Quite a theory: No law is unfair if only that law is being followed.
According to an election board attorney in Howard County, Maryland, tossing 80 percent of the signatures on a voters’ petition does not add up to a “right-to-vote case” at all. Gerald Richman says the board merely “[carried] out the dictates of the law.” He denies that “fundamental fairness is an issue.”
The proposed referendum aimed to stop a rezoning in Howard Country permitting the building of larger grocery stores. I’m skeptical of zoning as an instrument to protect citizens and their property, so if I resided in Howard County, I would not likely vote Yes.
But as things stand now, I also would not be allowed to vote No.
Two months after the election board okayed the first batch of signatures, the board turned on a dime and began massively nullifying signatures, essentially killing petition rights unless voters can win them back in court.
Were the tossed signatures deemed fraudulent? No. The only “problem” is trivial variations between how voters signed their names on the petition and how their names are registered. Things like omitting a middle initial. An attorney for the residents notes that under such restrictive requirements, the signatures of Ben Franklin and John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence could not have been counted.
That notion of fairness is one King George would’ve been mad for.
The old guns in the major media marshal their resources as subtly as they can to turn minds their direction, usually leftward. That’s so obvious that I don’t talk about it much.
My regular listeners know that this is not a major obsession of mine. I comment on media bias only now and then. But when a spectacular, or just funny, example comes up, I do have to recognize it, right?
To not comment would be to ignore the wild donkey in the room.
The Associated Press fact checked the new Sarah Palin memoir, Going Rogue, finding a few errors, some self-serving spin. Mrs. Palin provocatively noted that the AP had devoted eleven reporters to attack her book, when they could have been fact checking health care reform costs, for instance.
She got that fact right — the AP did hire eleven “fact-checkers.” In contrast, the AP set not one reporter to check Joe Biden’s book, even after he received the VP slot nomination last year.
Yes, the Palin book merited AP coverage eleven-to-zero over the Biden book.
Liberal bias, anyone?
In the AP’s defense, one could say that Palin is good story … Biden? Not so much. True enough. But eleven-to-one better copy?
Well, maybe. But the AP fact-checked her book, and not books by the Clintons or Barack Obama. The press’s Palin obsession looks a little indecent.
What a difference a year makes. As I sit down to my Thanksgiving Day feast, that’s what I’m thinking.
And I certainly know I have a whole lot to be thankful for.
Let me start by thanking you. For caring about freedom and justice. For your critical support for this Common Sense program and for the Citizens in Charge Foundation — the nation’s only organization with the express purpose of defending the initiative and referendum rights of Americans.
Last year at this time, I still faced Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s politically-motivated persecution. I’ll never forget seeing the fear in the face of my then 9‑year old daughter as I left for a trip to Oklahoma. That certainly wasn’t the America we know and love.
This year, as we enjoy Thanksgiving and prepare for the Christmas season, Lillie is wondering which Nintendo DS game she might score from Santa — not about her father being imprisoned 1,000 miles away from home.
As you know, the charges — that had threatened me with ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine —were dismissed many months ago. We won. The court even ordered that the indictment itself be expunged from the record.
Yet, without the good work of so many people, from across the country and across the political spectrum, folks who helped me pay for my legal defense and who roared their disapproval online, on the airwaves, in print and in person to raise public awareness to the story of the Oklahoma‑3, the ugly cloud of an indictment would likely still be hanging over our heads.
Oh, sure, we would have ultimately prevailed in court. We were innocent. But with Oklahoma’s Attorney General delaying at every turn, it might have taken several more years to ever get our day in court.
What made the difference? The AG had felt the sting of public attention. Oklahomans — and Americans everywhere — successfully focused their revulsion on him, and against his attack on us and on initiative rights.
Thank you for coming to the rescue. Thanks for helping protect my rights, as well as the rights of Oklahomans — and yours.
This year saw more than freedom and vindication for the Oklahoma‑3. We gained a bigger victory, too: Dramatic reform for Oklahoma’s petition process. First, the state’s residency law was struck down in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment. Then, three important bills were passed through the state legislature to open up the nation’s toughest petition process.
For the first time in decades, a legislature enacted real reforms to enable citizens to use the initiative process, instead of passing restrictions designed to cripple its use.
How did it happen?
The prosecution of the Oklahoma 3 certainly galvanized a number of activists. But had there not been aggressive efforts to organize and mobilize supporters, the energy and urgency created by such an outrageous prosecution would have dissipated.
In November of last year, Citizens in Charge Foundation helped Oklahomans for Initiative Rights put on a Saturday forum in Oklahoma City to discuss Oklahoma’s initiative process and ways to reform it. Hoping to fill a meeting room for 35 to 40 people, over 100 people overflowed the room.
A number of great Oklahomans and super organizations, most notably Oklahomans for Responsible Government and Oklahomans for Initiative Rights, came together to push these bills. They lobbied day after day in the capitol as well as launching a 70-city tour of the state to mobilize grassroots support.
Not surprising, hard work leads to success. But best of all, our Citizens in Charge campaign has spread far beyond Oklahoma — it’s all across the country.
We helped pass legislation in Virginia to protect petitioners from arbitrary judicial abuse, we worked to form broad-based coalitions in 14 states that in turn were able to stop a number of anti-initiative bills and, just weeks ago, I traveled throughout California to begin organizing groups there. Across the country, we face concerted attacks against the right of citizens to be heard.
The old saying is true: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Thank you for being a good person doing so much to help put citizens in charge. Where we get organized, when we stand up to fight, we citizens are able to battle back and win against entrenched special interests and power politics.
At Citizens in Charge Foundation, we’re re-doubling our national efforts to organize and mobilize grassroots Americans to protect initiative rights and insure that citizens are in charge. To continue to protect and defend the freedom for which we are so thankful today.
Your support — your contributions and your activism — made this year’s victories possible. On behalf of my family and myself, please accept my deepest appreciation. Have a great Thanksgiving.
Sincerely,
Paul Jacob
President, Citizens in Charge Foundation
P.S. I can’t wait until next year. Let us at ’em! Citizens in Charge Foundation has an aggressive campaign to defend the initiative process across the country and to turn the tide on the politicians and special interests in 2010. They seek to block us from checking government power. But we shall block them — through ballot initiatives and referendums and recalls. With your continued support, we’ll take names and … put citizens back in charge.
In a time of expanding surveillance and shrinking liberty, the citizens of Great Britain are now threatened with yet another massive assault on their rights and dignity.
A certain Lord Smith of Finsbury wants the government to lord it over Her Majesty’s subjects even more obnoxiously by slapping them with a “personal carbon allowance.”
This carbon allowance would be enforced by giving everybody a personal ID number. Britons would have to supply the number whenever they buy anything, from gas to airline tickets, affecting their carbon output. Presumably, vendors would check a customer’s newest proposed purchase against some database. Only so many logs you could toss on the fire and then you’re out of luck, unless you buy more carbon credits.
The proposal is vicious in itself. But the potential for “abuse” of such an abusive protocol is also massive. In an age of rampant credit card fraud and identity theft, how hard would it be for a sales clerk in the proposed regime who has used up his own quota to “borrow” somebody else’s carbon-permission ID number?
If the British government wields this latest Orwellian bludgeon and the citizens don’t rebel, they’ll accept anything. We Americans may shake our heads in disbelief, but we’re hardly immune to such eco-totalitarian trends.
It can happen here. After all, Lord Smith’s proposal merely takes the obsession over carbon emissions to its logical — and absurd — conclusion.
John Maynard Keynes’s most popular notion was his infamous “multiplier” effect. Spend some government (taxpayer) money, and the effects “multiply” in the economy, as if the Invisible Hand were on speed.
The truth is the reverse: “the divider” effect. Create government jobs and progress in the marketplace “divides” as a result of the increased taxes needed to support the jobs.
Our orator-in-chief also says he’s in the business of “saving jobs.” Like most politicians, he loves “multiplier” talk, because it gives him the green light to spend.
But, like the bank bailouts, what’s really happening with stimulus spending is that some people are getting raises and bonuses while the unemployment rate goes double-digit.
The actual multiplier effect regards talk. For every dollar government spends, politicians claim umpteen more jobs “saved.” It’s not reality. The multiplication effect occurs entirely in rhetoric and in PowerPoint presentations.
The New York Times tells us how “the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower” for a cemetery in Arkansas. Then, “a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.”
The magic of this sort of job creation doesn’t rest upon the logic of markets. Here the magic lies simply in the lying. The “multiplier” multiplies because politicians tell multiple lies.
Last week, when President Barack Obama met with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, there was reportedly no discussion of the fact that our country owes China over $800 billion.
Just suppose you owed someone $800 bucks … or $800,000. Do you think it could affect the relationship?
What about nearly a trillion dollars?
The Obama Administration just announced that American-Chinese relations are “at an all-time high.” But a story in the Washington Post compared our relationship with China to the nuclear stalemate of the Cold War, known as “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD. We’re dependent on them for future loans; they’re dependent on us to pay back old loans and new.
Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution explained that “the Chinese can pull the rug out from under our economy only if they want to pull the rug out from under themselves.”
Reassuring? Not very.
Why have we allowed a foreign power to gain such leverage over us?
Because our politicians cannot — will not — limit their yearly spending to the trillion-plus dollars in revenue from American taxpayers.
When it comes to debt, China’s tyrants have taken better care of their country than our politicians have of ours. But we needn’t cede them control. Far better simply to stop borrowing billions from Beijing.
How? Slash spending. If our politicians can’t do it for us, maybe they can do it for their Chinese allies.
