Category: national politics & policies

Categories
Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

Fauci’s the Focal Point

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, science, research

Senator Rand Paul “has it in” for Fauci — said Dr. Anthony Fauci at last week’s Senate hearing. 

The former director of the NIAID and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden made it sound like the Kentucky senator was trying to put him in prison. But what Dr. Paul asked of Dr. Fauci was an apology — not jail-time.

Why, though?

“If we don’t want this to happen again, him acknowledging that he was wrong to fund this research will be a word of caution and warning to the next generation of people to come through,” the senator told Mark Halperin. “And the debate will have ultimately been won on ‘gain of function.’

“The danger of it.”

The point, Rand Paul says, is to stop the madness of this type of research.

Earlier in the interview he had noted that scientists had warned that the results at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should not be published. It would be a blueprint, or recipe, for a never-ending biological warfare by terrorists.

The whole interview is worth listening to. Mark Halperin does what so few journalists do when confronting a contentious issue: formulate each question in epistemically sound terms, for clarity. “Is that an established fact in your mind, or do you need to know more?” 

Here are some responses from Sen. Paul:

  • Fauci was a long-time supporter and financer of gain-of-function research: fact.
  • Fauci “was aware that they [the Wuhan researchers] were doing gain-of-function research” but Fauci would quibble over semantics, about the exactitudes of what qualifies as such: fact. (Fauci’s being evasive.)
  • Fauci funded that research: “without question” a fact.
  • Fauci lied about the wet market origin theory: fact.

There’s more. Let’s praise a journalist for asking clear questions and a politician for giving clear answers.

Especially about the coronavirus origin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies political economy

Trump-Approved Profits

Donald Trump, oil, prices, inflation, redistribution, socialism

Occasionally, President Trump takes an anti-capitalist rhetorical turn. He apparently supposes his unleashing of an Inner Mamdani will help him through a political rough patch. 

Or perhaps he is just momentarily confused.

The president recently asserted that oil companies are making too much money right now and “ought to give back” some of it to the public. This, although “I’m a big free enterprise guy.”

But oil companies don’t owe buyers anything more than the oil they supply. Nor, when prices are low, do buyers owe oil companies or gas stations more money than what they pay.

In markets, a sudden big drop in supply of a good — like oil, shipments of which might be blocked by wars in the Middle East — tends to lead to higher prices.

Companies unable to ship or sell the good lose money. If demand remains the same or increases, prices for the part of the supply still available go up. Which means more profits and more money to expand production and distribution.

Consumers of oil should want its producers to be as successful as possible. That’s just reason, common sense. High profits encourage and fund more digging, refining, and distribution, and attract more competition — ultimately increasing supply to reduce prices. 

Whenever supply of an urgently needed good takes a hit, producers should be as free as possible to deal with the problem and to enjoy the rewards of dealing with it successfully. Any big free enterprise guy should be able to understand this. 

You too, Mr. President.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights litigation national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Visas for 1st Amendment Foes?

Marco Rubio, censorship, travel visas, foreign policy, 1st Amendment, free speech

Last December, the U.S. State Department imposed visa bans on five persons who, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

But is it okay for the U.S. government to withhold visas from foreigners acting to undermine the freedom of speech of Americans?

Not okay! says a judge trying to put a halt to the administration’s withholding of visas from foreign officials and others who push for such censorship.

Why? Because noncitizens “could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk — not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate ​its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.” 

The don’t-attack-freedom-of-speech requirement is said to unlawfully burden noncitizen speech.

Of course, to withhold or revoke a visa does not stop anyone’s speech. The persons thus deprived are at liberty to keep demanding the curtailing of online U.S. speech. They’re not being tossed in the hoosegow.

The judge’s stance could be used to waylay any attempt to counteract specific coercive actions by noncitizens to undermine U.S. freedoms, whether originating from Brussels or Beijing. All such attacks manifest the actors’ often-articulated viewpoints.

Indeed, some persons contend that ejecting formerly visa-equipped foreign students from the U.S. for terrorizing Jewish students and vandalizing campuses are suffering from violations of freedom of speech. This is incorrect. No foreign-based soldiers in a war against U.S. freedoms possess an inalienable right to condition-free visas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment fraud national politics & policies subsidy

$100 Billion Stolen

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., medicare, fraud, hospice

Last month, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed six billion dollars worth of Medicare fraud, where scamming operations were caught “chasing money from our agencies.” 

Some while willfully neglecting patients.

On Friday, he estimated that the HHS “loses $100,000,000,000 a year to theft.” This was from an interview on the Fly Zone Podcast, widely shared by conservatives on X.

“We shut down 800 hospices,” Kennedy explained. “You know what a hospice is? Where you’re going to die. Typically, if you go to a hospice, you leave within 18 days because your dying is terminal.” This is the context. Yet, when HHS investigated taxpayer-funded hospices in Los Angeles, “the people never died. Two or three years later they were there, and we’re paying $6,000 a month.”

The enormity is breath-taking: “We found a hotel room with 29 hospices in it. I mean a hotel, every room was a hospice, and none of them had any patients.” Some of the scams were more ambitious, involving bribery of patients and worse.

“Estonians and Armenians and people from Eastern Europe . . . were getting the patient numbers . . . stealing them from doctors’ offices.” And there were more scams, too, from members of other ethnic groups — remember Minnesota’s Somali fraudsters? 

Tellingly, after closing down the operations, the HHS did not receive “a single call from a congressman or from a business owner saying, ‘Oh, you shut down my hospice and all these patients are on the street.’ None of them, because they were all crooked and they knew they were crooked.”

Folks on the left seem oddly silent. Have you heard any denunciations of, say, greed? Or is that vice only attributable to corporations and “the millionaires and billionaires”?

This should be a non-partisan issue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
election law fraud national politics & policies Voting

Truth Be Told

Donald Trump, non-citizen voting, democracy, voting, elections, corruption, voter ID

President Donald Trump told a prime-time national audience, last week, that the Department of Homeland Security found 278,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls after checking roughly half the states. 

“It’s a number,” as my old boss says.

The Washington Post called it “an exaggerated claim that noncitizens are registering to vote en masse.” No, noncitizens are not really registering to vote so much as being registered — without their knowledge or understanding through deliberate government policy that pretends it’s pro-democracy to throw folks on the voter list who are not legally entitled to vote.

Not that there aren’t cases of fraud. There are. But I trust the good intentions of the average non-citizen more than the intentions of the politicians in states regularly facilitating their voter registrations.

Which, incidentally, can undermine an immigrant’s ability to gain U.S. citizenship. 

Fully 250,000 of that aforementioned total were found in just four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The other roughly 28,000 noncitizens were discovered on the rolls in “two dozen or so states” by running those voter files against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database.

Of course, some of these 278,000 identified will likely turn out to be citizens. Some will turn out to be pets. Data is sometimes incorrect. Mistakes happen. But let’s find out. 

In a sensible country, every state would (1) check its voter file against the federal SAVE database (and other data at DHS and the State Department), (2) institute a sensible, respectful and lawful process to check with voters so identified to clarify the facts, and then, (3) follow the law to remove each illegal registrant.

Instead of merely arguing about the extent and severity of the problem, why not just solve it? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies term limits

Terminal Representation

term limits, age limits, Congress

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has been absent from Congress, hospitalized for weeks — first with no comment on his medical condition, still with very little information divulged. 

There should be an ethic in public service that when one is incapacitated, one hands the trust given back to the public to fill anew.* Sadly, this tradition has fallen victim to . . . take your pick: incumbency, partisanship, lack of electoral competition, Cicero’s times/mores.

History’s third-oldest U.S. Congress “boasts” 23 members of the House and Senate now eighty years old or older. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the senior Iowa Senator, is the oldest at 92.

This aging of our decision makers has set up a seniority system of sorts. Hardly healthy. 

No wonder polls show overwhelming public support for age limits. 

Though I, too, would vote for, say, an 80-year age limit, if given the chance . . . age is not really the problem. I know people in their eighties who could well serve in Congress. 

For a time. 

The better answer is good old-fashioned term limits, which garner even greater public support. 

Mitch McConnell entered the U.S. Senate at age 42. He then spent the next 42 years in Washington, the longest serving senator in Kentucky history. 

The six older U.S. Senators — Durbin (IL), Grassley (IA), King (ME), McConnell (KY), Risch (ID), Sanders (VT) — average 33 years in Congress, while the 17 octogenarian House members average 28 years. Only Rep. Jim Baird of Indiana has been there less than a decade, first elected at age 73.

“We don’t think senility is really the problem,” says U.S. Term Limits CEO Nick Tomboulides. “We think incumbency is the problem, and senility is the symptom.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Part of the politics with Sen. McConnell is partisan: he is a Republican but the governor who would appoint his replacement for the rest of 2026 is a Democrat. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
deficits and debt national politics & policies too much government

Spending All the Way to the Abyss

Entire categories of federal spending shouldn’t exist.

Now, it would be easy to eliminate budget deficits and to begin to make big and regular dents in the national debt, were it not for one teensy-weensy problem. Just hand me the budget (in electronic form, please) and a red pencil and I’ll hack away at the billions and billions. And trillions.

If that would take too long, I’d enlist a team of like-minded spending cutters to help.

We’d be doing something like what the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, tried to do early in the second Trump administration. DOGE didn’t go or wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near far enough, though. We know this because the big picture of runaway government spending hasn’t changed.

That’s what would thwart me and my team too: lack of political will. Or too much political will pulling in the opposite direction. Too many constituencies for all the spending and too many politicians, both parties, catering to the constituencies.

That’s the teensy-weensy problem.

The current U.S. national debt is approaching $40 trillion. This year, the federal government has already borrowed $1.4 trillion. These seem like catastrophic amounts. But somehow the U.S. still teeters on the edge of fiscal doom, yet to fall in.

Maybe when we get to a trillion trillions in federal debt and when a billion dollars won’t buy a dozen eggs, then we will surely see real reform. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship too much government

Socialists to Seize Power?

socialism, Democratic Party, prison, authoritarianism, totalitarianism

Evan Barker isn’t surprised. 

“The democratic socialist surge of the past several weeks has stunned the nation,” this former Democratic operative wrote last week. “From left to right and everywhere in between, people are asking: How did we get here? What does it mean? And will the Democratic Party survive it? The prevailing reaction has been shock.”

She’s not shocked, though, because for half a decade she had worked for “a slew of progressive candidates” teaching “DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network.” 

But after the big loss for Kamala “Salad Slinger” Harris and Tim “Cringe” Walz, Barker left the party. And wrote a book, Nothing Left, regaling us with how she became disillusioned with “a leadership class” that had drifted “further and further from the working-class Americans they purportedly represented.”

Barker’s not alone. Others in the rah-rah crowd for an older Democratic Party have also expressed their chagrin. On the First of July, well-known “liberal” journalist Jonathan Chait published in The Atlantic “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists.”

Noting that the Democratic Socialists of America despise the Democratic Party, with many of DSA’s stalwarts veering off into communist advocacy without much nudging, the question becomes why Democrats with some sense don’t come to their alleged senses.

Chait observes that Michael Harrington, the socialist founder of DSA, placed into its bylaws “the expulsion of members who were ‘under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,’ a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.”

Yet, the Democratic Party isn’t as moderate as Harrington!

Truth is, “DSA supporters see internal division not as a risk but as a historic opportunity to seize power.”

And the “means of production.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

The States Fair

Great American State Fair, Donald Trump, Pennsylvania, July 4

I’m usually suspicious of business-government partnerships. But some occasional and low-level efforts are inevitable and at worst anodyne.

Take the Great American State Fair in the District of Columbia. This was an effort conceived by Donald Trump in 2023, and “enacted” (?!?!) by the president’s executive order once he resumed office in 2025. The idea was to celebrate the semiquincentennial in the capital with booths from each state. It was all very huzzah-hooray-USA-oriented, and sounds like good clean fun.

I did not attend, and it reached its natural conclusion without me last Saturday, on the Fourth of July.

Interestingly, a number of states pointedly did not participate. One gets the feeling that this was all about hating on Trump, but maybe not. Be that as it may, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor wouldn’t fund or organize the Pennsylvania booth, saying that he couldn’t whip up any business sponsors.

That is unlikely, for when Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, Dave McCormick, heard about it, he called his state’s senator from across the aisle, John Fetterman, and the two decided to do it all themselves. “I started to call businesses, and they came out of the woodwork,” said the Republican.

From the accounts I’ve read, the event was either a self-serving (Trump-o-centric) failure or a moderate success — not a blowout — with the Pennsylvania booth standing out, featuring antique flags and a replica of the Liberty Bell.

This is old-time patriotic fun, a way of celebrating the good stuff of our states and the union.

A cynic might say it’s all bread-and-circuses, a distraction, but the answer to that is: enjoy but don’t be distracted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts