Categories
Common Sense First Amendment rights folly national politics & policies political challengers

Trump Speech

Donald Trump, free speech, law suit, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

What is free speech? Is it what presidential candidate Donald Trump is trying to squelch?

Last week Trump’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Club for Growth. The Club, a well-known 501(c)4 limited government advocacy group, has put out a number of public service messages (“ads” as they witlessly call them in the politics biz — they are in truth anti-advertisements) criticizing Trump for past high-tax/tax-hike stances.

“Rest assured,” the lawyers wrote,

we will not sit idly by and allow special interest groups and political action committees like yours to defame Mr. Trump and cause damage to his reputation and business interests by intentionally disseminating libelous statements you fully know to be untrue and, even worse, continue to purposely mislead the American people for your own financial gain. Toward that end, Mr. Trump has authorized our legal team to take all necessary and appropriate actions to bring an immediate halt to your defamatory Attack Ads.

The lawyers, like Trump himself, must know that the case has zero merit. As Jonathan Adler explained in his coverage, what we have here “is commonly known as a SLAPP suit — a suit that’s designed to shut people up. ‘SLAPP’ stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and the idea is that well-financed plaintiffs can use lawsuits, and the threat of suits, to discourage speech that they don’t like.”

These days, abridgments of free speech typically come from government coercively stamping out peaceful speech.

Meritless lawsuits, and their threat, are another and quite distinct anti-free-speech affront.

Would you trust anyone who employs such a method?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Donald Trump, free speech, law suit, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

Categories
Thought

Frederick Douglass

“Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845

Categories
links

Townhall: The Climate Change War

According to the experts, any day now a civil war will break out in California.

Click on over to Townhall to consider the mother of all attribution errors! Then come back here for context:

Categories
Thought

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

“We must not confound liberty with anarchy. Liberty is the reciprocal respect for personal rights, according to certain fixed rules known by the name of law. Anarchy is the privilege of some and the spoliation of others, according to the caprices and arbitrary will of the cunning and the violent, and the feebleness and lack of energy of the timorous.”

Categories
meme

Term Limits and Jefferson

term limits, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, collage, photomontage, elephant, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

“My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years rather than for life was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governor, which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhapsbe induced by their independenceto forget.”

—Thomas Jefferson

Click for high resolution image

term limits, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, collage, photomontage, elephant, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

 

Categories
video

Video: The Right to Try — The Dying vs. the FDA

How can this society deny the right of dying patients to try new medicines? Watch this powerful video by Reason TV.

Categories
Common Sense folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers tax policy too much government

Weekend with Bernie: Fairy-Tale “Free”

Bernie Sanders, Free, Fairy Tale, promises, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, illustration

Bernie Sanders is many a progressive’s fairy-tale candidate.

Well, yeah.

Not “once upon a time,” but today . . .  the federal government’s public debt is in the double-digit trillions. The total debt — consisting also of unfunded/underfunded welfare state “promises” — may be in the triple digits. Still, politicians pat themselves on their backs when they deliver annual deficits under half a trillion per year.

Meanwhile, Senator Sanders, former member of America’s Socialist Party and current caucuser with the Democrats, is running on the “freebie” platform: let’s spend more!

He serves as the pusher of a very old folly: thinking that good things come to us without cost.

But the costs have to be paid.

And will be.

That’s the essence of common-sense wisdom since ancient times. Usually I conjure up an accountant or an economist to explain this, but why not go back to folklore? Folk and fairy tales, along with myths both ancient and modern (remember Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?), tell us that magic powers come at a price.

And those costs can be killer.

Far-left-of-center magic pretends that not only can Bernie provide “free” stuff for everyone (including those of us in his “hard-working middle class”), but also that the wherewithal for these goodies (college, medicine, food, shelter, meaningful work) can easily come from . . . three pot-of-gold sources: “the rich,” “print more money,” and that least plausible sprinkle of fairy dust, “government efficiency.”

We tell children fairy tales not to make them wish for magic solutions, but to illuminate the logic of responsibility.

Bernie didn’t get that lesson.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Bernie Sanders, Free, Fairy Tale, promises, collage, photomontage, James Gill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, illustration

 

Categories
Thought

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

“[T]here are men who look upon social revolution as a kind of fairyland.”

Categories
Accountability Common Sense term limits

Coming to Terms with A Logical Fallacy

Neocon, Neo Conservative, Photomontage, collage, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, JGill, Jim Gill

Good people can disagree about term limits.

It’s not a moral issue, but about practical governance.

I love term limits, while my friend Lew Rockwell, the former Ron Paul aide who started the Mises Institute and runs the popular website LewRockwell.com, isn’t a fan.

In a brief post to his site, entitled “The Term Limit Hoax,” Rockwell lamented that “Term limits apply only to the institutionally weakest branch of government, the legislature, to further weaken it, and never to the presidential bureaucracy, which actually runs the government, nor to the judges. It’s why neocons, those ultimate presidential supremacists, love term limits.”

This is the classic logical fallacy of guilt by association. Neoconservatives breathe air, too. Should the rest of us turn blue?

Usually if politicians — neocon or otherwise — claim amorous feelings for limits, as the late Bob Novak warned, “They’re lying.” Yet, most regular folks — all races, genders, political parties, levels of neocon-ness, you-name-it — actually do want term limits.

Lew’s correct: Congress is weak. It was designed to be the strongest branch, holding the all-important purse strings and a law-making monopoly. Yet, career politicians have shrunk from fulfilling the First Branch’s constitutional role, consistently handing more and more power to the executive branch and the courts.

That’s not the result of term limits, but a lack thereof.

Why is there “never” a push for term limits on the “presidential bureaucracy”? Well, those bureaucrats don’t even have terms as such. And any limits would have to be legislated by Congress. Congress enacted that bureaucracy, every cubicle of it, and the longer congressmen stay in Washington, the more they champion it.

Limit judges? A term-limited Congress might help there, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Neocon, Neo Conservative, Photomontage, collage, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, JGill, Jim Gill

 

Categories
Thought

Ludwig von Mises

‘Nothing can serve as a substitute for an ideology that enhances human life by fostering social cooperation — least of all lies, whether they be called “tactics,” “diplomacy,” or “compromise.” If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice.’

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, first published in German as Liberalismus, 1927, and in English as The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth, 1962.