Category: national politics & policies

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The New Non-Normal

Joe Biden MAGA speech

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today,” President Joe Biden offered last night, “is not normal.”

You can say that again!

“A crowd of about 300 invited guests — a mix of elected officials and dignitaries, along with Democratic supporters,” reported CNN, “watched Biden speak” at Independence Hall in Philadelphia “from behind panes of bulletproof glass.” 

The president said some other things with which I agree.

“There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever,” Mr. Biden intoned. Well, “ever” goes just a tad too far. After all, the American Revolution was violence. But generally, yes, Joe is right that “we can’t allow violence to be normalized.”

Which is why he should call out the political violence that occurred throughout the summer of 2020 as well as that of January 6th. 

Biden spoke against “the politics of grievance” and those who “obsess about the past.” But golly gee whiz, does Biden really want to alienate his Critical Race Theorist fan base?

“You can’t love your country only when you win” an election, he argued. Hasn’t that been an equal opportunity foible for both Rs and Ds — considering the 2016 as well as 2020 presidential results!

Losing the battle for the economy of the nation, Mr. Biden is looking for Campaign 2022 to be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” But making sweeping attacks about all who favor Trump being “semi-fascists” has led even Democrats like U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan to criticize Biden.

“They refuse to accept the will of the people,” the president said of so-called MAGA Republicans. “They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

Sadly, that applies to both parties as well.

“Get engaged,” Biden implored the audience. “Vote, vote, vote!”

Well . . . maybe just vote once.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights First Amendment rights general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Just a Board Whose Intentions Were Good?

Homeland Security, censorship, spying, social networks, free speech, disinformation

They say it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

The Department of Homeland Security has caved and is now closing its new Disinformation Governance Board. Critics had been disinformatively saying that the board would probably be used for censorious purposes.

Au contraire, says DHS — even though the board was originally headed by an exponent of countering wrongthink about such matters as the “alleged” Hunter Biden laptop. No. Per DHS, this board really, truly, deep down, supposedly had only benign intentions.

When announcing the shutdown, DHS also announced that it has a bridge to sell you.

(Gotcha! DHS didn’t announce anything about a bridge. That’s just a bit of disinformation that I perpetrated with the help of my woefully abused First Amendment–protected freedom of speech!)

In May, DHS Secretary Mayorkas insisted that the board was no threat to free speech. The point was to address threats “without infringing on free speech.” Rather, the board would be doing things like disputing the strangely persuasive misinformation that the U.S. now has an open southern border.

Even early on, though, the board had been planning to coordinate its anti-disinformative efforts with Big Tech social media firms, which have been censoring on behalf of government. And various government officials will still be working to delegate the nuts and bolts of violating the First Amendment to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. No letup on that front in sight.

DHS may be ending its ill-named board. But beware: its spirit and agenda live on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: This board was previously discussed in these pages on May 2, in “Homeland Censorship Board.”

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deficits and debt folly national politics & policies

Relief Spelled S-U-B-S-I-D-Y

Joe Biden, emergency, inflation, student loans

In a bid to bail out the sinking ship of his party, President Joe Biden has decided he can go ahead and bail out Americans who are having trouble paying off their student loans.

Yesterday he announced that (quoting The Epoch Times) “his administration will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off $10,000 in federal student loan debt for some borrowers,” with the Education Department giving the specifics: “individuals earning less than $125,000 a year or families earning less than $250,000 will be eligible for up to $10,000 in debt cancellation.” Pell Grant recipients in the same situation will be eligible for relief of up to twice as much.

The politic nature of the move is so obvious that . . . it isn’t getting enough attention from critics. 

Most of those alarmed at the move concentrate on the unfairness: rewarding those who have not met their obligations and thereby penalizing those who have. Defenders of student debt relief make the usual arguments about the need to help the under-privileged — by giving them more privilege (if anything’s a privilege it is to be able to take out a loan and then not pay it back).

You may be wondering how a president can authorize spending billions of dollars. Isn’t that Congress’s job? Well, the administration has found a semi-plausible excuse — from Congress: a 2003 higher education law that allows the Education Department to provide relief in response to a national emergency. 

And what is the emergency?

Pick one. Inflation, for example.

Which is spurred by overspending.

Which an extra $250 billion will merely increase.

You gotta wonder: isn’t it college graduates who cook up this stuff?

It’s ‘We the People’ who deserve not relief but a full refund.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The 7 Percenters

voting machine, term limits, democracy, voters, voting

Forget “the one percent.” I want to know about the seven percent.

Last month, the Gallup polling outfit asked Americans about our confidence level in Congress. Did we have “a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little”?

Unlike the 93 percent of us with firing brain synapses, there appeared an enigmatic seven percent, folks who actually confessed to harboring “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of faith in that cabal of corrupt careerists legislating loquaciously in our nation’s Capitol.

It takes all kinds, I guess. The shadowy, slow-witted, and ill-informed must show up in statistics somewhere, right?

Granted, only five percent of Republicans expressed that much cockeyed confidence; it was six percent a year ago. Trusting Democrats hit double-digits, with ten percent believing congressional bull, a fall from the 17 percent hornswoggled in 2021.

Gullible independents came in at the overall average — seven percent — a decrease of five percentage points from last year, when 12 percent clutched a false sense of security regarding our federal legislature.

Among a long list of American institutions, Congress roused the absolute least confidence. Odd that we feel worse about the people we elect to represent us than those we have little if any direct responsibility for or control over.

This must change.

We desperately need term limits. And the competitive elections brought by creating smaller districts where grassroots campaigns employing shoe-leather can compete with the big money and special interest power behind professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption national politics & policies

Thin Blue Nonsense

Justice, thin blue line, Themis, scales of Justice

What did Vice President Mike Pence learn from the Trump years?

Perhaps, that his 2016 ploy to ratchet up his career backfired . . . when his running mate actually won?

Thank goodness, he followed normal procedures in January 2020, rejecting then-President Donald J. Trump’s pleas to send back to the states the Electoral College slates. 

In a recent speech at St. Anselm’s College, the former Vice President advised fellow Republicans not to overreact to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Mr. Pence insists that Republicans “can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI.”

That sounds about right, until you read the rest of Pence’s remarks. “The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who stand on the thin blue line at the federal and state and local level, and these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”

Has Pence lost “the plot”? The FBI has a long history of abusing the rule of law. While leaders are rightly blamed — J. Edgar Hoover used his agency to create a vast spy-and-blackmail network — they have not worked alone to do flagrantly unconstitutional things. After all, remember in October of 2020, the Bureau made headlines foiling a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. The plot was concocted by multiple agents, who worked mightily to entrap members of a citizen militia into going along with it.*

Pence surely remembers that the FBI agents who conspired against the Trump administration were breathtakingly partisan, lying and concocting documents to perform what amounts to an attempted coup d’etat. 

It’s not a “law and order” outfit if its most consequential actions illegally serve partisan political purposes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* These G-men and G-women were consenting adults — consenting not only to the politics of such entrapment, but also to engaging in sexual acts to get their way. 

Note: Two defendants in the Michigan conspiracy case are now being retried, after the jury in their first trial could not reach a verdict.

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international affairs national politics & policies

Survival Disallowed?

climate change, transition, science, starvation, poverty

By their assault on farming in the Netherlands, those who would sacrifice humanity on the altar of Mother Nature have given a big clue of how far they will go . . . to make our lives harder. 

Pretty darn far.

Will Dutch farmers be forced out of business? Will others face skyrocketing food prices, hunger, even starvation? 

Yet the elites say: So what? “It’s a transition.”

Livestock produce ammonia. Ammonia must be stopped. Whaddyagonnado?

We’re under assault in the U.S., too. Even if the attacks don’t always top the headlines and energy producers have yet to blockade roads en masse. 

Specifically, the Legal Insurrection blog calls our attention to three new governmental obstacles to energy production:

  • The federal government is pausing oil and gas leases on 2.2 million acres of Colorado land to permit more study of environmental impact.
  • A federal judge is re-imposing a ban on the sale of coal on federal lands to permit more study of environmental impact.
  • The federal government is stopping a pipeline to transport gas from Idaho to Wyoming to permit more study of environmental impact.

If this goes on, sooner or later people without AC or heat will be rioting against utilities and gas stations . . . as Biden and the rest pretend that high prices and low supplies are caused by evil entrepreneurial greed.

Every election day we will have another chance, sort of, to stop the insanity. Meanwhile, we can at least stop pretending that this is not happening.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Natural Immunity We Need

CDC guidelines

“This is two years too late,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “but it’s a good step.”

Interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is talking about new official COVID-19 guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC no longer recommends

  • the six-foot “social distancing” rule, which led to maximum comfort for paranoiacs, introverts, and Scandinavians in supermarkets and other public spaces;
  • that the unvaccinated quarantine after exposure;
  • testing for the asymptomatic; and
  • contact tracing outside of hospitals and places like nursing homes.

Bhattacharya’s interpretation of all this is that the “CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words.”

Much of the new regimen is the result of understanding that natural immunity is a huge factor in the epidemiology of the disease. Bhattacharya’s complaint is that this has always been the case, and that the CDC and government lockdowners should have recognized this early on.

While the expert class has inflicted much damage, the CDC continues to whistle past the graveyard. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation,” the author of the new guidelines insists, “with more tools — like vaccination, boosters, and treatments — to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-19.” 

But to get those mediocre-at-best vaccines past regulatory hurdles, government-directed medicine suppressed information about (and public discussion of) the most basic tools we have to treat new diseases. Governments at many levels, along with social media companies and CNN and many doctoring outfits, actively suppressed a number of treatments that could have saved lives, with HCQ and Ivermectin being only the most infamous.

The natural immunity we need to encourage most is skepticism toward government bureaucrats and Big Pharma flacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

The Act That Can’t Cut It

Trump, raid

During Donald John Trump’s time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he expressed his displeasure with some documents by tearing them up.

Which is illegal, as CNN takes pains to make clear. His underlings would then scoop up the shreds of paper and tape them together. 

Keyword: farcical.

This comedy might be funny to watch in a sequel to, say, In the Loop, the 2009 political satire. But it’s not so funny in the current iteration, with the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.

The search for documents “illegally removed from the White House” has seems an obviously political ploy. Since Trump was legally allowed to de-classify documents, his taking of allegedly still-classified docs seem, well, a rather trivial matter.

Keyword: petty.

Right-leaning media and the left-ensconced media talk about all this very differently, of course, and I confess to finding the former a little more convincing than the latter. Focusing on documentation seems like an excuse to find some petty thing to disqualify Trump from running again in 2024.

While Trump not running again might be the best thing for the GOP, and America, that’s not really relevant: Republicans are stuck with the one champion, with few decent alternatives, and Democrats are in worse shape. Which is why they fret about Trump.

Using the Presidential Records Act of 1978 as a disqualifier for a Grover Clevelandesque re-run of a defeated president is on everybody’s lips. But there’s a problem: how could it possibly pass constitutional muster? The Constitution specifies the qualifications for the job. Congress cannot add or subtract to those qualifications by law.

That was the argument used to disqualify term limits in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton: qualifications for candidates were specified in the Constitution. Neither states nor Congress could change it.

If Democrats seek to breach this principle . . . then let’s look at term limits again.

Keywords: do it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies social media

Receding From the Facts

fact check, media, truth, lie

Thesis: we’re entering recession, but the Biden administration disagrees.

For political reasons.

May we discuss?

Sure, here in Common Sense. (We’ve yet to censor or flag ourselves.) Big Tech social media is a different story.

Loath to preside over an officially designated recession, the Biden administration suggests that when you look at all the data in just the right light, it’s “unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year — even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter — indicates a recession.”

Others disagree, saying the familiar definition cannot be so summarily dispatched. On Instagram, poster Graham Allen cheekily asked Siri how we know it’s a recession. Her reply: “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

Not a sacrosanct indicator, but standard.

Enter the Guardians of Discourse. 

Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) has flagged Allen’s post as “false information” and in some cases prevented viewers from seeing it.

The “independent” fact checker on duty was Politifact, which warned Web surfers it just ain’t so that “the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession.”

This is where we’re at. Discussion of political motives at the White House has become so hazardous that the People of the Fact Check must rush to repudiate any intimation that any assiduous politics is going on. It’s all just assiduous data comparison.

Well, reality check: “fact checks” can be biased too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

A Mad Cycle

gun free zone, 2nd Amendment, guns, gun control. US Constitution

The cycle runs like this:

  1. Some (usually young) man shoots a number of people in a gun-free zone;
  2. Media people whip their viewers into a frenzy about the need for “common sense gun control laws” or a complete gun ban;
  3. Politicians scurry to “do something.”

Despite the fact that the Uvalde and Indianapolis mall shootings suggest contrary policies, Congress has just produced a law that actually takes a step . . . in the wrong direction, adding more penalties, for example, on top of existing penalties for convicted felons caught in possession of firearms.*

“Contrary to what you may have read or heard, the story of how that happened is not an inspiring example of bipartisan cooperation to protect public safety,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “It is a dispiriting illustration of how the worst instincts of both major parties combine to produce policies that are neither just nor sensible.”

The deal gave R’s tougher sentences and D’s more gun control, and “both got to pretend they were doing something to prevent mass shootings.”

Not addressed? The insane policy, originally pushed by one Senator Joe Biden, of “gun-free zones.” As anyone with common sense knows, bad guys who want to make a statement by killing lots of people, prefer gun-free zones to other areas.

A more subtle aspect of the cycle is how the topic of gun legislation, as handled by politicians and major media propagandists, itself elicits broken men to break the law and kill, kill, kill.

What if the best way to break the cycle would be to accept the Second Amendment as a given and spurn every demagogue in Congress and the media who persists on defying the Constitution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Neither the Uvalde nor the Indianapolis shooter were convicted felons.

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