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Common Sense free trade & free markets insider corruption nannyism national politics & policies too much government

Welfare Kings

Bear Stearns. You gotta like an investment company with the word “bear” in it. If you are the kind of investor to go bullish over anything big, Bear, Stearns & Co., Inc., was BIG. For years its subprime mortgage biz made investors go all squirmy with bullishness.

They could pretend that the word “bear” was there for irony.

Call it prophecy, instead: The Bear Stearns bull lies on the ground, gored. Time to sell off the carcass.

The Federal Reserve has forced through a takeover deal, with J.P. Morgan buying out the dead bull. At a low, low price – though not nearly as low had the Federal Reserve stayed out. It’s another so-called capitalist bailout, an attempt to make a failure not seem so big.

This is not free-market capitalism, folks. This is big business welfare-statism.

In their normal run of operation, businesses negotiate the uncertainties of markets using tools like the profit-and-loss statement, aiming for profit. When they don’t manage this, they fail. Remember that term, loss?

Well, in today’s truly bipartisan political economy, the bigger you are the more scared our rulers get when you fail. So they prop up, as best they can, the biggest failures.

Forget welfare queens. The welfare kings are businessmen on the take from government. The losers are everybody else, as idiotic risks and bad business practices get propped up by government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Justice, Skirted

Two years ago in Oklahoma, Riccardo Gino Ferrante was arrested for aiming a camera up a 16-year-old girl’s skirt while in a Target store. He was arrested and convicted of a felony.

Unfortunately, in mid-March four-fifths of Oklahoma’s Court of Criminal Appeals voted that no felony occurred.

Why?

Because “the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Now, being in a public place does remove or decrease one’s expectation of privacy. But ought that extend even to the private space WITHIN one’s clothing?

The court answered in the affirmative. As Judge Gary Lumpkin wrote in his dissent, “It is open season for peeping Toms in public places who want to look under a woman’s dress.”

This is judicial common sense in the age of Britney Spears? At least there’s still the knuckle-sandwich penalty someone might get.

If our court system can’t get this one right, everyone should agree that something’s wrong.

The judiciary must be independent. But it must be independent of the other branches of government, not detached from common sense, or all semblance of sanity.

Oklahoma legislators now seek to outlaw currently court-protected invasive and gutter photography. Should they also consider random intelligence testing for the judiciary? They have more than probable cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Arnold Loses His Strudel

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger no longer likes term limits. He explained why in an interview with the LA Times.

Says Arnold: “[O]riginally I felt very strongly that it was the greatest thing ever done. Because I despised the idea of guys being so locked in and safe in their positions, staying up in Sacramento and doing their deals and all this stuff.

“Now ’ve been there for four years and I say to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster.’. . . It’s going to hurt the state, because we have to start all over again, getting acquainted with these new people coming in. . . . John Burton, whom I’d just gotten used to working with; he used to bring me delicious Austrian coffee and apfelstrudel. Now he’s gone.”

Gee, competitive elections are so inconvenient, aren’t they? With the people coming and going and all this stuff? Not to mention the strudel crisis.

U.S. Term Limits president Phil Blumel observed: “Yes, Arnold ‘learned’ the lessons most politicians learn after a while in office: that government is the solution not the problem and that staying in office is better than leaving it.’

Blumel is right on. And I’m happy to report that California citizens ignored Arnold’s recent brainstorms and his endorsement of Prop 93, a devious term limits extension measure, defeated in February by Golden State voters. If the governor is still sad, well, maybe somebody can bring him some jelly doughnuts as a consolation prize.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Saving a Scandigooginesian Denny’s

Can zoning laws stop time?

Consider the Denny’s in the Ballard district of Seattle, Washington.

It’s an odd building, and, in its own odd way, a landmark. The community adapted to it. Lots of people talk of it fondly — even the ones who would normally zone out a Denny’s on principle.

But it is a Denny’s. Or was until it closed a few months ago. And the owners want to sell it to a developer.

They filed to get it declared a landmark, hoping that it wouldn’t be. Well, play with fire, get burned. Lots of people glommed on to the proposal. Seattle’s Landmark Preservation Board decided in late February that the building should not be demolished.

There was much yammering about its unique architecture. There’s apparently a style called Google, and while I’ve ogled at the building in the past, it’s still, well, a Denny’s. Because it’s in Ballard, a community of Seattle known for high concentrations of Scandinavians, one architect was quoted calling the building’s style “Scandigooginesian,” because of Scandinavian, Google and Polynesian influences.

Unique, yes. But worth voiding private property right to sell? Hardly.

Sure Ballard defined itself by the building. But communities change, and redefine themselves with new development, like Ballard did when the building was built in 1964.

Besides, if folks in Ballard had patronized the Denny’s well enough, it would still be in business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

When Birds Attack

If you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s The Birds, you’ve probably seen a few chilling out-takes. People running. Birds swooping. People screaming. Glass shattering.

Could the scenario be even scarier? Well, yes: if, say, it were illegal for the victims to defend themselves.

This is not a movie remake. That’s what the beleaguered citizens of Bartow are currently facing. This is a small town outside of Orlando — a quiet community says the Orlando Sentinel. Well, except for the screaming.

Migrating turkey vultures have turned into quite a nuisance there. They rip shingles off roofs. They chew rubber from car windows. First pecking a little. Then a lot.

And the people? Screams. Of frustration.

They’re not allowed to do much about this. They may blow a shrill whistle to try to scare off the vultures, or tactically position stuffed toys that resemble dead vultures. But the beleaguered residents may not kill or even capture the birds.

The birds are protected by the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Apparently we’ve signed an agreement with the birds which makes it a criminal offense for anybody to ruffle their feathers. Too bad such well-meaning edicts don’t also make it illegal for birds to harass innocent villagers.

Once again we see the tyranny of well-meaning politics, un-tethered by even the tiniest amount of thought about the consequences.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

GASPworthy

I don’t live in Milwaukee County, so I’m not gasping right now. But, gasping or not, Milwaukee County residents have something the rest of us don’t. They have GASP.

GASP is the snappy acronym for CRG Network’s new Government Accountability in Spending Project. It’s an online database of information of Milwaukee County government’s finances. In the future, more local governments will go on the system. Right now, we can root around in the finances of this one county only. The search engine works like a breeze, and you can export the results of each search to a spreadsheet with an easy Export function.

CRG Network calls this “the ultimate in openness and transparency.” At crgnetwork.com it’s explained that “Scott Walker and the Milwaukee County stepped forward to be the first unit of Wisconsin government to commit” to this citizens’ resource. The project had funding help from the Sam Adams Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and Citizens in Charge.

Hey, I’m affiliated with two of these outfits! So I guess I’m patting myself on the back.

But not really. The hard work was done by the county’s Information Management Services Division, Controller’s Office, and Department of Administration, with a lot of help from professional volunteers of the CRG Network.

If you want to see how a local government spends its billions, you can hardly do better than putting Milwaukee County onto your research agenda. Thanks to GASP.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

No New Czars

Do we need another czar?

Ask Senator John McCain. In a year he could be president and appointing “czars.”

Scary thought. His McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law squelched too many freedoms for me to rush into rah-rah mode.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, agrees with me, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “McCain- Feingold has really left a bad taste in many people’s mouths, not just conservatives . . .”

But when Cooper asked Perkins what steps McCain could take to win support from conservatives, Perkins said McCain could “announce a family czar in the White House to focus on strengthening America’s families.”

You know, I’ve never liked that term, czar. Russian czars were dictators, the name taken from Caesar, the Roman emperor. We Americans are just generally down on all-powerful tyrants. So, why name our government officials “czars”?

Of course, Perkins’s idea isn’t for this Family Czar to tyrannize the countryside. He simply wants to bolster families.

But, ask yourself, which is more likely to come from some powerful new office in Washington: tyranny or stronger families?

And if you bet McCain would pick a swell person to be Family Czar, how would you like Hillary Clinton’s pick? Or Barack Obama’s? If you’re a Democrat, flip the examples around.

I wouldn’t want my own mother to pick someone for such a position. And she’s super swell.

Let’s make this our slogan: No new czars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability Common Sense insider corruption

Above the Law

It’s nice to have friends in high places. Or to sit on high yourself – way up above the law. Or so Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson must think, as he chirps from his high perch.

Last year, State Representative Mike Reynolds detailed publicly that Attorney General Edmondson had violated campaign finance laws. Numerous times.

Some of these Edmondson then sought to rectify, years after the fact. Some not.

But the Attorney General has not been prosecuted. Why, you ask? Well, it’s his job to prosecute such violations, and he has, not too surprisingly, not indicted himself.

Funny though, how Edmondson, a Democrat, has indicted Republicans Brent Rinehardt and Tim Pope for similar alleged violations.

Reynolds has now written to the governor, asking him to appoint an independent counsel. Reynolds argues that the Ethics Commission turns over matters for criminal or civil investigation to Edmondson, who “is hardly in a position to investigate his own campaign committee.”

But Edmondson told a newspaper, “It would be a waste of taxpayer money to pay another attorney to review what the Ethics Commission has already received.”

A spokesman for Governor Brad Henry, also a Democrat, says that the governor will not appoint an independent counsel.

Friends in high places . . . is for the birds.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Curiouser and Curiouser

When curious people do curious things, I get a bit curious myself.

A few months ago I mentioned how Warren Buffett had gone on record as saying he would like to be taxed more. Curious.

Bill Clinton said pretty much the same thing. And my response was to recommend they voluntarily give more. It’s legal to give money to the government; the U.S. Treasury is there to help.

Well, on CNBC recently, a listener emailed Buffett that very question. And the billionaire, not unreasonably, said that his charitable foundation probably does a better job of allocating resources than the government would do.

I can almost see your hand raise up. “Pick me, pick me, Mr. Buffett,” you are saying. “I’ve got a follow-up question!”

Me too. Doesn’t your very answer, Mr. Buffett, beg the question of why we should have higher tax rates in the first place? I mean, why give more money to an entity that will not do a good job of allocating resources?

Maybe good ol’ Warren shouldn’t be taxed more. Maybe we should send our charitable money to Mr. Buffett!

But no. I bet even you and I — yes, humble you and humble me — have just as good ideas of how to spend our money as does Warren Buffett.

And, of course, as does the U.S. government.

So the simple question remains, why higher taxes, Mr. Buffett?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Is Your Congressman on the List?

Popular political blogger Glenn Reynolds, he of InstaPundit fame, has done lots of yeoman work to bring attention to the proliferation of earmarks in the federal budget.

InstaPundit and others have pushed to make the process of stuffing pork into spending bills a lot more transparent, so constituents can see what’s happening while the wheeling and dealing is still in process.

Despite gestures from lawmakers in that direction, the effort has largely stalled. The Democrats, like the Republicans before them, proved more inclined to favor reform before they gained their new majority. Earmarks waste taxpayers’ money in ways ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous; they still get tucked away in murky committee reports, instead of listed openly in the bills lawmakers are constitutionally instructed to read and then vote on.

Twenty-three House members have publicly pledged to forgo earmarks. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus, has posted the list. Go to my PaulJacob.com and click the “Swearing Off Pork” logo to get to it. These 23 abstainers may not make up even a fourth of the conservative caucus, let alone a hefty percentage of the full 435-member House . . . but we gotta start somewhere.

Want the list to grow? Listen to the InstaPundit, who says: “Call your Representatives — congratulate ’em if they’re on it, and if they’re not, ask why not.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.