Bernie’s plan will SAVE MONEY through Government Efficiency!
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Tag: Bernie Sanders
Don’t worry…
Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”
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“You think the police deserve to be killed?” That’s what talk show host Michael Savage asked his caller yesterday.
What brought that on?
A self-described liberal woman named Teri had called The Savage Nation. Though not a Trump supporter, she “did not have the antipathy for him that most liberals did.”
“[U]nderneath his brashness and braggadocio,” Teri had thought, “there actually beat a heart for America.” But after his numerous initial appointments, she is now “terrified.”
On air, Teri admitted that her preferred candidate for president had been independent (not turned Democrat) Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Savage called Sanders a “con man” — a “race-baiter” who “attacked the police regularly.”
That’s when he inquired if it was her desire to see police officers murdered. To which, she replied, “No, my husband was a police captain.”
Savage: “That’s amazing. How could you vote for a man like Bernie Sanders, who hated the police and used the police as a weapon to stir up minorities?”
Teri: “Believe it or not, my husband actually supported him, too.”
Savage: “Why would a police captain support Bernie Sanders?”
Teri: “Well, my husband was a very honored and honorable policeman.”
Savage: “You mean, all the police who were killed deserved to be killed?”
Savage, indeed. Does he really believe that a person criticizing certain police behavior or seeking reform necessarily thirsts for the blood of innocent police? Really?
Or does he simply hope to shut down any thoughtful conversation about the injustice in our criminal justice system?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Today, the Democratic National Convention begins in Philadelphia.
Yesterday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, announced her resignation amidst a growing controversy over the DNC’s favoritism toward Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders during this year’s presidential contest.
Months ago, Sen. Sanders called for Wasserman Schultz to step down, noting her closeness to the Clinton campaign and angered by what his campaign perceived as unfair treatment. To which, Wasserman Schultz had smugly responded, “Spoken like someone who has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do.”
It seems Sanders had a lot better understanding of what the DNC does than she thought.
Thanks to WikiLeaks, the American people have also gotten in the know. Last Friday, WikiLeaks released 20,000 emails from top DNC officials, reportedly snatched by Russian hackers. In the emails, one can read the DNC’s top financial officer suggesting a smear against Sanders over his religion. “AMEN,” responded the DNC’s CEO.
Yes, indeed, the Democratic Party establishment was rigging the process. “The release provides further evidence,” Michael Sainato wrote in The Observer, that “the DNC broke its own charter … by favoring Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee, long before any votes were cast.”
Caught breaking the rules, Wasserman Schultz is out!
Sorta. She’s out after the convention, not before.
Furthermore, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still “in.” Mrs. Clinton just offered her a position on the campaign, and said she was “grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention in Philadelphia.”
By hook and by crook.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: Medill DC on Flickr (Creative Commons)
“We’re being treated very unfairly.”
I don’t know about you, but this constant complaint from Donald Trump is getting a bit old.
Even if true.
Maybe I lost some patience for this shtick because my side in the political arena — the 85 percent majority for term limits, for example — has constantly had to bear with undue weights from major candidates, public officials, and other political insiders. This week I’m in Arkansas to help put term limits back on the ballot, after politicians lied to the citizenry in a legislatively referred measure, successfully fooling them to substantially weaken the limits.
It turns out that honest people have always been at a disadvantage in politics, because our enemies often feel free to lie, cheat, steal, etc.
My impatience is that, well, coming from a billionaire, the complaint seems … hollow. To the extent that wealth and fame lead to an unfair advantage over others, Trump has indeed parlayed both into a shot at the White House.
So to talk about how being treated unfairly smacks of narcissism. It is like going to the funeral of a good friend and having to listen to some whiner take the limelight to complain of his lumbago.
It seems inappropriate, in context.
But mainly it reminds me of Bernie Sanders in particular, and the socialist left in general. “Life [or The System] has treated us unfairly — so give us free stuff!”
Trump is not asking for free stuff. He is merely expecting us to forgive his ugly tirades — as in the current mess about the judge sitting on his Trump University case — and nasty escalations of name-calling.
He expects a free pass. And has so far gotten one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem. With Hillary Clinton.
Asked about the Clinton Foundation, yesterday, by CNN’s Jake Tapper, host of State of the Union, Bernie re-questioned himself:
Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships?
And Bernie answered, “Yeah, I do.”
How many roads must mainstream media reporters walk down before they investigate and report on the myriad of ethical cracks in the Clinton Foundation?
To the most obvious conflict of interest in the history of the human race, add the fact that even after promising President Obama that the Clinton Foundation would at least be totally transparent with an annual report of all donations … well, Hillary welched on the deal, not revealing the donors.
While Bernie’s condemnation of Hillary’s ethical shortcomings was big news, less reported were the senator’s comments regarding whether Mrs. Clinton is “too quick on the draw, too eager to use military force.”
Bernie again was clear: “I worry about that. Yeah, I do. Her support for the War in Iraq was not just an aberration.” Sanders went on to cite Secretary of State Clinton’s role in pushing President Obama to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya and to intervene in Syria.
Hillary’s judgment on issues of war and peace is questionable … especially when we don’t know whether or not a foreign leader or his cronies have written big checks to the Clinton Foundation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“We have an important choice to make,” presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders recently wrote to Congress. “[D]o we stand with the working people of Puerto Rico or do we stand with Wall Street and the Tea Party?”
The bill in question has been dubbed Paul Ryan’s “first big victory as Speaker,” but was written in tandem with the White House. The plan attempts to rescue Puerto Rico, a United States territory, from financial collapse with both bailouts and austerity — the latter including a lowered minimum wage.
I hadn’t heard any Tea Party squawk about this, so that reference must be just signaling on Bernie’s part.
Puerto Rico is $72 billion in the hole. Basically, Sanders wants to partially repudiate that debt: “The billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street cannot get a 100 percent return on their bonds while workers, senior citizens and children are punished.”
Of course our sympathies are almost entirely with the people of Puerto Rico. But it was their government that racked up the debt, and repudiating sovereign debt is a tricky and parlous thing.
What happens when the United States itself faces similar (or worse) straits? Would Bernie then, again, plan to stick it to the government’s creditors — even after he, himself, had voted to increase spending above revenues and periodically raise the debt ceiling — and think that this wouldn’t have consequences?
Meanwhile, the possible minimum wage reduction is one of the stickiest of the issues. Bernie sees it as “sticking it” to the poor.
In truth, it would help increase employment, thus help the poor get out of poverty.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The other day, Fox News Network’s Bill O’Reilly asked University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee a question. The subject was the socialistic gimme-gimme attitude of youthful Bernie Sanders supporters. The previous segment, “Watters’ World,” had paraded interviews with a handful of college students, asking them to clarify just how much free stuff they wanted.
It was a funny segment, if you think young people talking foolishly about government is funny.
Calling Sanders “the Giveaway King,” O’Reilly asked Goolsbee his general impression of the gimme-gimme attitude. It was the softest of softball questions. “What do you think about that?”
Talk about open-ended. Any response given thus says a lot about the interviewee, seeing how broad he may answer.
“Well, look, I’ve told you I’ve never been a big fan of socialism,” spake President Obama’s famed advisor. “I’m an economics professor.” Chuckling, he went on. “I’ve got the sense you don’t want these people getting free air to breathe. You’d like them to mail in their checks to make sure they work for it.”
Goolsbee could have started off as sensibly as he ended: “I’m against free stuff. Socialism doesn’t work.…”
He didn’t. He immediately reduced O’Reilly’s position to that of a straw man, using the reductio ad absurdum.
Why? For levity’s sake? Well, both O’Reilly and Goolsbee were jovial.…
But his nasty quip fulfilled a purpose, making sure that ideologues on the left continued to have license to think the worst about their opponents.
Thus Austan Goolsbee, despite his protests, carried water for crazed socialism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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David Brooks has a story to tell you.
His New York Times op-ed, yesterday, “The Danger of Single Story,” builds on a good premise: “each individual life contains a heterogeneous compilation of stories. If you reduce people to one, you’re taking away their humanity.”
Brooks puts a political edge on what otherwise might sound like a lesson in manners with his next sentence: “American politics has always been prone to single storyism — candidates reducing complex issues to simple fables. This year the problem is acute because Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are the giants of Single Storyism.”
Brooks then asserts that Trump and Sanders share a similar story that they beat to death, “the alien invader story.”
You can see how it applies to Trump, a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Aliens invade!
But Brooks recognizes that Sanders’s story is about “the evil entity called ‘the banks.’” Not exactly alien. This menace is home-grown.
Then our pundit moves on to issues not in the single-story vein of Trump and Sanders, and how what seem to be opposite stories (incarceration prevents crime; too much incarceration is a moral horror) can both be true.
Crime is low right now, but Brooks devotes most of this putative paean to multiple crime stories. The third Bernie story he takes a bite of, the $15 minimum wage, belies the Single Storyism charge. That is, the point of his essay.
Way to go, sophisticate.
He also draws a complete non sequitur: “Raising the minimum wage to $15 may make sense in rich areas.” Nothing he wrote gives any credibility to that. At best the hike would do nothing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Also, please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money.
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Campaign finance reform is surely dead … if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
Which would be good.
Not Clinton being elected, mind you. What would be good is the death of so-called campaign finance reform — the kind supported by Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. They insist on a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protection and give Congress awesome new powers to regulate their own and their opponents’ campaigns.
But wait — if Mrs. Clinton supports campaign finance reform, why would her election kill this seriously bad proposal?
Well, Hillary Clinton made it abundantly clear at last week’s Democratic presidential debate, as I explained this weekend at Townhall: large campaign contributions do not influence her in any way. Even a fat $15 million from Wall Street interests to her super PAC — or $225,000 a pop speeches paid by Goldman Sachs and their ilk — registers no corrupting effect whatsoever.
And those millions deposited in Clinton Foundation accounts from foreign governments?
They couldn’t possibly sway the steady former Secretary of State. Not even the smallest smidgen.
Just like there has never been corruption at the IRS.
Don’t believe Hillary? Then trust President Obama, who also gobbled up major Wall Street funding when he ran in 2008 and 2012. But again, according to her, “President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.”
Not. At. All.
So the solution to government corruption is simply to elect trustworthy, incorruptible candidates … like Hillary Clinton.
Well, call her half right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Common Sense Needs Your Help!
Also, please consider showing your appreciation by dropping something in our tip jar (this link will take you to the Citizens in Charge donation page… and your contribution will go to the support of the Common Sense website). Maintaining this site takes time and money.
Your help in spreading the message of common sense and liberty is very much appreciated!