Category: Common Sense

I support ice cream and disagree that the Food and Drug Administration should prohibit all ice cream. Keep your hands away from my spoon, FDA!

Okay, the FDA doesn’t want to ban ice cream. It just wants the power to do so. It wants the power to define substances like dioxin as health threats at any level of concentration whatever. And guess what. There’s dioxin in ice cream. Steven Milloy, with the Cato Institute, reports that a few years ago FDA issued an alarmist reassessment of dioxin. Congress asked FDA to get an independent scientific assessment of its conclusions, but the agency has yet to do so. Milloy thinks it’s because they know their “finding” wouldn’t survive that evaluation. “Left to its own devices,” says Milloy, “the EPA might set a limit 1,000 times lower than [existing standards].

It’s no wonder Congress was skeptical. . . .” The EPA wants to say that any level of dioxin, no matter how far below the current threshold, is potentially cancerous. Milloy points out that new super-stringent standards would give the agency “potentially unlimited regulatory authority over any source of dioxin emissions.”

Like many chemicals, dioxin exists in nature as well in human technology. And Milloy notes that just one serving of “Ben & Jerry’s ice cream [contains] about 2,000 times the amount of dioxin that the EPA claims is safe . . .” There’s dioxin in ice cream. Now you know. But you’ll keep eating ice cream. Why am I not surprised?

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Breaking one’s word makes a politician untrustworthy. But does it also make a politician go crazy? If not, why is Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo talking so crazy?  Tancredo won his congressional seat promising he would not go to Washington for a career. After six years, outta there. But once in office he found plenty of reasons for continuing to enjoy the perks and prestige in the Congress.

Today, his bountiful importance has rendered Tancredo prostrate with awe. The need for immigration reform makes him especially indispensable, he says. But Tancredo’s reform agenda seems to have been hijacked by scapegoating and bigotry. In a recent interview Tancredo says, “There are places right now in East LA and southern Texas that you would honestly think there is absolutely nothing that you would say makes them part of the United States of America. They are a separate country it is a separate country right now, at this moment.”

Uh . . . how about a desire for freedom and to build a better life, Congressman Tancredo? Isn’t that what makes these people Americans regardless of the language they speak or their race or creed? Then Tancredo adds, “Now how many people in their heart of hearts in [the Islamic Community] want to see the demise of this country? How many would cheer, not out loud maybe, but in their hearts when things like 9/11 occur? . . . I’ll tell you; it’s a majority.” Cripes. I guess if you can’t prove your lineage going back to the Mayflower, you’re some kind of traitor.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

What do you think about school vouchers, allowing students to use some of the tax dollars we’re now spending to go to the school of their choice? Is that worth at least trying in your schools? Washington, DC may be getting school vouchers. It’s being debated in Congress, because as a consistent policy Congress micromanages the city.

Susan McDermott opposes school vouchers in our nation’s capital. As a member of the school board, she is actively lobbying to block the new plan. That’s her right, of course. But still it’s a little strange. She’ s not a school board member in Washington, she’s from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Why does she care so deeply about the education programs in a city a thousand miles away? Is there a problem with trying vouchers in even a few places?

Some will argue, yes, that vouchers will be bad policy. Fine. But it sure seems like their real fear is that vouchers might improve education. The policy might work, for heaven’s sake! And that would be so embarrassing. Washington Mayor Anthony Williams supports the voucher proposal. He told The Washington Post : “Democrats can still have concerns about vouchers as a national issue, but give us a break in terms of what will work here in the District. We are not trying to make national policy here, we just want to help our children.” Help the children? Consider what’s best for the students in all of this political wrangling? The mayor is full of new ideas! Oh, but don’t let that influence any of our national policy. Heavens, no.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

I’m squarely against crime. Yes. If you are too, I have good news. Crime rates in the U.S. have been dropping. Not for all crimes and not everywhere. But the drops have been large enough and consistent enough to add up to a significant trend.

A trend that reporters and professors of criminology have taken note of. And would like to explain. But can’t. That’s the gist of a recent story in Christian Science Monitor . The most the experts can come up with is a “911 effect.” According to this theory, violent felons reverted to hand-holding mode in the wake of the terrorist attacks that shocked and then united all Americans. Yet crime was already declining by then.

I’m no expert, but in my spare five minutes a day I do surf the web, and came across the blog of journalist Robert Bidinotto. Bidinotto has written about crime for Reader’s Digest, and is editor of an anthology, called Criminal Justice . He observes the obvious: crime is down because we’re locking up violent felons longer. If you’re in jail you can’t rob a liquor store and you can’t kill the clerk behind the counter. “In other words,” writes Bidinotto, “so-called ‘get tough’ sentencing laws of recent years much maligned by ‘progressive’ criminologists and criminal apologists have been working exactly as anyone but an academic could have predicted.”

We could test Bidinotto’s theory by letting all the murderers loose. But that might not be such a good idea. And besides, the professors still wouldn’t get it.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Only a few of us really work for a living. At least, according to day laborer and U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings, of South Carolina. Senator Hollings says we don’t make anything anymore. He says that, “At the end of World War II we had 40 percent of our work force in manufacturing, and now we’re down to 10 percent. We’ve got 10 percent of the country working and producing, and the other 90 percent talking and eating.” So says the senator, as he announces he won’t run again for reelection after seven six-year terms in office. You do the math. Kind of proves you don’t have to be a candidate to say things that make no sense. Never mind this guy’s contempt for non-thing-makers.

Let’s agree that manufacturing is indeed a smaller part of the economy than it used to be. Couldn’t manufacturing be getting more productive? A long time ago, 90 percent or more of American adults worked on a farm. Is it really a disaster that this percentage has shrunk? What it means is that today you can plant, gather and sell wheat a lot more productively than you could in the days when it was just one guy and a horse and a plow. B

efore we farmed the fields, humans were hunters and gatherers. We got our meals by plucking berries and killing game. Then the agricultural sector came along and put the hunter-gatherers out of business. A tragedy . . . or an advance? There’s nothing sacred about how we do things now if we can find a way that’s even better.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” sometimes gets it wrong. On one issue, I think he’s half right and half wrong, so I’m going to play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde here. O’Reilly complains that people in public life, including him, often get unfairly bashed by their critics. He mentioned certain attacks on Arnold Schwarzenegger that have little to do with how Schwarzenegger might perform as governor of California. Fair enough. But then O’Reilly makes two further claims. One, that it’s largely the Internet’s fault as if public figures never got bashed before the 1990s. And two, that “too little” is being done to protect public figures from the ravages of this Wild Cyber-West.

It seems that there is a lot of very open, uninhibited discussion out there, and O’Reilly is miffed about it. He says, “the court system in this country does not protect anybody in the public arena. [W]ith the rise of the Internet . . . you could say anything you want about anybody. And it just goes unchecked. Shouldn’t there be a check and balance in this?”

But what checks and balances does O’Reilly want? There are already laws against libel and slander in this country he’s welcome to use them. But he seems to be hinting that there must be some form of prior restraint that people must be stopped from having their forums even before they open their mouths.

A lot of people would like to gag O’Reilly too, so why don’t we have a peace treaty that goes like this: we let Bill O’Reilly talk, and he lets all the rest of us talk.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.