Archive for March, 2008

Time To Revisit The Endangered Species Act

Monday, March 31st, 2008

By altering procedures and policies over the past several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act. President Bush’s appointees have “rejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law,” The Washington Post […]

Running Up And Down With Guns

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

On Feb. 23 the Los Angeles Times reported: “In a victory for gun-rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on bringing loaded firearms into national parks. “Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday that his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into […]

Every breath you take, every move you make, they’ll be taxing you

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Prompted in part by government interventions including the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — which required banks to make riskier loans to less credit-worthy borrowers to avoid charges of racist “red-lining” — America’s banks and mortgage companies created new sources of high investment return in recent decades. Home mortgages — both the secure and the […]

Did Obama just come out against quotas … or not?

Monday, March 24th, 2008

The current president, George W. Bush, is not a gifted orator. Oratory seems to be one of those things no one thinks matters much in a president — until it goes missing. Those who dislike the current president may cite any of a dozen policy issues. But they rarely fail to mention how they cringe […]

‘And every other terrible instrument of the soldier’

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

In a “move that surprised some observers,” the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday, attorney Alan Gura, appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the federal guard who sued the District of Columbia in 2003, claiming he feels unsafe because he’s not allowed to keep his guns at home, “appeared to concede large chunks of […]

When is money too clean to be laundered?

Monday, March 17th, 2008

It’s a long-established tradition of meddlesome governments, seeking to outlaw behaviors which — unlike robbery and assault — produce no “victim” anxious to cooperate with authorities: When the first unenforceable law doesn’t work, ban another activity, previously considered innocuous, to help enforce the first. When authorities developed radar guns to enhance “speeding ticket” revenues from […]

‘To train school children in … loyalty to the state’

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Don’t you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they’re really up to? For years, I’ve called for the complete shutdown of America’s massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I […]

Court outlaws most California home schooling

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Research conducted by the National Home Education Research Institute in 2001 shows homeschooled students, on average, outperformed their public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects, and that performance gaps impacting minorities and genders are virtually eliminated among the homeschoolers — a fairly strong rebuttal to the racist explanation for public-school […]

What would you do to defend your gun rights? Switch banks?

Monday, March 10th, 2008

CDNN Sports of Abilene, Texas is an advertiser in Shotgun News. Frankly, if I had my way, such folks would simply open the envelope containing my check — or the e-mail with my credit card data — package up that old 1903 Winchester self-loader that I’ve had my eye on, and ship it right to […]

‘Now the teacher will shoot me for being late with my homework!’

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Last year, my own Nevada state senator, Republican Bob Beers, proposed a law which would have “allowed” Nevada government-school teachers to carry concealed weapons on school grounds — if they wished to do so — after passing an arduous training course. Needless to say, there was a public outcry, and not the outcry one would […]