Category: Common Sense

What would it really take to impose any kind of campaign finance regulation across the board?

Spending limits, for example. Wouldn’t you have to bind and gag the candidates at a certain point? Campaign finance laws say, for example, don’t do x .

Now, if the candidate then goes on to do x minus y , is he then violating the law, at least in spirit? I credit Mickey Kaus with making this point recently about the Coleman for Senator campaign in Minnesota. Kaus, in turn, credits the observations of one Eric Black. Kaus writes that “Norm Coleman was able to communicate publicly what it might have been illegal (under campaign finance laws) for him to communicate privately namely that he really didn’t want the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee to run negative TV ads against Mondale.”

Our political system is now one where the little guy can get stomped by the same rules the major players bypass with throat-clearing and smoke signals. Kaus, Black, and probably you too have come to realize what should have become obvious to everybody over the 25 years since the Watergate era and that first flurry of campaign finance reform.

Namely: You can’t run a free campaign in a free country if your next move must depend not on what you need to do to get your message across, but on what some regulation tells you to do.

If we’re really that afraid of money and influence, we’ve got to stop printing dollars and we’ve got to outlaw campaigns. But I don’t want to go that route.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Ted Kennedy to the rescue? You may know him as a humble and mild-mannered public servant. But to a select few in our nation’s capital, he’s none other than Perk-Man, defender of perks, paybacks, and the special-privilege way.

As soon as Perk-Man got the emergency call on the special emergency Perk-Jeopardy Hotline, he flew into action. Seems US Airways is in bankruptcy and already has been bailed out by nearly a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the taxpayers, courtesy of our Congress. So US Airways is trying to cut costs so they can return a profit and stay in business.

Problem is, they were planning to cut jobs that involved giving special VIP service to folks like Senator Ted Kennedy. This service which you and I can’t get even if we paid extra is free to many lawmakers. Not a bad place to cut, you say? But our politicians need their perks!

So Senator Kennedy got into his Perk-Man Costume. Had a little trouble fitting into the costume, but anyway, he quickly flew into action. He called the CEO of US Airways and had a little conversation. Begged to save the jobs for the two folks fluffing pillows and gophering about for lawmakers. Or maybe Perk-Man said, “Don’t mess with me, I have the power to make or break your business, buddy-boy. I’m Senator Perk-Man!”

Ah Perk-Man, you have saved your perk once again. How inspiring.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

He was “detained” for 422 days. I’m not sure what his crime was. The government didn’t accuse him of any. No evidence of any, either.

His name is Tony Oulai. He is a pilot from West Africa. He was detained September 14, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks. While he was trying to fly home to Los Angeles, airport security found Oulai with flight manuals and a stun gun. Is it strange for a pilot to have flight manuals? And people do carry stun guns to protect themselves from attackers.

Perhaps, in the wake of the horrifying events of 9/11, such possessions were enough to justify at least a raised eyebrow. But there is no excuse whatever for what happened next. Mr. Oulai was detained our new euphemism for “imprisoned” not because of any suspected link to terrorism. But because his visa had expired. And because he told INS officials that he was in the country legally. But mostly let’s face it because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I haven’t read all ten billion laws on the books about immigration and flying and talking to INS officials. I’m sure Oulai’s visa had expired, and that under pressure he fibbed about it. But I’m also sure that this man did not deserve to be left to rot in one jail cell after another for 422 days. On the basis of zero evidence of any actual crime.

Want to deport him, deport him. But don’t take away his freedom. That’s not what America is all about.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

As long as we’re into prohibiting so many things these days, I want to add a particularly dangerous practice to the list.

It’s called parody. Problem is, it gives people too many ideas. You’ve heard about the lawsuit against McDonald’s for victimizing some fat guy with its junk food? Looks like that’s just the beginning. I blame parody. Some jokers run a publication called The Onion. There’s a companion web site at theonion.com. I worry that when they make fun of some idiotic trend and float a fake proposal, somebody is likely to get the wrong idea.

For example, chocolate. The Onion ran an article with the headline: “Hershey’s Ordered to Pay Obese Americans $135 billion” a take-off on the lawsuits against cigarette companies. Not long after The Onion ran its clever little parody about how Big Chocolate “knowingly and willfully market rich, fatty candy bars,” comes a real-life story. Headline: “New Legal Target: Chocolate.”

Seems the Environmental Safety Institute is suing chocolate manufacturers for allegedly hiding the fact that there is lead in the chocolate. Or something. Maybe this Safety Institute didn’t get their idea to sue from The Onion or Mad Magazine . Maybe it’s just ideology plus litigiousnes. Whatever, I don’t think we can take the risk of giving troublemakers any more ideas.

We should ban parody. Now. And I mean that sincerely. Stop. Just stop. Hey I mean it. I’m really serious, here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

Is John Poindexter going to get away with it?

We can thank William Safire for steering our attention to a scary government program that has actually been in the works for some time now. The purpose of the program is to develop software that will collect and analyze every possible kind of information about you, using a single centralized government database. All in the name of Homeland Security.

This isn’t some Orwellian scare story. Admiral Poindexter had the idea for the program right after 9/11. He got funding for it from the Defense Department, and he is already sub-contracting the development. The project, called Total Information Awareness, is on a five-year development track. Congress would still have to give final authorization to put it into place. But gee, once all the technology is there, it would be a shame to waste it, right?

Safire writes, “[Poindexter] is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic ‘stovepiping.’ And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.”

Will the government now be allowed to put all the data from separate private and public sources into a single information warehouse? So it’s easy as apple pie to spy on everything we do that has an electronic trail? It’s scary. But there is still time to object. So let’s object.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Wow. Talk about an election, eh? Several congressional seats actually changed hands. Exit-polling data is still stuck in the computers, but there are a few things we can conclude from the elections.

According to pundit Robert Novak, one of them is that Social Security reform is no longer the “third rail” of American politics electrocuting all candidates who touch it. Novak says, “Victories by candidates who vigorously endorsed individual private retirement accounts shattered a tenet of American political folklore: Social Security is the third rail for Republicans; touch it, and you will die.”

Novak reports that despite shrill attacks on candidates who did dare to talk about reforming Social Security, many such candidates won office anyway. But I think the third rail was ripped out of the political track some time ago, when self-limiter Mark Sanford ran for Congress in 1994.

One of his issues was how people should be allowed to plan more of their own retirement themselves. Sanford, by the way, is now the governor of South Carolina. Have recent stock market gyrations again made Social Security dangerous to talk about? Well, voters already know that government is doing a worse job of managing their money than they can.

As Scott Rasmussen points out in his book Social Security Choice , voters have known for a couple decades now that the Social Security Trust Fund is not funded and can’t be trusted. Thanks to political leaders willing to give the voters credit for brains, the “Third Rail” is history.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.