Politics should be more like Howard Stern

Whenever I make my weekly call into Dr. Laura Schlessinger, I don’t automatically get to speak to the good doc straight away. I have to ask my question first to a call screener. The call screener’s job is to filter out the irrelevant and redundant callers so that the audience is presented with fresh, unique people for Dr. Laura to berate. Basically, there’s a layer of oversight preventing unnecessary people from
wasting the doctor and audience’s time.

This concept needs to be brought into the Legislative process.
Last night I sat in a Recreation and Parks Department meeting for more than five hours, listening to the public’s opinions on such immensely vital issues as Astroturf and a chain-link fence.

Now I am all for the power of the people. I fully believe that lawmakers should have to answer to their constituents. I absolutely agree with the people’s right to be heard. However, I also believe in the people’s right to not have to listen to the same redundant crap for five hours.
Last night, during discussion on possible entrance fees to the Golden Gate Park botanical gardens, upwards of 35 different people took their two minutes to appeal to the commission.

How many of these people presented fresh, worthwhile points that were worth considering? Maybe the first three. The remainder of the time was spent repeating the same rhetoric ad nausea for over an hour. The panel had no power to stop the endless parade of folks regaling us with wild tales of their youth spent looking at plants.

One woman spoke on eight different topics and made sense exactly zero times. Commissioner Larry Martin fell asleep several times and Commissioner David Lee looked like an angry kid who had lost his ridalin.

What I propose is the implementation of the same system that radio shows exercise. There should be a speaker screener. Before you’re given the opportunity to address the panel, you must make your case to a fair, impartial third party. This party will decide your level of relevance to the issue. If you make the exact same point as someone else before you, sorry the commission already knows that fact. If you are just plain crazy, you will be taped for the year-end "commissionary style" blooper reel.

People who are directly affected by the issue will still get their voice heard, but the time-wasters will be filtered out of the meeting. They will however have a chance to make their speech, which is really all they want to do. Some just want to have their voices heard in any capacity. I believe, on normal basis, many of them only ever speak to their cats.

What you’ll have with my plan is a more efficient, worthwhile discussion by those intimately involved and informed on important issues. The commission will be more engaged, and thus, more capable of absorbing the information presented by the public.

Free speech is great. It’s the most important of the Constitutional amendments. But by the end of the meeting, I was willing to give up habeas corpus and quarter a few soldiers just to get out of there.