Tag Archives: culture

The 1st Amendment

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…and the Progressives’ war against it.  They insist that only certain speech is permissible, and they are the arbiters of what we will be allowed to say and what we will be allowed to hear.

If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.

President Barack Obama said that to The New Republic in a recent interview.  Plainly, some folks shouldn’t be allowed to talk to their Congressmen, or to influence the vote of that employee.  Nor are news organizations allowed to report on that, unless they’re saying the right sorts of things.

There’s more, as Kirsten Powers noted in the article at the above link.

[T]he White House has kept Fox News off of conference calls dealing with the Benghazi attack, despite Fox News being the only outlet that was regularly reporting on it and despite Fox having top notch foreign policy reporters.

They have left Chris Wallace’s “Fox News Sunday” out of a round of interviews that included CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS for not being part of a “legitimate” news network.

This is an extension of the attack on that inconvenient clause in that hard-to-understand Constitution that has continued since Obama tried to blacklist Fox News from press conferences in 2009.

It’s not just the Party, though.  Media Matters typifies the assault from outside the Party.  In their Media Matters 2012 memo (copies here and here) [emphasis added]:

…during a recent press conference, ABC‘s Jake Tapper asked Robert Gibbs how Fox News—”one of our sister organizations,” as he put it—is different from any other network.  His question indicates the pervasive unwillingness among members of the media to officially kick Fox News to the curb of the press club.  By legitimizing Fox News as a news organization, reporters and commentators are enabling the network to continue conducting a massive conservative political campaign under the guise of journalism.  In the process, they are permitting Fox News to dominate the national discussion by spreading smears and lies—smears and lies that become conventional wisdom.  They are also defending an organization that has nothing but contempt for journalistic standards—hence undermining their own profession and the public interest at the same time.

Disagreement can only be dishonest, and so the disagree-ers must be prevented from speaking.  Thus, Media Matters proposes “The Solution:”

…we must launch new initiatives specifically designed to push back against Fox News’ partisan tactics.

Media Matters even complains about the reach of the 1st Amendment:

Conservatives are unwilling to yield even to minimal restrictions placed upon the press and speech by our laws….

Because it’s just plain wrong to insist on individual liberty.  When that’s inconvenient to a point of view.  And not a single LiberalProgressive, as Powers notes, is sufficiently embarrassed by these activities to protest.  It isn’t Progressives who favor, in Powers’ words, “cherishing dissent and an inviolable right to freedom of expression.

This is Progressive freedom.

The Brits Get It

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Or some of them do.  We need to figure it out, also.  Here’s another bit from The Telegraph; this lady was unimpressed with President Barack Obama’s “oration.”

There were some quite surreal moments when Mr Obama seemed to be channelling Gordon Brown at his most self-congratulatory.  Specifically rejecting the notion that America “must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future” (that is, we can afford to support both the old and the young), he said: “For we… understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” Ah, yes—remember that refrain: we will govern for the many, not the few?  Which turned out to be a euphemism for high tax, high-spend economics, galloping entitlements and an epidemic of welfare dependency?  Warning to America: it didn’t work out.

And

Mr Obama made no attempt to explain how support at both these ends of the age range was going to be afforded.  Or what effect his insistence that the most expensive entitlement programmes—social security, Medicare and Medicaid—were untouchable would have on the US deficit.  Hard economic fact could be countered by ideological passion: “[These entitlements] do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.”  Well, maybe.  But they have to be paid for with hard cash—by somebody.

And

The core message was pounded home relentlessly: American government is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual.

Then she offered an alternative from a roughly contemporaneous oration by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Then we got Mr Cameron’s offering, which, by comparison with the Obama message, seemed to be coming from a future world: from those who had learnt the lesson of overly powerful centralised political institutions that have spent money like there was no tomorrow on programmes that were steeped in benign rhetoric about “social fairness”.

And

Mr Cameron had a dream of the European Union as an open, flexible, freely diverse fellowship of nation states, each of them democratically accountable to its own electorate, and all of them able to cooperate in whatever ways suited their individual needs at any given time.

Talk about role reversal.

On Being More Like Europe

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Or at least more like British Europe.  Here is one area in which we could learn and from which we would profit by copying.

The Telegraph had this last weekend.  From their brief article about Great Britain’s Immigration Exam, their citizenship test, it’s clear that the Brits are going back to expecting prospective citizens to know what it is that is British culture and going away from politically correct froo-froo.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has torn up the 2007 edition’s section on New Labour, swept away guides to immigrants’ rights and put a new focus on what it means to be British.

The Life in the UK handbook, described by the Home Office as “essential reading” for migrants sitting the new test from March, will focus on British values, culture and history, as well as the success of Olympic heroes at London 2012.

Out go politically correct sections on how to complain about being arrested and “mundane information about water meters”, and in come “the events and people who have helped make Britain a great place to live”, ministers said.

Our schools would do well to make this adjustment, also.  (Take the sample test, too.  It’s fun.)

Ethics and the Left

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Let’s talk about this in the context of Presidential elections and the Electoral College.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, award Electoral College votes on the basis of which candidate won the state’s Congressional districts in the popular vote.  The winner of a district gets one Electoral vote, and (in general) the winner of the state’s overall popular vote gets two Electoral College votes.  Four other states, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, are actively moving in that direction, with a number of other states in the talking stage.  Virginia is the farthest along, having passed out of committee a by-district proposal in the state Senate (awarding the two votes to the candidate winning the most districts rather than the overall popular vote) and sent it to the full Senate.

What’s interesting here is not so much the rationale for making the move, but the arguments against and who is making those arguments.

Virginia State Senator Donald McEachin (D) calls the bill a “sore-loser bill” and added

The bill is absolutely a partisan bill aimed at defying the will of the voters, giving Republican presidential candidates most of Virginia’s electoral votes, regardless of who carries the state[.]

Virginia State Delegate Vivian Watts (D) sponsored or co-sponsored several bills over the years that would have apportioned Virginia’s electoral votes by Congressional district; she had this to say about that:

I’m age 72 so I spent a lot of years in the wilderness and the last time the state had gone Democratic [before 2008] was following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  I thought back in those days about how we were just totally ignored.

But she opposes the present bill coming before the House of Delegates.  The argument that Democrats weren’t getting their voices heard yesterday is valid, but the argument that Republicans aren’t getting their voices heard today is invalid.  Hmm….

Nationally, Democrats also oppose today what they wanted yesterday.  Mike Tate, Democratic Party Chairman, had this to say:

They can’t appeal to a majority of voters, whether it’s here in Wisconsin or Michigan or in the rest of the Midwest, so they are undermining a majority of voters.  The Republicans realize that where they are today, they can’t win a presidential election. It’s an audacious attempt to rig the system.

And, as The Washington Post summarizes,

Democrats nationwide attacked the proposed plans, which could tip the balance away from population-heavy urban centers to more rural districts that tend to favor Republicans.

Because bitter, gun-clinging, bible-toting rural Americans aren’t as important as more progressive, citified Americans.

Democratic political analyst Larry Sabato had this to say:

[I]t is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb—the whole hand, in fact—on the scale for future Republican candidates.  We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it.  A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans.  A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor.

No, we insist the handicap favor the Democrats.  We insist that Democratic Chicago alone carry Illinois in its entirety, against the will of the rest of the state.  We don’t accept that letting the grass roots—individual Americans themselves—determine the apportioning of Electoral College votes is in any way democratic.

It is the Democrats themselves, presently in the ascendant, who fear the future and want to seal their superiority by blocking—today—a more democratic apportionment.

Thus, as the Post points out at the end of the article at the first link above, this isn’t the first move (in Virginia, to take that state as our example):

[S]everal [Electoral College apportionment bills] have been introduced over the past decade, all with the same rationale of giving more say to voters on the losing side.  The only difference is that those bills were submitted by Democrats, back when they weren’t having as much luck in the state in presidential elections.

And Democrats nationally were in favor of changing the Electoral College system to better favor them in the aftermath of their narrow losses in 2000 and 2004.  And before that in response to the Nixon victories in the 1970s.

Ethics are what we say they are, say Democrats, when we need them to say that.

Takers vs Doers

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Nicholas Eberstadt has the call.

A growing body of empirical evidence points to increasing dependency on state largess.

Then he enumerates [emphasis his]:

  • Over the 50-plus years since 1960, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, entitlement transfers—government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens—have been growing twice as fast as overall personal income.  Government transfers now account for nearly 18% of all personal income in America—up from 6% in 1960.
  • According to the BEA, America’s myriad social-welfare programs (the federal bureaucracy apparently cannot determine exactly how many of these there are) currently dispense entitlement benefits of more than $2.3 trillion annually.  Since those entitlements must be paid for—either through taxes or borrowing—the burden of entitlement spending now amounts to over $7,400 per American man, woman and child.

To pay for this, every child is born with a $7,400 debt.  Including those who will be recipients of this welfare.  Which means, as a practical matter, the other children are born with an even greater debt.

  • In 1960, according to the Office of Management and Budget, social-welfare programs accounted for less than a third of all federal spending. Today, entitlement programs account for nearly two-thirds of federal spending.  In other words, welfare spending is nearly twice as much as defense, justice and everything else Washington does—combined.  In effect, the federal government has become an entitlements machine.

Yet President Barack Obama insists that entitlements don’t sap us, they strengthen us.  He’s partially right: they strengthen those who control the handouts from these entitlements.  Politically.

  • According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half (49%) of Americans today live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits.  That percentage is up almost 20 points from the early 1980s.  And contrary to what the Obama White House team suggested during the election campaign, this leap is not due to the aging of the population.  In fact, only about one-tenth of the increase is due to upticks in old-age pensions and health-care programs for seniors.
  • As entitlement outlays have risen, there has been flight of men from the work force.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of adult men 20 and older working or seeking work dropped by 13 percentage points between 1948 and 2008.
  • In recent years, the biggest increases in disability claims have been for “musculoskeletal” problems and mental disorders (including mood disorders).  But as a practical matter, it is impossible for a health professional to ascertain conclusively whether or not a patient is suffering from back pains or sad feelings.  The government’s disability-insurance programs were intended to address genuine need.  On the current trajectory, the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out of money during Mr Obama’s second term.
  • The president and others describe Social Security and Medicare as “social insurance” programs rather than transfer schemes.  True, the eventual beneficiaries of these programs contribute payroll taxes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds during their working lives.  But “insurance” programs are meant to pay for themselves; Social Security and Medicare cannot do so.

Moreover, insurance programs pay the premium payer or the payer’s designated beneficiary later, not some stranger currently.

And who’s paying for all of this?  Slightly over half, and dwindling, of those Nancy Kress called mules in her Beggars novels.  And those of our children who are picking up the debt.