Arizona Dems’ unreasoned defense of gun buybacks

April 17, 2013 Leave a comment

(Wikimedia)

I have to say, the Boston bombing earlier this week makes these days sad and sobering.  Breaching insanity-as-usual, there is for a time, something approaching a public consensus on the reality of evil.

Of course, it is one thing to admit evil exists; it’s another thing to take action that combats it.  Gun buybacks definitely aren’t one of those things.  Today an AP headline tells of an amusing way to deal with them: “Ariz. bill passed makes cities sell turned-in guns.”

The law in Arizona already requires that cities sell confiscated weapons.  All the new bill does is extend this to buyback guns as well.  This move exposes the absurdity of the buyback project.  The number of guns removed by buybacks are hopelessly miniscule compared to the stock in circulation.  And, only upright, conscientious citizens think of turning their guns over to law enforcement.  This increases the ratio of bad guys with guns to good guys with guns.  So buybacks are a losing proposition on two counts.  Inasmuch as cities decide to conduct these exercises in futility, why shouldn’t the state mandate that they recoup some of the cost?

Okay, so this is a slap in the face of liberal feel-good activism.  But the rejoinder by Democrats is unworthy of being called reasonable or logical:

Democrats argued that Republicans complain about the federal government when it requires the state to take action, yet they’re quick to force local governments to do what they want. “We hate it when the federal government mandates it to the state, and we’re doing the same thing,” said Sen. Lynne Pancrazi, D-Yuma. They also complained about victims having to deal with the knowledge that a gun that killed a loved one could end up back on the streets.

This appears to be some sort of appeal to a double-standard.  But there’s a huge distinction between unwanted federal meddling and the state prescribing laws for the cities that are organized directly under its authority.  That distinction is the simple difference between the constitutions of the U.S. and Arizona respectively.  The Democratic senator is actually complaining about the compulsory nature of laws themselves rather than any hypocrisy Republicans might harbor.  But this is highly inconsistent coming from a party that thrives in direct proportion to the increase of government regulations, budgets, and lawsuits.

The complaint about guns ending up back on the streets is a non sequitur.  That happens already, in spite of the new bill being passed.  In fact, any gun that killed a person is more likely to have been seized than bought back.  How often does a person commit murder with a gun and then sell the weapon to law enforcement?  And if that were to happen, what is the likelihood the victim’s family would actually know or care about the ultimate fate of the gun?  Arizona Democrats sure are testing the limits of the emotional appeal.  Break out the tiny violins.

But what is most remarkable of all is that the AP reporter quotes these Democrats matter of fact, as if their statements actually made sense.

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , , , ,

The Rob Portman effect and proximate casualties

April 3, 2013 Leave a comment

20130403.tricolor

Polling last week revealed increasing public support for same-sex marriage.  CNN affixed a sleek label, the “Rob Portman effect,” to the positive correlation between 1) personally knowing someone close who is gay or lesbian, and 2) support for same sex marriage.

This explanation reminds me once again of my days studying political science.  One class I took, under Dr. Scott Gartner, featured the professor’s own research on American public opinion during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.  Popular memory attributes Walter Cronkite’s post-Tet offensive commentary as having soured opinion against the latter war.  President Lyndon Johnson lamented at the time, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”  This sound bite helped fueled the notion that television coverage decisively turned the public against the war.

But Gartner’s research unearths a sturdier explanation of changing opinions on Vietnam.  His multivariate analysis of wartime opinion polls shows “proximate casualty” as bearing the strongest positive correlation to opposing the war.  That is, opposition is most likely when the respondent knows someone from nearby who died in the war relatively recently.  Sound familiar?  Regardless of era, the public assesses policy not with the brain but with the gut.  Then and now, feelings trump facts.

English-speaking students of the Spanish language never forget the two forms of the verb “to know,” conocer and saber.  The first applies to people, and the second applies to facts.  Just as there is a distinction between knowing someone personally and knowing a fact logically, there is a distinction between the person proper and the circumstances pertaining to him.  When we think of our loved ones, it’s natural to want peace and equality to be the prevailing and rightful state of affairs.  But there’s tremendous value to acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that, in many respects, they are not.  The sooner we stop deceiving ourselves about reality as it relates to the ones we love, the sooner we can turn the corner and work for the kind of peace and equality that we can actually attain.

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , , , ,

Sequester: Obama forces the balance

March 2, 2013 4 Comments

20130302.cogitduck028

The federal budget sequestration saga culminated with a geeky–if odd–bang on Friday.  After days of touring the country and sounding alarms, President Obama denied he was feeding fears of fiscal “apocalypse,” felt compelled to concede, “I am not a dictator,” and confessed he could not change Republicans’ will through a “Jedi mind meld.”

In his Saturday radio address, the President acknowledged that Americans are tired of having to “careen from one manufactured crisis to another.”  It’s good to remember who is in the drivers’ seat.  It was President Obama who signed the legislation that triggered the sequester.  In light of this fact, Cosmoscon recently supplied a fitting name for the White House’s trite theatrics: Obamaquester.

In the days leading up to sequestration, the media indulged dire headlines.  Yahoo News’s leading caption warned Thursday, “Deep cuts to Begin.”  LiveScience jarred us with “Sequester cuts could hit scientists hard.”  The National Parks Service warned that bathrooms would go uncleaned, sending Mother Jones in a panic.  And the Navy announced the Blue Angels would cancel shows.  Mother Jones probably could care less for that jingoistic propaganda outfit.

The media has not been totally obeisant to White House talking points.  Clicking through Yahoo’s “Deep Cuts” reveals news copy weary of alarmism.  The Christian Science Monitor’s Decoder Wire challenged Obama’s characterization of “automatic” spending cuts.  Yet, as with many other media sources, it was reluctant to put the actual cuts in perspective.

Fortunately, the fiscal conservatives on WordPress have been on top of it.  The Southern Voice supplied a great Heritage Foundation graphic emphasizing that only budget growth shrinks under sequester, not the budget itself.  International Liberty highlighted effective sequester editorial cartoons.  I found Mike Ramirez’s pie picture to be an invaluable graphic.

The Moon in Daylight shared a great gamer’s analogy for Obama’s political strategy.  The President is a “munchkin mini-maxer.”  That is, he is a player who unscrupulously exploits a loophole in the rules or a coding glitch.  Instead of “investing” all his skill into a well-rounded array of abilities like negotiation, initiative, or magnanimity, Obama has pooled all his skill points into demagoguery.

This singular focus yielded political absurdity the day sequestration went into effect.  Besides denying that he was a dictator, he confessed “I’d like to think that I’ve still got some persuasive power left.”  And once Obama issued the “Jedi mind meld” snafu, the White House Office of Perpetual Campaigning parlayed it into a geeky-hip social media meme.  Should we expect less from the country’s premier community organizer?

One White House tweet implies tax hikes will “bring balance to the Force.”  But we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.  With a sluggish recovery, and over $600,000,000,000 in new revenue to pour in from the fiscal cliff deal, our economy needs more taxes like Luke Skywalker needed his hand chopped off by a lightsaber.  If the politics of sequester have to stoop to science fiction references, then it’s more fitting to say that our one-track president, with his incessant campaigning for tax hikes, “brings force to the balance.”  Politically, what Obama wants most and at all costs is to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes.

Filed under All posts, Cogitduck Comic Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

What’s wrong with this cartoon?

February 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Stuart Carlson via Go Comics

Here’s a simplistic take on President Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Carlson, the cartoonist, sympathetically depicts Obama as calm and optimistic.  Meanwhile, Republicans are shown as afraid to work on the nation’s problems.

But why should we buy Carlson’s conception of what our country’s problems are?  Serious issues, like the national debt and our values crisis, are missing from the junk pile.  And of the concerns listed in the cartoon, some are hardly worth addressing, at least on the federal level.  Gun violence has declined drastically compared to twenty and thirty years ago.  “Mental health crisis” is more apt to a mountain of national dysfunction than “guns.”

Carlson’s cartoon reinforces the myopic notion that big government activism is the way to solve national problems.  But why propose a new federal preschool initiative when the extant Head Start program has been found to be of questionable value?  Like the manufacturing hubs proposal, it’s just another reinvention of the wheel, adding to the accretion of federal programs that don’t do what they’re supposed to.

The policy proposals laid out last week were predictable.  And so has been media coverage.  A report by Rachel Rose Hartman of Yahoo does little more than relay the White House’s talking points unchallenged.  Fair enough, we can recount all the times Yahoo reporters have uncritically parroted Republican initiatives.  On one hand.

Consider also an AP fact check of Tuesday’s speech.  In contrast to his challenges of Obama’s statements, fact checker Calvin Woodward goes out of his way to thoroughly stomp on Marco Rubio’s mention of a balanced budget amendment.  Dismissing it as unserious, he conveniently forgets that such an amendment failed to pass Congress by one vote as recently as the Clinton presidency.  He beefs that federal revenues declined during the recession, but ignores that they’ve since recovered.  And he launches a lengthy apologetic as to the necessity of deficit spending at the federal level.  We can only imagine the AP giving such generous balance to a Republican president.

As Kohaleth observed, “Nothing is new under the sun.” Mr. Obama wasted the bully pulpit again. Rather than make a genuine effort to unite the nation and move it forward, he did what he knows how to do best: deploy emotional rhetoric to build political advantage for his own party.  The President remains a one trick pony.  Media and the public they serve are largely lost in the pomp of the speech.  The only paean we can honestly deliver is one that declares Obama’s speech another pale and uninspired echo of “Hope and Change.”

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , , , ,

Stigmatize gun ownership like smoking?

February 1, 2013 2 Comments

The Christian Science Monitor continues to astound with its idiocy.  One recent Monitor headline described the belligerence of Hamas as mere “military action.”  This when their signature mode of armed conflict–rocket attacks–consists in the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians.  So much for the idea of terrorism.

Now, the Monitor‘s editorial board suggests gun violence can be curbed by a public perception campaign akin to that which stigmatized smoking.  What would this look like? We can imagine the Ad Council cartoon propaganda now: a bratty, freckled blonde boy, sporting a sideways baseball cap, growls, “Hey bro, owning guns is not cool.”  Will subjecting upstanding, law abiding gun owners–who are generally paragons of civic responsibility–to such a silly and divisive psychological campaign really help?

There are better stigmas to promote instead. When Hollywood celebrities earnestly “demand a plan” of politicians while remaining unapologetic for their own glorification of gun violence, we ought to stigmatize their hypocrisy (and chuckle given their unintended fulfillment of this prophetic Portlandia parody). When our society allows severe mental illness to remain untreated out of fear of institutionalization and the corresponding desire for maximal autonomy, we should stigmatize indifference towards such danger.

Michael Medved is right when he declares that gun violence is a spiritual rather than a material problem. Prisoners of progressive thought are always trying to stigmatize material things.  They say SUVs kill the earth, or guns kill people.  At least the market tinkering of “cash for clunkers” had the probable effect of increasing the nation’s overall fuel efficiency.  But gun buybacks only decrease the ratio of gun ownership between law-abiding citizens and criminals.  Why is it ever good for criminals and murderers to have relatively more guns than the population at large?

The Monitor editorial also suggests an expansion of non-gun-owner rights along the lines of “non-smoker rights.”  Please, everyone, we have to think more carefully about rights!  We can’t just keep making up new ones.  Especially ones backed by stigma.  Have the editors at the Monitor forgotten that stigma–based on the materialistic concern of skin color–once supported the Jim Crow “right” for whites to not share public accommodations with blacks?

Rather than invoke stigmas based on material things, let’s stigmatize undesirable attitudes and behaviors instead.  We can start with the unfounded hysteria over gun violence.

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Reverse schadenfreude over Tim Scott

December 19, 2012 1 Comment

I have to admit, I was energized when I learned that South Carolina governor Nikki Haley selected Tim Scott to succeed Jim DeMint in the U.S. Senate.  Here we have a female Republican of South Indian descent drafting a solid conservative who happens to be African-American.  Compared to their counterparts in California–the dusty, Democratic dinosaurs Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein–these two young and dynamic leaders come off quite favorably.

It is unfortunate that we have to talk about race so much.  Commentators from the Left have been less than charitable in characterizing the GOP’s celebration of the appointment.  One blogger at The Washington Post front-loaded her criticism this way: “Yes, the giddiness is almost embarrassing as Republicans congratulate themselves . . .”

No commentary where a form of the word “giddy” appears within the first three words can really be worth reading.  Regrettably, that was once the fourth word used in one of my older posts!  I think being on the receiving end of it, I will retire the adjective. It only betrays a reverse schadenfreude, where one is either frustrated at, dismissive of, or indignant at the joy of another.  Not a helpful attitude.

Neither is it constructive to refer to Senator-designate Scott as a “cynical token,” as happened in a recent New York Times editorial.

Whatever critics say, the Republican trumpeting is necessary, if only to counter the incessant squawking about a race problem coming from MSNBC types.  Take note of Scott’s ascension to the Senate, as it is just one more indicator that reality runs counter to noxious media narratives.

 

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , ,

Reverse psychology

December 13, 2012 Leave a comment

2012.12.13.cogitduck023

Michigan’s accession to the right-to-work club made shockwaves for a day or two.  It’s mostly conservative news consumers who learned anything about union thug brutality like that enacted against Steven Crowder, Americans For Prosperity, and their hot dog vendor.  As an aside, the careful reader of this blog will remember Mr. Crowder as the guy who experimented with Halloween candy redistribution.

A couple of days ago Michael Medved highlighted something remarkable about the coverage of Michigan’s right-to-work controversy.  Consider how The New York Times tortures the English language in this story (emphasis mine):

Republicans said they intended to cast final votes as early as Tuesday on legislation abruptly announced last week that would bar workers from being required to pay union fees as a condition of employment, even as thousands of union members planned to protest at the state Capitol and as President Obama, visiting a truck factory outside Detroit, denounced the notion.

The liberal bias couldn’t be any more naked.  We should agree that forcing a worker to pay dues is something less than desirable.  To be “barred” from this coercion is comparable to being denied a root canal.  Not exactly something to complain about, or tape your mouth over in protest, for that matter.

These grammatical gymnastics are hardly distinguished from the cartoon routines of reverse psychology, something I’ve tried to represent with today’s comic.

Filed under All posts, Cogitduck Comic Tagged with , , , , , ,

Return of Taxosaurus Rex

December 2, 2012 1 Comment

2012.12.02.neckbite

I was compelled to illustrate some sort of combed-over neck-biting dinosaur after I heard my local morning commute talk host share this bit of candor from Chris Matthews.

To break it down: after a Republican House member tells the difficulties of the fiscal cliff negotiations and of his own hope for comprehensive tax reform, Chris Matthews rebuffs with what amounts to a lurid confession of his own gut feeling.  He motions with clawed finger at his own neck and speaks of his fellow liberals, “they want to see the bite mark on your neck” and “they want to know that you guys defending the rich have paid a price.”

This post-election bloodlust is entirely consistent with what we saw in the 2012 campaign.  From the White House on down, the Left has little regard for the fiscal or cultural health of the country.  Rather, the fires of antipathy must be continually stoked, against the Tea Party, against outmoded geezers pointing to the original meaning of the Constitution, against anyone who would stop the feel good parade that happily coincides with Democratic politicians’ hunger for influence and power.

Please remember this the next time some distasteful news come out of Washington: Conservatives, through the Republican party, want to put an end to this gross manipulation.  Honestly, rolling government spending back to manageable levels does not stem from a desire to bite the neck of food stamp recipients.

Liberals like Matthews would rather keep afloat the long-failed fantasy of big government activism.  Enough elites are sympathetic to this vision to keep it from dying its natural death.  And as long as that is the case, we will all continue to be hurt by the avenging claws of Taxosaurus Rex.

Filed under All posts, Political Cartoons Tagged with , , , , ,

The Wizard of Bogeyman Narratives

November 28, 2012 Leave a comment

Yahoo News has thrown up (in the fullest sense of the term) a piece by Chris Moody on Grover Norquist.  It’s accompanied by a gaudy, melodramatic illustration that’s more at home disgracing the cover of the now defunct liberal siren Newsweek.  But if by invoking The Wizard of Oz imagery Yahoo wants to claim squatter rights to that niche, that’s fine by me.

Here’s a painful point of Moody’s text:

But Norquist is like a bearded Lernaean Hydra, which grows only more powerful the more you attack it. The evidence? A majority of Republicans have not publicly joined the rogue moderates, reinforcing the narrative that they remain under Norquist’s binding spell.

Where is this “narrative” coming from?  Perhaps Mr. Moody is describing an out-of-body experience, because it is media that drive narratives, and he is very much a part of that enterprise.

That Republicans don’t budge on their no tax pledge is a point even Chuck Todd can understand.  There is an electoral base that must be answered to.  And no, these constituents to whom congressmen are accountable are not drooling, rabid, or themselves cult followers of a giant, green, bearded head.  Some segment of the population even finds their demands sensible.

Of course, it hurts the noggins of liberal journalists too much to try to draft anything other than “GOP beholden to extremist” pieces.  They could try an expose on Michael Moore, who recently touted–under delusion–a strong re-election mandate as a justification for President Obama to lead a righteous charge off of the fiscal cliff.  But then again, journalists are supposed to target powerful and relevant voices.

Our media corps’ oblivious lopsidedness is the price of the free market, where people with big soft hearts–and reasoning most often just as soft– funnel into a self-selecting army that’s out to change the world.  Thankfully there are today many means of recourse to soft pieces like Yahoo’s Norquist essay.

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Obama Dividend

November 7, 2012 6 Comments

First things first.  Congratulations to President Barack Obama and his supporters on the re-election bid.  And to Mitt Romney, thank you for your tremendous dedication, energy, and effort on behalf of America and the conservative cause.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about “The Romney Dividend,” the delayed gratitude that came after the October 3 debate.  It was the natural reward for the nomination of such a disciplined, diligent man.  Now that Barack Obama has won re-election–though by a percentage smaller than 2008–it appears there is something of an Obama dividend.  But this one was not born of the President’s character and ideas as much as the perfection of the Democratic party vote-getting machine.

A fine report at the Wall Street Journal looks at the anatomy of the 2012 Obama victory.  Jim Messina and other top advisers sold the President on a risky, early blitzkrieg of negative advertising.  Some have complained that Romney should have responded sooner, but the Journal report indicates that Federal election laws tied the Romney campaigns’ hands until after the August nomination.  Whatever the case, the smear job, which at its worst insinuated that Romney gave one plant worker’s wife terminal cancer, indelibly poisoned Midwest working class voters against the GOP candidate.

That the President won re-election with such an intense, interminable hatchet job is beyond depressing.  Recall how the campaign wound up, even in the days after Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy:  “Don’t boo, vote!” and “Voting is the best revenge.”  Scorn and panic was far and wide on the Left.  Samuel L. Jackson unleashed coarse rhymes and Will Ferrell promised to eat trash if only you would vote Barack Obama.

Remember when the media pegged the Tea Party as driven by hate and fear?  The second Obama term has its foundations on these two base emotions.  Of course each individual has their own calculus going into the voting booth, but how many boneheads were stoked by Michael Moore’s videos featuring elders’ vulgar threats of violence?  And along those lines, how many first-time women voters were really driven by Lena Dunham’s comparison of voting for Obama to great sex?

Where is the civility and decency in our public life?  The same place that Hope and Change got left at.  Perhaps in the rough of some golf course in these great United States.  And now the President thinks he can go from the dirtiest Chicago mudslinging one minute to become the Magnanimous Unifier in the next?

Despite the outrageous situation, we have to hope and pray that the President actually matures and changes as he’s said he has and as polls show Americans demand.  Even if he does not, I steadfastly believe that regardless of color, age, sex or any other way you can slice and dice the electorate, Americans will ultimately be amenable to reason.

Filed under All posts Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →