Author: Redactor

ideological culture media and media people

A Little Maher Common Sense

Post author By Redactor
Post date November 20, 2020
1 Comment on A Little Maher Common Sense

I’m not the biggest fan of Democrat comedian-pundit Bill Maher. But when he’s right, he’s right.

Mr. Maher once said the sun rises in the east. I concur. He also says that Democrats shouldn’t be so off-puttingly wackadoodle and tyrannical. Correct.

According to Maher, “Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive, social justice warrior, woke bulls—t. The party that disappears people or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things. [Democrats] think silence is violence, and looting is not. [And we’re the party of] replacing ‘Let’s not see color’ with ‘Let’s see it always and everywhere.’”

In his indictment, the HBO jester argues “the crux of the problem” is that “Democrats too often don’t come across as having common sense to a huge swath of people.”

Right again!

“It would be so easy to win elections,” he deduces, “if we would just drop this s**t!”

Maher notes a New York Times post-election report that congressional “Democrats wept, cursed and traded blame” over the election results on a recent conference call. Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) warned that “we’re not going to win” in Georgia if Democrats are talking “Medicare for all or defunding police or socialized medicine.”

“Democratic rhetoric needs to be dialed back,” Maher quotes Rep. Connor Lamb (D-Pa.). “It needs to be rooted in common sense.”

“I feel like I’m being asked to be quiet,” responded squad-member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

Tlaib is half right. The solution to this problem for Democrats is to abandon their anti-common-sense positions. Not to hide them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags Bill Maher, Democrats, woke culture

Today

Fidelio

On November 20, 1789, New Jersey became the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

In 1805 on this date, Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera, Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (in English, Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love, later renamed Fidelio), premiered in Vienna. Beethoven wrote four overtures for the opera, all part of the orchestra’s concert repertoire. The opera tells the tale of the rescue from unjust imprisonment of Florestan by his wife Leonore, who disguises herself as a boy, Fidelio.

media and media people

Not Acosta

In late April, Scott Johnson, cofounder of the political blog Power Line, a former attorney and an accredited reporter, was banned from the Minnesota government’s daily briefings about the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials also stopped answering his written questions.

Why?

Minnesota officials told the Washington Free Beacon that the briefings were limited to “professional journalists.” But if they regarded Johnson as something other than a professional journalist, why had he been allowed to attend to begin with?

More plausible is Johnson’s contention in his June lawsuit against the state that officials simply didn’t like his conservative political perspective or his questions. Johnson had been critical of the policies of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, in combatting the pandemic.

Months later, Scott Johnson has won his lawsuit. He can attend the briefings now. And officials must answer at least three of his written questions per week.

A question occurred to me as I was mulling this story: Isn’t what Minnesota did in banning Johnson from the COVID-19 briefings exactly like what Trump did to that CNN banshee, Jim Acosta, when he banned Acosta from presidential briefings?*

No, not exactly, I answer myself. Trump ousted a reporter who was persistently rude and disruptive. “Asking questions government officials dislike” and “being a constant ass” are not the same thing.

At Power Line, Johnson has posted many reports about the lawsuit and about the course of the pandemic in Minnesota.

He may not be welcome by those in government he probes, but we out here, far from power, are glad he is there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* CNN sued and a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the White House, after which CNN and the Trump Administration agreed Acosta could return as long as he followed rules of decorum newly written by the administration and applied to all reporters.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags CNN, Jim Acosta, press

Thought

…of rights….

Rights are lost by disuse.
Legal maxim, reported in Henry Louis Mencken, A new dictionary of quotations on historical principles from ancient and modern sources (1946), p. 1044.

Today

Of/By/For

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the ceremonial dedication of the military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, appropriating an old phraseology for republican government — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — and giving it its most memorable usage.

On the same date in 1955, National Review published its first issue.

general freedom national politics & policies

Lockdown Mania, Winter Phase

Post author By Redactor
Post date November 18, 2020
2 Comments on Lockdown Mania, Winter Phase

New Mexico, along with many other states, is going into lockdown.

“The rate of spread and the emergency within our state hospitals are clear indicators that we cannot sustain the current situation without significant interventions to modify individual behavior,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is quoted in her office’s press release.

“The public health data make clear,” the governor asserts, that “more aggressive restrictions are not only warranted but essential if we are to prevent mass casualties. Without the compliance and cooperation of New Mexicans statewide, we do not need to imagine the bleak public health calamity we will face — the images from El Paso the last few weeks, from New York City earlier this year, and from Europe at the outset of the pandemic will be our fate in New Mexico.”

The report from The Hill did not interrogate the claims, just repeated the planned massive intervention and accepted the statements as fact.

Contrary to all this assertion, the evidence that lockdowns help remains worse than murky. European states that locked down tightly early in the year are experiencing this second or third “wave” worse than those that did not go full-on “mitigation.” The classic case is Sweden, which infamously resisted lockdown mania. Using the best test of success, “excess mortality,” Sweden is doing remarkably well.

Sweden’s a problem for lockdowners, who avoid fair comparisons and . . . are devoted to spin. On the same day, Business Insider and Reuters covered the same story, with these headlines:

Sweden has admitted its coronavirus immunity predictions were wrong as cases soar across the country.

Second wave, same strategy: Swedish COVID-19 czar defiant despite surge.

Meanwhile, a controlled study of lockdown mitigations using obedient Marines found: quarantines don’t control the spread of the disease.

Nevertheless, politicians seem hellbent on lockdowns, something they know how to do . . . whether it helps or not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Tags authoritarian society, Covid 19, lockdown

Today

Tell and Shaw

On November 18, 1307, legend has it, William Tell shot a crossbow bolt to pierce an apple, toppling it off his son’s head. He was forced to do this by the local Austrian authority, whose hat hung on a pole in the Altdorf town square Tell had refused to bow to when entering the village. Tell endures as a Swiss folk hero, and provides the subject of a famous opera by Rossini — the music of which is associated with, in many ears, Bugs Bunny and the Lone Ranger.

In 1926, on this date, George Bernard Shaw formally refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize for Literature, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

Thought

José Saramago

Nobody performs her or his duties. Governments do not, because they do not know, they are not able or they do not wish, or because they are not permitted by those who effectively govern the world: The multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power — absolutely non-democratic — reduce to next to nothing what is left of the ideal of democracy. We citizens are not fulfilling our duties either. Let us think that no human rights will exist without symmetry of the duties that correspond to them. It is not to be expected that governments in the next 50 years will do it. Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.
José Saramago, Nobel banquet speech (December 10, 1998).

First Amendment rights ideological culture

Buzz-Sawing the Conservative Treehouse

Post author By Redactor
Post date November 17, 2020
5 Comments on Buzz-Sawing the Conservative Treehouse

Big Tech, censorship, free speech, first amendment,

“They’re really showing their hand now, aren’t they?”

That is how one blogger puts it. And the “They” are the leftward tech giants that provide platforms on which all of us can (in theory) have our say.

“They” — Google, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress — have provided these platforms in a country where freedom of speech is protected, if imperfectly, by the First Amendment and allied ideas, institutions, habits, and sensibilities.

But the First Amendment cannot, by itself, protect speakers of speech from having the rug yanked out from under them by these service providers. With increasing frequency and brazenness, the tech giants are de-platforming speakers they disagree with despite past assurances of being open to all comers (not using speech to do anything illegal).

In this case, “they” means WordPress, which has notified a popular political blog, The Conservative Treehouse, that its days are numbered. Because “your site’s content and our terms” are incompatible, “you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2.”

It took many years and, apparently, the (apparent) election of Joe Biden for WordPress to discover this “incompatibility.”

Says the Treehouse: “After ten years of brutally honest discussion, opinion, deep research and crowdsourcing work” by the site, WordPress can cite no violation of any term of service “because CTH has never violated one.”

So, what’s the upshot? At a minimum, if you’re using a big-tech platform but aren’t toeing the big-tech ideological line, seek alternatives. Pronto.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts