Category: national politics & policies

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”

This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.

And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.

The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media video-sharing platform.

It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.

There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices. 

This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.

And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment ideological culture national politics & policies

Unpresidential but Precedented

Joe Biden, SOTU, State of the Union

President Biden may be doddering, dithering, and cranky, but his writers are mis-educated dolts.

The State of the Union address, last week, was performed before Congress by a man so hopped-up on stimulants that . . . one looks for precedents. Not among the U.S. Presidents, though, but among the Chancellors — the “schkankily clankily” guy, as Norm Macdonald referred to him; the man who is known to have been on drugs.

I bring up precedents because Biden’s writers did — idiotically.

The address began by memorializing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 address before Congress, in which FDR used the word “unprecedented.” Biden’s speech writers take this as an occasion to use the word. “Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.”

And then proceed to mention more precedents for the “unprecedentedness” of it all.

It’s almost as if they don’t know the meaning of their keyword.

The biggest precedent is the pure partisan nature of the message, which — instead of performing a sober constitutional duty to give Congress the president’s view of the union of the states — has become, in recent years, a simplistic barrage of invective against the president’s opposing party.

This year’s SOTU address was worse than ever on the partisan divide, with “populist” attacks upon the SCOTUS for allowing Roe v. Wade to fall, and relentless attacks on Republicans. The most interesting and substantive topic was Social Security, with the usual (quite precedented) promise to shore it up with tax increases . . . on the rich. (Reason magazine took the idea seriously and found its fault.)

Thankfully, Biden’s writers avoided the biggest State of the Union cliché of all: the traditional pronouncement that the state of the union “is sound.”

It is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies regulation

Stop the Work Stoppers

Labor Department, gig economy, freelancing

Republican Representative Kevin Kiley of California has introduced H.J. Resolution 116 to block “the rule submitted by the Department of the Labor relating to ‘Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act.’ ”

116 is a legislative attempt to thwart legislation by regulators.

Labor’s rule is modeled on the AB5 Act passed in California several years ago. Catering to unions, AB5’s idea was to kill the livelihoods of many gig workers or freelancers by making it much harder for companies and independent contractors to deal with each other.

The new rule, too, aims to kill competition with unions and expand the pool of employees who can be unionized.

AB5 caused a firestorm, leading to citizen initiatives, court battles, and victories and setbacks for besieged employers and freelancers. There’s been some backtracking of AB5, in part because sponsoring lawmakers realized that it hurt even favored constituencies. But California is still a land mine for would-be freelancers.

The Labor Department is trying to impose AB5-style reclassification on the national level now that national lawmakers have failed to pass legislation to do it.

These days, the many dictators in our government often regard legislative means of passing legislation as an option only of first resort. If that fails, well, stick it to the people some other way.

So Kiley — and, hopefully, an effective congressional majority — must pass a law saying no, regulators, you may not pass this law in the guise of a regulation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies political economy

Shrinkflation, Shrunk Nation

Joe Biden, inflation, ice cream, economics

In another pathetic pre-recorded speech, played before Sunday’s Super Bowl, President Joe Biden lambasted America’s corporations for “shrinkflation.” 

“As an ice cream lover,” he explained in the vid, “what makes me the most angry is that ice cream cartons have actually shrunk in size but not in price.”

The Guardian expands upon the president’s gripe: “Inflation dropped to 3.1% in December but some companies are thought to have responded to rising costs by marginally shrinking the size of products — shrinkflation — as well as changing recipes to reduce the amount of more expensive ingredients — sometimes known as ‘skimpflation.’”

My, oh my, so businesses must adjust to inflationary pressures as well. 

When the costs of their inputs go up, they do not automatically become charities. Knowing that consumers do not sport infinite incomes and demand schedules utterly “inelastic” — buying the same goods in the same quantities even at higher prices — they often adjust by reducing quality or quantity.

It is one of many ways that inflation hurts us.

Inflation has even been referred to as the sneakiest of all taxes, taking from the masses and giving to the insider class, those closest to government (those who receive newly-created money first).

Biden calls “shrinkflation” a “rip-off” and insists that “the American public is tired of being played as suckers.”

Well, that will prove true only if the American public rejects those politicians who push the policies that led to the inflation — politicians like those in the 116th and 117th Congresses, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden himself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Accountability folly national politics & policies

Sympathetically Diminished

senile Joe Biden, memory, guilt

“I’m sympathetically diminished.”

That’s how legal analyst Jonathan Turley described President Joe Biden’s “victory lap” over news that special counsel Robert Hur would not charge Mr. Biden with felonies for his “willful” mishandling and disclosure of classified documents. 

You see, in the special counsel’s “searing” 300-plus-page report, one reason for not prosecuting Sleepy Joe is that investigators found our president’s “memory was significantly limited.” In interviews, Biden couldn’t “remember when his son Beau died,” CNN explained, “nor the years he was vice president.”

Sure, it’s hard to testify about past criminal willfulness if one cannot remember the past. 

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him,” the special counsel points out, “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Ah, our 81-year-old commander-in-chief! Where did I put those nuclear codes?

Mr. Biden is “someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”

Yes, I certainly have my own misgivings about our commander’s . . . er, cognitive skills. How can a man incompetent to stand trial possibly be competent to preside over the federal government?

Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House counsel Richard Sauber expressed their own doubts “that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”

“Appropriate”?

They claim “a lack of recall” is “a commonplace occurrence among witnesses.”

If not leaders of the free world.

Is our major party choice for president going to be between a sitting chief executive who cannot be charged for criminal conduct because he is “not all there” and one who can be and is being prosecuted, strangely disadvantaged by his pre-octogenarian mental acuity?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship Regulating Protest

Home of the Surveilled 

surveillance, banking, Congress, government, privacy

Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.

In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?

Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.

It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.

FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.

On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up. 

Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.

Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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