federal legislative body in the history of the United States, holding the position for all but two years from 1983 to 2021. 

Well, he’s in the news again— and not for receiving a laurel of appreciation from a grateful state.

“Longest-serving legislative leader in US history given 7 1/2 years in federal corruption case,” reads the Associated Press headline.

In addition to the prison sentence following his February conviction for “trading legislation for the enrichment of his friends and allies,” Mike Madigan has alsobeen fined $2.5 million.

The “Velvet Hammer,” as Madigan was called, was, in the end, hammered, found guilty “on 10 of 23 counts in a remarkable corruption trial that lasted four months. The case churned through 60 witnesses and mountains of documents, photographs and taped conversations.”

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey demonstrated anger over Madigan’s perjury on the stand. “You lied. You did not have to. You had a right to sit there and exercise your right to silence,” the judge told the convict at sentencing. “But you took the stand and you took the law into your own hands.”

Just as the corrupt career politician did as Speaker for four miserable decades. 

Justice may have taken too long, but I applaud it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Common Sense: Clown Car of Felonies
December 18, 2018

Common Sense: Keystone Correlation
September 28, 2017

Common Sense: Most Messed Up
July 13, 2017

Townhall: Term Limits, Now More Than Ever
May 04, 2014

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

RFKj’s Clean Sweep

Big Pharma, RFKj, corruption, healthcare

“All of the guardrails for this kind of a committee, which I served on many years ago, have simply disappeared,” says Sara Rosenbaum, Professor Emerita of Health, Law and Policy at George Washington University. 

She’s referring to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy’s “retiring” of the entire 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

You know, the group that did such a bang-up job for the Centers for Disease Control during the pandemic.

“After the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves vaccines based on whether the benefits of the shot outweigh the risks,” the BBC explains, “ACIP recommends which groups should be given the shots and when, which also determines insurance coverage of the shots.”

A lot of money rides on what this board determines, you see.

Which is a big element of Kennedy’s complaint against the whole of the Big Pharma/Big Government complex. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal prior to what he calls a “clean sweep.” “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.”

Various newspaper reports quote a lot of experts expressing their shock and worry, but — in the articles, mind you — avoid Kennedy’s key points.

After the corruption of “science” by Big Government during the pandemic, sweeping out the old board gets an enthusiastic thumbs up. 

Let’s hold the new board members fully accountable; perhaps they could break with tradition by not holding any meetings in secret.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Sleepy’s New Clothes

Joe Biden, Jake Tapper, election, president, democracy, cover up, scandal

“I was shocked to see his condition,” CNN commentator Van Jones tells Jake Tapper on State of the Union. Mr. Jones is talking about when former (but then-) President Joe Biden stepped up to debate his challenger, current (but then former-) President Donald Trump.

“And so was the world,” he continues. “And that wasn’t the first time [Biden] was in that condition; the book makes it very, very clear.”

The book noted above being Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, written by host Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios. 

“There are people who knew and said nothing and that is a crime against this Republic,” argues Jones, “and I think the Democrats are gonna pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover up.”

“It was obvious to the American people before the debate,” former Obama strategist David Axelrod offers. Obvious to politicians, too, but not “politically wise to speak out.”

“[T]his is The Emperor’s New Clothes playing itself out in real time,” Jones elaborates. “Everybody knew but everyone was afraid to say.”

Later in the program, still pitching his book, Tapper blames a “small, secretive group of advisors” as the culprits, clarifying that “the original sin of the 2024 election” was “President Biden’s decision to run for reelection, even though he would be theoretically 86 years old at the end of his second term and was showing every day of it.”

One can only wonder how Mr. Tapper and so many other journalists missed in real time what a president of these United States was “showing.”

Democrats remain focused on the disaster of losing the election, but the real disgrace? After the June 27, 2024, debate non-performance, they and their fawning media allowed a person clearly not up to the job to remain in this most incredibly powerful position for another seven months. 

Silly me, I’m focused on the presidency and the job he’s supposed to do for Americans. Not just wielding political power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights insider corruption

The Biden’s Four Ways

Joe Biden, censorship, mind control, obey, obedience, free speech

In response to controversies about pandemics, elections, and whatnot, Congress did not quite pass — nor President Biden quite sign — a new law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. (As far as I know.)

Biden’s government did act, regardless, with the force of law to shut people up. According to the Media Research Center’s new report on Biden censorship — ready to be shared with all who contend that his administration perfectly respected our freedom of speech — the cabal I call The Biden censored Americans using four approaches:

Direct action. For example, ordering a big tech firm or a judge to censor somebody. White house advisors, agency bureaucrats, and others exerted this kind of pressure.

Policy or rulemaking. Examples include the State Department’s agreement with foreign nations “to pressure Tech platforms to censor more” and Homeland Security’s attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board to police speech.

Partnerships with state and private actors to censor speech. Biden’s National Security Council collaborated with the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit to impose UK censorship on Americans.

Grants to organizations to attack and flag utterance of incorrect speech, which the government could then censor.

These were effectuated, by MRC’s count, with 57 initiatives.

As soon as he began his second term, President Trump issued executive orders to combat such muzzling of debate. Congress must do its part too.

No matter what defenses are put in place, though, we will see further attempts by government goons to gag us. We must be vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

The Trillion-Dollar Mark?

ELON MUSK, DOGE

According to Fox News, Elon Musk “met with a small group of House Republicans on Wednesday evening to discuss the quest to find as much as $1 trillion in government waste.”

That would indeed be significant. 

But until then, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” popularly called DOGE, continues to find insane wasteful spending in the “mere” millions.

Consider the Small Business Administration, which “administers” loans to . . . well . . . “DOGE said it identified that the Small Business Administration (SBA) granted nearly 5,600 loans for $312 million to borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the loan,” reports Fox. 

Loans made in the pit of despair that was the COVID pandemic.

Children have no business taking out SBA loans — the obvious quip would be about “lemonade stands” — but Musk suggests there could be reasons for the practice, just not in the 5,593 cases DOGE specifies, because the wrong Social Security numbers were used in those applications.

But let no one say the federal government is not balanced, for “in 2020 and 2021 the SBA issued 3,095 loans for $333 million to borrowers over 115 years old.”

And speaking of the ancient, Bernie Sanders wrote to Newsweek to give the socialist view of the subject: “The person who is running the government right now is Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has taken it upon himself, with the support of President Trump, to virtually dismantle the United States government.”

Don’t get our hopes up, Senator.

Unlike Harry Enten at CNN, I’m not at all shocked to learn that DOGE has majority support in America at present. “I was truly surprised by this,” said Enten last Thursday, “but the numbers are the numbers.”

After all, it’s only common sense to seek to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Isn’t it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption regulation too much government

Killing a Bureau

consumer protection, bureaucrats, paperwork, regulations, freedom

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?

The mission itself is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts.

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState hopes the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it: as critics have long argued. Why does this agency exist except to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise? One of many federal agencies that should expire. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on the CFPB:

Give Them Credit — February 2, 2014
Invulnerable Government — November 28, 2017
Peel Back the Onion — November 30, 2017
Protector Protection — January 6, 2020

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government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

The Biden Is No More

Joe Biden, stumble, exit

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., went out as he came in, plagiarizing.

Well, in style anyway, his bizarre farewell address striking ultra-familiar themes. 

“Most Biden speeches are acknowledged (Lincoln, Obama) or unacknowledged (Neil Kinnock, John Kennedy) homages to other politicians,” explains Matt Taibbi. “This last Biden attempt at an Eisenhower impersonation offers an anti-insight. We’re warned about an ‘oligarchy,’ which Webster’s defines as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.’” 

And here the intelligent reader is already ahead of the author. 

“He tries to tag disobedient billionaires like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg (as opposed to Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Steven Schwartzman, etc.) as this new oligarchy, but there’s one closer to home, which Biden referenced later in the speech: ‘In the years ahead . . . it is going to be up to the president, the presidency, the congress, the courts, the free press and the American people . . . I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. . . . Now it’s your turn to stand guard.’

“Biden’s possibly ad-libbed distinction between ‘president’ and ‘presidency’ was the most inspired line of his career,” Taibbi quips.

And eerily defining . . . of Biden’s stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . . and various vacation hot spots.*

Taibbi contrasts the man — “stumbling, tumbling” — with the machinery of the office — run by a mostly-unseen cabal Taibbi defines with reference to H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Invisible Man.

Other sci-fi metaphors come to mind. In his penultimate paragraph, Taibbi mentions Frankenstein filmmaker James Whale, and then in his last line Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. But didn’t Philip K. Dick provide a hundred examples of fake personae as presidents and tyrants? 

Except that the Biden Administration, whatever it might have been, was limited in its power because it lacked legitimacy from half the population — and was as cognitively challenged as Biden himself.

Yesterday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Meet the Press that our sleepy commander-in-chief had been manipulated by his staff into signing key executive orders under false pretenses. And running interference for this Democratic Party “presidency” were Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).

Thank goodness, the Age of “The Biden” is over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Biden spent 40 percent of his term in office “on vacation.”

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Oligarchy Malarkey

Joe Biden, farewell speech, covid, oligarchs

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape, in America, of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” President Biden warned the nation Wednesday night. 

“We see the consequences all across America.”

Yes, we do, but what specific consequence brought on the president’s sudden awareness of the “O” word: The Democrats’ political defeat? His own? Harris’s?

Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was a swell fellow back in 2020, when he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, tossed in $400 million to goose Democratic Party turnout. But when the Meta CEO admitted that Facebook was bullied by the Biden administration into censoring content, he becomes a terrible oligarch.      

As for “extreme wealth,” Democrats outspent Republicans. By a lot.

Biden compared his swan song to President Eisenhower’s famous 1960 farewell address, in which World War II’s Supreme Allied Commander sounded the alarm about a military-industrial complex with dangerous levels of power. Says Biden: “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

“Potential”? “Could”? 

I guess he means that, say, some day Big Tech might censor discussion of information about a candidate’s drug-addicted, gun-toting son’s international influence-peddling operationjust weeks before an election. 

Or perhaps squelch news on the origin of a pandemic killing millions. 

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” argued the president.

He’s got a point. Look at the elaborate ruse run by Democrats at the White House, in Congress, at the DNC, in the media, pretending for those of us in TV Land that our commander-in-chief, the most powerful man in the world, was fully competent to execute the duties of the office even while knowing he most certainly was not. 

Joe Biden is a charter member of the “oligarchy” about which I’m most concerned. 

This is Common Sense. 

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government transparency insider corruption scandal

Managing the President: 2021–2024

Joe Biden, deep state, lizard people

Yesterday, we considered the farce of Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.), serving out her term from an assisted living home — suffering, her family says, from “dementia issues.”

So, today, let’s discuss the donkey in the room: the president of these United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. 

“Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public,” explains a major exposé in the Wall Street Journal.

How “throughout”? Almost from day one: “a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on,” notes The Journal, “in just the first few months of his term.”

The reportage confirms what we suspected. “The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”

This structure also served to cover for Biden’s most characteristic failing, “foot-in-mouth”: his hand-holders sought “to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.”

Not a morning person, the staff concocted an elaborate schedule of afternoon meetings which they tried to keep very short. “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether.”

Perhaps most importantly, “[t]he strategies to protect Biden largely worked,” the report reminds, “until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump.”

Luckily, the Washington cabal has not quite figured out a way to have a president as figure-head only and keep the deception from the American electorate. 

But too close for comfort.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Pardon We All Saw Coming

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, pardon, Ukraine, China, corruption

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Back in June, after his son was found guilty on gun charges, President Biden said: “I will not pardon him.”

Now he’s saying “I believe in the justice system, but . . .”

Let’s remember the Conspiracy Theory floating around before the election.

Various cynical people, cynics I call them, declared that despite Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son, he was only waiting for the election. After the election, when the action could no longer hurt him or any Biden-substitute candidate, he would then pardon his son.

And so it has come to pass— as of last night.

I guess if you can’t get Al Capone on anything else, you get him on tax evasion. But I don’t care that much about the gun charges or the tax charges against Hunter Biden. I care about the corruption.

I care about the many millions of dollars funneled into the Biden family and the Big Guy, Joe Biden, in consequence of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling deal-making with firms in Ukraine, Romania, and China. Millions that fell into his lap over the years only because of who his dad is. And what daddy could do — as in fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Biden family corruption.

Riding high, Hunter Biden felt he could get away with anything, including massive tax evasion.

The son can, I take it, no longer be imprisoned for any of the law-breaking we know about. Or even suspect.So maybe, thus unencumbered, Hunter can now take the stand about his father’s role in all the graft and bribery. 

Interestingly, Hunter’s pardon removes his ability to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Because he can’t be incriminated, i.e. criminalized, he can be compelled to testify. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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