Republicans Have Plan to Get Hillary Elected

One can only assume that the Republicans of South Dakota are gunning to get Hillary Rodham elected President. Whatever your view is on abortion, if you are a Republican, you have to believe that Sout Dakota’s move to outlaw abortion has got to be about the dumbest political move for a party to have made in the past century.

Perhaps Gov. Mike Rounds (R) will ruin his career but save his party’s chances to win the 2008 Presidential election by vetoing the SD state legislature’s bill. That’s not likely though.

The next step will be a court challenge. It will not take long to make its way to the US Supreme Court and they won’t be able to skirt it. It’s no mystery that the current Court will not uphold Roe. This Court has been practicing a more faithful interpretation of the Constitution than any group has perhaps since the Founding Fathers wrote it. The majority seem to have little respect for previous Courts' legislating from the bench using twisted legal logic wrapped in arguments that loop back on themselves. (Even still, don't expect them to do much about VAWA III on Constitutional grounds, since chivalry still trumps the Constitution).

Hillary Rodham must be licking her chops. A majority of Americans would prefer that Roe stand. So Hillary Rodham will not only have that working in her favor, but also the ire of moderate female voters who will not be happy with the idea of fat white bastards telling them what they can and cannot do regarding pregnancy and abortion. She is an expert at playing the gender feminist victim angle. We can also expect Republicans to loose their majority in the Senate and perhaps even the House.

The fall-out of Roe being overturned will be sad for the country for several reasons:

First, the current gender feminist waged war on men, boys, and fathers will pick up steam like never before. If you think the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is bad, wait ‘till you see what Hillary Rodham has in store for us.

Over time, the country will become more geographically polarized. Abortion is a “litmus test” issue. Since the overthrow of Roe will put it back to the states to determine their own abortion laws, some will keep it legal, some will not. In the end, Democrats will tend to congregate even more in blue states and conservatives even more in red states. The rest of us won’t have much chance of finding a place to live that has some political balance anywhere in the country.

Perhaps the worst outcome will be that the current batch of idiots in Washington might reopen the Constitution for amendments. Even those in favor of abortion have to admit that Roe was always on shaky Constitutional grounds. With abortion back in the hands of states, a federal law on the matter would make little difference. State’s rights will trump any federal abortion law, no matter how well crafted. So, that leaves only a Constitutional amendment to legalize abortion throughout the land.

That certainly would be a scary thought for everyone that is anti-abortion. But, it should also be a scary thought for anyone that cares about the country and its Constitution. Contemporary politicians are not even a shadow of the giants that formed this country. Once the Constitution has been opened up for amendments, Hillary and Co. will not stop at legalizing abortion. A Constitutional debate among the current crop of politicians might lead anywhere, but the likely result will be a country that has little respect for individual liberty.

For a classically liberal individual like me, that is a nightmare scenario. I'm no fan of abortion, but I care more about individual rights and liberty than any other issue. Because it was such a poorly crafted decision, it has always been inevitable that Roe would be overturned. But, Republicans did not have to move this fast to make so.

As Alan Greenspan pointed out in a speech recently, the political terrain is ripe for a third party. His argument was that the two political parties are way out on the extremes, while most of the American public lumps in the middle. Actually, I'd go a step further and say that, except on a couple of issues, the two political parties look more alike than ever. They both are interested in controlling as many aspects of our lives and decisions as possible. With Bush showing that even a Republican can dramatically increase federal spending, abortion is about the only litmus test left that clearly shows the difference between the two parties.

Only a third party can save us from this mess. Obviously, with the rigged political system we live under, it's not likely to emerge.

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Still Politically Correct to Ignore the Obvious

The Seattle Times' Broder heralds a study about high school drop-outs to be released on Thursday by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Broder was happy to list some of the reasons for dropping out that he read in his advance copy of the report, but in usual gender-screened fashion, he failed to mention one glaring fact: 4 out of 5 high school drop-outs are boys.

If anyone wants to seriously address this problem, they need to addressed the fact that the public school system has been feminized to the point that it drives almost one third of all boys that begin high school out before they graduate.

It will be interesting to see in the actual report whether Bill and Melinda are as self-censured (and editorially censured) as Broder.

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Specious Forecasts Signal Market Peaks

Lawrence Yun, a senior economist for the National Association of Realtors, provides one of those tell-tail signs of a bubble about to burst. He says that real estate values could increase by up to 40% in the Seattle area over the next two years. A 20% increase is his low estimate.

The crux of his argument .... Real estate values in Seattle have not gone up as much as real estate values in other west coast cities. Thus, Seattle has some catching up to do. But, wait, you might ask, aren’t economists on the payroll of the real estate industry the first to point out that real estate markets are local?

Well, let’s just set that thought aside for a moment and stick to pure economics. The price of a commodity may rise if the price of a close substitute for it has risen. So, you can ask yourself, is a house in Seattle a close substitute for a house in San Diego? Maybe this is so for independently wealthy home owners at the high end of the market, but not likely the case for most people.

At any rate, to buy into Yun’s logic, you need to believe that real estate prices in say, Las Vegas, are not grossly overvalued to begin with. Of course, there-in lies a problem. Cities like Las Vegas peaked a year ago. Even San Diego is looking over the bubble’s crest. So, if you believe Yun's premise, you have to accept the possibility that it's just as likely that this will mean Seattle's prices will be chasing real estate values in other west coast cities down instead of up.

There are some reasons to believe that Seattle prices will hold flat, maybe even go a little higher. Seattle is one of the worst cities in the country with regard to regulation and limitation on new construction. Simple restrictions on supply can keep prices from dropping. But, if you are convinced by Yun's forecast, you’d have to also believe that butterflies in China really do cause tornados in Kansas.

Yun’s “forecast” reminds me of all the Wall Street “experts” – those that stood to benefit the most from a soaring stock market – who spent 1999 euphorically talking up the stock market. Cable news channels, particularly those focused on business, seemed to have an endless parade of Wall Street guests who babbled incoherently about the virtues of the New Economy. “Everything has changed,” they liked to say.

Anyone with a more bearish outlook was shunned. Those wise (and usually older and more experienced) people were only interviewed from time to time in order to give the audience someone to hiss and scorn. Too bad more people did not read Edward Chancellor’s "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation," which was available in the Fall of 1999.

Bubbles have been around as long as markets, so it’s never too late to pick up Chancellor’s book. Anyone enthused by Yun’s real estate forecast definitely should hit Amazon.com fast.

Yun, like the Wall Street experts, is only doing what he is paid to do - talk up the market. Few people can believe that prices can drop when they have only seen them rise. During the tech driven stock market bubble of the late 1990's, people were either unaware or dismissed the fact that for over 100 years, the average PE ratio of US stocks was 15. Just before that bubble burst, the PE ratio hit 44. Today, people have forgotten or dismissed the fact that real estate values in the US closely track growth in personal income. Check out this graph (scroll down a bit to see it) and you might get a little dose of the reality that Yun does not appreciate.

The industry that pays his salary would be none too pleased if, instead of cheering on price increases, Yun had come out and said that current real estate values represent the latest in a long history of market bubbles. However, many regular investors would have benefited in 1999 if some of the Wall Street experts had bucked tradition and their job description in order to give us more warning signs.

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Talk is Good When Dad's Not Around

Looks like someone finally found the virtues of family. Susan Paynter, one of Seattle’s Vagina Warriors, is normally busy tapping away on her keyboard about the evils of the patriarchy. Oh, she never uses that word of course, because she writes in code. But we recognize her victimhood obsession for what it is.

Now, everything appears to be different. After bemoaning the fact that in many families both parents work (wait, wasn’t that a goal of the societal reconstructists … oh, never mind), she recommends that we all eat dinner together and talk.

I suspect that her vision of these conversations is that we all sit around the table and learn how to claim victimhood over some perceived injustice or another. And, of course, she leaves out the fact that in almost of half of the families in the state, the father has been driven out of the household. I guess, though, in her world, talk is always best when he’s not around.

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Mayor Vows to Bring Warm Weather Back

Mayor Nickels announced today, "We overshot our Kyoto goals. A new ice age may be upon us."

"The Borg are restless. I shall eat more beans. Let them eat beans."

The Mayor then went on to describe his new environmental program called Beans for Sustainable Living.

And, Seattle's believers said, "Hail be unto our savoir."

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Mayor Responsible for Freezing Weather

Mayor Nickel's Emergency Climate Re-Warming Beans 

Seattle’s megalomaniac mayor takes credit for recent record low temperatures in the Northwest.

He now promises to re-warm our environment by amping up his own already incredible levels of methane production through consuming large quantities of beans.

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Mexico's Chances: Better than Slim, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series of articles on Mexico written for those of you that would like to find a real solution to the problem of illegal Mexican immigration. See Part 1 here.

For those that think we should build a huge wall on the border with Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, I can understand your frustration. Your proposed solution, however, is not only absurd both in terms of cost and effectiveness, but completely misses the point.

Just so you know where I am coming from, I believe that most Mexicans that come into our country contribute to our economy and we would be worse off without them. They perform low-skilled and difficult labor and, most importantly, the work extremely hard. Anyone that has experience working with Mexicans (as I do) knows that they work hard, do good work, and are accustomed to hard labor. They do not complain and are thankful for the work they can get. This is one of the reasons Mexican workers are such a threat to unions in the US.

But, I admit that there is something unsettling, even for me, about Mexicans pouring across the border illegally. Unlike previous waves of immigrants that were welcomed into this country in past centuries, even invited, Mexicans are undocumented and have difficulty assimilating to our culture because they must stay in the shadows. (Even still, most of their children eventually do assimilate and many become great citizens, with a focus on family).

Building a wall to keep them out is a silly idea. To find a real solution, you need to look at what is happening in Mexico that constrains employment and keeps these workers in a permanent under-class.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial that explains the reason why. Again, as I have discussed before, it comes down to Carlos Slim and others like him in Mexico. The extreme upper-class of Mexico treats the entire country like their own personal hacienda. Every industry has a dominant monopoly that controls the market. Prices are kept high and employment artificially low (yes, believe it or not, competition increases employment and raises salaries, because companies compete not only for market share but for employees).

Carlos Slim's domination of the telecommunications market in Mexico through his company Telmex is a case study in Mexican corruption. In a rare case of journalism exploring this sad phenomenon, O’Grady exposes what is really happening there.

Excerpt:

Mr. Slim's company has been masterful in protecting its turf. One example is its success in using endless litigation to fend off regulatory orders that it provide interconnections to other carriers at fair rates, as required by law. However, in crushing competition, Mr. Slim has not acted alone. He has had help from the government of PAN President Vicente Fox, as he did from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) President Ernesto Zedillo before him.

If critics are to be believed, Mr. Fox's telecom minister Pedro Cerisola, a former Telmex district manager, has actively engaged in protecting Telmex against competition. Mr. Cerisola hasn't done much to hide his partiality toward Telmex. One of his more bizarre statements -- in light of the fact that healthy regulation of the market requires an acknowledgment of the obvious "dominance" of Telmex -- was when he reportedly said that "in Mexico, there is no dominant telecom operator."

Last week in an interview at his law office here, Gerardo Soria, a former commissioner at Cofetel, told me that he resigned from the commission in 2002 after only four months because he "realized that [Mr. Cerisola] was not independent." According to Mr. Soria, the minister's goal has been "to put barriers to competition."

Other examples abound. Telmex is not the only company Slim owns. For example, Slim has a major stake in Televisa, one of only two television networks allowed to operate in Mexico. Televisa and Slim own Sky, a satellite TV broadcast company that has no competition. A few years ago, DirecTV Mexico was a competitor, but because it had to pay so much to Televisa for programming, it never made money. Eventually, Sky purchased DirecTV, thus cementing its monopoly. Mexicans pay 25% more for the basic satellite TV package than Americans do (much more for the equipment required) and receive less programming in the basic package. Premium channels are even more expensive.

One might think that satellite TV would face other types of competitors that get TV signals into the homes of Mexicans, so perhaps a single operator of satellite TV is not such a bad thing. Think again. The cable TV operator in Mexico City (by far the largest market) is owned by Carlos Slim. Meanwhile, the free terrestrial broadcast stations in Mexico City are owned by Televisa.

You might think, so what? Most Mexicans are poor, so why does it matter that something like telephone service and TV service are more expensive for the small middle class there. Well, there are several reasons this is important. First, all industries in Mexico are like this. Cemex, Mexico’s major cement producer, is also a major exporter to the US, where it sells cement at half the price it sells for in Mexico. The government owns the major electricity producer and distributor (a monopoly, of course) and electricity prices in Mexico are much higher than in the US, while also having a reputation for brown-outs and black-outs several times a day.

It’s not just the Mexican consumer that suffers. All of these high prices result in higher costs for Mexican companies, inhibiting their ability to compete in global markets. For example, Mexico was once a major source of manufactured goods sold in the US; but even with Mexico’s low labor costs, higher costs for power and everything else leave the country unable to compete with China. Those manufacturing jobs have moved to China over the last decade. Guess where the Mexicans who have lost their jobs are going for employment now?

Monopolies are not just bad because they raise prices for consumers in their home country. They also stifle innovation and create insurmountable roadblocks to new business formation though their collusion with corrupted government officials. It's virtually impossible for entrepreneurs to enter the market. When industries have real competition, companies compete not only for customers, but they also compete for employees. This increases the number of workers employed in each industry while also raising their wages.

But, when monopolies are allowed to exist and have government as an ally, guess where unemployed Mexican workers go. You got it: USA.

So, talk of building a wall might make you feel good. But, it wont solve anything. The solution lies in exposing the corrupted system in Mexico, detailing how people like Carlos Slim are ruining opportunities in the country for everyone else, and pushing for change.

As someone that regularly does business in Mexico, I can tell you that Mexican businessmen and average Mexicans desperately hope that America will push the Mexican government to change its practice of providing privilege to people like Carlos Slim. If America does not use its leverage to push Mexico to change, successive governments who are increasingly leftist will promise to do so. They always sell out to people like Slim (if they weren't bought and paid for already), and things only get worse. And, the waves of Mexicans crossing the border just continue to increase.

In the end, a wall along the border would only serve to further the aims of Carlos Slim and would not stop illegal immigration from Mexico. It allows him and his government cronies to blame every ill suffered by Mexico on the big monster to the north, while deflecting blame from themselves.

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Mothers Should Stand Up for their Sons

According to a recent study, members of Congress who have daughters tend to vote more liberally on so-called women’s issues. In particular, they tend to vote against restrictions on abortions.

If only the mothers of sons would do the same. And, for the record, let’s make it clear that voting to restrict abortion is not a men’s issue.

Some issues that mothers in Congress with sons or even regular mothers who exercise their right to vote should include:

An improved educational environment for boys in public schools. This should include working to abolish the current system that seems to punish boys for being male.

Reworking Title IX so that it is no longer a quota system and takes into account the large number of student athletes on football teams. Men’s rowing, wrestling, and gymnastics teams around the country have been eliminate for not other reason than to make sure the number of women participating in college sports is equal to the number of men.

Elimination of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and especially the “date rape” provision in the new version of this hateful legislation. Mother’s of sons should make no mistake about the fact that the date rape provision of VAWA puts teenage boys at extreme risk.

Pushing for shared custody of children in a divorce and eliminating or greatly restructuring the current child support system.

Outlawing the use of ADHD drugs to treat boys for behaving like what they are, boys. Only in the most extreme cases should a boy ever be given a drug like Ritalin and even then it should be last resort and used for only a limited period of time.

Conducting a detailed investigation and research into why teenage boy suicide is 5 times what it is for teenage girls.

Pushing for military draft for women, as we currently have for men. And, pushing the military to put women into more combat roles, preferable in equal percentages as men.

There are plenty of other policies (or elimination of policies) that you may think of, so please feel free to add them to the comments.

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Just Who is Subsidizing Whom?

I can think of a lot of big corporations to accuse of being subsidized by the state, but Walmart is not among them.

Boeing has received untold tax-breaks and the state is paying for a port devoted exclusively to them. Nordstrom got a city subsidized parking garage in exchange for staying downtown. All three pro sports teams in Seattle are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. This last one is particularly egregious, because the only people being employed with “living wage” pay are usually from out of town and instead of making a descent income, they are paid millions.

So, come again on the accusation that Walmart is receiving state subsidies because some of its workers get healthcare insurance from the state. How is that?

Employer provided healthcare is a relic of World War II that never should have happened. During the economic boom years after the War, companies were searching for ways to compete for the best employees. They started offering healthcare because it was tax deductible and it was irrationally appreciated by employees more than a dollar-for-dollar increase in pay. It would have been better for the federal government to simply provide a tax deduction for money individuals paid for healthcare insurance.

Since that time, we have a built-in expectation that employers should provide healthcare coverage as part of an overall benefits package. This is super-inefficient and really just downright silly. First, not all employees are valuable enough for a company to economically justify providing health insurance for them. And, not everyone is employed, so even if you force all employers to provide healthcare not everyone would have it. Moreoever, the best risk pools for things like healthcare are not necessarily groups of employees of companies. Some companies employ mostly the young (low cost insurance) and others employ much older people with kids and over much longer terms (high cost insurance).

Finally, healthcare insurance, as it is currently structured, does not put the true cost of healthcare in front of the consumer. If consumers were required to make choices over real dollars, they would make better choices about providers, medicine, and treatments. The laws of supply and demand really do work and, even if the market is artificially inefficient, an equilibrium will be reached. The current equilibrium reflects artificially expanded demand (people purchasing services and medicine without pondering the true cost) and artificially constrained supply (due, in part, to liability that causes many doctors to alter, reduce, or abandon their practice).

So, the entire premise of companies providing health insurance to employees should be questioned. But, to then carry this anti-logic forward and accuse Walmart of receiving subsidies from the state because they don’t insure all of their employees is just plain ludicrous. That would be like accusing Boeing of receiving subsidies because the children of its workers attend public schools.

Look at the other option: Suppose Walmart just did not employ any of these people. Would that make things better? Because that really is the other side of the argument. Most if not all of Walmart's uninsured employees are low-skilled and lucky to have a job that keeps them off welfare. In fact, it's just as plausible to argue that Walmart is subsidizing the state by employing some of these people. Would the state prefer to provide both healthcare insurance and welfare for these people?

This may well be the direction that Walmart is heading in. Radio transmitters are now so cheap that it barely costs more to paste one onto a box than it does to print a barcode on it. With radio transmitters on products, a consumer could simply toss items into a cart and casually walk through a special hallway to the exit. Before the customer gets to the front door, an automated system will have scanned the radio signals of all the products in the cart and hit the customer’s debit or credit card.

That last step requires a little extra infrastructure in place than we have right now, but most Walmart shoppers use either debit or credit cards and cell phone companies already have pilot projects connecting cards to mobile phones. Soon, we will all simply see the check-out balance on our mobile phone and just push "ok." We are less than two years away from payment with mobile phones being nationwide and relatively common. That eliminates the need for most cashiers in stores. Stocking shelves could be done robotically and, frankly, its surprising that it's not already done that way.

So be careful what you ask for. By requiring Walmart to pay for healthcare insurance for all employees, even the least productive, the cost of maintaining those employees will be raised. Eventually, the company will decide that keeping them doesn’t make sense and technology would be lower cost and more efficient, not to mention less political headache. No wonder Danny Westneat hates radio-tags so much.

Then the state will have a large increase in its welfare rolls and more healthcare insurance expense to boot. What will it do then? Tell companies that they must have employees even when they are no longer needed? That sort of approach has put all the major airlines in the country into bankruptcy and has almost toppled Ford and GM recently.

Healthcare needs reform, but not of the type that involves more government, more laws, and more regulation. What it needs is to breath more of the fresh air of a free and efficient market.

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Thanks for the Angle

It takes a misguided idealist like Danny Westneat to celebrate the fact that an elderly woman is passing up the chance to get 8 times the value of her house in cash, a new house, and medical care for the rest of her life just so she can stay in the same hovel she's lived in since she was a kid. If Westnut were really as caring as he likes to present himself to be to the rest of us, he'd counsel this woman to take the money and live the years she has left without a worry in the world.

But, since this sort of idiocy seems to sell in Seattle, perhaps we should use this argument for all sorts of things. For example, I don't want a tunnel to replace the Viaduct because I have a nostalgic feeling for that old structure. It's what I know and I don't plan to change.

Thanks for the new angle Danny.

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A Lesson from the Super Bowl

The loss of the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl due to what was widely believed among football fans in Seattle to be bad officiating provides an abject lesson in civics to the control freaks of Seattle and Washington State government.

The last thing you want is for officials to decide the outcome of a football game. As Mike Holmgren said:

We knew it was going to be tough going against the Pittsburgh Steelers. I didn't know we were going to have to play the guys in the striped shirts as well.

The same holds for starting a business or even a family. It’s tough enough without government getting in the mix, trying to regulate outcomes, and decide who will win and who will loose.

So, all of you football fans that feel like you had a game stolen by officials, make sure you write or call your representative in the state legislature and tell them you don’t want them to repeat what the officials did in the Super Bowl.

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So Long My Valentine

The Seattle Times tries to do a service to all of us singles out there just before Valentines Day by giving stories of couples hooking up. This must make Eve Ensler’s Seattle followers of the Vagina Cult rabid. They are busy trying to supplant what was once a day to celebrate love with their Vagina Monologue darkness.

People do keep hooking up, even if they have to overcome the risk of rejection. For men, though, there is an additional risk that makes many hesitate if not completely abort before making a commitment. These days, the feminist state is actively working to free women and girls from the oppression of the patriarchy. There is no such thing as “the patriarchy” of course, so that means that the state is simply attacking boys, men, and the institution of marriage at every opportunity.

The evidence is everywhere. Almost 50% of men in their thirties in King County have never been married. That is a perfectly rational response to the risk of loosing your economic and physical freedom that a relationship now poses for all men.

Since men are turning their noses up at marriage, and keeping the fruits of their labor to themselves, the feminist state has taken another tact: it is getting harder to get at the resources of men through marriage and children, so the feminist state has decided to attack men while they are still boys. The next generation of men are getting shortchanged in public schools, denied the opportunity to go to college, and prepared for an adulthood of second-class citizenship.

Even teenage love has been criminalized, at least for the male side of the equation, as the new version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has dedicated huge sums of federal dollars to "solve" an exagerated problem of "date rape." In other words, any girl that has second thoughts about necking with your teenage son will be encouraged to accuse him of rape; after that, he will be guilty until proven innocent or, in other words, guilty of being a boy. It's now important for all parents to teach their boys that "no" means no, "yes" means no, and any forward advance by a teenage girl should be treated with extreme caution if not outright rejected.

Sadly, that leaves the perception that suicide as about the only option left to achieve freedom. Teenage boys and adult men are taking that option at alarming rates.

Valentines Day used to be fun. It was a day for many people to celebrate the fact that they had found love and a day for the rest to be reminded that a loving relationship is the best way for a human to find happiness. Lately though, the forces of darkness have been winning, and Valentines Day is left as nothing more than a reminder of how cynical and disaffected forces can ruin just about anything.

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Mother of NOW is Past

Betty Friedan, arguably the mother of contemporary feminism, died on Saturday at the age of 85. Ironically, it was just one day before the Super Bowl, a day around which the inheritors of Friedan’s feminine cult movement created the myth that women around the country were suffering domestic violence.

Betty started the whole thing with a book called The Feminine Mystique that she wrote in 1963. In it, she claimed that women suffered from a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction" that she called "the problem that has no name." She based this “research finding” on a survey of her classmates at her college reunion. Thus began the practice by so-called scholars in Women Studies departments in universities around the country of using anecdotal evidence (e.g., surveys not based on statistical sampling methods) to make broad assumptions.

She seemed to evolve from those early beginnings, however. She asserted that women should seek an independent identity but also work with men. She was shunned by her successors at NOW and other major women’s political groups as they adopted their current paranoid delusion of patriarchal “control and oppression.”

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Someone Radio-Tag Westneat, Please!

I guess it’s just too much to ask that Seattle's control-freak liberals would ever be logically consistent. Danny Westneat is really grasping for things about the Bush administration to complain about now. That’s pretty hard for a professional knee-jerk complainer, but he must have run out of all the juicy items after five years of it.

Now he’s upset that the US government wants to radio tag all of the livestock in the US. But, not long ago, Democrats were complaining that the Bush Administration was not doing enough to protect the country’s beef supply from Mad Cow disease. The latest hysteria is about bird flue. And, suddenly, one of these Democrats in the Seattle media is worried about how solving this problem will affect the rights of animals? Or, is it even more silly and he’s worried about the record keeping costs?

Tracking livestock would not be a complicated task or a record keeping nightmare as Danny-boy asserts, with radio tagging, an internet connection, and an Oracle database. In fact, this would be so simply that it is amazing we didn’t do it 10 years ago.

So, trying to make this into something to complain about is silly enough. But, Westnut goes one step further and suggests that this “is a mark of a country gone round the bend with fear.”

Huh? Isn’t fear and victimhood at the core of everything the Democratic Party – Danny’s party – runs on? It’s gotten so bad, even the Seattle Weekly complains about Seattle’s nanny-ism.

Locally, we have a mayor that is regulating how close a customer can get to a lap dancer in a strip club, for Christ’s sake! Mayor Nipples is even regulating the light level in these joints and working hard to make sure no additional joints are built.

Hysteria seems to be the norm rather than the exception in Washington State and especially Seattle. Our government officials are routinely trading away our liberty for hollow promises of exterminating every conceivable risk in life.

So, radio tagging farm animals seems like an awfully minor thing to be worried about. (Well, unless you are a member of ELF or something – are you Danny?) Farm animals don’t have human rights and, in the end, we kill them.

Fathers do have rights. At least they used to. So do (or did) the boys in our public schools. When will a two-bit journalist like Danny Westneat write a column about how we have succumbed to fear and political convenience and traded away those rights in order to satisfy the hysteria du jour?

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