Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Accountability national politics & policies

Robot Signatures Rule!

“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.

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Thought

Comte de Volney

Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority.
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793; second English-language translation, the Philadelphia edition, 1802).

Today

Protest Worth Its Salt

Mahatma Gandhi began the Salt March, a 200-mile march to the sea, to protest the British monopoly on salt in India, on March 12, 1930.

insider corruption national politics & policies too much government

The Trillion-Dollar Mark?

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.

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Thought

Mary Wollstonecraft

Men . . . submit every where to oppression, when they have only to lift up their heads to throw off the yoke; yet, instead of asserting their birthright, they quietly lick the dust and say, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Women, I argue from analogy, are degraded by the same propensity to enjoy the present moment; and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman (1792), chapter 4.

Today

Shaken, Sworn In

March 11, 2010 — minutes before being sworn in as President of Chile, economist and businessman Sebastián Piñera is shaken as an earthquake hits central Chile and aftershocks disturb the ceremony.

education and schooling

Goals, Goals, Goals

Aleysha Ortiz wants to be a writer. There’s a hitch: she says she’s illiterate.

Ya gotta have goals, as teachers used to say in the Seventies.

When goals were still in vogue.

Her near-term goal, however, is suing the school she graduated from, in Hartford, Connecticut, for . . . graduating her with honors!

She has a case. While graduating illiterates has almost become a tradition in America — teachers’ unions are on board — you would think that even a woke administrator might judge graduating an illiterate with honors a step too far.

Now, in truth, the 19-year-old can read and write, a bit. But she’s always had trouble, she says.

“Ortiz is suing the Hartford Board of Education, the City of Hartford and her special education case manager, Tilda Santiago,” explains The New York Post, “for negligence.”

The negligence being that the school was too slow in testing for and following up on her dyslexia. “Just one month before graduation, she began receiving the testing, which was not completed until the last day of high school,” the Post clarifies. “The testing concluded that Ortiz was in fact dyslexic and ‘required explicitly taught phonics, fluency and reading comprehension.’”

There is more to the story, of course. She was born in Puerto Rico, came to the U.S. at five, and didn’t speak English at all well when she started school.

A lot of folks raise skepticism about the now-college-freshman (!), more than implying she was just an unmotivated student. And that a multi-million-dollar lawsuit seems a bit much.

But ya gotta have goals.

Pity that our government schools’ goals have so little to do with education.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Paul Goodman

It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 14.

Today

The Mahatma

On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.

Update

Lady McBiden & the Triumvirate

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 9, 2025
No Comments on Lady McBiden & the Triumvirate

Before Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., won the presidency in 2020, the signs of his senescence — indeed, his precipitous mental decline — were already in evidence; as his term in office chugged along, it became clear that he was running neither the country nor even his own bath.

Paul Jacob, in these pages, began referring to the administration as “The Biden,” to signal that he knew, like you knew, that the man himself, “Sleepy Joe,” was not in charge.

But who was?

Speculate was all we could do. Oh, sure, an investigative reporter could have done the job of investigative reporting, but that’s so yesteryear. This is the third decade of the 21st century!

But now, courtesy of a guest on Patrick Bet-David’s “Valuetainment” PBD Podcast, we have insider testimony. Former Mid-Atlantic Regional Chair of the DNC, Lindy Li, was a rich, enthusiastic fundraiser for the Democratic Party, and she tells her full story in “‘I Was Inside The CULT!’ – Lindy Li EXPOSES DNC Cover-Up, Billion-Dollar SCAM & Obama’s 3rd Term.”

Who ran the country, as we say colloquially, from 2021 to 2025?

Jill Biden.

The First Lady pulled a four-year Edith Wilson/Weekend at Bernie’s routine. With help from Joe’s only surviving son, Hunter.

And behind her were three key advisors who “ran the world,” in Ms. Li’s phrasing: Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, and Mike Donilon.

So now we know. One could doubt Lindy Li’s testimony, but it seems more than merely plausible, it seems believable. “The Biden” was President Jill and a triumvirate of old Biden cronies.