Forbidden by the Forest Service from using powered equipment, a shovel brigade of 60 people last weekend made temporary repairs to Tombstone’s water line.

Forbidden by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment, a shovel brigade of 60 people last weekend made temporary repairs to Tombstone’s water line.

“It took 60 people two days to complete a work project that could have been done in two hours with the appropriate equipment,” Barnes said. “We have a lot more work that needs to be done up there, but we don’t have the permits from the forest service to go back.”

For reasons that only bureaucrats understand, the Forest Service decided that the use of heavy equipment like a bulldozer is more harmful to nature than 60 people with shovels, even though in the end the work done is exactly the same, and that this same work was done repeatedly in the past by heavy equipment.

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The IPCC has decided that it is too difficult to purge non-peer-reviewed envionmental activist press releases from its next report.

The IPCC has decided that it is too difficult to purge non-peer-reviewed envionmental activist press releases from its next report. Instead,

[A]ny information they choose to use will be considered peer reviewed just by being posted on the Internet by the IPCC.

In addition, the IPCC has decided “to impose gender and geographical quotas on IPCC membership,” rather than simple pick the best scientists.

And climate scientists wonder why the public no longer believes anything they say.

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The Social Security Trust Fund will start losing value in 2013.

The day of reckoning looms: The Social Security Trust Fund will start losing value in 2013, not 2020 as claimed.

In 2010, Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary projected that this interest income would keep the trust fund growing in real value through 2020. The 2011 projections moved this date to 2018, and the recently released 2012 projections pushed the date to 2012, meaning that the trust fund will start declining in real value next year. After 2013, the trust fund is projected to decline by greater amounts each year until becoming exhausted in 2033.

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“And ask yourself this, if they’re that egregious at lying on that issue, what else are they lying about?”

“And ask yourself this, if they’re that egregious at lying on that issue, what else are they lying about?”

Meanwhile, on the same day that the President invoked executive privilege to avoid giving Congress emails and documents concerning the Fast-and-Furious gunrunning scandal, the Attorney General admitted lying in his testimony to a House committee, and that same committee voted to hold the Attorney General in contempt, ABC News has as its lead story … the heat wave in the northeast.

As I’ve said many times before, if you depend on television news to find out what’s going in the world, you’re not merely uninformed, you are misinformed.

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The TSA’s security checkpoint of the future.

The TSA’s security checkpoint of the future.

After checking their luggage, passengers would identify themselves not with driver’s licenses and paper boarding passes, but by scanning fingerprints or irises to prove they have an electronic ticket. Passengers would walk with their carry-ons through a screening tunnel, where they’d undergo electronic scrutiny — replacing what now happens at as many as three different stops as they’re scanned for metal objects, non-metallic items and explosives. …

If screeners notice anything suspicious, a passenger would still be pulled aside and possibly patted down.

There’s a lot more. Read it all. For example, there’s this quote:

The so-called riskiest or unknown passengers would face the toughest scrutiny, including questioning and more sensitive electronic screening. Those who voluntarily provide more information about themselves to the government would be rewarded with faster passage.

I call this Orwell’s 1984 come to life, a totalitarian’s dream and a free person’s nightmare. Once in place, what’s to prevent this from spreading to all phases of life? Nothing. You give government this kind of power and it will use it, and that use will not be for your benefit, but for the government’s benefit alone.

I fear that freedom is dying, one security checkpoint at a time.

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Eric Holder has retracted his false claim that the Bush administration had started the program allowing guns to be smuggled illegally to Mexico.

More Fast-and-Furious news: Eric Holder has retracted his false claim that the Bush administration had started the program allowing guns to be smuggled illegally to Mexico.

The Justice Department has retracted a second statement made to the Senate Judiciary Committee. During a hearing last week, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that his predecessor, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, had been briefed about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver. Now, the Department is retracting that statement and claiming Holder “inadvertently” made that claim to the Committee.

In other words, Holder has now admitted that he lied when he was testifying to Congress.

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According to FBI statistics released last week, violent crime has declined for the fifth year in a row, the 18th time in the last 20 years.

More guns, less crime: According to FBI statistics released last week, violent crime has declined for the fifth year in a row, the 18th time it has declined in the last 20 years.

Facts are hard things. You can claim that more guns will cause more violent crime, but the facts remain what they are: Wherever there are gun control laws, crime is higher. Wherever people are allowed to own guns, crime goes down.

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A Virginia dog receives a voter registration form in the mail, asking him to register to vote.

A Virginia dog that died two years ago received a voter registration form in the mail last week, asking it to register to vote.

The organization that sent out the form is called “the non-profit Voter Participation Center,” which is working to get “groups like young people, minorities, and unmarried women” to vote. Which suggests strongly that this center is a leftwing political activist group working to win future elections for Democrats, by any means necessary. A close look at their website confirms this, as they have many ties to liberal organizations and think tanks. More here.

This is further evidence that when Democrats scream about “the suppress the vote” efforts of Republicans, they are really worried about is the possibility that voter fraud will be eliminated, preventing them garnering fake votes.

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A Wyoming think tank is suing the Federal Election Commission in behalf of three Wyoming residents who were denied the right to run a political ad hostile to Barack Obama.

A Wyoming think tank is suing the Federal Election Commission in behalf of three Wyoming residents who were denied the right to run a political ad hostile to Barack Obama.

What was that language again? I think the words are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

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