Do you have kids? They’re the greatest. Then again, they can drive you nuts, until you want to tell them to put a sock in it.

Well, in Pinellas County, Florida, there’s a twist. They put the kids in a sock. A four-year old boy was disciplined in a public school there by being placed in a “body sock” designed for therapy with autistic children. But this boy isn’t autistic. Instead, the sock was used to effectively incarcerate the child.

The boy’s parents, not informed by the school, are now threatening to sue. The boy’s father says, “I don’t like it at all.”

I’m with him.

Next thing I know, there’s a bill in California, introduced by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, that makes it a crime to spank your kid.

Should parents caught swatting their tantrum-throwing, unruly kids face a year in jail or a $1,000 fine? Or perhaps forced parenting classes?

And who would pretend to have the secret of parenting? The government?

Get a grip, legislator. Abuse is already against the law.

I’m not a spanking parent. Though, my kids demanded some restraint of tirade and a swat here or there. I know parents who spank much more readily. It’s one of many decisions parents make.

Lieber has never had children, but does have a cat, which her veterinarian told her not to hit. She says, “[I]f you never hit a cat, you should never hit a kid.”

Dear legislator, I would never legislate your parenting of your cat. Why not back off legislating our parenting of our children?

This is Common Sense. Apparently in very short supply. I’m Paul Jacob.

President George W. Bush is telling the Democrats to give up the porkbarrel.

In his State of the Union — as previously spoken in one of his radio adresses — Mr. Bush says voters sent a message last November about fiscal discipline: “And one of the best ways we can impose more discipline on federal spending is by addressing the problem of earmarks.”

Thanks. Thank you, Mr. President. For noticing the problem of hog-wild spending on legislators’ pet projects. The flagrant abuse of the taxpayers’ wallets on this count.

You’ve given occasional lip service to the problem during these past years of mostly Republican control of Congress. But you’ve wielded the veto pen, what? Maybe once in your administration so far?

So I’m wondering: Does this latest commitment of yours have any teeth?

Of course, not everyone agrees with the idea of gnawing out the earmarks from legislation. Apparently some members of Congress are telling reporters that they “know their districts better than federal bureaucrats, so they are better at directing spending.”

Gee, I guess a congressman knows whom he needs to bribe better than some congressman in some other district. But if we give his formulation the benefit of the doubt, it really proves too much, doesn’t it?

Maybe the people who earn their incomes know their own priorities about how their own money should be spent even better than congressman piling on pork to get re-elected. Just a thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The passing of Gerald Ford and all the talk about what a nice guy he was, a man definitely not Richard Nixon, reminds me of those turbulent Watergate days.

It’s one more bookend to a blessedly bygone era. Just a couple years ago we finally learned the identity of Deep Throat, an anonymous and pivotal source for much of the Washington Post’s reporting on the gradually unfolding Watergate scandal. Made famous by the Woodward and Bernstein book All the President’s Men and then by Hal Holbrook’s paranoid and angry performance in the movie of the same title.

Here’s a little-known fact about the high-level CIA man, Mark Felt, who turned out to be Deep Throat. On page 23 of Bob Woodward’s book about Felt, The Secret Man , we learn that his first job out of law school in the early 1940s was with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment? To determine whether “toilet paper with the Red Cross brand name had an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. People were resistant to questions about their toilet paper usage, he discovered, and he couldn’t solve the case.”

Couldn’t solve the case, eh? Ah, Watergate: easier to decipher than how to regulate toilet tissue! This is just one of umptillion examples of how silly some of our basic regulations are.

And it wouldn’t have helped had toilet-paper users been forced to testify before Congress!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Gone are the pyramids’ shiny outer surfaces. The Colossus of Rhodes fell by the sea. Roman armies razed the Temple of Jerusalem, one of the greatest architectural marvels ever.

Dams last less long than most big projects, though longer than Herod’s completed temple. The American Society of Civil Engineers figures that the average life of a dam spans 50 years. The older, the less safe, and the more cracks and holes need filling.

There are a lot of dams in America. And their age is becoming a problem. James Workman, writing for the Property and Environment Research Center in a PERC Report, writes that there are “79,000 high-hazard dams the size of a two-story building or higher” in our country, and “two million smaller dams.” Workman claims that the “number of obsolete, orphaned, or ‘deadbeat’ dams has risen; today 15 percent of America’s National Inventory of Dams are classified as being of ‘indeterminate ownership.’”

It is time to unbuild many of those dams.

How? Workman has come up a nifty exit strategy for businesses, governments and communities that own (or are merely left with) deadbeat dams. “Junk bond” their removal. The dam sites and reservoirs have more value take apart than kept together. So finance the removal on those grounds alone. Leverage environmental set-asides and similar laws and business factors, and get these dams unbuilt safely, for all our gain.

Junk bonds for dams! What a concept.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Break out the bubbly. There’s a politician willing to “accept responsibility.”

You’re thinking: “Huh? No!” But it’s true.

According to the House Ethics Committee, Representative John Conyers has “accepted responsibility” for “possibly” violating House rules by assigning campaign-related work to his official taxpayer-funded congressional staff.

Conyers, a 36-year Washington veteran, admits to a “lack of clarity” in communications with his staff about what was expected of them. He has agreed to do better from now on.

I think what we have here is a congressman who admits that he maybe accidentally gave his congressional staff marching orders to work on election campaigns, or something.

Perhaps. I sense a lack of clarity.

Possibly.

But I’m not sure.

The former aides who testified against Conyers indicate that there was no ambiguity about his demands that they work on election campaigns, and not just his own. And there’s a litany of allied charges that I can’t cram into my two minutes here. But we all know how ambiguous orders to get me elected in violation of nominal House rules can be.

Meantime, no one talks about banning franking privileges or other taxpayer-funded incumbent advantages enabling congressmen to run for re-election 24 hours a day. But at least Congressman Conyers is being made to pay, and dearly, for his own especially egregious displays of such abuse of power. All the world now knows that maybe perhaps the congressman’s instructions to staff were not completely clear. Possibly.

This is Common Sense . . . I think. I’m probably Paul Jacob.