Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855; 1881)
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Walt Whitman
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Independence
On August 10, 1809, Ecuadorians attempted independence from Spain with the Declaration of Independence of Quito, but failed with the execution of all the conspirators a few days less than a year later.
Independence was finally achieved in 1822.
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The Developer’s Lot
If you’re going to own things, don’t own them in New York City.
This town is an epicenter of official looting, as, for instance, what the city’s Parks Department is doing to “perplexed plaintiff” Theodore Trachtenberg.
Trachtenberg owns a lot in New York, on which he hopes to build housing. Before he could proceed, he had to remove a tree from the lot.
“Therefore,” the city — the Parks Department, the city, it’s all the same gang — is fining him $230,000.
Why? Well, they want money is why. If you can invest in NYC housing, this means you have money.
If a little girl without money were to pluck a dandelion in her back yard, Parks would fine her only a
Trachtenberg is suing. The filing says: “Parks did not plant the tree, has never performed any work on, nor took care of the tree, nor has even registered it on its online resource called NYC Tree Map.”
The insanity is slightly complicated by a claim that two small trees on a nearby sidewalk were damaged by the work.
“The ownership of those two trees is not being contested, but the damage is,” says Mikhail Sheynker, Trachtenberg’s lawyer. Sheynker says he hasn’t observed the damage that the city describes.
But he has observed that in the 1990s, “the Parks Department didn’t really issue fines over trees. But they figured out this is a moneymaker.”
Trachtenberg should have developed a tract in some other burg.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932; Journey to the End of the Night, 1934).
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Gandhi & Yeltsin
On August 9, 1942, British forces arrested Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay, spurring the Quit India Movement into nationwide action.
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, and his entire cabinet.
The Institute for Free Speech and its clients, Connecticut State Senator Rob Sampson and former Connecticut State Senator Joe Markley, have won a long-awaited judicial victory.
The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed that it was okay for the senators to criticize the state’s governor at the time, Dannel Malloy, in a campaign mailer. The State Election Enforcement Commission had contended otherwise.
In 2014, Markley and Sampson had collaborated on a mailer to defend their anti-big-spending, anti-big-taxing views against those of the governor. According to the Commission, the mailer thereby violated the state’s campaign finance law. The reason: it benefited the governor’s political opponent.
That opponent supposedly should have paid a third of the cost of the mailer.
By the agency’s anti-speech reasoning, any statements in any campaign mailer that might somehow benefit some political candidate in the state — even a citation of the Declaration of Independence or a logic- (as opposed to fact-) check — would violate campaign finance law.
Certainly, were the principles of logic widely disseminated in the state, this would pose a grave danger to a huge majority of candidates.
The SEEC fined Sampson and Markley.
Now the state supreme court has ruled that doing so violated the First Amendment; “candidates must be able to communicate where they stand on issues in relation to other candidates and public officials. . . .”
Good. But couldn’t the judgment have come quicker? The same court issued an interim ruling back in 2021. The justices could have clobbered the SEEC’s lunatic presumption back then.
Freedom of speech delayed is freedom of speech denied.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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“Johnny Nolan”
I wonder what people did before they invented coffee.
Johnny Nolan, a character in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945, directed by Elia Kazan, written by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, performed by James Dunn); based on the novel of the same name by Betty Smith (1943).
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Born & Died
Francis Hutcheson, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and a great influence on David Hume and Adam Smith, was born in Ireland on August 8, 1694. He died on his birthday in 1746.
Followers of Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement against the British rule on August 8, 1942.
On the same day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
Democrats have effectively sidelined the biggest story of this election year — the assassination attempt upon the candidate the party has sought to destroy since 2015 — with a brazen switcheroo-coup from presidential candidate Sleepy Joe to the once-widely disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.
It was all done unceremoniously and undemocratically in a breathtakingly daring backroom duress deal, detailed by Seymour Hersh.
Also itemized last week? The cover-up of Kamala Harris’s record. In “Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history,” Jim Bovard informs New York Post readers about the media’s memory-holing.
“In 2019, GovTrack labeled Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator — further to the left than even Bernie Sanders — but this month deleted the webpage that said so,” explains Mr. Bovard.
So, what’s to the left of a “democratic socialist”?
Maybe the Vice President was channeling her father, a Post Keynesian (far, far left if not exactly Marxist) economist, when she pushed the progressives’ beloved “equity” theory of equality, which she explicitly construed as equality of outcomes.
If you wonder how far to the left she has gone, consider her work to help BLM-associated rioters. “In 2020, as looters and arsonists ravaged Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, then-Sen. Harris urged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund ‘to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’”
Bovard says this appeal “effectively exonerated anyone committing violence or other crimes, portraying them as worthy of speedy release from jail — but the bail fund paid to release rapists and child molesters and future murderers, not just looters.”
Now, fittingly, Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the man who in 2020 “allowed rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis.”
Would a Democratic president want to burn down half of America?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Kamala Harris
This is just an extraordinary day. It’s a testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy, and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances.
Vice President Kamala Harris yammers on about President Biden’s diplomatic triumph, on the tarmac welcoming freed prisoners from Russia, while the president looks dumbly (or dumbfoundedly) away.