Author: Redactor

Categories
insider corruption political challengers

As Goes Maine

On Monday I reported on the Ron Paul campaign’s “open secret” strategy: Gaining delegates in the caucus states, while letting the caucus-night straw poll numbers basically take care of themselves. The “popular” vote on caucus nights in states like Iowa and Minnesota and Maine may show Santorum or Romney as a winner, but the Ron Paul folks are picking up the actual, nomination-effective delegates.

Meanwhile, GOP insiders continue to work openly and sub rosa against the Paul candidacy, as is now pretty clear in Maine. Business Insider reports that

  • “Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong”;
  • “Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count”;
  • “nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold — held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count”;

. . . and on and on and on.

The open conspiracy of deliberately under-reporting Ron Paul votes may be more than matched, however, by the open secret of the Ron Paul delegate strategy, with the Paul campaign now believing “it has won the majority of Maine’s delegates.”

Real change is, apparently, a messy thing. And preventing it . . . even messier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Thomas Jefferson

“I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”

Categories
Thought

John Adams

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Contra Mandated Contraception Coverage

Regulators spawned by “Obamacare” have mandated that employer-provided medical insurance plans provide contraception as a benefit. 

The problem, as currently reported and debated, is that only churches are exempted — church-run or -affiliated hospitals, for example, are not. And so Catholic hospitals, along with other religious-based charitable endeavors, must conform, despite their commitment to age-old ideas about the sanctity of life, which they say contraception and abortifacients, especially (some contraceptive methods are de facto abortion-inducing), abridge.

Many conservatives argue that the mandate thus runs afoul of the First Amendment. But it turns out that many Republican politicians have supported similar mandates in several states.

Mike Huckabee signed one such mandate into law in Arkansas.

No big news that GOP politicians are often just as bad as Democrats, of course. But forget, if you can, the First Amendment angle. The mandate runs afoul of something even more fundamental: common sense.

Adding an umpteenth mandate to the list of regulations government places on contracts amongst employers, employees, and insurance companies hardly passes the smell test. The more benefits that government insists you contract for, the higher your insurance rates. The higher the rates, fewer are those who would willingly buy, thus scuttling the whole point of “health care reform.”

We ostensibly want more people to purchase major medical insurance. Not fewer.

It’s possible that some reformers seek precisely that, to put insurance companies out of business, leaving only government to take up the slack, as a “single payer.”

In the case of Republican reformers, however, is there a hidden agenda or just mere foolishness?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

Categories
media and media people

There Goes Da Judge

Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court justice (and therefore often called “Judge Napolitano”), has been a legal and constitutional analyst for Fox News for some time. For several years now he’s hosted a nightly program on Fox Business called Freedom Watch, ending each show with a tagline: “Defending freedom, every night of the week.”

Monday night he amended it: “Defending freedom, everybody’s freedom, every chance I get.”

The tagline changed because Freedom Watch is now off the air. Fox pulled it.

Thankfully, Napolitano will still appear on various Fox commentary shows as an on-air consultant. Hence the teeth in those parting words: “every chance I get.”

The show began three years ago as a weekly webcast video. It soon began to air more frequently, and in 2010 hit the Fox Business channel — though it should have found a place on the News channel, alongside Hannity and O’Reilly and The Five. Napolitano drove home his philosophy with a series of oft-repeated slogans, including one of my favorites, “Does the government work for us or do we work for the government?”

Napolitano’s straight-forward, enthusiastic and general “good guy” approach made the radicalism of his political beliefs palatable to a wide viewership.

Yes, Freedom Watch was a great show — there is nothing else quite like it on television, though John Stossel’s weekly show remains on Fox Business, and hails from a similar perspective. Both are popular as excerpted on YouTube.

A lot of folks will miss Freedom Watch, but I, for one, will keep watch for Napolitano’s future projects.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
incumbents political challengers

To America With Love

Congress’s approval rating just dipped to a mere ten percent — a new all-time low even lower than the all-time low set just months ago when their abysmal approval rating was even lower than the historic low hit a few months before that.

No, Congress, we don’t want to be your Valentine.

About now someone somewhere is saying that folks may not like Congress, but they do like their own member of Congress. Not so. A recent poll showed that voters don’t want their own so-called representative re-elected, either.

So, why do incumbents still get re-elected? Well, in most congressional districts, there is a dominant political party — either the Democrats or the Republicans. The winner of that party’s primary is a virtual shoo-in in the general election.

Most folks turn out to cast their votes in the general election, when in most districts it’s already been decided, but fail to show up in the all-important primary election, when they could actually make a difference.

What to do? Well, several patriots hopped into a phone booth and changed into a SuperPAC, called the Campaign for Primary Accountability. The group says, “We have two parties. Both are irresponsible. Both are unaccountable.”

And already the SuperPAC has raised $1.8 million to target, in their primaries, a number of supposedly safe House incumbents: Representatives Spencer Bachus (R-Ala), Bob Brady (D-Pa.), Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), Tim Johnson (R-Ill.), Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio).

There could be no better Valentine for our republic than seeing entrenched incumbents defeated. The primary is a smart place for that battle. You might even want to send your own heartfelt message.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H

“Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.”

Categories
Thought

Kurt Vonnegut, his novel Slaughterhouse-Five is based on surviving the Allied raid on Dresden on this day in 1945 as a POW.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

Categories
ballot access political challengers

Something Up His Sleeve

In 2008, Republican insiders in a number of states worked mightily to ensure that presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul met with no success. So, this time around, his campaign has trained supporters in the caucus states to act like insiders.

What’s the secret?

“There were no actual delegates rewarded in last Tuesday’s voting,” Greg Gutfeld clarified on Red Eye, his late-night Fox News show. The votes reported on caucus night are not the votes that count, the ones that elect delegates. Instead, the delegates — who go on to pick other delegates to go to the state convention and then the national convention, and ultimately choose the GOP candidate — are picked later, after many caucus attendees have gone home for the night.

Ron Paul’s supporters stick around. And vote themselves in as delegates.

“We do have to remember,” Ron Paul has gloated, that “the straw vote is one thing, but then there’s one other thing called delegates, yeah!”

News sources consistently report caucus night straw vote totals, but rarely mention that such caucus polling is relevant only for perceptions of “momentum.” The actual candidate selection mechanism? Something else again.

Indeed, it looks like a majority of Minnesota delegates, as well as surprisingly high percentages in Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, may actually end up supporting Ron Paul for President.

Un-democratic? Paul supporters are unashamed of their strategy, as campaign senior advisor Doug Wead happily explained to Rachel Maddow. As they see it, they are only acting according to the rules that usually serve to favor insiders in the GOP boys’ club.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.