Category: ideological culture

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Common Sense ideological culture

And the Award Goes To…

With last night’s Oscars on everybody’s noggins, I’ll hand out a few of my own awards, just to keep in the spirit of this news cycle.

Best performance by a lead actor? This last year Rep. John Boehner came out to challenge Glenn Beck as chief public weeper, and he gave a good showing. Still, the award has to go to Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama, for making us cry.

Best performance by a lead actress? I am tempted to award Hillary Clinton, for her work trying to make U.S. foreign policy seem plausible, but, really, it’s unraveling every day, and she seems too oblivious to reality to deserve accolades. So, the honor goes to Nancy Pelosi, for her role as outgoing House Speaker. She may not have done it all that well, but it was a pleasure to see her leave.

Best foreign language effort? This has got to be a tie, between the Tunisians and the Egyptians, kicking out their non-term-limited tyrants.

Best first-run, open-in-all-venues effort? That has to be the Tea Party showing last November. Breaking a long stretch of largely united governments — legislative and executive branches united under one party, first Republican and then Democrat — the Tea Party voters sent a well-deserved chill down politicians’ backs.

It’s worth noting that the Tea Party merited Independent Spirit Award attention, too. True independence of spirit is rare in big-time politics. Let’s hope it continues for another major showing next year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people too much government

Wisconsin Whitewash

NBC anchorman Brian Williams says government workers in Wisconsin are “rising up and saying no to some of the most extreme cuts in the nation.”

It’s a glorious revolution. . . .

Thousands have been descending on the statehouse to protest the new governor’s willingness to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions.

One demonstrator tells NBC that teachers are fighting for the “same thing” Egyptian demonstrators are fighting for — budget cuts equaling dictatorship, presumably. Others say that the proposed cuts “unfairly penalize union employees.”

Of course, these folks aren’t about to recognize the fact that, in many states, untrammeled splurging on public union employees has long unfairly penalized taxpayers.

The protesters’ assertions get a fair amount of attention from national media. We’re hearing less about the violent rhetoric and even threats that some have engaged in. Governor Walker has been compared to Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler, and one placard shows him being targeted by a sniper’s rifle.

National Review’s Jay Nordlinger reports that the governor and members of his administration have been threatened with violence. “I have heard from people closely connected to the threatened individuals,” Nordlinger writes. “Their letters are hard to take. The last few days have made quite clear that, if you cross the public-employee unions, you run risks: and not merely political risks. . . .”

Don’t the hazards of trying to reduce the extent to which taxpayers are looted deserve a few moments on the evening news?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Enslaved for Your Own Good

If government is “justified” in forcing you to buy health insurance for your own good — the fabled and perhaps fatal conceit of Obamacare — is it also justified in forcing us to keep up with “good” TV shows?

That’s the nutty notion floated at the satirical site The Onion, which drily reports: “FCC to Fine Americans Who Don’t Keep Up with TV Shows.” Seems too many office hours are spent explaining what happened on some iconic television show a co-worker missed. So the FCC is fining anyone who falls behind.

Hyuk, hyuk, get it? The government would never actually mandate television watching! No, it just makes us pay for boring documentaries on PBS.

Nor would the government ever issue commandments about when you can smoke on private property or even in your own homes. Or . . . would it?

But the government would never declare what you can and can’t eat, or what foods you can and can’t dish out. Right? Unless, that is, you’re a kid in a government-overseen cafeteria or a chef in a New York City restaurant prohibited from serving dishes containing the allegedly alarming ingredient of trans fat.

Well, the government would never require you to dutifully read even so salutary an e-letter as Common Sense, eh? (I’m pretty sure about this one.)

Whether the policy-makers’ notion of “the good” comports with your own doesn’t matter, of course. They’re the government, and they’re here to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

The Real Reaganism

Last week Americans honored the late Ronald Reagan on the occasion of his 100th birthday. There was one man who certainly made a difference.

Reagan’s cumulative pressing of his core belief in freedom and free markets was more important than any single accomplishment — or mistake. His dogged commitment to the principles of freedom changed the course of history, even as Reagan, the politician, didn’t always live up to his lofty beliefs. As president, he ran up (then) record budget deficits and he flip-flopped on draft registration, for example.

Still, as much as President Reagan could fall short, his legacy grows sweeter over time, in part because of a second major idea. He believed that the common sense of the people was far more capable and worthy of trust in making the important decisions we face than are politicians left to their own devices.

That’s why Mr. Reagan took time from his 1980 campaign to send a letter to New Jersey activist Sam Perelli, who was lobbying his state’s legislators to establish a process where citizens could put issues on the ballot. “George Bush and I congratulate you on your efforts to attain, for the people of New Jersey, the right to initiative and referendum,” Reagan wrote. “We urge you to keep up your fight and we endorse your efforts.”

Mr. Reagan is remembered for his faith in freedom and in our democratic ability to defend that freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Tyrants Are Not Our Friends

Last month, an upset apple cart led to political revolution.

On December 17, Tunisian government agents tried to confiscate Mohamed Bouazizi’s livelihood. When he refused to hand over his produce, he was slapped by a female inspector and then beaten by two of her colleagues, who took his scale. When he went to the municipal building to get his property back, he was beaten again.

Later that day in the public square, Bouazizi doused himself with lighter fluid and set himself on fire. He died weeks later, but not before demonstrations erupted in his home town and spread throughout Tunisia.

Tunisians had long labored under the repressive dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who repressed both political speech and commerce. No longer. He’s been ousted.

So do our leaders celebrate with the Tunisian people? No. The New York Times reports that Ben Ali was “an important ally of the United States.” He’s now in exile in Saudi Arabia, another dictatorship allied with the United States.

Protest has spread further, most notably to Egypt, yet another repressive government supported by America’s State Department . . . and taxpayers.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassures us that, “the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

That response? To imprison and torture bloggers and opposition political leaders.

Our most effective aid to Africa would be to stop subsidizing repressive regimes and pretending that slavery is freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture

The Kid With the Illegal Magic Marker

Want to be marked for life? Be a student in DeLynn Woodside’s math class at Roosevelt Middle High in Oklahoma City, where last month a 13-year-old boy fell prey to another exercise of unenlightened zero-tolerance-for-common-sense policies.

The child’s high crime was using a magic marker in school, a no-no in light of the school’s graffiti problem. The police report documents his “possession of a permanent marker on private property,” which is illegal. According to Ms. Woodside, the boy was “writing on a piece of paper, which caused it to bleed over onto the desk.” When she asked for the marker, he tried to hide it.

A problem? Perhaps. But if so, a minor one. She could have dealt with it by explaining that markers are not allowed in school and by asking him to put the marker away and not bring it back to school. Instead, at the teacher’s behest the child was arrested and taken to a certain Community Intervention Center, a holding facility for juvenile offenders. A sergeant “booked the marker into the property room.”

Stories like these seem like real knee-slappers until you realize the outsized inanity displayed is probably not so funny for the kids being dragged downtown and booked.

Legislators, teachers, police — nobody who enables, sanctions or participates in such episodes — deserve any laurels. Treating kids as criminals for the most trivial violations of the rules, even rules that make sense, is itself criminal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies too much government

What Gets Lost in Washington

The current battle over “health care reform” is a great example of why representative government frustrates.

It’s not just that the vast majority of Americans who oppose the Democrats’ bill didn’t get their way. It’s that the proponents of socialized medicine (and that’s the real goal, here: The eventual complete government takeover of medicine) are playing a sort of obstacle-course race . . . as I argued yesterday.

Meanwhile, how the anti-Obamacare message hits Washington vexes, too.

Some partisan pundits and pollsters go so far as to say that the Democrats’ reform legislation suffers because it lacks a good name. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is not a catchy moniker. “Obamacare,” used primarily by its opponents, is super-catchy. And the Republicans repeal effort is pretty clever: “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.”

Though “job-killing” may reference a hot, current topic, it is far from the most salient thing one might say against the Democrats’ rushed-through plan.

Standard politics: Even when politicians do the right thing, they push it for the wrong reason.

Media folk are now beginning to spin the popular opposition to Obamacare. Carefully worded polls “prove” that Americans aren’t overwhelmingly against the plan.

Which misses the real point: Incredulity. Democrats ballyhooed the notion that further government intervention into medicine would reduce costs. Nonsense, of course. And Americans know it.

That common-sense skepticism is precisely what gets lost in all the politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

The Ratchet Still Holds

Government grows by a ratchet effect.

When Democrats gained unified control over Congress and the Executive Branch in 2009 they understandably moved to increase the size and scope of government, rather than, say, swiftly follow through with President Obama’s various promises to withdraw from foreign interventions. Adding new stuff? More politic.

Thus the legislation called (by opponents) “Obamacare.”

Democrats hoped that the wide number of people who would bear the initial costs would soon forget about them (the reform is already causing substantial increases in private insurance rates) while the smaller group of people who make obvious gains in services would solidly rank behind the reforms.

A slight miscalculation. Americans reacted against Obamacare immediately, and gave control of the House back to the Republicans.

Who, yesterday, voted to repeal Obamacare.

But since Democrats control the Senate, the bill will die there. If by some miracle it passed, the president will veto.

In the ratchet they trust.

Hoping dispersed costs will eventually be lost sight of, and feeling certain that the concentrated effects will indeed nurture a voting bloc, progressive Democrats see a bright future for ever-expanding government incursion into medicine. As with most government encroachments, if it doesn’t work as advertised, more intrusiveness will be the next proposal for “reform.”

So far Democrats have plied their obvious advantage, reducing the repeal effort to symbolic action. Let’s hope Republicans can muster something more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Determined To Be Free

Years ago, on a past Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I played a video of his speeches for my children. Upon hearing the words King delivered in a Selma church in 1965, I was overcome with emotion. Who wouldn’t be?

“Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they’re worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36-years-old, as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life – some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right.

“A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he’s 80. He’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. The cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. . . .

“We’re going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!”

Moving. Inspiring. And common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

The Nihilist as the Vilest

Yesterday I surveyed the media landscape and found the weekend’s most obnoxious theme: That Jared Lee Loughner, the apprehended suspect killer in Saturday’s Tucson massacre, was somehow spurred to commit his gruesome shooting spree by the “inflamed rhetoric” of today’s protest politics. I titled my effort “Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame.” Hans Bader had a better title for his Washington Examiner contribution: “Shootings obscure America’s generally bland and timid political culture.”

Yes, bland, he wrote.

“My French relatives regularly denounce their country’s leaders in far more heated and pungent terms than Americans like Sarah Palin do. Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were attacked far more vitriolically in the media than recent presidents like Obama and Bush were. . . .” He notes that today’s left-leaners have become so timid as to become “stiflingly conformist.”

In Slate, Jack Shafer pointed out that “Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.” David Weigel, also in Slate, turned his gaze on a politician actually writing legislation to “shut down” uncool speech, noting that “[t]here’s no evidence — none — that violent pictures or words inspired the violence in Arizona.”

So, what motivated Loughner? A Mother Jones exclusive sketches the young man’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and . . . meaning. But neither Loughner’s philosophical nihilism nor his will to annihilate fit well with any purely political narrative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.