Vin Suprynowicz

As this is being written, on the day the Supreme Court handed down its ballyhooed “gun rights” decision in the case D.C. vs. Heller, sundry outraged mayors are fuming because the U.S. Supreme Court has, “for the first time,” discovered in the Constitution an individual right to bear arms, placing in danger all their precious (though thoroughly counterproductive) local victim disarmament edicts.

The City of Chicago, for instance, currently governed by yet another Richard Daley (how many does this one make?) had filed an amicus brief arguing that since the Second Amendment restricts only FEDERAL gun-banning, it shouldn’t apply to Cook County.

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A May 14 editorial in the Review-Journal cited a portion of Vern Bostick’s study, “The Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing,” published in “Rangelands,” June, 1990.

This brought a letter from a newly arrived “expert” on the extent to which desert tortoises are allergic to having large ungulate grazers sharing their range, arguing that desert tortoises won’t use cow droppings to get nourishment or moisture no matter how desperate their straits, and that “All leading tortoise scientists agree that cattle grazing and tortoises don’t mix.”

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Those who want government to run our lives are endlessly frustrated with such “outmoded” ideas as state sovereignty and the Electoral College.

The initial ideas were simple enough: While the federal government would guarantee the residents of each state a republican form of government and refrain from infringing the citizen’s basic rights — the right to speak our minds, to worship and associate as we see fit, to carry firerarms anywhere and any time we want — all but a limited set of federal duties (manning a fleet, overseeing foreign trade, setting the gold or silver weight of the dollar) would be left to the sovereign states.

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Much nonsense has been heard from both presumptive big-party presidential candidates on the topic of energy and gasoline prices. More will probably be forthcoming, as it’s judged politically unwise these days to challenge too directly the suicidal lunacy that holds America can remain prosperous by turning her back on the coal and oil that fast-growing foreign nations will continue to burn for centuries to come.

There was, however, a ray of sunshine Tuesday, as presumptive Republican nominee John McCain finally took enough pity on Americans squeezed by skyrocketing energy costs (which drive up the price of everything hauled by truck, of course) to take a more sensible stance on offshore oil drilling.

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Image by mandj98 via FlickrPrairie dogs are considered pests not just by farmers and ranchers — their burrowing can render vast acreages unsuitable for cattle grazing — but by golf course operators and even agencies of the federal government. (Threatened with fines of a $100,000 a day from the Federal Aviation Administration, the City of Albuquerque, N.M. reluctantly agreed to exterminate an infestation of prairie dogs at the airport in March of 2007.)

The animals are cute, though they can carry a disease known in animal populations as the sylvatic plague — among humans as the “Bubonic Plague.”

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Tourists keep writing in to complain about all those illegal immigrants bracing them on the sidewalks along the Las Vegas Strip, pushing those little fliers and cards into their hands, the ones with photos of young babes in provocative poses: “Straight to Your Room, just dial 1-800-BOOBs.”

To their credit, the complainants rarely object to the risque poses or the nature of the services offered. They complain primarily about the unsightly litter — most of these solicitations end up on the sidewalk — and secondarily about the low-grade grunt-and-shove harassment by the non-English-speaking purveyors, many still wearing their colorful wool caps from the mountains of Jalisco.

These objections have been a low-level background noise for decades. There’s only one reason no one in a position to change this acts: hypocrisy. More »

Image via WikipediaThe government has some big advantages over mortal plaintiffs.

For one thing, the government is, for all practical purposes, immortal.

Back in the 1980s, it became an article of faith among well-meaning “environmentalists” without much practical knowledge of the West — and thus for the federal bureaucrats anxious to please that large if remote constituency — that grazing cattle on arid western lands serves to “destroy fragile ecosystems.”

Western ranchers presented evidence that desert plants developed in an ecosystem that needs large ungulate grazers to churn their seeds into the soil, to fertilize wetlands, to carry moisture into arid valleys and thus benefit tortoise populations — which is why more tortoises are found on grazed land than ungrazed. More »

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 have expected if one were under the impression Nevada and America are still freedom-loving nations with governments whose powers are limited by the written Constitution.

If it had been me, I suspect a legislative decree ordering the immediate arrest of any administrator of any government building who made any effort to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from walking in bearing pistols or Browning Automatic Rifles would have been more to the point — especially given the salutary effects on judges and administrators long overdue for a reminder of who’s the boss around here. More »

In response to my recent piece on enforcing our established immigration laws (I did not mention the potential effectiveness of machine guns and land mines, which would be the first resort of any statesman or military commander who really wanted to “secure our borders,” the avoidance of such obvious tools thus demonstrating that every public figure you’ve ever heard use that phrase was lying through their teeth), some well-meaning souls have responded with the traditional Libertarian prescription that there’s “no need to limit immigration; all we have to do is get rid of the welfare state.”

First, before anyone tries to insist that “Most illegal aliens aren’t on welfare,” let’s stipulate once again that the so-called “public schools” are one of our most vastly expensive welfare programs — a massive wealth redistribution scheme funding a humongous make-work government hamster wheel that loots money under threat of force from the paychecks and bank accounts of those who choose to educate their children at their own expense or to bear no children at all, and transferring it to “benefit” those who care so little for their own offspring that they are content to have their spirits broken and their minds “molded” by paper-pushing government functionaries I wouldn’t trust to train my cat.

And there are regions of this country today — parents working two jobs if the regulators have left them any, tax-strapped, unable to afford large families — that are failing to see school population declines only because they’re so swamped with English-as-a-third language illegal aliens.

Perhaps somewhere there is an illegal alien who declares, “I won’t take welfare — I waited to have children till I was in my 30s precisely so I could pay to send my child to private schools out of my own earnings, which I can afford because I made the sacrifices necessary in my youth to learn a valuable skill or trade.” But I doubt this is a statistically significant group. More »

Around this time in the presidential election cycle, Democratic candidates traditionally start “running to the center.”

With a wink and a nudge to their core, far-left constituencies, the candidates in effect say, “For the next five months I’m going to sound like a small-government Republican, talking about tax cuts and free enterprise and a strong defense and cutting back the welfare rolls. But don’t worry, this is just to have a calming effect on all those oxen we’re going to get back to collectively goring next year.”

The rhetoric then shifts to the right — until the day after the election, of course, when the candidate hopes to be drawing up lists of cabinet nominees from a directory of “Who’s Who Among Socialists on Campus.”

I hope my congratulations are not premature, but it’s worthy of note that, so far, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama does not seem to be taking this path. If Sen. Obama is elected president, it will not be because he has disguised the fact that he is a dyed-in-the-wool collectivist. More »