Category: Accountability

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Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Shameless: The Next Generation

Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton, President, Bernie Sanders, Health Care, mud, Common Sense, attack

On Tuesday, former (and perhaps soon to be again) First Daughter Chelsea Clinton attacked Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her mother’s chief rival in the presidential primaries.

“Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea charged, telling an Iowa audience that he “would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

The Sanders campaign quickly fired back that the young Clinton was “wrong” and disingenuously ignoring the fact that Sanders would bestow government-​paid healthcare coverage on every American. For free! (Unless you happen to pay taxes, that is. Then, it’d be very expensive.)

“It wasn’t an honest attack,” declared Democratic strategist David Axelrod on CNN.

But on ABC, Hillary defended her daughter, doubling-​down by arguing, “that’s exactly what he’s proposed. To take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together.”

Strange, in 2008, when Hillary was promoting a single-​payer system and Barack Obama took issue, Mrs. Clinton decried “tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook,” asking, “Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal healthcare?”

“This is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged,” the 2008 Hillary declared. “So shame on you, Barack Obama!”

Now it’s Hillary Clinton who knows no shame.

“More striking perhaps,” lamented Mark Halperin, a senior political analyst for MSNBC and Bloomberg News, “was a lack of interest that most of the news world had to [Chelsea’s] remarks.”

Maybe when Clintons “dismantle” the truth, it just isn’t news anymore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Clinton, President, Bernie Sanders, Health Care, mud, Common Sense, attack

 

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Accountability folly ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Doom in Oil Boom?

Oil, cheap, energy, climate change, global warming, prices, illustration, Common Sense

Tragedy has hit the environmental movement: The price of oil is going down.

And may go down further.

While environmentalists quiver, science writer Ronald Bailey chortles. “Resource depletionists” — the prophets of “peak oil” — should, he says, hide their heads in shame! They’ve been so very, very wrong in the prophecy biz.

As oil descends towards $20 per barrel, we should ask ourselves: where’s the tragedy? Well, it will postpone the switch to non-​fossil fuels. The need is far from obvious, and the incentive is to use energy in its cheapest, most efficient forms.

But if increased CO2 in the atmosphere is destabilizing the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystem, cheaper oil (and thus more burning of it) might lead to the much-​ballyhooed tragedy for all.

Still, that’s a big “if” — the more we learn about the climate, the more doubtful the identified CO2 causation and attendant doom.

Besides, global warming catastrophism’s implicit message — the “need” for global political control over everybody and everything to “manage” climate changes — seems awfully convenient for those who just love intrusive government … on “principle.”

It echoes the Keynesian technocratic conceit in economics — that experts should manage the economy by fiscal methods (increasing debt) and monetary intervention (central bank interest rate manipulation and bad asset purchase). It’s pretty obvious that they shouldn’t, because they’ve demonstrated they can’t.

As prices for oil defy “peak oil” prophets’ predictions, it becomes obvious: the world works differently than dreamed up by the prophets of doom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Oil, cheap, energy, climate change, global warming, prices, illustration, Common Sense

 

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

This is Yellow Journalism

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Washington Post, Bias, video, Common Sense, illustration

Weeks ago, I took Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to task for behaving like rude, dishonest children — she, fibbing about Trump being used in an ISIS recruitment video; he, using a vulgar term to describe her 2008 defeat by President Obama.

The mainstream media is joining the bad behavior, copacetic with “Clinton avoiding the same kind of treatment as Trump,” Callum Borchers informs in his piece headlined: “Does the media have a double standard on Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s embellishments?”

Short answer: Yes.

When Mrs. Clinton made her false accusation, ISIS was actually using her husband, former Pres. Bill Clinton, in a recruitment video. Even with this man-​bites-​dog angle — astoundingly underreported — Borcher predicts that Hillary will “emerge from this media brush fire unsinged” in no small part because there are “enough … supportive media outlets.”

Now the Post reports that a new 51-​minute “propaganda video released by the Somali-​based al-​Qaeda affiliate al-​Shabab includes a clip of Trump calling on the United States to bar Muslims from entering the country …”

The story’s lede smears Mr. Trump with guilt by association:

Last month, The Washington Post reported that white nationalists have begun using Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a recruitment tool. Now, the polarizing Republican presidential front-​runner has become the recruitment fodder for another group of marginalized extremists.

The Post’s previous article found white supremacists trying to somehow glom on to, but clearly being rebuffed by, Trump. Repeatedly associating the two is gutter journalism. Should we hold our breaths for stories about members of the Revolutionary Communist Party favoring Clinton or Bernie Sanders?

Spare us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom government transparency ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Ethics First

government, cronyism, crony, trust, worry, Common Sense, illustration

The biggest problem facing Americans? According to a Gallup poll, for the second year in a row, it’s our government.

Maybe I should say “the government.” Few think it represents us. Which is sort of a big problem for a representative government.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump says our leaders are “stupid.” Were that the case, it’d be easier to correct. The reality is worse.

We have an ethical problem in government. Those entrusted to represent us represent, instead, themselves. And their cronies. And special interests.

Charged with creating a level playing field where we can all succeed through hard work, our elected officialdom have tilted that field. Oh, they’re doing just swell. The rest of us? Not so well.

Elected officials from Washington to state capitols have hiked up their pay, finagled perks, per diems and other bennies, and rewarded themselves with lavish pensions. Meanwhile, most Americans lack even a 401K to help save for retirement, much less a pension beyond a meager (and politician-​imperiled) Social Security safety net.

Transparency? Well, it’s not just Hillary Clinton who has conducted public business privately. Even with her scandal looming in the headlines, Defense Secretary Ash Carter confidently did likewise.

Let’s end pensions for politicians, nudging them to return to our world. And let’s change the rules so they work serving the public, not for private gain.

Can we count on our elected representatives to rectify their ethical lapses? Not on your life. We need to do it ourselves, using ballot initiatives to put ethics first.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability Common Sense First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

re: Solutions

New Year, 2016, resolutions, Common Sense, illustration

Today’s the traditional day for New Year’s “Resolutions,” but instead of resolutions, how about some solutions?

Sure, Thomas Sowell has sagely reminded: there are no solutions in social life, only trade-offs.

But, utopian perfection aside, let’s agree that some changes would be better than others, and, let us resolve to solve some nagging problems — or at least trade up. And since the really nagging problems are political …

For Republicans: this could be the year to give up on government as society’s chief moral agent, empowered to regulate everybody’s medicine cabinets and bloodstreams. End the failed War on Drugs, with legalizing marijuana the simplest first step. Vice will continue, as it always has. But it’s another kind of vice to think that force, policing and imprisoning folks, will “solve” the problem. Much less even reduce the availability of drugs.

For Democrats: this could be the year to give up on government as micromanager of markets — and people’s marketplace choices. Face it: folks will make decisions that liberals don’t like. They’ll eat at McDonalds and buy large sodas — and the wrong stocks. And guns! But adding to the mass of regulations doesn’t make consumers choose better, it makes stuff more expensive and business less open to competition. Indeed, almost all the regulations designed to help “the little guy” backfire, helping big business by hobbling their upstart competitors.

Our leaders, at present, cannot even balance budgets. They are addicted to debt. To pretend we must have more and more government to prevent our addictions or save us from personal debt is ludicrous.

Can we resolve to stop pretending that bigger government is always the solution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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New Year, 2016, resolutions, Common Sense, illustration
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Accountability general freedom ideological culture individual achievement national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Virus and Host

John McAfee, libertarian, presidential race, president, candidate

Presidential candidate John McAfee is an adventurer. Best known for founding the first successful anti-​computer virus company, he has also been shot at in tropical jungles, by men trained by U. S. forces, with American-​bought guns. This range of experience makes him the most interesting presidential hopeful, bar none.

His big issue is cyber-​security. He thinks Americans have placed themselves in a too-​precarious position. As he sees it, the war on terror has served as a grand distraction from the real threat, a prime example of doing foreign policy and national security completely upside-​down wrong.

He has a point.

But he’s neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and not long ago he realized that his own Cyber Party didn’t have the oomph to get him on the ballot in enough states.

So he has announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination.

Why? He’s obviously not a libertarian in any strict capital‑L sense. But the septuagenarian insists that he has been a libertarian at heart since before the word entered common use.

This is what the Libertarians get for their most obvious success: obtaining and keeping ballot status in more states for more election cycles than any other “minor party.”

Think of the Libertarian Party as the host, and one-​time Republicans like former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson — and now McAfee — as viruses, aiming to commandeer the host’s operating system.

Of course, one might also view the LP as a virus attempting to do the same to the federal government.

Shall we root for the viruses, for once?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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John McAfee, libertarian, presidential race, president, candidate