Author: Redactor

Categories
term limits

Scientist Discovers Fire

A puzzled professor at Rice University, who also sits on a commission investigating whether term limits should be scuttled, offers evidence that people like term limits. Moreover, it seems people are especially prone to like them during times when the career politicians have gone out of their way to destroy the economy and all things wonderful and beautiful.

The popularity of term limits is old news. Term limit measures pass every time voters get a chance to vote for them. Many people who blog and write letters to the editor and attend Tea Party rallies regularly demand term limits — even as pols and pundits regularly announce, in tones of increasing desperation, that the term limits movement has expired already, and anyway we-already-have-term-limits-they’re-called-elections.

Bob Stein’s research pertains to Houston. His 1998 survey of registered voters showed 22 percent of respondents supporting city term limits “very strongly.” By 2009, 41 percent supported term limits “very strongly.” The number who opposed term limits “very strongly” rose from only 7 percent to 12.

The Houston Chronicle also reports that in a 2002 article, the professor observed that Americans support term limits “for elected officials at all levels of government.” But he professed not to understand the reason for this enthusiasm.

Somehow it doesn’t occur to the professor that Americans don’t want to be ruled by an entrenched, unmoving, heedless oligarchy that represents only itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency ideological culture

“Representatives” Who Avoid Voters

Here’s a surprise. Congressional Democrats who faced angry voters in town halls last summer have scrupulously skipped the pleasure during more recent visits home.

The New York Times suggests that although the open town-​hall style political meeting may not be quite dead yet, it’s “teetering closer to extinction,” inasmuch as only a few of 255 House Democrats held such meetings during a recent week-​long recess. Instead they arranged invitation-​only, scripted meetings with that portion of the electorate who believe that super-​sizing the nanny state and burying the country in an Everest of debt are the best things that could ever have happened to us.

These congressmen evade communicating with unhappy constituents to “avoid rage.” And to prevent video clips of their fatuous non-​answers to highly pertinent questions about mega-​billion-​dollar bailouts and pork barrel projects and socialized health care, etc., from showing up on YouTube.

One politician explains that town hall attendees last summer didn’t want to “get answers” so much as pursue a political agenda. I can’t help but remember the YouTube video in which a congresswoman “leading” a town hall forum seemed more interested in her cell phone than in a constituent’s explanation of why she didn’t want a government solution to medicine’s current institutional problems. Anyway, who really expects to escape “political agendas” at political forums convened to discuss politics?

Hopefully, the brilliant campaign strategy of ignoring voters and their legitimate concerns won’t pay off on election day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture

Facebook’s Secret Shame

Facebook has had some bad press lately.

The popular social networking site got in trouble in recent months for the ever-​more-​cavalier way it treats users’ privacy. People complain that their data has been unilaterally exposed in ways they never expected when they first signed up for the service, and that privacy settings have devolved into a confusing, hard-​to-​tweak labyrinth.

Facebook seems to be adjusting its privacy practices in response to the bad publicity. But there’s another lamentable Facebook practice that has, unfortunately, received less sustained attention: Its willingness to shut down a user’s Facebook page solely because somebody else is offended by the viewpoint expressed on that page.

The “somebody else,” in the case I’m referring to, is the government of Pakistan, which banned Facebook because of a page encouraging people to display images of the prophet Muhammad in protest of threats of violence against the show South Park, which had made fun of making threats against people who display images of Muhammad.

“In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL,” gloated Najibullah Malik, who represents Pakistan’s Orwellian “information technology ministry.”

It’s dangerous to cave in to demands for censorship. The folks at Facebook were faced with the loss of a large market, but they should have let the anti-​censorship page remain published and let Facebook users in Pakistan pressure their government to lift the ban.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights media and media people too much government

Liberty and Licenses

Oh, no. We’re being drowned — in alternatives.

Remember the good old days, with three choices for national broadcast news, Walter Cronkite and whoever the other guys were? Plus the local paper and the New York Times? Sure, there were other avenues. But if the big boys happened to have a unitary government-​approved perspective on something, you could battle uphill for years with hardly anyone noticing your particular flag.

Then cable arrived. The Internet. Zillions of webzines and blogs. If you want an alternative to whatever the Official View is, you don’t have to look very far or for very long. It’s harder for the powers that be to burble baloney unchallenged.

Big, big problem, all this competition, right?

It is according to Michigan State Senator Bruce Patterson. He wants to license journalists the way Michigan licenses plumbers and hair dressers.

From what I can tell, the state can’t be trusted with protecting us from bad hair cuts, let alone tell us who’s best suited to toot out the news. But Patterson says we’re being overwhelmed by all the media outlets. Poor us! So we need guvmint — which always puts the truth first, of course — to tell us good reporting from bad. 

Think about this: The traditional job of journalism is to provide a check on lying politicians. Now politicians will vet those who get the privilege to criticize them?

Puh-​leeze.

Patterson, we’ll take a pass.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The New Hollywood Blacklist

Hollywood folks often boast about their tolerance and liberality. Maybe they should look up those words.

Our national myth-​makers especially like to go over the horrors of the McCarthy “Blacklist” period, when the power of government nudged studio owners to blacklist writers and actors and directors who were (or were associated with) Communists.

Almost no one likes blacklists. Indeed, the McCarthy period censorship did much to harm the anti-​communist movement.

But don’t look for such subtleties of judgment from Hollywood today. After all, there is a working blacklist right now.

This time, though, there’s no pressure from Congress or regular Americans for this form of censorship. Hollywood players serve as their own censors, maintaining their blacklist by shunning those they don’t agree with politically.

Take the case of J. Neil Schulman. He was an up-​and-​coming writer in the ’80s. The people at L.A. Law really liked his proposals. But he had the gall to write an op-​ed they didn’t approve of, favoring the right to gun ownership, so the L.A. Law folks dropped him like a hot potato, and spread the word. “Too right-​wing,” they said.

Dan Gifford tells the tale on Big Hollywood. It’s an interesting story. You can see why the new blacklist is more effective than the old: It’s tacit, hush-​hush. There are no hearings, interviews, what-​have-​you. But the effect is pretty much the same as the McCarthy Era blacklist: Chilling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense insider corruption political challengers

Vote Absurdly If You Wish

Today is Election Day, with primaries or runoffs in 12 states. Let’s hope at least a few incumbents fall, from both parties.

Most Americans would cheer that. But we’ll then hear TV talking heads and pundits in the press tell us how crazily we’ve voted.

In 1994, ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings condescendingly reported that “The voters had a temper tantrum last week.… Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”

Were our choice so limited, I’d say give the two-​year olds a shot.

Jennings’s snooty attitude has been echoed again and again this year. Mike Allen, Politico’s chief political writer, said after Utah’s Senator Bennett flamed out in a GOP convention, “There was no reason for his state to turn on him. Nobody delivers for Utah the way he does.”

Allen went on to rant about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s unpopularity in his home state: “Voters are not thinking … the idea of Nevada kicking out Harry Reid is absurd! He’s the #1 senator: #1 out of 100. Nobody delivers for Nevada like Harry Reid.”

Apparently, Mr. Allen knows best. Utah and Nevada voters? Fools, the lot of them — for not liking all the presents their big-​shot politicians delivered for them.

Common sense, on the other hand, has it that anyone who votes to please the Washington press corps is truly crazy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.