For those of you who follow my miscellaneous national and topical interests like signature-gathering, and Ward Connerly's SuperTuesday, you'll also know that I follow First Amendment questions of whatever type. The Paul Jacob story hits all three. Connerly is helping a group in Oklahoma collect signatures as I write. Signature-gathering difficulties there are driven largely by politics - and although the people of Oklahoma are quite rational, their Attorney General and special interests seem to have figured out that out and realize they must hamstring the people.

Enter Paul Jacob. Like him or hate him and his efforts, he helped a group in 2005 in Oklahoma collect signatures for a version of TABOR (taxpayer rights initiative). Taxpayer initiatives are serious challenges to government and special interests because when taxpayers can say no and turn the spigot off - special interests and the "governmental class" (the army of people working for the government get to vote, and self-lobby, too) get mad. Mad enough to put people who threaten them in jail.

So, when Democrat Attorney General Drew Edmonson told a grand jury to indict Jacob earlier this year, they jumped. Grand juries would indict cinder block if told to, and even under the best circumstances, a grand jury indictment is under a standard of evidence that there is simply enough evidence to warrant a trial - not that anyone is guilty. Regardless, the indictment was for "conspiracy" to "defraud the state", a stretch of that charge based on the underlying crime of ... coordinating signature-gatherers who did not intend to live in Oklahoma forever. That is, using "out-of-state" signature gatherers invalidates a signature in Oklahoma (nowhere in the Oklahoma code however, could I find a law criminalizing out-of-state gathering, merely the AG interpretation that residency means someone must intend to live in Oklahoma forever). From the non-crime of not knowing exactly where one might live in a few years, and two years following the Oklahoma state court's "referee" refusal to place TABOR on the 2006 ballot, the AG indicted 3 petition drive leaders (with no indictments for any criminal circulator below them, another hard piece of logic to follow). Now clearly this all contrived to make all signature-gathering of any type more difficult, and to plant the fear of criminal prosecution in the hearts of petition-drive leaders.

But the AG made a technical mistake in his grand jury indictment, and misused the multi-county nature of that body, so he had to drop the charges. Yesterday, he reissued the charges under his own office's direct power of prosecution, and is going full-steam ahead.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, or libertarian (I guess if you're authoritarian, you should support the AG), you should take note of this case. It's about control and power. It's about suppressing speech and petitioning. Sure, reasonable rules can invalidate bad or petitions created in error - and although there is probably no compelling interest in state residency requirements even if there were, this case is one of ambiguity in law being used as a blunt hammer to quash dissidents. Even if you are an opponent of Jacob's views, to remain silent when his speech and petition rights are subverted is to invite the same to happen to you when you disagree with the establishment.

In all, this is probably the most important First Amendment case, and clearly the most important petitioning case to arise from the year 2007. Follow it closely. Prevent it from happening in your state. Blog it if you can. Write a letter to the editor if its relevant. And be careful when you travel through Oklahoma.

Stephen Milloy reports here on a book (“Eco-Freaks”, Nelson Current, 2006) by fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) researcher John Berlau that argues, among other things, that the over-regulation and hysteria of 70s environmentalism and the ban on asbestos may have contributed to (the ultimate cause was still Osama bin Laden) the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Milloy writes that the book details the:

... series of events leading up to the decision to stop using asbestos fireproofing in the WTC and the post-Sept. 11 testing of the WTC-type fireproofing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Well after construction began on the WTC towers, the campaign of Mount Sinai Hospital’s Irving Selikoff to scare the public about asbestos reached World Trade Center construction manager Rino Monti, who became worried in May 1970 that office workers might be exposed to asbestos from air passing over exposed asbestos fireproofing that had been sprayed on to the buildings’ structural steel.

Selikoff and Monti pushed for asbestos substitutes, vouching for their safety and effectiveness – even though the substitutes had barely been tested against fire, according to WTC documents from the 1970s.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) testing apparently indicates that the eventual test results on the substitutes were later demonstrated unreliable, and that asbestos was superior (to at least the early substitutes).

Sure, there are environmental movements and issues that have proven to be tremendously beneficial to society, but we must be careful when we evaluate such questions. This is not to say that we should be using asbestos everywhere, but that environmental questions are still subject to the question of whether the cure is better than the curse and the alternatives fully tested. DDT was just such an issue. Sure, its bad stuff for humans to be around, but so are the malarial flies that DDT kills.

Occasional commenter Hans Bader, on the economic effects of race preference, also hails from CEI.

In an example of an over-reaching and lazy legislature or legislative services writer, Michigan is stuck with this example of craziness which is making the international wires.

It seems that, following a case where sex was traded for drugs, the Court agreed that the law, which defines as Criminal Sexual Conduct I (first degree rape, life-in-prison), any "sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony," could logically result in someone who commits adultery being sentenced to life in prison. No one since 1971 has been charged with a felony for adultery, but it is still on the books.

Now don't get me wrong. Adultery is a really bad thing and as a result there will be political momentum not to clean this up. But if we threw everyone who has committed it into jail for life for first degree rape ...

Time to clean up both laws. The newer law should be more precise and not include every conceivable linkage (that requires a bit of thought), and the older law updated.

UPDATE: Here's the Court of Appeals decision in a case where the law was actually used in a way the legislature intended, and to raise the stakes on a really bad punk who deserved the outcome (using drugs to coerce sexual favor is rape, so there is no sympathy here for this defendant). But that doesn't mean the law couldn't be misused, either, and still warrants a tightening.

Following a story from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, two Michigan families appeared on Feb. 21st in a consolidated case before the US Supreme Court. The case involved federal wetland regulations and a zeal of enforcement that expanded new laws on the issue allow federal and state regulators to engage in.

A little background:

The first case involves Midland resident John Rapanos, whose difficulties started in 1989 when the Michigan Department of Natural Resources ordered him to cease preparing his property for possible development. Rapanos had cut trees, removed brush and leveled his cornfield, which is surrounded by drainage ditches that Rapanos contends were dug in the early 1900s by order of the county commission.

The DNR, acting for the federal government, laid regulatory claim to the property under the Clean Water Act of 1972, which prohibits the discharge of dirt or sand into “navigable waters” without a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Regulators claimed that moving soil on the Rapanos property constituted a discharge of pollutants that required a permit because the drainage ditches might carry water to tributaries that could connect to navigable waters. The Rapanos property is approximately 20 miles from the nearest potentially connected navigable water.

So Rapanos actually filled the ditch, and he was prosecuted criminally for the action.

Nonetheless, the federal government in 1994 prosecuted Mr. Rapanos for filling wetlands on this property without a permit. He was convicted in 1995, fined $185,000 and sentenced to three years probation.

According to the MPCC report, U.S. District Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff, had "misgivings" which is why the above sentence was so "light". Zatkoff wrote:

(T)he case that I just sentenced prior to this case … was the case of Mr. Gonzalez, who was a person selling dope on the streets of the United States. He is an illegal person here. He’s a citizen of Cuba, not an American citizen. He has a prior criminal record. … So here we have a person who comes to the United States and commits crimes of selling dope and the government asks me to put him in prison for ten months. And then we have an American citizen who buys land, pays for it with his own money, and he moves some sand from one end to the other and government wants me to give him sixty-three months in prison. Now, if that isn’t our system gone crazy, I don’t know what is. And I am not going to do it.

Zatkoff's ruling - using the all-too-rare common-sense of a judge - must be filed in the "There is some law" category. And while I'm filing the rest of the case in the "no law" category (because of the absurd interpretations of the 1972 Clean Water Act), I'm creating a category of "too much law".

We can have good environmental and clean water protections without going overboard. It's a matter of precise definitions and not expanding the scope of laws by executive interpretation. Such actions harm the credibility of legitimate laws and protections of the environment, and create a resentment to the government that harms everyone.