Category: responsibility

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Abortionists’ Cartoon Advice

planned parenthood, left, Trump, extremism, radical, Trump, funding

Let it not be said that Planned Parenthood lacks for principles.

When Donald Trump offered a deal, last year, to fund Planned Parenthood only if the organization would stop doing abortions, the company immediately clarified the situation. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept,” said the outfit’s executive vice president. “Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

And, for Planned Parenthood, abortion is indeed critical. “The Trump administration needs to stop playing political games that would put access to the full range of safe reproductive care at risk,” said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-NY), “or they will get the fight of their lives.”

Well, that fight was won by Planned Parenthood. The politician who once said he would “shut down the government” over the abortionist enterprise has caved after various roadblocks. Trump signed a stopgap omnibus spending bill, last week, which continues to funnel $500 million towards the outfit.

So, as if to celebrate, a Pennsylvania branch of the abortion mill — er, “reproductive care” service — engaged in a bit of ebullience, a “light-hearted” tweet:

We need a disney princess who’s had an abortion

We need a disney princess who’s pro-choice

We need a disney princess who’s an undocumented immigrant

We need a disney princess who’s actually a union worker

We need a disney princess who’s trans

This caused a firestorm.* And not because its Disney obsession was silly. The problem? The tweet showed that Planned Parenthood is really, really committed to valorizing the killing of fetuses. And that its agenda is far, far left.

The outfit should be left without taxpayer funds.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The Tweet was quickly removed.

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency local leaders moral hazard nannyism porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Bailing on Mass Transit

mass transit, metro, cars. low income, recession

Around the country, our major metropolitan transit systems have hit the skids. “Between 2016 and 2017, ridership fell in each of the seven largest transit markets,” the Washington Post informs.

You might guess that the reason for declines in ridership might have something to do with bad planning and poor service. Washington, D.C.’s Metro system, with which I am all-too familiar, is a horror . . . run by people I wouldn’t trust to sweep your driveway much less mine, and certainly not to manage how I get between those (or any other) two locations.

But the Post quotes an urban planning scholar who attributes the decline (in part) “to increased car ownership, particularly among low-income and immigrant populations, who were in a better position to afford cars following the Great Recession.”

This puts planners in a pickle since, he explains, if “low-income people are doing better, getting the ability to move around like everyone else, it’s hard to say that what we should do is get them to remove themselves from their cars and back on trains and buses.”

Shockingly sensible — especially coming from a planning specialist. “Transit systems should deliver quality service to low-income people,” he insists. “But low-income people do not owe us a transit system.”

Well, maybe that’s the problem, this notion that governments “owe” this service to “low-income people.”

After all, web-based services like Uber and Lyft have shown how market innovations provide the best ways to move millions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Good Guy With Gun

Blaine Gaskill, school shooting, gun, gun control, Maryland, defense, 2nd Amendment

Short version of the story: a good guy with a gun at a Maryland high school stopped a bad guy with a gun. In less than a minute. How? Because the good guy had a gun and was inside the school with the gun.

The bad guy was able to shoot a 16-year-old female student, apparently someone with whom he had a previous relationship, as well as a 14-year-old male before an officer on site responded. This officer, Blaine Gaskill, was on the spot in less than a minute. Gaskill and the assailant fired simultaneously. The assailant fell dead. What exactly happened is still unclear; there has been some media speculation that the bad guy may have shot himself.

But the 17-year-old shooter is dead. The female victim, though still alive, is unfortunately in critical condition. The male victim is in stable condition.

The good guy was armed — with a gun. And he was on site. If you’re learning about the incident here first, it’s because the story isn’t being plastered all over the place 24-7 as it would have been had the shooter been able to wreak much more havoc because nobody could quickly counter him.

So, is it okay to let responsible, well-trained administrators, teachers and others in schools be armed?

Well, ask the question a different way. If you happened to be inside the school at the time, would it be okay to survive when some maniac with a gun starts shooting at you and others inside that school?

Let’s defend our loved ones.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom individual achievement local leaders political challengers responsibility

Liberty Rising?

Nick Freitas, Republican, Virginia’s House of Delegates, libertarian, conservative freedom

“Let me make something very clear,” Nick Freitas stated unequivocally. “I don’t have a political career.”

Freitas, a Republican member of Virginia’s House of Delegates announcing his candidacy for the United States Senate, was responding to advice that running against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine “could hurt [his] political career.”

It’s music to my ears. And to Matt Kibbe’s. The leader of Free the People calls Freitas “the most interesting liberty Republican you’ve never heard of.”

Yet, in Virginia’s conservative networks, Freitas has made quite a name for himself, defending the Second Amendment and fighting Medicaid expansion in a one-seat GOP-majority House.

“You can’t fix everything through government force and coercion,” he explained to Kibbe. “If the path we’re going down, which is just ‘let us manage the federal government as it continues to expand, as it continues to increase debt,’ that’s just not a Republican Party I’m interested in.”

Del. Freitas added that the American people seem similarly uninterested.

Perhaps he is simply telling us what we want to hear. He wouldn’t be the first bait-and-switch politician. But Freitas isn’t exactly playing for the bleachers by naming Calvin Coolidge rather than Ronald Reagan as “the best president of the 20th century.”

And he talks about individual liberty, which, he explains, is “based off the premise that I have a right to pursue happiness in accordance of what my definition of happiness is, so far as it doesn’t infringe on your right to do the same thing.”

He had me with “I don’t have a political career.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Self-Defense, Implausible?

gun, gun free, school zone, control, schools, teachers, Israel, defense, gun control

Don’t take a GUN-FREE ZONE sign to a gun fight.

Whenever there’s a horrific incident of mass murder, advocates of citizen disarmament blame the right to protect oneself against armed attackers. The thinking seems to be that if we make it illegal for all civilians to have guns, bad guys willing to kill people will also refrain from using guns as they try to kill people.

This is implausible.

And if you do not see its implausibility immediately regarding firearms, consider drugs. Not taking them, but the war on same. Drugs didn’t vanish upon prohibition. Neither would guns if prohibited.

President Trump argues that students would be safer were schools a harder target. Why not arm well-trained teachers? “If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm, they could end the attack very quickly.” He’s right.

Not a new idea, of course. It’s been argued, for example, by the NRA, whose chairman says that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.

This idea is being practiced right now — in Israel.

As Tzvi Lev argues at the Arutz Sheva 7 site, Israel proves the NRA’s point.

Even Israel — where Arab communities are “rife with illegal weapons” despite their illegality — has not always been quick to recognize that it’s better to have lots of armed civilians when terrorists start shooting at civilians. But after terrorists attacked a school in 1974, the government began arming and training teachers — somehow failing to defer to the terrorists’ preference for gun-free zones.

In both of the only-two school shootings in Israel since then, teachers killed the attackers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

He Applied Himself

pre-crime, PKD, guns, gun control, shooting, Parkland, Florida, prevention, freedom

“I need to make this count,” wrote a young man in Everett, Washington.

Unfortunately, it looks like he wasn’t attempting a big career-oriented project. He was planning a mass shooting.

“I need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can,” is one of many damning journal passages the police have made public. Apparently he had settled on attacking the high school he attended. “I’ve been reviewing many mass shootings/bombings (and attempted bombings) I’m learning from past shooters/bombers mistakes.”

Ambition and rigor: missapplied.

Fortunately, his grandmother read his journal and discovered a rifle in his guitar case. She turned him into the police the Tuesday before the Florida shooting I wrote about last week. And maybe just in time.

Meanwhile, last week’s Parkland, Florida, shooting dominates the headlines. Fellow students and neighbors of the Florida shooting victims have ramped up their condemnations and demands — including at a horrorshow “town hall” on CNN.

Yet the nature of the difficulties in preventing such atrocities has become lost in the rhetoric and anger.*

In a free society, we cannot arrest people before they commit a crime. In the Everett case, officials were “lucky”: despite the young man’s lack of a criminal record, they were able to charge him with a burglary they allege he committed the day before arrest — and his extensive planning notes are being taken as evidence for intent. He’s also been charged with attempted murder.

We should be in inquiry mode, right now. It could be helpful to know the exact motivations for both the Florida shooter and the Everett wannabe — and similar cases.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Law enforcement is tasked with uncovering spree shooting plots today — and to protect, too. But the armed, uniformed school resource officer at the Parkland high school failed to protect. He heard the gunshots but never entered the building, while the shooter killed 17 innocents.

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