Categories
general freedom local leaders

Tyranny Averted?

Parents United Rhode Island has apparently fended off a vaccination mandate in their state.

Mike Stenhouse explains how this coalition leapt into action against a legislative effort to impose universal vaccination. (We use the term “vaccinated” loosely, since any ameliorative effects of the vaccines reportedly fade pretty quickly and don’t actually prevent COVID-19.)

The mandate’s penalties for noncompliance would have included monthly $50 fines, doubling of recalcitrants’ state income taxes, and fines upon employers of $5,000 per unvaccinated employee.

State Senator Samuel Bell submitted the legislation, S2552, on March 1 of this year. Because the country was by then returning to something like pre-pandemic “normal life,” the bill seemed dead on arrival.

But then the Boston Globe shifted into overdrive to revive the legislation, which also received new support from local media.

That’s when ParentsUnitedRI.com and others sounded the alarm. In just a few weeks, the bill became radioactive, hurrying former sponsors to renounce their support.

The state legislature’s current session ends June 30. Stenhouse suggests that although the senate president could still fast-track the Draconian proposal at any time, “there is likely no political appetite for such a heavy-handed measure, especially in an election year.”

If Bell’s bill does die in the current session, it’s even less likely to be revived in the next. Whatever political appetite there may be right now to stomp people who make the “wrong” decision about getting vaccinated, popular opposition has done its work, making medical tyranny much less likely.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability general freedom local leaders term limits

Freedom in Granite

“In the past two years,” the Cato Institute announced last January, “Governor [Chris] Sununu and the State of New Hampshire have topped Cato’s rankings for both our Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors and our recently released Freedom in the 50 States report.”

How? Why? 

The governor points to “a long history of local control,” insisting that “town meetings matter.” 

He also cites the state’s executive council which, along with the governor, publicly debates “every contract over $10,000,” as well as a two-year gubernatorial term that “sucks” for him but gives citizens “all the say.”

Most of all, consider the sheer size of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives.

“When you have one of the largest parliamentary bodies in the free world with 400 members representing only 1.4 million people,” Gov. Sununu explains, “by definition” it has to be “one of the most representative bodies of government in the world.”

He elaborates that “they only get paid a hundred bucks a year. I mean, it’s like herding cats. Don’t get me wrong, it has its ups and downs. But that’s one state representative for about every 3,000 people. Like town selectmen, your representative in Concord is going to be somebody you know, somebody you see at the grocery store, somebody you can easily reach and who can hear you. It’s very different from other states where you have one person representing a district with tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

“Which means the control is really at the individual level,” Sununu adds, and “an individual citizen has much more say on how their taxes are spent or what’s going on in their schools or whether that pothole is going to get filled or not.” 

Sounds like citizens are more in charge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders nannyism

The Next-Worst Thing

New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.

Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.

“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.

“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”

 “Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?

Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.

He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-worst thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom local leaders too much government

Intrusive, Improper, Offensive

The In-N-Out Burger restaurant won’t kick out customers who fail to display a “vaccine passport” proving they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19.

In-N-Out has restaurants in California and the Southwest. And it has one in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has ordered restaurants to enforce the city’s vaccine mandate.

Arnie Wensinger, an attorney for the chain, has explained the company’s defiance.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” he said on KPIX-TV. “It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason. [This is] intrusive, improper, and offensive.”

In an age of weasel words and abject apologies for non-wrongdoing, In-N-Out Burger is forthright in defense of itself and its customers.

Not without cost. The health department closed the restaurant for mandate violations, and it was able to partially reopen only for takeout and drive-through orders. 

Indoor dining is verboten.

The San Francisco health department says that the restaurant was informed “multiple times about the proof of vaccination requirement,” as if the mere repetition of such an order were enough to justify it. The “outreach team provided information so the restaurant could comply. . . .”

Of course, the folks at In-N-Out Burger know that they “could comply.” And the San Francisco government has also been provided with information on why they should leave In-N-Out alone. Would repetition help?

Leave In-N-Out alone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment local leaders

Charges Dropped

The best part of the story — not counting Shannon Joy’s pluck and defiance — is how promptly the prosecutor dropped the bogus charges of “criminal trespass” against her.

The Rochester mom and radio talk show host had been handcuffed while attending a Fairport school board meeting this August. Her dastardly deed consisted of wearing a mask wrong.

Joy figures that board members were sick and tired of her vocal criticism of their policies — she has a platform outside of board meetings — so, in collaboration with others, the board had staged her arrest with malice aforethought.

To supporters at the courthouse, Joy spoke of “bully tactics sometimes employed by school boards and superintendents who don’t want to hear from parents about their children’s education.”

The county’s policies about masks are less than uniform. PJMedia’s Megan Fox points out that in Monroe County and other nearby counties, people are not required to wear a mask “except in public schools, government buildings, and some doctors’ offices.”

Irony and hypocrisy were not eschewed by arresting officers. One cop teaming up to handcuff Shannon Joy was not wearing a mask. Another wore her own mask in the same under-the-chin fashion for which Joy was being hauled away. These officers did not, however, arrest themselves.

“How is this America?” Joy tweets above an arresting image of the arrest.

Well, it’s not the Mayberry America. It’s not the best America. But at least there was a refreshing return to common sense in her courtroom victory.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts

Categories
local leaders

Political Intimidation Unmasked

Last week, Illinois state regulators threatened Dr. Jeremy Henrichs with “personal and professional consequences,” specifically loss of his medical license, if he continued to oppose mandatory mask-wearing in schools.

Henrichs is a board of education member and a medical doctor.

He questioned the necessity of masks. Why? On the basis of his best medical judgment — and he is hardly alone in seeing good reasons to oppose mask mandates, especially for children. In response, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation “has threatened my medical licensure unless I expressly support and enforce a mask mandate for all students.”

In his public protest, Henrichs added that it’s bad for democracy when people tolerate this kind of intimidation.

Fortunately, in this particular case the intimidation is not being tolerated, for state lawmakers called for hearings on the matter.

The agency that threatened Dr. Henrichs soon apologized, apparently ending the threat to him. (According to the letter of apology, though, the complaint won’t be formally closed until the Medical Disciplinary Board meets on September 1.)

In addition, the entire Mahomet-Seymour school board of which Henrichs is a member has signed an op-ed defending him.

Their op-ed argues that board members should be “free to express their opinions, debate with their colleagues . . . and vote their conscience without the threat of coercion. . . .”

So it’s looking good for Dr. Henrichs. But power-holders with censorious mentalities are still out there, eager to crack down on speech with which they disagree.

Whenever they can get away with it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Recent popular posts