Common Sense with Paul Jacob

The Los Angeles Times reports there will be far fewer initiatives on the ballot to excite and entice Republican voters this November.

Why? The Times suggests one big reason is that Yours Truly hasn’t worked on initiatives this year.

True, I’ve been involved in many initiatives in years past. Likewise, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s politically-motivated prosecution of Rick Carpenter, Susan Johnson and me, for helping a 2005 petition drive, is distracting. (The whole story is at freepauljacob.com.)

But the Times story is off in several respects.

First, use of the initiative goes up and down without much regard to my personal involvement.

Second, I’m not a partisan Republican. The issues I’ve worked for — term limits, tax and spending limits, property rights — have never been very popular with politicians of either party.

Unlike partisans, I don’t use initiatives to mobilize voters for a candidate or party. Instead, I like such measures because they allow citizens to actually set policy.

Sadly, though, the Times is onto something. There has been a concerted campaign by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and other groups to block conservative or libertarian ideas from the ballot. They’ve even hired “blockers” to harass citizens engaged in the democratic process.

And the Oklahoma prosecution has created a chill. Not a single initiative has qualified there. A recent editorial in the Oklahoman called this November’s ballot “blander than dry toast.”

Some people like it that way. I don’t.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

In 1991 I had a choice. To best work for term limits, I needed to move close to the nation’s capital. But where? Maryland or Virginia or the District of Columbia? I chose Virginia.

Nowadays I regularly travel through all three jurisdictions, though Maryland makes me nervous.

Prince George’s County police recently barged into the Berwyn Heights mayor’s home and shot his two dogs dead. Turns out their little home invasion was illegal — they lacked a no-knock search warrant, or any real case.

Weeks before this, a man arrested for the alleged homicide of a policeman was murdered in jail. Police working there refuse to cooperate in the investigation. Now we learn that many guards at the jail have criminal records and have committed crimes at the jail.

The Prince George’s County police have a long, sordid history. But you may be thinking, why lump in the whole state?

Well, the ACLU recently obtained documents showing that for 14 months in 2005 and 2006, Maryland state police spied on anti-death penalty and anti-war activists, with no probable cause of any crime. Names of political activists were entered into law enforcement databases as suspected terrorists or drug traffickers.

No wonder when the Washington Post held a contest to pick a new slogan for the state, the winner was: “Maryland — wait, we can explain.”

Hmmm. But how exactly do you explain a police state?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Should I go into the prediction biz? A friend and loyal reader thinks I already consult a crystal ball.

He was impressed with my Townhall.com column prediction that gas prices would fall. Though not quite a prediction, I did advise, in my July 6th column, that folks shouldn’t panic, that the price of gas would likely fall, significantly, and soon. Five days later, crude oil hit an all-time high and the average price of gas at the pump followed, to a high of $4.11 a gallon national average.

And then, as if on cue, the price of crude fell roughly 20 percent. The pump price has dipped back below $4 a gallon and is still falling.

Of course, not all of my, er, prognostications are as rosy. Weeks ago I told you about animal rights extremists torching a van at UCLA. With the violent nature of such groups, I said people are going to get hurt.

Well, the violence has sure escalated. UC-Santa Cruz Professor David Feldheim’s house was firebombed as he, his wife and two young children slept. Thankfully, they were able to escape the burning home with relatively minor injuries.

Jerry Vlasak, a North American Animal Liberation spokesman, defended the attack, saying, “Perpetrators must be stopped using whatever means necessary, and the use of force is a morally righteous tactic. . . .”

I don’t need a crystal ball to see that these groups are the very opposite of righteous.

It only takes Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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.