Category: ideological culture

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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.

Categories
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.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame

On Saturday, a mentally unstable 22-​year old man opened fire in a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona, seriously injuring a congresswoman, murdering six and wounding eleven more.

According to the New York Times, “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.” The Washington Post’s coverage could have run under the same headline: “The mass shooting Saturday morning that gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D‑Ariz.) and killed a federal judge raised serious concerns that the nation’s heated political discourse had taken a dangerous turn.”

No mention of the person who actually pulled the trigger. Instead, insinuations that those who have strongly expressed their political opinions are the real culprits.

“The rhetoric has devolved and descended past the ugly, and past the threatening, and past the fantastic, and into the imminently murderous,” argued MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. Olbermann’s guest, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, while admitting he didn’t know the shooter’s motivation, suggested the violence was the “inevitable” result of “violent political rhetoric” and “incitement.”

The Huffington Post trotted out Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva to relay the day’s message against “vitriolic rhetoric” from “extreme elements of the Tea Party.” Grijalva attacked Sarah Palin, arguing, “if she wants to help the public discourse, the best thing she could do is to keep quiet.”

Let us mourn the deceased, support the injured, prosecute the guilty. Yes. But it is indecent to twist an act of violence into an excuse to smear opponents and silence robust political debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.