Common Sense with Paul Jacob

I am not a perfect man. For example, I’m behind in my reading. I’ve got a stack of books yea high on my desk, and some of those books have pages. I can’t keep up with it.

As I say, I’m not a perfect man. But at least I try not to make other people suffer as a result of my delinquency. Not so much can be said about our lords and masters in the nation’s capital. Our congressmen also have a lot of reading to do. But they never really get around to perusing all the legislation they pass before they pass it. Not all the way through. There is just too much of it, with too many clauses and sub-clauses. This is pretty mind-numbing stuff.

One result is that really nasty provisions sometimes get tucked into the bills, unconstitutional assaults on our freedom which few people know about, not even most of the congressmen, until it’s way too late. An example is a federally-mandated national database that is supposed to keep tabs of your every visit to the doctor, including what you thought was confidential conversation about your medical problems.

The mandate for this database was imposed by the 106th Congress, along with a lot of other haphazard track-and-spy provisions. What, you never heard of this database? Behind on your reading, huh? Well, I just found out about it myself. I am not a perfect man. And I don’t know everything about everything. But one thing I do know is that if our legislators can’t take the trouble to read the legislation before they vote for it, they shouldn’t vote for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Some folks are rethinking our controversial drug laws. But while polls show more than a quarter of Americans now favor decriminalizing marijuana, not one of the 535 folks who represent us in Congress agrees. At least, no one has introduced meaningful legislation or come forward to champion this cause. And while initiatives in various states are legalizing marijuana for medical purposes and moving away from incarceration, federal penalties for drug offenses continue to get more and more draconian.

I don’t mean to comment here on the merits of our nation’s drug policies, or lack thereof. All I’m saying is that, yet again, we aren’t being well represented because our political system has been monopolized by career politicians. The system is stagnant because careerists are unwilling to take political risks for what they believe in.

New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is pushing for changes in the drug laws even though he knows it is not an immediately popular stand. He tells Rolling Stone magazine that he’s living proof of the virtues of term limits: “Would I have brought this issue out if I thought I could be elected to a third term?” he asks. “I don’t know. In the first term, I talked about the failure of the Drug War and that arresting people isn’t going to work. But it wasn’t until the second term that I made a conscious decision to turn up the volume and search out some solutions.”

Quite a telling admission. And whether or not you agree with Governor Johnson on the drug issue, surely there’s something wrong when our representatives run from important issues and play it safe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

In my view, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize criminal behavior. Would you agree with me on that? Yet that is what’s happening.

Maybe you’ve heard how law officers get to keep some of the money they grab from drug-trafficking suspects. No evidence or trial is required. Empowered by anti-racketeering and other laws, they can just snag the goods at will.

But that’s not all. Social workers now have a financial incentive to kidnap children. That’s what a Massachusetts couple, Heidi and Neil Howard, found out when their first baby girl was born terminally ill. A social worker pushed her way into their home and found it in disorder. The kitchen was being remodeled, and there was a lot of tension in the air, possibly the kind of tension associated with having a terminally ill baby. Social workers told Heidi that if she didn’t sign a complaint against her husband, she could lose her two sons. Then they used that signed complaint to take her two sons.

More and more, agencies are conniving to break up families. Feminist writer Wendy McElroy says the Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed by Congress in 1997, deserves a lot of the blame. The Act awards a “finder’s fee” of up to $4,000 to agencies that adopt out a child. Of course, to adopt out a child, you first need to have a child in tow, ready to go.

Taxpayer-funded payoffs alone won’t turn cops into robbers or child protection specialists into kidnappers. There has to be a certain lack of moral scruples also. But you know, the payoffs don’t exactly help, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Amazing. It’s happened before. But so infrequently that you want to grab the people involved by the shoulders and shout, “Hey! Good job! That’s what journalism is supposed to do: Report facts!”

I’m talking about an article in the Philadelphia Daily News that explains why it’s so hard to reform the Pennsylvania legislature: Incumbents in Pennsylvania rule the roost virtually unchallenged. The Daily News notes that only five seats out of 203 are now regarded as competitive. The culture of incumbency “breeds an isolated, insulated body eating millions of tax dollars each year, spending billions more without the scrutiny we give TV sit-coms.” Add all the charges and convictions for drunken driving, bribery, spousal abuse and the like, and it’s not a very pretty picture.

How to shake up the status quo? Here’s where the Daily News loses a few of its laurels. The paper says that campaign money is what’s to blame for super-high reelection rates. But Eric O’Keefe, President of Americans for Limited Terms, has studied the election, and he says, “it’s the low spenders who are most entrenched.”

O’Keefe agrees that party bosses can extort money when they have to, and throw it at the few contested races. But the question is, why are so many races uncontested to begin with? The real problem here is the power of incumbents to crimp competition and stave off reform, even without huge campaign coffers. To tackle that problem at the root, you need term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Onion pungency. Ornamental fish. Cranberry breeding. How to de-bone salmon.  Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against food. I just don’t think the nation’s taxpayers should be spending millions of dollars on onion pungency studies and anti-salmon-bone technology.

Our career congressmen no doubt disagree. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, over the past year our congressmen have splurged more than $1.7 billion on federal grants for just such academic projects, earmarked for the home districts of powerful legislators. In other words: pork. Something to serve up to a particular interest group in your district to help flavor the reelection bid.

Academic pork is, in fact, 60 percent fatter than it was just a year earlier. Can we be sure it’s pork? Well, let’s think about this. Nine of ten states that got the most grant money happen to have legislators heading up the relevant congressional committees. Meanwhile, nine of ten states at the bottom of the grant heap have no committee heads in their congressional delegations. This is the kind of pattern you expect to see when career politicians are putting personal careers ahead of the common good.

For example, New Hampshire wasn’t doing very well in the academic pork area until Congressman Judd Gregg became top dog of a subcommittee overseeing the Commerce and Justice Departments. Now Dartmouth is getting an $18 million earmark to study cybercrime and the University of New Hampshire is getting $14 million for a marine lab and a pier. Sounds fishy to me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Do term limits help? I mean, do they really, really help our political leaders behave in a more responsible manner?

Well, my goodness they would have to, at least insofar as they show the door to the most corrupt careerists and make way for new people, more idealistic people. If you have some actual electoral competition in your democracy, that’s got to help some, don’t you think?

But is there anything more specific we can point to in the term-limits track record? Well, yes, there’s plenty. For one thing, it turns out that the state legislatures that have been term-limited for a while are now more willing to put a lid on out-of-control taxing and spending.

In an article for the Cato Institute, Michael New points out that term-limited legislatures in California, Maine, Colorado and Oregon have each enacted tax cuts that have surprised long-time observers. And the Montana statehouse, which has just seen a big influx of freshmen legislators, has passed a Tax and Expenditure Limitation bill that will be one of the toughest in the country if it becomes law. In Colorado, taxes were curbed by the same initiative process that brought term limits to that state, forcing the state government to hand back $2.3 billion to taxpayers over the space of just a few years. Colorado’s tax cut of 3.4 percent was the largest among the Rocky Mountain states, just as Maine’s 3.8 percent tax cut was the largest among New England states.

Term limits can’t bring tax limits all by themselves, of course. But gee, they sure do seem to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Shocker! This just in from Oklahoma . . . the career politicians there want to kill term limits!

Oh, I know . . . big surprise, right? But the anti-social attitude of the career politicians still appalls me every time I hear tell of it. It seems career politicians are all in favor of electoral competition and suchlike, right up until the minute revitalized democracy threatens to loosen their hammerlock on power.

There is a new twist now in Oklahoma. You see, in virtually all the term-limited states, citizens have capped service at six or eight years. And when the career politicians in those states realize that they can’t get away with getting rid of term limits altogether, they often talk instead about “strengthening” term limits, as they call it. Often what they mean is extending the limits, say from eight years to twelve years.

Well, anyway, the twist in Oklahoma is that the politicians there already have their twelve years, and that’s still too brief a candle for the careerists. Twelve years is still not enough time to find the bathroom, they say. Oklahoma’s term limits don’t even take effect until 2004, but the careerists want to kill the limits right now, before they have a chance to get off the ground.

The politicians have friends in a group called the Association of County Commissioners. Apparently the county commissioners in Oklahoma would rather deal with the same good old boys they’ve known all along than have to contend with fresh faces and fresh ideas. But I’m betting Oklahoma’s citizens will make clear that the term limits in their state are here to stay. And maybe even could use a little trimming.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Several years ago at a news conference, a reporter got confused and thought I’d advocated term limits for the media, you know, in addition to politicians. I told him we weren’t advocating such limits for the press, but nonetheless he ought not mention the idea above a whisper for fear it would take off.

Today, there are term limits on 19 state legislatures and 38 governors, but, of course, there are no limits for the media and nobody seriously advocating them. Yet, there are self-limiters in the media. Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot is leaving Washington of his own accord, and sounding a lot like a citizen legislator.

Gigot says about our capitol city, “It is horribly seductive . . . there is no more parochial place in America. Most of the city’s intrigues, which can seem so compelling, count for little in the end. . . . I started out trying to cover Washington the way a foreign correspondent would, trying to explain the bizarre native rituals to the rest of America. But the longer one stays here, the harder that is to do. Covering the city can lead to tunnel vision that focuses on political tactics and trivia over substance. I’ve sometimes found myself falling into that trap, a sign that some distance is in order.”

Gigot concludes, “The imperative of the political class is to accumulate even more power. Politicians don’t arrive here corrupt, or at least most don’t, but the attraction of power is corrupting to all but the hardiest souls.”

Paul Gigot, lessons learned, is headed to New York to become editor of the Journal ‘s editorial page. Good luck to him.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

What is left to say about Congressman Gary Condit? How about, “Enough already!”

But no, it’s never enough. Not when a congressman is holding his seat with the ferocious resolve of a professional politician locked in on a lifelong career at $150,000 smackers a year, not to mention the perks and a gold-plated pension.

No, this guy isn’t planning to give up his job, his position, his power no matter what. Judging by his obtuse stonewalling on TV, Condit is saying, “Go ahead: Drag me, my family and the entire country through this sordid tale: I can stand neck-deep in open sewage longer than you can.”

Perhaps that’s the new Washington standard. Now, to add insult to injury, the Condit camp is saying that the congressman never denied the affair with Chandra Levy, you know, the one he won’t confirm. You see, it was his taxpayer-funded staff who told reporters there was no relationship. Mr. Condit, of course, had no idea what his very own staff was telling the media. You just can’t get good help these days.

Condit’s fallen so far that even fellow Democrats in Congress are no longer defending him. In fact, there is talk of removing him from the House Intelligence Committee. (No doubt a very small committee to begin with.) But Condit’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, explains why this scandal just makes Condit an even more effective congressman. Lowell tells us, “He’s probably the only person on the Intelligence Committee who can’t be blackmailed anymore.”

Now there’s a dandy slogan for Mr. Condit’s reelection campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Hey, listen up. You may have heard of voice recognition software. The software is not quite up to Star Trek standards yet, but it can recognize ninety-plus percent of what you tell it at a normal conversational pace.

Most people can take or leave voice recognition software given its current capabilities. But it turns out that those with dyslexia can enormously benefit. Dyslexia makes it difficult to read and write words correctly. The voice recognition technology allows dyslexics to get a report or letter done cleaner and faster.

And seeing the words appear on the screen as they are spoken actually helps improve reading and writing ability over time. Marshall Raskind, a learning disabilities researcher in Pasadena, says that children often show improvement in decoding skills after just ten hours or so working with the software.

Isn’t the free market great? Not only can something like this be invented to begin with, but it can also be distributed, sold, funded and continually improved. And the people who need the help most have a chance to get it without paying millions of dollars.

So what’s the problem, according to some critics? Raskind says he has discovered that “many people view assistive technologies in general as a crutch, a way of avoiding a problem. It’s weird,” says Raskind. “It’s like seeing someone with a white cane and saying, ‘Rip that cane out of their hands and let them do it themselves.'”

Thank goodness folks with dyslexia are now able to show how well they can think, even if they have a little trouble decoding written symbols. Their critics should try it . . . thinking, that is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.