Category: national politics & policies

Categories
government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies

Great & Powerful Teleprompter

There’s a man behind a curtain somewhere doing whatever one does to a teleprompter.

Load? Arm? Detonate?

Last week, in Tampa, a Republican teleprompter put words into the mouth of Speaker of the House John Boehner, then chairing the convention, specifically these words: “In the opinion of the chair, the ‘ayes’ have it and the resolution is adopted.”

The resolution concerned whether a number of Ron Paul delegates would be seated. The vote was awfully close. How the actual voice vote turned out was supposed to be for Boehner to judge, not an anonymous guy (or gal) behind the curtain, ghost-writing democracy.

Yesterday, while the Democrats gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina, were busy tucking God and Jerusalem back into their platform, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa held the gavel. But not control of his own teleprompter.

The resolution restoring those elements to the party’s platform, coming after the platform committee had already completed its work, required a two-thirds vote. When the votes were heard . . .  well, Mayor Villaraigosa wasn’t sure. He had the convention vote again. And then again.

Finally, perhaps after seeing the teleprompter, which read, “In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds having voted in the affirmative . . .” he decided, to loud booing, that the resolution had received two-thirds.

As the country prepares (cringes) for the fall campaign, we’ll hear plenty from President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney and about both men. But who cares? The real power in our system of governance, as these conventions make clear, are the guys running the teleprompters.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers

The Gray Fox

Clint Eastwood, crazy? Like a fox.

Last Thursday, at the Republican Party Convention in Tampa, he spoke to a primetime television audience of millions in the type of direct language politicians never utter. The movie star’s message was simple, but his presentation was more acting routine than speech, using an empty chair as a prop and pretending President Obama was sitting next to him. His delivery came in stops and starts, seemingly ad-libbed with the 82-year old no quicker or more nimble of thought and word than other octogenarians I know.

Much of the mainstream media pounced, diagnosed Eastwood as nearly insane, and noted that the actor’s 12-minute talk upstaged presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Funny, I think Eastwood’s words touched many regular folks — and perhaps a raw nerve for those favoring the president.

While celebrities have every right to speak, I’m tired of the usual sophomoric spewing of famously uninformed opinion — “hot-dogging it,” as Eastwood put it. But we didn’t watch movie star Clint Eastwood last week; we saw businessman Clint Eastwood.

In 1967, early in his Hollywood career, Eastwood created his own production company, Malpaso, which has handled virtually all of his American films. Eastwood knows firsthand the demands of running a business. In fact, he enjoys a reputation for finishing his films on time and on budget and making profits.

When someone doesn’t do the job, Eastwood signs the proverbial pink slip. He thinks voters should do likewise. After all, “we own this country,” Eastwood reminded us. “Politicians are employees of ours.

“When somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

I Know Savings

I don’t personally know Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who won the Tour de France seven times, including after beating cancer.

I don’t know if Armstrong tricked folks for all those years he was competing, finding some ingenious way to pass more than 500 drug tests even while doping, as witnesses tell the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

I don’t know what to make of the USADA’s doping charges, but, as for the agency’s motivations, a federal judge wrote that, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.”

And I don’t know whether Armstrong chose to drop his challenge to the USADA charges against him because after years of fighting the agency, as he wrote, “enough is enough,” or, as USADA contends, there was ample “evidence” that “Armstrong used . . . and administered doping products.”

But there is something I know. I know where we can cut some federal spending.

On the Opposing Views blog, Tim Dockery points out that USADA “receives almost 70 percent of its funding from the federal grants” and “is a government program masquerading as a non-profit organization. This non-profit status allows it to investigate and prosecute athletes without affording them the constitutional and due process protections required of other federal agencies.”

Why is the federal government paying to police sport? In a way that undermines our standard of justice? When we’re already 16 trillion in debt and butting in costs money?

Yes, “enough is enough.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies political challengers

The Punisher Vote

As bad weather and thousands of good Republicans descend upon Florida, it’s worth keeping perspective: The best (and perhaps only) reason to vote for Mitt Romney is the same as the best/only reason Americans had to vote for Barack Obama in 2008: to punish the party previously in power.

The excesses of united Republican government in the mid-oughts, and the sheer irresponsibility and insider bias in the lame duck Bush years, as the GOP president panicked and turned Wall Street into the largest welfare queen class in America, required punishment.

Americans wanted a change. So they voted, understandably, for the man who promised change.

But what did they get?

Bush had pushed in a new welfare “entitlement” program; so did Obama and the Democrats. Bush had pushed bailouts for the wealthy and the protected; so did Obama and the Democrats. Bush had pushed war and occupation and “nation building”; so did Obama and the Democrats. Bush had presided over deficits and a rising debt; so did Obama and the Democrats.

Turnabout being not merely fair play, but the will of the pendulum to swing back, it seems like voting against Obama is what is in order. It seems almost ineluctable.

But, uh, there’s a problem. Is Romney electable?

Both major parties tend to throw up lackluster candidates when the opposition has an incumbent in the White House. Take three examples: Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and John Kerry, paragons of pointlessness.

But, this time, a pointless challenger has history endow him with a point: Obama and the Democrats deserve to be punished.

Not much of a platform? True. But it’s something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies

Waste, Fraud and Abuse

There are few things less inspiring than listening to Republican and Democratic Party candidates and their flunkies discuss entitlement reform.

Last weekend, the Romney camp defended its newly acquired reform high-ground from assaults by the current administration. Rep. Paul Ryan had famously charged that the Democrats’ health care reform package of 2010 had “raided” nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars to help extend Medicare-like benefits to younger populations. The Obama camp swears on a stack of, uh, Bibles, that all it did was cut waste and fraud and, yes, expanded services to seniors in the process and . . .

I don’t have the heart, or stomach, or liver (which organ is it that deals with bile?) to diagnose all this with scientific scrutiny, but I will say, off-hand, both sides look pathetic.

Who can believe that politicians and their hangers-on in the bureaucracies have actually honed in on — much less will actually cut —nearly a trillion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse?

Not that they aren’t there. It’s just that waste and fraud seem awfully stubborn, given that even those spending a lifetime in politics have made no progress against them.

Except during campaign speeches,

Washington politicians seem much friendlier to the wasters, fraudsters and abusers than to taxpayers. And the former are better organized, too.

It’s all preposterous.

And the supposed Republican reformers? They are “defending Medicare” so that older people don’t have to lose anything. But if the system is falling apart, it may be that the only fair thing is for every current recipient to lose something, so as not to lose everything.

The unmentionable truth? Waste is part of the system, and the programs are themselves fraudulent and abusive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The A-Word

The n-word got dropped on MSNBC’s The Cycle this week. The show’s co-host [No First Name] Touré called Mitt Romney’s use of the word “angry” to describe some of the rhetoric coming out of the White House as “the ‘niggerization’ of Obama”:

“You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Naturally this led to a battle between Touré and conservative co-host S.E. Cupp. She took particular issue with the fact that Touré admitted that VP Joe Biden‘s “chains” comments were divisive, but is now calling Romney a “racist” for saying the Obama campaign is “angry.”

“Do you see how dishonest that is?” she asked.

Good question. But here’s a better one: Doesn’t talk of race and code-words obscure the real issue here, anger?

Romney shouldn’t be calling for the Obama administration to be less angry. He should be angry himself, and castigating the president and his crew for being angry at the wrong things.

We should be angry at the continuation of wars, foreign (the Middle East) and domestic (on psychoactive drug use), to the detriment of fiscal stability as well as our civil liberties.

We should be angry that the nation’s pension system has been systematically stripped of its surpluses for 77 years — by politicians in Washington.

We should be angry that federal (along with state) policy has interfered with medicine to such an extent that the most idiotic ideas around — nationalization/socialization — almost seemed plausible to a sizable minority of Americans.

We should be angry that the Democrats pushed through yet another expensive entitlement, “Obamacare,” while the rest of the federal government sunk further into insolvency.

And yes, we should be angry that our leaders can’t stick to decent issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility

A Loan of Common Sense

If you give something that belongs to you, without expecting to get it back, that’s giving. You just hand over a gift and forget about it. Perhaps you would appreciate a “thank you.”

If you lend to someone, you expect to be repaid. Those who don’t repay are called deadbeats.

If you mug somebody on the street and grab his wallet, you are stealing. You are then a thief, a robber.

That’s all straightforward enough. This is not: Say that you steal from the productive citizens of one country or countries (Country or Countries A) and give the dough to the fiscally irresponsible government of another country (Country B), and you call it a loan. But when Country B can’t pay the installments, it is provided another loan originating in the wallets of the very same Country A citizens from whom was extracted the original loan.

What is this? You are not only stealing, you are shuffling IOUs instead of getting repaid. You are also misrepresenting the nature of the transactions, for it is clearly a gift of stolen money and not anything voluntary, like a loan.

Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government, goes into a bit more of the nitty and gritty of Greece’s tricky tranche of “repayment” on its “loan” from the European Union, and relates it to the similar finagling here in the United States . . . which all rests on credit expansion by the Federal Reserve. “The eggheads in Washington, D.C.,” he says, offer only one solution: “just keep digging.”

But how deep? At some point it gets too hot down there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Banker Away

Republican candidate for the U.S. Presidency Mitt Romney has received some flak for keeping some of his vast hoard of wealth in foreign accounts. Though I have a few problems with Mr. Romney, this isn’t one of them. Folks with savings and investments should diversify. Anyone with large amounts of money should consider diversifying beyond our borderlines.

And not just for “tax avoidance” reasons, either.

For one thing, as nice and generous as our politicians are, the U.S. isn’t exactly stable and business-friendly. That used to be the U.S. It may not be, any longer.

Take Peter Schiff’s new endeavor. The redoubtable Schiff, an investment expert perhaps best known for having predicted the 2008 mortgage crisis and the severity of the current recession, has started a gold bank, Euro Pacific Bank Ltd., which will back deposits with gold. The actual yellow stuff.

Its most interesting innovation will be its offer of a “gold debit card,” for use worldwide. Peter Wenzel calls this idea “awesome,” but then notes the downside:

U.S. security laws have become so intrusive, burdensome, and expensive to comply with, that it made it difficult for Schiff to offer the services in the U.S. So, Schiff opened his bank offshore, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It operates outside the jurisdiction of U.S. security regulations, and does not accept accounts from American citizens or residents.

America’s place in the world is changing. And not for the better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

A Fraudulent Pill to Swallow

If you’re like me, you often rub up against common opinion and find little sense in it — or, as I like to put it, popular opinion with the common sense bled out of it.

On Monday I reported on an anti-Obamacare lawsuit against the federal government for mandating the purchase of medical insurance that included “free” contraceptive drugs (including “morning after pills”). I took on the obvious problems, but neglected to mention that it’s not insurance.

I guess you can call turnips “rainbows” and politicians “angels,” but, based on accepted meanings of terms, it is not “insurance” when benefits include regular maintenance or common preventive (“prophylactic”) products.

One doesn’t insure against dandruff by buying a policy that provides you with “free” shampoo or against sunburn by purchasing a policy that offers free SPF50 sunscreen. One doesn’t insure against obesity with insurance that provides “free” healthy foods according to This Diet or That Diet.

For instance, it would be absurd to have an insurance policy to pay for one’s vitamins.

In a sense, the vitamins are the insurance. Think of them as a separate, medicinal form of insurance, which you pay for at purchase.

Same for contraception.

One buys insurance for unexpected and irregular needs. Calling Obamacare’s “contraception benefit” mandate “insurance” is a fib.

Much of what we think of as insurance actually amounts to confused (and confusing) methods of savings (at best) or a confidence game to get some people to pay for the regular goods and services other folks use (at worst). By force and fraud.

The force is the government mandate. The fraud is calling this whole program “insurance.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Spice Trade

“Who knows how this got out,” one scientist mused, trying to account for how a synthetic marijuana substitute leaked out of his lab and onto . . . the black market.

I’ll echo that “who knows?” and raise it a “par for the course.”

The War on Drugs backfires all the time.

Take all the lying drug warriors have done (and continue to do) about illegal substances. Their job is to discourage drug use, so they engage in hype. However, once a drug user figures out that the government regularly lies to them about the dangers, they distrust everything the government says.

Our drug use educators also rarely admit that a key factor in all drug use is hormesis, the principle whereby the effectiveness (and lethality) of a drug varies by dosage. No doubt the “zero tolerance”/”just say ‘no’ rap” is easier to communicate, and sports a superficies of sense. But the downside of making drugs illegal (and thereby putting them in the black market) has a consequence: drug purity becomes almost impossible to maintain, rendering drug users unable to manage their doses — and, by long-term adaptation, making them more and more reckless, less and less responsible.

Not a good result.

Also bad is today’s trendy (and reportedly dangerous) marijuana substitute known as “Spice.” And yes, this — along with a cabinet filled with new synthetic substances — was invented by government-funded chemists.

To aid the War on Drugs.

No one knows who leaked the recipe onto the Net, allowing enterprising folks overseas to synthesize it and transport it here. It’s another case of outsourcing caused by an allegedly “well-meaning” government program.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.