Think Freely Media presents Common Sense with Paul Jacob
Worried about the Deep State undermining democracy in Washington? What about the Deep State in Missouri? Today, Ron Calzone will sit in a St. Louis courtroom with his wife, Anne, intently listening to arguments in his case, Calzone v. Missouri Ethics Commission, before the entire Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
It costs time, not money. Ron Calzone and others read and consider legislation on their own dime. Calzone’s all-volunteer Missouri First group, which analyzes legislation filed in Jefferson City from a constitutional, pro-liberty perspective, doesn’t even have a bank account. A small businessman outside of Rolla, Calzone devotes a great
Surely there’s something good in the first legislation put forth by the brand-new Democratic House majority — though nothing jumps to mind. The 571-page smorgasbord bill “addresses voting rights, corruption, gerrymandering and campaign finance reform,” writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, “as well as the creation of a
In recent years there has been a great burgeoning of public debate about ideas. Politics. Ethics. UFOs. You name it. This “burgeoning” has mostly taken place online. Some people are so good at it that they have made their whole livings at it, parlaying advertisements and donations into successful careers.
“Riddle me this,” William Rainford tweeted during the big national #MeToo civil war over the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Why would the accuser of Kavanaugh take a polygraph, paid for by someone else and administered by private investigator in early August, if she wanted to remain
The U.S. Copyright Office is enforcing an unjust and destructive law merely because it is there. Selectively enforcing. Valancourt Books prints books on demand. It keeps no stocks of books in a warehouse in between orders. Even so, the Copyright Office is demanding to be supplied with physical copies of
In Hawaii, those who would compel others to promote abortion have suffered a well-deserved setback. A U.S. District Court tossed a law requiring pregnancy centers to post ads for abortion clinics. Among the centers that would have been affected was one run by a church opposed to abortion. Of course,
The beginning of the end of actor James Woods’s time on Twitter likely occurred on July 20, 2018. Only recently discovering a tweet that he posted then, Twitter has locked Woods out of a forum where his right-leaning messages have been followed by 1,730,000 people. His delinquent tweet forwarded an
Good Google’s evil twin, Bad Google, is at it again. In addition to doing bad things to advance its political agenda, Google is willing to work with bad governments do bad things. For example, the authoritarian Chinese government. Google is working on a mobile version of its search engine, code-named
“Social media has given extremists a new tool with which to recruit and radicalise,” writes British Labour MP Lucy Powell in The Guardian. And just where are people “being exposed to extremist material”? On Facebook! “Instead of small meetings in pubs or obscure websites in the darkest corners of the
It is hard not to miss the ideological left’s inconsistency regarding “diversity”: demanding diversity of race and gender, they enforce a monoculture that somehow cannot tolerate intellectual and political competition. We see this in higher education, dominated by left-of-center professors and administrators; in the news media, overwhelmingly filled with Democrats;
In the dystopian world of the future, all financial transactions will be made by credit card. In this dark world, the people who run credit-card firms must be appeased. If they dislike what you’re doing, they will have the power to prevent you from receiving financial support for your work