Category: national politics & policies

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media and media people national politics & policies subsidy

Trump vs. Big Bird

NPR, PBS, Big Bird, public television, public radio,

For decades, taxpayers have been forced to fund PBS and NPR, and with them any political tilts that we disagree with.

For decades, some lawmakers have nominally agreed that taxpayers should be liberated from this unchosen obligation.

But nothing has changed.

Now, however, President Trump has issued an executive order to simply end “Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.”

“Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage. No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies. . . .”

I say we have a right that our tax dollars not be used at all to fund public broadcasting. And that, also contrary to the text of the order, the government is not “entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.” 

It should have no authority to pay for any activities unrelated to the proper functions of government.

I will, however, accept the result of the executive order, defunding of public broadcasting. If we do get this result.

“The federal funding that supports Public Media,” PBS is alerting its viewers, “is at risk of being eliminated.” 

But this public media is also — and famously — supported by pledge drives and other non-governmental funding sources.

Zero public funding doesn’t mean a world without Big Bird; an absence of subsidy does not mean an absence of the MacNeil Lehrer NewsHour — or its successor show, PBS News Hour. These and many other much-loved shows might well thrive solely on voluntary funding.

“Now is a critical time to act,” urges PBS.

Yes. Tell Congress to ratify the elimination of federal funding of public media now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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incumbents national politics & policies term limits

Old as the Hills

Congress, term limits, age limit,

“I’ll give up power when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

This is the operative principle for today’s politicians.

The examples are so obvious: 

  • Nancy Pelosi, born in 1940, continues to represent California’s 11th District despite having lost the Speakership for the second time, despite having spent nearly four decades in the House of Representatives. 
  • Senator Chuck Schumer, a decade younger than Mrs. Pelosi (and thus not yet an octogenarian), is still serving his fifth term as a senator from New York State.
  • Senator Dianne Feinstein demonstrated extreme mental fragility before dying in office at age 90 — after serving more than three decades.

There are Republican examples, too, but age, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, “is a bigger headache for Democrats than Republicans for one central reason: Democrats have a lot more old members.” While the median ages are nearly identical between the two parties, “of the 20 oldest House members elected in 2024, 16 were Democrats. In the Senate, where tensions over age are more subdued, nearly all of the oldest senators — 11 of the 14 who were older than 75 at the start of this Congress — were Democrats.”

This may strike a sense of dissonance, I know. The old cliché is that Republicans are tired old men and Democrats are wild young (and female) firebrands. But the true nature of the establishment doesn’t quite fit the old saws and preconceptions.

The Journal notes that 70 percent of Americans support an age limit on holding office.

Sure, as the next best thing to term limits! We know the crux of the problem is not age, it is the advantages of incumbency, and the length of time in power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

The State & Child Rape

kids in cages, immigration, border, trafficking,

Four billion bucks: That’s what Los Angeles County has confirmed it will pay “to settle nearly 7,000 claims of ‘horrific’ child sexual abuse related to their juvenile facilities and foster care homes over a period of decades,” according to a BBC report. “Survivors say they were abused and mistreated by staff in institutions meant to protect them — with many of the claims linked to MacLaren Children’s Center, a shelter that permanently closed in 2003.”

A lawyer for the plaintiffs offered the perfectly apt cliché, of foxes and hen house: “they were raping boys and raping girls.”

Meanwhile, something odd’s going on with the “children in cages” issue.

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of Health and Human Services, said, in a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, that “we have ended HHS as . . . the principal vector in this country for child trafficking.” He went on to say that “during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery. And, we have ended that, and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

Last year, a whistleblower claimed that the Biden-Harris administration had “created a ‘white glove delivery service’” funneling migrant minors “into the hands of criminals, traffickers, and cartel members throughout the United States.” 

The federal government has failed worse than LA County.

Not so much by intention of politicians (we hope) but by abusive acts of government workers and contractors.

However, a major lawsuit against the worst contractor has been dropped, and the contractor re-engaged in “servicing” migrant children.

On this issue, government failure has been massive.

So, maybe when we hear calls for taking kids away from parents at local and state levels, for, say, “gender acceptance” rationales, we should demand that proponents come up with guarantees that such interventions will make things better.

For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

A Cuomo Indictment?

New York City, Mayor Andrew Cuomo, covid

Can there be “pandemic justice”?

On June 11th of last year, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the House of Representatives interviewed former Governor of the State of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, in pursuance of getting to the bottom of the disaster that was COVID in New York and beyond. 

Cuomo had counsel; the interrogation was transcribed.

The focus? The governor’s disastrous decision to send coronavirus patients back to his state’s nursing homes, where they quickly spread the new disease to its most vulnerable targets.

On October 30th, the Select Subcommittee sent an official letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, “a detailed referral for criminal charges against Mr. Cuomo pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 1001,” which Garland unsurprisingly ignored. 

Partisans sometimes stick together; fearing being hanged separately.

On Monday, Representative James Comer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a repeat request, but this time to the new AG, Pam Bondi.

The case against Cuomo is fairly clear: “Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the Select Subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability.”

Cuomo made multiple criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the state’s report, “Factors Associated with Nursing Home Infections and Fatalities in New York State during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis” (2020).

It is worth remembering that the legacy news media made Governor Cuomo their pandemic hero and sex symbol, even as his policies killed as many as 10,000 people.

How to hold media folk accountable?

You already have: the media’s low ratings.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Excellence in Success

space, freedom, NASA, SpaceX, DEI, quota

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has “parted ways with” — I’m guessing fired, despite the glowing words that attended the parting — DEI officer Neela Rajendra.

The Free Beacon reports that NASA seems to have been nudged in this direction by a Beacon report that despite the anti-DEI policies of the new U.S. administration, the Jet Propulsion lab had tried to retain Rajendra by changing her title. She still had many of the same responsibilities, including managing “affinity groups” like the Black Excellence Strategic Team.

The propulsion lab is now replacing its DEI department with a new one called “Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success.” 

Even assuming that race and gender consciousness are now no more — probably not a safe assumption — we may wonder why such a department, solely devoted to “excellence and success,” is necessary.

If it is, how did the NASA of the 1960s, including Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, ever manage to reach and land on the moon? Surely this kind of accomplishment must have required pervasive excellence. Maybe, back then, commitment to excellence was one of the requirements for getting and keeping NASA jobs to begin with?

Among Rajendra’s own excellences: hostility to deadlines and criticism of SpaceX for being “fast-paced” and failing to promote DEI, as she complained in 2022. 

A few years later, it was a SpaceX capsule that enabled the rescue of NASA astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. 

Now that’s “team excellence”!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Praying to the Deep State

Stephen Colbert, deep state, conspiracy, Donald Trump

The Deep State does not exist.

How do we know?

If it did exist, it would have stopped Trump’s tariffs!

Welcome to modern political theology and ideological theodicy — by way of late-night “comedic entertainment.”

Because of Trump’s tariffs, “we’ve had the worst day for our economy since Covid,” quipped Stephen Colbert on Thursday’s Late Show. “Just a reminder: this time he’s the disease.”

I found his setup somewhat funny, goofy looks and all, and I don’t usually find Colbert funny. But as the bit progressed . . .

“It’s all pretty solid proof that there is no Deep State.”

I’ve already given away his punchline, because it was not so much funny as eye-roll-worthy.

“Because if there was, they would have stopped this s**t.”

The assumption here is that, by definition, the Deep State must be omnipotent. While we can point to existing institutions working under the new rubric of “Deep State,” it’s never been all-powerful. It’s just very powerful, working in mysterious (secret) ways.

“But if they do exist,” Colbert continued, “I just want to say to the cabal of financial and governmental elites who pull all the strings behind the scenes, ‘maybe put a pause on your 5G chip/JFKjr/adrenochrome/chemtrail orgy and jump in here cuz we’re f**king dying!’”

Here’s the deal: Trump was hounded with unprecedented state surveillance, impeachments, lawfare, and speech suppression . . . and dodged bullets from assassins. While we know nothing, if we catch a whiff of anything it’s that “non-existent” Deep State.

So begging it to take out Trump is . . . late-in-the-game.

The cabal has already tried. Many times. And failed. Proving itself perhaps more desperate than competent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies tax policy

DOGE Does the IRS

DOGE, dog, meme, watch dog, who watches the watchers?

A note of caution going into today’s subject: let us try to bite our tongues; no expressions of schadenfreude; no sarcastic “Boo-hoos” or the like.

The IRS has been grossly inefficient for a very long time, as now uncovered in a Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] investigation.

Courtesy of Laura Ingraham, we learn that the Internal Revenue Service is “35 years behind” in its scheduled upgrades, and “already $15 billion over budget.”

“You’ve heard the sob stories,” says Ms. Ingraham. “And they are quite entertaining at times. But the [presumably non-Fox legacy news] media — they continue to spread this story: ‘DOGE is some dark and mysterious organization; you know, embedding itself into departments like some jack-booted thugs, just intimidating staff, threatening those that don’t comply.’ OK. We’re asking, what is the truth?” 

So she interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Treasury’s DOGE adviser, Sam Corcos.

“We,” Corcos said, including himself in the IRS’s very “they” themness, “process about the same amount of data as a midsize bank. A midsize bank has 100 to 200 people in IT and a $20 million budget. The IRS? It has 8,000 IT employees and a $3.5 billion operations and maintenance budget. I don’t really know why yet.” But he does notice that 80 percent of that budget goes to “contractors and software licenses.”

“DOGE advisers have found billions in waste just by asking questions,” explains Ingraham’s report. Secretary Bessant blames the power of special “entrenched interests” that “keep constricting themselves around the power, the money, and the systems. Nobody cares.”

“Inertia” is also a word often heard on this subject.

Democrats have been complaining about the president’s cutting of the IRS budget, and number of employees. But if most of the force is just spinning gears, the cuts could hardly be said to hurt the “service.”

And you’d think that the most pro-government party in our political system would want this key function of government — everything rests on taxes, they admit — to be efficient, do the assigned jobs well.

But for some reason that does not seem to be the case.

Shocking, I know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

The 2024 Switcheroo

Obama, Biden, President, power

The Summer of 2024 was a political maëlstrom. It included a near-miss assassination attempt and a withdrawal of a sitting president of the United States from his re-election campaign, almost at the last possible moment. 

We still do not know much about Trump’s would-be assassin on that roof in Butler, Pennsylvania. Nor does there seem much media interest in that still mysterious criminal episode. But we are learning more about Joe Biden’s stepping down from the campaign, and Kamala Harris’s taking the reins of the Democratic ticket.

Most recently, from a insider-exposé just out by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (Apri 1, 2025), we learn that Barack Obama, former president and key Democratic Party insider, not only pressured Biden to step down (along with Nancy Pelosi), but he also opposed Kamala Harris’s hasty top-of-the-ticket switcheroo. Strongly. For five days. Then he gave his endorsement.*

It’s widely reported that the Bidens dislike Kamala Harris. It’s also well known that Obama is not exactly Joe Biden’s biggest fan — the Obama/Biden pairing was political, making the match perhaps the most fraught since Kennedy/LBJ.

We learn from co-author Jonathan Allen that Obama refused to endorse Ms. Harris on that infamous first day, after Biden’s endorsement,* and that Obama was pitching for an open convention.

Obama’s political instincts are unmatched within the Democratic Party. That his advice was resisted says a lot about where the party was headed.

And where it’s at now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* If you, like me, are looking for why Biden, so soon after stepping down, publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, the sample on Amazon won’t tell you. But Ms. Harris entreated Biden immediately upon his resignation: “You need to endorse me,” she said, according to co-author Amie Parnes. Pressure was applied.

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media and media people national politics & policies political economy tax policy

The Trump-Tariff Question

Donald Trump

“To this day I cannot tell you what Trump truly believes about tariffs,” Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles recently confessed. “Does he want tariffs instrumentally, to increase trade? Does he believe in tariffs as a revenue-raising mechanism? And is he hard-core on tariffs? I couldn’t tell you; the man is inscrutable.”

In “Tariffs Are Awful, But The Income Tax May Be Worse,” economist Walter Block seems less confused. “Donald Trump supports them on the ground that the McKinley administration was prosperous, and relied upon tariffs,” Walter’s Eurasia Review op-ed posits. Our free-market economist notes that this rests on a fallacy: “since A precedes B, A must be the cause of B.”

Professor Block offers a better “historical episode to shed light on this matter, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.” You know, the tariff hike that worsened the Great Depression.

The best part of Walter Block’s refutation, however, follows his explanation of the Law of Comparative Advantage. He discusses the gains to our economy if the expert workers Trump fires from the IRS were to find work in the private sector.

And, contemplating the idea of switching from income taxes to tariffs, our widely-published octogenarian notes that “it takes relatively little labor to run a tariff system. Hey, we already have tariffs in place. An increase in their level would hardly call for much more manpower, likely hardly any more at all.” The gains of nixing income taxes would be vast; the harms of higher tariffs would be comparatively minuscule.

An interesting argument? Sure. But I don’t see politicians giving up the income tax any time soon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense general freedom national politics & policies

President Veto Remembered

Grover Cleveland, veto, limited government

This week, here at Common Sense, we did not celebrate the birthday of Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), whom some of my friends regard as the last great president of these United States. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tuesday’s Today feature.

Is there any reason to devote a column to him? 

Sure:

  • He was the only president, prior to Trump, to serve two non-consecutive terms, designated as the 22nd and 24th president in the history books.
  • Like Trump, and like presidents Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was born in New York; like Van Buren and the Roosevelts, he had, before his presidency, served as governor of that state.
  • Also like Trump, he weathered a major sex scandal. Accused of fathering a child out of wedlock, he admitted to it. And still got elected.
  • Grover Cleveland also made history by being the first president to get married in the White House. He married his former ward — itself something of a scandal — in the Blue Room during his first administration.*

The main truth about Grover Cleveland, though, was that he was a great believer and practitioner of honesty in government, and was the last real limited government man in the office — though, like all presidents, he was hardly consistent on this issue. He supported sound money, and opposed (but could not stop) the imperialist move of annexing Hawaii. He could be called President Veto, for his 584 vetoes held the record until the first four-term president stretched out enough years in office to beat it. 

He also knew his place: “Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.”

He was the only Democrat President in the half-century following the Civil War, when the Republican Party dominated, and was — consequently — super-corrupt.

Today we have a Democrat-turned-Republican fighting an ultra-corrupt Democrat-dominated federal government. 

Donald Trump could learn a lot from Grover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This made his bride, Frances Folsom, the youngest First Lady in history — at the age of 21. There was a 27-year difference between them.

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