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Common Sense

Lessons to Recall

There is more to an election than just the outcome. The process counts too. The dialogue between candidates and the voters. California voters did a lot more than say “Hasta La Vista” to one governor and “Hola!” to another. For one thing, there was plenty of poetic justice.

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant, was attacked for allegedly insensitive opposition to allowing illegal aliens to get drivers’ licenses. This was supposed to hurt him in the Latino community. But doggone it if exit polls didn’t show Latino voters also opposed granting the licenses. Meanwhile, Davis was flip-flopping madly and in vain to gain their support, first vetoing then signing the new law.

There was justice in the fact that Davis, well-known for campaigns where he savaged his opponent, had no opponent but himself in the recall. Still, even Gray Davis sent a great message. His concession speech was in the best tradition of American democracy, as Davis urged those who loved California to accept the verdict. It showed character. I hope the impact of this recall will be felt throughout the country.

Only 17 states have a recall process, and only 24 have some process for voter-sponsored initiatives. California’s process isn’t the perfect model, but citizens should be empowered in every state. After the election, Arnold said, “For the people to win, politics as usual must lose.” Can the people win in your state? Do you have voter recall of officials? Do you have Initiative & Referendum? Well, you should.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Come Back, Isabel

Isabel, we hardly knew ya. I live in the DC area. A few weeks ago a hurricane called Isabel paid us a visit. It had skipped past Florida and Georgia and decided to rage through North Carolina, Virginia and DC. More a tropical storm than a hurricane by the time it got to our neck of the woods. Still, it caused damage. There were power outages.  The wrong power got hit, though. For example, the DC Metro system decided to shut down its subway when it was not yet really necessary to do so for the sake of safety. In fact, the system was shut down in the middle of the day, and hours before the storm was scheduled to show up.

Why did they Metro this? Power play. Social engineering: they wanted to encourage people to stay off the street. The chairman of Metro’s board, Jim Graham, told The Washington Post that the decision to close was “part of a coordinated action to get people to stay at home.” So because Metro decided that it knew better than its customers whether its service was really wanted and needed, thousands of people had to scramble for other transportation.

Totally unnecessarily. Metro is, of course, not an independent private company worried above all to keep its customers happy. They’re a brainchild of government, and subsidized by the government. And they seem to think they are obliged when they have the chance to impose bureaucratic mothering on their riders. This is why I say the wrong power lines got knocked down that day.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Walk and Chew Davis

The apocalypse . . . Armageddon . . . the California recall. Well, that’s one down. And I feel good about it. The recall was called all manner of wild and crazy names by elitist bipartisan hipsters. However, it turned out to be just another example of the American-as-apple-pie process of petitioning our government, scheduling an election, and then voting. What’s not to like?

In fact, after all the predictions that the winner would get just a tiny percentage of the total certainly less votes than Governor Gray Davis received just a year ago it turned out that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s percentage and vote total bested Davis. Arnold terminated the guy.  In 2002, Davis got 47 percent of the vote in an election with very low turnout and with 60 percent of voters expressing disgust for their choices.

I feel good knowing that a clear majority of Californians got what they wanted: an end to Davis’s corrupt and incompetent tenure and a new governor with more support and a chance to do better. Isn’t that what we all hope our political process will deliver? The recall even peeled off plenty of votes from standard Democratic constituencies.

If this was a Republican plot, Republicans have gotten smarter. Some said the process would be too confusing. But voters, said to be too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, went through 135 candidates on the ballot like a knife through butter. Elections, the rule of law, democracy, citizen control . . . Bring it on.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

A Worm in the Apple

Suppose you believe in term limits, as I do. Should I use tax money to fund my efforts to term-limit politicians? Not that they’d give me that money anyway. But wouldn’t it be wrong to grab your wallet to support a cause you don’t believe in? Heck, it might be wrong for me to grab your wallet anyway. Yet I read stories all the time about how government officials use our own money against us.

A few months ago New York City landlords, being taxpayers, had to help pay for protests in favor of price controls over their own property. Despite the Big Apple’s big deficit, the city council spent $75,000 to organize protestors pushing rent control. Including $28,000 to bus in protestors from Albany.

Why on earth should a landlord have to pay a nickel to fund the agitation of people who want to bop him in the nose? It’s ridiculous. And why should other taxpayers have to pay? Most importantly of all, doesn’t this destroy the political process with those in power putting a thumb on the scales?

Gene Russianoff, an attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, says this type of thing is typical. He says, “Elected officials make a call about what they think is in the interests of their constituents.” Gifford Miller, council speaker, is blind to the travesty. Or at least pretends to be. “I think it’s an entirely appropriate use of our dollars,” he says.

I guess this means that if the politicians say it’s for my own good to hit me over the head with a baseball bat, I’ll also have to pay for the baseball bat. Now I understand.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

On Leave for Stealing

I live in the nation’s capital, so scandals in DC sometimes get my attention faster than scandals in the rest of the country. If DC teachers union officials are lining their pockets with money siphoned from union dues, sure, I notice. But union officials are corrupt elsewhere too.

Recently the former president of a teachers union in Miami, Florida, Pat Tornillo, pled guilty for robbing the union. The amount is $650,000, money that bought luxury cruises, jewelry, clothing, and other goodies. Tornillo charged a lot of his extracurricular expenditures on the union’s credit card. An FBI agent, Hector Pesquera, says, “It is nauseating to see the amount of money Tornillo spent on exotic trips and luxuries when the school teachers were going without raises for many years.”  I guess that’s the point of stealing, to get more money than you otherwise can. To be fair, Tornillo’s annual salary was a paltry $243,000. How could Tornillo get away with it as long as he did, on such a huge scale?

In the DC scandals, accountability also seemed lax. And it’s not even as if it was hard to catch in these cases. The accountants might have noticed the missing money when they review the bank statements. Or the credit card statements. The Florida union didn’t even fire Tornillo after he got arrested they just put him on leave. Yet their own records showed that he had taken their money. Were they hoping he would be acquitted? Surely there are better standards we can exemplify for our kids.

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Ice Cream From Hell

I support ice cream and disagree that the Food and Drug Administration should prohibit all ice cream. Keep your hands away from my spoon, FDA!

Okay, the FDA doesn’t want to ban ice cream. It just wants the power to do so. It wants the power to define substances like dioxin as health threats at any level of concentration whatever. And guess what. There’s dioxin in ice cream. Steven Milloy, with the Cato Institute, reports that a few years ago FDA issued an alarmist reassessment of dioxin. Congress asked FDA to get an independent scientific assessment of its conclusions, but the agency has yet to do so. Milloy thinks it’s because they know their “finding” wouldn’t survive that evaluation. “Left to its own devices,” says Milloy, “the EPA might set a limit 1,000 times lower than [existing standards].

It’s no wonder Congress was skeptical. . . .” The EPA wants to say that any level of dioxin, no matter how far below the current threshold, is potentially cancerous. Milloy points out that new super-stringent standards would give the agency “potentially unlimited regulatory authority over any source of dioxin emissions.”

Like many chemicals, dioxin exists in nature as well in human technology. And Milloy notes that just one serving of “Ben & Jerry’s ice cream [contains] about 2,000 times the amount of dioxin that the EPA claims is safe . . .” There’s dioxin in ice cream. Now you know. But you’ll keep eating ice cream. Why am I not surprised?

This is Common Sense.  I’m Paul Jacob.