Category: media and media people

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Accountability Common Sense folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility term limits too much government

It’s the Stupid Spending

debt, spending, Congress, term limits

These United States are approaching a crisis. Mounting debt seems increasingly unpayable. Sovereign default and financial chaos are “in the offing” — drifting from the (future) horizon to the (present) shore.

The costs of our debt load have been accommodated as astute economists predicted, with the weakest recovery in American history.

Seven years ago I wrote:

According to increasing numbers of Americans, it’s the level of spending by government that must decrease. We must balance budgets. Soon.

One could play sloganeer and say “It’s the spending, stupid”; or, twist that, to say “It’s the stupid spending.” But however you formulate the problem, what the new Republican House must do is find a way to cut spending.

They haven’t. Is there any reason, even with super-duper businessman Donald Trump riding herd, that they will make net cuts?

We can expect gross spending to increase and the debt to balloon even bigger.

Why?

Well, we are trapped.

Even the politicians themselves feel trapped.

You see, once the government begins a program, a constituency comes to depend upon it, and resists being “betrayed.” And the media supplies a steady stream of sob stories about the brutality of “austerity.” Politicians fear the passion of voters reacting to a specific hyped human need more than the general desire for less spending. So politicians increase the stupid spending.

Well, if the politicians are trapped, release them. Free them.

How? Term limits.

Congressional term limits would un-trap not just the pols — it’d free the voters, too. Let’s end the pretense that sending the same politicians to Washington term after term can produce local prosperity. Oh, the power of incumbency may lavish benefits on career congressmen, but it doesn’t pay off for the rest if us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It was President Harry Truman who said that term limits would “help to cure senility and seniority — both terrible legislative diseases.”

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Illustration: Gustave Doré, “Avaricious and Prodigal”

 

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Accountability local leaders media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers responsibility term limits

Sic Transit Gloria Flake

Senator Jeff Flake, Senate, term limits, conservatism, Conscience of a Conservative, Arizona

Yesterday, a major American politician gave up.

Sort of.

Senator Jeff Flake, the junior member of the upper chamber from the State of Arizona, took to the Senate floor to announce that his “service in the Senate will conclude at the end of my term in early January, 2019.”

Actually, most of the speech was an appeal to President Trump.

Or a lambasting.

In either case, he was echoing his recent book, Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle, which columnist David Brooks has described as a “thoughtful defense of traditional conservatism and a thorough assault on the way Donald Trump is betraying it.”

In the Age of Trump, anti-Trumpian manifestos are . . . controversial in GOP ranks. And his opposition has cost him. All bets were against him winning re-election.

“I believe that there are limits to what government can and should do,” Flake wrote in a letter to supporters, going on to say “that there are some problems that government cannot solve, and that human initiative is best when left unfettered, free from government interference or coercion.”

Solid principles. Principles I share. But how principled was Flake? He began his career promising to limit his own terms, in accordance with . . . conservative principles. And yet the man from Snowflake, Arizona, broke that promise in 2006, holding on to his House seat for three more terms.

For his remaining 14 months in the Senate, Flake can return to the principle he reminded himself of in yesterday’s speech: “Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office.”

There’s life after Congress. And Jeff Flake can do good things in the real world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Asleep at the Constitution

Niger, war, Congress, Sen. Lindsey Graham, responsibility,

Are we at war in Niger, too? Do our “representatives” in Congress know?

The answer to the first question is, obviously, yes. The answer to the second is, admittedly, no. 

Yesterday, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) what the four U.S. soldiers ambushed and killed weeks ago were doing in Niger. “I can say this to the families,” Sen. Graham offered, “they were there to defend America,” before conceding that, “[W]e don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world militarily and what we’re doing.”

Oh.

Graham acknowledged he had been unaware U.S. military forces were even in the African country. And still hasn’t “been briefed.” Later in the program, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also confessed his profound ignorance . . . before reading in the newspaper about the deaths of four soldiers there.

Still, Sen. Graham expressed great hope that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) could “create a new system” to ensure that “if somebody gets killed there, that we won’t find out about it in the paper.”

Huh?

Doesn’t Congress’s job description include something about debating and deciding on policies, providing funding, and checking executive power?

Not, surely, cuddling in ignorance and burping up pablum.

Cradled in their long-term careers, our congressional delegates neither debate, deliberate, nor oversee much of anything.

In any case, we can be sure that Congress’s role in our constitutional system is not to scoop reporters to war news.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Shadow Boxing with “Nazis”

Ben Shapiro, Jane Coaston, The New York Times, Nazis, violence, free speech, First Amendment

Voltaire’s prayer, “make my enemies ridiculous,” has been granted to Ben Shapiro.

The New York Times has graced its pages with the writings of one Jane Coaston, who, in “The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro,” accuses the brilliant intellectual pugilist Mr. Shapiro for “shadow boxing meant to pander to his conservative fans.”

And while she admits the truth that “campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr. Shapiro, Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald,” she insists that “the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.”

Failing to back up her “cultural underdog” thesis in any way, Coaston’s essay wanders off, evading the street and campus violence by leftist activists who, until recently, were given de facto license by mayors and college administrators to shout down, beat up and “de-platform” people they called “fascists.”

By just glossing over all this, Ms. Coaston is pandering to her audience — certainly not challenging it, which is precisely what she accuses Mr. Shapiro of doing.

Amusingly, I noticed this journalist arguing earlier this year that “you should punch Nazis in the goddang face.”

But Antifa and other “Nazi-punchers” aren’t in the habit of sending out questionnaires before planting fist to face or bike lock to noggin.

Which brings us to the ridiculous. She minimizes the extent to which Ben Shapiro and others have been threatened (and their fans violently attacked) by mobs shouting against “fascism” and “Nazis.” And yet she provided not merely the intellectual ammunition for this practice, she provided the declaration of war.

Maybe she has a career in politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular Regulating Protest U.S. Constitution

Force Over Persuasion

free speech, BLM, Black Lives Matter, tolerance, censorship

Today’s campus radicals assert that free speech is bad because it “gives voice” to people with hateful, dangerous views.

Does that argument seem at all familiar? It is the old RightThink rationale for censorship.

A recent Spiked “Unsafe Spaces” event at Rutgers (“Identity Politics: the New Racialism”) was interrupted by now-too-famiar shouts and out-of-turn questions and invective. Kmele Foster, one of the panelists, had been explaining how important free speech rights were to the civil rights protesters in the 1960s, and to Martin Luther King in particular.

At “that precise moment,” as Reason’s Matt Welch puts it, the shouts of “Black lives matter!” began. And continued.

But more interesting than this bullying? Some of the more coherent theses articulated by the interrupters. One woman, CampusReform relates,

yelled in response to the panelists that she doesn’t “need statistics,” later complaining that “the system” controls facts.

“It’s the system. It’s the institution,” she said. “Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.”

Well, the moment you prove immune to any fact is the exact point in time that you’ve given up on rationality, free inquiry, and maybe even civilization itself.

It’s so 1984-ish.

And it demonstrates the old idea that, when you can no longer reason or allow others to express different opinions . . . or even discuss the factuality of this or that contention, you have only one other option: force.

Become bully.

Or tyrant.

Civilization is the triumph of persuasion over force. Being against free speech is to reverse that.

The acme of barbarism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government

Crossing the Twitter Rubicon

Liberty, Trump, censorship, NBC, New York Times, First Amendment

No sooner had I upbraided media folks for overreacting to various presidential peccadillos regarding Puerto Rico, when Donald J. Trump, in his running media battle, crossed a line with this week’s most notorious tweet.

He first complained, perhaps correctly, that, “Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a ‘tenfold’ increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pure fiction, made up to demean.” But then the chief executive officer of the United States of America tweeted this: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?”

The answer to his question is: never.

The Federal Communications Commission licenses the network affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS across the country — not the networks themselves — to broadcast their television signals using public airwaves. Still, through those affiliates a tyrannical FCC could no doubt damage the networks.

Government licensing of media outlets is anathema to the First Amendment. And the thought of the POTUS actively threatening the ability of NBC or other networks to report the news as they freely decide is . . . well, unthinkable.

I don’t buy the accusations that Trump is undermining freedom of the press by criticizing the press — even arguing by tweet, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) . . . is the enemy of the American People!” The president is as free to criticize the media as the media is free to criticize the president.

It might be his duty.

But considering the use of official government power to potentially “shut down NBC and other American networks,” as UK’s Independent reported, or just to temper their coverage?

Despotism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Accountability folly ideological culture insider corruption media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Choice Corruption

Harvey Weinstein, donor, democrats, corruption, sex scandal, boycott,

What is corruption? said no jesting Pilate ever.

But please, stay for an answer.

A week ago, Jimmie Moore pleaded guilty to filing a false campaign finance report in order to conceal a $90,000 payment to drop out of a congressional race. Moore is a former Philadelphia judge (heavens). The nearly one-hundred-grand came from the incumbent he was challenging: Congressman Bob Brady (D-Pa.).

Moore, who implicated Rep. Brady in the scheme, now faces as many as five years in prison. Brady, for his part, has yet to be charged.

A pro-life politician’s 15-year tenure in Congress has ended. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has resigned following revelations that he had urged the woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to have an abortion. Additional bad behavior — “a culture of abuse and a culture of corruption” in his congressional office — was detailed in an in-depth Politico exposé.

But for the biggest scandal story, go Hollywood. Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been ousted from The Weinstein Company upon allegations that he had committed criminal sexual assaults for decades. As a huge donor to the Democratic Party, questions abound. Which Democrats had knowledge of Weinstein’s behavior and yet remained silent?

That ‘look the other way’ rot has already spread to a media/entertainment institution: Saturday Night Live. Last Saturday night, observers were surprised that SNL did not feature even one joke at liberal Weinstein’s expense.

“It’s a New York thing,” quipped Producer Lorne Michaels when questioned about the omission.*

I’m not big on launching boycotts at every turn. But how could anyone who values evenhandedness turn on SNL next Saturday — or the following — as if nothing had happened?

Who needs these jesters covering for corruption?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* Audience members at a rehearsal said there had been a Weinstein joke, which garnered a big laugh, but it was apparently pulled from the live broadcast.

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

Throwing in (and out) the Towel(s)

symbolism, crying, outrage, Hurricane Irma, gaffe, ideology, Trump

There is a time and a place for everything. Including the truth.

You do not proclaim that Uncle Eben was a skinflint miser and a sour old puss at his funeral. (You wait for the reading of the Will.)

Immediately upon Puerto Ricans coming up for air, after the devastation of Hurricane Irma, President Trump went for a visit. At one point, he threw paper towels out at a crowd, as if he were a sports star throwing . . . cloth towels. And he noted, after a pro forma expression of regret at loss of life, how shockingly low was the number of deaths.

For these and other such “gaffes” Trump has been roundly, hysterically criticized.  

But a good portion of the American people has ceased to care about such matters. Sure, Trump says some worse-than-inelegant things, gives new twists to “photo opp.” But the over-reaction on the left and in the media (but I repeat myself) seems to have completely inoculated vast hunks of American humanity — who now choose to see the humor in all this.

It’s time, at last, to learn a new lesson: Political Man does not live by symbols alone.

No matter how hard he (she/zhe?) tries.

In today’s political environment, it might help us all if we gave up the symbolic battles and discussed actual policies and principles. After all, the substantive ideological divide is deep enough.

It seems certain: continued over-reaction in the Symbolism Department will prove feckless.

Americans increasingly don’t give a feck.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability Common Sense general freedom media and media people national politics & policies Regulating Protest responsibility

Time for Action

NFL, freedom, rights, football, Pence, Prison Reform

More protests during the national anthem; more opposition to those protests by the Trump administration; more recriminations about the administration’s opposition to the protests. Ah, modern times.

Let’s review:

  1. NFL players have a constitutional right to take a knee during the national anthem.
  2. NFL owners do have or could have (depending on who you believe) a contractual right to require players to stand for the national anthem or face action.
  3. Presidents have a right to suggest that owners fire NFL players who take a knee during the anthem, though I’d really prefer they not use the term SOB — though again they have a right to say it.  
  4. Vice-Presidents have a right to leave an NFL game if NFL players take a knee during the anthem or, believe it or not, for any reason they feel like. And under our free system, they can even go further, and plan their reaction ahead of time depending on what action players take.*
  5. NFL fans have a right to continue to be fans or not.

I love football, but haven’t followed the NFL for decades.

I love rights even more. And I think we certainly ought to be talking about and, more importantly, working on criminal justice reform. Let’s not lose sight of that in the controversy over the NFL protests.

Perhaps, the time for protest is ending. The time for action is now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Did Vice-President Mike Pence leave the Colts-49ers game as a PR stunt? Well, every move the president or the VP make is a public relations stunt. If that’s the primary attack on the VEEP’s actions, he has turned the corner and is in the clear.

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folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

A Special Place in Heck?

Hillary Clinton, Trump voters, Trump, women, woman, vote, election, democracy,

Former First Lady scolds women for not voting . . . for a former First Lady.

Yes, “Michelle Obama,” the BBC headlined last week, “scolds female Trump voters.”

Need you ask why? You probably have already guessed.

“Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,” Mrs. Obama remarked at a Boston conference.

Though a majority of women who voted cast their ballots for Mrs. Clinton, a slightly smaller majority of white women voted for Donald Trump.

And to those women who did not vote for Hillary? “Well, to me that just says, you don’t like your voice.”

The idea that one woman candidate can serve as “the voice” for all women is not merely absurd. It is sexist. But it is something that this most recent First Lady shares with the former First Lady who just lost a major election. Yes, Hillary Clinton has said much the same kind of thing. And Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton’s husband’s command, famously argued “there is a special place in hell” for women who refuse to toe the line and vote Clinton II.

Heck, there is a special place for women who think, appraise and choose against social pressure: America. Here people matter as individuals, as persons, not as members of their race, religion, sex, or . . . political party.

But the arrogance of these women leaders shows no understanding of effrontery. “You like the thing you’re told to like,” Mrs. Obama belittled female Trump voters.

Truth is: women were repeatedly told to like Hillary for president. But they refused to do as they were told, which is why Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama are attacking them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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