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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:
- “President Obama has led this nation from crisis to recovery, and we’re now on the cusp of resurgence.”
- The public schools fail to adequately educate kids — at stupendous cost. Rather than innovate, Biden demands we “commit to 16 years of free public education for all of our children.”
- Biden’s biggest pitch was for “a moon shot to cure cancer.” (Cancer will be cured . . . but not by politicians.)
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.
Social Security, like similar systems in Europe, is on a trajectory to insolvency, which could lead to a sovereign debt crisis.
The reason for the crisis? Social Security has always been a pay-as-we-go system, dependent on many workers paying in to a system that sends their contributions to a smaller number of retirees. When the number of retirees expands above the ability of workers to cover at established rates, the system goes broke. Meanwhile, all the system’s budget overages from the beginning to the present date have not been saved and invested. Congress has been taking the overages and spending them, putting IOUs in a notebook.
It is a serious problem.
Or, it isn’t! That is, not if you believe The Nation, which states in a recent article that this is all the result of a legally mandated “bogus” accounting conceit. The Congressional Budget Office, you see,
assumes that Social Security and Medicare Part A will draw on the general fund of the US Treasury to cover benefit shortfalls following the depletion of their trust funds, which at the current rate will occur in 2034.
That would obviously lead to an exploding debt, but it’s a scenario prohibited by law.
The Nation’s somewhat confused author suggests the dire warnings are wrong because “Congress could preemptively pass laws to avert the situation before the deadline; it could take the approach favored by progressives and increase revenue to the programs by lifting the payroll tax cap, or alternatively raise the retirement age and lower benefits.”
Well, yes. But until a fix happens, the doomsday warning stands.
Why does he think we make the warning?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
President Barack Obama pledged we’d be out of Afghanistan by 2016, but yesterday announced a “modest but meaningful extension of our presence” — keeping the 10,000 troops currently stationed there for all of 2016, and then, in perpetuity, maintaining a force five times larger than previously planned.
Why? Because, after 14 years of conflict and nation-building, Afghanistan is still neck-deep in violence. Last month, the Taliban briefly captured Kunduz, a city of over 250,000 people. Going forward, Obama admitted, “There will continue to be contested areas.”
The Afghan government is not self-sustainable and nobody seems to know how many years or decades or centuries that might take to achieve.
Meanwhile, over in Syria, the U.S. cannot train more than four or five moderate soldiers after much bluster and promise — and splurging a cool $500 million.
The U.S. invaded and “regime-changed” Iraq, helping shape a new government and national army. With all that effort — a cost of thousands of lives — once our soldiers weren’t doing the daily fighting to tamp down the bloody sectarian chasm, ISIS formed, the Iraqi army ran away and the country soon collapsed into civil war.
The Iraq Conquest put southern Iraq into Iranian orbit. How many lives was that worth?
The problem? Not military incompetence. The mission is the problem. Has any politician or military leader plausibly put forth a plan whereby our country’s intervention actually creates an improved and sustainable political order in any of these nations?
If so, let’s see it.
If not, why are our soldiers still in harm’s way?
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.
Tonight, the Democratic Party holds its first presidential debate of this cycle. Finally! It’s one of only six total throughout the entire campaign for the party nomination.
And all the other debates will be on weekends, with much lower TV viewership.
What does it suggest when a political party wants to minimize rather than maximize the degree to which the public gets to see its candidates and hear the party’s message?
“[I]t seems infelicitous,” writes The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “for Democrats to be embroiled in a very public fight in which party leaders are increasingly being accused of limiting the exposure of the candidates to voters.”
Is Supreme Democratic Party Commander Debbie Wasserman Schultz afraid that familiarity will breed contempt?
As party chair, Wasserman Schultz unilaterally decreed that debates shall be limited to just six. She also warned that “candidates will be uninvited to any debates if they accept invitation to any debates outside the 6-debate schedule.” (Meanwhile, Republicans are holding nine presidential debates, but likewise, dictatorially, blocking participation in additional debates.)
Wasserman Schultz, facing protests and heckling, claims her only aim is to prevent the debate schedule from getting “out of control.”
Or out of her control, perhaps?
Presidential candidate and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley called it a “rigged process,” asking, “What national or party interest does this decree serve?”
The limited debate schedule serves as a huge advantage for frontrunner Hillary Clinton by limiting the breakout opportunities of her opponents.
But, at least tonight, all the world’s a stage.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Sheila Weinberg wants to raise your taxes. So fervent is her money-lust that she even threatens to run for president, and only half-jokingly, on that single issue.
More surprising: I would enthusiastically vote for her.
What gives?
Well, Weinberg isn’t demanding a tax increase or a spending cut, per se — just one and/or the other until accounts are balanced. She points out that tax increases tend to concentrate the minds of taxpayers to oppose greater spending by government. Otherwise, as long as governments — local, state and federal — can hide the true costs of their “services,” more will be spent, and more debt incurred, than the people can afford, or want.
That’s why this friendly CPA founded Truth in Accounting, a nonpartisan, non-profit group working to “compel governments to produce financial reports that are understandable, reliable, transparent and correct.”
Too much to ask? No, if you ask me, or you, or Sheila, or anyone else . . . until we inquire of politicians, and then, well . . . apparently, yes. And not merely at the federal level.
“For years, citizens have been told that their home state budgets have been balanced,” Weinberg recently told Watchdog.org. “If that were true, state debt would be zero . . .”
Yet, last month, Truth in Accounting issued its 2014 Financial State of the States report disclosing that state governments are truthfully — whether they admit it or not — a cumulative $1.3 trillion dollars in arrears. Individually, all but 11 states are carrying debt.
Lies won’t set us free. Or pay the bills.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Don’t feel lonely, Mrs. Clinton. You’re not the only public official shielding public actions from the public by using private modes of communication — a private email account and server, or texts on a personal cell phone.
Meet fellow Democrat Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago Tribune* recently took the Emanuel administration to court for the second time in three months. The paper charges the mayor is “[violating] state open records laws by refusing to release communications about city business conducted through private emails and text messages.”
Still pending is the World’s Greatest Newspaper’s first lawsuit against the mayor’s office, seeking the full disclosure of emails specifically concerning a $20-million-dollar no-bid public school contract, over which the Feds have now launched a criminal investigation.
The Trib argues in its legal complaint that Freedom of Information Act requests “have been met with a pattern of non-compliance, partial compliance, delay and obfuscation.” But on Chicago Tonight, Mayor Emanuel offered that, “[W]e always comply and work through all of the Freedom of Information [requests] in the most responsive way possible.”
Probably all just a big misunderstanding . . .
What’s especially droll is to find presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, two Democrats who have long fought against privatizing any government function or service no matter how inefficiently performed or delivered, suddenly embracing a creative new approach to privatizing government . . . beginning with their own transparency and accountability.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In full disclosure, my brother, Mark Jacob, works for the Tribune.
As the nation reels from another school-place murder spree, this time at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, The Detroit News took notice of a not wholly unrelated milestone: St. Louis, Missouri, took “title” to “nation’s murder capital” from Detroit, Michigan.
Detroit’s Chief of Police waves, as he put it, a “flag of progress,” not a “flag of success.” Crimes overall are down . . . as are (interestingly) police forces. Still, as the FBI stats for 2013 make clear, “Motor City’s overall violent crime rate remains the nation’s worst for the second straight year for cities of more than 100,000 residents.”
St. Louis scored 50 murders per every 100,000 population; Detroit went down to 44 per 100,000.
But hold your breath: all this is based on a per capita reckoning: Detroit still tallied more murders than did St. Louis, 298 to 59. Detroit just has more population.
In total terms, Chicago actually leads the nation, with 411 murders. (These include all murders, not just gun-related homicides.) New York follows with 333. Then it’s Detroit, followed by Los Angeles (260), Philadelphia (248), Houston (242), and Baltimore (211).
The 2013 murder count for the nation?14,249. Subtract the seven highest grossing murder cities and the number is 12,246.
That’s still a lot, but remember: nationwide, the murder rate (including murders with guns) continues to plummet — even with more guns in private hands. Could it be that more than “more cops” and “more jails,” more guns is the answer?
Dramatic Gun-Free-Zone shootings are trend exceptions. Most usages of guns remain in self-defense. Real gun control has been, in a sense, privatized.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
