Tag: media

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crime and punishment election law national politics & policies

Serious Times

Donald Trump, shooting, assassination, media

Former President Donald Trump came a half-​inch from being assassinated on Saturday. Thank goodness he’s alive. 

Let’s reflect for a moment on what would have happened to our country had Mr. Trump not turned his head slightly just before the bullet hit his right ear. 

Potentially serious violence and unrest? Even if the sorrow, despair, and anger millions would feel at having their presidential candidate murdered in cold blood were to be completely peacefully received, what is the takeaway? 

It is destructive. We are less free if political power is dictated by the barrel of a gun. And it is the government’s job to prevent that from happening. 

Political talking heads are calling for a different tone and I’m all for that, so far as it goes. But it is a vague concept that no one agrees upon. And the answer certainly isn’t less freedom of speech. 

“You know the political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated,” President Biden told the nation last night. “It’s time to cool it down.” 

I think, instead, it is time for Mr. Biden to turn up the heat: on the Secret Service. 

This weekend’s deadly* shooting represents an epic failure. To allow a would-​be assassin to climb onto the roof of a building 140 yards away, a rifle in hand and in line of sight of a former president giving a speech, demonstrates an incredible level of incompetence. 

Heads must roll at Secret Service. (Figuratively.) A new and beefed-​up detail should be protecting Trump. And it is past time for RFK, Jr., to be granted Secret Service protection as well.

I don’t say this often but … spend the money! 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Corey Comperatore, a father sheltering his family with his body, was struck by a bullet and killed. Two others were seriously injured by the gunfire. Also, the shooter was killed by Secret Service snipers. 

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ballot access election law insider corruption partisanship

Degrading Democracy, CNN-Style

watchdog, guard dog, media, press, newspapers

Everyone’s talking about last month’s CNN debate. We can’t unsee President Biden’s performance.

But something else did go unseen: candidates independent of the two dominant parties — specifically, RFK, Jr.

“CNN RULES WOULD HAVE BARRED EVERY INDEPENDENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR LAST 112 YEARS,” read this month’s Ballot Access News (BAN) cover story.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Self-​deputized to supposedly defend “democracy,” CNN sponsored the recent presidential debate using criteria pointedly designed to shut out independent voices — even those polling double digits.

The main culprit was their mandate that “the candidate must [be] certified for the ballot in states with at least 270 electoral votes, by June 20.”

That doesn’t make any sense given the calendar for ballot qualification. As BAN relates, “The rule about being on the ballot was probably written by individuals who had no knowledge of the typical time-​line for presidential candidates running as independents, or nominees of new parties.”

Plus, “the rule” was applied with a double standard — one for Republicans and Democrats and another for other parties and independents.

“They require certainty for the independent candidate to show ballot placement,” notes BAN, “but they only require probability for the Democratic and Republican invitees.”

Once upon a time major news outlets were seen as playing a vital watchdog role, as referees, politically. Today, CNN and its ilk require their own umpires, a whole new set of watchdogs.

We are it — all of us on X, Facebook, podcasts and the blogosphere — we are those watchdogs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling media and media people

Erroneous About the Eclipse

Whoopie Goldberg, The View, science

The View is not something to audit on a regular basis. It may decrease IQ. Nevertheless, we may have to defend Sunny Hostin for her silly ramblings on eclipses, cicadas, earthquakes, TDS and The Rapture. 

I’m not sure. She sure seemed to be saying that the recent eclipse and climate change were integrally related.

But the banter of the women was so light-​hearted that maybe we shouldn’t hold her to high standards.

Besides, Whoopi was there to provide rational pedantry — no matter how inaccurate she was. (Contra Ms. Goldberg, there are thousands of cicada species, and you may respectably pronounce the word in a variety of ways). It could be that Sunny was merely trying to be funny about the Sun.

As the man said at the end of Chinatown, “Forget it, it’s The View.”

But how hopeless was Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s little lecture to the students at Booker T. Washington High School? She was instructing the students and taking credit for their “opportunity” to go outside and see the eclipse.

“A Full Moon is that complete, rounded circle which is made up mostly of gases,” she mis-explained, “and that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the Moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?”

Well, no, the Moon is not mostly composed of gases. It possesses the scantest of atmospheres, but does have water — or so I last read.

Even eclipsing The View, sending embarrassing, ultra-​ignorant politicians to teach astronomy in the inner cities is — Lunacy!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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He Is the Eggman

Joe Biden, age

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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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Roald’s Revenge

Roald Dahl, censorship

Two centuries after the heady days of Elizabethan drama, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler produced The Family Shakespeare. 

In it they infamously “bowdlerized” the Bard. 

History has accelerated. Roald Dahl, the beloved author of arch children’s books (and more adult fare, too), had been dead only 33 years when it came out that his publisher is sanitizing his books. 

For the children.

For wokeness.

It’s not nice, you know, to call someone fat. Or to suggest that witches wore wigs because they were bald. 

So snip-​snip and a trip to the thesaurus later, and British kids can now read the word “enormous” instead of “fat.” And learn, via addition (something the Bowdlers didn’t dare: they only made careful cuts), that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Salman Rushdie called this “absurd censorship” and said that the culprits, Puffin Books and the Roald Dahl estate, “should be ashamed.”

The backlash has been huge, but the umbrella publishing house, Penguin, insists the unexpurgated Dahl will still be available, in a “Roald Dahl Classic Collection.”

Shades of New Coke versus Classic Coke!

In America, Penguin won’t even try to publish its sanitized editions.

There are several footnotes to the story. 

One: a four-​decades old conversation “has come to light, revealing that [Dahl] was so appalled by the idea that publishers might one day censor his work that he threatened to send the crocodile ‘to gobble them up.’” 

Two: Ian Fleming’s James Bond is getting a similar treatment.

I’m reminded of the all-​too-​hungry crocs in Live and Let Die.

And where Dahl’s gobble-​uppers should be when publishers place their toes in censorious waters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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What He Says and What He Means

Joe Biden, lies

A handy reference chart.