Categories
ideological culture media and media people too much government

Got Ads?

First the hush-hush secrecy; then the lies. Now something even . . . worse?

President Barack Obama doesn’t think the American people can handle the truth. Neither do several progressive non-profit groups in Colorado that have produced a plethora of cringe-worthy ads promoting Obamacare.

One print ad, “Let’s Get Physical,” pictures a young women giving a thumbs up sign and showing off her birth control pills standing next to a scruffy-faced man-boy, with the text: “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.* I got insurance.”

No worries, eh? The asterisk informs readers that, “The pill doesn’t protect you from STDs.”

Another advertisement, “Brosurance,” reaches out to young . . . drunkards. “Keg stands are crazy,” we’re informed. “Not having health insurance is crazier.” It continues: “Don’t tap into your beer money to cover those medical bills. We got it covered.”

Gee, thanks. In fact, both print ads end with the “thanks obamacare!” slogan.

So, can floundering Obamacare be saved by harnessing the awesome power of sex appeal and inebriation and huge dollops of kitsch and irony? Only if young people are as vacuous as these ads insinuate.

“Younger Americans may indeed be reckless enough to do keg stands and have unprotected sex on a regular basis,” Nick Gillespie wrote in Time, “but they’re not so dumb as the ‘Got Insurance?’ ads — or the architects of Obamacare — seem to think.”

Because, as Gillespie and others point out, Obamacare overcharges young people to supposedly lower costs for others. Let’s get real, bro.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption local leaders

Talk of the State

All it takes for the triumph of overgrown government is for good men to shut up.

Eric O’Keefe is talking — despite a gag order.

He spoke to the Wall Street Journal, which relates that in recent weeks a special prosecutor has

hit dozens of conservative groups with subpoenas demanding documents related to the 2011 and 2012 campaigns to recall Governor Walker and state legislative leaders.

Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand “all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications” both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees.

Eric O’Keefe (I could call him “Mr. O’Keefe,” but that would be odd, since he’s been a trusted friend and colleague for decades) heads Wisconsin Club for Growth, one of the targeted groups. He’s risking a lot by defying the gag order.

But he believes the public has a right to know.

And, considering that gag orders of this type, especially as applied to what looks like a crazed, partisan political witch hunt, are as un-American as you can get.

In case you were not aware, Eric authored an important book Who Rules America: The People versus the Political Class, after having served as the master strategist behind the nation’s most successful co-ordinated multi-state initiative campaign, for congressional term limits, in the early 1990s.

Eric’s now in the hot seat. Under the state’s “John Doe law” folks have been imprisoned — yes, political prisoners in the United States. And, according to the Wisconsin Reporter, most of those under investigation have remained “tighter than a drum,” not daring to speak out.

It’s always easiest for rulers when their opponents (and victims) are forced to remain silent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Theodore Parker

Theordore ParkerDemocracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.

Categories
Thought

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard ShawPolitical necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.

Categories
media and media people

Too Much Truth

Both what to report and when to report it can be legitimately debated in an editorial room. But not whether to accept demands to conceal “unflattering” truth for the sake of being allowed to report at all.

That’s the “dilemma” some news organizations face when they wish to report from within a country whose government will deny access unless they toe the line.

The reportage by longtime Reuters journalist Paul Mooney, who specializes in China, has apparently been too candid. The Chinese government has denied him a visa. His career there may be over. What should Reuters do?

Not what Bloomberg News did when its reporting incurred the displeasure of Chinese officials. Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about the financial ties between billionaire businessmen and Politiburo officials, for fear of being ejected from the country. Bloomberg insists that it has merely delayed the story. But the motive is clearly a desire to appease the Chinese government, which has already blocked the Bloomberg News website inside China and refused new visas to Bloomberg journalists.

Instead of killing or deferring disapproved journalism, any news outfit threatened with expulsion by an authoritarian government should publish its honest reports and let the chips fall where they may. If kicked out, it should seek other ways to report on the country. Covert communiqués from careful Chinese citizens. Secondary sources if necessary. That’s better than actively cooperating with wrongdoers to hide their sins.

It’s really not too different from crime reporting. Crime bosses don’t like a nosy press, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
links

Townhall: Obama Can’t Avoid Fabled Ovoid Crack-up

The biggest story of the week is turning into the biggest story of the month, the year, perhaps the decade. The much-heralded, much-despised “Obamacare” reform has had a great fall. What are the chances for the king’s henchmen to put it back, intact, on the wall? Not high, not at all.

Click on over to Townhall, then back here, for a bit more reading.

Chiefly, you may want to look up the Wikipedia entry on Humpty Dumpty. Did you catch yesterday’s posted (linked) Obamacare video?

The folks at Reason magazine have been doing a good job keeping up with the latest in Obamacare stories — and yes, those stories are getting bizarre.

Categories
video

Video: Obamacare in One Lesson

This is a pretty good breakdown of what Obamacare is/was and why it was a bad idea from the start:

Categories
Thought

Jean-Baptiste Say

The laws of Mahomet have prohibited loan at interest; and what is the consequence in the Mussulman dominions? Money is lent at interest, but the lender must be indemnified for the use of his capital, and, moreover, for the risk incurred in the contravention of the law.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

Pledge or No Pledge

School authorities in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, decided not to require students of all ages to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They said they couldn’t find time to put it in the schedule, etc., thereby both disappointing and puzzling local veterans, who were the ones who brought the issue up.

The “time” excuse was just that, of course. What the real reasons for the decision are, I don’t know, and will let others guess.

On the bright side, there are reasons not to require recitation of the Pledge. My qualms center on how un-American it seems. Veterans today often talk up the Flag, and the Pledge, etc., but the Founding Fathers took allegiance seriously, and they didn’t secede from Great Britain to pledge their sacred honors to a symbol — a fighting banner too easily unanchored from the best part of the short declaration, “with liberty and justice for all.”

Besides, the Pledge was written in the late 19th century by Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist who targeted the Pledge at those sectors of society that he most feared: immigrants, anyone prone to “radicalism.” And yet when I read his political agenda, I see the very radical ideas that corrupted American politics away from limited government.

Worse yet, Bellamy devised an ominous salute to go with his recitation. (Thankfully, that was modified to the hand-on-heart gesture in 1942, when Congress officially adopted the Pledge.)

I’d rather students learn about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Substance, not symbol; law, not fiction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Jean-Baptiste Say

Henceforward, it will be reckoned no more avaricious or immoral to take interest, than to receive rent for land, or wages for labour; it is an equitable compensation adjusted by mutual convenience; and the contract, fixing terms between borrower and lender, is of precisely the same nature, as any other contract whatsoever.