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Accountability ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Listen to the Warm

Greta

I like publicity stunts as much as the next activist. But haven’t we had enough of the whole Greta Thunberg bit yet?

On Wednesday, the 16-year-old Swede provided testimony on an apt stage, let us grant her that — the U.S. House of Representatives’ foreign affairs subcommittee joint hearing on the global youth climate change movement. 

She didn’t prepare any remarks, though. She merely “attached” the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming “as her testimony.” Her rationale? “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists.” And “to unite behind science.”

You know, for “real action.”

It was what happened right after she demanded “real action,” though, where the stark reality of the situation became clear: a grown man in a suit, elected to Congress, asked, “Could you expand on why it’s so important to listen to the science?”

And then the non-scientist spoke . . . not very expansively.

 Forget that science qua science isn’t to be “listened to,” it is to be engaged in, with conjectures, research and refutations. (There was nothing like that at the hearing.) Forget also that the science is increasingly less clear on the severity of what warming we see. Remember only that an elected official used a girl to imbue a text (the IPCC report) with moral legitimacy, dubbing it “best available ‘united science’” — the better to push an unargued-for massive coercive government intervention into the life of our civilization.

Is no adult in the room ashamed of what they are doing . . . exploiting a cute youngster to subvert rationality?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Greta

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judiciary national politics & policies Popular Second Amendment rights

Packing

Beto

“Are you proposing taking away their guns?” 

“I am,” replied former Texas Congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke to ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir’s question. If, anyway, “it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.” 

“Hell, yes,” he added, later in last week’s Democratic presidential debate.

“We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Yesterday, I noted that U.S. Senator Kamala Harris seemed oblivious to any consideration of the constitutional rights of citizens to “bear arms.” Today, consider the constitutional work-around both Democrat presidential contenders support. You see, when they talk about confiscating your guns, they do not intend to go to all the hard work of changing the law of the land. They plan, instead, merely to change the High Court — something the president, with a majority of Congress, can do — and have the new justices re-visit the legal interpretation.

O’Rourke “spoke openly after launching his run,” informs Politico, “about expanding the high court to as many as 15 judges.” Fox News reported that he “is open to making drastic changes to fundamentally reshape the Supreme Court — essentially court-packing, with a twist.”

The “twist” is the scheme that I wrote about in March. In a bizarre nod to bipartisanship, O’Rourke would have Republicans select five justices, Democrats select five more, and then have those ten judges select yet another five. 

Only tradition and public opinion have kept the highest court in the land from previous hijackings.

Is Republican opposition all that stands in the way now?

Gives a whole new meaning to the question: Are you packing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Beto

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education and schooling national politics & policies Popular too much government

Biden Under the Bed

Joe Biden, bed, monsters, record player, black child,

Former Vice-President Joe Biden was put on the spot, again, about race. During last Thursday’s presidential candidates’ debate, ABC newscaster Lindsey Davis asked what responsibility Americans should “take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”

Triple, Biden said, “the amount of money we spend. . . .”

On “very poor schools, the Title I schools.”

From $15 to $45 billion a year.

Dodging the reparations question, he offered a four-part plan for educating poor children that was very . . . educational. 

Biden’s second solution is “make sure that we . . . help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home.” 

Send in more psychologists!

Step three is to “make sure that . . . 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School.”

Sounds like forcing every parent to put their 3-year-old into school. Or just “poor” 3-year-olds? Neither sounds good.

If my elementary school math still holds, next comes policy objective No. 4. 

And it’s a doozy. 

“We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children,” Sleepy Joe declared. Because as he explained “they”— wealth-challenged parents — “don’t know quite what to do.”

But Biden does. “Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words.” 

The former VEEP explained that children from “a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get [to school].”

Language skills matter. But do we really want the next president to station a social worker under every kid’s bed to make sure the record player isn’t skipping?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Joe Biden, bed, monsters, record player, black child,

Illustration adapted from an image by Rusty Clark

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An Opportunity to Forgo

national unity, war, peace, nationalism,

“We just marked the anniversary of 9/11.” 

That’s what Democratic presidential aspirant and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg reminded last night’s debate audience. “All day today, I’ve been thinking about September 12th, the way it felt when for a moment we came together as a country.”

The terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon, and the attempt foiled by brave citizens who were killed in the crash of their airliner in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, did indeed result in a wonderful bond of unity throughout our country.

Having lost more than 3,000 citizens, we came together.

“Imagine,” instructs Buttigieg, “if we had been able to sustain that unity.”

Before we all sing along with John Lennon, though, consider: (1) It is not so easy for government to re-create the sort of public horror, fear, grief, etc., necessary to ensure maximum national unity, and (2) please don’t try. 

The purpose of government is not to produce a pressure-cooker society where we forever exist on a wartime footing.

Do you miss the good old days of World War II? Totalitarianism threatened much of the globe; 70 million people died in the war. But it unified our country, which defeated Nazism, fascism, and a murderous empire.

We must memorialize the victory, not repeat it . . . just for unity’s sake. 

Yet the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocosio-Cortez (D-NY) states that “the House of Representatives recognizes that a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal is a historic opportunity. . . .”

Opportunity? 

Our motto should be ‘Liberty’ — not ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’ 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Labor’s Holiday

Haymarket Riot

Most of us celebrate Labor Day by not working. Labor and celebration being distinct, this is not really as funny as it may sound.

The celebration became federal law in the late 19th century, a time beset by “labor unrest” and “agitation.” At least two major violent incidents at that time can help us understand the origins of our Labor Day, and reduce the current collective blood pressure.

The date of the first was May 4, 1886, a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago that went very bad. This Haymarket Affair is one of those handful of stories in our high school history books we tend to remember, involving bombs, deaths, anarchists, hasty prosecution, hangings, pardons, and much more. People still argue about who is to blame. What we don’t argue with is the aftermath: the Second International of communist and socialist parties chose, in 1889, the ancient celebratory day of May 1 to commemorate the Haymarket riot as “International Workers’ Day.”

It has come to be known as “Labor Day” in some countries.

But other, less radical labor activists had already pushed a Labor Day for their cities and states before Haymarket, and they had chosen early September as the proper time for a celebration of “the working man.” A majority of states had enacted early September labor holidays by 1894.

In June of 1894, Congress passed legislation making the first Monday of September “Labor’s Holiday.”

President Grover Cleveland signed the bill into law mere days after the Pullman Strike ended — with a not quite universal judgment that he had mishandled it. Cleveland’s intervention in the strike led to a higher body count and more property damage than the Haymarket riot. That being said, it does not appear to have moved President Cleveland as much as you might think — he did not spearhead the Labor Holiday legislation, and his signature is not as important as it may seem, since congressional support was high enough to override any veto.

Associated then with activism to increase the economic and legal power of unions, to this day the official Labor Day in September serves as an alternative to the more radical celebrations in May. But both seem antiquated, now. Our alleged “radicals” today have shifted their focus from labor remuneration and working conditions to providing to workers and non-workers alike free stuff. 

And union participation in America, which waxed up until about the time I was born, has waned since. Only the government worker segment is heavily unionized today.

Nowadays, Labor Day has about the same symbolic and political significance as Arbor Day.

The most important lesson may be this: we talk about how divided the country is, politically and culturally. But the level of foment is not nearly as violent as it was when Labor Day became a national holiday.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

Haymarket Riot

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national politics & policies Popular responsibility U.S. Constitution

Congress’s King

King of Diamonds, King Donald, Donald Trump, trade, tariff, power,

Politics today reveals a troubling dialectic.

Thesis: President Trump boasts that he is going to unilaterally “do something” as if he were Emperor, not President. 

Antithesis: Then comes pushback from political opponents and the media, castigating our current commander-in-chief for imagining himself a lawless dictator. 

Synthesis: This is soon followed, however, by the discovery that the president does have such awesome power. 

Legally.

In our constitutional system, can a president can just wake up one day and slap tariffs on imports? Well, numbskulls in Congress passed a law handing the president that specific power.

When President Trump declared an emergency to re-direct money, appropriated by Congress for different purposes, toward building the Wall, many argued that the president cannot usurp Congress’s undisputed power of the purse. True, but irrelevant. Congress had indeed delegated all these undefined and largely unchecked “emergency” powers to the prez.

Last week, as the trade war with China was coming to a boil, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”*

I thought, “Does Trump really think he has the legal authority to order all U.S. businesses to leave China?”

Yes . . . and apparently he does. It’s called The International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

“One of the enduring phenomena of the Trump era,” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN, “is going to be the list of statutes that give far too much power to the President, but that many didn’t used to worry about — assuming there’d be political safeguards.”

Or that “the right person” would always be in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Note that Mr. Trump did not order the companies to leave, but did assert his “absolute right” to do so.

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King of Diamonds, King Donald, Donald Trump, trade, tariff, power,

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And Then There Were 20-Something

MIke Gravel, president, candidate, war, draft,

The media won’t have my favorite Democratic presidential candidate to kick around anymore. 

“Mike Gravel drops out of 2020 race,” Vox headlined Catherine Kim’s report. “He never wanted to be president anyway.” A subhead continued: “The former Alaska senator simply ran to get other candidates to talk about American imperialism.”

It was largely a Twitter campaign, which, as The New York Times featured months ago, was run by two teenagers, David Oks and Henry Williams. “It wasn’t exactly a bid for the presidency,” the paper cautioned, “but neither was it really a prank.”

The goal? Launch Gravel — and, moreover, his issues — onto the debate stage. Though the campaign garnered enough individual donors to qualify, his lackluster polling results kept the former U.S. Senator out of prime time.

During the Vietnam War, Sen. Gravel worked to end the military draft and had the courage to read the Pentagon Papers into the Senate record in order to inform the public about the war. After leaving the Senate, Gravel continued his battle against U.S. military intervention, as well as advocating for initiative and referendum.

Back in 2008, in another quixotic presidential bid, he succeeded getting into the debates, lobbing in a few much-needed zingers. He was 77-years-old then; today he is 89.

Oks’ and Williams’ “real goal was to inject Gravel’s far-left views,”  informed FiveThirtyEight.com, “into the primary.”

Though I disagree with Mike Gravel on a number of his “far-left” issues — and for endorsing Bernie Sanders for president — he has my utmost respect. 

And if “ending ‘imperialist’ wars, legalizing drugs and enacting dramatic political reforms” be “far left,” make the most of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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MIke Gravel, president, candidate, war, draft,

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Strange Days

swing, space, weird, ufo, aliens, strange,

We live in a strange time when a possible official UFO disclosure by the government doesn’t seem strange at all.

What’s odd is one of the two major American political parties proudly talking up socialism.

What’s weird is the increasing financial instability of the country’s top two social programs, Medicare and Social Security, while Americans seem unworried and politicians push not to shore the programs up, but expand them.

What’s bizarre is over $22 trillion in federal debt, and the current president and Congress piling on ever more with new trillion-dollar deficits.

What’s strange is . . . well, OK: UFO disclosure is a bit strange.

It is worth noting that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have unearthed quite a lot of information on UFOs already. When FOIA mechanisms were first set up, no one expected the avalanche of requests that would be related to UFOs. But that is what happened — and they haven’t dredged up nothing.

When President Trump was asked about the issue by George Stephanopoulos, his response was dismissive, however. “People are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”

Like me, he probably has seen nothing first-hand, experienced nothing. But by now he has surely been briefed.

Or has the de facto Deep State coup attempt against his presidency entailed keeping him in the dark?

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, running for Trump’s job, told YouTuber Joe Rogan that he would pass on whatever he might learn about UFOs if president. “Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?”

Yet even that is not the strangest thing Sanders has said.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

swing, space, weird, ufo, aliens, strange,

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Courage and Wisdom?

gun violence, gun control, law, mass shooting, 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump,

President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals. 

“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.

But how useful are these?

  1. The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
  2. Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
  3. Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse . . . made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
  4. Denying “dangerous individuals . . . access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
  5. Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?

But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds. 

And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”

Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?

If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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gun violence, gun control, law, mass shooting, 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump,

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Into and Out of the Muck

Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, debate, prosecuter, criminal justice, reform,

Yesterday I referenced “pigs flying” . . . and Icarus’s waxed-wing fail. 

Today, it’s just about the muck.

Now, I am on the road and definitely not catching every word of the Democratic debates. But amidst much nonsense and embarrassment — and there was a lot of it, from what I can tell, not excluding the much-googled New Agey blather of Oprah’s favorite guru, Ms. Marianne Williamson — one exhange stood out: Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s takedown of Kamala Harris’s shockingly punitive and ugly career as a prosecuting attorney.

Now, Rep. Gabbard snuck in her attack* on Harris in place of answering a question about Harris’s own sneak attack, in the previous debate round, on former U. S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden’s 1970s’ opposition to mandatory bussing. Gabbard ably shifted away from dealing at all with Sleepy Joe — who is a buzzkill and soon-to-be buzzard lunch. She deflected, addressing, instead, a real issue, Kamala Harris as callous crime-fighter. 

This shows that Gabbard is developing real politicians’ chops — if you cannot carefully answer a question different from the one asked, you aren’t a true [sic] politician in America.

After the debate, the two candidates took further whacks at each other. The Jezebel article I consulted used the metaphor of “wrestling match” rather than my pigs-in-muck figure, but we are talking about the same thing.

But note, Rep. Gabbard is always calm and well-spoken. She seems able to descend into the muck and coming out without too much stink.

Does this give her an advantage over Donald Trump?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana: she blocked evidence . . . that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so; she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. . . .” etc.

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Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, debate, prosecuter, criminal justice, reform,

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