Author: Redactor

Hawaii was the last state to join the union. But it was first in something important.

Way back, long before statehood, when a guy named King Kamehameha was in charge, Hawaii established equal rights without regard to race. Its first written constitution declared all men to be “of one blood.”

That was before our Civil War.

So, it is more than a little sad to see, after all the suffering racism has caused — and after the slow progress we’ve made — the first . . . er, fiftieth state, slide backwards.

A bill introduced into the U.S. Senate by Senator Daniel Akaka would create a new Native Hawaiian government, basing citizenship on racial identity. A person with one drop of pre-1778 native Hawaiian blood would be held separate from all others who live their lives in Hawaii.

Before the Hawaii Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Jere Krischel testified against the racial classification in the Akaka Bill:

My family has been in Hawaii for over 100 years. My extended family has been in Hawaii since before 1778. And all of my family deserves to be treated equally. Civil rights do not discriminate.

But race-obsessed politicians like Senator Akaka do discriminate. What would King Kamehameha say?

This is Common Sense. I’m not King Kamehemeha, I’m Paul Jacob.

Do you believe that exercising our democratic rights should be as tough as the Twelve Labors of Hercules? Even Hercules had trouble with those, capturing a hound from Hades and so forth.

No, it shouldn’t be such a chore. But in state after state, power brokers whine that it’s way too easy for voters to consider an initiative that legislators dislike.

Sure, there should be safeguards against electoral fraud. But this isn’t what politicians in, say, Michigan fret about.

According to one new proposal, by Michigan Senator Michelle McManus, a certain number of petition signatures should be collected in each of 83 out of 110 House districts.

The point of this formula? Only to force petition supporters to spend resources unproductively. There’s nothing “democratic” about the burden. Does election to some statewide office, like governor, require votes to be apportioned among districts according to such a formula?

Of course not.

Another notion is that constitutional amendments are so important that only the Michigan legislature should be allowed to place them on the ballot. This would presumably ensure that such amendments are properly “vetted.” Otherwise, “special interests” might have too much influence.

Wrong again. Initiatives are vetted by voters in the campaign before the election. The whole point of citizen initiative rights is to end-run “vetting” by biting and snarling politicians.

Sometimes I think Hercules had it easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Computers are only human . . . er, computers are only finite beings — that’s better — and can only do as much at any given time as their microprocessors, random-access memory, storage space, network connections, and software allow.

On a Wednesday in March, the computer database that takes earmark requests from Congress failed. In the words of Roll Call, “an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site” and forced “an extension to the request deadline to next week.”

So our representatives are still at it. Let it not be said that they aren’t busy. They are so busy that they clog up computers with too many requests for data entry.

I could commiserate. I have had computer troubles too. I sometimes even resent the way my life is being run by the demands of technology. I don’t always feel liberated.

But for once I’m sympathizing with the poor, dumb machines. Too many requests for too much pork! It’s not their fault. They can only do what they do.

We should take our hats off and honor these computers. They’ve suffered much to accommodate Congress. Let’s thank them. In fact, thank goodness they’ve suffered failure before they completely tanked our economy.

Yes, we may have to pay the price for all the requests, and for all the computers . . . but we wouldn’t need upgrades if Congress could just keep its “generosity” with our money under control.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Years ago, Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley voted against Oregon’s charter school legislation. He lost.

Later, he and his wife applied to send two of their kids to a newly forming charter school. The school was late in starting up, so he lost again as the application wasn’t acted on.

But now that Willamette Weekly leaked the application, it’s getting lots of attention.

Merkley first denied the report. Then, when the actual applications were produced, well, he stopped denying.

It’s funny how politicians who vote lockstep with teachers’ unions and the establishment monopoly school system keep on undermining their own publicly espoused positions. They keep voting with their dollars and good sense in their private lives . . . against the bad sense of their official loyalties.

It’s a revelation of attitude: Merkley and other such politicians believe that choice is only for the few. Them.

Steve Buckstein, a founder of Oregon’s Cascade Policy Institute, puts the story in  perspective. He quotes a famous Supreme Court judgment from 1922, about an Oregon law to outlaw all private schools. The justices said No Way. And insisted that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”

Too many politicians agree with this only when it comes to their own children. We could use their help making education better for all children. Schooling should be made to fit kids, not schools to fit . . . politicians’ re-elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Two years ago in Oklahoma, Riccardo Gino Ferrante was arrested for aiming a camera up a 16-year-old girl’s skirt while in a Target store. He was arrested and convicted of a felony.

Unfortunately, in mid-March four-fifths of Oklahoma’s Court of Criminal Appeals voted that no felony occurred.

Why?

Because “the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Now, being in a public place does remove or decrease one’s expectation of privacy. But ought that extend even to the private space WITHIN one’s clothing?

The court answered in the affirmative. As Judge Gary Lumpkin wrote in his dissent, “It is open season for peeping Toms in public places who want to look under a woman’s dress.”

This is judicial common sense in the age of Britney Spears? At least there’s still the knuckle-sandwich penalty someone might get.

If our court system can’t get this one right, everyone should agree that something’s wrong.

The judiciary must be independent. But it must be independent of the other branches of government, not detached from common sense, or all semblance of sanity.

Oklahoma legislators now seek to outlaw currently court-protected invasive and gutter photography. Should they also consider random intelligence testing for the judiciary? They have more than probable cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

If you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, you’ve probably seen a few chilling out-takes. People running. Birds swooping. People screaming. Glass shattering.

Could the scenario be even scarier? Well, yes: if, say, it were illegal for the victims to defend themselves.

This is not a movie remake. That’s what the beleaguered citizens of Bartow are currently facing. This is a small town outside of Orlando — a quiet community says the Orlando Sentinel. Well, except for the screaming.

Migrating turkey vultures have turned into quite a nuisance there. They rip shingles off roofs. They chew rubber from car windows. First pecking a little. Then a lot.

And the people? Screams. Of frustration.

They’re not allowed to do much about this. They may blow a shrill whistle to try to scare off the vultures, or tactically position stuffed toys that resemble dead vultures. But the beleaguered residents may not kill or even capture the birds.

The birds are protected by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Apparently we’ve signed an agreement with the birds which makes it a criminal offense for anybody to ruffle their feathers. Too bad such well-meaning edicts don’t also make it illegal for birds to harass innocent villagers.

Once again we see the tyranny of well-meaning politics, un-tethered by even the tiniest amount of thought about the consequences.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I don’t live in Milwaukee County, so I’m not gasping right now. But, gasping or not, Milwaukee County residents have something the rest of us don’t. They have GASP.

GASP is the snappy acronym for CRG Network’s new Government Accountability in Spending Project. It’s an online database of information of Milwaukee County government’s finances. In the future, more local governments will go on the system. Right now, we can root around in the finances of this one county only. The search engine works like a breeze, and you can export the results of each search to a spreadsheet with an easy Export function.

CRG Network calls this “the ultimate in openness and transparency.” At crgnetwork.com it’s explained that “Scott Walker and the Milwaukee County stepped forward to be the first unit of Wisconsin government to commit” to this citizens’ resource. The project had funding help from the Sam Adams Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and Citizens in Charge.

Hey, I’m affiliated with two of these outfits! So I guess I’m patting myself on the back.

But not really. The hard work was done by the county’s Information Management Services Division, Controller’s Office, and Department of Administration, with a lot of help from professional volunteers of the CRG Network.

If you want to see how a local government spends its billions, you can hardly do better than putting Milwaukee County onto your research agenda. Thanks to GASP.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.