Vin Suprynowicz

Pollster Scott Rasmussen told a local radio host this week that if GOP Congressman Ron Paul were to pursue a third-party candidacy next fall — which he considers unlikely — Paul would draw more votes from Barack Obama than from the Republican nominee. That is how upset the anti-war Left is with the president, Mr. Rasmussen said.

Wow.

And if the Obama administration has upset that traditional Democratic constituency with its “forgetfulness” over closing the Guantanamo POW camp and speeding up withdrawals from our counterproductive, hugely expensive “nation-building” enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan, you don’t even want to ask how happy traditionally left-leaning civil libertarians are about the administration’s stance on the Bill of Rights.

Obviously, this administration hates the Second Amendment. When Robert Levy and Clark Neily of the Cato Institute launched the gun rights case that became District of Columbia v. Heller, the administration argued — unsuccessfully, thank heaven — that there was no Second Amendment right for residents of the District of Columbia to own handguns to defend their homes. (And no, they certainly didn’t add that it would be more militarily useful for residents to own machine guns, offering to hand them out at cost.)

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It was a bit of a consciousness shifting event to sit in a banquet hall at the Tuscany Resort in Las Vegas Monday evening alongside some 95 county sheriffs and a handful of deputies — most in full uniform with gleaming badges — listening to and applauding speakers you’d more commonly associate with Libertarian Party gatherings or seminars sponsored by the Austrian economists of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The most common topic of discussion at the gathering of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association appeared to be the National Defense Authorization Act recently signed into law by President Barack Obama, condemned by speaker after speaker for gutting a huge segment of the Bill of Rights by extending to the executive branch powers previously associated only with military forces operating overseas.

Does the phrase “indefinite detention” ring a bell?

If I had to list a second most popular topic at the gathering it would probably be some aspect of United Nations Agenda 21, which has given the schoolmarms of the fascist Left such popular euphemisms as “sustainable development,” but which is actually about shoving rural folk off the land under any of a thousand “environmental” pretexts, the long-term goal being to cluster a sharply reduced remnant of European and American mankind into urban tenement ghettos from which we can be shuttled to our state-assigned jobs in little solar-powered trolleys.

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Richard Mack first came to national attention when, as sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, he successfully brought the lawsuit Mack v. United States (re-named Printz v. United States, when Mack’s suit was joined with that of Sheriff Jay Printz of Ravalli County, Montana), arguing Congress had no legitimate power to order local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks under the 1993 Brady Bill, or “Handgun Violence Prevention Act.”

Mack and Printz won a significant Supreme Court victory for states’ right and limits on federal power, though many authorities now argue the decision had little practical effect, since most police agencies seem pleased as punch to earn a profit charging law-abiding citizens to submit to fingerprinting and other indignities in order to be licensed to exercise what was previously considered their “right” to keep and bear arms.

(Effect in “preventing handgun violence”? Since criminals seem little deterred from carrying without permits, while the hassles and expense of complying with the law do presumably disarm at least some crime victims who might otherwise carry, the law has accomplished the opposite of its stated purpose, of course.)

Sheriff Mack, a Utah native who’s now running for Congress in Texas (21st District, against Lamar Smith, who the sheriff describes as a “Republican in Name Only”), also serves on the board of Oath Keepers, an outfit supporting government officers who vow to keep their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, even when ordered to do otherwise. (God bless ’em.)

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Farm injuries among youths have been declining for more than a decade, according to Barbara Lee, senior research scientist at the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield, Wisc.

But more than 15,000 youths under the age of 20 were still injured on farms in 2009, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Most of those injuries involved routine farm chores, according to Nancy Leppink, deputy administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division — though some involved kids riding four-wheel-drive vehicles and the like.

In July 2010, two boys, 14 and 19, died in a corn bin they were trying to clear in Illinois. A few months later, a 3-year-old Michigan boy died after falling from the combine his father was driving.

So the federal government now proposes to race to the rescue, naturally, with proposed new regulations that would:

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They say when you stand at the base of the great pyramid of Khufu and look up, you don’t see a pyramid, at all. The proportions are so vast that the third dimension drops away, and it appears you’re simply gazing at a flat new horizon, albeit tilted up at 51 degrees.

(This may be no accident. The western horizon was a very important place to the ancient Egyptians — the boundary between this world and the World-Beyond. And while it’s true the Egyptians were fixated on that land of the dead, it may not be true that all their best-celebrated texts were merely instructions to the traveler on how to conduct himself once he’d crossed that horizon for good. The promise of all mystery religions — Egypt’s surely among the oldest — was of a ritual and a sacrament that would allow the traveler to voyage to the World-Beyond … and return.)

But we were speaking of getting so close to things that it’s hard to see them with a proper perspective. I believe that happened to most of the newshounds commenting on the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night.

They’ve been following the inside baseball of the jockeying for position among the would-be Republican presidential nominees for so long that they seemed to miss the obvious: Many Americans have been studiously avoiding this sideshow. Tuesday evening was the first time many changed the channel and watched Mitt Romney and Ron Paul speak for a few minutes.

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The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to block the development and use of low-cost coal and oil reserves in this country — and even in Canada.

Bad enough that the administration continues to block the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas, a job-intensive private project which would reduce our dependence on Mideast oil and which has already passed every environmental review with flying colors. Beyond that, “Each step the government took … showcases its defiance,” as the administration continued its deepwater drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down as illegal, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of New Orleans found last year, holding the Obama administration in contempt of court.

Against this background, if we are to avoid crippling the U.S. economy entirely, it’s more urgent than ever that known high-grade uranium deposits be developed to facilitate new nuclear power plants, responsibly but quickly.

So the Obama administration announced Monday it’s going to … ban new mining claims on a million acres “near” the Grand Canyon, an area known to be rich in high-grade uranium ore reserves … for 20 years!

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Fed by streams tumbling from the Selkirk Mountains and bordered by parkland, the 19-mile stretch of clear water in the Idaho Panhandle known as Priest Lake has been called “the Lake Tahoe of the upper Northwest,” The Washington Post reports. Houses and resorts crowd the privately owned lakeshore; piers and a marina jut into its waters.

A local couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett run an excavation business in Priest Lake. Back in 2005, Chantell bought Mike a 0.63-acre lot in a subdivision about 500 feet from the lake, as a surprise.

There are several homes between the Sackett lot and the shore, the Post reports; Mike worked on the construction of one and says it required no special federal permit.

In 2007, the couple obtained local building permits and began to fill the lot in preparation for building their dream home. Three days later, officials from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers ordered work to stop, claiming they thought the land might contain wetlands.

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Nation’s “Forests Are Severely Damaged By Marijuana Grow Sites,” reads the headline on the Dec. 7 press release from the U.S. Forest Service, datelined Washington, D&C.

Marijuana cultivation sites in 20 states on 67 national forests “have caused severe damage,” said Forest Service director of law enforcement David Ferrell. In California alone, the Forest Service has cleaned up and restored 335 sites, removing 130 tons of trash, 300 pounds of pesticides, five tons of fertilizer and nearly 260 miles of irrigation piping, the agriculture cop testified.

“Natural vegetation and wildlife are killed as growers use liberal doses of herbicides, rodenticides and pesticides, some of them banned in the U.S.,” Mr. Ferrell told whatever staff members were filtering in and out of the room. “These chemicals can cause extensive … damage to ecosystems. Human waste and trash in the grow sites are widespread. Winter rains create severe soil erosion and wash the poisons, this waste and trash into streams and rivers — including Congressionally-designated Wild and Scenic Rivers.”

No! Not the Wild and Scenic Rivers!

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And now the bustling streets and malls fall strangely quiet. In many a home the living room rests ankle-deep in an effluvia of ribbons and bows, while in the background someone has left the TV running — Alastair Sim throws open his window on a bright and shining world for the 56th time, and asks the lad in the street what day this is.

It’s Christmas morning, sir. And yes, he certainly does know the butcher shop on “the next street but one” with the big, fat turkey still hanging in the window — “the one as big as me.” (You thought it was a “goose”? Me too — but they actually say “turkey,” I checked.)

By day’s end, Sunday, much of the predictable hand-wringing over the commercialization of the holiday will have faded away, as in many homes the most expensive new Christmas toys will lie broken or abandoned in some forgotten corner, while toddlers play themselves to happy exhaustion in that yet-to-be-unseated, all-time-champion source of Christmas delight … the empty cardboard box in which the presents arrived.

A fancy high-tech toy has no option but to remain a fancy high-tech toy, you see, while a cardboard box can be a frontier fort, a hot rod with stick shift, a lonely aircraft dangerously icing up as it makes the perilous climb over the Andes …

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America’s great national holiday is July 4 — celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But how long did that confederation of sovereign states, founded to fight the Revolution, really last?

Only the brightest of today’s young scholars are likely to recall that it passed away after only a dozen years, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Constitution.

With Mr. Jefferson safely off in Paris, Alex Hamilton and the gang moved heaven and earth to convince a skeptical public that the stronger new central government they proposed would never grow powerful enough to take away any of their hard-won freedoms.

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