Ok ... by "us" I mean "them."  We already knew it because we paid attention.  By "them" I mean the low information voters (75-80% of the electorate.)

1. Policy is driven by media coverage.
2. Coverage is driven by two things: 
   1. Media bias, and Events …
   2. Events are the key, not bias.

   And who decided which events are important?  Bingo.

Intro graphs:

I remember an example someone laid out 25 years ago. The Reagan administration issued its pornography report -- detailing the immense harm caused by pornography. One network showed a group of people in the South burning books. That network’s message: censorship. Another network showed a shelter for boys who had been victimized by pornographers. Neither network was the slightest bit inaccurate -- but what they chose to say, and show, mattered greatly.

The Gosnell trial has been dismissed as a “local crime” story. Yet somehow the Newtown massacre wasn’t. That event was covered by papers beyond the Hartford Courant. It was the biggest story in the country, something that “shocked the conscience of the nation.” The president moved, Congress moved.

The reason the media haven’t covered Gosnell is that they don’t want to -- simple as that. Now, we can discuss why they don’t want to -- that wouldn’t be a long discussion, because everybody knows. But the point is, they don’t want to, and they have a right not to cover the story (I guess).

Go read it all.  

The last few days I've been pndering a post advocating that the Left/Donks simply attempt to amend the Constitution.  That way they could avoid "us" objecting to little phrases like "Congress shall make no law" and "shall not be infringed" ... and the entire 9th and 10th Amendments.

But before I could write and post the darned thing at look like a RWL (right wing lunatic) the Donks go an do it themselves.

Bill Maher: ‘The Second Amendment is bullsh*t’

And that whoe "freedom of association" thing?  Your Day on Liberal Radio: We 'Gotta Get Rid of the NRA'

or the tip of the iceberg?

Or shutting the barn door after the horse is loose?

A friend of mine is enduring chemo treatments and reltes the following

"I pick up a flyer sitting on the table next to me, and it does little to ease my nausea. It’s a letter from the doctor asking cancer patients to contact their congressional representative to stop the sequester cuts.

We are writing to tell you about severe cuts to cancer care that the government is making. . . . A special committee of Congress tried but failed to reduce government spending by at least $1.2 trillion. That kicked in automatic spending cuts that will be made to defense, healthcare, education, and other government programs. These automatic spending cuts are referred to as “sequestration.” Among the sequester cuts will be an overall 2% cut in Medicare payments that will negatively affect providers of medical care, including community cancer clinics.

Unfortunately, with cancer drugs the real impact of sequester cuts will be far greater than 2%, because many of these drugs will end up costing more than what we are paid to give them to our patients.

We ask you to join us in fighting these destructive sequester cuts to cancer care. We are working with other cancer care providers across the nation in asking Congress to help stop these cuts. Please join us by contacting your members of Congress.

What they don’t say in the letter is that while the total effect of sequestration for the fiscal year 2013 will be $3 billion, this is the same amount Obamacare is supposed to reduce Medicare spending this year. But, as reported by Heritage, if “Medicare patients can’t access vitally needed care because of $6 billion in total reduced Medicare payments, they’d better prepare for next year. That’s when Obamacare cuts an estimated $41 billion out of Medicare—in addition to the Medicare sequestration cuts of $9 billion that year. . . . By 2020 Obamacare will reduce overall Medicare spending by more than $100 billion a year.”

I want to stop the nurse and ask her if the doctor’s office had given a similar letter to patients when Obamacare was coming down the pike. Did they put out a letter before the election warning patients of the cuts in Obamacare and asking them to vote for Romney so the healthcare law could be repealed? Did it even cross their minds? I want to ask her if they plan to distribute another letter next year urging cancer patients to contact the White House or the media or anyone about how they’re suffering under Obamacare."

Over at Libertarianism.Org, philosopher Neera Badhwar has a very nice post laying out the case for a sophisticated libertarian view of just that type of question, drawing Aristotle’s concept of voluntary action and John Locke’s theory of just exchange (as explained in his mostly unknown essay Venditio). Badhwar, like Locke, rejects the simplistic libertarian view that whatever people agree to in the absence of force or fraud is necessarily just. “A desperately poor but healthy woman whose family is on the brink of starvation because of a drought might be willing to sell her kidney to a well-off man (or his broker) for a large sack of rice,” but

By the baseline of simple humanity, the exchange is both disproportionate, and disrespectful of the desperate individual’s humanity (the idea for such a distinction between baselines is due to Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation, 1996). Indeed, it is no more just than an exchange between a man dying of thirst in a desert and a well-off, well-stocked tourist who, passing by him, agrees to give him some water in return for all his property after they reach home. Every philosophical ethical theory joins commonsense morality in condemning such a deal as unconscionable, and the common law agrees by refusing to uphold it if the thirsty man reneges on it.

So what would a fair price be? Badhwar suggests that it is the price that would be the price that emerged in a competitive market. And what does that mean?

Whatever else it might be, it is a market in which people are free to buy and sell. The kidney market, then, is decidedly not a competitive market, since kidney sales are banned in every country but one (Iran). If kidney sales were legal everywhere, or at least in most countries, and there was free legal trade in kidneys, many rich people would go to poor countries for kidney transplants (as they do for other medical procedures) and the price of kidneys would rise in those countries. Ironically, it is the attempt to save people from exploitation by banning kidney markets that has led to the unimaginably high levels of exploitation and injustice that we see in underground kidney deals.

This, too strikes me as exactly right, and very well-put. Read the whole thing yourself. It’s a great essay. And it’s great to see another heretic joining the blogging team at Libertarianism.org!

Wesley Smith at National Review informs us that a piece of legislation, AB 460, has been filed in California that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as it does heterosexual. But it does not require the gays and lesbians in question to be infertile. Nor does it require them to try to conceive a child using heterosexual means, natural or artificial. The sole criterion -- as it is for heterosexual couples -- is the inability to get pregnant after a year of sexual relations. 

Thus -- since, to state the obvious, two people with the same plumbing cannot produce a pregnancy no matter how many times they have sex -- insurance companies would be obliged under this legislation to pay for artificial insemination, surrogacy, and so on for fertile gay people. The bill expressly prevents discrimination based on marital or domestic partnership status, so "theoretically every gay and lesbian in the state could be deemed infertile for purposes of insurance coverage merely by the fact that they don’t wish to engage in heterosexual relations."

Good thing California can afford it.

from Judith Levy over at Ricochet.com