Category: ideological culture

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility term limits too much government

The Politics of Inertia

Frankenstein, monster, shut down, shutdown, Congress, government, deep state

Congress’s failure to establish, last week, any semblance of budgetary responsibility led to one of those “government shutdowns” that the press likes to yammer about so breathlessly.

Then, early this week, Senate holdouts caved, allowing a short-term fix to bring the federal government fully back to life, like the monster in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab given a defibrillator jolt.

Usually these government shutdowns are caused by Republicans not playing along — Obamacare being the sticking point most recently — but this time the desperate negotiators were Sen. Chuck Schumer (D -NY) and his Democrat gang, whose “heroic” stance was all about immigration reform and “the Dreamers.”

After they folded, and the Monster was bequeathed new life, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin asked former Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz what her party had gained from its temporary obstructionism.

Her answer? “Potential for momentum.”

That had to be one of the more bizarrely drawn happy faces over complete and utter failure that we have witnessed since . . . well, the last one.

Even Ms. Baldwin was incredulous.*

The Democratic Party’s disarray is astounding. If any party has momentum on its side, it is the party of Andy Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, the party of the elitist media, insider government and the Deep State, and the resistance to Trump.

So why its current pathetic fortune? Because the Democrats have rested so long upon their “momentum.”

Inertia can sure have its downside.

On the “bright side,” Democrats will have occasion to revisit this, for no real budget has been established. All Congress even tries to do these days is provide temporary fix after temporary fix.

Call it potential for catastrophe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The CNN anchor may have been nonplussed by the specter of entropy in the odd Newtonian metaphor.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government

Twitter’s Merkel Tactics or Merkel’s Twitter Tactics?

Twitter, censorship, Germany, Merkel, speech, double standard

Is Twitter cooperating with Germany’s new crackdown on social-media speech because otherwise it risks steep penalties? Or is Twitter just doing what it would do anyway?

When Germany’s new law against unwelcome speech went into effect this year, many Germans protested. “Please spare us the thought police!” was the headline in one top-selling paper, Bild.

The law requires social-media sites to block unapproved content — which includes “hate speech” and “fake news” — within 24 hours or face exorbitant fines. (Of course, every piece of news, no matter how well or shabbily reported, gets decried as hateful “fake news” by somebody.) Under the new law, Twitter suspended the accounts of two officials of the political party Alternative for Germany who tweeted that Muslim men have violent proclivities. Hateful, fake, inexact, whatever, such tweets by themselves threaten nobody and violate nobody’s rights.

Did Twitter act only under duress here?

Well, in the U.S., the company is not ordered by our government to muzzle anybody except perhaps terrorists or persons directly instigating a crime. Yet Twitter regularly suspends or bans users whose speech it considers objectionable. Moreover, it has become notorious for especially targeting speech that can be regarded as on the right end of the political spectrum — while leaving intact the tweet-speech of left-wing micro-bloggers no matter how threatening or abusive.

I don’t say America’s government should become involved. It should certainly not compel Twitter to drop its double standard.

Instead, it is Twitter itself that should become involved . . . and drop its double standard.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest tax policy too much government

Still at Large

IRS, drain the swamp, Trump, Lois Lerner, tax, tax man

Blogger Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine Law School, still counts the days since we learned that the IRS was blocking applications for nonprofit status from right-leaning groups at the behest of former IRS honcho Lois Lerner.

Now years later, the agency can still arbitrarily victimize any one of us. Nor have Lerner and other bad guys been brought to justice. Lerner collects a six-figure pension, instead.

And so, on Day 1699, Caron highlighted Kimberly Strassel’s proposal that President Trump make 2018 “the year of civil-service reform — a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.” Exhibit A? The IRS and civil “servants” like “Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits.”  

And on Day 1709, Caron called our attention to Lerner’s attempt to suppress a deposition she gave in June “for a civil suit that victims [of IRS targeting] brought in 2013.” Lerner thinks we have no right to know why she felt justified in discriminating against applicants for tax-exempt status based on their political viewpoint.

Unfortunately, not everyone cares about justice as much as Caron.

Consider an obtuse Washington Post editorial pretending that the IRS didn’t really target conservative groups. Instead, “conservative groups, their allies in Congress and the IRS itself all bear responsibility” for the appearance otherwise.

And the aftermath.

Uh huh. If only victims of the abuse of power would stop being so indelicate as to object!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Ho Hum

Donald Trump, sex, scandal, Stormy,

The President of the United States allegedly had an affair — or a one-night stand with attempts at an affair — with a porn star. And paid her to keep silent. While he was married to his current wife, and his son was an infant. Donald Trump denies it, but a variety of reporters claim to have multiple corroborations.

It’s all very tawdry.

And it looks like it has elicited . . . yawns.

Sure, the newsmedia push it. But the American people seem almost bored.

The election of Donald Trump marks the end of an era, maybe. Trump has overwhelming support from social conservatives, and it isn’t for his morals. Meanwhile, the Left loathes the Donald for alleged mistreatment of women, which they deemed so unimportant when documented against President Bill Clinton that it birthed the “move on” movement.

So, what changed?

The political divide between left and right is now so forbidding that questions of character pale. Democrats won’t like Trump even were he to usher in the Millennium, and Trump might have to tattoo a 666 on his forehead and anoint himself the Beast to shake off his so-con support.

For conservatives, the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, after eight years of Obamamania in the media, was simply too much to bear. Indeed, a large swarth of the Democratic Party faithful didn’t quite trust her.

As for Democrats, the inability to defeat an opposing candidate caught on audiotape bragging about grabbing women’s private parts must be as frustrating as devil-with-a-blue-dress Bill’s success in the 1990s was for Republicans.

Character? So passé.

I wonder if it will come back.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture moral hazard

Through a Lens, Darkly

Matthew A. Sears, SJW, Social Justice Warrior, University, dialectic, truth, argument, protest

The “best debates” are ones in which one side shouts down the other side and threatens violence.

Well, that is what a Washington Post essay implies. In “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the real defenders of free speech on campus,” Matthew A. Sears, an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick, offers a bizarre take on current campus controversies.

After two years of bizarre antics from leftist student bodies in colleges and universities all over the country, academics as diverse as Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, and Camille Paglia have denounced the intentionally disruptive and even violent tactics of student mobs. We need to go back to the Socratic method and “the disinterested pursuit of truth,” as Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it.

Sears counters this by defending the “social justice approach” as better than a “disinterested pursuit of truth.” Instead of “constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.”

Conflating Socratic “dialectic” with the screaming matches and overt force used by the social justice students who have shut down lectures, seminars and fora featuring non-leftist figures such as Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray, is more effrontery than enlightening.*

And about that “social justice lens”? Lenses refract, mirrors reflect — and Sears’ argument, you will notice, defends bad behavior out of his classroom by focusing on how he teaches in class.

We don’t need mirrors or lenses to see the deflection here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It was heartening to read most commenters on the page engaging in a merciless “dialectic” against the author.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Times Must Change

USSR, Soviet Union, communism, socialism, apologist, New York Times

“Political leaders prefer to project a noble history, sometimes by turning complicity in atrocities into claims of victimhood,” the New York Times informed us last Sunday. “In Russia, Mr. Putin and many of his lieutenants came from the K.G.B. and resisted fully confronting its repressive history. And they, like many of their countrymen, prefer to portray Stalin not only as the architect of the Gulag but also as the leader who built Russia’s industrial might and led it to victory in the Great Patriotic War.”

The Gray Lady here marks the passing of Arseny Roginsky, an organizer and activist who kept alive the memory of state mass murder in his homeland. The Times quotes the late hero as insisting that common talk of “victims of repression” is nowhere near enough. The repression did not merely descend upon the people as “a plague.”

The victims were targets of “state terror.”

But there was something missing in this too-brief notice. Though the Nazis were mentioned, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t.

Communism was not.*

State terror did not infect its perpetrators biologically, like the world’s worst case of x-oplasmosis. It neither descended from the heavens nor ascended from the swamps. The infection was ideological — the result of Marxian socialism, of unworkable communism.

By not mentioning socialism or communism or even the USSR, the New York Times carries on its sad history of leftist apologetics. The case of the lying propagandist Walter Duranty — the Times’ award-winning foreign correspondent and author of Mission to Moscow — should have been the last of that.

It isn’t, apparently. The Times still protects its safe-space socialist readers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The omissions were also present in the Times’ initial obituary.

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

Where Have You Gone, Al Franken?

Al Franken, apology, resignation, exit, sexual, misconduct, disgrace, excuse, guilt

Today, finally, is the day. Barring some last-minute hijinks in the extended resignation ritual announced almost four weeks ago by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), the comedian turned cad turned politician turned pervert leaves his U.S. Senate seat.

And hopefully keeps his mitts off other people’s seats to boot.

Even without deadline hijinks, the Franken saga has been strange. After hearing Franken’s resignation statement on the Senate floor, CNN’s Chris Cizzilla wrote, “He didn’t believe he had done anything for which he should have been forced to resign.”

But note: No one “forced” Senator Franken to step down. As my Sunday Townhall.com column reminded, he did so voluntarily. 

Why?

Peer pressure. Three-quarters of fellow Democratic Party senators demanded Franken leave, to clear the way for election-year attacks on Republican sexual sleaze-balls without partisan distraction.

And now some cry crocodile tears. They want the no-longer-amusing Franken out. Sure. But they also wish to continue the pretense that Franken is a wonderful fellow just the same.

“His voice will be stronger than ever,” argued fellow Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar—ridiculously. A Vox article was headlined, “Al Franken resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations, but Democrats aren’t making him leave in disgrace.”

Is it a paraphrase of the old joke: “Don’t go away in disgrace, Senator, just go away”?

But Franken is leaving in disgrace. Should be.

Eight women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. The senator’s response has been to publicly apologize, profusely, and then, later, claim that “some of the allegations” are “not true.”

Others he remembers “differently.”

Not good enough, ex-senator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom government transparency ideological culture moral hazard national politics & policies too much government

A Tale of Two Sectors

best of times, worst of times, 2017, 2018, optimism, pessimism

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’ popular 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The British master was not prophesying our times. He was describing the period of the French Revolution.

But the judgment feels awfully familiar.

Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, Antony Davis and James R. Harrigan talk up the case for “the best of times,” for optimism: “Global illiteracy rates are below 14 percent. Global rates of extreme poverty are below 10 percent. Despite there being more people currently alive on the planet than ever before, there are also more calories per capita than ever before.”

Davis and Harrigan provide actual reasons for thankfulness as we meet the New Year.

Is there a case for pessimism, nevertheless? Yes. And Davis and Harrigan discuss at length a topic covered here earlier this month: the Ballou High School educational improvement scandal.

Optimism and pessimism, rationally speaking, fall into two camps: private sector progress and government-sector regress.

So, following Dickens’ checklist, ours is an age of

  • wisdom and foolishness —  check (both)
  • belief and incredulity — check (pick your subject)
  • Light and Darkness — check (just move your eyes from higher ed’s hard science departments to the humanities)

and on and on.*

But the most unsettling thing about the “best of times” is that sometimes the great feeling of ebullience can end suddenly: one feels great in free fall — unburdened! free! — right before one hits the pavement.

Splat.

Maybe the best thing we can do this coming New Year is watch our governments as if we were hawks. To avoid the splat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Dickens’ long and memorable first paragraph: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . .”

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom government transparency ideological culture moral hazard Regulating Protest tax policy

Been Burned

IRS, I.R.S., corruption, taxes, budget, tears

“They’ve been burned. They’ve been hammered. They’ve been bludgeoned,” George Washington University law professor Miriam Galston explained to the Washington Post. “They’re trying to survive.”

In this heartbreaking discussion at this special time of year, the “they” are the poor, long-suffering folks . . . at the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the Post analysis, “conservatives” have schemed to “scale back the IRS and shrink the federal government.” (I guess this is supposed to tear at every American’s heartstrings.) Notably, they “capitalized on revelations in 2013 that IRS officials focused inappropriately on tea party and other conservative groups based . . . Among conservatives, the episode has come to be known as the ‘IRS targeting scandal.’”

Note that term of art: episode.

The Post saw no scandal, however — despite the IRS having admitted to harassing, blocking and delaying Tea Party and conservative groups from exercising their most fundamental First Amendment rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech, in some cases for four years.

Instead, the Post decries the response to this gross violation of citizens, a congressional check on the power — and budget — of the agency responsible: reducing the budget for the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS from $102 million in 2011 to $82 million in 2016.

Heavens, Washington is never supposed to work like that! It actually approaches . . . accountability.

The budget cuts, along with hefty settlements the IRS is now paying to victimized groups that sued, make it less likely the IRS will repeat this scandalous . . . episode.

“To many, the IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative and even some progressive groups is not a scandal,” my Sunday Townhall.com column concluded. “To me, that’s the biggest scandal of all.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

N.B. The title reference is to Neil Young’s song, Burned, which begins, “Been burned, and with both feet on the ground . . .”

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IRS, I.R.S., corruption, taxes, budget, tears

 

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Accountability folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies tax policy too much government

The Hyperbole Is Falling

Trump Derangement Syndrome, hysteria, Donald Trump, progressives, leftists, Democrats, taxes, tax bill

A mad killer is on the loose!

That is one way to get attention . . .

The sky is falling!

You are getting the idea . . .

Trump is literally Hitler!

Extravagant hyperbole is not necessary to criticize the current President. Indeed, as Chicken Licken and the Boy Who Cried Wolf demonstrate, that can backfire. Especially when you are complaining about something on which Trump has proved to be pretty darn good — the tax bill, for instance.

Nevertheless, as it passed through Congress, Democrat pols and the major media dinosaurs have doubled down on overstatement: A “middle-class con job” was Sen. Ron Wyden’s characterization; singer-actress Barbra Streisand (presumably now living in Australia or Canada), re-tweeting a New York Times piece on “the Great American Tax Heist,” accused Trump of pushing the bill for “personal gain”; Bernie Sanders calls it a “tax cut for billionaires” who, instead of being helped, he says, should be “asked to pay more in taxes.”

Yes, the richest (by and large) will get the most reductions, since they pay the most taxes already. Bernie should be reminded that it is the very nature of taxes that “ask” is the wrong active verb. And calling a cut in what’s taken from taxpayers a “heist” is too absurd for commentary.

It does look like most taxpayers will get tax relief. That’s good. Alas, the debt may grow larger, depending on the economic growth spurred by the tax reform. But I notice that the Democrats tend to complain about deficits only when Republicans are in charge. And vice-versa.

Partisan Derangement Syndrome at work.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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