Category: media and media people

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media and media people national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Broken Fix

Washington Government is broken. Everyone — even those limited to a single firing brain synapse — knows as much. But, what to do about it?

Washington scribe Ezra Klein offers “The 13 reasons Washington is failing,” on The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog.”

First on Klein’s list? Earmarks. Really. Yes, the little pork-barrel items stuffed into bills without any debate or serious consideration to boost an incumbent politician by a million or a billion dollars here or there. Klein blames the GOP House for banning earmarks.

“It used to be that Boehner could ask a member to take a tough vote and, in return, help him or her get a bridge built back home,” explains Ezra. “That bargaining chip is gone.”

Our political system desperately needs it back, so we can put the genie back in the Klein bottle. Congressional leaders simply must be able to keep your representative on the take.

But that’s not all. Government is also too transparent, or, as Ezra puts it, “Too much sunshine can burn.”

Sure, effective political bridge-trading needs to be done behind closed doors. Away from the prying eyes of pesky voters.

Klein goes on to lament that, “Big business has lost a lot of its power over the Republican Party.” That’s a problem. Really. Progressives are nonplussed.

And Klein argues “The Republican Party has become particularly extreme” and “Ted Cruz (and others like him) has gained a lot of power over the Republican Party,” before informing readers: “There is no ‘Republican Party.’”

All of which — obviously and unquestionably — explains why Big Government cannot give us nice things. Or so says one insiders’ outsider.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Countdown to Zero

The New York Times has a timeline of the progress of Obamacare.

It’s okay as far as it goes. Which is not too far, since only the most recent dates seem readily accessible. And since the Times editors blindly favor the Obama-assault.

But sure, labor leaders have both criticized and praised Obamacare (9/12/13), some states have fought it (or “moved to undercut” it) (9/18/13); Pennsylvania State University has decided not to fine employees $100 a month for being too reticent about personal details on “wellness” questionnaires (9/19/13). Etc.

A headshake-worthy aspect of the chronology, however, is its showcasing of opinion published in the Times itself — as if each Times-punditarian rebuke of opposition to medical serfdom were another epochal event in the steady march of the wonderful Obamacare. So Gail Collins “chastises Republicans” for jeopardizing global stability to oppose Obamacare (9/19/13). Paul Krugman avers that the GOP, “hysterical” over Obamacare, is changing from stupid party to crazy party (9/20/13).

Fine, fine. But toss in some pro-free-market, anti-socialist and anti-Krugman events also, okay? Like the first publication of Ludwig von Mises’s comprehensive, devastating critique of Socialism (1922). The publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, sweeping saga of social collapse as feverish proto-Krugmaniacs stamp freedom out of existence (1957). The day Mike Tanner elaborated “Why Freedom Is the Key to Health Care Reform” (9/5/09). And let’s not forget John Goodman’s seminal post, “When It Comes to Healthcare Issues, Paul Krugman Is Wrong 100% of the Time” (5/30/13).

All that being said, a timeline is one thing, “progress” quite another. The word implies a good goal. Though hey, doctors do sometimes speak of the “progress” of a cancer or a fatal disease.

In the end, a timeline of Obamacare must include its own demise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people

Journalism Codified

The great revolutionary idea at the time of our nation’s independence rubs against the grain of politics and “statecraft,” as practiced by khans, kaisers, and kleptocrats: divide and conquer, divide and rule. It is no wonder that the art of making legal distinctions is so often based not on human rights but governmental convenience.

Take the right of a free press.

The notion of open government has it that the right to participate in the dissemination of knowledge (particularly information about government) is to be an individual right. Modern Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws are a great example of government accommodation of this right.

But the Michigan House is now attempting to restrict access to state information by trying to set up a definition of journalist, making it easier for journalists to finagle data from government, harder for lone individuals. The state’s House Judiciary Committee just approved HB 4770, which does a number of things, including setting very particular definitions of terms like “newspaper” and “journalist.”

All the better to make the practice of publishing information about government more of a privilege than a right.

This was made even clearer at the federal level, by Senator Diane Feinstein, whose support for a new “shield law” to protect journalists is best understood by its limitations: bloggers, you don’t count. And she actually referred to a “special privilege” to publish. Not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Politicians like it when they have credentialed, easy-to-identify (and easier-to-manipulate) professional journalists to contend with.

Citizens with those rights? Why, it drives them crazy.

Crazy enough to try to codify what a “journalist” is, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The Tyrants’ M.O.

Somewhere, recently, I saw the Lord Acton maxim about power (how it corrupts, and, if absolute, corrupts absolutely) referred to as a “cliché.”

Just because a phrase is common doesn’t mean it’s cheapened by repetition. Some expressed truths are that profound.

If anything, we need to repeat the Acton Axiom more often, and louder. For we live in a time when the federal government usurps power, denigrates, evades and undermines the rule of law, and appears “hell bent” (now that’s a cliché) on accumulating power in concentrated form . . . you know, like Sauron did with the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings. (Another possible cliché, eh?)

The NSA spying program story, as it unfolds, exemplifies the typical pattern:

  1. Information gets leaked.
  2. The government denies it.
  3. Further information comes out, establishing the lying nature of the denial and
  4. Adding more details of even more shocking nature.
  5. The government makes further denials . . .

And repeat ad nauseam.

Retired Lieutenant General James R. Clapper still serves the president as Director of National Intelligence, even after lying directly to Congress about the existence of NSA “metadata” collection system.

Meanwhile, the long arm of the secrecy establishment has retaliated against journalist Glenn Greenwald (who helped break Snowden’s first and subsequent leaks) by detaining the journalist’s partner without charge for the legal maximum of nine hours in Great Britain, upon coming home from a trip.

And the gentleman I reported on last week, who shut down his encrypted email service and erased his records rather than fork it all over to the government, says he has been repeatedly threatened with imprisonment.

Typical modus operandi of tyrant wannabes. Don’t worry about “cliché”; worry about tyranny.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Paging Woodward and Bernstein

The Federal Election Commission is now implicated in the Obama administration’s years-long hounding of groups ideologically hostile to it.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Kimberly Strassel details how, at the behest of a lawyer in the Obama administration, FEC staff “have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS’s infamous Lois Lerner.” After the Obama lawyer filed a complaint with FEC against a conservative organization called American Issues Project in 2008, FEC staffers asked Lerner about the group. They went on to repeatedly challenge AIP’s non-profit status, cooking up new report-length rationales each time a previous one was exploded.

Papers like The Wall Street Journal as well as various blogs have published regular updates about how IRS personnel — top officers, not just a few file clerks — really did go after ideological critics of the Obama administration in the run-up to the 2012 election. But a “paper of record” like The New York Times barely notices the story except to rationalize it away. Same with other “liberal” outlets.

How many dots must be connected before left-leaning media mavens and their troops say “this is too much even for us! Letting IRS, now FEC, plus anyone in the Obama administration who winked and nodded get away with this would be hazardous to our own health! The next administration may be staffed by unscrupulous Republicans instead of unscrupulous Democrats! We’re going to start reporting on this! We may even criticize such abuse of power! Sharply criticize! Yeah!”?

How many?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people too much government

Cuban Luxury

The New York Times has an odd title for its report on the slowly increasing disposable income in some incipiently quasi-post-Communist corners of Cuban society: “Slowly, Cuba Is Developing an Appetite for Spending.”

What a starving man lacks is not the appetite for food.

It is true that in any production-killing statist society, people may suppress ambitions and desires in psychological self-defense. But they hear about what they’re missing. If wealth and opportunity are allowed to begin to return, it is not “appetite” that revives only slowly and tentatively. It’s long-range planning of production, accumulating of capital, engagement in previously outlawed forms of trade. People must wonder whether the new hints of freedom will be expanded or capriciously reversed.

What counts as indulgence in the new Cuba? Watching a 3-D movie not on the big screen of a theatre, but on a 55-inch screen in an apartment. “This is novel — at least in Cuba,” says Manuel Alejandro, a Havana resident who recently saw his second 3-D movie on that 55-inch screen.

But those with disposable income to spend on a living-room movie theater, backyard swimming pool or car washes “are strictly a minority in Cuba, where the state pays its four million workers [in a country with an estimated 11 million people] an average salary of $19 a month.”

Most Cubans “live humbly.” For them, the slow development of economic freedom at the margins of the failed communist utopia is way too slow.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Give PSA’s a Chance?

After the George Zimmerman verdict, a slice of the country protested, insisting on the guilt of the exonerated Zimmerman. The president went on air and pled “for understanding.” And Fox’s Bill O’Reilly took the occasion to chide the country’s black leadership for not doing the right kind of Public Service Announcements.

Much of what O’Reilly said was on target. The high rates of unwed parenthood in the African-American community — 73 percent — and the consequent predominance of single-parent households lies at the heart of many problems.

Yet, neither O’Reilly’s idea of PSAs “telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant,” nor President Obama’s efforts to give young black men “the sense that their country cares about them,” would likely change behavior.

Black unemployment and rates of illegitimate births were lower half a century ago than white rates. What happened?

Black Americans were hardest hit by the rise of the welfare state.

First, raising minimum wages placed low-skilled workers at a disadvantage, with each wage floor hike doing more damage.

Second, the general switch in state aid from assistance to intact families to aid to mothers with dependent children took away a major disincentive for irresponsible sexual practices. Throw in the sexual revolution, and you have a powder keg.

Third, the War on Drugs established the market conditions for illegal activity, and encouraged the formation of gangs. Drugs made users unfit for most work, while providing a lucrative draw for those wanting to advance economically.

None of this is a mystery. But sadly, I fear America’s black leadership would rather do Bill O’Reilly’s PSA’s than really address these problems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Bees’ Knees News

Though the George Zimmerman trial ended in an acquittal, many folks are still confused as to the facts. One thing we learned during the case is that journalists are not always reliable, the infamous NBC redaction of the 911 call being only the most obvious example.

But if you are looking for media’s systemic failures, you don’t need to bring in race and shootings and Skittles. Look no further than stories about bees.

I’m not talking about “killer bees” of my youth — supposedly coming up from South America to “take over” the continent, and sting, sting, sting and kill, kill, kill.

Didn’t happen. Simple extrapolations based on movements of some bee populations did not spell eco-disaster for the good ol’ USA.

But another bee story, much hyped, also turns out to be false, or at least only half, or quarter, true: “Bee-pocalypse!”

Since 2006 we’ve been hearing how Colony Collapse Disorder has destroyed bee hives, vast populations of the insects, and worse, continues to threaten both natural and contracted pollination, and thus agriculture . . . and Life on the Planet.

Shawn Regan, writing for the Property and Environment Research Center, says that this story, once the media’s veritable bees’ knees, setting people “in the know” all abuzz, was mostly just bad reporting. U.S. honey bee colony numbers are stable, he shows, explaining that commercial beekeepers, “far from being passive victims, have actively rebuilt their colonies in response to increased mortality from CCD.”

Yes, capitalism has adapted.

If you had been suckered into this story, maybe you should have looked at the local supermarket: honey production has remained stable.

As has bad environmental reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Dick Durbin’s Dangerous Idea

Politicians think in terms of institutions. If you identify yourself as an individual, a mere citizen, pfft: you’re nothing. But say you are from a lobbying group, or a government bureau, or a news organization — suddenly you matter.

That’s even how they interpret the Constitution.

They are wrong.

Back in May, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin expressed doubt whether “bloggers, or ‘someone who is Tweeting,’ should be given media shield rights.” He believes a big unanswered question looms:

What is a journalist today in 2013? We know it’s someone that works for Fox or AP, but does it include a blogger? Does it include someone who is tweeting? Are these people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection?

Durbin thinks he’s both clever and profound to ask “21st century questions about a provision in our Constitution that was written over 200 years ago.”

But he is actually missing the whole enchilada, the point of the Constitution.

First, our two-century old freedoms don’t have an expiration date. Second, individuals have rights, not “institutions.” And not because we belong to a group. Either everyone has a basic right, or no one does.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds countered Durbin’s institutional prejudice with a fine piece in the New York Post, where he takes a common sense position: “a journalist is someone who’s doing journalism, whether they get paid for it or not.”

Reynolds reminds us that, in James Madison’s time, “it was easy to be a pamphleteer . . . and there was real influence in being such.”

Just so for today’s Tweeters and bloggers.

Hey: as far as I’m concerned, you’re being a journalist just for commenting on this at ThisIsCommonSense.com.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

A Little More

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt” goes the old saying. It’s a message completely unappreciated by the folks producing MSNBC’s Lean Forward spots, featuring various network stars spouting lame political talking points.

Go figure — in place of paid advertisements from real customers, the propaganda vignettes air frequently.

Months ago, I took issue with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry for saying in one spot that “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”Melissa Harris-Perry

She was arguing for higher taxes so government can spend more money on education. I was anxious we not replace Mommy and Daddy with Big Brother.

Harris-Perry is back for Round Two.

“Americans will always want some level of inequality,” she informs us, “because it’s a representation of a meritocracy.” Then the Tulane professor reassuringly adds, “People who work hard and sacrifice and save their money and make major contributions: we think that they should earn a little more. And they should have more resources. And that’s fine.”

No problem. You want to invent amazing new technology, develop life-saving drugs, create inspiring art, produce incredible abundance? Fine. For your “work” and “sacrifice” and frugality and “contributions” Melissa Harris-Perry is willing to permit you to have, well, “a little more.”

Emphasis on “little.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.