Category: national politics & policies

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Robot Signatures Rule!

Joe BIden, autopen

“I’ve got a pen,” said Barack Obama, famously, “and I’ve got a phone; and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward. . . .”

There has been a lot of talk, recently, about the danger posed by Donald J. Trump’s executive orders. Understandable, but no matter how dangerous an imperial president may be, the one thing you cannot say about the “use of the pen to sign executive orders” is that it is unprecedented.

But there’s one kind of pen that is somewhat . . . problematic: the autopen.

It’s a signing machine.

The first was called the “polygraph,” invented by John Isaac Hawkins in 1803; President Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic user.

Today’s autopen is much advanced. Regular people probably use something like it to file their taxes, or use it regularly on legal documents in PDF form, but the presidential autopen is more secure. Or is supposed to be.

In 2005, the Bush legal team decided it was hunky dory to use an autopen to “sign” documents when the president is out of the country. What matters, the lawyers reasoned, was presidential intent.

Since then, all three presidents have used an autopen. 

But Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., used it to sign nearly everything. 

Or so alleges The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “The organization’s assertion points to a pattern whereby all documents featuring Biden’s signature, except for the one announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race last year, utilized the autopen,” reports Christina Davie. “These claims raise questions about presidential authenticity and executive authority.”

As that Bush era report makes clear, it’s presidential intent that matters. And in the case of the 46th president, we know that he did not remember ever signing at least a few of his executive orders.

As the Oversight Project makes clear in its report title, “Whoever Controlled the Autopen Controlled the Presidency.” I wonder, was it Jill Biden? Or one of the named triumvirate of Biden cronies?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

The Trillion-Dollar Mark?

ELON MUSK, DOGE

According to Fox News, Elon Musk “met with a small group of House Republicans on Wednesday evening to discuss the quest to find as much as $1 trillion in government waste.”

That would indeed be significant. 

But until then, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” popularly called DOGE, continues to find insane wasteful spending in the “mere” millions.

Consider the Small Business Administration, which “administers” loans to . . . well . . . “DOGE said it identified that the Small Business Administration (SBA) granted nearly 5,600 loans for $312 million to borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the loan,” reports Fox. 

Loans made in the pit of despair that was the COVID pandemic.

Children have no business taking out SBA loans — the obvious quip would be about “lemonade stands” — but Musk suggests there could be reasons for the practice, just not in the 5,593 cases DOGE specifies, because the wrong Social Security numbers were used in those applications.

But let no one say the federal government is not balanced, for “in 2020 and 2021 the SBA issued 3,095 loans for $333 million to borrowers over 115 years old.”

And speaking of the ancient, Bernie Sanders wrote to Newsweek to give the socialist view of the subject: “The person who is running the government right now is Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has taken it upon himself, with the support of President Trump, to virtually dismantle the United States government.”

Don’t get our hopes up, Senator.

Unlike Harry Enten at CNN, I’m not at all shocked to learn that DOGE has majority support in America at present. “I was truly surprised by this,” said Enten last Thursday, “but the numbers are the numbers.”

After all, it’s only common sense to seek to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Isn’t it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies regulation

Egg Prices Crisis

eggs, inflation, bird flu

“Get used to high egg prices,” The Atlantic blurbed Annie Lowry’s February 27 article, “it was a miracle they were low in the first place.” 

Titled “It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap,” it appears to have an agenda: prepare us for yet higher prices, or worse: no eggs.

“Consumers are furious,” explains Ms. Lowry, emphasizing that eggs are a very, very popular food. “Or at least they were, until a highly pathogenic form of bird flu spread to American flocks in 2022. Today, the Department of Agriculture is tracking 36 separate outbreaks across nine states. The disease has led to the death or culling of 27 million laying hens — nearly 10 percent of the nation’s commercial flock — in the past eight weeks alone.”

The culling of flocks — and which birds are selected — could potentially be the most controversial element of the story. Donald Trump, on the campaign trail last year, complained about the cull orders and promised to bring down egg prices fast. 

But his administration’s new five point plan is no quick fix:

  • subsidize on-farm biosecurity upgrades
  • compensation to farmers forced to cull their flocks
  • investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics
  • nixing some regulations
  • increasing foreign imports. 

That comes to $1.5 billion spending increases to lower egg prices!

But it was a jokey comment by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins that sent Trump critics into paroxysms. “I think the silver lining in all of this is, how do we solve for something like this?” said the Department of Agriculture head. “And people are sort of looking around, thinking, ‘Maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

Ha ha. 

But taking the joke as a serious proposal? The yolk’s on them.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fire or Promote the Best?

DOGE, government waste, corruption, spending, debt

Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.

Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.

On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .

“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.

The suspense didn’t last long.

Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner. 

“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”

Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism

Nixon & Trans Athletes

Trump, federalism, state's rights, Constitution

The President of the United States clashed with the governor of Maine over transgender participation in government-organized athletics. Quite a hoot.

Behind this fracas looms the legacy of . . . Richard M. Nixon.

First, the fracas: “In a tense exchange with Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, President Donald Trump threatened to strip Maine of its federal funding,” explains CNN, “if the state refuses to comply with his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.”

The brief volley of promises (threats) between the governor and the president made other governors “uncomfortable.” Yes, that’s a news story.

“Is Maine here?” he wondered aloud. “The governor of Maine?”

“Yeah,” Gov. Janet Mills answered from across the room. “I’m here.”

And then came a testy political exchange, the kind you don’t often see, culminating in this from Trump: “You better comply, you better comply, because, otherwise, you’re not getting any federal funding.” 

“See you in court,” she promised.

“Good; I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Trump may not be wrong. He may have the better legal case.

But doesn’t it seem weird that the president of the United States can extort compliance from the states on matters that are not enumerated in the Constitution?

Well, back in his first term Trump signed an executive order to direct a new devolution process of turning back education to the states. But the transgender issue is a big deal, and most Americans (around 80 percent) are against “biological” “men” competing with girls and women in sports, and since much of sports in America takes place in state-directed/taxpayer-funded contexts, Trump is leveraging federal bloc grants against states that balk at his agenda.

Thank Nixon and his “New Federalism.” While an attempt to give power back to the states, it also tied federal money to the devolution, which has effectively turned states into welfare queens begging big bucks off Washington, severely compromising the states’ . . . basic competence.

It’s this policy that Trump should be fighting.

But that would make governors even more uncomfortable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies

The Color of Tyranny

politicians, panic, Elon, Trump, bureaucrats

“The Trump administration on Friday fired a group of prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 criminal cases and demanded the names of FBI agents involved in those same probes so they can possibly be ousted,” reports an AP story from last weekend, “moves that reflect a White House determination to exert control over federal law enforcement and purge agencies of career employees seen as insufficiently loyal.”

That’s just for starters. Trump & Company is taking all the discretion it can to fire government agents who persecuted the once and current president in what was, certainly, a concerted campaign to scuttle his first presidency . . . and any chance at a second. 

There are several contexts to all this. One: we are witnessing a purge of those who worked against him. The other is a more general context: Trump has promised to cut down the size of government, and that can only be done by firing people — as Elon Musk is developing with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

This has a lot of people worried. “If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare,” frets The Bulwark. Robert Kuttner states that most of what is being done through executive order is illegal — only Congress can dismantle what Congress authorized. NPR notes that DOGE leader Musk is not even legally hirable by the federal government.

Illegal government is, ipso facto, tyrannical.

But there exists a relevant bottom line: is the Trump color revolution being “tyrannical” against the American people, or “merely” against federal employees?

The federal government itself has been rogue for decades. Much of what it does is unconstitutional as well as abusive. 

The Constitution is a vast system of checks upon politicians, functionaries, and rapacious private interests on the make. To those who itch to practice real tyranny, its chains themselves appear tyrannical. If the net effect of Trump’s barrage of executive orders and DOGE edicts is to reduce government burdens, is it really the kind of tyranny we must freak out about?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
local leaders national politics & policies

Darkest Day Survived

Howard Lutnick, World Trade Center, Twin Towers

On September 11, 2001, the nominee for secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, took his son Kyle to his first day of kindergarten; which, he told the Senate, “is why I am with you today.”

The detour made him late for work at the company of which he is CEO, Cantor Fitzgerald, a leading financial service firm then located on top floors of the World Trade Center.

His brother Gary “and 657 of my other friends and colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald” lost their lives that day.

Lutnick asked the surviving employees, about a thousand people, to help him rebuild the company and help the 658 families who had lost a loved one. Over the next five years, they all donated 25 percent of their salaries to those families, about $180 million. These acts of generosity “stitched my soul back together,” he said.

“My employees never expected to get paid back, but I had other ideas. In 2008, we took a division of our company public and each employee received double what they had given.”

Lutnick does seem like “just a good dude,” as J.D. Vance describes him.

I don’t know whether he will do a good job as Secretary of Commerce. Leading a major government agency isn’t the same as leading a major business. I guess part of the answer depends on whether we, like Lutnick, support President Trump’s trade policies.

I do suspect he’ll be a better head of that department than the last one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
national politics & policies public opinion

The CIA’s Mutating Opinions

CIA, Wuhan, Covid, China, cover up

As January closed, the CIA changed its story on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But was it big news? 

Most people had given up any hope of finding a natural origin, and evidence favoring the virus’s creation in Wuhan, China — partly funded by U.S. taxpayers courtesy of Big Pharma bureaucrat Dr. Antony Fauci — has been clear for a very long time.

So the CIA saying it now “believes” that COVID-19 was leaked from the Chinese lab looks, suspiciously, like a convenient change of opinion upon the beginning of the 47th presidency. 

New beliefs for a new president!

Note that the CIA certainly offers plenty of reasons to make light of the turn.

  1. The agency expresses “low confidence” in the new opinion.
  2. The spokesman admits that no new evidence was behind the shift.
  3. The spooks say they continue “to assess” both theories of coronavirus origination.

Very political. 

The change of mind looks like this: the CIA had pushed the natural origination story because it had an agenda, and Americans have largely given up on that agenda. Left pushing a wet noodle, the CIA now tries to recover some of its cachet — or prevent further erosion of public opinion in the institution — by siding with the once-derided belief.

And the “low confidence” warning is there to allow mainstream news media to downplay the story. The whole thing smacks of propagandistic manipulation rather than honestly informing the president, Congress, the Pentagon, or the American people.

Oh, and what of that agenda? 

Let’s just say that the agency always seeks to keep us ill-informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

A Whistleblower’s Ordeal

Eithan Haim can finally start to put it behind him, the nightmare that began after he helped to expose the fact that a hospital was lying about no longer performing sex-change surgeries on minors.

Reacting to bad publicity about these operations, in March 2022, the Texas Children’s hospital declared that they would no longer perform them. But Haim was among the residents there who quickly learned that hospital was simply not telling the truth and continued to inject puberty blockers into kids as young as eleven.

That the destructive “gender-affirming care” on minors was continuing was first reported by Christopher Rufo at City Journal, relying on documents provided by Haim. These were redacted medical records of the supposedly discontinued “care.” The names of the victims were concealed.

One result of the story was a state ban against performing such operations on minors.

Another was federal prosecution of Haim for allegedly violating the Health Insurance and Accountability Act. The Department of Justice’s case was weak. The DOJ had to keep refiling its court papers because of errors. And it had to replace the initial prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari, when it turned out that she had a conflict of interest.

At PJ Media, Rick Moran points out that even if Haim were not ultimately convicted, he was being forced to suffer a huge financial and personal toll as he fought the charges.

Haim: “I was facing a kangaroo court in a few weeks.” 

Not anymore. The Trump DOJ dismissed the case with prejudice — meaning Haim cannot be re-charged.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Fireflly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
deficits and debt national politics & policies too much government

The Biggest

Congress, US Capitol, debt, government, inflation

Trump’s riding high, in the first week of his second term — but not regarding the biggest problem he faces, inflation and economic instability.

“When bondholders don’t see a credible fiscal path to be repaid for current and future government debt,” writes Veronique de Rugy at Reason, “they expect that eventually the central bank will create new money to buy those government bonds, leading to higher inflation.

“Recent inflation wasn’t just about money supply; it reflected the market’s adjustment to unsustainable fiscal policy.”

Winning, for Trump, cannot equate to Spending.

While Ms. de Rugy tries to explain this all in terms of a big-picture economic analysis, she does not quite reach back in time far enough. We had stagflation way back when I was young. It was cured then not by decreased spending but by Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve putting the brakes on money-and-credit expansion. He stopped inflation. 

A pure recession immediately followed, followed by recovery in the new administration, Ronald Reagan’s, who helped reduce the rate of growth of government (and not much else).

Inflation could, theoretically, be handled by the Fed alone, now, as then.

Except — the federal government can hardly now afford to service existing debt, which would skyrocket with the nitty-gritty of the Fed’s cure, higher interest rates. 

Today, debt service (paying just the interest) approaches One Trillion Per Annum. 

“A crucial tipping point was reached in 2024 when the interest expense on the federal debt exceeded the defense budget for the first time,” Nick Giambruno summarizes at The International Man. “It’s on track to exceed Social Security and become the BIGGEST item in the federal budget.” 

Increasing it yet more would cripple the government.

The only way out, if there is one, is a radical decrease in spending and deficits, as de Rugy advises. Trump’s path to success is somehow accomplishing that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts