LMD May 2017

Page 1

Riding Herd

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”

by LEE PITTS

– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

May 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 59 • No. 5

A Foot In The Door S

projects that could “jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species, or result in the destruction or adverse modification of [critical] habitat of such species”(E&E Daily, March 29). The hearing was held by the increasingly important Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, a panel Bishop created after winning the Natural Resources gavel two years ago (E&E Daily, January 14, 2015). Led since January by Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho), Oversight has seven full-time GOP staffers — more than any other Natural Resources subcommittee, according to data from LegiStorm, a congressional staff tracking service. Oversight staff director Rob Gordon, a veteran of the Hill’s periodic ESA fights, and counsel Megan Olmstead, a relative newcomer, will provide Republican lawmakers with most of the legislative ammunition they need. They and many other staffers featured in this story were not made available for interviews. Gordon, who spent seven years at the conservative Heritage Foundation before returning to the Natural Resources panel when Bishop took over, also served as the Trump transition team’s advisor on regulatory reform (E&E Daily, January 22, 2015). He has been continued on page four

continued on page four

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. that when a government bureaucrat tells you something is either temporary or only slightly invasive, you should grab your wallet, cover your butt and run because you are fixing to get cheated, bamboozled, filmflammed, duped, deceived, hoodwinked and hornswoggled in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.

Vilsack’s Vision In getting their foot in the door, Avon and Fuller Brush salespersons were rank amateurs compared to the bureaucrats deeply embedded today

in every nook and cranny of the U.S. government. With a shoe the size of Oklahoma the salesmen at the USDA have their foot in your door and you will buy government enforced mandatory animal ID whether you want it or not. You may have thought we stopped this nonsense a few years ago but they are back knocking on our door once again. We emphatically said “NO” to their first product, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) that they tried to cram down our throats back in 2010 when the USDA held

eight public meetings to sell you on Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack’s bad idea to identify and register every farm animal in the country. In 2011 the USDA received 1,618 comments about mandatory animal ID, most of them negative. Despite the backlash, the USDA initiated the NAIS anyway, a voluntary program that asked producers to register their premises and identify their animals with a national animal tracking database. The vast majority of stockmen refused to register. One of their more serious concerns concerned the protection of proprietary information. After enough ranchers failed to sign up which made the program worthless, something happened that rarely occurs: The feds seemed to have backed down. NAIS was never fully implemented and was eventually discontinued all together. And continued on page two

Battle Over Landmark Law Already Raging Out of Public Eye BY CORBIN HIAR, E&E NEWS REPORTER

W

ith most of Washington focused on fights over government funding, Obamacare and Russian meddling, a few congressional aides and outside advocates are quietly preparing for what could be an epic battle over the Endangered Species Act. The contentious conservation law was protected by President Obama’s veto from Republican efforts to ease restrictions on farmers, energy companies and developers. But with Republicans now controlling Capitol Hill and the White House for the first time since 2004, the endangered species law — which hasn’t been significantly updated since 1988 — appears vulnerable. On one side of the fight are staffers for House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), who said last year that he wants to repeal and replace the law (E&E Daily, December 9, 2016). But in the 115th Congress, Bishop is instead focused on narrow sections of the ESA that Republicans and industry groups find problematic. His first hearing this year centered on a provision requiring input from the Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service — agencies that jointly administer the ESA — on government-approved or -funded

H

ere is the correct way to load a horse. 1. First, catch your horse. Using apples, carrots and sweet talk, draw it near. When it’s eating out of your hand rub its neck and attempt to put the lead rope around its neck. After this doesn’t work place a bucket full of sweetmix on the ground and when the horse comes within your range, rope it. When that fails just have the wife catch your nag for you. It works every time. 2. Lead your horse to the loading area. When it spies the hated horse trailer it may rear on his hind legs and jerk the lead rope from your hand. If so, repeat step one. 3. Leaning on the lead rope with all your weight play tug of war with your horse to drag it into the trailer. You weigh 185 pounds and it weighs 1,200 pounds. You do the math. Next, ask your wife and one of the kids to get behind the horse, lock hands around his rump and push while you pull on the lead rope. This puts the heads of your wife and kid in close proximity to the rear end of the horse, which has just consumed a bag of green apples and a bucket of sweetmix. This creates an unfriendly noxious environment and your loved ones may be overcome by the deadly fumes. 4. Next, ask your neighbor to grasp your horse’s tail and twist and pull on it to get your horse moving towards the trailer. Go to house to retrieve ice and cold compresses for your neighbor to apply to area where he got kicked. 5. Your neighbor suggests that he put his in-heat mare in the trailer enticing your male horse to load right beside it. Lead your horse around in circles several times to get him dizzy and suddenly aim toward the trailer. As your stud horse overruns you to breed the mare in the trailer she tries the kick the stud and instead nails you in the groin. Borrow the neighbor’s ice pack

BY LEE PITTS

uburban housewives used to be plagued by a species known as the “door-to-door salesman.” These hucksters sold everything from an early version of Google known as encyclopedias, to religion to vacuum cleaners. One of their favorite tricks when the housewife opened the front door was to stick a foot inside the door jam so the woman of the household could not say a quick, “not interested,” and close the door. If the salesmen succeeded in getting a foot in the door the housewife could count on it costing her a chunk of change and her valuable time. The bloated bureaucracy in Washington DC has borrowed the salesman’s favorite trick. Take federal income tax for instance. Income taxes in the U.S. were first levied for a brief period following the Civil War to pay for that bloody battle. They were supposed to be temporary. Hah! Recently a study concluded by the National Tax Payers Union found that taxpayers spent 6.89 billion hours and $263 billion in complying with the Tax Code in just one year. The instructions that accompany the basic 1040 Form were just two pages in 1935 but now the Tax Code is 11,000 pages long plus an additional 16,000 pages in related rules. This is a good example of The Pitts Postulate which states

How To Load A Horse

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