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incumbents media and media people national politics & policies

Conservatorships Now!

“Libertarians Want Control Over Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell,” the headline read.

That’s odd. Libertarians don’t usually want control over anyone.

But at issue is whether Sleepy Joe and Motionless Mitch have control over themselves.

“The U.S. Libertarian Party has filed for conservatorships for President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, referring to them as ‘geriatric elites’ mentally unfit to properly serve the American populace,” Newsweek reported on Tuesday.

“Both subjects’ ability to receive and evaluate information effectively, make decisions, and to communicate are impaired to such an extent that they lack the capacity to represent themselves or the interests of Americans,” explained a party news release.

“These men, and others like them (like Diane Feinstein and John Fetterman) are not well enough to be left alone in the house all day,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle argued. “How are they well enough to govern our lives and spend our tax dollars?”

She added: “so we’ve compassionately decided to step in and make those important decisions for them.”

At 80 years of age, Mr. Biden is the oldest president ever. If re-​elected in 2024, he would be 86 at the conclusion of his term. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 81 years of age, has been in public office in Washington for the last 38 years. 

The problem, of course, is not age as a number, but that both men have exhibited behavior that concerns us for their health and well-​being. Mitch has repeatedly frozen in public, to be led away like a zoned-​out sleepwalker, while the president, on his recent Vietnam trip, closed a press conference with “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”

Still, their string-​pullers persist in milking each to the last drool-​drip of inertial power. Their families should step in. 

Until then, the Libertarian Party will have to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

In Evidence

In yesterday’s Washington Post, fact-​checker Glenn Kessler explained, per the headline: “How Republicans overhype the findings of their Hunter Biden probe.”

He has a point. For example, the official House committee staff carefully stated that they had “identified over $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates.” But Committee Chairman Comer turned that into: “The Biden family received over $20 million from our enemies around the world.”

The whole $20M+ didn’t go to the Biden Crime Family. Kessler’s analysis puts that number at merely $7.5 million. 

I guess this is why gang members sometimes turn on each other.

But Kessler — like so many other mainstream media mouthpieces — gets something very, very wrong.

“No evidence has emerged that any of these funds can be traced to Joe Biden himself,” the fact-​checker asserts before delving into the specifics of his checked facts. Near the close, Kessler reiterates: “No money has been traced to Joe Biden.”

That’s just not true.

In a text that was discovered on the infamous Hunter laptop (now verified even by big media behemoths), Hunter Biden tells his daughter that his father (now President Biden for those following closely at home) makes Hunter kick back roughly 50 percent of his income.

A statement made in confidence to a loved one is commonly referred to as evidence. Strong evidence.

There are additional communications and invoices showing Hunter paid bills for “the Big Guy,” including home repairs and improvements costing thousands of dollars.

No matter how hard “fact checkers” ignore the evidence, it is still there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Way We Censor Now

In China, the government now sells software to social media companies so they have the best real-​time idea of what the government currently does not want people to say. 

The companies then perform such obliging actions as removing posts and banning users.

The software serves as a self-​defense system — of the social media companies. You see, if the companies fail to sufficiently prevent government-​outlawed speech on their websites, they will be punished. Maybe ruinously. By the Chinese government.

So who is doing the censoring here? 

Obviously, the government.

In the U.S., the intimidatory relationship between government and social media firms is not quite so advanced or nearly so clear. But as we keep learning from documents extracted by litigation and subpoenas, for years now our federal government has been telling firms to censor things, and the firms have complied.

The latest example is that Facebook, which has always said that its content-​moderation policies are “independent,” obeyed White House demands to censor posts about the likelihood that the COVID-​19 virus originated in a Chinese lab, not in nature.

In a July 2021 email, Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive, asked whether anyone could “remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/​labeling — claims that Covid is man-made.”

To which a VP in charge of content policy replied: “We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

No matter how White House press secretaries or others try to dress it up, “private” censorship conducted in obedience to governmental requests is governmental censorship.

And is eerily close to the Chinese practice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Wannabe Dictator

The question posed in boffo episode four of Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show is whether Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator, as asserted by a chyron that Fox News displayed for 27 seconds on the day his administration arrested Donald Trump: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.” (Fox News hastened to apologize to the world and to fire the producer who so incontinently chyronized.)

Carlson spends a couple of minutes discussing absurd reactions to the brief-​lived caption. But most of his satirical 13-​minute monologue is about whether President Biden qualifies for dictator-hood.

Carlson suggests that you have to do much more than jail political rivals to qualify.

Dictators enrich themselves and their families, taking bribes or kickbacks from businesses or other dictators.

In a dictatorship, it’s no longer possible to fight the injustice of the system. If people “gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator, they’ll be arrested by state security services even years after the fact.”

In a dictatorship, you can’t even complain from your home; unauthorized opinions on the Internet must be censored.

In a dictatorship, major mental or physical lapses by the Dear Leader would be routinely covered up by a compliant media.

A dictator would say your kids belong to him. But Joe Biden says your kids belong to all of us; we have joint custody.

It’s a litany that could be extended, and Tucker Carlson does so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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He Is the Eggman

Humpty Dumpty was a good egg. 

Well, that’s what we tend to think, but the original nursery rhyme doesn’t specify an eggman (goo goo g’joob) at all. And says nothing about his character. 

All the rhyme says? He had a great fall, and the king’s forces — masculine and equine — couldn’t make him whole.

This was brought to mind with yet another pratfall by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., along with yet another stream of journalistic puffery trying to make the octogenarian seem like a good egg — and the falls insignificant.

That was the general tenor of Adele Suliman’s Washington Post article, “Biden isn’t the only politician to fall: Why we can’t look away,” last Friday. Ms. Suliman provides a history of stumbling pols, which she relates to Biden’s most recent tumble, at the Air Force Academy after his commencement speech.

But it’s the New York Times that went all out, with four authors explaining our shared Biden moment: “The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world.”

Yet, also, Biden’s “a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”

The article has been roundly ridiculed, but the problem is, if anything, underplayed. 

Now is not the time to be worrying about an eggman president.

It’s our eggshell republic that should be on our minds.

Goo goo g’joob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Internet controversy national politics & policies social media

Dys Glitch

After some technical glitches in livestreaming Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement of his presidential run, the snide tweets poured in.

“‘This link works,’ Biden posted on his Twitter account,” The Epoch Times attempted to regale us, “sharing a link to a donation page for his campaign as the DeSantis team and Twitter owner Elon Musk struggled to resolve the glitches plaguing their scheduled Twitter Spaces interview.” 

But the worst was also from The Biden — nobody believes that Joe himself is in charge of his own Twitter account — in which a few “positions” of DeSantis received mockery, leading popular YouTuber/​Rumblist Viva Frei to respond with “Is this really the best you could piece together? You couldn’t fragment the sentences more if you tried. Pathetic.”

And that’s really where we’re at. Newscasters and the Twitterati made much of the Twitter Space glitch, but not even Donald Trump, Jr., with his hashtag “#DeSaster,” did much more than weakly echo his father’s heyday on Twitter.

This is not 2016. 

Everybody seems tired.

There are a number of challengers, already, in the running to oust feeble Joe Biden. Donald Trump himself, of course, and now Ron DeSantis, whom we are told runs a distant second to the former president. Neither man seems likely to reach beyond the conservative half of the electorate. Only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat, offers much “newness,” and he’s afflicted by a hard-​to-​listen-​to cracked voice: spasmodic dysphonia, “a specific form of an involuntary movement disorder called dystonia that affects only the voice box.”

Metaphor for the race so far? There’s a lot of “dys” in the tone of our times, but it’s just not very profound. If the future weren’t at stake, one wouldn’t even bring it up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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