Category: media and media people

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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies Popular

Are Democrats Socialists?

Deer in the Headlights

Does it matter that the chair of the Democratic National Committee doesn’t know if her party is socialist?

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was grilling Debbie Wasserman-​Schultz on the meaning of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s popularity within the Democratic Party. Mrs. Wasserman-​Schultz responded by boasting that the Democrats “really are a Big Tent Party.” Then Matthews veered out her comfort zone of horse-​race politics and self-​congratulatory posturing.

“What is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist?” he asked.

Mrs. W‑S chuckled. Uncomfortably.

“I used to think there was a big difference,” Matthews went on. “What do you think it is?” Mrs. W‑S evaded, blathering on how it is that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is what will really count in the upcoming election.

Karl Dickey, at the Examiner, holds that Democrats, today, are socialists: “one only needs to look at the Democratic Party’s platform to understand that it is a socialistic political party.”

Meanwhile, Juan Williams, discussing the issue on Fox News’s The Five, argues that there is a big difference between Democrats and socialists: Dems just like regulation and redistributing wealth; socialists want to nationalize industry and run everything through a central bureau.

And that is the definition that anti-​socialist economists Yves Guyot and Ludwig von Mises settled on. Technically, Williams is right.

But the fact that the head of the Democratic Party waffled on the distinction says more about the party than a definitive answer would have.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Deer in the Headlights

 

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Gross Domestic Prevarication

Eternal Koch, meme, Paul Jacob, Koch Brothers, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

A sign of these sorry times for professional journalism: Time magazine runs a dishonest smear against Charles Koch, completely twisting the billionaire’s remarks at a recent meeting of major donors in Orange County, California.

“Charles Koch Says US Can Bomb Its Way to $100,000 Salaries,” screamed the headline. The sub-​heading added, “Building bombs and using them is one way to growth, the billionaire suggests to allies.”

What did Mr. Koch actually tell the assembled crowd of major donors?

“I think we can have growth rates in excess of 4 percent. When I’m talking about growth rates,” explained Koch, “I’m not talking about that GDP, which counts poison gas the same as it counts penicillin. What a monstrous measure this is. If we make more bombs, the GDP goes up — particularly if we explode them.”

In other words, while Time’s headline portrayed Koch as a warmonger, the billionaire businessman wasn’t suggesting this country “Bomb Its Way” anywhere. Certainly not “to growth.” In fact, Koch was making the opposite point: true economic growth can’t come from producing or using “poison gas” or other munitions.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had found this article’s headline to be a flat-​out concocted falsehood; Time soon changed the headline.

Yet, even the re-​written headline was sort of a slap: “Charles Koch Mocks Common Measure of Prosperity.” Only after reading the sub-​head — “Calls ‘monstrous’ the notion that GDP values bombs as much as medicine” — was it clear that Koch was making a very common sense point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eternal Koch

 

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folly ideological culture media and media people

It’s a Disgrace

Crying Children

State-​powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.

Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.

O’Neill, editor of the London-​based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.

Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-​folk use to flag and meta-​comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).

And how about the case of the svelte-​model-​adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-​body-​ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-​body-​ready” in the super-​model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-​blobby sentiment.

Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.

What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-​backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-​skinned and/​or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.

As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-​be-​offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Crying Children

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Times Misfires

NYT-NRA

Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?

Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-​bearing at its April convention.

According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life … the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy.… So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment.…”

But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”

So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues … but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.

The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.

It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.

This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.

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NYT-NRA

 

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media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Humble Hillary Heads Off

Hillary Clinton, collage, photomontage, illustration, editorial, election, presidential, campaign, poverty, accomplishments, election

Hillary Clinton announced, yesterday, that she wants to be the next president of these United States. She made it official via an Internet video, which starts off with all kinds of normal, regular folks expressing their hopes and plans for 2015.

The small boy singing about “little tiny fishes” steals the show.

After a minute and a half of innocence-​by-​association, Hillary Clinton comes on to say that she, too, has big plans: “I’m running for president.”

Mrs. Clinton continues: “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

She should know, what with her family’s struggles after leaving the White House in 2000 — multiple mortgages on multiple multi-​million-​dollar domiciles. I’m sure we all relate to that.

“Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion,” she states, “so you can do more than just get by, you can get ahead and stay ahead.”

Apparently, without Hillary at the helm of our Leviathan federal government, all we can do is “just get by.” Barely. Never “get ahead” and “stay ahead.”

“Because when families are strong,” intones Clinton, “America is strong.”

Yes, the woman who wrote It Takes a Village now extols family strength.

“So I’m hitting the road to earn your vote,” she pledges. “Because it’s your time.”

Or so says this Everywoman, a former first lady, U. S. Senator, presidential candidate, Secretary of State, and savvy cattle futures trader.

Hillary Clinton has had a long career in government. It will be interesting to see what she runs on — what she identifies as accomplishments — as opposed to what she runs away from.

Or deletes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hillary Clinton Campaign

 

 

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Common Sense folly media and media people responsibility

Who Are the Bigots Now?

political, editorial, collage, photomontage, illustration, gender, rape, Rolling Stone, women's studies, campus, violence

“Why did Rolling Stone … so massively screw up” in “falsely accusing a University of Virginia frat of gang-​raping a freshman girl?” asks Alex Griswold of The Daily Caller. “[I]f you work for liberal magazine The New Republic, the answer is that they were too right-wing.”

Most of my online friends are with Griswold, excoriating and ridiculing TNR’s Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig’s questionable analysis of the piece in question. Before I pile on, let me just say what is right about her analysis in “Rolling Stone’s Rape Article Failed Because It Used Rightwing Tactics to Make a Leftist Point…”

She ably summarizes a world view. 

“The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases” while the “right,” she insists, “tends to understand politics on the individual level,” which she imputes to “a general obsession with the capital‑i Individual.”

That, she thinks, is why “the right” pokes at “specific details of high-​profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.” If the leftist critique doesn’t apply there, she thinks “rightwingers” hope, they thereby disprove the left’s systemic oppression thesis.

Note how she just assumes the accuracy of the left’s approach; she just ignores how often lefty journalists get actual “big-​picture” stats wrong. For example, on the subject of “rape culture,” they routinely suppress discussion of accurate stats on false rape charges by women against men.

Worse yet, she honestly does not see how her “leftwing” media comrades have prejudged coverage of recent race-​based and rape-​involved cases, doing injustice to individuals.

Is this mere media bias?

No. It’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s bigotry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Upside Down World View