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.
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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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.
On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”
Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.
It may be difficult to resist hoping that Trump gets elected this November to allow many of the Democrats’ worst initiatives be left to die on a withering vine. (Examples of the worst: Congress-bypassing regulations designed to penalize production of gas-powered cars and outlaw certain freelance or contract work.)
Still, the candidate and his party have many flaws.
We cannot forget that. Indeed, with their abandonment of the tiniest desire to reduce the size of the federal leviathan, remembrance should be easy.
Shrink government? Radically reduce spending? Reduce debt? No such goal was seriously pursued in the first Trump administration, and no such goal is mentioned in the twenty-point Trump-Republican Party platform.
There’s talk of tax cuts, ending inflation (somehow), diverting spending from Democratic projects. Sure. But the platform insists that Social Security and Medicare programs not be modified in any way.
In any way!
And about Obamacare — the biggest expansion of the medical state in recent years, which Republicans had once pledged to repeal — the platform is mute.
The 2016 platform said that improving healthcare “must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare,” a declaration retained in 2020. Now it’s gone. Republicans seem to have succumbed to the strategy of turning Obamacare into yet another supposedly unassailable, supposedly inextirpable entitlement program.
Unfortunately, you don’t recover or expand liberty by accepting every expansion of serfdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Unreason is at all times one of the happier privileges of patriotism.
Branch Cabell, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Parcel of Reconsiderations (1934), p. 274.
On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain, a little less than two years and three months before Kamala Harris, the most famous Jamaican-American, was born.
In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.
The Vice President’s hometown of San Francisco is one of 17 cities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Like 75 percent of those cities (according to verify.com), the City by the Bay also offers that vote to noncitizens in the country illegally.
Not included in this list of cities is New York City, as the Big Apple’s measure providing the vote to nearly a million noncitizens is still being battled in court. Or Boston, which only awaits approval by the Massachusetts Legislature.
Neither are Telluride, Colorado, nor Yellow Springs, Ohio, on the list. Voters in both states, in 2020 and 2022, respectively, passed statewide constitutional amendments to say only U.S. citizens can vote in all state and local elections, canceling those local ordinances. Beginning in 2018, six states have enacted Citizen Only Voting Amendments, and eight more states will vote on them this November.
Back in 2016, San Franciscans narrowly passed Proposition N giving noncitizen parents and caregivers, legally documented or not, voting rights in school board elections. Harris had been prosecuting attorney in San Fran before becoming California’s attorney general. As AG, Ms. Harris ran for the U.S. Senate and would have gone to vote for herself on Election Day 2016 . . . and on Prop N.
Surely, she didn’t forget to vote on the proposition. Right?
So, how did she cast her ballot: in favor of providing noncitizens here illegally the franchise? Or not?
If she ever does a non-scripted interview, perhaps an enterprising journalist might pop that question. Or perhaps a voter in swing states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin — where Citizen Only Voting Amendments are on the ballot — will ask Vice President Harris.
Answer, please.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
André Gide, Autumn Leaves (Feuillets d’automne, 1941, trans. Jeanine Parisier Plottel).
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 renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.
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.