Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary.
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 48.
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Mervyn Peake
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Baltic Independence
On August 27, 1991, the European Community recognized the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova after they had declared their independence from the USSR.
RFK, Jr., is clearly more afraid of Democrats wielding power than he is of former President Donald Trump. That’s why the independent dropped out of the presidential race last week and endorsed Mr. Trump, the Republican Party nominee.
“I began this journey as a Democrat,” explained Robert Kennedy, Jr., stating that it was “the party of my father [the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, when he was assassinated], my uncle [President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963], the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote. I attended my first Democratic Convention at the age of six.…”
But last October, RFK, Jr., left the Democratic Party, arguing that Democrats have “departed so dramatically from the core values that” he “grew up with,” that it has “become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big Pharma, big Tech, big Ag, and big money.”
And he also acted out of necessity, when the party “abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.”*
Kennedy bitterly complained about the efforts of Democrats to deny him a spot on state ballots, blasting “DNC-aligned judges” that threw him “and other candidates off the ballot — and” have attempted “to throw President Trump in jail.”
NBC News suggested that Kennedy sees Trump as “a partner — and a fellow victim.” Probably so, but RFKj specifically cited “Free speech, the war in Ukraine, and the war on our children” as “the principled causes that persuaded [him] to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw [his] support to President Trump.”
Kennedy Democrats for Trump?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* RFK, Jr., wondered aloud: “How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?”
NOTE: Mr. Trump reportedly promised Mr. Kennedy that, if elected, he would release all the classified material related to his uncle JFK’s assassination. A pledge Trump made in 2016 and did not keep.
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George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
George Santayana, “Tipperary,” Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922).
On August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment to United States Constitution took effect, giving women the right to vote in every state of the union.
Prior to the passage of this amendment, 15 states allowed women to vote. Most of them were west of the Mississippi. The territory of Wyoming was the first to extend voting rights to women in 1869.
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Camera Shy
After the racial tensions over cops shooting black people became a big story with the Ferguson incidents, Paul Jacob worked on several citizen initiatives to require “body cams” on police officers in cities around the country. Resistance to the practice has come from several quarters, not infrequently the police themselves — despite the “cop cams’” utility being to protect cops as much as anyone.
But the strangest wrinkle to this ongoing story came recently. Consult Jacob Sullum at Reason, whose article “Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off” tells the strange behavior of Police Chief Harold Medina, who got in a crash after driving by a homeless encampment on the way to a press conference, with his wife in the department-issued pickup truck. And yes, he pled the Fifth.
“Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them,” explains Sullum. “By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves. That is the whole point.”
But read the whole article. It’s quite a story.