N.M. ranch a glimmer of what renewable energy can mean to Arizona

When you turn on a light in Phoenix, you might be connecting with windmills on Steve Tapia's land in New Mexico. The 77-year-old rancher and his wife are among the property owners leasing out sites for 90 giant wind turbines on the stark Aragonne Mesa, halfway between Albuquerque and the Texas line. "It's been good wind since I was born," he says. "Now, we're making money from it." Arizona Public Service buys the energy output, enough to power about 25,000 homes. Tapia had his doubts about the towering white structures with three whirling blades. With his substantial belt, hefty bola tie and a face with the same hard lines as the rocks on the mesa, the former sheriff is a picture of the traditional West. But now, he likes the windmills' sleek silhouettes along the ridge line. Especially since the extra income helps keep his ranching operations going. This is the new West, where alternative energy is a growing business and a small but a growing source of power...read more

Enviro groups back roundup of wild horses

Two environmental groups are joining ranchers in an unusual coalition supporting the government's contentious removal of about 2,500 wild horses from the range north of Reno. The Sierra Club and Friends of Nevada Wilderness, which have been at odds with ranchers on past issues, agree with the need for the ongoing roundup of wild horses in the Calico Mountain Complex. The organizations, in a joint news release with the sportsmen groups Safari Club International and Coalition for Nevada's Wildlife, said an overpopulation of wild horses is harming native wildlife and the range itself. Sierra Club spokeswoman Tina Nappe of Reno said a wild horse can consume up to 26 pounds of forage a day and arid rangelands can't produce enough food for them. Wild horses have been observed chasing and harassing pronghorn antelope near water sources, the organizations said, and have been identified as a risk factor for critical sage grouse habitat. The bird has been petitioned for protection as an endangered species. Bighorn sheep and mule deer also compete for food and water with wild horses, the groups said, and their populations are down. Jeremy Drew, president of the Safari Club's Northern Nevada chapter, criticized various celebrities for suggesting the roundup is threatening the Calico herd with extinction. He noted at least 572 horses will be left in the herd. Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Bill Maher, Lily Tomlin and Ed Harris are among celebrities who have come out against the roundup...read more

Horse problem: Abandonment up in rough times

Brand inspector Mike Walck won’t soon forget one of the worst cases of animal cruelty he has seen. In mid-November, between Rulison and Parachute, someone shot a horse in the head, leaving the gray gelding in his late teens or early 20s for dead. But the horse didn’t die. “I don’t know why they were trying to kill the horse, but they damn sure shot it in the head,” Walck said angrily. “It’s a tough deal.” Walck said the horse has been nursed back to health and is recovering. No arrests have been made in the case. Unfortunately, Walck said, similar cases are on the rise. Walck, who oversees brand inspections from De Beque and Aspen, said he normally handles one or two abandoned-horse cases a year. He handled 14 or 15 last year, which he said is becoming a trend that is mirrored nationwide. There was a time when people could buy horses with the intent of feeding and caring for them for resale. About 10 years ago, horses were sold at sale barns for a minimum of $500 to $600, said Jim Brach, co-owner of Western Slope Cattlemen’s Livestock Auction of Loma. Better horses fetched $1,500 to $3,000. At that time, slaughter prices were about 40 cents a pound, he said. But these days, it’s likely folks will get at most a couple hundred dollars, and in some instances may owe money to the sale barn to sell a horse, Brach said. Slaughterhouses have disappeared in this country because it is illegal to buy or sell horses for human consumption in the U.S. Videotaped reports from Mexico’s slaughterhouses, however, indicate the practice is more brutal than any former U.S. plant. Some people cite an increase in abandoned, neglected and abused horses as one drawback of the ban on U.S. slaughterhouses. Costs for a veterinarian to euthanize a horse can run from $75 to $150, not including a disposal fee, which may be prohibitive to some hard-up horse owners. Selling an older horse for slaughter formerly added valued to the animals that weigh between 900 to 1,600 pounds. Horse owners selling for slaughter now often end up paying money to be rid of them. “Instead of doing that, they’ll abandon them and turn them out into the wild,” said Keene Rayley, brand inspector for Mesa County. “There’s getting to be a glut of horses on the market. This is the tip of the iceberg, and it’s going to get worse.”...read more

Many factors determine snowflake size, shape

The world’s largest snowflakes hit the ground during a January storm in 1887 at Fort Keogh, on the western edge of Miles City. At least that’s what’s listed in the Guinness World Records. A rancher described the snowflakes as “larger than milk pans” and measured one at 15 inches wide. A mailman, stuck in the blizzard, also witnessed the huge flakes, although their claim lacked tangible, corroborating evidence. Other challengers don’t even come close to dethroning the Miles City behemoth. Weather officials in Berlin, Germany, reported a storm in 1915 that produced 4-inch-wide flakes shaped like oval bowls, and a fall snowstorm in Laramie, Wyo., in September of 1970 dropped 3-inch-wide flakes. "While it’s tempting to blow off the record-breaking flakes as a tall tale, Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a physicist with a passion for snowflakes, believes in at least the possibility of pan-sized snowflakes. “It’s not an individual snow crystal — it’s gobs of snow crystals stuck to together,” said Libbrecht, who heads the physics department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. It’s hard to believe in softball-sized hailstones, but people pull them out of their freezers, he said. Libbrecht created the Web site SnowCrystals.com, which includes online photo galleries of snowflakes along with the science...read more

MCCARTNEY Offers hard-hitting Meat Industry DVD as Golden Globe Gift

SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY is hoping to convert celebrities attending this weekend's (17Jan10) Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles into vegetarians by placing his hard-hitting new PETA DVD, GLASS WALLS, in presenters and nominees' gift bags. The former Beatle, who will be among the presenters, agreed to endorse the hard-hitting film, which takes viewers inside the meat industry. The longtime veggie, who narrates and appears in the film, says, "I've often said, 'If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.' "Animals raised on modern factory farms and killed in slaughterhouses endure almost unimaginable suffering. I hope that once you see the routine cruelty involved in raising, transporting, and killing animals for food, you'll join the millions of people who have decided to leave meat off their plates - for good." [link

'The Wilderness Warrior'

Mark Hanna, the Republican Party operative responsible for William McKinley's election to the presidency in 1896, did not like Theodore Roosevelt. Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, famously dismissed Roosevelt as a "cowboy." "The reality, in fact, was far worse than Hanna contemplated," Douglas Brinkley writes in "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America." "Roosevelt was a pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist who had been trained at Harvard as a Darwinian-Huxleyite zoologist and now believed that the moral implications of 'On the Origin of Species' needed to be embraced by public policy." Much is known about him, but as Candice Millard showed in "The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Last Journey," and as Brinkley proves in his massive, fascinating study of Roosevelt's successful efforts to preserve more than 200million acres of America's forests and natural wonders, much remains to be learned. Roosevelt's obsession with wildlife and wild places began as a child (he collected mice and made accurate sketches of them, by subspecies) and continued throughout his life. He seriously considered a career as a biologist or naturalist before entering politics and was an authority on bears, deer and many varieties of birds. He was deeply in love with the American West and made trips into the backcountry as president, most memorably at Yosemite, where, in 1903, he camped in a snowstorm with John Muir. The image of Roosevelt and Muir dancing around a campfire is unforgettable; it is impossible to imagine any other president taking such joy in the outdoors. Roosevelt used every tool at his disposal to protect wild areas from development. He and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, created 16 million acres of new national forests in 1907 in a daring move against a congressional deadline. Roosevelt also passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 and used it to create 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon (which later became a national park.)...read more

Lori Armstrong brings taste of South Dakota into her novels

It's the geographical diversity - the plains, the Badlands, the mountains - that holds so much intrigue for Armstrong. That's why the Rapid City author, whose new book "No Mercy" was published this month, sets many of her stories here. In "No Mercy," Armstrong tells the story of Mercy Gunderson, a sharp shooter who takes a debilitating medical leave from the Army after her father's death to reassemble the broken remains of her family at their ranch in the Black Hills. But even as she leaves the war in Iraq, a new battleground is brewing on her own property as she fights for the land that's been in her family for generations. "Mercy is cool headed, but she never wanted to come back to South Dakota. Having to come back to South Dakota was probably the worst punishment for her," Armstrong says. "No Mercy" marks the beginning of Armstrong's second mystery series. The first, the Julie Collins mysteries, garnered a number of honors for Armstrong, including the 2007 Willa Cather Literary Award for best original softcover fiction and the 2009 Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America for the best paperback original. Armstrong currently is finishing the second book in the series, "Mercy Kill."...read more

Reality series captures every move of Montana ranch families

The spotlight has shined on Bill Galt of White Sulphur Springs before, but not like this. Galt and his ranching family are the subjects of an upcoming reality TV show on the Animal Planet channel that will debut later this year. The show, titled "Cowboys," follows three families that own and operate cattle ranches in Montana through the ups and downs of a season. The docudrama spotlights calving, weaning, cattle drives, auctions and more. The network describes the show as "set against the majestic backdrop of Montana." The show is set to start airing eight one-hour episodes in March. Also featured in the show will be Avon ranchers Earl and Glenna Stuckey and the Hughes Mountain Guest Ranch in Stanford. "From the traditional rancher who does everything by hand and on horseback to the modern ranch that uses high-tech equipment and all-terrain vehicles, each family's fortune depends on the success or failure of the season," the show's description reads. "Facing unpredictable weather, disease and injuries, thousands of new births and hungry predators waiting for an easy meal, these modern ranches continue the great American tradition of life on the range. 'Cowboys' is larger-than-life, life-and-death, real-life drama."...read more

East Texas online radio show is 'World Wild West'

It's 7 p.m. when Ralph Hampton dons a headset and starts the show. "We're coming to you live from sparkling San Augustine, Texas, from the second floor of the Hightop Feed and Seed," the 53-year-old says into a small microphone. This is "Ralph's Backporch," a connection from a small, East Texas town to Western and cowboy culture lovers the world over. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night, Hampton and Tamara Boatright, 42, host two hours of conversation, Western-style music and cowboy poetry broadcast by way of Internet radio. The Backporch has hit the Internet every week since October 2007, reaching a few thousand listeners throughout the nation and in Britain, New Zealand, Brazil and about 20 other nations. They began playing Western music that one of their advertisers mailed them. Playing the music led to interviews with the songwriters, several of whom were working cowboys. Then, cowboy poets started calling in to tell stories and read poems. Their guests have included songwriters Michael Martin Murphey and Don Edwards and National Public Radio contributor and cowboy poet Baxter Black. In November, they won the Western Music Association's Best Radio Station award. Ralph's Backporch plays the music that commercial radio stations won't touch, Boatright said. Since a few corporations now own almost every commercial radio station in the nation, she said, most mainstream country music stations play the same small list of songs. "It's music of the heartland," Hampton said. "Whether you are a farmer, a working cowboy — or some guy who grew up going to the movies and seeing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and now you wear a suit and tie and get stuck on the freeway every day — it's something they can listen to and relate to."...read more

Sheep rancher following lead of his ancestors

The fertile Lipan Flats east of here were mainly prairie when pioneer farmers started settling their land and clearing the brush in the late 1880s. The first settlers were J.C. and Lou Bell Bunnell in 1886. The town was named for J.M. Wall, a storekeeper who also served as first postmaster when the post office opened in 1906. When George E. Hemphill claimed his 640 acre tract four miles south of Wall, he plowed the land with mules he brought with him from Missouri in 1902. “I can remember my mother telling about Grandpa Hemphill hollering at those stubborn mules,” said John Horace “Took” Edwards. “He finally got rid of the mules and bought draft horses to pull the plow.” Hemphill bought the farm from W.A. and Victoria Pringle. His first crops were oats, cotton and milo. He later bought another 640 acres and added livestock production to the operation. He was one of the first Concho Valley stockfarmers to raise and feed lambs for shipment by rail to Fort Worth as fat choice lambs, Took remembers. Besides sheep and goats, he also got into the purebred Hereford cattle business...read more

Jensen-Alvarado Ranch house gives glimpse of 1800s

The brick ranch house on the Jensen-Alvarado Ranch in Rubidoux greets several thousand visitors each year, giving them an up-close look at Inland life in the 1800s. Elementary school children and seniors alike shuffle through the home, examining the bedroom furniture that belonged to the home's original owners, eyeing a cradle where babies were once rocked to sleep and looking at a piano that belonged to the home's original owners. The ranch, at 4307 Briggs St. in Riverside, was built by Cornelius Jensen, a retired sea captain and native of the island of Sylt. He reportedly completed the home in 1870. The home is the oldest nonadobe structure in the Inland Empire, according to information provided by Nancy Wenzel, interpretive services supervisor for the ranch, which is owned and operated by Riverside County. Jensen built the ranch and planted the vineyards and orchards on 460 acres he purchased from Louis Robidoux. At one point, the ranch was worth about $30,000, making it the second-most valuable in the Riverside and West Riverside areas...read more

'Bill Kitt' saga spans the whole life of Oregon cattle country

The only trouble with "Bill Kitt" the book is that we learn relatively little about Bill Kitt the man. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "I really felt that I could have sat down and done a biography just on my granddad," says Donovan "Jack" Nicol, who with his niece, Amy Thompson, is the author of a 450-page Western saga masquerading as Kitt's biography. "But that would be self-serving. "He did a lot, but he had a lot of other people with him -- a lot of them worthy of a book themselves. I thought, 'These were great stories, so let's bring 'em all in.' That's why I tried to cover the whole ranching picture during that time." So, while "Bill Kitt" the book uses Kitt's life "from trail driver to Cowboy Hall of Fame" as its framework, it offers near-encyclopedic aspects of cattle country life. For openers, Kitt's full name was William Kittredge. But he was known throughout southeast Oregon's cattle country and beyond by his nickname to the point a lot of folks might have been surprised to learn he had a longer moniker. His career in the cattle business spanned 1893 to 1958. It took him from a $25-a-month buckaroo to owner of one of the West's most massive cattle operations: 68,000 acres of deeded property in in Klamath, Lake and Harney counties in Oregon; Humboldt and Washoe counties in Nevada and Tehama County in California, as well as 850,000 acres leased from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Oregon and Nevada, plus 52,000 other leased acres. It also earned him distinction as one of only three Oregonians honored in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma City...read more

Song Of The Day #222

Ranch Radio will help get you off to a swinging week with The New Green Light recorded in 1954 by Hank Thompson. It's available on several of his collections which you can view here.

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

The season for snow cowboys

by Julie Carter

I was always a fair weather cowgirl, but it just didn't always happen that there were fair weather cattle that needed tending.

Fact of life - if you have cattle and live where winter is a force to contend with, you have to be dedicated to the job. Being a little bit crazy doesn't hurt.

The Texas Panhandle, Amarillo particularly, claims some notoriety for its miserable winters.
Running yearlings on winter wheat is a tricky deal requiring good hard horses and cowboys of the same ilk.

Darrell had a big string of yearlings on winter wheat throughout most of a miserable Panhandle winter. The wheat had gotten too short and the cattle needed to be moved.

Darrell, known for his penchant to always do things the hard way, called for some help to come move the cattle.

Trucking them would have cost about $100 dollars, but Darrell was determined to save the expense for Buster, the mega-bucks Kansas cattleman that owned the herd.

The morning that the cowboys showed up to move the cattle, a cold, bitter east wind blew in, driving ice and sleet in front of it, and into the faces of the cattle, horses and cowboys. Naturally, east was the very direction they needed to go.

The cattle fought to turn back, refusing to drive into the wind except by force. This kept all but two of the riders at the back of the herd plenty busy.

The two point riders were needed mostly just to open the gates. No danger of the cattle running off in that direction.

It took all of the morning and a good part of the afternoon to drive the herd six miles.
The cowboys took turns thawing out in the pickups that followed behind.

The horses had balls of ice and snow packed in their hooves and their eye lashes and nostrils were iced over, same as the cowboys.

There wasn't a creature, man or beast, that wasn't chilled to the bone and hoping they'd live to see another warm day.

Nobody ever heard if Buster appreciated all the misery and work that went into saving him $100, but it was quite some time before Darrell was able to round up any extra winter help again.

In times of blizzards, a solid broke horse that will pull whatever you tie a rope onto is a must.
Yearlings are known to ball up in a corner of a wheat field and die out of pure spite.

Farmers seem to be irritable about it when they have to run over bones to plow in the spring, so a fella needs to be able drag off the deads and make them available to the used-cow dealer.

Many a wheat pasture lord has become closely acquainted with the guy at the rendering service. All part of winter wheat pasture cowboying.

Meanwhile, back in the mountains where winter may not blow in quite the same as it does on the plains, cold and snow are still the challenge.

It was late in the fall and everything but a few strays had been gathered out of the mountain pastures, but the search would continue as long as the hills were passable.

My brother and I were still pretty young when we tagged along with my dad to track a few of the last stragglers in the deep canyons fronting the Rocky Mountain range of home.

With our horses in single file, we trudged through the snow that had settled in the bottom of the draws.
Often we had to dismount and let the horses lunge their way to the top of a steep hill. We would catch them at the top of the ridge after we first, and then they, floundered through the belly deep drifts covering the north slopes in the shade of the pines.

Wet boots and wet gloves aided in fingers and toes turning to popsicles without feeling.
As the sun made its way to setting behind the mountain range, the cold fell on us like a heavy blanket, chilling us to the marrow.

We were so cold by the time we headed home that my brother, unable to reach his stirrups, unknowingly lost one of his too big hand-me-down boots during the long miserable jog trot back to barn.

As long as there are horses that need ridden, cattle that need tended, cowboys will saddle up in the chill of winter and do the job because it's there to be done, no matter the conditions.
In their youth, it comes more easily. A few decades later, justification for waiting for the sun to shine comes even easier.

"Why ride colts in a snowstorm? How can you teach them to watch for rattlesnakes in this weather?"

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net

It's The Pitts: Loco-Vores

By Lee Pitts

You aren’t going to believe this one. Or, perhaps you will when I tell you where the event took place. It seems that some folks out in San Francisco have started eating dirt. Yes, now in addition to scheduling wine and olive tastings on their weekends California hipsters will have to add “soil tastings.” Although I was not there (gosh darn it) a group of foodies were invited to a new restaurant in Frisco for a “Taste the Earth” celebration where they tasted some of the nuances between soils from different “terroirs.” If you try this yourself at home please be careful to avoid soils from sewage sludge terroirs, horse boarding terroirs and feedlot terroirs.

This is all part of the “locovore” movement, mostly a bunch of veg heads who believe that you should only eat foods grown within 100 miles from your house. I sympathize with all vegan locavores attempting to live in some parts of West Texas where your diet is going to be limited to beef, rattlesnakes and cottonseed hulls.

Get used to hearing the word locavore a lot. It was first coined during the 2005 World Environment Day in San Francisco (where else) by Jessica Prentice and in 2007 the Oxford American Dictionary named it their “Word of the Year.” (I didn’t even know there was such a thing!) Locavores believe we should be celebrating our local “foodways” and “foodsheds,” and they aren’t talking about the smokehouse out back. As I understand it, a “foodshed” is the “terroir” where your food should come from and I get a funny feeling they aren’t talking about a Tyson or JBS slaughterhouse.

The locavores say that, on average, the food we eat travels 1,500 miles before it gets to our plate. While I really like the idea of patronizing farmer’s markets and eating more locally I wonder if the locavores in Frisco have ever been out of the Golden State? It’s one thing to live within shouting distance of Salinas, Napa and the Pacific Ocean where you can regularly dine on the four necessary food groups, salad, fish sticks, wine and beef, but quite another if you live in Duluth. If you order a locavore bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich in a Big Apple deli you can have everything on it except the bacon, lettuce and tomato. And hold the bread and mayonnaise too.

I’d imagine that being a locavore is a lot easier when you live in Florida or California where you can order anything on the menu 365 days a year, but how about the folks in South Dakota? Where are they going to get freshly squeezed orange juice in the middle of January? And leafy greens are a little sparse out Wickenburg way.

If you enjoy the occasional shrimp dinner and live in landlocked Nebraska you are either going to have to raise them in your salt water swimming pool or move to the left or right coast to satisfy your craving. I’d imagine a locavore in Alaska or the middle of the Mojave Desert is going to starve to death! If this idea catches on the good folks in Wyoming are going to wish they’d built more hot houses and fewer windmills. And those folks waiting in Las Vegas buffet lines are sure going to be disappointed.

Just for fun I decided that I’d fix a locavore dinner for my wife just to see how hard it would be. First of all you can forget her favorite food, which is cheese, because there hasn’t been a dairy within a 100 miles of my house for decades. Lamb was also out because the coyotes ate the last sheep in these parts in 1961, as was pork because the only hogs around here are wild ones. I take that back, 4-H and FFA kids have lambs and pigs and they’ll become billionaires if we all become locavores.

Being a locavore is part of the sustainability movement and my American Oxford Dictionary defines the word “sustainable” as something that can go on indefinitely. How are New York locavores going to be able to “sustain” themselves in the middle of winter by eating locally raised food exclusively? They better take a page from the book of those kooks out in Frisco and get used to the scrumptious, yet gritty, taste of dirt.

Song Of The Day #221

Our Sunday Gospel tune is My Lord Keeps Me Satisfied performed by The Lonesome River Band on their 10 track CD Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

Eight-Year-Old on TSA Terrorist Watchlist Gets Frisked

The Transportation Security Administration, attempting to squelch nefarious rumors, has asserted on its web site under a “Mythbuster” feature that “No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.” Unfortunately for the TSA, the New York Times found an 8-year-old on its list. Mikey Hicks, a Cub Scout in Camden, New Jersey, is a frequent flyer who can’t seem to get a break because he shares a name with another Michael Hicks who has drawn suspicion from the Department of Homeland Security. This coincidence has resulted in numerous airport delays for his family over the years. Mikey, who was born less than a month before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, received his first pat-down by TSA screeners when he was 2 years old — an experience that left him in tears...read more

The Bogus Anti-Terrorist Crackdown on Financial Freedom

In the post–9/11 era, federal officials are treating cash as they would a suspected weapon of mass destruction. They have created legions of new restrictions and reporting requirements for citizens’ money. But the new controls have done nothing to make Washington any more competent at protecting Americans from real threats. Federal experts estimated that Mohamed Atta and the other 18 hijackers required only about half a million dollars in total financing to carry out their attacks on September 11, 2001. That is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars’ worth of currency transactions that occur daily around the world. Terrorism expert Brian Jenkins observed, “Terrorism tends to be a low-budget item. The real resources are fervent young men who are willing to blow themselves to bits.” But the feds seized upon the attacks to greatly expand intrusions into Americans’ financial affairs. The terrorist attacks instantly endowed George W. Bush with the right to micro-manage world financial institutions — or so the Bush administration apparently believed. And while Treasury Department officials portrayed their decrees as first strikes against “money that kills,” in reality it is almost impossible to determine which dollar bills have homicidal intent. The USA PATRIOT Act gave the feds the right to financially strip-search every American...read more

FBI admits Spanish politican was model for 'high-tech' Osama bin Laden photo-fit

The US state department was forced to withdraw the mocked up photo-image, circulated around the world last week, after the discovery that it was not quite as technically sophisticated as the FBI had originally claimed. The digitally altered image of an older and greying Bin Laden was meant to show how the world's most wanted terrorist might now look without his trademark turban and long beard. It was released in a renewed effort to locate him, more than eight years after the September 11 attack which he ordered and directed. But it created an unexpected stir in Madrid when a Spanish MP recognised strong elements of himself in the image and complained to the US...read more

The Drug War vs. the Bill of Rights

In America, our liberties our ostensibly protected by the U.S. Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. How much has the drug war compromised our Constitutional rights? Let us consider a countdown, starting with the Tenth Amendment and moving to First. The Tenth Amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This effectively means that if the Constitution does not grant the power to the federal government over something, then it is for the states and people to decide. Some people here would say this is the most important amendment. If the federal government obeyed it, the entire drug war as we know it would be impossible. In 1909, Hamilton Wright, U.S. official to the Shanghai Opium Commission, complained that the Constitution was "constantly getting in the way" of his drug war ambitions. Indeed, in domestic politics, there is no Constitutional authorization for a federal drug war whatever. Without a grant of power, the U.S. government is supposed to butt out. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed the Harrison Narcotic Act into law. There was no constitutional basis for this, but at least by the time alcohol prohibition came around, it was recognized that the federal government would need constitutional authority to ban liquor. They passed the 18th Amendment and repealed the disaster of alcohol prohibition with the 21st amendment. By 1937, however, there was no more such deference to Constitutional procedure...read more