Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn’t make sense not to use both.
Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, was the only American politician to have voted against America’s involvement in both World War I and World War II.
There’s no accounting for taste, especially regarding humor.
For instance, the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” is, to me, a classic. And I think Donald Trump’s recent sarcasm — “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” — was funny.
And surprisingly appropriate to the situation.
Did the Russians give WikiLeaks the hacked DNC emails? We don’t know.
Was Trump malevolently, traitorously standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue inviting a foreign adversary to criminally cyber-attack his political opponent, as hyped? No.
Still, I’m not copasetic with Trump’s apparent buddy-fest with Russian President — and thug — Vladimir Putin. Yet, Trump is hardly the first American politician to act the fool before Putin.
Republican President George W. Bush bizarrely claimed to have looked into Putin’s soul. It was cloudy that day.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jetted over to the Kremlin with a silly “Reset” button. Still, friendly Russian interests have been financially generous to the Clintons.
Russia bailed out President Obama (and Assad) after Syria crossed Obama’s apparently evanescent red line. Recall that open microphone that caught Obama telling outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to let Putin know, “After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Vladimir Putin must wonder how his Soviet forebears could have possibly lost the Cold War to a country led by such ninnies.
In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney called Russia our number one geopolitical foe . . . only to be ridiculed by Obama and mocked in the media. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” scoffed a contemptuous Obama. Current Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “preposterous notion.”
Since then, Russia has annexed Crimea, made war in eastern Ukraine and occasionally bombed U.S. forces in Syria.
The Baltic nations, some of which have significant Russian minorities, understandably feel threatened. America has pledged to militarily defend these tiny countries bordering Russia.
But no discussion of that on the campaign trail.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging. The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was later renamed Liberty Island.
President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom (1943).
The persistence of the issue of raising the minimum wage is an indictment of public education, for at least two reasons:
Bernie Sanders wanted a 15-buck minimum. Hillary went on record supporting a 12-buck rate. Donald Trump would prefer that the minimum wage regulations be enacted by the states, though he says a hike to ten dollars per hour would really help the less fortunate.
It wouldn’t.
That is the tacit theme in a Wall Street Journal piece on the recent minimum wage rate hikes in 14 American cities, including the nation’s capital. A classic, succinct article on BET makes the point even more stark: a duo of economists from Trinity University “report that when a state, or the federal government, increases the minimum wage, Black teens are more likely to be laid off. The duo analyzed 600,000 data points, which the Employment Policies Institute says included ‘a robust sample of minority young adults unprecedented in previous studies on the minimum wage.’”
Just as theory predicts.
Could it be that politicians promise a raise because they believe government-schooled Americans too miseducated to know better?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Bureaucracies established by prohibition are inherently inefficient and unable to discover the knowledge required to solve social problems. Prohibition also suppresses the market’s ability to solve social problems, so that little or no progress is made while prohibitions are in effect. And finally, prohibitions create profit opportunities which add to the problems prohibition is intended to solve.
Dr. Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (1991).
On August 4, 2010, in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage that had passed two years earlier by the state’s voters.
With the two most disliked and distrusted politicians in American history snatching the two major party presidential nominations, lots of voters — free-market conservatives, libertarians, liberals concerned about civil liberties and war, moderates, decency advocates — are looking for an alternative.
The Libertarian Party, our age’s perennial “third party” on state ballots, has a golden opportunity.
Perhaps that’s why delegates to 2016’s Libertarian Party nominating convention chose two two-termed former Republican governors to take up the freedom banner: New Mexico’s Gary Johnson and Massachusetts’s Bill Weld.
Both are nice men. They are the most accomplished and credentialed politicians in the race — more than Hillary Clinton; far more than Donald Trump. They don’t seem radical or threatening.
But that might be a problem. They are too nice. They are not threatening enough.
I’m not suggesting they threaten anyone, but in ideological terms they often appear more as moderates than as libertarians, as Ilya Shapiro noticed last week when he asked the pointed question, “Is Johnson-Weld a Libertarian Ticket?”
The Johnson-Weld take, economist Mark Thornton noted, is more libertarianish than libertarian: the pair are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal for Republicans which is great, but they fall short of Libertarian.”
This isn’t exactly a shock. Anyone who watched the bizarre CNN town hall with Johnson and Weld will remember that odd moment when Johnson called Democrat Hillary Clinton “a wonderful public servant” and Weld dubbed her a “lifelong friend.”
No need to attack Mrs. Clinton personally, of course, but when a Libertarian cannot find one discouraging word about what a President Hillary would mean, it seems they want to appear Democratish.
And not libertarian.
Well, it’s a strategy. But it won’t appeal to #NeverHillary voters, or impress many #NeverTrumpers, either.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.
Rose Wilder Lane, Give Me Liberty (1936).
On August 3, 2008, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 90. His novels, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, explored life under totalitarian Communism, and remain classics of modern literature. 
His huge survey of Soviet concentration camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was an important contribution to the demise of Communism as a popular ideology, showing just how horrifying the repression in the Soviet Union had become.