URLs du Jour

2018-02-23

Demagoguery

Proverbs 15:12 returns to criticize another disfavored group, mockers.

12 Mockers resent correction,
    so they avoid the wise.

Hm, that explains a lot about my Facebook and Twitter experiences. (Mocker: "Oh, sure it does.")

Fun fact: A word search tells us that "mocker" appears 16 times in Proverbs. (22 times in the entire Bible, all Old Testament.)


■ We are fortunate to have David Harsanyi watch CNN so we don't have to. He reports back: CNN’s Shameful Town Hall Is A Clarifying Moment On Guns.

CNN hosted an anti-gun rally “townhall” yesterday featuring freshly grieving children and parents from Parkland High who aimed their ire at the NRA, politicians who are peripherally associated with the NRA and anyone who didn’t say exactly what they wanted to hear. It was an event where a Parkland student could compare Marco Rubio to a mass murderer and question whether NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch truly cares about her children without ever being challenged.

I hope CNN got the rating it was looking for, because it’s almost guaranteed that NRA membership and gun sales are about to spike.

Hopefully the hysteria will burn itself out soon.


NR provides a New Hampshire-related story, by Lindsey Burke: New Hampshire Can Lead the Way on School Choice, But Will It?

"Education Savings Accounts will be our most significant step yet in giving parents and children the ability to choose the education path that is best suited for them,” declared New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu in his latest State of the State address.

A new proposal would make New Hampshire the seventh state to enact ESAs, and potentially the first to provide all families the opportunity to use them. With an ESA, parents who need to find a school or education option that is a better fit for their child can access some of the money the state would have spent on their child in the public system. They can then use those funds to pay for private-school tuition, online learning, special-education services and therapies, private tutoring, and a host of other education-related services, products, and providers. Parents can also roll over unused funds from year to year.

Reporting from Ground Zero: we are seeing the usual scare tactics deployed against the legislation. Fortunately, opponents' arguments consistently demonstrate their values: preserving the "public school system" status quo over improved education for kids.


■ The Club For Growth provides their 2017 Congressional Scorecard! Yay!

Each year the Club for Growth publishes a Congressional Scorecard that tracks how members of Congress vote on economic legislation. Throughout the year, the Club for Growth issues Key Vote Alerts urging Representatives and Senators to vote in favor of economic policies that strengthen our nation’s economy and shrink the size of the federal government. Similarly, Key Vote Alerts are issued when it is imperative that lawmakers strike down legislation that will raise taxes, increase harmful regulations, and grow our already massive government. At the end of the year, the Club for Growth Foundation conducts a study of how members of Congress voted on key issues, including the Club’s Key Vote Alerts, and ascribes a score. The Club shares this congressional scorecard with Club members, the press and with the public. It rewards free-market champions and exposes big-government, tax-and-spend politicians.

How did NH do? Awful.

Both Senators Shaheen and Hassan tied (with a lot of other Democrats) for 58th place. Which doesn't sound so bad, except that they both got that for a single vote for fiscal sanity, against a GOP proposal to increase refundability of the child tax credit. Only six senators had worse scores than Shaheen and Hassan.

Over in the House, Carol Shea-Porter got in 285th place. She achieved this thanks to a single vote: a Nay on making "further supplemental appropriations" for "disaster assistance for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and calendar year 2017 wildfires, and for other purposes",

The other NH CongressCritter, Ann Kuster, couldn't even manage that: she got a perfect zero.


■ And our Google LFOD Alert was set off by a Union-Leader article about one Nellie McKay: With a wry sense of self, she’s equal parts singer, writer, actress, comedian and activist. She's at Concord's Capitol Center for the Arts, tonight!

It's a bouncy interview, in which Ms. McKay reveals herself to be a "citizen of the world", and says a lot of our problems are due to "nation states":

Government. People can organize on a much smaller scale than government. But then why do we have government? It really almost comes down to not trusting people. Not trusting people in other countries or not trusting your neighbor, and you need that regulatory force. But because we don’t trust each other, we imbue that handful of people with an enormous, an obscene, an insane amount of power.

I identify a lot with the New Hampshire spirit of “Live Free or Die,” because of the grotesque over-surveillance and the insane militarization of our society and the police state. You know, “Live Free or Die” has never rung truer.

Oooh, hard core libertarian? Well, not quite. From earlier in the interview:

If we had a universal basic income, coupled with single-payer health care and universal child care, people could just get by. They could take care of family, they could pursue their own dreams and happiness.

And then beyond that, if you want fancier things then you can have a job. We just need a maximum wage, a decent tax on the richest people and the corporations, and then cut through our over-bloated military budget.

Yes, that whole rant about government having an "insane amount of power"? Ms. McKay wants to give it even greater powers of expropriation.

Expropriation from other people, of course.

So never mind about that LFOD thing. Kidding!


Last Modified 2018-03-02 4:33 PM EDT