Category: media and media people

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crime and punishment government transparency ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

The Dog-​Ate List

It’s hard to keep track of things. It helps to make a list.

I’m trying to follow all the IRS-​scandal stonewalling, the latest example of which is how emails inculpating Lois Lerner and others have mysteriously disappeared; with, allegedly, no server backups (see my latest Townhall column, “The Dog Ate My Country”).

How many ways have fedgov officials fudged, fabricated, prevaricated, and otherwise non-​cooperated with investigators after news broke that IRS had targeted for special harassment sundry conservative groups applying for tax-​exempt status?

  • When the head of IRS’s department overseeing nonprofit applications, Lois Lerner, felt compelled to admit that IRS had specially targeted right-​leaning organizations applying for nonprofit status, she and others put the main blame on a few low-​level clerks.
  • Lerner twice formally refused to testify to Congress about the doings of her own department. Yet she also asserted, formally, that “I have not done anything wrong.”
  • IRS says it’ll take many years to comply with congressional requests for relevant documents. IRS was prompter when it handed abundant confidential information on conservative nonprofits to the Justice Department so that they could be selectively prosecuted.
  • DOJ selected an “avowed political supporter”  of President Obama to lead a meaningless “investigation” of the targeting of Obama’s critics. No prosecutions of wrongdoers are in the works.
  • Initially professing outrage at the IRS’s “inexcusable” targeting, Obama later airily dismissed the affair as a “phony scandal.” On which occasion was he lying? (Hint: both.)
  • Major media outlets do all they can to abet the stonewalling.

What did I miss?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Do Not Pass Dumb, Do Not Collect Your Wits

In the empire of fibs and euphemisms, the person who re-​asserts the bald truth can find himself excoriated not merely as a traitor to All That Is Good And True and Beautiful, but scorned as a crazed lunatic and all-​around dangerous fellow.

After economist David Brat defeated the House Majority Leader this week, folks left, right and center set themselves to poring through the professor’s writings for any juicy tidbit to get excited about. The drollest kerfuffle was over this:

If you refuse to pay your taxes, you will lose. You will go to jail, and if you fight, you will lose. The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military.

Max Weber: 1864-1920Charles Cooke defended Brat from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico’s Ben White, all dismissive or worse. And then, for the real meat of the frenzy,  “[a]s is its wont, the progressive blogosphere lost its collective marbles too: One contributor sardonically described Brat’s claim as a ‘doozy,’ while another contended that such opinions were sufficient for ‘one to question his, shall we say, cognitive coherence.’”

Cooke’s point is that Brat’s thesis is obviously true.

But it’s more than that. This notion that governments claim a monopoly on the use of force is non-​controversial. It was defined neatly in almost those very words by the near-​universally respected sociologist Max Weber. A long time ago.

And, news to progressives with short attention spans, Barack Obama also stated this as a bedrock truth: “What essentially sets a nation-​state apart … is the monopoly on violence.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Free Money

If an email popped up offering free money, what would you do?

Delete it? And wonder how it got past your spam filter?

Me, too.

Well, some Washington wags — call them re-​distribution professionals — say we’re crazy.

As are Republicans in the 19 states that have refused to expand their states’ Medicaid rolls as part of Obamacare, and in the five states — Indiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia — still debating whether to do so.

Republicans are “rejecting what is more or less nearly free money from the federal government,” says a baffled Josh Barro of the New York Times.

Karen Finney, host of MSNBC’s Disrupt, sneers that these GOP-​led states are “leaving money on the table.”

“It’s free money!” exclaims an exasperated Joan Walsh of Salon​.com, adding that, “It’s stimulative money.”

Under Obamacare, the federal government first demanded and now urges states to expand the Medicaid rolls well beyond those at the poverty line, with our central government generously offering to pay the cost for the massive expansion fully for three years … and then 90 percent after that.

One local newspaper identified one major issue, trust: “The trademark of Obamacare is broken promises.”

Will the federal government keep paying nearly all the cost? In Virginia, before any expansion, Medicaid already accounts for nearly one out of every four dollars in state spending.

“This is another picture of how extreme this Republican Party has become,” according to Walsh, “that you had this organized backlash to taking money that once would have been a no-brainer.”

This is the new GOP extremism, refusing to be bought off?

It’s no vice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people property rights too much government

Naked Truth Up North

In the U.S., broadcasters and savvy consumers worry about the behavior of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the electromagnetic spectrum not by defending property rights, but by licensing segments of the spectrum within locales. The FCC even regulates content to some extent, by threat of withdrawing licensure.

But it could be worse. We could be in Canada.

How so? Well, Canadian politicians have long picked at a cultural scab: their identity crisis, their fear of being overshadowed by the U.S. So, up north, regulation of broadcast content centers on the promotion of “Canadian” artistry and talent in place of programming generated elsewhere, chiefly America.

Yes, the Canadian Radio-​television and Telecommunications Commission has quotas.

And like all quota systems, it has long ago embraced absurdity.

The latest nonsense?

The demand that two Canadian porn channels provide more home-​grown pornography. In addition, the channels have been charged with not been providing enough closed captioning. (Just what adult movies need, careful transcription.)

AOV XXX Action Clips and AOV Maleflixxx are on notice, and their respective licenses are under review:

The X‑rated specialty channels are supposed to air 35 per cent Canadian programming over the broadcast year and 90 per cent of its content should have captioning.

As part of proposed licence renewals, the commission plans to hear evidence on the apparent non-compliance.

It might be awfully funny to horn in on those hearings, listen to what people will say about upping Canadian porn production to meet standards that encourage, uh, national pride.

But the dirtiest truth is that most regulation of the airwaves is just as ridiculous, if not quite as nakedly so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption media and media people

Guerrilla Video Strikes Again

Even as many in mainstream media repeatedly insist that there’s nothing to see here, so let’s move on, cheeky activists like James O’Keefe continue to use new technologies to expose dubious doings (and worse) on the political left.

O’Keefe first earned notoriety by recording employees of Planned Parenthood seeming to endorse a racist agenda, and, later, ACORN workers seeming to endorse a criminal one. Planned Parenthood didn’t suffer much of a cost from the ensuing controversies. But ACORN lost congressional funding and eventually shut its doors.

Not entirely, however. Some elements of the organization continued under different guise. O’Keefe’s Project Veritas recently recorded admissions by a field organizer, Jennifer Longoria, for Battleground Texas (BT), an ACORN successor outfit. According to Longoria, BT routinely scrapes voter information from voter registration rolls on behalf of the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Wendy Davis.

Longoria confesses the chicanery even though BT staff have been warned not to fall prey to O’Keefe-style inquiries about values and practices.

“[E]very time we register somebody to vote, we keep their name, number.…”

“And that’s from the voter registration form?” asks an O’Keefe associate.

“Right, from the form. That data collection is the key.”

The Texas Secretary of State makes clear that voter registrars are prohibited from copying telephone numbers from registration forms. It’s against the law.

A “news gathering” outfit like the Texas Tribune may downplay the revelations, but the cat’s out of the bag. As they say, data collection — and distribution — is the key.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Lying Will Not Set Us Free

A professor in the John Hopkins University School of Nursing published, a decade ago, an alleged statistical finding of a rather shocking nature: “the leading cause of death in the United States among African American women aged 15 to 45 years,” she and her colleagues wrote, was “femicide, the homicide of women,” clarified as “intimate partner violence.” Domestic homicide.

Attorney General Eric Holder passed along the statistic. It got a lot of attention. You’ll find the claim on government websites and on YouTube.

Thankfully, it is not true.

Christina Hoff Sommers first blew the lid off the bad statistic in 2011. More recently, writes Wendy McElroy at Reason,

the Washington Post fact checker, Glenn Kessler investigated Holder’s statement and published his results. Kessler wrote that CDC “data show that, for the year 2008 (the year before Holder’s speeches), cancer, heart disease, unintentional injury and HIV/​AIDS all topped homicide. Then if you break out intimate-​partner homicide, that ends up being seventh or eighth on the list (depending on whether you also include all homicides.)” As a basis of comparison, in 2008, cancer killed 1,871 black females; heart disease, 1,629; all homicides, 326.

You can see the motive to up the numbers. One instance of domestic violence ending in death is horrific, but thousands would carry more political weight.

Wendy McElroy, upon whose reportage I am entirely and confidently reliant, asks if the truth would have the “same media appeal as sensationalized falsehoods.” She concludes, sadly, with “Perhaps the media can be shamed into valuing the truth.”

We depend upon the honesty and good will of our fellow citizens — scientists, journalists, bureaucrats and politicians the most. Inaccuracies are bad; lies are worse. The truth can set us free. But falsehood is mainly useful to hoodwink us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.