Liquor distributorships – base special-interest politics from Jefferson City

Before we get into a few details below, let us state up front three principles:

• When the legislators’ special interests are satisfied, the general interest suffers.
• The special interests will claim that general economic principles apply to everyone else, just not to them.
• Ridding the books of bad special interest laws and regulations is just as important as creating new legislation.

The issue is simply this: Does the proposed legislation now being debated support the general interest? The proposed legislation would make it nearly impossible for the producer to change distributors under guise of a non-existent franchise to be protected. Both of these provisions constitute unnecessary state interference in the operation of the free market, raising costs for consumers.  

Medicaid expansion – what Big Media is concealing

There are many good reasons for refusing to take the Obamacare bait.

Big Media has been incessantly trumpeting that the benefits of a state expanding Medicaid are so great and completely without downside that only reprobate Republicans could oppose it. Among the benefits touted are free money from Washington and better health care for the poor.

One reason the clamor has been so great is the silence of the mainstream press – Big Media – about why a state may wisely choose to decline. Another is that the  Obamacare legislation was crafted with politically motivated incentives and penalties designed to bolster support.

Below we will list some of the good reasons why the expansion of Medicaid is like the spider’s entreaties to visit his humble abode. 

Press bias – the path to citizenship

An AP article in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Piece-by-piece in immigration on the House, gives one more insight into the bias pervading the mainstream press, Big Media, and AP dispatches in particular.

We read this telling sentence:

Many in the conservative-led House don’t have the appetite for a single, big bill on immigration, especially not one that contains a path to citizenship, still viewed by some as amnesty.

Hmmm. Permanent residency and eventual citizenship for illegals is not amnesty. Sounds to us like a hint for low-information voters. After all, only “some” people still believe the myth of amnesty. You wouldn’t want to be part of that crowd.

But reasonable people will in fact concede that amnesty is the proper term for forgiveness and pardon of criminal activity. The operative word from the AP is “still,” a weasel word serving many rhetorical purposes. As in:

• You nasty Republicans STILL believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
• You conservatives STILL think that the Constitution and our laws should be respected, the border secured, and lawbreakers prosecuted.

In any single story these are small details. But repeated endlessly they will produce in many the desired impression more effectively than overt bias.

It could be objected that the illegal soon-to-be citizens would have to pay a fine and therefore there is no amnesty. The counter is that without a judicial proceeding based on existing law there would indeed be amnesty. But this little debate promotes another goal of the progressive media: move the argument far away from the substance of the issue and make it into a debate on semantics or emotion.

Anything but a debate on the substance. We have yet to hear a single justification for this egregious “path to citizenship,” which for our money is completely and utterly without any reasonable justification and completely separate from the other issues, such as temporary guest workers.

LGBTQ ‘training’ in our public schools

One more compelling reason for school choice, private schools, or home schooling

The Columbia Daily Tribune of April 5, 2003 published a disturbing story about a recent day of training for all teachers and staff at Rock Bridge High School (Columbia, Missouri.) The training materials were provided by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, an activist group seeking “to empower educators as partners to ensure every student can fully participate in school life.” The group’s goal is to enlist teachers as “allies” in the fight to stamp out “anti-gay biases.” Rock Bridge has sponsored training of this sort in the past. This time it was more thoroughgoing.

The results? Teaching should not be gender-specific, said Rock Bridge’s guidance director. (Will references to husbands and wives be permitted?) One teacher stressed the importance of “developing school culture.” The principal spoke of “awareness,” echoing the guidance director’s goal of raising “awareness about issues our LGBTQ (see note below) students experience.” The staff adviser to the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance wanted to make “sure the school environment is very sensitive to everybody’s feelings.”

All this is couched in language designed to make the program goals sound reasonable and neutral, even desirable. In our view this is far from the case. 

March Quotes of the Month

Sequester Joe Biden.  ­– NY Sun, in response to the $585,000 charge for a night at the Intercontinental in Paris.

Illegal immigrants are to immigration what shoplifters are to shopping. ­– See the video for which the quotation is extracted here.

The problem with the modern Republican party is you have a bunch of Republicans who speak like conservatives and act like moderates. We need Republicans who can speak like moderates and act like conservatives. — Raul Labrador, Congressman (R, Idaho)

Some government spending is necessary, much is sinfully wasteful, and the remainder is corrupt. — Mona Charen

The facts of life are conservative. ­– Lady Thatcher

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of debt, I fear no bankruptcy, for Obama is my shepherd. He prepareth a table of food stamps before me, and maketh me lie down beside waters He hath cleansed and seas He hath made recede…– Mark Helprin, Psalm 23, newly revised according to modern principles. the full version is here.)

Austerity is the result of countries’ democratic decisions to wait until the last minute before acting, under the pressure of the markets, mainly by raising taxes rather than implementing long-waited reforms. — Lorenzo Bini Smaghi

But it would be difficult to overstate how deeply the specter of the villainous corporation shapes American political thought. The influence is more visible the farther to the left one moves along the political spectrum.  — Kevin Williamson

…the truth is that for many academics, not only is there no such thing as “the disinterested pursuit of truth.” There is no such thing as truth. I’m not kidding. Truth, along with such related concepts as “reason,” “fact,” “logic,” and “objectivity,” are routinely treated as Eurocentric social constructions by which white men have traditionally oppressed women, non-whites, homosexuals, non-Christians, and the environment. —  Philosophy Professor Jack Kerwick

Troglo