Friday, July 18, 2003

The French are always good for a laugh.
Cathryn Crawford writes about Big Brother and his big GPS. An Oregon governmental task force is proposing to install GPS transponders in private vehicles to monitor, and then tax, road usage.
I'm starting to wonder about this "African Uranium" controversy. Are the Dems swinging at a tarbaby?



Here's the sit: Bush, in his last State of the Union address, mentions a British report. That report claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium from an African nation. At about the same time, the CIA had a letter, supposedly bogus, that mentions an attempted purchase of uranium from Niger. This letter and the British report are two different things. The Brits still stand behind their story. (The CIA's letter, BTW, has been tied to France.) In other words, there is no there there. Bush didn't lie, he didn't deceive, he did nothing wrong. The sequence of events is easily explainable.


So why isn't the Bush Administration making that easy explaination?


Enter the tarbaby. The Bushies are, if nothing else, slick politicians. Nothing happens in Dubya's White House by accident. I doubt that the clumsy handling of this controversy is purely accidental. Rove and company may be waiting for that last foot to get lodged in the tarbaby. He and Dubya have left a lot of hoof prints on people who "misunderestimated" Bush. This may be another example of them setting up his adversaries.

Bob Barr does deserve hazardous duty pay!

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Instapundit noticed some interesting backpedaling from the anti-gun crowd...
But here's the most revealing quote:

Matt Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group, said there is no evidence that greater access to guns reduces crime.

Remember how anti-gun folks used to say that reducing gun controls would lead to "blood in the streets?" Now the best they can claim is that it probably won't reduce crime.

I guess that Sarah's minions realize that the "blood in the streets" thing needs actual blood in an actual street at least once to be effective.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

The Clinton "legacy": Road Ban in Forests Is Leveled


Clinton's land grab attempt out here in the West was overturned. This was a sleazy attempt to use the Wilderness Act to seal off millions upon millions of arces of public land. The harm it did to logging is obvious. Loggers need to cut roads to get to their timber leases. But other suffered as well. There are pockets of private land surrounded by these wilderness areas. Owners were unable to build or, as I understand it, maintain roads to their property. Also, hunters and others use the roads to get into the back country. Letting the roads go to pot prevents people from getting at land that they pay taxes to maintain. What good is Public land if the Public isn't allowed in?!?