Category: partisanship

Member-Directed Funding

“Congress is about to bring back its secret weapon,” CNN headlined a column yesterday.

Congress? Weapon?

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

“Earmarks are back,” Chris Cillizza immediately informs readers … you know, “what is technically known as ‘member-directed funding.’”

Before you can say “terrible idea,” the cable channel’s editor-at-large does admit that “members securing money for pet projects in their districts could go wrong.”

Yeah. Right. Has gone wrong. Will go wrong. Is wrong.

“This is a sneaky big deal,” offers Cillizza nonetheless. “And a massive win for party leaders of both parties.”

Cillizza argues that it was a big mistake for Speaker John Boehner and the GOP leadership in Congress to take away their ability to reward individual congresspeople by stuffing a couple multi-million-dollar pet projects into the budget. What’s not to like for an incumbent politician? They get to hand out money right in their districts, with their name attached to it.

As long as a member of Congress plays ball.

The way the party bosses say.

In return, that incumbent can likely stay in this nation’s heralded leadership for years, decades.

When “you realize that in taking away earmarks,” explains Cillizza, “Boehner robbed party leaders of their most potent weapon to keep their rank-and-file in line on key votes.”

Is it even plausible for the functioning of our democratic republic that “party leaders” — nowhere mentioned or given any power in our Constitution — leverage our tax dollars to essentially buy off our representatives in order to keep our representatives “in line” on other important votes?

No.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, corruption, earmarks

partisanship social media

Consigned to Outer Darkness

Post author By Editor
Post date January 11, 2021
10 Comments on Consigned to Outer Darkness

mass media, establishment media, censorship, free speech

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are on a de-platforming binge.

The official rationale? Anyone “associated” with rioting must be expelled from virtual society.

Yet these social media outfits have hardly ousted endorsers of violence against innocents with anything like consistency. Iranian Boss-man Ali Khamenei still has a Twitter account. Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez, who has opined that some people “have no choice but to riot,” is still merrily blathering on Twitter.

The latest victim of Big Tech’s assault on speech is not an individual but a competing platform, Parler, whose support for free speech is its main selling point.

Apple has kicked Parler off its app store, and Parler got booted from the Google Play store, too.

Now Amazon, which provided storage for Parler, is kicking Parler off its servers with essentially zero notice because Amazon employees “were lobbying the company to disconnect Parler from AWS for hate speech,” which is like arguing that USPS or the Constitution must be shut down because it enables hate mail.

Apparently, once enemies of speech employed by a big-tech service provider scream “Deplatform so-and-so,” any erstwhile reservations of top management — Jeff Bezos, in this case — pop like a soap bubble under a hot iron.

Parler was one possible landing place for the President of the United States, booted from Twitter for allegedly inciting the capitol riot.* It now seems that Trump may find refuge at Gab.com, where his tweets expunged from Twitter have been republished.

But note: Gab has long been out in the wilderness, denied service on Google’s and Apple’s systems.

Folks who demand inclusion sure do practice exclusion well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account in protest of Twitter’s action. And I deactivated mine as well — something I meant to do when Twitter blocked the New York Post’s truthful reporting on Hunter Biden during the election.

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media and media people partisanship

Mainstream Disinformation

“A historic crime and disgrace.”

That is how left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald characterizes U.S. media coverage of the 2020 presidential race.

Back in October, he resigned from The Intercept, a publication he co-founded with the aim of providing “fearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable.” Its editors, you see, refused to publish his writing unless he removed “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.”

When the New York Post, the nation’s fourth largest newspaper, reported on emails from a laptop belonging to his son, Hunter Biden, Facebook and Twitter quickly blocked folks from sharing the news. Arguing the story was “hacked,” Twitter shut down the Post’s account for the critical final weeks of the campaign.*

“We will not waste our time,” declared National Public Radio, on “stories that are just pure distractions.” Now, with Hunter acknowledging the FBI criminal investigation of the family business, the state-media outlet’s Distraction Meter appears out of whack.

But there’s more. “[A]s soon as these [Hunter Biden] documents became known,” Greenwald told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, “the operatives in the intelligence community, the CIA, [former CIA Director] John Brennan, [former Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, [former NSA Director] Michael Hayden — all of the standard professional liars — issued a letter claiming that this material was the hallmark of Russian disinformation, even though they had no basis for thinking that.”**

This, he points out, “gave the media permission to lie to the public continuously” by enthusiastically repeating the baseless claim.

Most ominously, there was again “domestic interference on the part of intelligence agencies in order to manipulate the outcome of our election,” Greenwald explains.

The election is over. Our national nightmare is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* There were two huge problems with Twitter’s excuse: (a) the Post’s revelations were not from a hack, and (b) stories are continually written from information hacked and unlawfully leaked to the media — and then shared widely on Facebook and Twitter without any impediment.

** Greenwald is best known for breaking the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of classified information showing unconstitutional NSA spying on Americans, while working for the UK Guardian. Mr. Snowden claimed his “breaking point” in deciding to release the information “was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.”

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ideological culture partisanship

Ssshhh, Not Now

“Democrats need to keep their eye on the ball,” a Democratic Party strategist confided to The Washington Post on deep, dark background, “and not say things that are, on balance, a loser when everything is on the line.”

To what “loser” is this anonymous capital insider referring?

“D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser gave [President Trump] ammunition,” informed The Post this week, by “publishing a sweeping list of historical figures whose names should be removed from public property or ‘contextualized.’”

Developed by a task force Mayor Bowser appointed this summer called DCFACES (District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions), the report calls for “renaming 21 public schools, 12 recreational facilities, six public housing complexes and other sites.”

The Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial are both fingered, though they are on federal property, not city land. Still, plenty of statues, schools and other public buildings controlled by the city bear the names of such historically tainted folks as Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell and Presidents James Monroe, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor and Woodrow Wilson.

“The mayor, her top advisers and the authors of the list,” The Post noted a day after the public release, “would not discuss it.”

What caught my attention, however, was the issue of timing.

“The mayor usually has very good political instincts,” offered former D.C. Chamber of Commerce CEO Barbara Lang. “I was just surprised that this came out now, quite frankly.”

As The Post explained, Lang “believes Bowser should have waited to publish the report until after the presidential election.”

Why after? Because the issue is a “loser.” And the Dems do not want the public to know their lofty and ludicrous (and loser) goals and aspirations until after all votes are cast.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags monuments, racism

national politics & policies partisanship

Voting Like a Neo-Nazi

Richard Spencer, alt-right, white nationalist, Biden Supporter, Joe Biden

Dinesh D’Souza is tickled. You see, Richard B. Spencer, the almost-famous “alt-right”/“Sieg Heil” guy is voting, he says on Twitter, “for Biden and a straight democratic ticket.”

D’Souza, who is relentlessly pro-Republican in addition to pushing conservative values and arguments, had his dearest dream handed to him. Richard Spencer, an ethnonationalist, is loathed mightily by the left. And, frankly, by most of the right. Not to mention those looking straight-ahead and ‑backwards. So to have Spencer prefer the Democrats is rich.

For Republicans. (And not a few others.)

Usually, Democrats revel in lambasting Republicans for garnering support among the explicitly racist set. Now, tables turned.

Yet this is not really all that “out there.” Spencer, who is often characterized as a neo-Nazi, has admitted to many leftist sympathies in the past. His only real heresy from the left is his racist nationalism. He likes transfer programs, regulations, etcetera. Hefty-sized, all-encompassing government.

In his original tweet, Spencer explained his rationale less ideologically, though: “It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’* or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.”

Uh, what?

Oh, the heights — or depths — of irony should this election between Sleepy Joe and The Donald come down to a contest over competence. Mr. Trump’s struggles with the pandemic — as well as the economic impacts of a lockdown strategy so tightly embraced by progressives —hardly proves the competence of Democrats. Nor do riots in cities run by Democrats over alleged structural racism administered by those same Democrats.

But the Democrats were competent enough to get a Richard Spencer endorsement.

That’s something?

At least for the Republicans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

“Accelerationism” noun : the scheme to embrace one’s opponents’ ideas so that they prove themselves spectacularly bad, and one can then ride in during the ensuing chaos. [Risky maneuver.]

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Tags alt-right, Biden Supporter, Joe Biden, Richard Spencer, white nationalist

national politics & policies partisanship Popular

Between the Devil and the Deep State, See?

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 18, 2019
3 Comments on Between the Devil and the Deep State, See?

Donald Trump, Imperial Presidency, President, crown,

“If it turns out that impeachment has no sting, has no bite,” exasperated Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., speculated on Meet the Press, “and we are in the aftermath, what it will mean is that there will be an unlimited, an imperial, executive branch that can do whatever it wants to do.”*

Per the “imperial presidency, actually, that ship sailed a while ago,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka quickly responded.

“I mean, it was a problem under George W. Bush. It was a growing problem under Obama. And it has come to its apotheosis under Donald Trump.”

There appears a left-right consensus among TV chatterers that, a Constitution of enumerated federal powers notwithstanding, the president can “do whatever [he] wants to do.”

But considering what we are learning about “the interagency” machinations to take down the current imperator, the imperial guard may be as big a problem.

Last week, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.” Though the IG did not find conclusive evidence that political bias inspired the launch of the investigation, he did detail “many basic and fundamental errors” that “raised significant questions” … adding portentously, “we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified.”

“[A]s as the probe went on,” reported The Washington Post, “FBI officials repeatedly decided to emphasize damaging information they heard about Trump associates, and play down exculpatory evidence they found.”

The evidence piles up: Washington is dangerously out of control, and our career-politician Congress can only muster to provide a constitutional check on the flimsiest grounds and partisan manner.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Somehow Professor Glaude seems to have forgotten President Bill Clinton, who reached his highest ever public approval rating — 73 percent — in the aftermath of his 1998 impeachment by the then-Republican-controlled House. Been there, done that.

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