Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
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Author: Redactor
This morning I’ll stand in Washington State’s capitol in Olympia to turn in more than 340,000 voter signatures on petitions — enough to place Initiative 517 on the ballot next November.
I’ll be there representing Citizens in Charge, the major funder of the initiative, joined by Eddie Agazarm, former head of Citizen Solutions, and Tim Eyman, the leader of Voters Want More Choices.
I-517 strikes three critical blows for protecting the state’s citizen initiative process: (1) providing more time to gather signatures, (2) protecting the First Amendment rights of people circulating or signing a petition, and (3) guaranteeing issues will be voted on if sufficient signatures are gathered.
Currently, Evergreen State petitioners are allowed only six months to gather petition. I-517’s one-year petitioning window will give less well-funded grassroots groups a better chance to place an issue onto the ballot.
Petitioning is “a guaranteed First Amendment free speech right and it deserves protection,” points out Mr. Agazarm. “I-517 sets penalties for interfering with or retaliating against petition signers and signature gatherers.” Such harassment has been happening with greater frequency in recent years.
Tim Eyman is best known for his tax cut initiatives, but I-517 is close to his heart because of his experiences petitioning against red-light cameras. In each of his campaigns they were sued by “out-of-state red-light camera corporations with their lawyers funded by camera profits, and city officials with their lawyers funded with our own taxpayer money.”
I-517 simply requires that initiatives backed by enough signatures be voted on by the people. Even when an initiative is precluded from taking effect, for whatever legal reason, a vote of the people can help educate public officials.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Charles de Montesquieu
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
The most prescient thing ever said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, was articulated by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
The medical reform package is quite the hodgepodge. Actually reading the whole thing makes taking on Middlemarch, War and Peace, and In Search of Lost Time a course of light entertainment.
The latest revelation from its thousands of pages? A passage prohibiting doctors from asking their patients questions about guns in the home.
The Washington Post reports that many gun control groups are incensed at the power of the NRA to limit their ability to “collect information”:
Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.
Considering the quality of previous doctor-led sociological studies into gun usage — and really, this is not a medical problem but a complex, society-wide issue far beyond the competence of medical training to comprehend — the prohibition might really best be described as a defense of scientific method.
But the big issue here is not the politics of “research.” It’s that a health care reform package passed nearly three years ago contains hot potatoes such as this, and we are only discovering them now.
Nancy, you were all too disastrously correct.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Another New Year.
Should I have used an exclamation point? Shouted out the calendrical truth?
When each new year brings the same old nonsense, an exclamation point seems a bit like overkill. British novelist E.M. Forster famously said that democracy was worth “two cheers, not three.” Does a new year deserve at best half an exclamation?
After all, there will be many repetitions in 2013 of what we saw in 2012.
Incumbent politicians will just “happen” to throw up hurdles, making initiative measures harder to put on the ballot as well as more difficult to pass. They will also continue to support “campaign finance” regulations that will “just happen” to make incumbents more likely to get re-elected.
And of course they will continue to heap scorn on, and oppose any way they can, term limits.
Further, their tendency to avoid properly dealing with unsustainable government worker pension programs set to unravel in too many states and localities, will still continue, up until (and past?) the last possible moment for reform.
Similarly, the national debt will grow. Politicians will still get away with calling slight reductions in expected spending increases “spending cuts,” even when spending continues to soar.
But hey: at some point the politic avoidance of responsibility will evaporate when the economy these fools are driving hits the proverbial wall.
Before that happens, it sure would be to our advantage to take over our own government, wresting power away from politicians and creating real measures of accountability. We’ll need democratic tools like initiative and referendum.
Three cheers for citizens who take the initiative . . . and a few unashamed exclamation points!!
This is Common Sense! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Thoughtful Kindness
Bumper stickers. Now that’s free speech. Which I love. But that doesn’t mean I love all bumper stickers. Sure, some are cute, funny, occasionally brilliant. Others are just crude.
But my least favorite bumper sticker might surprise you. The bumper strip that ticks me off the most reads:
“Practice Random Acts Of Kindness And Senseless Acts Of Beauty.”
Now, most folks who put this one on their car are nice. They’re thinking about “kindness” and “beauty” — so, I’m certainly not gonna say anything if I see them at the market.
But . . . why waste kindness by doing it randomly? The random implies heedlessness, thoughtlessness. How much better to be provident in kindness, thinking ahead and in context.
Should the purse-snatcher really benefit as much or more from our kindness as the little girl in the neighborhood who is always helping us with our groceries?
Should our lazy, good-for-nothing brother-in-law get what time we have for kindness or should it go to someone who will take our kindness and turn it around into even more kindness?
Now, I’m not suggesting anyone be unkind to anyone. But precisely because practicing kindness is so important — it’s the glue that holds a friendly society together — it is worth taking the time to recognize and reward good behavior. Rather than bad. Or just sticking the dial on “random.”
And how can beauty ever be senseless?
How about a new bumper sticker: “Practice Thoughtful Acts of Kindness and Sensible Acts of Beauty”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This installment of Common Sense first aired in November 2006.
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John Wycliffe
This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People. [Prologue to the 1384 translation]
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John Wycliffe
I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.
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Townhall: Want Milk?
This weekend’s contribution to Townhall.com by Yours Truly concerns another one of those automated congressional time bombs. You know, like the “fiscal cliff” but less cliffy and more bomby. Head on over, and then back here, for a few links:
- Thomas Jefferson’s pithy contribution to the socialist calculation debate, here.
- The Washington Post’s “dairy cliff” article, here.
- What Jia Lynn Yang said, here.
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Video: Don’t Tell the Kids
Penn Jillette has some provocative things to say about how to talk to kids about school shootings and the like. And the provocation is not just his swearing: