Washington

Vancouver, Washington, Mayor Tim Leavitt enthusiastically supports a bridge project that would carry light rail trains from Portland, Oregon, into his town. “There is no more important opportunity for our city and our region than completion of the Columbia River Crossing,” he intones.

Transportation activist Margaret Tweet is more cautious. “Precious little discussion is held on the true transportation needs of our region by the government agencies that propose costly solutions,” she writes.

Back in 1995, Clark County — which includes the city of Vancouver — held a vote on a measure to fund the extension of Portland’s light rail to Vancouver. It was defeated. As if fearing repetition of this, today’s city “leaders” chose not to risk a similar negative vote. According to them, they alone should decide this expensive, controversial public works project.

So a group of citizens led by Larry Patella filed an initiative petition to gain a vote to forbid the city from spending any money to facilitate the Columbia River Crossing project. But their petition fell 32 signatures short of qualifying.

Then it was discovered that 606 people had signed the petition more than once. By state law, the county threw all the duplicates out.

So, seventy-five plaintiffs, including 44 folks who mistakenly signed the petition twice, sued to have their signatures count . . . just once. And last week a judge overturned the rule on duplicate signatures.

Is the initiative a go? Maybe not. Vancouver City Attorney Ted Gathe has issued a legal opinion saying the citizen-initiated ordinance is outside the power and scope of the initiative process. The city council seems poised to use the attorney’s opinion as an excuse to again block a vote of the people they serve.

Allegedly serve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I’ve lived near Washington, D.C., for 21 years, but somehow the local obsession for the Washington Redskins has never taken hold. Most of my “NFL time” has been spent rooting for Washington’s agony of defeat.

Recent seasons have been very, very good to me. But this year, an impressive rookie quarterback, Robert Griffin III, led the team into the playoffs. In the opening game, RGIII and the ’Skins jumped out to a 14-0 lead. But Griffin, already hurt, re-injured his knee and had to leave the game. The Seattle Seahawks came back to win, ending the Redskins’ season.

That’s when Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy pounced, blaming the team’s loss squarely on “bad karma” caused by the “offensive team name and demeaning sports mascot.” Milloy even called the star quarterback a “noble savage.”

Sports columnist Mike Wise urged Griffin to take up the issue of the team’s name. “I just figure that, as a good, decent inhabitant of the planet,” Wise wrote, “he would respect the groundswell of offended people who don’t want to cheer for a team that enshrines America’s persecution of its indigenous people.”

Hey, Native Americans are cool, and U.S. Government policy toward misnamed “Indians” was very uncool — and dishonest and corrupt. So while I hate to see teams being coerced to toss out mascots like Chiefs, Braves, Warriors, Fighting Sioux, Seminoles, Fighting Illini, I think it a grand effrontery that Washington’s football team is named the Redskins.

It’s not just that the name “Redskins” offends — the mascot represents Washington, home to the government that cheated and abused Native Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

When the local government of Washington, D.C., says, “Don’t worry” — people worry.

Matthew Marcou, deputy associate director of the District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation’s Public Space Regulation Administration, told those ruled by his long-worded administrative agency — the people working the city’s many food trucks, which feed lunch to a great number of Washingtonians and tourists on sidewalks every day — not to worry.

Just because the wording of a new sidewalk regulation would shut down eight of the city’s ten most popular food trucks doesn’t mean the good folks at the Public Space Regulation Administration couldn’t simply — almost magically — grant a waiver.

Be happy.

Still, there are the malcontents, the businesspeople who want some sort of certainty about the rules controlling their enterprise. The Washington Post reports that “Owners of food trucks . . . are put off by a still-unknown process that relies on the kindness of bureaucrats to keep their businesses alive.”

Che Ruddell-Tabisola is the D.C. Food Truck Association’s executive director and also a co-owner of the BBQ Bus. “[W]hy would you put forward regulations that are only successful when you make an exception to the rule?” asked Che.

The word “regulate” comes from the word “regular”; the goal of regulation being to make things regular. Therefore, regulations that require significant use of waivers fail. They aren’t rules at all. They constitute, instead, a labyrinth of economically suffocating and graft-inducing red tape.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Josh Sutinen is 17. He can’t vote yet. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t having an effect on the politics of his hometown of Longview, Washington.

After his father’s second valiant if unsuccessful attempt to get into the Evergreen State’s House of Representatives, Josh became fascinated with political change. Conveniently, an issue soon darkened his town: Red light cameras.

Josh organized an initiative campaign to remove the red light cameras. Indeed, visitors to the family business, Sutinen Consulting, will sometimes find Josh manning the front desk — and then bringing another employee up from the back room (where they fix computers and do other technical things beyond my understanding) while he fields calls from major newspapers around the state, even around the country.

The campaign has been difficult; the powers that be in Longview (“The Planned City”) fought back. First they balked at giving the collected signatures to the county, to be counted. Then they even sued the petitioners — Josh Sutinen and Mike Wallin — to prevent the initiative from appearing on the ballot.

So the petitioners are fighting back. Josh is now preparing to gather signatures for an Initiative 2, which would prevent the city from suing citizens who draw up initiatives that challenge city policies.

Joining Josh is initiative guru Tim Eyman. Eyman has worked against red light cameras up north, and is enthusiastic about Longview’s second initiative as well, saying it is “exceptionally good policy and something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

I’ll keep you posted.

This is CommonSense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Not long ago on Townhall.com I briefly told the tale of two journalists, both arrested for taking pictures at a public meeting. This stunk of tyranny, to me. “Government cameras on citizens? Dangerous. Citizen lenses trained on government? Essential safety devices.”

What I didn’t mention was that the public meeting was for the District of Columbia’s taxi-cab commission. The commission oversees what was once a remarkably free system of taxis, but has become more regulated while also earning a reputation for corruption. Pete Tucker, one of the reporters, was on the scene to cover a breaking story related to that corruption: The commission’s proposal to regulate the industry using the over-used and idiotic “medallion” system, familiar to New Yorkers and far too many other city-dwellers.

Well, Tucker’s work has reached the completion stage, now, with Reason TV’s video about the medallion system up on YouTube. It’s an eye-opener.

The gist of the piece may be familiar: Government regulation helps bigger businesses at the expense of smaller ones . . . as well as consumers. You may have read similar tales from economists such as those in the French Liberal School (Frédéric Bastiat), the Chicago School (Milton Friedman), the Austrian School (Ludwig von Mises), and Public Choice (James Buchanan). Courtesy of the Reason video, now you can see ordinary citizens making the case. One said, “We know tyranny when we smell it.”

The stench is also of corruption, which has driven the politics behind the new regulatory scheme.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.