Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Let me put it this way. If the only way we can stop people from using marijuana is by killing free speech, I’d like to keep the free speech.

I’m heartened by a recent Supreme Court decision that may put a stop to one particularly loony aspect of the War on Drugs. It may clear the way for states to let patients obtain marijuana on the recommendation of a doctor. The decision is a blow to those who don’t want cancer patients to use medical marijuana and don’t want doctors to be able to talk to them about it.

In arguing its end of the case the Bush administration has been claiming that “the provision of medical advice” is not “pure speech.” And that they should have the right to penalize doctors who speak too freely about pot. Why? Because the speaking in question has to do with “the conduct of the practice of medicine.” Did you get that? If speech has a purpose beyond itself, it isn’t “pure.”

“Pure” speech would have to be speech about nothing, I guess. Seinfeld speech. By this reasoning, the government can regulate my speech when I ask my wife to pick up some milk on the way home. After all, that wouldn’t be “pure” speech either. It pertains to the conduct of grocery-getting. Of course, some acts of speech per se entail actual violation of rights or participation in a crime. But that is a different standard than simply stomping speech the government is uncomfortable with it. Which would be unspeakable.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

I’ve changed my view of the Terri Schiavo case. I had the vague impression from TV that it had to do with folks in the government hassling the husband of this poor woman and keeping her alive against her will. It seemed to be about a woman’s tragically irreversible fate, with the usual arguments on both sides.

I’m afraid that this is the blurry glimpse too many people have. But visit the terrisfight.org web site, published by Terri’s family, and you’ll get a different idea. Terri Schiavo has certainly suffered brain damage as a result of an accident several years ago. But as the family takes pains to document at the site, “Terri smiles, laughs and cries. Terri recognizes voices and responds. At times, she vocalizes sounds, trying in her best way to speak. Terri is not a brain-dead vegetable as characterized by her husband and legal guardian. . . . Terri is not on a respirator or any artificial life support. She is a living human being and needs to be granted an opportunity to recover. Terri has not had any progressive rehabilitation or arousal therapy in more than ten years.”

The family claims that Terri’s husband never used $750,000 of award money for Terri to see properly to her medical needs. If she dies, he stands to gain the balance of that award. Terri’s parents and family would be happy to take over her care and relieve her husband of the burden. But he does not want this. And I think the family is right to ask why.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Every year Congress sits back and allows itself to automatically accept an “automatic” pay raise. The mechanism is the COLA, or Cost of Living Adjustment. And every year I complain. Because I don’t want to ignore this self-serving conduct. Also because the congressmen keep coming up with more crazy arguments.

People say that congressmen hand out pork to special interests. Yes, and pay-raise-grabbing congressmen are one of those special interests. Now senators will be getting $158,000 a year, an increase of more than $3,000. The increase is “automatic.” But thanks to a few renegade colleagues the congressmen do have to show their colors each year anyway. This time the Senate had to vote 60-34 to reject a proposal to exempt senators from the COLA. And there were the usual incomprehensible rationales.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Republican, says, “I think that our representatives of government deserve a pay raise consistent with the work that we’ve produced.” Frist can’t mean that, not really. I would be happy to take him up on it but that means the congressmen owe the U.S. taxpayers something like 4 trillion dollars. Then there’s Ted Stevens, the Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is the central nexus of pork distribution. “This is not a pay raise,” stipulates Stevens. “This is an increase that’s required by law.” Uh, sir. It isn’t required if you vote it down, is it? And who do you think is making U.S. federal law anyway? It’s not the lawmaking body on Mars.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

CBS News is wrong. Their reporter is wrong. Dan Rather is wrong. Mostly I just blame Dan. Say you have a large group of people who brush their teeth. It turns out a few of the teeth-brushers are also axe-murderers. What can you conclude about the horrid effects of teeth-brushing? Nothing. But don’t be surprised if a journalist on CBS intones about the “dark side” of the “largely unregulated” teeth-brushers.

Recently “The CBS Evening News With Dan Blather” ran a two-part story about homeschoolers. Oh, not about how homeschooled kids score higher on average than public-schooled kids on the standard tests. Or why they got pulled from school. No, instead CBS dredged up a few horror stories about wacko parents, and muttered ominously about the whole homeschooling community. Which consists of between one and two million kids and their parents, wanting to give them something better.

Andrea Yates drowned her five kids. Andrea Yates homeschooled her kids. Would it have been hard for her to drown them after they got home from a school? For most parents it’s very hard to drown their kids. Most parents love their kids. But give me a minute and I’ll find examples of teachers who have abused kids, and of parents who have abused kids returning from school.

By the CBS kind of reasoning, even becoming a parent should be subject to regulation. But do we really want Joe Bureaucrat monitoring everything we do, just because somebody else out there is bad?

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

Ya gotta admire her spunk. Florida just passed a law banning restaurants from letting their patrons smoke a cigarette.

Wava Saunders, a 57-year-old grandmother with 11 grandchildren, owns a Tampa restaurant with her husband called Grandma’s Kitchen, right off Interstate 4. Despite the new law, Saunders says if you want to smoke, come on in. Her civil disobedience has made her a folk hero among two-pack-a-day truck drivers. It’s not as if non-smokers don’t get fair warning. There’s a sign on the door that says, “There is smoking on these premises and feel free to go to a non-smoking establishment if it bothers you.” “Anyone who smokes knows a cigarette tastes better right after you eat,” says one trucker, who says he passes up another restaurant down the road so he could light up at Grandma’s. Like other truckers, he’s spreading the word about the smoker-friendly policy. “I’m definitely proud of them, and I support them,” he says. Another trucker says, “I think it’s great. They’re standing up for their rights. I enjoy smoking. I do it at home, I do it in my truck, and I’ll do it here.”

Mr. and Mrs. Saunders just got socked with a citation. And the enforcers are warning them that expensive fines are on the way if they don’t back down. They don’t intend to. They say the worst that could happen is they’d end up having to close the place down. They say they’re willing to pay that price, if they have to, for the luxury of standing up for their rights. Good for them and let’s hope they don’t have to.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

When I heard about it I could only roll my eyes. How typical of these career politicians and their anti-democratic antics.

Governor Warner, the top office-holder here in Virginia, doesn’t like the idea of us little people knowing what we’re going to vote on before we vote on it. It seems that the governor is in favor of making “changes” in the tax laws. What changes? Well, Warner says no details until after November 4, after voters have decided the fate of Virginia’s assemblymen. He says it would be unfair to expose his plan to debate right now. That would allow critics to take a “demagogue, sound-bite” approach.

We’re not going to get the details, but somehow I have an intuition that it’s about taxes going up, not down. A GOP critic of the governor, Scott Leake, says, “The ’95 election was a referendum on Allen. The ’99 elections were a referendum on Jim Gilmore and the car tax. The 2003 elections are a referendum on nothing.”  That may sound partisan, but Warner spokeswoman Ellen Qualls repeats the governor’s claim that sketching new tax policies now will only help the critics. She says letting voters know what they’re voting for is “not a responsible way to do what may be the most complex task politicians ever set out to do in government.”

Yeah, I’m sure it’s much too complex for us dumb voters to understand. We’re so dumb we even thought representative government had something to do with representation.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

The mayor is dead-set against it. The local paper says it may cause “a wound that never heals.” Wow, scary stuff. Until you realize they’re talking about simple democracy, in the form of a citizen initiative.

Mayor Victor Ashe, the News-Sentinel, and the town council want to build a $10 million dollar state-of-the-art hotel in downtown Knoxville. Why? To bring in new business for the publicly-funded convention center already costing taxpayers there an arm and a leg. Yet politicians are looking to raise property taxes to cover an existing $10 million deficit. The voter initiative they’re so afraid of would forbid the city from using taxpayer dollars to build the hotel. It’s true, as the mayor charges, that owners of the hotels currently in downtown Knoxville are underwriting the cost of the petition drive.

Well, no big sin if folks don’t want their own tax dollars used to put them out of business. But it is a sin to ignore the taxpayers the ones who’ll have to cough up their hard-earned dough. A recent poll shows 80 percent of Knoxville voters opposed to a new city-funded hotel. The citizen initiative is a building block of a free society. It’s one way citizens have of keeping elected officials from getting out of control. Here we have a special deal being awarded to the few at everyone’s expense.

It’s cases like this that are why we must have the citizen initiative process. Special interest schemers will never want their schemes put to a popular vote, but so what? The people do.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

All the usual suspects came out against the California recall campaign. Not only political partisans. But also folks who distrust the democratic process as such especially when it has teeth.

I’m going to leave the topic of the California recall real soon, promise. But let me just get in one point here about the old question of whether we’re a “republic” properly speaking or a “democracy.” Every now and then a reader tells me we’re a republic, not a democracy, so stop using the word democracy. But I think that’s a false alternative, one captured in a recent article by Professor John Lewis.

Lewis claims that the recall is an instance of pure democracy citizens ruling directly rather than through their representatives even though all Californians did is replace one ruler with another ruler. According to the professor, it’s an ad hoc “whim” to get rid of a destructive governor unless that governor is also guilty of “manifest illegality.” But the issue isn’t unfettered democracy or mob rule.

The issue is whether there is a benefit to having democratic checks on our rulers, including the obvious check of being able to fire a guy who gets way out of hand. And the issue isn’t so much the name we give our system as its features. It makes no sense to trust the “representatives of the people” if we can’t trust the people themselves. We don’t want unfettered “mob rule,” but we don’t want unfettered “politician rule” either. Count me in favor of a constitutional democratic republic.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

It may not loom very large in the grand scheme of things. But it shows the outsized career politician ego. It’s all about, “Hey, I brought you a bag of taxpayer-funded goodies, so I’m a hero, just in the mold of, say, frontiersman Daniel Boone. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and take down his name and put up my name.” Maybe that’s not what happened. Maybe the congressman wasn’t in on the deal that the highway cutting through the Eastern Kentucky mountains should lose the name of Daniel Boone and gain the name of the congressman.

All we know is that Governor Paul Patton asked the state’s transportation secretary to replace Boone’s name with the congressman’s name. And the transportation secretary played along. But the congressman sure as heck could have said, “No! Don’t do this! You’re a better man than I am, Daniel Boone!” The congressman Republican Hal Rodgers of Somerset has represented his district for over 20 years. He helped funnel federal funding to Kentucky so that the state could eliminate tolls at that Daniel Boone highway.

Great, now all of America gets to pay for that road instead of just the people who drive on it. So the decision was made to reward the porkbarreler who got the subsidy by dropping the name of the man whose life and legend have filled countless volumes. And installing the name of the congressman. “It’s a tremendous honor to have this parkway named after me,” Rogers said. “I am humbled.” Not humble enough.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

I guess this is as good a time as any to hawk the virtues of Instant Runoff Voting. If things had gone a bit different in California, IRV would have really come in handy.

Out a field of 135 candidates, Arnold Schwarzenegger won the right to succeed the ousted governor with a fat plurality that was almost a majority: 49 percent of the total. There won’t be any haggling over pregnant chads. The fixers in California may actually have padded Arnold’s margin with all their last-minute Arnold-sliming. That may say more about the voters’ opinions of Davis than of Arnold, since Arnold admitted that there was some truth to the charges of sexual misconduct. But the vote totals could have gone a lot differently. Anybody who filled out the paperwork was free to run.

This was good, in that folks who might not have survived a typical primary process had a chance to make their case to voters. On the other hand, if there had been more than three or four realistic contenders in the race, the ballots could easily have been split in such a way that no clear favorite emerged. Maybe one guy with 18 percent, the runner-up with 17 percent, etc. Nobody would have been ecstatic about that outcome.

Instant Runoff Voting solves the problem by giving value to voters’ second-ranked and third-ranked choices. In each round of the voting, votes for the last-place candidate get re-assigned to the voters’ second-choice candidates. The process continues until someone gains an actual majority. Think of it as a way of terminating electoral confusion.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.