David McElroy

It’s been like something from the kind of Christmas movie that doesn’t get made anymore. All over the country, anonymous people have been showing up at Kmart stores (and a couple of other chains) and paying for thousands of dollars worth of Christmas presents for strangers.

Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody seems to have organized it. As far as anyone can tell, it’s just people voluntarily helping people — without having any politician or bureaucrat force them to.

I’d read about the phenomenon last week, and I saw a story in the Birmingham paper Tuesday about it happening at several local stores. The largest single contributor paid $6,400 at one local Kmart toward other people’s layaways. So what is going on?

I think it’s simple. There are a lot of really good-hearted people who truly want to help others. Maybe you don’t really have to hold a gun to folks’ heads to get them to want to help people. And maybe those folks prefer deciding for themselves what to do with the money they donate — instead of having government bureaucrats decide for them.

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I love to watch people’s attitudes toward media shift as the facts of a story changes. I’m never sure whether what I’m seeing is funny or pathetic, though. I guess it’s both.

I’m reminded of that again as I watch various people try to decide what they think of media reports in the last week or two that Ron Paul just might be doing well in Iowa. As the facts of the story have changed, pro-Paul and anti-Paul people have both scrambled to spin the media’s role to suit their own narrative.

For a long time, there wasn’t anything especially positive for the media to report about Paul. He hung around down around 10 percent in real polls and it was clear to all that his positions weren’t going to be adopted by the mainstream anytime soon, so he wasn’t someone to take especially seriously in news coverage. (Let’s not get sidetracked into fanatical craziness about straw polls and website “polls,” both of which are about as close to meaningless as you can get.)

During that period, news coverage was mostly about which candidates were jockeying for the lead or about which new candidates were seen as having the potential to become serious challengers. There wasn’t much to say about Paul in either of those regards. (Remember that the media cover elections as though they’re horse races, not as though they’re about ideas. The public wouldn’t bother to read or watch actual intellectual coverage.) So during that period, all I heard was screams from my Paul-loving friends that the media “hate” Paul and that they’re “trying to make sure he can’t win.”

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I’ve seen a lot of unsafe driving in my life, but almost none of it had to do with use of phones. I’ve seen people swerve out of lanes while they were eating, putting on makeup, reading books, looking at maps and even kissing. I’ve seen people obviously distracted because of looking at billboards, road signs, scenery and traffic accidents. We’ve all seen those things. But for some reason, some so-called safety experts have become fixated on banning the use of phones by drivers.

Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board urged all states to make it illegal to use a phone in any way while driving. The NTSB even said the use of earbuds or wireless headsets should be banned. As far as I can tell, nobody has called for a ban on eating while driving, putting on makeup while driving or reading newspapers and maps while driving.

And why is the agency calling for this ban? It says that distracted driving “contributed” to an “estimated” 3,092 deaths last year — and that “some of it” was due to cellphone use. There are a couple of really basic problems with this logic. First, isn’t it interesting that an estimated number is given in such an exact way, giving the illusion of precision? It would be easier to say, “This is what we’re guessing,” but that wouldn’t support their position, so they give you an number to make it appear that the experts know these things.

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