Jesse Jackson Jr. demands Obama hire 15 million unemployed Americans

By David McElroy · October 17, 2011

Many of us have breathed a sigh of relief that Congress hasn’t been foolish enough to pass Barack Obama’s jobs bill. However, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) says Congress’ failure to pass the legislation is an act of rebellion — and that Obama should declare a “state of emergency” and simply give government jobs to 15 million unemployed Americans.

It’s always seemed that logic was purely optional in the Jackson family, and it seems that Jesse Jr. hasn’t turned out any better than his crazy father. The scary part is that the younger Jackson is actually a member of Congress, not just a publicity-seeking gadfly the way his father’s always been.

To make sure you see that his words aren’t being taken out of context, watch the video here. Jackson compares Congress not passing Obama’s jobs legislation to the Confederate states seceding from the Union. Jackson said Obama simply needs to act on his own, in the way he imagines Abraham Lincoln might have in the face of rebellious states. In addition to employing 15 million Americans for five years — at an average salary of $40,000 a year — Jackson says Obama should also unilaterally spend hundreds of billions of dollars more to bail out all cities and states across the country. He says the total cost of the plan would be $804 billion.

“President Obama tends to idealize — and rightfully so — Abraham Lincoln, who looked at states in rebellion and he made a judgment that the government of the United States, while the states are in rebellion, still had an obligation to function. …On several occasions now, we’ve seen … the Congress is in rebellion, determined, as Abraham Lincoln said, to wreck or ruin at all costs. I believe … in the direct hiring of 15 million unemployed Americans at $40,000 a head, some more than $40,000, some less than $40,000 — that’s a $600 billion stimulus. It could be a five-year program. For another $104 billion, we bail out all of the states … for another $100 billion, we bail out all of the cities.”

If you wonder about Jackson’s economic literacy, well, wonder no more. This is the same economic illiterate who earlier this year blamed the iPad for killing thousands of jobs in the United States, which makes nearly as much sense as blaming the advent of CDs for mostly putting vinyl-pressing plants out of business for the past few decades or for blaming the development of automobiles for killing off buggy whip makers. (Of course, Obama himself recently sounded a bit ignorant of economics when he claimed in an interview that one problem with the economy is that businesses are learning to be more efficient. He cited the example of banks’ increasing use of ATMs instead of human tellers as a problem.)

Jackson and people of his ilk care only about one thing. They care about getting the money and power to do what they want to do. They don’t care about legalities. They don’t care about the Constitution, which you’re supposed to care about if you’re a member of Congress and supporting the whole state system. To be fair, there are people on the other side of the aisle who would be just as happy to unilaterally seize power, but that’s the real point: This isn’t an ideological issue. It’s an issue about the kind of power-hungry people who just want their way and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

The coercive state is dangerous to all of us even when it obeys its own rules in how it decides what we have to do. It veers way off the path into serious tyranny when loose cannons such as Jackson become taken seriously. At this point, I see no evidence that anyone is going to take him seriously, but the very fact that a demagogue such as him can be elected to Congress should be all the evidence you need of the kind of results a majoritarian system is going to give us as things get worse in the future.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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