Category: Common Sense

Career politicians and ideological allies have been waging an ever-more vicious war on citizen initiative rights.

Some of the sordid details are reported in political journalist John Fund’s Wall Street Journal article, “The Far Left’s War on Direct Democracy.”

The tactics used to assail statewide petition drives range from “restrictive laws to outright thuggery.”

The restrictions involve anything from slashing the time allowed for collecting signatures to massively increasing the cost of running a ballot campaign.

The thuggery also takes many forms. Often, so-called “blockers” are recruited to harass circulators and prospective signers.

Seeking to imprison people for ten years for promoting an initiative, based on zero evidence of wrongdoing, also counts as thuggery, I think. That’s what the Oklahoma attorney general is trying to do to Rick Carpenter,  Susan Johnson, and Yours Truly. Fund notes the hypocrisy of indicting us for allegedly hiring “out of state” petitioners, when state officials couldn’t care less about how “out of state” the blockers are.

Visit freepauljacob.com for more details about our case.

The groups using the most vicious tactics to undermine the process tend to be far left-wing. Their pet causes tend to be much less popular than reforms like term limits, capping state spending, and the like. If they have to destroy democracy to get their way, that’s fine with them.

But we don’t have to let them get away with it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

One of the two major-party presidential candidates had taken to calling the other one “Dr. No,” for saying “no” to new oil drilling . . . until the so-called “Dr. No” sorta/kinda said Yes.

You may recall that “Dr. No” is the name of a James Bond villain. That moniker had already been awarded to another political figure, an actual doctor, Congressman Ron Paul. Dr. Paul votes “No” to any legislation that he believes flunks the test of constitutionality.

But there’s another Dr. No in Congress, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, also a physician. He’s not as radical as Congressman Paul, but he’s certainly a thorn in the side of his free-spending senatorial colleagues.

Senator Coburn has placed many so-called “holds” on bills that would have passed by hurried voice vote. Other senators have exploited this same rule, but not as prolifically as Coburn — who is relatively new to the Senate but has enough initiative to study up on Senate procedures.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, recently tried to thwart Coburn by folding all the legislation he has blocked into one omnibus bill. The Republicans, perhaps shamed by Coburn’s insistence that legislation be considered thoughtfully rather than just flung into law, actually stuck by Coburn. Reid lost.

Coburn says he’s not a go-along, get-along guy when he thinks his colleagues are going the wrong way.

Sometimes “No” is the best medicine, especially in Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, a monumental chronicle of the horrors of the Soviet labor camps, has died at the age of 89 . . . seventeen years after the dissolution of the empire that treated him so brutally for so long.

In his last years Solzhenitsyn embraced President Vladimir Putin as a “restorer of Russia’s greatness.” A dubious endorsement, since some of this so-called “greatness” has been achieved through the very kind of tyranny that Solzhenitsyn suffered. Putin has reversed much of the liberalization implemented since the fall of the Soviet Union, and can be crudely autocratic.

Frankly, much of Solzhenitsyn’s own philosophy is inconsistent with a fully free society. But one need not accept his whole world view to revere his achievement in so effectively exposing the inhumanity of Soviet communism.

We honor Solzhenitsyn for the literary work that earned him a Nobel Prize, yes. But we also honor his courage and tenacity in creating and promulgating his work, despite the Soviet government’s almost constant harassment of him.

The Soviet government first targeted Solzhenitsyn in 1945, when he was arrested for criticizing Stalin’s conduct of the war in a letter to a friend. He was sent to Lubyanka prison for beating and interrogation, then to a labor camp. Morally wrong, certainly. But also, from the Soviets’ own perspective, a huge blunder.

Solzhenitsyn admitted that before his tenure in the camps, he had not questioned the Soviet system. After that, he would help destroy it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

How long does it take for the wheels of justice to grind ’round to grab a corrupt politician? In Senator Ted Stevens’s case, the answer is “a long time.”

It took a year for the government to charge him with anything, after raiding his Alaska home on July 30, 2007.

Exactly one year later, the senator found himself indicted for failing to report over $250,000 in gifts, including a major renovation of his house courtesy of one of Alaska’s biggest oil field contractors.

I guess I should’ve said the word “alleged” somewhere. But anyone who has studied the career of Mr. Stevens knows that these charges were a long time coming. Back in 2003, I wrote a column for Townhall called “The appearance of corruption.” It was all about Stevens, a man who sure knows how money and politics can work hand in hand.

Corruption?

He’ll no doubt shout “No! No! No!”

But he’s been saying “Yes” to dubious deals for a very long time. He’s been in the Senate for 40 years.

As I wrote in that column I mentioned, the lesson applies, though, to more than just one Alaskan senator: What we have is a “Congress run by career politicians who wield the power of the federal government to thwart competition so they can enrich themselves and their special-interest cronies.”

And that, folks, is corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The shot heard round the world in 1775 was momentous. But it was only the beginning of a particular struggle to secure rights.

Advocates of the right to keep and bear arms won a great victory in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller.

This ruling, too, is a momentous event, and one that will ricochet.

And it, too, represents only the beginning of a struggle. The court’s decision leaves the door open to all sorts of possible qualifications and restrictions on the right to protect oneself. But the majority has given defenders of the Second Amendment a powerful weapon simply by acknowledging that this constitutional provision means what it says.

What’s next for those who care about this issue? One thing you can do is formally attest that you agree that the Second Amendment means what it says, and petition our nation’s lawmakers to accept this fact as well. The publishers of the Patriot Post have prepared an online petition to this effect.

It is posted at patriotpetitions.us/second. If you add your John Hancock, you will be affirming that the Second Amendment “was established to define an individual ‘right of the People to keep and bear arms,’ and that there is no more important constitutional issue than that of defending the plain language and original intent of the Second Amendment.”

That’s hitting the bull’s-eye.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

One of the biggest post-9/11 policy blunders was the Sovietization of airport security.

Some TSA screeners try to be civil even as they grab your almost-empty tube of toothpaste, as if there were a security risk there. A few seem to be in a permanent bad mood, ready to snarl if you give the least evidence of expecting civility.

You can actually be arrested just for “distracting” a TSA officer. What counts as an actionable distraction? Who knows? Let’s just say that despite all the new and mysterious “security” precautions, passengers with inquisitive minds are hardly secure from the security personnel themselves.

Alas, excuses for surliness are about to multiply. The TSA wizards are promising to install some 600 “behavior detection officers” in airports by the end of the year. Their job will be to interpret your facial twitches to see if you have bad intentions. I’m not kidding. Let’s say you manifest disgust with how the screeners are treating you. Hmm. Very suspicious.

Rampant rudeness is unavoidable in such a system. The TSA screeners do monotonous  work all day long, and any “mistake” or comment that someone makes may have been perpetrated 200 times already that day. And these irritated bureaucrats have the power to make life very tough for you. And me.

Let’s face it: A cattle-car-like security regime is going to treat people like cattle.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.