Category: media and media people

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media and media people national politics & policies tax policy too much government

Smart Reaction?

If you balk at having more and more of your life run from the nation’s capital, you’re stupid.

Or, so blares Joe Klein in a Time magazine online article, “Too dumb to thrive.”

See, “smart” Americans understand that a trillion in federal “stimulus” spending can only do “good.” Apparently dumb Americans are the ones telling pollsters that the “stimulus” money is being wasted.

Klein says the biggest part of the stimulus is a tax cut for most, meaning more money in their paychecks. But ignorant Americans focus on the huge debts we’ll have to pay back . . . in higher taxes.

Klein says that the second biggest portion of stimulus money went to state governments to keep our kids’ teachers from being laid off and state taxes from being raised. The notion that without the stimulus all the public school teachers would have been pink-slipped is a bit much.

As for higher state taxes, couldn’t state spending actually be cut? And not just on police, teachers and firemen?

Klein’s blithering blathering reminds me of Chris Matthews, and other MSNBC geniuses, who contend that politicians are in deep doo-doo because “people are angry and scared” and want to take their frustrations out on someone.

People are angry and scared, sure. But taking out our anger out on those responsible for destroying our wealth and freedom seems . . . well .  .  . smart.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Haiti on the Hot Seat

Television theologian Pat Robertson attributes Haiti’s current woes to a two-century-old pact:

[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti. . . . They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” . . . Ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. . . .

Pact with the devil? True story??

The Haitians threw off the French long before the rule of Napoleon III . . . but, whatever. It is doubtful that any amount of thumbing through an encyclopedia before going on air would have saved Pat.

Soon after the Robertson clip we got the clip from actor Danny Glover. Glover says climate change caused the earthquake. Apparently, he was mad about the failed summit. “They’re all in peril because of global warming . . . because of climate change. . . . When we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens. . . .”

Hey, why not? “Global warming” causes everything! Maybe even the heated hectoring of Pat and Danny.

Where’s the common sense?

Oh, here: This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

Palin, 11 — Biden, 0

The old guns in the major media marshal their resources as subtly as they can to turn minds their direction, usually leftward. That’s so obvious that I don’t talk about it much.

My regular listeners know that this is not a major obsession of mine. I comment on media bias only now and then. But when a spectacular, or just funny, example comes up, I do have to recognize it, right?

To not comment would be to ignore the wild donkey in the room.

The Associated Press fact checked the new Sarah Palin memoir, Going Rogue, finding a few errors, some self-serving spin. Mrs. Palin provocatively noted that the AP had devoted eleven reporters to attack her book, when they could have been fact checking health care reform costs, for instance.

She got that fact right — the AP did hire eleven “fact-checkers.” In contrast, the AP set not one reporter to check Joe Biden’s book, even after he received the VP slot nomination last year.

Yes, the Palin book merited AP coverage eleven-to-zero over the Biden book.

Liberal bias, anyone?

In the AP’s defense, one could say that Palin is good story . . . Biden? Not so much. True enough. But eleven-to-one better copy?

Well, maybe. But the AP fact-checked her book, and not books by the Clintons or Barack Obama. The press’s Palin obsession looks a little indecent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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individual achievement media and media people

A Prince, Indeed

Richard Nixon once called him “the enemy”; he was my favorite columnist and TV talking head.

Robert D. Novak passed away in August. I’ll miss him. Not only was he a tremendous advocate for term limits, he was a great guy.

While Novak was certainly a conservative, he wasn’t in the tank for anyone. A columnist from 1963 to 1993 with writing partner Rowland Evans, and then until last year writing alone — as well as in 25 years on CNN — Novak broke a lot of stories, and made more than a few politicians angry.

No wonder. Never a fan of  politicians, Novak wrote in his autobiography that his initial negative “impression of the political class did not change appreciably in a half-century of sustained contact.”

Early in his career, Novak was tagged as the “Prince of Darkness” for his bearish attitude on politics. The name stuck.

But Novak was really a prince of open-mindedness, or that’s how it seems to me. Born Jewish, he spent most of his adult life as a Protestant, and then converted to Catholicism in his late sixties. Few of us remain open to profound change so late in life.

And in other ways he was simply a regular guy. Whenever I see a Corvette, the car he loved so much, I’ll think of Bob Novak.

And whenever I see a politicians pinned by a pundit, then too, I’ll remember Bob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.