Author: Redactor

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Kochs: The Real Thing

Lying about who you are to trick an ideological adversary into embarrassing himself on tape?

A dubious means of advancing your cause. 

But James Taranto notes a key difference between an effective conservative sting operation against an NPR officer, Ron Schiller, and an earlier, ineffective liberal sting operation against Governor Walker of Wisconsin. Namely, “that the guy who prank-​called Walker claimed to be an actual person, so that there was a second victim of his prank.”

The other victim in the Walker sting, which rocked Wisconsin politics with all the power of a wet firecracker, was industrialist David Koch, one of two brothers who have philanthropically supported free-​market causes over the years. They’ve been a major backer of the Cato Institute, for example. The guy pretending to be David Koch in the prank phone call to Walker sought to represent the Kochs’ influence on Wisconsin politics as somehow corrupt and immoral. The opposite is true.

Richard Fink, executive vice president of Koch Industries, told National Review Online that the brothers won’t be deterred by smear attacks from the left.

“We will not step back at all,” Fink says. “We firmly believe that economic freedom has benefited the overwhelming majority of society, including workers, who earn higher wages when you have open and free markets. When government grows as it has with the Bush and Obama administrations, that is what destroys prosperity.”

Good for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Keeping Up with the Arabs

It’s open season on Middle East dictators — but I’m a little jealous. Greater freedom and democracy may be coming to Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain, but what about us?

The last two decades Americans have asserted themselves, changing control of Congress several times as well as passing term limits and other reforms directly through numerous statewide citizen initiatives.

Have our elected representatives responded by facilitating such democratic participation? Not on your life!

This year, many state legislators came into session hell-​bent on blocking the citizen check of initiative and referendum. 

In Colorado, legislators have proposed a constitutional amendment making it harder to place initiatives on the ballot. It would also mandate a 60 percent supermajority vote to pass a constitutional amendment, allowing deep pocket special interests the power to defeat reforms popular enough to win 59.9 percent of the vote.

Last November, Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment to make it a little easier for citizens to petition an issue onto the ballot. Now, just months later, state senators narrowly passed an amendment that would make the same process much more difficult.

Currently, Nevada citizens must gather signatures in each of the state’s three congressional districts to qualify a statewide ballot issue. Legislation is pending to increase this requirement from three petition drives to 42 separate petition drives — one for each of the 42 state legislative districts.

Thus our “representatives” seek to stop the people from representing themselves.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Indefinite Detention, Definitely Wrong

“No western government has ever claimed the power to do this,” said Judge Andrew Napolitano, on Fox’s The Plain Truth. “Not the King of England, not Hitler, not Stalin, not even the Russian and Chinese Communists.”

Hitler comparisons are a dime a dozen these days, but Napolitano was not referring to something minor. He was talking about the power to hold someone for the whole of his or her natural life, even after being acquitted in a U.S. court of law. 

By a jury. 

Yes, on March 7, 2011, Barack Obama, President of the United States, signed an executive order detailing how detainees will be held. Key word: “continued” — which is code for Indefinite.

The president’s supporters squirmed. Obama had promised to close the Guantánamo Bay facility during his campaign. On AlterNet the story was covered as a “step forward.” The Washington Post, on the other hand, quotes Republican Representative Peter T. King saying the order vindicates George W. Bush, whose administration had established the practice of indefinitely holding suspected terrorists at the site.

The order does affirm the right of habeus corpus for detainees. But its aim is to merely provide a review of cases. It doesn’t question “the executive branch’s continued, discretionary exercise of existing detention authority” — which is what rightly bothers Judge Napolitano. 

The order is legalese; non-​lawyers may nod off. It’s hard to see the Hitlerian element.

But that’s what the “banality of evil” is all about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Life, the Universe, and Everything

The answer is 42.

The question? Not Douglas Adams’s Ultimate Question concerning “life, the universe, and everything.” Instead, it’s the answer to the question, “How many mandates does the State of Oregon place on the medical insurance packages Oregonians are allowed to buy?”

Forty-​two.

The number is far too large — and yet the number will likely increase this year, courtesy of the state legislature, despite the fact that the current mandates raise the cost of medical insurance for Oregonians.

Steve Buckstein, speaking before the state’s House Committee on Health Care, for-​instanced Iowa, which sports 16 fewer mandates. The state has lower percentages of uninsured folks and lower premiums than in states with higher numbers of required services. 

Buckstein, a policy analyst for Cascade Policy Institute, was arguing for HB 2977, which would allow Oregonians to purchase medical insurance from other states. This would add competition to the current highly over-​regulated market.

Buckstein shouldn’t have to do this. The purpose of the federal union was to create a vast free trade zone. Misguided state mandates such as the ones he’s fighting rest upon prohibiting state citizens from buying outside the state, which runs up against the grain of the Constitution. For too long Congress has exempted the medical insurance industry from the correct application of the Commerce Clause, leading to a crippled industry and opening the way for disastrously unworkable ideas like, well, “Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Stop the Mortgage Madness

The New York Times wonders how “home buying [might] change if the federal government shuts down the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Despite vague agreement that misguided government policy somehow encouraged short-​sighted, irresponsible conduct, many want government to keep it up.

It’s supposedly “well understood” that Fanny and Freddie “misused” government’s support to back “millions of shoddy loans.” Shoddy how? Shoddy because awarded to high-​risk debtors on terms impossible without the government’s easy credit, subsidies, regulations, exhortations and bailout net. Many of the loans would not have been made by creditors obliged to consider not only potential profits but also all the actual and potential costs, without government interference.

In the article’s very next paragraph, however, we learn that although the consequences of “misused” government support for untenable loans are now “well understood,” there’s a “much more divisive question” now in play: “whether the government should preserve the benefits that the companies provide to middle-​class borrowers, including lower interest rates, lenient terms and the ability to get a mortgage even when banks are not making other kinds of loans.”

Huh? You mean, many politicians and beneficiaries of government largesse are “divided” over whether a policy of destructively encouraging irresponsible conduct should be clung to with only cosmetic, if any, changes — even though this policy sank the economy?

Scavengers picking carcasses may not care about the long run. But the rest of us should.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Unkinder Cuts

The Republicans’ proposed cuts to the federal budget are called “deep” in Washington. So deep that Democrat Sen. John Kerry called them terrible, and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin protests that “Republicans are unfairly and unwisely placing the burden of spending cuts on domestic programs. Durbin tells Fox News Sunday he’s ‘willing to see more deficit reduction, but not out of domestic discretionary spending.’”

The Democrats have offered, instead, a shallower set of cuts, of $6.5 billion from domestic spending, hardly a tenth of what the Republicans offer.

But what the Republicans offer is only 5 percent of the budget deficit. Not the budget, mind you, just the Godzilla-​sized deficit.

I’m curious where Durbin wants to cut. He’s offered no reduction in domestic “mandatory spending,” which is made up chiefly of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt. Barring repudiating the debt, where would he attack the budget?

That leaves one huge hunk open for paring down: war spending. But realize that shutting down our entire military, zeroing it out, wouldn’t completely close this deficit. To make substantial Defense Department cuts, we’d have to extricate ourselves from wars abroad or pull our troops out of Europe and Japan and Korea, etc. All things I think we can, should and must do.

Talk is cheap, and awfully vague. “A terrible idea”; “unfairly and unwisely” … as if our current budget mess wasn’t the result of a thousand terrible ideas … and unfair and unwise spending galore.

The Republicans’ proposed cuts are disappointing. The Democrats’ objections? Witless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.