Category: national politics & policies

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folly general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Faucists on the March

Fauci, fascist, authoritarian, Covid

While many experts, including Southwest Airline’s CEO, think that the air filtration systems on jetliners are so good that wearing protective face coverings (“masks”) is pointless, our Doctor Anthony Fauci will have none of it.

When the National Institutes of Health head honcho and Big Pharma Pusher No. 1 was asked about whether we can ditch masks on airplanes, he responded predictably: no. “I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step. . . .” He says that even with first-rate filtration systems, “masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

This was on ABC News’s This Week on Sunday. 

“As Christmas approaches, COVID-19 again threatens to upend American life, driving the spread, Omicron,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl narrated. “At least 43 states now have confirmed cases of the latest and by far most contagious variant yet. On Saturday alone, New York state reported nearly 22,000 new COVID cases, breaking a single-day record set just the day before.” And then Karl mentioned total COVID deaths in the United States — but not the number of Omicron deaths. 

See how the propaganda is pitched? The breathless relaying of statistics, but nothing like a sense of the science.

Contra Fauci, these once-discouraged and now-forever-exalted masks are not nearly as effective as made out. And they have severe “unintended” effects.

I put marks around “unintended” because for some people in power, the psychological effects of mandatory masks in a situation of perpetual or seasonal alarm might be the whole point: the inducement of a mass delusional psychosis. How very fascist.

We can appreciate the name “Fauci” both by rhyme and reason: Faucism is medical fascism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies social media

Should I Sue?

Senator Amy Klobuchar, censorship

Well, why not? According to some politicians, I have a perfect right to. 

But, you ask, on what grounds?

Because of the emotional injury I suffer when I listen to these bozos.

Legislation being considered in Congress would permit social-media companies to be sued for causing physical or “severe emotional injury,” a provision of the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act.

This legislation would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so as to make Internet service providers liable if they algorithmically recommend content that results in “severe emotional injury to any person.”

The text of the legislation is — you guessed it! — vague and murky. And would doubtless be applied with extreme selectivity if enacted.

Other bills being pondered would tackle things like “health misinformation.” Senator Amy Klobuchar declares that it is “our responsibility to take action.” 

Uh, what action?

The action of penalizing social media for inadequately censoring those with whom the senator disagrees.

Such rationalizations of assaults on freedom of speech are severely emotionally injurious to me.

Will I sue? Nah. I wouldn’t win. I doubt I would be one of the ones allowed to collect such bounties. Nor would any successfully passed legislation ever permit congressmen to be sued for their own psyche-pummeling lies, psy-ops, and blather.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s wrong to seek to penalize others merely for exercising freedom of speech, no matter how lousy or dispiriting that speech.

Lousy legislation, though — yes. If only we could sue for that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Packing Unpacked

Supreme Court, Justice, court packing

The “court packing” notion that progressives itch to implement has obvious flaws — which have been addressed (but not settled) in the recent report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, initiated by the Biden Administration last April. 

The report, just out, did not give progressives what they want. “Opponents contend that expanding — or ‘packing’ — the Court would significantly diminish its independence and legitimacy and establish a dangerous precedent that could be used by any future political force as a means of pressuring or intimidating the Court. The Commission takes no position on the validity or strength of these claims.” 

Not a few Democrats wanted the Commission to take a very negative position on those claims. Democrats currently maintain a shaky hold on power in the Legislative and Executive branches. Had the Commission given them the green-light to push progressives onto the Court — to overwhelm the current “conservative” majority — they might have consolidated power.

The report is inconvenient for that political move — as is Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s opposition. Damon Root, at Reason, summarizes Breyer’s case: “It is a tit-for-tat race to the bottom. One party expands the size of the bench for nakedly partisan purposes, so the other party does the same (or worse) as soon as it gets the chance.” Breyer fears that court-packing would undermine Court authority, and liberalism itself would suffer.

By “liberalism” I take Breyer to mean the order that is defined by the Constitution itself: separation of powers, basic rights, citizen control of government. And there is a way to save this kind of “liberalism”: fix the size of the Supreme Court in the Constitution.

The very opposite of court packing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Commie Beyond the Pale

Saule Omarova

President Biden has a funny way of admitting that his nominee for Comptroller of the Currency had to withdraw for being, well, too communist. He says Saule Omarova faced “inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.”

Is calling a communist a communist . . . personal? 

As for “inappropriate” . . . negative attacks against an appointee are only inapt if groundless or unrelated to prospective performance.

Ominously, Omarova’s paper on Marxism got memory-holed after she was nominated; she refused to cough it up to the Senate Banking Committee. Written back in her college days in the USSR — was that too long ago to serve as fair evidence?

Fast-forward.

An undated but recent video clip shows Omarova musing that oil companies should “go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.”

A 2019 Twitter tweet opines: “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”

Mass murder, mass repression — but hey, no gender pay gap!

In a 2020 paper, “The People’s Ledger,” Omarova proposed “a structural shift at the very core” of the current system. The Fed balance sheet “should be redesigned to operate as . . . the ‘People’s Ledger’: the ultimate public platform for both modulating and allocating the flow of sovereign credit and money in the national system.”

Central bank accounts would “fully replace — rather than uneasily co-exist with — private bank deposits.”

Not sure what that means, precisely? No wonder: slogging through the paper, we find vagueness — maybe even evasion. My guess: it’s all about massively increasing control over our wallets and lives.

Typical, but not just of Marxists, of the Washington elite more broadly. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship tax policy

Billionaires Backed Better

billionaire, Democrat, taxes

It’s a cliché of politics that the Republican Party is The Party of the Rich while the Democrats serve the Poor and Downtrodden.

But were that true, why so many Democratic billionaires?

And why is President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation offering the top income quintile a tax cut worth billions and billions?

At issue is a “$285 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively benefit high-income households over the next five years,” write Alyssa Fowers and Simon Ducroquet in the pages of The Washington Post. “The measure would allow households to increase their deduction from state and local taxes from $10,000 to $80,000 through 2026, and then impose a new deduction cap through 2031.”

“It’s the second-most expensive item” — when figured in budgeting terms, not merely in outlays.

True to form, Democrats promise that it would raise revenue, actually — eventually. In time-honored procrastination fashion, the legislation jiggers with the deduction cap over time, decreasing the cap in the future. A typical (and easy to re-jigger) politicians’ ploy.

What this is all about is subsidizing the rich in high-tax “blue states” — politically protecting Democrats in California and New York, to name the most obvious two, allowing them to pretend to “soak the rich” and “help the poor,” and decreasing the incentive in those states for the rich to leave for lower-tax environments, like Texas and Florida.

Arguably, these “SALT” caps are the worst sort of tax break possible, since they are regional (affecting different states differently) and even partisan. Not to mention regressive.

Instead of “Build Back Better,” the Biden plan should be dubbed the “Failed State Bailout.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Senatorial Suppressor

Elizabeth Warren, censorship, 1st Amendment, free speech

The brazenness of governmental assaults on freedom of speech continues apace.

In addition to “aggressive IRS scrutiny” of conservative groups, using campaign finance regulations to suppress speech, and FBI raids on homes of perpetrators of journalism, we are seeing government officials openly demand that private firms suppress speech.

In September, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Amazon chastising it for promoting books that contradict the government line about matters pandemical.

One target of Warren’s finger-wagging is The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.

I don’t know how cogent it is. I’m willing to let the authors make their case.

Not Senator Warren.

In her public letter, she rebukes Amazon for being “unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the sale of falsehoods . . . .” That’s a lot of book-warehouse-burning implicitly rationalized. How many classics of Western civilization contain falsehoods? Not to mention the I Ching.

Now the authors and publisher of The Truth About COVID-19 have sued Warren for acting to violate the First Amendment by proxy. Their filing cites a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that politicians violate the First Amendment when telling booksellers that selling certain books may be “unlawful.” Exactly what Warren does in her letter.

As that Court put it, “people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.” 

Let’s hope that today’s Supreme Court recognizes the same reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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judiciary national politics & policies too much government

Emergency Effrontery

Joe Biden, Covid, Vaccines

The ruling was hardly shocking. Most constitutional scholars expected it, I think. That being said, the whole business is . . . shocking.

I refer to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals coming down hard against the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate.

Say those words, “vaccine mandate,” reflecting on how it was “enacted” — not by act of Congress — and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s tortured justification for forcing private companies seems doomed.

At least if the Constitution retains any of its meaning.

“The stay,” explains Reason editor Jacob Sullum, “which the court issued on Friday evening, says OSHA shall ‘take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.’ It is officially a preliminary pause ‘pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.’ But the court left little doubt that it would grant those motions, saying ‘petitioners’ challenges to the Mandate show a great likelihood of success on the merits.’”

The administration’s desperate shoehorning of OSHA’s statutory ability to concoct an “emergency temporary standard” (ETS) is an act of effrontery. 

Sullum, in his detailed coverage, shows just how extraordinary and inapt the reliance upon the ETS is. The COVID-19 crisis cannot justify the mandate through the legal mechanism chosen. It is fairly obvious that, as the court put it, Biden’s decree “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”

Sullum quotes another judge’s concurring opinion to the effect that even a congressionally legislated mandate would be controversial, constitutionally.

But breathe easy: Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s Congress has no interest in creating a rational and constitutional response to the crisis.

And our Congress? Well, it doesn’t exist.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

One Against the Mandate?

Daily Wire, law suit, Covid, vaccines, mandates

“President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health,” declares Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of The Daily Wire. “They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”

Quoted by Alex Swoyer in The Washington Examiner, Boreing is explaining why his company — best known for its platforming (as we say these days) of commentators Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh, but also for its burgeoning news service and mini-entertainment empire — will not comply with “the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers.”

It is “suing in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the company announced Thursday,” Swoyer reports.

Though we’ve been hearing about these “requirements” for over a month, they were published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) just yesterday. Folks at The Daily Wire had been talking up their challenge ever since Biden first dropped his bomb, and had their legal response ready.

OSHA’s mandate, Swoyer explains, “directs large companies to require employees to get vaccinated by Jan. 4, or else pay for them to get tested weekly,” and also requires those tested-but-unvaccinated employees “to wear a face mask.”

Note that the tests for the coronavirus are not reliable, tests for antibodies are not even mentioned (and also not reliable), and face mask utility has not been demonstrated to anything approaching certainty, as I’ve discussed.

Grounds for challenge are legion.

Other affected companies should join The Daily Wire with parallel lawsuits, or at least amicus briefs.

The president’s mandate must not stand. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Taiwan in Two Words

Taipei, Taiwan, China, freedom

“Two words from Taiwan’s leader threaten to upend U.S.-China ties,” headlined The Japan Times’ story.

Weeks ago, China’s totalitarian leader Xi Jinping mentioned his itch for peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.* Or else. No pause in his warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, nor withdrawal of the continual threat of military invasion. 

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered that the two countries were “not subordinate” to each other — which deeply hurt Xi’s feelings because . . . well, his Chinazis have their hearts set on subordinating Taiwan. In fact, the only thing preventing that deadly, freedom-suffocating Sino-subordination is the united weight — military and economic — of allied countries.

Japan, for instance. And the European Union, too — which just voted to deepen ties to Taiwan, ignoring Beijing’s demand to shun the island nation. 

At a CNN “town hall” last week, President Joe Biden vowed the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Diplomatic folk tried to walk that back to “strategic ambiguity,” but billions of Asians heard him say it.  

“To whom does Taiwan belong?” asked Pat Buchanan earlier this year, in a column trudging through 70 years of weaselly-worded communiqués and diplomatic understandings.

But comedian John Oliver counters that “people who aren’t Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit f***ing played out, historically.”

“So maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it’s some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them,” he concluded on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. “Because the fact is Taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the Red Menace, nor is it some island-sized Viagra to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Taiwan is 23 million people who, in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit.”

Let’s call it: Not subordinate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Since Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China, there can be no prefix “re” in the threatened unification — by missiles and machine guns. 

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Settled Science

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, covid, gain of function

Remember the blow-up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-of-function research? 

Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right. . . .”*

Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”

Might? 

Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function. 

Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.

NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported . . . in April 2018.”

“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

Is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google. 

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