Today’s headline:
Radical Islamist Stages Gun Massacre in LGBT Nightclub!
Caring Progressives Demand that American Citizens be Disarmed!
Category: ideological culture
Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem. With Hillary Clinton.
Asked about the Clinton Foundation, yesterday, by CNN’s Jake Tapper, host of State of the Union, Bernie re-questioned himself:
Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships?
And Bernie answered, “Yeah, I do.”
How many roads must mainstream media reporters walk down before they investigate and report on the myriad of ethical cracks in the Clinton Foundation?
To the most obvious conflict of interest in the history of the human race, add the fact that even after promising President Obama that the Clinton Foundation would at least be totally transparent with an annual report of all donations . . . well, Hillary welched on the deal, not revealing the donors.
While Bernie’s condemnation of Hillary’s ethical shortcomings was big news, less reported were the senator’s comments regarding whether Mrs. Clinton is “too quick on the draw, too eager to use military force.”
Bernie again was clear: “I worry about that. Yeah, I do. Her support for the War in Iraq was not just an aberration.” Sanders went on to cite Secretary of State Clinton’s role in pushing President Obama to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya and to intervene in Syria.
Hillary’s judgment on issues of war and peace is questionable . . . especially when we don’t know whether or not a foreign leader or his cronies have written big checks to the Clinton Foundation.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Everybody is familiar with the standard theory regarding the Citizens United decision. Former comedian and current earnest socialist Sarah Silverman puts it this way: “Every politician takes money from Big Money, ever since it was made legal with Citizens United.”
Like most folks who talk this way, she doesn’t give a squeak of context. She barely even indicates that it was a Supreme Court case, 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. She does not mention at all that the ruling overturned the FEC’s act of suppressing a political movie.
But there is a much wider context than such bare facts — and if you want a good synopsis, you could hardly do better than read my friend Krist Novoselic’s calm, reasoned “look at the history of attempts to regulate independent campaign expenditures.”
This “modern history” started with what the New York Times called Richard Nixon’s “revolution in political financing.” The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 “required detailed disclosure of campaign contributions; set campaign contribution limits to candidates, parties and committees; set expenditure limits on campaigns, independent groups and individuals and created the first public financing of presidential campaigns and national conventions.”
And almost immediately the law began suppressing political speech and advertising. And led to a long series of court cases.
And decisions.
And revisions.
That define our times.
Krist (with whom I serve on the board of FairVote.org) provides the context you need to see through what he aptly calls “the hype” about “Citizens United,” as well as how the decision correctly removed the license given to the FEC’s role as “state censorship board.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Feminism is cancer.”
Milo Yiannopoulis is provocative. Apparently of violence as well as of thought.
Until very recently, best known for his Twitter presence (@nero) and his work at Breitbart, Mr. Yiannopoulis, a gay British man in his mid-30s, has undertaken what he calls his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” — speaking to anti-left audiences in hired halls at the heart of the modern university.
He outrageously decries the regnant “Social Justice Warriors” of anti-capitalism and intersectional feminism, and defends free speech and the candidacy of Donald Trump.
But obviously he is egging on the student mobs. One stunt was to take a poll asking whether the subject would rather his or her daughter get cancer or become a feminist.
Cancer, Milo chortles, was the overwhelming result.
Most people hate modern feminism, he says. It’s only on campuses that the youngsters are unhinged enough to believe that
- rich, pampered college students are “oppressed” just because they are women or gay or trans; that
- white men are “systemically” their “oppressors” and thus “privileged”; and that
- there exists an overarching Patriarchy in capitalist America, but not in the Mideast.
So he is shouted at and “protested” everywhere he goes. This week, Black Lives Matter protesters basically took over an event at DePaul University, with a young woman invading Milo’s personal space, apparently (you decide) hitting him in the face during a Q and A.
The university, which had charged organizers a huge fee for “extra security,” did nothing. Milo’s suing to get back that payment — for services plainly not rendered.
Some patriarchy. Some privilege.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“We have an important choice to make,” presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders recently wrote to Congress. “[D]o we stand with the working people of Puerto Rico or do we stand with Wall Street and the Tea Party?”
The bill in question has been dubbed Paul Ryan’s “first big victory as Speaker,” but was written in tandem with the White House. The plan attempts to rescue Puerto Rico, a United States territory, from financial collapse with both bailouts and austerity — the latter including a lowered minimum wage.
I hadn’t heard any Tea Party squawk about this, so that reference must be just signaling on Bernie’s part.
Puerto Rico is $72 billion in the hole. Basically, Sanders wants to partially repudiate that debt: “The billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street cannot get a 100 percent return on their bonds while workers, senior citizens and children are punished.”
Of course our sympathies are almost entirely with the people of Puerto Rico. But it was their government that racked up the debt, and repudiating sovereign debt is a tricky and parlous thing.
What happens when the United States itself faces similar (or worse) straits? Would Bernie then, again, plan to stick it to the government’s creditors — even after he, himself, had voted to increase spending above revenues and periodically raise the debt ceiling — and think that this wouldn’t have consequences?
Meanwhile, the possible minimum wage reduction is one of the stickiest of the issues. Bernie sees it as “sticking it” to the poor.
In truth, it would help increase employment, thus help the poor get out of poverty.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The fall of Venezuela is an atrocity.
The comic elements are clear enough — the further you remove yourself from the poverty, chaos, and collapse. We can wallow in a bit of Schadenfreude, taking glee as some American leftists squirm to explain why the socialist paradise they ballyhooed a mere three years ago now tail-spins to the grave.
The collapse of this socialist experiment offers an enormous level of tragedy. It’s not pretty.
The country’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro, makes his predictable desperation play. Rather than confront his own errors, and the futility of making socialism work in anything like a rigorous form, he boasts. “Venezuela Leader Says US ‘Dreams’ Of Dividing Loyal Military,” reads yesterday’s Reuters report. While no doubt true, this is one of those cases where whatever we dream to the north, our dreams are better than their current reality.
Of course the Venezuelan military should turn on Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s inheritor, protecting the right of recall, which Maduro is denying. By painting the U. S. as the bad guy, Maduro hopes to unite his people — especially his armed forces — around him. That’s what a desperate demagogic dynast does. Citizens and subjects traditionally abandon skepticism about their leaders when they feel threatened from the outside.
Which is one reason it would be a mistake for the U. S. to intervene.
Reuters poetically reports that the military is still united behind the socialist government, and resists the recall referendum, singing “Fatherland, Socialism, or Death!”
Wrong conjunction. Not “or” but “and” . . . if you insist on socialism.
The government, military pressure or no, should allow the recall vote, and soon.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A few days ago, the Barna Group released the results of its latest poll, asking “Americans whether capitalism or socialism align better with the teachings of Jesus,” explains The Hollywood Reporter. The results are that “socialism won 24 percent compared to 14 percent, with the rest answering ‘neither’ or ‘not sure.’”
And what about the year’s big race?
“When asked which presidential candidate’s policies aligned closest to the teachings of Jesus, Sanders was on top with 21 percent, compared to 9 percent for Hillary Clinton and 6 percent for Donald Trump.” Ted Cruz, no longer in the race, fared better than Hillary, but below Bernie, at 11 percent.
Now, it is worth mentioning that more significant polling on issues relating religion to politics has been done by Barna. Still, the commentary over at Fox on this poll was . . . interesting.
On Bill O’Reilly’s show, Monica Crowley made the crucial distinction between Jesus’ command to give to the poor and modern socialists’ demands to take from some, through taxation and by force, to give to others.
O’Reilly himself, however, went on a bizarre and joking riff about “buying his way to heaven” by leaving his wealth to charity . . . after he dies.
Looking over these poll numbers, I can only conclude that advocates of a free society have much work to do convincing Americans of the justice and benevolence of free markets, of “capitalism.”
And Christians have their work cut out for them, too . . . at the very least to disencumber themselves from the stench of socialist states and the brutal force those states inevitably rest upon.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
There is a big difference between government designed to protect our rights and a government tasked with protecting us from ourselves.
You couldn’t find a better example of this than the current Federal Drug Administration and its regulation of vaping.
Vaping is the imbibing of water vapor laced with nicotine and other ingredients. It is designed to replace the smoking of tobacco cigarettes. It is much, much less harmful than smoking. The genius of this innovation is that while it looks a lot like smoking, it involves no smoke. But it does involve inhaling, and blowing out wisps of . . . well, vapor.
It’s safer than smoking because smoking tobacco involves burning organic (and inorganic) matter, which puts tars and other chemical substances into one’s lungs.
But the competing companies that make the product are not allowed to tell us about its advantages.
New regulations of the e-cigarette industry from the FDA prohibit a lot of truth-telling in advertising. “Even if a few companies survive the shakeout caused by the FDA’s onerous regulations,” Jacob Sullum writes in Reason, “they will not be allowed to tell consumers the truth about their products.” It appears that “any intimation that noncombustible, tobacco-free e-cigarettes are safer than the conventional, tobacco-burning kind” places them under a category that simply must “be marketed only with prior approval.”
The legal judgments Sullum quotes will make you sicker . . . than your first cigarette puff.
Paternalistic government designed to save us from our vices ends up blocking us from actually lessening the bad effect of those vices.
Some help.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo credit: micadew on Flickr
President Obama and other politicians are taking a wide stance over the nation’s public restrooms. Important bathroom policy will finally be determined at the highest levels.
Last week, public educators nationwide received a legalistically-worded letter from the Departments of Justice and Education explaining how to legally treat transgender students under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. CNN boiled it down to “Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.”
Friendly federal “guidance” comes after dueling lawsuits between the Feds and North Carolina over that state’s House Bill 2, which establishes statewide restroom regulations. Those regs require that transgender folks use the bathroom appropriate to the sex listed on their birth certificate (whether Kenyan, Canadian or other).
Obama wants Americans to choose the restroom matching their self-chosen “gender identity.” Conservatives seem most worried that his policy is so loosely defined as to allow non-transgender male persons to simply claim to be transgender in order to shower with the girls volley-ball team or lurk in the powder room.
“Have we gone stark raving nuts?” questioned Sen. Ted Cruz, proclaiming: “Grown adult men, strangers, should not be alone in a bathroom with little girls.”
In California, there’s legislation to force businesses to make “all single-stall public restrooms” gender neutral. “Let’s make a clear statement that, if you want to go pee, by all means help yourself,” argued the proposal’s author.
Transgender people should be treated with care and respect, as should every person. But do we really need a national bathroom policy designed for maximum division in an election year?
Before politicians solve today’s glaring non-problem in public restrooms, they should solve a real problem first.
Just one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Socialists often brag how their activism — through unions — gave the modern world its five-day workweek. One could spend a book picking at this boast, but no need: it’s overshadowed by the latest.
A socialist country has just reduced the workweek to two days! Hooray for socialism!
Or, no cheers at all. For this epochal move occurred in Venezuela, the “world’s worst performing economy,” with an inflation rate soaring to 720 percent and an absence of food, toilet paper, and . . . electricity: “President Nicolás Maduro will furlough the country’s public employees,” Nick Miroff writes in the Washington Post, “who account for a third of the labor force — for the bulk of the week, so they can sit through rolling blackouts at home rather than in the office.”
It’s only government employees who get the five-day weekend. And this is not a sign of socialist efficiency (heh heh), ushering in a Marxist utopia.
Another nation ruined by socialism and technocracy!
But not just any nation. Venezuela can boast one of the largest oil reserves in the world. If Norway and Alaska and desert sheiks can milk their underground deposits and distribute goodies to their people, why cannot Venezuelans manage it?
Because they extended socialist planning beyond a kleptocratic sharing scheme. Experts had advised them decades ago to build the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, live off low- or no-priced electricity as well as oil sales. Today, oil goes cheap . . . and there’s a drought, too little water behind the dam.
Now Venezuelans are trying to burn oil to generate electricity — mostly without success. Socialism has it all — rampant corruption and catastrophic inefficiency.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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