Life After Kelo: Looking Back and Forward It’s one of the most hated Supreme Court decisions in decades, and it happened just three years ago. I’m talking about Kelo vs. New London, where a bare majority of the justices decided that it was OK for local governments looking to increase tax revenue to take land from their citizens and give it to a developer. Now, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution permits the use of eminent domain for “public use.” But over the decades, the courts had expanded the meaning of “public use” from takings for roads, schools and hospitals—things anyone can use or benefit from—to takings for “public benefit.” That meant urban renewal efforts and other plans for economic development, the argument being that eventually the public would benefit from the increased tax revenue. Kelo took that a step further and said that governments can take land from a private citizen if the government thinks the land would be more beneficial to the public in the hands of another private entity. The decision outraged even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote in her stinging dissent: “To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings ‘for public use’ is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property—and thereby effectively to erase the words ‘for public use’ from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” Appropriately, the aftermath of Kelo in New London itself shows the importance of the Constitutional limit on eminent domain and the absurdity of trying to determine “public benefit” based on predictions of future revenue. Three years after winning the right to take the property of Susette Kelo and her neighbors, there hasn’t been any public benefit in any form from the land that city officials took. In fact, the city doesn’t even know what to do with the land now that officials’ handpicked developer couldn’t muster the financing necessary to build anything....
Ways and Means Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most influential public figure in fighting racism against the American Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to success might run down Embassy Row. Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence -- a warrior. On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming....
Agricultural Policy: The Seen and the Unseen The full long-run effects of any government program are never known in advance. To illustrate, consider U.S. farm policies. A host of “emergency” agricultural programs were enacted by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Although the particulars of these programs have undergone numerous changes since then, the fundamental functions and impacts of many of them remain intact even though economic conditions bear little resemblance to those of the 1930s. The New Deal programs have proven to be not only persistent, but also profligate and regressive. In recent years, more than half of all direct government farm payments have gone to the 10 percent of farms with incomes of $250,000 or more. This is not likely to change in the new farm bill. Farmers, if married, will be eligible for subsidies if their annual incomes are as high as $1.5 million. Perennial government aid to farmers with such income levels was not foreseen when farm programs were initiated! The unforeseen consequences of U.S. farm policy may be even more important in programs for specific crops. For example, the price support program for sugar restricts imports and (in some recent years) domestic production. The program increases the domestic sugar price, often to levels more than double the world price. When the sugar program began, who could have foreseen that a major corporation, Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation (ADM), would become a major beneficiary? Although ADM does not produce sugar, it has reaped huge benefits from artificially high U.S. sugar prices, which increase demand for (and thus increase the price of) sugar substitutes. ADM is a major producer of high-fructose corn syrup, a widely used sugar substitute whose production became economical largely because of the price umbrella offered by the sugar program....
Animal-Rights Farm Should apes be treated like people? Under a resolution headed for passage in the Spanish parliament, respecting the personal rights of "our non-human brothers" won't just be a good idea. It'll be the law. The resolution, approved last week by a parliamentary committee with broad support, urges the government to implement the agenda of the Great Ape Project, an organization whose founding declaration says apes "may not be killed" or "arbitrarily deprived of their liberty." No more routine confinement. According to Reuters, the proposal would commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments. Proponents hail the resolution as the first crack in the "species barrier." Peter Singer, the philosopher who co-founded GAP, puts it this way: "There is no sound moral reason why possession of basic rights should be limited to members of a particular species." If aliens or monkeys are shown to have moral or intellectual abilities similar to ours, we should treat them like people....
Republican buoyed by calls for energy exploration A top U.S. Republican cited on Monday a surge in support among liberals for increased energy exploration as a reason why the Democratic-led Congress may act soon to allow expanded drilling in the United States. President George W. Bush and many Republicans in Congress support opening up drilling as a way of taming high gasoline prices, which have hit a record $4.11 a gallon. Democrats in Congress, however, have been looking at controlling oil speculation as well advocating greater conservation. "There's clearly a dramatic shift across the ideological divide in America in favor of producing more energy here at home," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters. "I can't imagine that the majority (Democrats in Congress) is going to ignore that indefinitely," McConnell added....
New Cars in California Must Display Global Warming Score California is making it mandatory for cars to be labeled with global warming scores, figures that take into account emissions from vehicle use and fuel production.The law requiring the labels goes into effect at the start of next year for all 2009 model cars, though its expected the labels will be popping up on cars in the coming months.The labeling law forces cars for sale to display a global warming score, on a scale of one to 10, which is based on how vehicles in the same model year compare to one another. The higher the score, the cleaner a car is. The score takes into account emissions related to production of fuel for each vehicle as well as the direct emissions from vehicles.The score will be displayed next to the already-required smog score, which also rates cars one to 10 for how many smog-forming emissions they emit. For both scores, an average vehicle will have a score of five.California is the first state of pass such as law, and a similar law will take effect in New York for 2010 model year vehicles....
Official: Feds should consider Rainbow Family ban The U.S. Forest Service should consider banning the Rainbow Family from Forest Service land after a confrontation last week led to the arrest of at least eight people, a top agency official said Monday. John Twiss, director of Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations in Washington, D.C., said he was among the officers who responded when Rainbow Family members threw sticks and rocks at federal officers. The confrontation started when officers tried to arrest a member of the Rainbow group for an alleged drug offense. Twiss characterized the Rainbow participants as "non-compromising," "arrogant" and "anti-authority." He said this year's episode and other disturbances at recent gatherings should prompt a review of whether Rainbow Family events are allowed. "I think we have to have that discussion within the agency," Twiss said. "We spend an awful lot of time and effort on these people. And frankly, the taxpayers deserve better."....
Montana greens to loggers: Come back! For decades now, the green extreme has argued the industries that develop the nation's natural resources for commercial use ought to be forced off the West's "public" lands. And they didn't much care which tactic did the job. If sawmills could be shut down and whole towns thrown out of work to supposedly "protect" the spotted owl or some other creature -- or even some small local populace of a species found in abundance elsewhere -- that effort was "good to go." In Missoula, Mont., the environmental extremists appear to have pretty much won that battle. The Plum Creek Timber Company still owns 8 million acres of mostly forested land nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana. But they don't cut trees on a lot of that land now. Instead, the former logging company has turned into "a real estate investment trust," The Washington Post reports. And what do real estate investment trusts do with forested land if it's no longer judged politically or economically rewarding to cut the trees for lumber? Are the environmentalists happy that they've finally convinced the loggers to do something else with those lands? What do you think?....
Public prompts changes in roadless plan Nearly 140,000 people have weighed in since January on a proposed rule for managing the more than 9.3 million acres of roadless backcountry in Idaho and the U.S. Forest Service says the comments have prompted it to make changes in the proposal. The Forest Service released a summary Thursday of public comments collected during a four-month period that ended in April. It's all part of the lengthy process of deciding how Idaho's roadless areas and other untouched lands will be managed, preserved or opened to logging and other uses. Changes to the proposed rule, stemming from public concerns, include better definitions of where road construction and tree removal is allowed in the case of threatening fire activity, said Brad Gilbert, the Forest Service's team leader on the proposed Idaho roadless plan. Other changes included strengthening protections on lands in the Boulder and White Clouds mountains of central Idaho, Gilbert said, as well as loosening restrictions in forests where road-building and tree removal has been allowed in the past. "We're making quite a few modifications to the rule based on those comments," Gilbert said....
Preparedness under fire: Federal firefighting system understaffed, report shows The federal firefighting system is "imploding" in California, due to poor spending decisions and high job vacancy rates, as the region struggles to keep pace with what looks to be a historic fire season, a firefighters' advocacy group charges. As a result, the firefighters say, small fires have exploded into extended, multimillion-dollar conflagrations because the U.S. Forest Service has been unable to contain them during the early "initial attack" stage. "The federal fire system is imploding in California. They are crossing their fingers and just hoping they get through the season without a disaster," said Casey Judd, who represents government firefighters from five agencies through the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association. As the "sheer number" of California wildfires pushed the nation to its worst measurable level of wildland-fire preparedness last week — Level 5 — a national multiagency coordinating group announced in a memo Monday that firefighter staffing levels in Northern California "cannot be maintained." Of all the agencies battling California wildland fires — including the region's two largest, the Indians and Basin fires in Monterey County's Los Padres National Forest — it is U.S. Forest Service crews that suffer the highest vacancy rates, entering this year's season with an estimated shortage of 500 firefighters, Judd said....
Rodent plague threatens ferrets The area of plague-infected black-tailed prairie dogs has more than doubled in western South Dakota since mid-May, and the disease could begin to seriously hurt the state's population of endangered black-footed ferrets. Plague is almost always fatal to infected prairie dogs and has killed a large number of the rodents, wildlife experts said. Black-footed ferrets hunt and dine almost exclusively on prairie dogs. "When ferrets eat an infected prairie dog, they'll get a massive dose" of plague, said Kevin Atchley, Wall District ranger for the U.S. Forest Service. "It's likely that some ferrets have perished." The infected area has bloomed from 4,000 acres to 9,100 acres as of last week, Atchley said. Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The disease, also known as bubonic plague, spread through the West after it appeared in San Francisco in 1902....
Enviros seek options to fight Roan drilling As the clock counts down for the planned lease of the top of the Roan Plateau for natural gas drilling, environmentalists are pinning their hopes on the courts, Congress and administrative actions to delay or block it. Gov. Bill Ritter, who has criticized the Bureau of Land Management plan and offered his own alternative, said his office does not plan to protest the Aug. 14 leases formally. Ritter said Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., is working on including his plan in the defense authorization bill pending in the Senate. Salazar, who also attended the event, confirmed that he is trying to submit legislation to make Ritter’s plan law before the lease sale. Environmentalists say none of those plans goes far enough to preserve the surface of the Roan Plateau, which has become a key battleground in the fight between energy development and environmental protection on public lands in the West. They are preparing to file a lawsuit arguing that the BLM failed to address the environmental and fiscal impacts of its plan adequately, and will ask a U.S. district court in Denver to block the leases until the lawsuit is resolved. Environmentalists are also planning to file a written protest of all the leases on top of the Roan, a move likely to delay any drilling, if not the actual issuing of the leases. According to BLM rules, no leasing can take place until the protests are resolved....
Suit attacks relocation effort Two environmental groups have filed a federal lawsuit against the Army and the Bureau of Land Management alleging that proper environmental studies were not conducted before nearly 800 desert tortoises were relocated for Fort Irwin's expansion. The Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors, which filed the lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, allege the federally endangered tortoises were moved to inferior habitat that included numerous roads and pockets of diseased tortoises. They also allege that illegal off-roading and dumping occurs at the site east of the Calico Mountains and south of Coyote Lake. "It's time to overhaul Fort Irwin's disastrous tortoise relocation program," said Ileene Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity, in a news release. "Though we can't stop the fort's expansion, we can ensure that the relocation of these rare animals is done right." The National Training Center and Fort Irwin initiated the tortoise relocation efforts in order to expand its borders to train soldiers being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress authorized the expansion in 2001, and the Army has spent more than $8.5 million on research and relocation of the tortoises....
Noisy national parks A lot of us seek out national parks to absorb that careful balance of natural sounds and breathtaking quiet. And even though the parks get more popular every year, we can usually find our silent spot — at least until a jet comes roaring overhead or an engine hums in the distance. But we might have to get used to it: America's flagship national parks are getting louder and louder, according to the Park Service's "natural sounds" office. Yes, the National Park Service actually has a "natural sounds" office, based in Ft. Collins, CO, dedicated to preserving the natural noises of a park — like howling wolves, roaring waterfalls, and even music from sanctioned events. They've discovered intrusive noises are among the things that annoy national park visitors most, and noise becomes a central concern for issues like helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon or snowmobiles in Yellowstone. Extraneous noise also interferes with wildlife, making it harder for animals to hear predators and generally raising their stress levels. The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees maintains a list of particularly threatened parks....
National Park Service impresses online with WebRangers site The National Park Service is reaching out to kids with an innovative Web site that gets them excited about visiting our nation's parklands before they've even left home. WebRangers, a program managed by the NPS Division of Interpretation and Education at http://www.nps.gov/webrangers/ is the recently added online companion to the Park Service's successful "Junior Ranger" program. Every year, over 450,000 children take part in Junior Ranger activities at one of the 290 national parks, where they can explore nature, learn about U.S. history, and take part in each park's special activities designed to really get their hands dirty. WebRangers enables children across the country and around the globe to explore the parks from the comfort of their couch---with the hope that they will be inspired to slip on a pair of hiking boots and go visit one....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: National attention brought sensational coverage Twenty years ago, Bob Ekey couldn't believe what he was seeing on television. Just outside his room at the Three Bears Lodge in West Yellowstone, a CNN reporter was broadcasting live that ash from fires burning in Yellowstone National Park was falling as he spoke. It was snow. “I wanted to go out and tackle the guy,” said Ekey, a Billings Gazette reporter covering the 1988 fires. “He sensationalized an already sensational story.” Most of the fires started outside the park in May and June. Media interest in the fires was local. “This was a regional story with small national interest until it kicked into August,” said Al Nash, the Yellowstone National Park spokesman, who in 1988 was news director at a Billings television station. “The networks and big newspapers weren't here until August.” By that time, some of the park's treasured places, such as Old Faithful Inn, were threatened, and national news crews poured in. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis even made an appearance in West Yellowstone, declaring that the event was the only game in town. But according to accounts, some members of the national media were clueless about the restorative role of fire....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: Back after the burn In a spot severely burned by the 1988 North Fork fire, a National Park Service interpretive sign notes that the area surrounding the boardwalk may be a meadow for decades. Instead, spring-green lodgepole pine trees up to 15 feet high have taken root across the hillside. The sign points out the misconceptions held by many after the 1988 fires burned almost one-third of Yellowstone National Park - that the landscape would take a long time to rejuvenate, that meadows might replace forests in some places and that some soils were so badly burned they were sterilized and no plants could take root. “There's just a lot of myth around the fires that's taken for truth,” said Don Despain, 67, a retired fire ecologist who worked in the park in 1988. “All of (the theories) have been proved wrong. By 1988, I knew that those were not true. The '81, '79 and '76 fires were just as hot as 1988.” During the summer of 1988, when 794,000 acres of Yellowstone burned, Despain was criticized for advocating fire as a natural part of the northern Rocky Mountains' ecology. He helped write Yellowstone's first fire management plan in 1972, which allowed naturally ignited fires to burn in two areas. By 1975, the policy was updated to allow natural fires in all but developed areas. “Fire in a forest that's dependent on fire, it's not destructive, it's recycling itself,” said Bob Barbee, Yellowstone superintendent in 1988. “It's a fact of life, like rain and sunshine.” Barbee wrote Yosemite National Park's first natural resource management plan, which included the use of prescribed fires, or fires set intentionally to burn fuels and reduce the risk of larger, more destructive blazes. Unfortunately for the Park Service, the summer of 1988 proved to be unusual. A dry spring was followed by a drier-than-usual July accompanied by lightning storms and high winds. Initially, lightning-caused fires were allowed to burn in remote areas, but by July 21, as seven fires burned in Yellowstone, federal officials ordered full suppression of all fires....
Yellowstone fires 20 years later: Foliage regrowth defied forecast Within days of the fires, new grasses and plants like fireweed had sprouted. Lodgepole pines - which produce conventional pine cones and also serotinous cones that release seeds only when exposed to great heat - dispersed from 15,000 to 2 million seeds per acre. An average of 2,000 to 12,000 later germinated in each acre. About 24 percent of the park's whitebark pine forest burned, but by 1995, whitebark pine seedlings had been found in every one of 275 study plots established to chart regrowth after the fire. “We were very concerned about the spread of non-native vegetation in the burned areas,” Renkin said. But besides Canada thistle - a temporary post-fire success thanks to its small, wind-borne seeds and deep roots - few invasive species took hold in significant numbers. That first winter was a stark, black-and-white portrait of burned trees and snow, Renkin said, but the following summer brought “the greatest wildflower show ever.” “Boom! The purple lupine came out. Then the daisies would come on,” he said. After widespread news reports on the fires, throngs of curious people showed up the next summer, and 1989 was the busiest year of the decade. Some predicted a grim future for the park, especially along a 660-acre site known as Blowdown, accessible from the road between Norris Junction and Canyon Village....
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Monday, July 07, 2008
Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report Biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent, according to the findings of an unpublished World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday. The daily said the report was finished in April but was not published to avoid embarrassing the US government, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent. Biofuels, which supporters claim are a "greener" alternative to using fossil fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and rising food prices will be on the agenda when G8 leaders meet in Japan next week for their annual summit. The report's author, a senior World Bank economist, assessed that contrary to claims by US President George W. Bush, increased demand from India and China has not been the cause of rising food prices. "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases," the report said. Droughts in Australia have also not had a significant impact, it added. Instead, European and US drives for greater use of biofuels has had the biggest effect....
9th Circuit: Judges shouldn't act as scientists An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled it's improper for federal judges to act as scientists when weighing in on disputed U.S. Forest Service timber projects. Timber industry lobbyists and Forest Service officials called the unanimous ruling overturning a challenge to a northern Idaho logging sale significant, partly because it emerged from a court often seen as favorable to environmental groups. In the ruling released Wednesday, the judges dumped a July 2007 decision by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel that halted the Mission Brush timber sale in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. Environmental groups The Lands Council, based in Spokane, Wash., and the Wild West Institute, in Missoula, Mont., contended the Forest Service's logging plan exceeded what was needed to restore the forest's historic character and claimed logging would harm the region's ecosystem for species including small, migratory owls. The ruling also overturns a 2005 9th Circuit decision in which judges concluded the Forest Service's approval of logging in burned areas of western Montana's Lolo National Forest was based on an arbitrary and capricious environmental analysis. U.S. Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, called this "the most important decision involving a Forest Service environmental case in the last two decades," saying it restores the ability of federal agencies, not meddling judges, to exercise discretion over timber sales. "The judges established a much more limited framework for judicial review of Forest Service decisions - a framework that's much more consistent with the standard use by other circuits," Rey told The Associated Press on Thursday. "The court says its role is not to act as a panel of scientists. They wanted to move back to a more appropriate role." Timber industry representatives said this will help stop judges from asserting their opinions over the decisions of Forest Service managers....
High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns The price of gas isn't an annoyance here. It's a calamity. Peggy Hanley uses a generator that burns a gallon of diesel fuel every hour — at about $5 a gallon— to power Forks General Store, the only place to buy groceries for miles around. There's no electric service, so Hanley, the owner, uses the generator to run eight refrigerators, nine freezers, lights and two ice machines for the store, which has been in a trailer since a fire destroyed the original building in 1994. There are no utilities and no public transportation in this unincorporated town of a couple hundred people along a narrow road that winds through the mountains 314 miles north of Sacramento. Many people here buy gas for their vehicles and gas or diesel for generators that power their homes. "I'm scared to death" of rising fuel prices, Hanley says. At the store, the hub for visiting whitewater rafters and residents of other isolated towns, gas cost $5.30 a gallon on a recent day when the national average was $4.07. This community may be an extreme example of how rising gas prices are hitting rural Americans particularly hard, but people in small towns from Maine to Alaska are in a similar bind as those here. Soaring gasoline prices are a double whammy for many rural residents: They often pay more than people who live in cities and suburbs because of the expense of hauling fuel to their communities, and they must drive greater distances for life's necessities: work, groceries, medical care and, of course, gas....
Utah-Nevada water standoff quiet, fierce On moonless nights here in the Utah-Nevada borderlands of Snake Valley, the naked eye can see five planets, countless stars and the great swath of the Milky Way. Climb the hill to Great Basin National Park and one can see the nighttime glow of Las Vegas, whose leaders say their sprawling city must have the water under Snake Valley - or wither and die. And they are coming for it, making plans for a 285-mile pipeline to tap the aquifer that stretches from Salt Lake City to Death Valley and take the water south. At the same time, Utah wants to build a pipeline on Lake Powell to suck up Colorado River water and send it northward to growing desert communities before it gets anywhere near Glitter Gulch. For now, the two driest states in the nation are in a quiet standoff, fitfully negotiating or scuffing lines in the sand. Eventually, though, the outcome of this tale of two pipelines, begun with an agreement struck 86 years ago to share the Colorado and now groaning under rapid population growth and climate distress, could shake the foundations of Western water law....
Bridger Fire fuels distrust of Army One sign of the distrust between the Army and the ranchers around the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site is that weeks after the Bridger Fire was extinguished, questions remain about how Fort Carson personnel managed the 48,500-acre fire that burned for two weeks on the training site and spread onto private lands. "Did they throw all the resources at the fire that they could have? Nobody will know that because in the first days, the Army didn't tell anybody what was going on," said Lon Robertson, a Kim-area rancher and president of the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition. "I know people first spotted smoke on the training site on (June 9)." Robertson also is a firefighter with the Kim volunteer department and he said the rural fire departments at Hoehne, Branson, Springfield and elsewhere rely on each other for help when the summer wildfire season begins. La Junta Fire Chief Aaron Eveatt said his department largely was kept in the dark about what was happening with the Bridger Fire until the Type II incident team took over. The Forest Service incident teams, made up of veteran wildfire managers, are accustomed to dealing with big fires, the public, the news media and local communities when they arrive at a blaze. "I don't want to second-guess how another department fought a fire, but it was like night and day after the Type II team arrived," Eveatt said. "That's when we were notified to be on standby to protect residences on private land."....
Legacy of UT's oil wealth: a denuded landscape Investors appealed to the patron saint of impossible causes when oil drilling began on University of Texas System land in 1921. It didn't hurt. Santa Rita No. 1 blew in on May 28, 1923, after rose petals blessed by a priest were scattered from the top of the derrick at the behest of some Catholic women in New York who had purchased shares in the Texon Oil and Land Co., which drilled that first well. Since then, the UT System's 2.1 million acres in West Texas have produced $4.4 billion in royalty payments and other mineral income for the Permanent University Fund, an endowment that supports the UT and Texas A&M University systems. But this long-running bonanza for higher education exacted a price from the remote, semiarid landscape where it all began. Millions of barrels of salt water, a byproduct of oil and natural gas production, contaminated 11 square miles, or more than 7,000 acres, killing virtually all vegetation and leaving the land vulnerable to wind and water erosion. Hundreds of mesquite stumps with three feet of exposed roots testify to the dramatic loss of topsoil....
Focus on elk as disease persists near Yellowstone Federal officials are considering a tentative proposal that calls for capturing or killing infected elk in Yellowstone National Park to eliminate a serious livestock disease carried by animals in the area. Government agencies have killed more than 6,000 wild bison leaving Yellowstone over the last two decades in an attempt to contain brucellosis, which causes pregnant cattle to abort their young. Cattle in parts of Wyoming and Montana where bison haven't roamed for decades are being infected, and livestock officials in both states are now targeting elk as the cause. "We've got way too many elk," said John Scully, a rancher living in Montana's Madison Valley. "Clearly with so many elk, the risk rises. We need to reduce their numbers." A tentative proposal, drafted by federal officials, sets a goal of eliminating the disease — not just controlling it in bison and in elk. Livestock officials say infected elk herds around Yellowstone must be culled — an explosive proposition for a prized big game species that has thrived under the protection of a dedicated constituency of hunting groups. Nevertheless, pressure is mounting to kill or capture more of the animals....
Cattle Fever Ticks Lay Claim To A Million Acres In Texas The Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) marked an ominous anniversary July 3 by expanding the preventive cattle fever tick quarantine area in south Texas by 307,000 acres, after the dangerous livestock pests were detected on cattle outside quarantine areas in Starr and Zapata counties. Fever ticks, capable of carrying and transmitting deadly “tick fever” to cattle, have been detected on livestock or wildlife on 139 Texas pastures during the past 12 months. “In July 2007, the first preventive quarantine was established-39,325 acres in Starr County-to enable the US. Department of Agriculture’s Tick Force and the TAHC to inspect and treat livestock moved from the area, get ahead of the fever tick and push it back across the quarantine line,” said Dr. Bob Hillman, Texas’ state veterinarian and head of the Texas Animal Health Commission, the state’s livestock and poultry health regulatory agency. “Now, a year later, we have more than a million acres under preventive quarantines in Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Maverick, Dimmit and Webb counties, in addition to the half-million acres in the permanent fever tick quarantine zone that runs alongside the Rio Grande, from Del Rio to Brownsville.”....
Weak horses sent to Mexico to be slaughtered The traders at Dallas County's half-filled horse auction knew the fate of their scrawny thoroughbreds even before they herded them into the ring. And it wasn't to go back to the ranch. The ones with visible backbones and skin stretched over their ribs – at least half of the 36 horses for sale – would probably end up in Mexico, where money can still be made off horse slaughter. Texas horse traders say it's the best solution to the combined wallop of forced American slaughterhouse closures last year and one of the worst horse markets in history. "We don't have anywhere to move them, and they're starving to death," said Steven Oden, a horse trader from Terrell whose prize horses once sold for $8,000 but now go for $800. Breeders, ranchers and cowboys are struggling to continue a livelihood that extends generations. The closure of the kill plants coupled with the rising price of hay and fuel means rising numbers of horses with dwindling funds to care for them. Horse owners say they're left with little option but to sell their horses to a "killer buyer," or trader who buys the horses at a reduced price and takes them to Mexico for slaughter. About 25,000 horses have been shipped to Mexico for slaughter this year, 10,000 more than this time last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture....
Taste of western culture The best place to get a taste of western culture at the Stampede is at the Western Showcase art show. Since 1912, western art has been a fixture at Stampede and now the showcase has grown to become one of the top western art shows in Canada. Located in Hall C and Hall D of the Roundup Centre, the Western Showcase features work of over 100 artisans. The Western Showcase is the largest western art show in Canada and gives visitors a first-hand look at unique pieces that celebrates cowboy culture. From a life-size moose sculpture, to landscapes and native art this show attracts buyers from around the world and brings together artists from across North America. "This is the best show, absolutely the nicest show," says Stephen Lee a rancher and artist from New Mexico. "The international crowd and the attention [we] get is like no other." Lee says, for him, western art is about telling a story with every piece. The inspiration for his bronze piece called Cruz, which has been chosen for this year's art auction, came from his own horse. "Cruz is one of my mares. She's a horse we raised at our ranch and we broke her. As you can see from the piece the topic is her bucking which is something she did alot when I was raising her, but I broke her. It's about her and I growing up together," says Lee....
Longhorns announce return of ranch rodeo At high noon in downtown Colorado Springs Friday the streets looked reminiscent to a scene from an old western movie. Hundreds of Texas longhorn cattle took over Tejon Street to announce the arrival of the Ride for the Brand Ranch Rodeo. Now in its sixth year, the ranch rodeo is has become part of the summer rodeo tradition in Colorado Springs. Following the rodeo on Saturday, the Pikes Peak Range Riders will return from their trek around the mountains on Sunday. They will then ride in the rodeo parade Tuesday night to celebrate the beginning of the 68th Annual Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo on Wednesday. In professional rodeos, the competitors are often professional athletes who spend much of the year competing in rodeos around the country. But at the ranch rodeo, all one hundred of the competing cowboys come from working ranches. Even the competition events are typical of ranch life. They include wild cow milking, ranch bronc riding, trailer loading, stray gathering, and sorting and branding....
Early settlers pushed into New Mexico One of the biggest land deals in United States history helped bring about the settlement of the barren plains of Eastern New Mexico. In 1881 brothers Charles and John Farwell and others organized a syndicate of eastern investors and agreed to build the red granite capitol building in Austin in exchange for title to 3 million acres of land in the Texas Panhandle. This grant took in portions of 10 counties ranging from Yellow House near Lubbock in the south to the Oklahoma Panhandle in the north. The brand of this new ranch, “XIT,” was designed to foil rustlers, and XIT became the name of the ranch. In 1882 when they began surveying and fencing this vast area, it forced the settlers who were already there to move on. Many of them moved west into New Mexico. Yellow House, near the present site of Lubbock, fell inside the XIT property, so in 1882, Newman began moving his cattle to Salt Lake, now Grulla Wildlife Refuge, just across the state line in New Mexico. Since his brand was “DZ,” the ranch was known by that name. With him came several cowhands, including my step-grandfather, R. L. “Bob” Wood, who was Newman’s first cousin; Sid Boykin; Walter Fulcher; and Julius Darby, a black man. Newman had bought the rights to the water from Andy McDonald, and McDonald’s brother Will’s wife, Lizzie, became camp cook. The men dug troughs at the northeastern end of Salt Lake to catch the spring water which flowed into the lake and built an adobe house. The logs for beams and door frames had to be hauled from Las Vegas, N.M., and Newman complained that they cost him $10 apiece....
Uncle Amos Oliver and Gene Autry This time of year, rodeo stories come out of the woodwork. Jack Oliver reminds that Belton July 4 rodeos were the training ground for three Belton/Bell County All Around American Cowboys on the National Circuit, Cotton Proctor of Belton, Bob White of Three Forks and Les Hood of Killeen. Which brought up the close friendship Jack's uncle, the late Amos Oliver, well known farmer-rancher in the Three Forks Community, with the late Les Hood, and Uncle Amos meeting up with the cowboy movie star singer, Gene Autry. Uncle Amos was a good friend and strong supporter of Les Hood and attended every rodeo in driving distance when Les Hood was riding. Back of the chutes visiting with Les and other rodeo hands was where Autry came in. Both Oliver and Autry were strong and well known breeders of shorthorn cattle. They checked out the shorthorn pens carefully and faithfully at every show. "One year at Ft. Worth Gene Autry asked Amos if he would consider buying a $10,000 registered shorthorn bull from Scotland. If they each would buy one it would help on shipping costs. Uncle Amos and Gene Autry each bought one of those $10,000 calves to be shipped from Scotland, the British Isles....
9th Circuit: Judges shouldn't act as scientists An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled it's improper for federal judges to act as scientists when weighing in on disputed U.S. Forest Service timber projects. Timber industry lobbyists and Forest Service officials called the unanimous ruling overturning a challenge to a northern Idaho logging sale significant, partly because it emerged from a court often seen as favorable to environmental groups. In the ruling released Wednesday, the judges dumped a July 2007 decision by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel that halted the Mission Brush timber sale in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. Environmental groups The Lands Council, based in Spokane, Wash., and the Wild West Institute, in Missoula, Mont., contended the Forest Service's logging plan exceeded what was needed to restore the forest's historic character and claimed logging would harm the region's ecosystem for species including small, migratory owls. The ruling also overturns a 2005 9th Circuit decision in which judges concluded the Forest Service's approval of logging in burned areas of western Montana's Lolo National Forest was based on an arbitrary and capricious environmental analysis. U.S. Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, called this "the most important decision involving a Forest Service environmental case in the last two decades," saying it restores the ability of federal agencies, not meddling judges, to exercise discretion over timber sales. "The judges established a much more limited framework for judicial review of Forest Service decisions - a framework that's much more consistent with the standard use by other circuits," Rey told The Associated Press on Thursday. "The court says its role is not to act as a panel of scientists. They wanted to move back to a more appropriate role." Timber industry representatives said this will help stop judges from asserting their opinions over the decisions of Forest Service managers....
High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns The price of gas isn't an annoyance here. It's a calamity. Peggy Hanley uses a generator that burns a gallon of diesel fuel every hour — at about $5 a gallon— to power Forks General Store, the only place to buy groceries for miles around. There's no electric service, so Hanley, the owner, uses the generator to run eight refrigerators, nine freezers, lights and two ice machines for the store, which has been in a trailer since a fire destroyed the original building in 1994. There are no utilities and no public transportation in this unincorporated town of a couple hundred people along a narrow road that winds through the mountains 314 miles north of Sacramento. Many people here buy gas for their vehicles and gas or diesel for generators that power their homes. "I'm scared to death" of rising fuel prices, Hanley says. At the store, the hub for visiting whitewater rafters and residents of other isolated towns, gas cost $5.30 a gallon on a recent day when the national average was $4.07. This community may be an extreme example of how rising gas prices are hitting rural Americans particularly hard, but people in small towns from Maine to Alaska are in a similar bind as those here. Soaring gasoline prices are a double whammy for many rural residents: They often pay more than people who live in cities and suburbs because of the expense of hauling fuel to their communities, and they must drive greater distances for life's necessities: work, groceries, medical care and, of course, gas....
Utah-Nevada water standoff quiet, fierce On moonless nights here in the Utah-Nevada borderlands of Snake Valley, the naked eye can see five planets, countless stars and the great swath of the Milky Way. Climb the hill to Great Basin National Park and one can see the nighttime glow of Las Vegas, whose leaders say their sprawling city must have the water under Snake Valley - or wither and die. And they are coming for it, making plans for a 285-mile pipeline to tap the aquifer that stretches from Salt Lake City to Death Valley and take the water south. At the same time, Utah wants to build a pipeline on Lake Powell to suck up Colorado River water and send it northward to growing desert communities before it gets anywhere near Glitter Gulch. For now, the two driest states in the nation are in a quiet standoff, fitfully negotiating or scuffing lines in the sand. Eventually, though, the outcome of this tale of two pipelines, begun with an agreement struck 86 years ago to share the Colorado and now groaning under rapid population growth and climate distress, could shake the foundations of Western water law....
Bridger Fire fuels distrust of Army One sign of the distrust between the Army and the ranchers around the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site is that weeks after the Bridger Fire was extinguished, questions remain about how Fort Carson personnel managed the 48,500-acre fire that burned for two weeks on the training site and spread onto private lands. "Did they throw all the resources at the fire that they could have? Nobody will know that because in the first days, the Army didn't tell anybody what was going on," said Lon Robertson, a Kim-area rancher and president of the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition. "I know people first spotted smoke on the training site on (June 9)." Robertson also is a firefighter with the Kim volunteer department and he said the rural fire departments at Hoehne, Branson, Springfield and elsewhere rely on each other for help when the summer wildfire season begins. La Junta Fire Chief Aaron Eveatt said his department largely was kept in the dark about what was happening with the Bridger Fire until the Type II incident team took over. The Forest Service incident teams, made up of veteran wildfire managers, are accustomed to dealing with big fires, the public, the news media and local communities when they arrive at a blaze. "I don't want to second-guess how another department fought a fire, but it was like night and day after the Type II team arrived," Eveatt said. "That's when we were notified to be on standby to protect residences on private land."....
Legacy of UT's oil wealth: a denuded landscape Investors appealed to the patron saint of impossible causes when oil drilling began on University of Texas System land in 1921. It didn't hurt. Santa Rita No. 1 blew in on May 28, 1923, after rose petals blessed by a priest were scattered from the top of the derrick at the behest of some Catholic women in New York who had purchased shares in the Texon Oil and Land Co., which drilled that first well. Since then, the UT System's 2.1 million acres in West Texas have produced $4.4 billion in royalty payments and other mineral income for the Permanent University Fund, an endowment that supports the UT and Texas A&M University systems. But this long-running bonanza for higher education exacted a price from the remote, semiarid landscape where it all began. Millions of barrels of salt water, a byproduct of oil and natural gas production, contaminated 11 square miles, or more than 7,000 acres, killing virtually all vegetation and leaving the land vulnerable to wind and water erosion. Hundreds of mesquite stumps with three feet of exposed roots testify to the dramatic loss of topsoil....
Focus on elk as disease persists near Yellowstone Federal officials are considering a tentative proposal that calls for capturing or killing infected elk in Yellowstone National Park to eliminate a serious livestock disease carried by animals in the area. Government agencies have killed more than 6,000 wild bison leaving Yellowstone over the last two decades in an attempt to contain brucellosis, which causes pregnant cattle to abort their young. Cattle in parts of Wyoming and Montana where bison haven't roamed for decades are being infected, and livestock officials in both states are now targeting elk as the cause. "We've got way too many elk," said John Scully, a rancher living in Montana's Madison Valley. "Clearly with so many elk, the risk rises. We need to reduce their numbers." A tentative proposal, drafted by federal officials, sets a goal of eliminating the disease — not just controlling it in bison and in elk. Livestock officials say infected elk herds around Yellowstone must be culled — an explosive proposition for a prized big game species that has thrived under the protection of a dedicated constituency of hunting groups. Nevertheless, pressure is mounting to kill or capture more of the animals....
Cattle Fever Ticks Lay Claim To A Million Acres In Texas The Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) marked an ominous anniversary July 3 by expanding the preventive cattle fever tick quarantine area in south Texas by 307,000 acres, after the dangerous livestock pests were detected on cattle outside quarantine areas in Starr and Zapata counties. Fever ticks, capable of carrying and transmitting deadly “tick fever” to cattle, have been detected on livestock or wildlife on 139 Texas pastures during the past 12 months. “In July 2007, the first preventive quarantine was established-39,325 acres in Starr County-to enable the US. Department of Agriculture’s Tick Force and the TAHC to inspect and treat livestock moved from the area, get ahead of the fever tick and push it back across the quarantine line,” said Dr. Bob Hillman, Texas’ state veterinarian and head of the Texas Animal Health Commission, the state’s livestock and poultry health regulatory agency. “Now, a year later, we have more than a million acres under preventive quarantines in Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Maverick, Dimmit and Webb counties, in addition to the half-million acres in the permanent fever tick quarantine zone that runs alongside the Rio Grande, from Del Rio to Brownsville.”....
Weak horses sent to Mexico to be slaughtered The traders at Dallas County's half-filled horse auction knew the fate of their scrawny thoroughbreds even before they herded them into the ring. And it wasn't to go back to the ranch. The ones with visible backbones and skin stretched over their ribs – at least half of the 36 horses for sale – would probably end up in Mexico, where money can still be made off horse slaughter. Texas horse traders say it's the best solution to the combined wallop of forced American slaughterhouse closures last year and one of the worst horse markets in history. "We don't have anywhere to move them, and they're starving to death," said Steven Oden, a horse trader from Terrell whose prize horses once sold for $8,000 but now go for $800. Breeders, ranchers and cowboys are struggling to continue a livelihood that extends generations. The closure of the kill plants coupled with the rising price of hay and fuel means rising numbers of horses with dwindling funds to care for them. Horse owners say they're left with little option but to sell their horses to a "killer buyer," or trader who buys the horses at a reduced price and takes them to Mexico for slaughter. About 25,000 horses have been shipped to Mexico for slaughter this year, 10,000 more than this time last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture....
Taste of western culture The best place to get a taste of western culture at the Stampede is at the Western Showcase art show. Since 1912, western art has been a fixture at Stampede and now the showcase has grown to become one of the top western art shows in Canada. Located in Hall C and Hall D of the Roundup Centre, the Western Showcase features work of over 100 artisans. The Western Showcase is the largest western art show in Canada and gives visitors a first-hand look at unique pieces that celebrates cowboy culture. From a life-size moose sculpture, to landscapes and native art this show attracts buyers from around the world and brings together artists from across North America. "This is the best show, absolutely the nicest show," says Stephen Lee a rancher and artist from New Mexico. "The international crowd and the attention [we] get is like no other." Lee says, for him, western art is about telling a story with every piece. The inspiration for his bronze piece called Cruz, which has been chosen for this year's art auction, came from his own horse. "Cruz is one of my mares. She's a horse we raised at our ranch and we broke her. As you can see from the piece the topic is her bucking which is something she did alot when I was raising her, but I broke her. It's about her and I growing up together," says Lee....
Longhorns announce return of ranch rodeo At high noon in downtown Colorado Springs Friday the streets looked reminiscent to a scene from an old western movie. Hundreds of Texas longhorn cattle took over Tejon Street to announce the arrival of the Ride for the Brand Ranch Rodeo. Now in its sixth year, the ranch rodeo is has become part of the summer rodeo tradition in Colorado Springs. Following the rodeo on Saturday, the Pikes Peak Range Riders will return from their trek around the mountains on Sunday. They will then ride in the rodeo parade Tuesday night to celebrate the beginning of the 68th Annual Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo on Wednesday. In professional rodeos, the competitors are often professional athletes who spend much of the year competing in rodeos around the country. But at the ranch rodeo, all one hundred of the competing cowboys come from working ranches. Even the competition events are typical of ranch life. They include wild cow milking, ranch bronc riding, trailer loading, stray gathering, and sorting and branding....
Early settlers pushed into New Mexico One of the biggest land deals in United States history helped bring about the settlement of the barren plains of Eastern New Mexico. In 1881 brothers Charles and John Farwell and others organized a syndicate of eastern investors and agreed to build the red granite capitol building in Austin in exchange for title to 3 million acres of land in the Texas Panhandle. This grant took in portions of 10 counties ranging from Yellow House near Lubbock in the south to the Oklahoma Panhandle in the north. The brand of this new ranch, “XIT,” was designed to foil rustlers, and XIT became the name of the ranch. In 1882 when they began surveying and fencing this vast area, it forced the settlers who were already there to move on. Many of them moved west into New Mexico. Yellow House, near the present site of Lubbock, fell inside the XIT property, so in 1882, Newman began moving his cattle to Salt Lake, now Grulla Wildlife Refuge, just across the state line in New Mexico. Since his brand was “DZ,” the ranch was known by that name. With him came several cowhands, including my step-grandfather, R. L. “Bob” Wood, who was Newman’s first cousin; Sid Boykin; Walter Fulcher; and Julius Darby, a black man. Newman had bought the rights to the water from Andy McDonald, and McDonald’s brother Will’s wife, Lizzie, became camp cook. The men dug troughs at the northeastern end of Salt Lake to catch the spring water which flowed into the lake and built an adobe house. The logs for beams and door frames had to be hauled from Las Vegas, N.M., and Newman complained that they cost him $10 apiece....
Uncle Amos Oliver and Gene Autry This time of year, rodeo stories come out of the woodwork. Jack Oliver reminds that Belton July 4 rodeos were the training ground for three Belton/Bell County All Around American Cowboys on the National Circuit, Cotton Proctor of Belton, Bob White of Three Forks and Les Hood of Killeen. Which brought up the close friendship Jack's uncle, the late Amos Oliver, well known farmer-rancher in the Three Forks Community, with the late Les Hood, and Uncle Amos meeting up with the cowboy movie star singer, Gene Autry. Uncle Amos was a good friend and strong supporter of Les Hood and attended every rodeo in driving distance when Les Hood was riding. Back of the chutes visiting with Les and other rodeo hands was where Autry came in. Both Oliver and Autry were strong and well known breeders of shorthorn cattle. They checked out the shorthorn pens carefully and faithfully at every show. "One year at Ft. Worth Gene Autry asked Amos if he would consider buying a $10,000 registered shorthorn bull from Scotland. If they each would buy one it would help on shipping costs. Uncle Amos and Gene Autry each bought one of those $10,000 calves to be shipped from Scotland, the British Isles....
FLE
How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment? Early next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love. That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. That a majority on both sides of the aisle — not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties — intend to vote for such a violation of Americans' right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever. We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court. Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights....
Report details snooping in celebrity passport files A federal investigation of unauthorized snooping into government passport files has found evidence that such breaches may be far more common than previously disclosed, and the State Department inspector general is calling for an overhaul of the program's management. In a report issued Thursday, the inspector general found "many control weaknesses" in the department's administration program, including what investigators said was a lack of sound policies on training staff, accessing electronic records and disciplining workers who break privacy rules. The investigation was launched in March after it was disclosed that government and contract workers had snooped in the files of three presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. To assess the extent of the problem, investigators assembled a sample of 150 famous Americans, including athletes, politicians and entertainers, and examined how many times their files in a government database were viewed over a six-year period. The files of 127 people in the sample were accessed at least once; in total, these files were "hit" 4,418 times. Nine of the files were opened more than 100 times. State Department officials did not identify the celebrities whose files were included in the sample. More than 20,500 federal and contract employees have access to the records database, including State Department staff and officials involved in investigations, security assessments and other analyses, the report says....
No evidence needed under terror profiling plan The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups. Currently, FBI agents need reasons -- such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated -- to investigate citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials say, would let agents open terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, are deemed suspicious. Although President George W. Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would let the FBI consider those factors among traits that could trigger a national security investigation....
Sheriff's drug fund spending revealed Camden County Sheriff Bill Smith stopped paying jail inmates from seized drug assets when state investigators began looking into the controversial practice last July, according to copies of checks he released to avoid a lawsuit last month. But Smith continued to use the federal forfeiture money for other questionable expenditures such as college tuition for favored deputies, a Kingsland boxing club's lease, and a retainer for a private lawyer, the checks show. And he used the federally regulated fund to pay routine expenses after county commissioners cut his operating budget last year. Federal guidelines say the asset money, returned to counties based on drug arrests, is to be used only for law enforcement purposes such as equipment, jails or training. They expressly say the funds are not to be used for the department's general operational costs or in any way that gives the appearance of extravagance, waste or impropriety. But over the years , Smith has used the money to work inmates on private property, establish college scholarships and donate to Camden nonprofits. Questions over his use of the funds led County Commission Chairman Preston Rhodes to refuse to sign an authorization form in September to receive money from the federal government this year. The records show Smith spent about $615,000 from the fund from July 2007 through May. Commissioners repeatedly criticized his use of federal drug money to pay jail inmates to work on private property, including the sheriff's, and not just in Camden County but also at his ex-wife's house in South Carolina....
Repeal the Second Amendment? A Chicago newspaper's call to repeal the Second Amendment is an "unconscionable attack on the entire Bill of Rights and the freedoms it protects," the Second Amendment Foundation says. In an editorial published on Friday, the day after the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 ruling upholding the individual right to own firearms, The Chicago Tribune called the Second Amendment an "anachronism" that should be repealed. "The amendment was intended to protect the authority of the states to organize militias," The Chicago Tribune said. The newspaper supported its argument by claiming that a 1939 case, U.S. v Miller, established the amendment as a "collective right" that applied only to service in some type of militia. But that's a false argument, the Second Amendment Foundation said. "The Chicago Tribune's editors have demonstrated an appalling short-sightedness," said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. "If they are so willing to abandon one civil right for an entire class of American citizens, what's next? Perhaps they would strip some citizens of their First Amendment rights to free speech or religion...Once you make it acceptable to destroy one civil right, it does not take a very big leap to embrace limitations on, or the abolition of, another civil right," he added....
Bush fingerprinting plan faces resistance Key members of Congress are siding with the airline industry and moving to block the administration from forcing airlines to take fingerprints of foreign visitors before they fly home. The opposition is setting up a clash over a final Bush administration effort to tighten security and immigration by keeping better track of when visitors leave the country. U.S. and foreign airlines say fingerprinting 33 million visitors a year would devastate them financially, costing $12 billion over 10 years, at a time when soaring fuel prices have helped put some airlines out of business and forced others to cut flights. "U.S. airlines obviously cannot bear the staggering additional costs," the Air Transport Association, which represents major domestic carriers, wrote last week in comments on the proposal. The full House plans to vote this month on a measure barring the Homeland Security Department from requiring airlines to take fingerprints until the department tests a fingerprint system with airlines. The House Appropriations Committee approved the measure last week as part of a bill funding the department for 2009. The department fingerprints visitors as they arrive and tracks their departures using paper forms that are sometimes inaccurate. Others opposing the department's plan include Germany and the United Kingdom, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Travel Industry Association....
How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment? Early next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love. That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. That a majority on both sides of the aisle — not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties — intend to vote for such a violation of Americans' right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever. We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court. Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights....
Report details snooping in celebrity passport files A federal investigation of unauthorized snooping into government passport files has found evidence that such breaches may be far more common than previously disclosed, and the State Department inspector general is calling for an overhaul of the program's management. In a report issued Thursday, the inspector general found "many control weaknesses" in the department's administration program, including what investigators said was a lack of sound policies on training staff, accessing electronic records and disciplining workers who break privacy rules. The investigation was launched in March after it was disclosed that government and contract workers had snooped in the files of three presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. To assess the extent of the problem, investigators assembled a sample of 150 famous Americans, including athletes, politicians and entertainers, and examined how many times their files in a government database were viewed over a six-year period. The files of 127 people in the sample were accessed at least once; in total, these files were "hit" 4,418 times. Nine of the files were opened more than 100 times. State Department officials did not identify the celebrities whose files were included in the sample. More than 20,500 federal and contract employees have access to the records database, including State Department staff and officials involved in investigations, security assessments and other analyses, the report says....
No evidence needed under terror profiling plan The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups. Currently, FBI agents need reasons -- such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated -- to investigate citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials say, would let agents open terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, are deemed suspicious. Although President George W. Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would let the FBI consider those factors among traits that could trigger a national security investigation....
Sheriff's drug fund spending revealed Camden County Sheriff Bill Smith stopped paying jail inmates from seized drug assets when state investigators began looking into the controversial practice last July, according to copies of checks he released to avoid a lawsuit last month. But Smith continued to use the federal forfeiture money for other questionable expenditures such as college tuition for favored deputies, a Kingsland boxing club's lease, and a retainer for a private lawyer, the checks show. And he used the federally regulated fund to pay routine expenses after county commissioners cut his operating budget last year. Federal guidelines say the asset money, returned to counties based on drug arrests, is to be used only for law enforcement purposes such as equipment, jails or training. They expressly say the funds are not to be used for the department's general operational costs or in any way that gives the appearance of extravagance, waste or impropriety. But over the years , Smith has used the money to work inmates on private property, establish college scholarships and donate to Camden nonprofits. Questions over his use of the funds led County Commission Chairman Preston Rhodes to refuse to sign an authorization form in September to receive money from the federal government this year. The records show Smith spent about $615,000 from the fund from July 2007 through May. Commissioners repeatedly criticized his use of federal drug money to pay jail inmates to work on private property, including the sheriff's, and not just in Camden County but also at his ex-wife's house in South Carolina....
Repeal the Second Amendment? A Chicago newspaper's call to repeal the Second Amendment is an "unconscionable attack on the entire Bill of Rights and the freedoms it protects," the Second Amendment Foundation says. In an editorial published on Friday, the day after the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 ruling upholding the individual right to own firearms, The Chicago Tribune called the Second Amendment an "anachronism" that should be repealed. "The amendment was intended to protect the authority of the states to organize militias," The Chicago Tribune said. The newspaper supported its argument by claiming that a 1939 case, U.S. v Miller, established the amendment as a "collective right" that applied only to service in some type of militia. But that's a false argument, the Second Amendment Foundation said. "The Chicago Tribune's editors have demonstrated an appalling short-sightedness," said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. "If they are so willing to abandon one civil right for an entire class of American citizens, what's next? Perhaps they would strip some citizens of their First Amendment rights to free speech or religion...Once you make it acceptable to destroy one civil right, it does not take a very big leap to embrace limitations on, or the abolition of, another civil right," he added....
Bush fingerprinting plan faces resistance Key members of Congress are siding with the airline industry and moving to block the administration from forcing airlines to take fingerprints of foreign visitors before they fly home. The opposition is setting up a clash over a final Bush administration effort to tighten security and immigration by keeping better track of when visitors leave the country. U.S. and foreign airlines say fingerprinting 33 million visitors a year would devastate them financially, costing $12 billion over 10 years, at a time when soaring fuel prices have helped put some airlines out of business and forced others to cut flights. "U.S. airlines obviously cannot bear the staggering additional costs," the Air Transport Association, which represents major domestic carriers, wrote last week in comments on the proposal. The full House plans to vote this month on a measure barring the Homeland Security Department from requiring airlines to take fingerprints until the department tests a fingerprint system with airlines. The House Appropriations Committee approved the measure last week as part of a bill funding the department for 2009. The department fingerprints visitors as they arrive and tracks their departures using paper forms that are sometimes inaccurate. Others opposing the department's plan include Germany and the United Kingdom, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Travel Industry Association....
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Old Glory waves across the land today
Cowgirl Sass & Savvy
Julie Carter
Old Glory will wave majestically in rodeo arenas across America this weekend, starting today. It's the Fourth of July and cowboys, if they are anything, are patriotic.
Don't misunderstand. It doesn't take a holiday for them to bring out the flag. It's there at every rodeo.
Honor to the stars and stripes happens first, before anything else.
Even the livestock seems to know the routine. Watch as the cowboys stand at the chutes, hats held over their hearts as the colors are posted and the national anthem is played.
The bucking horses in the chute will snort and kick the gate behind them like it should be part of the music's percussion.
For a rodeo contestant, it's an exciting sound that echoes in the recesses of their rodeo memories long after they no longer compete.
It goes with the smell of the arena dirt, the banging of the gates as livestock is moved around, arriving trailers rattling across the parking lot and the sound of hoof beats as someone lopes a horse to the arena.
As all of us honor America, our freedoms, and the price paid for both, I find myself annually honoring the cowboy as well. This particular holiday is his "Cowboy Christmas," the most lucrative run of rodeos of the season.
Rodeo rigs are progressively bigger, fancier, and technology has kicked rodeoing up a notch from the days of standing in a pay phone booth to enter a rodeo or find out when you drew up. So much is different, yet so much is the same.
It still requires the basics. First, the cowboy has to get there, and second, he has to have brought his cowboy skills with him.
Fourth of July rodeoing is defined by road-weary cowboys, tired horses, pickups filled with dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers and muddy boots.
The dashboard of the vehicle is full of rumpled programs, Copenhagen cans, empty coffee cups, dust-covered sunglasses, gas receipts, a ball cap or two and a road map.
Many moons ago, when I was part of the rodeo world, I spent tired Fourth of July rodeo marathons wondering what the rest of the world did for their holiday and gave pause to the idea I might be missing something.
I'm not sure how any of that really works, I've just heard rumors about boating, fishing, barbequing and such.
Now that I no longer compete in rodeos, I still don't have the skills for the non-rodeo things. It wouldn't be true if I told you I didn't miss those days of driving across the state three times in four days to hit every rodeo possible.
I even miss the mucking around in the mud after a summer downpour at the rodeo grounds, washing off the barrel horse's legs and gear with the nearest water hose and cleaning up the kids, dog and my boots with the same effort.
I miss the camaraderie with the friends who shared the same passion for the same sport and questioned their sanity for it only briefly.
For me, it wouldn't be the Fourth of July if I wasn't standing in the hot sun, beating rain or dusty wind waiting for the next rodeo event to move the entertainment along.
So that's what I do. However, now I carry a camera and put what I know of rodeo in print.
I don't suppose I'll ever be anywhere else but at a rodeo grounds somewhere on the Fourth of July.
It just is who I am.
Join me at a rodeo for a look into the heart of the rodeo cowboy at his best. Today would be a good day to start.
Julie can be reached through her website at www.julie-carter.com
Cowgirl Sass & Savvy
Julie Carter
Old Glory will wave majestically in rodeo arenas across America this weekend, starting today. It's the Fourth of July and cowboys, if they are anything, are patriotic.
Don't misunderstand. It doesn't take a holiday for them to bring out the flag. It's there at every rodeo.
Honor to the stars and stripes happens first, before anything else.
Even the livestock seems to know the routine. Watch as the cowboys stand at the chutes, hats held over their hearts as the colors are posted and the national anthem is played.
The bucking horses in the chute will snort and kick the gate behind them like it should be part of the music's percussion.
For a rodeo contestant, it's an exciting sound that echoes in the recesses of their rodeo memories long after they no longer compete.
It goes with the smell of the arena dirt, the banging of the gates as livestock is moved around, arriving trailers rattling across the parking lot and the sound of hoof beats as someone lopes a horse to the arena.
As all of us honor America, our freedoms, and the price paid for both, I find myself annually honoring the cowboy as well. This particular holiday is his "Cowboy Christmas," the most lucrative run of rodeos of the season.
Rodeo rigs are progressively bigger, fancier, and technology has kicked rodeoing up a notch from the days of standing in a pay phone booth to enter a rodeo or find out when you drew up. So much is different, yet so much is the same.
It still requires the basics. First, the cowboy has to get there, and second, he has to have brought his cowboy skills with him.
Fourth of July rodeoing is defined by road-weary cowboys, tired horses, pickups filled with dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers and muddy boots.
The dashboard of the vehicle is full of rumpled programs, Copenhagen cans, empty coffee cups, dust-covered sunglasses, gas receipts, a ball cap or two and a road map.
Many moons ago, when I was part of the rodeo world, I spent tired Fourth of July rodeo marathons wondering what the rest of the world did for their holiday and gave pause to the idea I might be missing something.
I'm not sure how any of that really works, I've just heard rumors about boating, fishing, barbequing and such.
Now that I no longer compete in rodeos, I still don't have the skills for the non-rodeo things. It wouldn't be true if I told you I didn't miss those days of driving across the state three times in four days to hit every rodeo possible.
I even miss the mucking around in the mud after a summer downpour at the rodeo grounds, washing off the barrel horse's legs and gear with the nearest water hose and cleaning up the kids, dog and my boots with the same effort.
I miss the camaraderie with the friends who shared the same passion for the same sport and questioned their sanity for it only briefly.
For me, it wouldn't be the Fourth of July if I wasn't standing in the hot sun, beating rain or dusty wind waiting for the next rodeo event to move the entertainment along.
So that's what I do. However, now I carry a camera and put what I know of rodeo in print.
I don't suppose I'll ever be anywhere else but at a rodeo grounds somewhere on the Fourth of July.
It just is who I am.
Join me at a rodeo for a look into the heart of the rodeo cowboy at his best. Today would be a good day to start.
Julie can be reached through her website at www.julie-carter.com
Saturday, July 05, 2008
FLE
5 arrested in Rainbow Family clash with feds About 400 members of the Rainbow Family threw rocks and sticks at 10 federal officers as they tried to arrest a member of the group, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday. Five members of the group were arrested and one officer was slightly injured. A government vehicle was also damaged. Ten Forest Service officers were patrolling the main meadow of the Rainbow Family's camping area Thursday night and apprehended one person described as being uncooperative, Rita Vollmer, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, said in a statement Friday. "Officers began to leave the gathering site with the subject and were circled by more Rainbow participants that began to physically interfere," Vollmer said. About 400 Rainbows surrounded the officers trying to leave, she said. "The mob began to advance, throwing sticks and rocks at the officers," Vollmer said....What can we learn from this? First, you and 400 of your compadres can surround and threaten Forest Service law enforcement, and it's no sweat. Second, you can throw rocks and sticks at them, no problem. Third, whatever you do, don't threaten them with a pair of bridal reins or you will be charged for assault with a deadly weapon. Don't believe me? Just as rancher Kit Laney who did five months in the federal pen. How many Rainbow Family member do you think will wind up in the federal pen?
ACLU plans to investigate Rainbow Family treatment The American Civil Liberties Union said Saturday that it plans to investigate the actions of federal law enforcers who arrested five Rainbow Family members in western Wyoming during their annual gathering. The U.S. Forest Service says a mob of about 400 members of the Rainbow Family, a group of hippie types and eccentrics who camp on public land every year, threw rocks and sticks at Forest Service officers who tried to arrest a member of the group. Up to 60 federal and local law enforcers responded, Forest Service officials say, and fired "pepper balls" — similar to paint balls but containing a pepper solution — at the crowd to control it. As many as 7,000 members of the Rainbow Family camped out this year on Forest Service land near the Big Sandy Reservoir. The group holds a weeklong gathering on public land in a different area each year. The Rainbows and federal officers have clashed before, and in 1998, the Forest Service established a national response team to deal with the group. The ACLU plans to accept collect calls from Rainbow Family members for the next two weeks to hear their version of events, Linda Burt, executive director of Wyoming's ACLU, said Saturday....
Rainbow gathering inspires odd jurisprudence More than 100 participants in the annual Rainbow Family of Living Light "Gathering of the Tribes" near Big Sandy made appearances at a temporary federal court at the fire station here this week. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management had issued numerous citations and warnings, ranging from traffic violations to drug possession, during the week before the event semi-officially began Tuesday. Chief U.S. District Judge William Downes signed the unusual order to create the temporary courtroom because the closest federal courtrooms to the gathering are in Green River, Lander and Jackson, he said Thursday. Farson was chosen because it is close to the gathering and because it imposed the least inconvenience to law enforcement and the Rainbow gathering participants, Downes said. "We sent the magistrate judges to them." This marked the first time in Downes' nine-year tenure that he has signed an order to create a temporary court, he said. "But it was clearly appropriate here." The court will remain as long as Rainbow gathering participants are in the area, he said....
5 arrested in Rainbow Family clash with feds About 400 members of the Rainbow Family threw rocks and sticks at 10 federal officers as they tried to arrest a member of the group, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday. Five members of the group were arrested and one officer was slightly injured. A government vehicle was also damaged. Ten Forest Service officers were patrolling the main meadow of the Rainbow Family's camping area Thursday night and apprehended one person described as being uncooperative, Rita Vollmer, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, said in a statement Friday. "Officers began to leave the gathering site with the subject and were circled by more Rainbow participants that began to physically interfere," Vollmer said. About 400 Rainbows surrounded the officers trying to leave, she said. "The mob began to advance, throwing sticks and rocks at the officers," Vollmer said....What can we learn from this? First, you and 400 of your compadres can surround and threaten Forest Service law enforcement, and it's no sweat. Second, you can throw rocks and sticks at them, no problem. Third, whatever you do, don't threaten them with a pair of bridal reins or you will be charged for assault with a deadly weapon. Don't believe me? Just as rancher Kit Laney who did five months in the federal pen. How many Rainbow Family member do you think will wind up in the federal pen?
ACLU plans to investigate Rainbow Family treatment The American Civil Liberties Union said Saturday that it plans to investigate the actions of federal law enforcers who arrested five Rainbow Family members in western Wyoming during their annual gathering. The U.S. Forest Service says a mob of about 400 members of the Rainbow Family, a group of hippie types and eccentrics who camp on public land every year, threw rocks and sticks at Forest Service officers who tried to arrest a member of the group. Up to 60 federal and local law enforcers responded, Forest Service officials say, and fired "pepper balls" — similar to paint balls but containing a pepper solution — at the crowd to control it. As many as 7,000 members of the Rainbow Family camped out this year on Forest Service land near the Big Sandy Reservoir. The group holds a weeklong gathering on public land in a different area each year. The Rainbows and federal officers have clashed before, and in 1998, the Forest Service established a national response team to deal with the group. The ACLU plans to accept collect calls from Rainbow Family members for the next two weeks to hear their version of events, Linda Burt, executive director of Wyoming's ACLU, said Saturday....
Rainbow gathering inspires odd jurisprudence More than 100 participants in the annual Rainbow Family of Living Light "Gathering of the Tribes" near Big Sandy made appearances at a temporary federal court at the fire station here this week. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management had issued numerous citations and warnings, ranging from traffic violations to drug possession, during the week before the event semi-officially began Tuesday. Chief U.S. District Judge William Downes signed the unusual order to create the temporary courtroom because the closest federal courtrooms to the gathering are in Green River, Lander and Jackson, he said Thursday. Farson was chosen because it is close to the gathering and because it imposed the least inconvenience to law enforcement and the Rainbow gathering participants, Downes said. "We sent the magistrate judges to them." This marked the first time in Downes' nine-year tenure that he has signed an order to create a temporary court, he said. "But it was clearly appropriate here." The court will remain as long as Rainbow gathering participants are in the area, he said....
Dr. North On Celebrating July 4th
...When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to save money like a maniac because the government has stolen 30% to 40% of everything you have made, it takes away a lot of the enthusiasm for celebrating the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson wrote that document, the British were extracting approximately 1% of national income from the American colonies. For the southern colonies, it may have been 2.5%. If we could somehow get back to the tyranny of Great Britain in 1776, I would be willing to celebrate the Fourth of July with greater enthusiasm. But that would take a revolution....
...When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to save money like a maniac because the government has stolen 30% to 40% of everything you have made, it takes away a lot of the enthusiasm for celebrating the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson wrote that document, the British were extracting approximately 1% of national income from the American colonies. For the southern colonies, it may have been 2.5%. If we could somehow get back to the tyranny of Great Britain in 1776, I would be willing to celebrate the Fourth of July with greater enthusiasm. But that would take a revolution....
Friday, July 04, 2008
JESSE HELMS, RIP
There was a side to Jesse Helms the media won't report.
As a young Senatorial aide I would ride back and forth from the Senate Office Buildings to the Capitol on a small train. One double car was reserved for Senators, the rest were first-come first-serve for staff and the public.
One day after a Senate vote I was heading back to the office, but the cars for staff were full. Normally, I would have to wait until the train returned to catch a ride. The cars reserved for Senators was not full and Senator Helms said, "Come on in, you can ride with me." As we entered the Dirksen Senate Office Bldg., there were two sets of elevators, one reserved for Senators and one for the public. There was a large crowd and line in front of the public elevator, so Senator Helms grabbed my arm and said, "You can ride up with me." Both of these thoughtful and gracious acts were not typical of the Senators I had been exposed to.
I also recall an incident in a room just off the Senate Chamber. One liberal Senator was upset with some amendment Helms had offered. He told Helms, "I'll bet you think you can walk on water." Helms replied, "I can" and the bet was on. Helms then filled a paper cup from the water cooler, poured it on the carpet, and walked on it.
No matter his sometimes controversial stands, Jesse Helms was an exception in the Senate - an exception because he was a true gentleman with a friendly and humble demeanor.
Helms, North Carolina's Former `Senator No,' Dies
By Jim O'Connell and Gopal Ratnam
July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Jesse Helms, the former five-term U.S. senator from North Carolina whose relish for thwarting initiatives he opposed as too liberal earned him the nickname ``Senator No,'' died at age 86.
As a Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee, the conservative senator was best known for pushing to withhold U.S. dues owed to the United Nations, opposing the 1977 treaty that ceded U.S. control of the Panama Canal, and backing policies aimed at isolating Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Helms tried in 1983 to filibuster legislation to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He also gave fits to both Republican and Democratic presidents by using parliamentary tactics to block administration nominees he opposed. In 1997, he thwarted Massachusetts Governor William Weld's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Mexico, saying Weld, a Republican, was a bad choice because he backed the medical use of marijuana.
``Somebody said, `Jesse, why do you so often advance things or take positions that you know you don't have any chance to win?''' Helms told reporters in 2002. ``And my answer to that is, I do it on principle.''
Helms died at 1:18 a.m. today in Raleigh, said John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center Foundation in Wingate, North Carolina, in a phone interview today. The cause of death has yet to be determined, he said.
Presidential Condolences
President George W. Bush, in a statement, expressed his condolences for the family and called the conservative icon ``a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.
``So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July,'' America's Independence Day, Bush said.
Helms was ``a leading voice and courageous champion for many causes he believed in,'' said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, in a statement. ``Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals.''
While Helms embraced the nickname ``Senator No,'' in many ways ``he was a visionary,'' Dodd said.
``He was talking about Social Security reform in the early 1980s and private accounts to supplement it, and talked about reforming the State Department, which is one of the things he got done, and talked about holding the United Nations accountable,'' Dodd said.
Helms also could change his mind, as he did on AIDS, backing U.S. legislation to provide treatment for people with the disease in Africa, Dodd said. The singer Bono ``told me personally that Helms helped save hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa because of his change in position,'' Dodd said.
Heart Surgery, Cancer
Helms didn't seek another term in 2002, citing health problems. He had undergone heart-valve transplant surgery and survived prostate cancer and a knee replacement. Much of the last year of his term was spent in the hospital, and during his appearances in the Senate he used a motorized scooter to make his way around.
His 30 years in office made him North Carolina's longest- serving senator.
``My friend and long-time senator from my home state'' was a man ``of consistent conviction to conservative ideals'' who served ``on principle, not popularity or politics,'' said the Reverend Billy Graham, the Christian evangelist, in a statement released on PR Newswire.
Conservative `Icon'
When Helms announced his decision not to seek re-election, the Boston Globe called him ``an unyielding icon of conservatives and an archenemy of liberals.''
Washington Post political writer and columnist David Broder wrote in 2001 that Helms was ``the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.''
In his 1990 re-election bid, facing Democrat Harvey Gantt, a black man who was mayor of Charlotte, Helms broadcast a television advertisement that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter while the announcer said, ``You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.''
In 1994 he caused an uproar when he told a newspaper that President Bill Clinton ``better have a bodyguard'' if he ever visited North Carolina.
Helms was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, North Carolina, a rural community outside of Charlotte. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and after the war was a reporter and city editor of The Raleigh (North Carolina) Times.
He started in politics as a Democrat at a time when the party drew its strength in the South. Helms served as an administrative assistant to two Democratic U.S. senators from North Carolina in the 1950s. From 1953 to 1960, he was executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association.
TV, Radio
From 1960 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1972 Helms wrote and presented daily editorials on WRAL-TV in Raleigh and on a radio network. He also served as executive vice president of the Capitol Broadcasting Co. in Raleigh.
He switched party affiliation in 1970, drawing support from free-market conservatives, foes of federally mandated racial desegregation and Christian evangelicals. A similar coalition was behind the shift that led the South to go from solidly Democratic to Republican.
Helms's stances on contentious social issues made him a frequent target of critics from the Democratic Party and made many of his election campaigns into close races. In 1984, when Republican President Ronald Reagan won North Carolina with 62 percent of the vote, Helms won with 52 percent.
Historic Company
``You may not have agreed with his politics all the time, but he was a gentleman about it,'' Bush said in 2001 when Helms announced he wouldn't seek another term in office.
Helms had lived in a nursing home since May 2006 and suffered from dementia, a spokesman said. He is survived by his wife Dorothy and three children.
Helms's death on July 4 puts him in the historic company of John Adams, the second U.S. president, and Thomas Jefferson, the third president, both of whom died on July 4, 1826, and James Monroe, the fifth president, who died July 4, 1831.
There was a side to Jesse Helms the media won't report.
As a young Senatorial aide I would ride back and forth from the Senate Office Buildings to the Capitol on a small train. One double car was reserved for Senators, the rest were first-come first-serve for staff and the public.
One day after a Senate vote I was heading back to the office, but the cars for staff were full. Normally, I would have to wait until the train returned to catch a ride. The cars reserved for Senators was not full and Senator Helms said, "Come on in, you can ride with me." As we entered the Dirksen Senate Office Bldg., there were two sets of elevators, one reserved for Senators and one for the public. There was a large crowd and line in front of the public elevator, so Senator Helms grabbed my arm and said, "You can ride up with me." Both of these thoughtful and gracious acts were not typical of the Senators I had been exposed to.
I also recall an incident in a room just off the Senate Chamber. One liberal Senator was upset with some amendment Helms had offered. He told Helms, "I'll bet you think you can walk on water." Helms replied, "I can" and the bet was on. Helms then filled a paper cup from the water cooler, poured it on the carpet, and walked on it.
No matter his sometimes controversial stands, Jesse Helms was an exception in the Senate - an exception because he was a true gentleman with a friendly and humble demeanor.
Helms, North Carolina's Former `Senator No,' Dies
By Jim O'Connell and Gopal Ratnam
July 4 (Bloomberg) -- Jesse Helms, the former five-term U.S. senator from North Carolina whose relish for thwarting initiatives he opposed as too liberal earned him the nickname ``Senator No,'' died at age 86.
As a Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee, the conservative senator was best known for pushing to withhold U.S. dues owed to the United Nations, opposing the 1977 treaty that ceded U.S. control of the Panama Canal, and backing policies aimed at isolating Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Helms tried in 1983 to filibuster legislation to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. He also gave fits to both Republican and Democratic presidents by using parliamentary tactics to block administration nominees he opposed. In 1997, he thwarted Massachusetts Governor William Weld's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Mexico, saying Weld, a Republican, was a bad choice because he backed the medical use of marijuana.
``Somebody said, `Jesse, why do you so often advance things or take positions that you know you don't have any chance to win?''' Helms told reporters in 2002. ``And my answer to that is, I do it on principle.''
Helms died at 1:18 a.m. today in Raleigh, said John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center Foundation in Wingate, North Carolina, in a phone interview today. The cause of death has yet to be determined, he said.
Presidential Condolences
President George W. Bush, in a statement, expressed his condolences for the family and called the conservative icon ``a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.
``So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July,'' America's Independence Day, Bush said.
Helms was ``a leading voice and courageous champion for many causes he believed in,'' said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, in a statement. ``Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals.''
While Helms embraced the nickname ``Senator No,'' in many ways ``he was a visionary,'' Dodd said.
``He was talking about Social Security reform in the early 1980s and private accounts to supplement it, and talked about reforming the State Department, which is one of the things he got done, and talked about holding the United Nations accountable,'' Dodd said.
Helms also could change his mind, as he did on AIDS, backing U.S. legislation to provide treatment for people with the disease in Africa, Dodd said. The singer Bono ``told me personally that Helms helped save hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa because of his change in position,'' Dodd said.
Heart Surgery, Cancer
Helms didn't seek another term in 2002, citing health problems. He had undergone heart-valve transplant surgery and survived prostate cancer and a knee replacement. Much of the last year of his term was spent in the hospital, and during his appearances in the Senate he used a motorized scooter to make his way around.
His 30 years in office made him North Carolina's longest- serving senator.
``My friend and long-time senator from my home state'' was a man ``of consistent conviction to conservative ideals'' who served ``on principle, not popularity or politics,'' said the Reverend Billy Graham, the Christian evangelist, in a statement released on PR Newswire.
Conservative `Icon'
When Helms announced his decision not to seek re-election, the Boston Globe called him ``an unyielding icon of conservatives and an archenemy of liberals.''
Washington Post political writer and columnist David Broder wrote in 2001 that Helms was ``the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.''
In his 1990 re-election bid, facing Democrat Harvey Gantt, a black man who was mayor of Charlotte, Helms broadcast a television advertisement that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter while the announcer said, ``You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.''
In 1994 he caused an uproar when he told a newspaper that President Bill Clinton ``better have a bodyguard'' if he ever visited North Carolina.
Helms was born Oct. 18, 1921, in Monroe, North Carolina, a rural community outside of Charlotte. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and after the war was a reporter and city editor of The Raleigh (North Carolina) Times.
He started in politics as a Democrat at a time when the party drew its strength in the South. Helms served as an administrative assistant to two Democratic U.S. senators from North Carolina in the 1950s. From 1953 to 1960, he was executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association.
TV, Radio
From 1960 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1972 Helms wrote and presented daily editorials on WRAL-TV in Raleigh and on a radio network. He also served as executive vice president of the Capitol Broadcasting Co. in Raleigh.
He switched party affiliation in 1970, drawing support from free-market conservatives, foes of federally mandated racial desegregation and Christian evangelicals. A similar coalition was behind the shift that led the South to go from solidly Democratic to Republican.
Helms's stances on contentious social issues made him a frequent target of critics from the Democratic Party and made many of his election campaigns into close races. In 1984, when Republican President Ronald Reagan won North Carolina with 62 percent of the vote, Helms won with 52 percent.
Historic Company
``You may not have agreed with his politics all the time, but he was a gentleman about it,'' Bush said in 2001 when Helms announced he wouldn't seek another term in office.
Helms had lived in a nursing home since May 2006 and suffered from dementia, a spokesman said. He is survived by his wife Dorothy and three children.
Helms's death on July 4 puts him in the historic company of John Adams, the second U.S. president, and Thomas Jefferson, the third president, both of whom died on July 4, 1826, and James Monroe, the fifth president, who died July 4, 1831.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
INDEPENDENCE DAY 2008
A Necessary Observance
If our nation’s Founders could visit us on this, our 232nd Independence Day, what would they make of us? What would they declare of us?
A hint can be discerned in a letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, as the Declaration of Independence had just been approved. “It ought to be commemorated,” said the man who would become our second president, “as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Day’s Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”
Americans have maintained the “Pomp and Parade” for more than two centuries now, and the “Bonfires and Illuminations” are commonplace, but how often do we recognize Independence Day as “the Day of Deliverance?” How often do we honor it with “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty”? How often do we contemplate the cost of our freedom, “the Toil and Blood and Treasure?”
Our Founders believed that independence was more than a choice; they viewed our break from royal rule as necessary.
Consider the first statement of the Declaration: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The signatories were emphatic that separation from the crown was not only an objective, but an obligation: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.” In conclusion, the Founders wrote, “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation...”
Their cause, of course, was not anti-government. Rather they objected to the misgovernment of the king, saying, “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Furthermore, the Americans had been patient, petitioning their British rulers for redress for over a decade. Armed hostilities had commenced on April 19, 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the colonists faced the full power of the British Empire in their quest for American independence.
One year before taking that step for nationhood, on July 5, 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, beseeching the British king for a peaceful resolution of the American colonies’ grievances. A day later, that same Congress resolved the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms.”
King George III refused to read the peace petition and assembled his armies. On July 2, 1776, Richard Henry Lee’s proposal for a formal declaration of separation passed, and the document was ordered printed on July 4.
The war-weary among us today might ask, was independence really necessary?
To pose the question at the outset of the Revolutionary War was to answer it. Representatives of the colonial Americans realized that, in voicing this query, they already possessed proof that they, not the King of England, were legitimate instruments of self-government for their countrymen. How could circumstances be otherwise when the king offered no remedy for his subjects’ complaints, no guarantee their rights would be respected, and no means for them to govern themselves in their new lands?
The founders knew, however, that power could not be its own justification. They recognized that only an appeal to overarching laws, binding the king as much as his subjects, was legitimate. And abuse of authority demonstrated disqualification of any governor, whether a monarch or a purported representative.
We would do well to apply this insight to the political debates of today.
Indeed, two competing philosophies of government at odds during the American Revolution have reappeared, with the anti-republican form seen in those politicians who would seek to gain favor by manipulating language and misrepresenting their positions. Royalists, on the other hand, believed that the king was divinely ordained to rule over the people and was therefore above the law. This view is manifest currently in government officials—especially our elected officers—who believe they may properly command the citizenry to whatever they please, to whichever they purport to be for the good of the people.
As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” Yet the prevailing philosophy of government proposes exactly this—that directions from Washington as to how we must conduct ourselves, in matters large and small, will lead inexorably to scarcity and will inevitably erode our freedom.
Our system of government today is not so different from the monarchy we escaped, except that a swarm of bureaucrats have taken up the throne.
A necessity thus presents itself to us as well: We must reconnect with the timeless principles that inspired our Founding Fathers; those same principles that long ago gave birth to a good, great and God-blessed nation.
“[W]hat do we mean by the American Revolution?” reflected John Adams. “Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”
Let us celebrate this Independence Day 2008 in a manner that Adams himself might recognize—with “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty,” and with a rededication to the principles of our necessary American Revolution. And as always, in the words of George Washington, “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
INDEPENDENCE DAY 2008
A Necessary Observance
If our nation’s Founders could visit us on this, our 232nd Independence Day, what would they make of us? What would they declare of us?
A hint can be discerned in a letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, as the Declaration of Independence had just been approved. “It ought to be commemorated,” said the man who would become our second president, “as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Day’s Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”
Americans have maintained the “Pomp and Parade” for more than two centuries now, and the “Bonfires and Illuminations” are commonplace, but how often do we recognize Independence Day as “the Day of Deliverance?” How often do we honor it with “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty”? How often do we contemplate the cost of our freedom, “the Toil and Blood and Treasure?”
Our Founders believed that independence was more than a choice; they viewed our break from royal rule as necessary.
Consider the first statement of the Declaration: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The signatories were emphatic that separation from the crown was not only an objective, but an obligation: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.” In conclusion, the Founders wrote, “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation...”
Their cause, of course, was not anti-government. Rather they objected to the misgovernment of the king, saying, “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Furthermore, the Americans had been patient, petitioning their British rulers for redress for over a decade. Armed hostilities had commenced on April 19, 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord, and the colonists faced the full power of the British Empire in their quest for American independence.
One year before taking that step for nationhood, on July 5, 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, beseeching the British king for a peaceful resolution of the American colonies’ grievances. A day later, that same Congress resolved the “Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms.”
King George III refused to read the peace petition and assembled his armies. On July 2, 1776, Richard Henry Lee’s proposal for a formal declaration of separation passed, and the document was ordered printed on July 4.
The war-weary among us today might ask, was independence really necessary?
To pose the question at the outset of the Revolutionary War was to answer it. Representatives of the colonial Americans realized that, in voicing this query, they already possessed proof that they, not the King of England, were legitimate instruments of self-government for their countrymen. How could circumstances be otherwise when the king offered no remedy for his subjects’ complaints, no guarantee their rights would be respected, and no means for them to govern themselves in their new lands?
The founders knew, however, that power could not be its own justification. They recognized that only an appeal to overarching laws, binding the king as much as his subjects, was legitimate. And abuse of authority demonstrated disqualification of any governor, whether a monarch or a purported representative.
We would do well to apply this insight to the political debates of today.
Indeed, two competing philosophies of government at odds during the American Revolution have reappeared, with the anti-republican form seen in those politicians who would seek to gain favor by manipulating language and misrepresenting their positions. Royalists, on the other hand, believed that the king was divinely ordained to rule over the people and was therefore above the law. This view is manifest currently in government officials—especially our elected officers—who believe they may properly command the citizenry to whatever they please, to whichever they purport to be for the good of the people.
As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” Yet the prevailing philosophy of government proposes exactly this—that directions from Washington as to how we must conduct ourselves, in matters large and small, will lead inexorably to scarcity and will inevitably erode our freedom.
Our system of government today is not so different from the monarchy we escaped, except that a swarm of bureaucrats have taken up the throne.
A necessity thus presents itself to us as well: We must reconnect with the timeless principles that inspired our Founding Fathers; those same principles that long ago gave birth to a good, great and God-blessed nation.
“[W]hat do we mean by the American Revolution?” reflected John Adams. “Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”
Let us celebrate this Independence Day 2008 in a manner that Adams himself might recognize—with “solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty,” and with a rededication to the principles of our necessary American Revolution. And as always, in the words of George Washington, “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Western Govs Hope to Sway Future Energy Policy Citing a lack of federal leadership, the nation's Western governors want to draft a national energy policy they hope will influence the next presidential administration. Governors participating in the final day of the Western Governors' Association meeting in Wyoming said their resource-rich region is well positioned to take the lead on the issue. "We all know that nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics," said Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. "This group is very, very serious about putting forward a policy recommendation to the next administration." Tuesday's meeting wrapped up three days of discussions on issues related to energy, climate change, water supply and wildlife habitat. Over the next several months, representatives from the governors' offices will craft the energy policy proposal....
Senators Fault Pentagon On Bases' Toxic Cleanup Five Senate Democrats wrote to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday, chastising the Pentagon for resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up three contaminated military bases in their states. They also slammed the Pentagon's refusal to sign cleanup agreements required by law covering 12 other sites on the Superfund list of the nation's most polluted sites. "We would like to know why your department is endangering the public health," wrote Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), who was joined by Sens. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.). Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said yesterday she will hold hearings on the matter. Menendez, Lautenberg and Nelson have also asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate....
Four Ways of Looking at Global Warming Policy Assume man-made global warming is a big problem. What should we do about it? The four general policies currently in play are (1) cap-and-trade; (2) carbon taxes; (3) encourage economic growth and allow richer future generations to deal with any problems; and (4) massive government-funded low carbon energy research. Of course, these policies can be mixed and matched in various ways, but all involve the invention and deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies. The first two proposals do it by raising the price of carbon-based energy relative to low-carbon energy technologies. The third one implicitly melds the two-century-long trend toward progressive decarbonization of our energy supplies with a strategy of adaptation. The fourth one aims to accelerate technological innovation by stimulating the research and engineering pipeline. When climate push comes to shove, politicians prefer cap-and-trade schemes. Why? Because they don't have to explicitly tell voters the bad news that they are raising the prices of electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. Senators and representatives instead cloak this mandated energy price increase in the virtuous language of the market, disguising the fact that cap-and-trade is really a hidden tax. Issuing emissions permits is like coining money. If the denizens of Capitol Hill decide to auction the permits,it will provide a vast new revenue stream with which members of Congress can play....
'Om'-ing in Wyoming They pray, enjoy and discipline their kids, walk their dogs, eat together, do art, fall in and out of love, work day jobs, volunteer, disagree, agree to disagree, play, grow older and usually wiser, behave imperfectly, love the land, and believe America's vision as a home of the free and land of the brave. Sort of like your family. "Welcome home" to the Rainbow Family of Living Light, which is conducting its annual international Gathering of the Tribes this year at this site southeast of Pinedale in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. "Welcome home," "we love you," "hello, brother," "hello, sister," are among the frequent greetings heard at the unofficial front gate, along the trails, at the camps and associated kitchens. Some activities aren't like your family. Some Rainbows indulge in certain drugs and eschew others. Some also say people and their bodies aren't shameful, so clothing is optional. The annual gathering runs for the first seven days of the seventh month. The main event happens in the middle of that period, or noon on July 4, when thousands assemble at the main circle for silent meditation before chanting "Om," a sacred sound of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions....
Coming under fire Wildland firefighters are sending up smoke signals all over the West, as doubts emerge about the Forest Service’s ability to tackle devastating wildfires. In spite of the concerns and a damning, recent Congressional testimony, San Juan Public Lands officials remain confident about the local front against fire, but admit that it has come at a price. The Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, the union representing federal firefighters, recently raised red flags about the Forest Service’s firefighting ability. In mid-June, Casey Judd, the union’s business manager, provided testimony before the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. In essence, Judd accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture of diverting funding away from fire preparedness and fuels reduction and toward administrative expenses. “It’s a mess,” Judd said this week from his office in Idaho. “We’ve basically spent the last 2½ years trying to demonstrate that Congress is not getting the straight scoop from the USDA.” As an example, Judd pointed to the recently completed U.S. Forest Service Albuquerque Service Center, a nearly 100,000-square-foot building centralizing administrative services for the agency. Judd also alleged that $400 million in firefighting funds were skimmed this year to fund administrative positions at the center....
'Paradise Is Burning': Fires Prompt California Evacuations On the eve of one of the biggest tourism weekends of the summer, rampaging wildfires are prompting the evacuation of a picturesque stretch of the California coast and blanketing other popular spots with a haze of brown smoke. "It's paradise. And paradise is burning," Brian Courtney, 50, said as he sat outside a shuttered Big Sur restaurant and talked with neighbors awaiting what they viewed as an inevitable order to clear out of town. "It's very unsettling," Mr. Courtney, an artist who lives several miles from the main road, Highway 1, said. "I'm waiting for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Get out.'" During a visit yesterday to a firefighters' camp at a state park on the outskirts of Big Sur, Governor Schwarzenegger pleaded with local residents to heed instructions to leave. "It's tough to move out of your home. We understand it, but do it. Listen to our authorities and the people that know better," the governor said. "We cannot think selfishly here and say, 'I am going to stay in my house ...' and all those things. It doesn't work." About 300 separate wildfires were burning across California yesterday, officials said. Most were uncontrolled and in the northern half of the state. Mr. Schwarzenegger said roughly 1,400 fires had broken out in the past few weeks. "That is, I think, the most amount that anyone has ever heard in this state at one given time," he said. "In the last two, three years we've seen there is really no fire season any more. It used to be that late summer into fall is the fires but now it's all year round."....
Thirsty Denver joining beetle battle? Front Range water consumers could help pay for the removal of trees infected by pine beetles in western Colorado under new legislation. Senate Bill 221 lets the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority loan money to water providers, which would pay to remove trees devastated by beetles in Eagle and Summit counties and other places, said Democratic state Sen. Dan Gibbs, of Silverthorne. “This really takes forest health, in particular how we pay for forest-thinning projects, to a whole other level,” Gibbs said. The bill lets the Colorado water authority issue bonds to finance the loans, Gibbs said. The money to pay back the loans could come from higher water bills in Denver, Colorado Springs and other places, he said. Denver residents get some water from Lake Dillon in Summit County, for example, so Denver Water could pay to remove infected trees and to plant new ones to protect their water supply, Gibbs said. If a forest fire occurs, exacerbated by infected trees, water supplies could be tainted because dirt will spill into rivers and lakes at a greater rate, Gibbs said. Gibbs points out that a significant amount of dirt was dumped into Colorado water supplies after the Hayman Fire, which burned almost 138,000 acres southwest of Denver in 2002....
Here's the drill: BLM pulls rank on state Amid all the loud noises erupting from the recent series of hearings conducted by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission regarding water and wildlife protection, one reality has escaped public notice. When all debate is done, the state agency may not have the authority to enforce whatever rules it finally adopts. Citing a list of legal precedents, the Bureau of Land Management claims jurisdiction to conduct leasing on federal lands as it sees fit. This assertion was made early last month in a letter to the commission from Sally Wisely, director of BLM's Colorado State Office. "BLM believes that certain draft rules would be pre-empted by federal law if applied to oil and gas operations on federal lands," Wisely wrote in a five-page letter that repeatedly proclaimed supremacy regarding activities on the federal domain. "The COGCC may avoid the pre- emption problems discussed above by adding language to the draft rules which acknowledges that COGCC regulations do not apply to federal lands and minerals absent BLM concurrence." In the federal hierarchy, BLM administers all matters pertaining to minerals, even on Forest Service lands. All of which appears to set the stage for a direct state-federal conflict of the sort that has not existed for a century or more. For its part, Colorado's Department of Natural Resources, of which COGCC is a part, shows no inclination to back down. "Issues regarding water and wildlife are expressly reserved for the state and we intend to protect them under the state constitutional provisions and mandates," said Mike King, DNR deputy director....
Land deal raises a few questions Sen. Max Baucus bills it as the most significant conservation deal in Montana history, and he’s right. This week’s announcement that Plum Creek is selling 320,000 acres for conservation purposes may be hard to top. The Montana Legacy Project was made possible by a provision in the recently approved U.S. Farm Bill that allows federal bonds to be sold, providing up to $250 million toward an overall purchase price of $510 million. The balance must be raised by the nonprofit partners in the project, including the Trust For Public Lands and the Nature Conservancy. The basics sound simple, but in reality the project will be complex, involving three closing transactions over the next three years. How those transactions unfold remains to be seen, raising plenty of questions about the project. Plum Creek, for instance, is requiring “fiber supply agreements” to ensure that timber continues to flow from the lands that are sold to its Western Montana manufacturing facilities for up to 15 years. How much timber will be harvested, and who gets to decide? More important, perhaps: What’s the long-term outlook for Plum Creek in Western Montana? So far, the Montana Legacy Project’s backers maintain that purchased lands eventually will be conveyed to the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Montana and to private ownerships, provided there are conservation easements discouraging subdivision and development and maintaining public access. The nonprofit partners say they have no plans to assume long-term ownership of the lands....Issuing bonds for federal acquisition instead of appropriations? This is a precedent which will lead to more federal acquisition than otherwise would be the case. I guess the feds owning one out of every three acres in the U.S. is not enough.
Senators Fault Pentagon On Bases' Toxic Cleanup Five Senate Democrats wrote to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday, chastising the Pentagon for resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up three contaminated military bases in their states. They also slammed the Pentagon's refusal to sign cleanup agreements required by law covering 12 other sites on the Superfund list of the nation's most polluted sites. "We would like to know why your department is endangering the public health," wrote Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), who was joined by Sens. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.), Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.). Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said yesterday she will hold hearings on the matter. Menendez, Lautenberg and Nelson have also asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate....
Four Ways of Looking at Global Warming Policy Assume man-made global warming is a big problem. What should we do about it? The four general policies currently in play are (1) cap-and-trade; (2) carbon taxes; (3) encourage economic growth and allow richer future generations to deal with any problems; and (4) massive government-funded low carbon energy research. Of course, these policies can be mixed and matched in various ways, but all involve the invention and deployment of new low-carbon energy technologies. The first two proposals do it by raising the price of carbon-based energy relative to low-carbon energy technologies. The third one implicitly melds the two-century-long trend toward progressive decarbonization of our energy supplies with a strategy of adaptation. The fourth one aims to accelerate technological innovation by stimulating the research and engineering pipeline. When climate push comes to shove, politicians prefer cap-and-trade schemes. Why? Because they don't have to explicitly tell voters the bad news that they are raising the prices of electricity, natural gas, and gasoline. Senators and representatives instead cloak this mandated energy price increase in the virtuous language of the market, disguising the fact that cap-and-trade is really a hidden tax. Issuing emissions permits is like coining money. If the denizens of Capitol Hill decide to auction the permits,it will provide a vast new revenue stream with which members of Congress can play....
'Om'-ing in Wyoming They pray, enjoy and discipline their kids, walk their dogs, eat together, do art, fall in and out of love, work day jobs, volunteer, disagree, agree to disagree, play, grow older and usually wiser, behave imperfectly, love the land, and believe America's vision as a home of the free and land of the brave. Sort of like your family. "Welcome home" to the Rainbow Family of Living Light, which is conducting its annual international Gathering of the Tribes this year at this site southeast of Pinedale in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. "Welcome home," "we love you," "hello, brother," "hello, sister," are among the frequent greetings heard at the unofficial front gate, along the trails, at the camps and associated kitchens. Some activities aren't like your family. Some Rainbows indulge in certain drugs and eschew others. Some also say people and their bodies aren't shameful, so clothing is optional. The annual gathering runs for the first seven days of the seventh month. The main event happens in the middle of that period, or noon on July 4, when thousands assemble at the main circle for silent meditation before chanting "Om," a sacred sound of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religions....
Coming under fire Wildland firefighters are sending up smoke signals all over the West, as doubts emerge about the Forest Service’s ability to tackle devastating wildfires. In spite of the concerns and a damning, recent Congressional testimony, San Juan Public Lands officials remain confident about the local front against fire, but admit that it has come at a price. The Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, the union representing federal firefighters, recently raised red flags about the Forest Service’s firefighting ability. In mid-June, Casey Judd, the union’s business manager, provided testimony before the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. In essence, Judd accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture of diverting funding away from fire preparedness and fuels reduction and toward administrative expenses. “It’s a mess,” Judd said this week from his office in Idaho. “We’ve basically spent the last 2½ years trying to demonstrate that Congress is not getting the straight scoop from the USDA.” As an example, Judd pointed to the recently completed U.S. Forest Service Albuquerque Service Center, a nearly 100,000-square-foot building centralizing administrative services for the agency. Judd also alleged that $400 million in firefighting funds were skimmed this year to fund administrative positions at the center....
'Paradise Is Burning': Fires Prompt California Evacuations On the eve of one of the biggest tourism weekends of the summer, rampaging wildfires are prompting the evacuation of a picturesque stretch of the California coast and blanketing other popular spots with a haze of brown smoke. "It's paradise. And paradise is burning," Brian Courtney, 50, said as he sat outside a shuttered Big Sur restaurant and talked with neighbors awaiting what they viewed as an inevitable order to clear out of town. "It's very unsettling," Mr. Courtney, an artist who lives several miles from the main road, Highway 1, said. "I'm waiting for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Get out.'" During a visit yesterday to a firefighters' camp at a state park on the outskirts of Big Sur, Governor Schwarzenegger pleaded with local residents to heed instructions to leave. "It's tough to move out of your home. We understand it, but do it. Listen to our authorities and the people that know better," the governor said. "We cannot think selfishly here and say, 'I am going to stay in my house ...' and all those things. It doesn't work." About 300 separate wildfires were burning across California yesterday, officials said. Most were uncontrolled and in the northern half of the state. Mr. Schwarzenegger said roughly 1,400 fires had broken out in the past few weeks. "That is, I think, the most amount that anyone has ever heard in this state at one given time," he said. "In the last two, three years we've seen there is really no fire season any more. It used to be that late summer into fall is the fires but now it's all year round."....
Thirsty Denver joining beetle battle? Front Range water consumers could help pay for the removal of trees infected by pine beetles in western Colorado under new legislation. Senate Bill 221 lets the Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority loan money to water providers, which would pay to remove trees devastated by beetles in Eagle and Summit counties and other places, said Democratic state Sen. Dan Gibbs, of Silverthorne. “This really takes forest health, in particular how we pay for forest-thinning projects, to a whole other level,” Gibbs said. The bill lets the Colorado water authority issue bonds to finance the loans, Gibbs said. The money to pay back the loans could come from higher water bills in Denver, Colorado Springs and other places, he said. Denver residents get some water from Lake Dillon in Summit County, for example, so Denver Water could pay to remove infected trees and to plant new ones to protect their water supply, Gibbs said. If a forest fire occurs, exacerbated by infected trees, water supplies could be tainted because dirt will spill into rivers and lakes at a greater rate, Gibbs said. Gibbs points out that a significant amount of dirt was dumped into Colorado water supplies after the Hayman Fire, which burned almost 138,000 acres southwest of Denver in 2002....
Here's the drill: BLM pulls rank on state Amid all the loud noises erupting from the recent series of hearings conducted by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission regarding water and wildlife protection, one reality has escaped public notice. When all debate is done, the state agency may not have the authority to enforce whatever rules it finally adopts. Citing a list of legal precedents, the Bureau of Land Management claims jurisdiction to conduct leasing on federal lands as it sees fit. This assertion was made early last month in a letter to the commission from Sally Wisely, director of BLM's Colorado State Office. "BLM believes that certain draft rules would be pre-empted by federal law if applied to oil and gas operations on federal lands," Wisely wrote in a five-page letter that repeatedly proclaimed supremacy regarding activities on the federal domain. "The COGCC may avoid the pre- emption problems discussed above by adding language to the draft rules which acknowledges that COGCC regulations do not apply to federal lands and minerals absent BLM concurrence." In the federal hierarchy, BLM administers all matters pertaining to minerals, even on Forest Service lands. All of which appears to set the stage for a direct state-federal conflict of the sort that has not existed for a century or more. For its part, Colorado's Department of Natural Resources, of which COGCC is a part, shows no inclination to back down. "Issues regarding water and wildlife are expressly reserved for the state and we intend to protect them under the state constitutional provisions and mandates," said Mike King, DNR deputy director....
Land deal raises a few questions Sen. Max Baucus bills it as the most significant conservation deal in Montana history, and he’s right. This week’s announcement that Plum Creek is selling 320,000 acres for conservation purposes may be hard to top. The Montana Legacy Project was made possible by a provision in the recently approved U.S. Farm Bill that allows federal bonds to be sold, providing up to $250 million toward an overall purchase price of $510 million. The balance must be raised by the nonprofit partners in the project, including the Trust For Public Lands and the Nature Conservancy. The basics sound simple, but in reality the project will be complex, involving three closing transactions over the next three years. How those transactions unfold remains to be seen, raising plenty of questions about the project. Plum Creek, for instance, is requiring “fiber supply agreements” to ensure that timber continues to flow from the lands that are sold to its Western Montana manufacturing facilities for up to 15 years. How much timber will be harvested, and who gets to decide? More important, perhaps: What’s the long-term outlook for Plum Creek in Western Montana? So far, the Montana Legacy Project’s backers maintain that purchased lands eventually will be conveyed to the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Montana and to private ownerships, provided there are conservation easements discouraging subdivision and development and maintaining public access. The nonprofit partners say they have no plans to assume long-term ownership of the lands....Issuing bonds for federal acquisition instead of appropriations? This is a precedent which will lead to more federal acquisition than otherwise would be the case. I guess the feds owning one out of every three acres in the U.S. is not enough.
FLE
Red tape may delay $400 million for Mexico drug war The Bush administration said Tuesday it would take months, and possibly longer, to deliver $400 million in emergency assistance to help Mexico combat murderous drug cartels, days after pressing Congress to urgently approve the money. Three senior Bush administration officials outlined various bureaucratic impediments to speedy delivery of assistance to bolster Mexican President Felipe Calderon's $4 billion, military-style campaign against drug traffickers. The cartels have killed more than 4,000 people over the past 21 months, including some 450 police officers, soldiers or government officials. Challenges to implementing the first phase of the Merida Initiative include developing coordination between the Defense Department, the State Department and the Treasury; setting benchmarks for success; and prolonged procurements of military equipment such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft. "Both governments have seized a political moment to show solidarity, but the real planning for implementation has yet to take place," said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. "There was a real sense of urgency to show cooperation, without coordination on a long-term plan."....Ain't this typical. They justify the expenditure because of an "emergency", it takes 14 months from the Summit for Congress to appropriate the money, and will it will take the Bushies upwards of a year to spend it on this "emergency". Two years to respond to an "emergency".... The Bush administration officials spoke as Texans in Congress vowed to re-double efforts to boost federal spending on U.S. law enforcement along the border to balance the aid flowing to Mexico. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, had added $100 million to the emergency supplemental spending bill to bolster U.S. law enforcement agencies operating along the U.S. side of the 1,947-mile border with Mexico. But the House knocked the added spending out of the final compromise version of the legislation. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said he remained "disappointed and frustrated that we can't get funding on this side that our Border Patrol and sheriffs desperately need."....I'm not sure this money would be spent wisely either, but it does let us know Congressional spending priorities: Mexico $400 million - U.S nada.
NTSB gives cause of crash that killed ICE officer The National Transportation Safety Board says a U.S. Customs and Border Protection instructor pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft during an aborted training flight landing contributed to a crash that killed an ICE officer. Julio E. Baray, of El Paso, Texas, was killed in the Sept. 24 crash of a Cessna 210 near the Moriarty airport. The NTSB said an autopsy report listed the cause of death as blunt force injuries to the head. Neither the customs agency nor the NTSB released the name of the instructor pilot, who was injured in the crash. The NTSB said that during interviews, he told investigators he could not remember the flight or the previous several days. Witnesses say the plane had been practicing takeoffs and landings just before the crash. Officials said it went off the runway and caught fire. The NTSB, in a report Monday on the probable cause of the crash, said the instructor pilot's failure to maintain control during the aborted landing and an attempted go-around resulted in a stall and the plane went down. The NTSB also cited the instructor pilot's inadequate supervision during landing.
Mandela off U.S. terrorism watch list Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress have been on the list because of their fight against South Africa's apartheid regime, which gave way to majority rule in 1994. Apartheid was the nation's system of legalized racial segregation that was enforced by the National Party government between 1948 and 1994. The bill gives the State Department and the Homeland Security Department the authority to waive restrictions against ANC members. The bill is H.R. 5690, which "authorizes the Departments of State and Homeland Security to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa."....
Young Lawyer Takes Victory Lap After Supreme Court Gun Case Win A group of gun rights advocates roared with approval as Alan Gura descended the stairs of the Supreme Court on the morning of June 26, having just learned of the high court's decision in the landmark Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller. "Goodbye, gun ban!" they chanted. Gura, whom history will remember as the lawyer who successfully argued that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms, smiled broadly. Goodbye, gun ban. A few minutes later, Mary Mitchell Purvis, a senior at the University of Mississippi, caught Gura between interviews with Associated Press Television News and National Public Radio. She presented the 37-year-old lawyer with a copy of the Heller opinion. "Would you sign this? I'm doing my thesis on your case." But of course he would. When libertarian activist Robert Levy, the lawsuit's financier, tapped Gura to argue the case before the Supreme Court earlier this year, more than a few Court watchers questioned the young lawyer's qualifications. Though he won the case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- in his first federal appellate arguments -- it was presumed that the high court work would go to a veteran. And now here was Gura, with his shaggy brown hair and iPhone, signing opinions like they just went gold....
The Ancient Right The U.S. Supreme Court D.C. v. Heller decision now makes it clear to all — the Second Amendment affirms an individual right to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense. Even though the Court’s opinion leaves room for laws regulating guns in schools and government buildings, as well as restricting “dangerous and unusual weapons,” these exceptions should be considered just that — exceptions. The opinion devotes only three pages to them, toward the end of a lengthy discourse on the historical basis for the individual right interpretation. Perhaps Heller’s deepest affirmation is that it invokes the natural right of self-defense in support of the constitutional right to have firearms. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia cites the historical evidence that the founders intended protection of an individual, not a collective right. He quotes founding-era legal scholar St. George Tucker’s version of Blackstone’s Commentaries: “The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible.” The rulers of big cities in 21st-century America, not to mention assorted despots around the world, have long sought to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Those limits have just been greatly relaxed, and it’s only a matter of time before they are pushed back to a level far more in keeping with the view of the Founders....
Gun Rights: Media Armageddon 2008 The Supreme Court ruling on gun laws last Thursday created media frenzy. Editorials, columnists, anchors and pundits predicted it would result in an American Armageddon. According to the major media outlets in the nation, innocent lives will be lost, the Supreme Court justices have joined forces with city criminals and life as we’ve known it is over. Who knew upholding the Constitution would have such disastrous effects? In the 5-4 majority vote, the Supreme Court’s ruling reversed the liberals’ longstanding interpretation of the Second Amendment, that it was a right of the state, not the individual, to keep and bear arms. For the past 70 years, America’s elites viewed the right to bear arms as a collective right. Applied in the District of Columbia, the law prohibited the ownership of handguns and made it a criminal offence to have an operable weapon in the home ready to defend self and family from intruders. While these laws intended to curb gun violence, they failed in that and made it nearly impossible for people to exercise the fundamental right of self-defense. While Americans should celebrate this law for its perpetuation of individual freedoms, the media instead perceives disaster....
Wilmette Suspends Local Handgun Ban Wilmette has suspended enforcement of its 19-year-old ordinance banning handgun possession in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that appears to invalidate such bans. In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns, a prohibition similar to those used in several major cities, including Chicago, and a handful of suburbs including Wilmette, Evanston, Winnetka and Oak Park. "The Law Department and the Police Department have suspended enforcement of the ordinance pending further review by the Village Board," Wilmette village attorney Tim Frenzer said Thursday. "Based on the decision today, at a minimum it calls into serious question the continued viability of the ordinance." Frenzer said questions remain about how directly the court's decision will impact local gun laws in Wilmette and other parts of the country. Washington is not a state, and each state has its own legal language governing the right to bear arms. "That aside, the opinion will require further review and discussion by the Village Board, but it's prudent at this point to suspend enforcement of it," Frenzer said. Wilmette's law, enacted in 1989, levied fines of up to $750 for handgun possession and allowed the village to seek a judge's order to have seized weapons destroyed....
A Victory and a Warning The Supreme Court rightly deserves applause for its fidelity to the Constitution in deciding Heller. The case is perhaps the most significant decision of this century. However, Americans should not forget that this was a 5-4 decision. Four justices of the Supreme Court would have ignored the plain language and historical context of the Amendment. Believing themselves at liberty to rewrite fundamental law, these justices would leave Americans at the mercy of armed criminals and a future government tyranny. The Second Amendment is part of the same Bill of Rights that guarantees liberty of the press, the right of assembly, and freedom of religious worship. If a near majority of the Court attempted to erase the Second Amendment from the Constitution, what is to stop them from taking a cavalier approach to other constitutional rights? While Americans should rejoice in the victory for individual rights in Heller, they should not forget that four justices of the nation’s highest court would have eradicated the right to bear arms. If only a slight majority of the Court respects the ancient and fundamental right of resistance and self-preservation, Americans should be concerned about the fate of other liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights....
Groups Sue U.S. for Data On Tracking By Cellphone Two civil liberties groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government yesterday, seeking records related to the government's use of cellphones as tracking devices. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government in federal court in Washington under the Freedom of Information Act. Last November, the ACLU had filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department for documents, memos and guides regarding the policies for tracking people through the use of their cellphones. The groups also want to know how many times the government sought location information without first establishing probable cause that a crime was taking place. The ACLU's FOIA request was made after an article in The Washington Post last fall revealed that federal officials were routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data on individuals and that courts sometimes have ordered the data released without first requiring a showing of probable cause....
Red tape may delay $400 million for Mexico drug war The Bush administration said Tuesday it would take months, and possibly longer, to deliver $400 million in emergency assistance to help Mexico combat murderous drug cartels, days after pressing Congress to urgently approve the money. Three senior Bush administration officials outlined various bureaucratic impediments to speedy delivery of assistance to bolster Mexican President Felipe Calderon's $4 billion, military-style campaign against drug traffickers. The cartels have killed more than 4,000 people over the past 21 months, including some 450 police officers, soldiers or government officials. Challenges to implementing the first phase of the Merida Initiative include developing coordination between the Defense Department, the State Department and the Treasury; setting benchmarks for success; and prolonged procurements of military equipment such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft. "Both governments have seized a political moment to show solidarity, but the real planning for implementation has yet to take place," said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. "There was a real sense of urgency to show cooperation, without coordination on a long-term plan."....Ain't this typical. They justify the expenditure because of an "emergency", it takes 14 months from the Summit for Congress to appropriate the money, and will it will take the Bushies upwards of a year to spend it on this "emergency". Two years to respond to an "emergency".... The Bush administration officials spoke as Texans in Congress vowed to re-double efforts to boost federal spending on U.S. law enforcement along the border to balance the aid flowing to Mexico. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, had added $100 million to the emergency supplemental spending bill to bolster U.S. law enforcement agencies operating along the U.S. side of the 1,947-mile border with Mexico. But the House knocked the added spending out of the final compromise version of the legislation. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said he remained "disappointed and frustrated that we can't get funding on this side that our Border Patrol and sheriffs desperately need."....I'm not sure this money would be spent wisely either, but it does let us know Congressional spending priorities: Mexico $400 million - U.S nada.
NTSB gives cause of crash that killed ICE officer The National Transportation Safety Board says a U.S. Customs and Border Protection instructor pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft during an aborted training flight landing contributed to a crash that killed an ICE officer. Julio E. Baray, of El Paso, Texas, was killed in the Sept. 24 crash of a Cessna 210 near the Moriarty airport. The NTSB said an autopsy report listed the cause of death as blunt force injuries to the head. Neither the customs agency nor the NTSB released the name of the instructor pilot, who was injured in the crash. The NTSB said that during interviews, he told investigators he could not remember the flight or the previous several days. Witnesses say the plane had been practicing takeoffs and landings just before the crash. Officials said it went off the runway and caught fire. The NTSB, in a report Monday on the probable cause of the crash, said the instructor pilot's failure to maintain control during the aborted landing and an attempted go-around resulted in a stall and the plane went down. The NTSB also cited the instructor pilot's inadequate supervision during landing.
Mandela off U.S. terrorism watch list Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday. Mandela and other members of the African National Congress have been on the list because of their fight against South Africa's apartheid regime, which gave way to majority rule in 1994. Apartheid was the nation's system of legalized racial segregation that was enforced by the National Party government between 1948 and 1994. The bill gives the State Department and the Homeland Security Department the authority to waive restrictions against ANC members. The bill is H.R. 5690, which "authorizes the Departments of State and Homeland Security to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa."....
Young Lawyer Takes Victory Lap After Supreme Court Gun Case Win A group of gun rights advocates roared with approval as Alan Gura descended the stairs of the Supreme Court on the morning of June 26, having just learned of the high court's decision in the landmark Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller. "Goodbye, gun ban!" they chanted. Gura, whom history will remember as the lawyer who successfully argued that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms, smiled broadly. Goodbye, gun ban. A few minutes later, Mary Mitchell Purvis, a senior at the University of Mississippi, caught Gura between interviews with Associated Press Television News and National Public Radio. She presented the 37-year-old lawyer with a copy of the Heller opinion. "Would you sign this? I'm doing my thesis on your case." But of course he would. When libertarian activist Robert Levy, the lawsuit's financier, tapped Gura to argue the case before the Supreme Court earlier this year, more than a few Court watchers questioned the young lawyer's qualifications. Though he won the case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- in his first federal appellate arguments -- it was presumed that the high court work would go to a veteran. And now here was Gura, with his shaggy brown hair and iPhone, signing opinions like they just went gold....
The Ancient Right The U.S. Supreme Court D.C. v. Heller decision now makes it clear to all — the Second Amendment affirms an individual right to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense. Even though the Court’s opinion leaves room for laws regulating guns in schools and government buildings, as well as restricting “dangerous and unusual weapons,” these exceptions should be considered just that — exceptions. The opinion devotes only three pages to them, toward the end of a lengthy discourse on the historical basis for the individual right interpretation. Perhaps Heller’s deepest affirmation is that it invokes the natural right of self-defense in support of the constitutional right to have firearms. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia cites the historical evidence that the founders intended protection of an individual, not a collective right. He quotes founding-era legal scholar St. George Tucker’s version of Blackstone’s Commentaries: “The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible.” The rulers of big cities in 21st-century America, not to mention assorted despots around the world, have long sought to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Those limits have just been greatly relaxed, and it’s only a matter of time before they are pushed back to a level far more in keeping with the view of the Founders....
Gun Rights: Media Armageddon 2008 The Supreme Court ruling on gun laws last Thursday created media frenzy. Editorials, columnists, anchors and pundits predicted it would result in an American Armageddon. According to the major media outlets in the nation, innocent lives will be lost, the Supreme Court justices have joined forces with city criminals and life as we’ve known it is over. Who knew upholding the Constitution would have such disastrous effects? In the 5-4 majority vote, the Supreme Court’s ruling reversed the liberals’ longstanding interpretation of the Second Amendment, that it was a right of the state, not the individual, to keep and bear arms. For the past 70 years, America’s elites viewed the right to bear arms as a collective right. Applied in the District of Columbia, the law prohibited the ownership of handguns and made it a criminal offence to have an operable weapon in the home ready to defend self and family from intruders. While these laws intended to curb gun violence, they failed in that and made it nearly impossible for people to exercise the fundamental right of self-defense. While Americans should celebrate this law for its perpetuation of individual freedoms, the media instead perceives disaster....
Wilmette Suspends Local Handgun Ban Wilmette has suspended enforcement of its 19-year-old ordinance banning handgun possession in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that appears to invalidate such bans. In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns, a prohibition similar to those used in several major cities, including Chicago, and a handful of suburbs including Wilmette, Evanston, Winnetka and Oak Park. "The Law Department and the Police Department have suspended enforcement of the ordinance pending further review by the Village Board," Wilmette village attorney Tim Frenzer said Thursday. "Based on the decision today, at a minimum it calls into serious question the continued viability of the ordinance." Frenzer said questions remain about how directly the court's decision will impact local gun laws in Wilmette and other parts of the country. Washington is not a state, and each state has its own legal language governing the right to bear arms. "That aside, the opinion will require further review and discussion by the Village Board, but it's prudent at this point to suspend enforcement of it," Frenzer said. Wilmette's law, enacted in 1989, levied fines of up to $750 for handgun possession and allowed the village to seek a judge's order to have seized weapons destroyed....
A Victory and a Warning The Supreme Court rightly deserves applause for its fidelity to the Constitution in deciding Heller. The case is perhaps the most significant decision of this century. However, Americans should not forget that this was a 5-4 decision. Four justices of the Supreme Court would have ignored the plain language and historical context of the Amendment. Believing themselves at liberty to rewrite fundamental law, these justices would leave Americans at the mercy of armed criminals and a future government tyranny. The Second Amendment is part of the same Bill of Rights that guarantees liberty of the press, the right of assembly, and freedom of religious worship. If a near majority of the Court attempted to erase the Second Amendment from the Constitution, what is to stop them from taking a cavalier approach to other constitutional rights? While Americans should rejoice in the victory for individual rights in Heller, they should not forget that four justices of the nation’s highest court would have eradicated the right to bear arms. If only a slight majority of the Court respects the ancient and fundamental right of resistance and self-preservation, Americans should be concerned about the fate of other liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights....
Groups Sue U.S. for Data On Tracking By Cellphone Two civil liberties groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government yesterday, seeking records related to the government's use of cellphones as tracking devices. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government in federal court in Washington under the Freedom of Information Act. Last November, the ACLU had filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department for documents, memos and guides regarding the policies for tracking people through the use of their cellphones. The groups also want to know how many times the government sought location information without first establishing probable cause that a crime was taking place. The ACLU's FOIA request was made after an article in The Washington Post last fall revealed that federal officials were routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data on individuals and that courts sometimes have ordered the data released without first requiring a showing of probable cause....
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Legislation Has Little Impact on Climate Change, Critic Says While the Bush administration has spent nearly $45 billion on climate change-related programs, according to Deputy Transportation Secretary Thomas Barrett, experts called for more spending and initiatives during a recent Senate subcommittee hearing on the topic. Critics, however, say the spending is wasteful and unnecessary. During his testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee last Tuesday, John D. Porcari, Maryland's secretary of transportation and chairman of the Climate Change Technical Assistance Program, said his state is developing a statewide Greenhouse Gas and Carbon Footprint Reduction Strategy to reduce emissions between 25 and 50 percent between 2006 and 2020, and to obtain 90 percent reductions by 2050. "If we can reduce the fuel burned by vehicles stalled in traffic, that is a gain," he said. "If we can improve the flow of traffic so fuel is burned at more optimal efficiency that is also a gain." Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, who was not asked to testify before the committee, told Cybercast News Service that climate change is not an imminent threat and legislation is not going to help "wave a magic wand" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "There's really nothing you can do to substantially reduce emissions," he said. "If every nation in the world followed the Kyoto Protocol, the amount of warming that would be prevented is 7-hundredths of a degree Celsius. ... We have no idea how to reduce emissions - these amounts that are being talked about in bills like Lieberman-Warner, 70 percent reductions in 42 years? Give me a break."....
Berkeley tree-sitters still hanging on In December 2006, protesters angry about campus expansion plans clambered into the branches of a threatened oak grove at the University of California-Berkeley. The tree-sitters continue to sit. There had been signs the protest might be coming to an end as a court case challenging a planned multimillion-dollar athletic-training facility inched closer to resolution. This month administrators, who won a court order allowing them to evict the protesters at any time, cut supply lines, yanked a few protesters out of the trees and drove the rest into a single redwood. For a while, it looked like campus officials were prepared to starve protesters out. But after the remaining half-dozen or so tree-sitters said they were a) not moving and b) rationing water, officials relented and offered sustenance to the protesters aloft. "This misguided effort to preserve a 1923 landscaping project certainly doesn't warrant any action that could cause harm or permanent health consequences for anybody involved," said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof....
The bulb hoarders The government wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love. Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year. And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available. In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011. The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US....Is anybody surprised at this? Soon we'll be sneaking our light bulbs in from Mexico, just like we do our toilets.
Now health and safety cut number of holes in chip shop salt shakers Pot-holed roads, crumbling schools, litter-strewn streets – there’s no shortage of problem areas crying out for their attention. But councils believe they have found a better use for their money: reducing the number of holes in chip shop salt shakers. Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half. And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas. Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution. Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’. They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer....How long will it take the food nazies on this side of the ocean to pick up on this? Note how the plan is to fool the citizen into thinking they have a "visually acceptable sprinking." The all-knowing government officials will trick us into better health. Grover Nyquist's "Leave Us Alone Coalition" is looking better every day.
Berkeley tree-sitters still hanging on In December 2006, protesters angry about campus expansion plans clambered into the branches of a threatened oak grove at the University of California-Berkeley. The tree-sitters continue to sit. There had been signs the protest might be coming to an end as a court case challenging a planned multimillion-dollar athletic-training facility inched closer to resolution. This month administrators, who won a court order allowing them to evict the protesters at any time, cut supply lines, yanked a few protesters out of the trees and drove the rest into a single redwood. For a while, it looked like campus officials were prepared to starve protesters out. But after the remaining half-dozen or so tree-sitters said they were a) not moving and b) rationing water, officials relented and offered sustenance to the protesters aloft. "This misguided effort to preserve a 1923 landscaping project certainly doesn't warrant any action that could cause harm or permanent health consequences for anybody involved," said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof....
The bulb hoarders The government wants your old-fashioned energy-hungry incandescent tungsten light bulb gone, and gone soon. But some people are willing to go to great lengths to hang onto the lights they love. Incandescent bulbs - that's the traditional kind to you or me - waste 95% of the energy they use, according to Greenpeace. They calculate that phasing them out in the UK will save more than five million tonnes in CO2 emissions a year. And yet some households are so attached to them that they not only keep buying them - they're stockpiling them ahead of the day when they're no longer available. In September last year, the UK government made a deal with major shops for the supply of traditional bulbs to be turned off. Some higher energy bulbs will be gone by January 2009, and all incandescent lights will be off by 2011. The agreement is voluntary, but other countries have announced legal bans, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US....Is anybody surprised at this? Soon we'll be sneaking our light bulbs in from Mexico, just like we do our toilets.
Now health and safety cut number of holes in chip shop salt shakers Pot-holed roads, crumbling schools, litter-strewn streets – there’s no shortage of problem areas crying out for their attention. But councils believe they have found a better use for their money: reducing the number of holes in chip shop salt shakers. Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half. And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas. Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution. Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’. They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer....How long will it take the food nazies on this side of the ocean to pick up on this? Note how the plan is to fool the citizen into thinking they have a "visually acceptable sprinking." The all-knowing government officials will trick us into better health. Grover Nyquist's "Leave Us Alone Coalition" is looking better every day.
FLE
AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State' Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others. Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T's internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government's warrantless wiretapping program broke. Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) -- which were under court seal -- and published the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated. The lawsuit that resulted from his documents is now waiting on the 9th U.S. Appeals Court to rule on whether it can proceed despite the government saying the whole matter is a state secret. A lower court judge ruled that it could, because the government admitted the program existed and that the courts could handle evidence safely and in secret. But the appeals court ruling will likely never see the light of day, since the Senate is set to vote on July 8 on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which also largely legalizes Bush's warrantless wiretapping program by expanding how the government can wiretap from inside the United States without getting individualized court orders....
Momentum stalls for wiretapping bill Backlash from a senator and liberal advocacy groups helped sidetrack legislation to legalize President Bush's undocumented wiretapping program last week, just days after it appeared to be on a fast-track to passage. The delay is a setback for Democratic leaders who support the measure, who had hoped to send the bill to Mr. Bush before this week's July 4 holiday break. The House June 20 put aside more than a year of partisan wrangling and easily passed a bill to modernize the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allowing U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop, without court approval, on foreign targets thought to be outside the United States. But opposition from Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, who has threatened to hold up the bill with a filibuster, forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, on Thursday to postpone a vote until next week. The legislation included retroactive immunity from lawsuits to phone companies that participated in a post-Sept. 11 surveillance program that operated outside court review - a controversial measure that had doomed previous attempts to pass a bill. Mr. Feingold, who opposes the bill's immunity provision, said the measure was "not a compromise - it is a capitulation."....
Airport gun showdown moves to courts Guns were the issue. But words and federal lawsuits became the weapons of choice Tuesday as Atlanta officials declared Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport a "gun-free zone," and gun advocates immediately retaliated by suing them. The fight about a new state law — one that permits licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons in more public places — began at Atlanta's city-run airport, the world's busiest with 89 million passengers a year. But city officials say they think it could eventually have a nationwide impact. "This is a matter of national significance," Mayor Shirley Franklin told reporters at a news conference. Permitting guns inside an airport, even weapons carried by permit holders, would create an unsafe environment that "would endanger millions of people," the mayor said. Franklin vowed Tuesday to lobby Congress and federal officials to mandate that any public facility receiving federal money be declared a "gun-free zone." That would affect airports nationwide. Franklin's comments followed a vow by city officials to arrest anyone carrying a gun at Hartsfield-Jackson. The city drew a line in the sand on the very same day a new state law easing gun restrictions in public places took effect. The new law allows licensed gun owners who pass background checks to carry concealed weapons on public transportation, in parks and recreation areas and in restaurants that serve alcohol — all areas that were previously off-limits....
Gun Bill Provides for Self-Defense District gun owners would be able to keep weapons in their homes, loaded and without trigger locks, for "immediate self-defense" under legislation being introduced in the D.C. Council today. The bill, sponsored by Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), would also repeal the city's 32-year-old ban on handguns, which was struck down last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 ruling. Mendelson released a draft of his legislation yesterday. The bill specifically addresses the majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia that said, "We hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense." Technically, the legislation would still require that firearms be kept unloaded and disabled, but it would provide a broad exception for guns that are present in the home for the purpose of "immediate self-defense." The exception is intended to address the high court's objection to a requirement that all guns be kept unloaded and either disassembled or outfitted with trigger locks. The exception would extend to firearms at the owner's "place of business, or . . . being used for lawful recreational purposes within the District of Columbia," according to the draft....
Civil rights coalition sues San Francisco over public housing gun ban Today, using the Heller decision as the basis for the challenge, the Citizens Committee, in partnership with the National Rifle Association (NRA), filed a civil rights lawsuit to confirm that the Second Amendment restricts state and local governments from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms as well. The lawsuit was filed in federal court against the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Public Housing Authority to invalidate the City’s ordinance (Police Code section 617) and lease provision that bans the possession of firearms in public housing. Before the Second Amendment can be used to challenge unconstitutional regulations laws at the state or local level, it must be “incorporated” through the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to the state and local governments. The lawsuit will serve to establish the incorporation doctrine in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, including California, and invalidate the existing ban on firearms in public housing in San Francisco in the process. “As with the advancement of any civil right throughout history, subsequent litigation is essential in order to establish both the parameters of the Second Amendment’s protections, and initially to establish that the Second Amendment restricts state and local governments from infringing on your right to self-defense,” said Chuck Michel, civil rights attorney for the plaintiffs in the case....
Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga "has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens." He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to "purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself." The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street. Judge Moon said, "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes - unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon." The woman said she was driving on E. 17th Street when Beard came riding up on a bicycle and pulled a gold handgun on her. When she refused to get out of the car, he began hitting her in the head with the gun. He then pulled her out and drove off with her gold 2001 Toyota Corolla....
AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State' Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others. Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T's internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government's warrantless wiretapping program broke. Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) -- which were under court seal -- and published the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated. The lawsuit that resulted from his documents is now waiting on the 9th U.S. Appeals Court to rule on whether it can proceed despite the government saying the whole matter is a state secret. A lower court judge ruled that it could, because the government admitted the program existed and that the courts could handle evidence safely and in secret. But the appeals court ruling will likely never see the light of day, since the Senate is set to vote on July 8 on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which also largely legalizes Bush's warrantless wiretapping program by expanding how the government can wiretap from inside the United States without getting individualized court orders....
Momentum stalls for wiretapping bill Backlash from a senator and liberal advocacy groups helped sidetrack legislation to legalize President Bush's undocumented wiretapping program last week, just days after it appeared to be on a fast-track to passage. The delay is a setback for Democratic leaders who support the measure, who had hoped to send the bill to Mr. Bush before this week's July 4 holiday break. The House June 20 put aside more than a year of partisan wrangling and easily passed a bill to modernize the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allowing U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop, without court approval, on foreign targets thought to be outside the United States. But opposition from Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, who has threatened to hold up the bill with a filibuster, forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, on Thursday to postpone a vote until next week. The legislation included retroactive immunity from lawsuits to phone companies that participated in a post-Sept. 11 surveillance program that operated outside court review - a controversial measure that had doomed previous attempts to pass a bill. Mr. Feingold, who opposes the bill's immunity provision, said the measure was "not a compromise - it is a capitulation."....
Airport gun showdown moves to courts Guns were the issue. But words and federal lawsuits became the weapons of choice Tuesday as Atlanta officials declared Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport a "gun-free zone," and gun advocates immediately retaliated by suing them. The fight about a new state law — one that permits licensed gun owners to carry concealed weapons in more public places — began at Atlanta's city-run airport, the world's busiest with 89 million passengers a year. But city officials say they think it could eventually have a nationwide impact. "This is a matter of national significance," Mayor Shirley Franklin told reporters at a news conference. Permitting guns inside an airport, even weapons carried by permit holders, would create an unsafe environment that "would endanger millions of people," the mayor said. Franklin vowed Tuesday to lobby Congress and federal officials to mandate that any public facility receiving federal money be declared a "gun-free zone." That would affect airports nationwide. Franklin's comments followed a vow by city officials to arrest anyone carrying a gun at Hartsfield-Jackson. The city drew a line in the sand on the very same day a new state law easing gun restrictions in public places took effect. The new law allows licensed gun owners who pass background checks to carry concealed weapons on public transportation, in parks and recreation areas and in restaurants that serve alcohol — all areas that were previously off-limits....
Gun Bill Provides for Self-Defense District gun owners would be able to keep weapons in their homes, loaded and without trigger locks, for "immediate self-defense" under legislation being introduced in the D.C. Council today. The bill, sponsored by Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), would also repeal the city's 32-year-old ban on handguns, which was struck down last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 ruling. Mendelson released a draft of his legislation yesterday. The bill specifically addresses the majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia that said, "We hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense." Technically, the legislation would still require that firearms be kept unloaded and disabled, but it would provide a broad exception for guns that are present in the home for the purpose of "immediate self-defense." The exception is intended to address the high court's objection to a requirement that all guns be kept unloaded and either disassembled or outfitted with trigger locks. The exception would extend to firearms at the owner's "place of business, or . . . being used for lawful recreational purposes within the District of Columbia," according to the draft....
Civil rights coalition sues San Francisco over public housing gun ban Today, using the Heller decision as the basis for the challenge, the Citizens Committee, in partnership with the National Rifle Association (NRA), filed a civil rights lawsuit to confirm that the Second Amendment restricts state and local governments from infringing on the right to keep and bear arms as well. The lawsuit was filed in federal court against the City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Public Housing Authority to invalidate the City’s ordinance (Police Code section 617) and lease provision that bans the possession of firearms in public housing. Before the Second Amendment can be used to challenge unconstitutional regulations laws at the state or local level, it must be “incorporated” through the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to the state and local governments. The lawsuit will serve to establish the incorporation doctrine in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, including California, and invalidate the existing ban on firearms in public housing in San Francisco in the process. “As with the advancement of any civil right throughout history, subsequent litigation is essential in order to establish both the parameters of the Second Amendment’s protections, and initially to establish that the Second Amendment restricts state and local governments from infringing on your right to self-defense,” said Chuck Michel, civil rights attorney for the plaintiffs in the case....
Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga "has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens." He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to "purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself." The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street. Judge Moon said, "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes - unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon." The woman said she was driving on E. 17th Street when Beard came riding up on a bicycle and pulled a gold handgun on her. When she refused to get out of the car, he began hitting her in the head with the gun. He then pulled her out and drove off with her gold 2001 Toyota Corolla....
NMSU RODEO
Salvo is tie-down champion
Nat Holland El Defensor Chieftain Reporter
Horse Springs roper Johnny Salvo is sitting at the top of his game. Salvo, who rides with the New Mexico State University rodeo team, is the College National Finals Rodeo champion in tie-down roping, after a series of top performances last week in Casper, Wyo.
"I didn't really try to win it, just tried to have good runs," Salvo said. "It didn't feel too much different from high school. I'm just a freshman, but I didn't really feel like I was an underdog or anything."
The top three ropers in each division qualify to compete in the finals, and Salvo has competed against most of them in previous rodeos.
Salvo is currently competing in various rodeos around New Mexico, and plans work his way eventually towards competing in the National Finals Rodeo.
"That's the toughest one to get into," Salvo said. "That is where everyone's sights are eventually."
After a year with the NMSU team, Salvo has adapted to life away from home.
"It's harder in the fact that you're not with your family anymore. You have to set up your own practices," Salvo said. "One of the best things about it is that it's nice to accomplish stuff on your own."
The NMSU rodeo team, coached by Jim Dewey Brown, doesn't practice together, according to Salvo, but everyone pulls for each other at the rodeos.
The credit for his win isn't his own, said Salvo. "Anytime I win I want to give the glory to God because that's where it comes from."
nholland@dchieftain.com
Gow races to national rodeo title for NMSU
The News-Review
New Mexico State University senior Bailey Gow can call herself a national champion.
Gow, a Roseburg High graduate, won the barrel racing aggregate title at the 60th annual College National Finals Rodeo last weekend at the Casper Events Center.
Gow — who placed fourth in barrel racing at the 2007 CNFR — finished with a time of 57.92 seconds over four runs, including a 14.22, which won the short go-round. Annelle Williams of University of Nevada Las Vegas was second overall at 57.95.
UNLV sophomore Jaymie Leach, another Roseburg grad, finished 17th in barrel racing. Leach’s fastest run was 14.55.
Gow is the second Roseburg native in four years to win a national barrel racing championship. Nataly Tatone captured the crown in 2005 as a senior at UNLV.
Gow finished fourth in the women’s all-around standings with 225 points. She finished 20th in breakaway roping.
Gow’s horse — “Aprils Honor” — won the women’s American Quarter Horse Association Horse of the Year award.
UNLV won the women’s team title with 470 points, followed by New Mexico State with 432.5. Walla Walla Community College was first in the men’s race with 740 points.
Salvo is tie-down champion
Nat Holland El Defensor Chieftain Reporter
Horse Springs roper Johnny Salvo is sitting at the top of his game. Salvo, who rides with the New Mexico State University rodeo team, is the College National Finals Rodeo champion in tie-down roping, after a series of top performances last week in Casper, Wyo.
"I didn't really try to win it, just tried to have good runs," Salvo said. "It didn't feel too much different from high school. I'm just a freshman, but I didn't really feel like I was an underdog or anything."
The top three ropers in each division qualify to compete in the finals, and Salvo has competed against most of them in previous rodeos.
Salvo is currently competing in various rodeos around New Mexico, and plans work his way eventually towards competing in the National Finals Rodeo.
"That's the toughest one to get into," Salvo said. "That is where everyone's sights are eventually."
After a year with the NMSU team, Salvo has adapted to life away from home.
"It's harder in the fact that you're not with your family anymore. You have to set up your own practices," Salvo said. "One of the best things about it is that it's nice to accomplish stuff on your own."
The NMSU rodeo team, coached by Jim Dewey Brown, doesn't practice together, according to Salvo, but everyone pulls for each other at the rodeos.
The credit for his win isn't his own, said Salvo. "Anytime I win I want to give the glory to God because that's where it comes from."
nholland@dchieftain.com
Gow races to national rodeo title for NMSU
The News-Review
New Mexico State University senior Bailey Gow can call herself a national champion.
Gow, a Roseburg High graduate, won the barrel racing aggregate title at the 60th annual College National Finals Rodeo last weekend at the Casper Events Center.
Gow — who placed fourth in barrel racing at the 2007 CNFR — finished with a time of 57.92 seconds over four runs, including a 14.22, which won the short go-round. Annelle Williams of University of Nevada Las Vegas was second overall at 57.95.
UNLV sophomore Jaymie Leach, another Roseburg grad, finished 17th in barrel racing. Leach’s fastest run was 14.55.
Gow is the second Roseburg native in four years to win a national barrel racing championship. Nataly Tatone captured the crown in 2005 as a senior at UNLV.
Gow finished fourth in the women’s all-around standings with 225 points. She finished 20th in breakaway roping.
Gow’s horse — “Aprils Honor” — won the women’s American Quarter Horse Association Horse of the Year award.
UNLV won the women’s team title with 470 points, followed by New Mexico State with 432.5. Walla Walla Community College was first in the men’s race with 740 points.
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