Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
MARKET
Digest H
JANUARY 15, 2013 • www. aaalivestock . com
Volume 55 • No. 1
The Cause of Our Lives by Lee Pitts
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A One-Man Mission
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Ken Ivory is a Utah native who has served in the Utah House of Representatives since 2010. He is an attorney, media-
“If you’re ridin’ ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it’s still there.” tor and a teacher who spent three years in Japan teaching English. Maybe this explains why, for a politician, he is so easy to understand. Utah is a state that does things right. From the no-GPSneeded way they name and lay out their streets to the common sense of her people, Utah runs a tight ship. That’s why it’s so surprising to learn that, according
to Ivory, “Utah is perpetually last in the nation in per pupil funding. At nearly $3,700 below the national average, it would take $2.2 Billion a year to bring Utah’s 600,000 K-12 students just up to the national average.” And Ivory knows right where to place the blame: our federal government. “Utah loses hundreds of millions of dollars because the fed-
eral government denies access to, or blocks consolidation of, Utah’s School Trust Lands,” says Ivory. Utah, to a large extent, depends on federal funds to educate her kids because almost two thirds of the land in Utah is untaxable federal land. In lieu of the taxes they’d be getting if Utah could tax her ground, the federal government sends the state $5.2 billion. That $5.2 billion represents more than 30 percent of Utah’s $13 billion annual budget, making them, basically, a ward of the state. Utah wants desperately to better educate her children and grow her economy but the federal government is standing directly in her way. There are trillions of dollars trapped in, and under, western lands but the feds won’t let those in the West responsibly access it. Jaws drop when Ivory tells a crowd that “there is more oil and gas trapped under just continued on page two
Finally, the Right Mascot for Radical Environmentalists ROBERT GORDON, The Heritage Foundation
rizzly bears, sea turtles, and sandhill cranes — these kinds of critters most likely come to mind when endangered species are mentioned. In the endangered species business they are known as “charismatic megafauna” and are often plastered across fundraising appeals. However, as the federal list of regulated species swells, fewer of its denizens are generally awe inspiring. Indeed, today, federally regulated invertebrates and plants now outnumber the total number of listed mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish combined — and, the latter often fail to clear the majestic hurdle themselves. For those of us fascinated by creepy crawlies, perhaps a beetle is just as interesting as a bear or bird. For others, however, this may seem more like the disingenuous “bait and switch” sales tactic that the Federal Trade Commission says is “to switch consumers from buying the advertised merchandise, in order to sell something else, usually at a higher price or on a basis more advantageous to the advertiser.” Appealing or not, these critters can have such adverse consequences that the Texas Comptroller maintains a website so that Texans can see
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by LEE PITTS
The Work Of Fools
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
hen Ken Ivory addresses a crowd on his favorite subject, federal land ownership in the West, he asks four simple questions. The “Four Why’s”, he calls them. 1) Why is it that over 50 percent of the land in the West is owned by the federal government while typically 4 percent of land in the East is? 2) Why did some western states succeed in securing benefits to their public lands promised at statehood, while others have not? 3) Why does the imbalance in land ownership to the West and East of what Ivory calls the Federal Fault Line, matter to western states and to the nation? 4) Why don’t we do something about the fact that our federal government hasn’t honored the same promise it made and kept with states east of Colorado? Good questions, don’t you think? To that list we would add one of our own: Why is Ken Ivory about the only politician asking such questions?
Riding Herd
what the next regulatory plague may be. Just this year, Texans have — in the name of a dimesized, underground spider known as the Bracken Cave meshweaver — jettisoned highway improvements. Similarly, in the name of the Houston toad, recovery efforts were slowed in the wake of horrendousTexas wildfires that destroyed 1,700 homes. The green community is readying to add to these Endangered Species Act injustices, fashioning a new weapon — the American burying beetle. As one liberal blogger puts it, the beetles “have earned the attention both of TransCanada and of environmental groups dedicated to protecting endangered species and interested as well in stopping the [Keystone XL] pipeline’s construction.” [emphasis added]. The beetle’s scientific name is Nicrophorus americanus, and in various government reports it is known as the ABB. As its scientific name hints (nekros: Greek for dead, dying person, corpse), the ABB is one of many species of carrion beetle which in turn are just a few of the thousands of kinds of North American beetles. American burying beetles depend upon carrion — rotting flesh, burying it, and laying eggs nearcontinued on page four
ow did this Grand Experiment we call America end up being run by a Congress of jerks and an army of incompetent bureaucrats with no common sense or real world experience? How did the greatest Democracy the world has ever known end up being dictated to by special interest groups and their lobbyists who routinely represent less than 5 percent of all Americans? Since when did the American Way come to be defined as unemployment benefits, political action committees and a “conservation” strategy that can best be defined as “lock it up and let it burn?” For those of you who think the solution to our dilemma is more government, we take you now to a press conference in Washington, DC twenty years from now. Amidst a nationwide food shortage, the work of fools is being defended the Secretary of the F F and D. No, those aren’t the grades your youngest son brought home on his last report card. It stands for the Food, Fuel and Fish Department, the consortium of bureaucrats, greenies, animal rights groups, unions and government bureaucrats who, like a circular firing squad, take turns blaming each other for their failed policies. “Mr. Secretary, why are there no eggs on the shelves of grocery stores?” “I can explain everything. After we outlawed cages for laying hens and turned them loose on open range they kept hiding their eggs. We assigned a task force to the problem and they looked high and low but they couldn’t find any eggs. Then an observant staffer discovered the hens were leaving their sanctuary by flying over the one foot tall fences. It turns out that chickens are actually birds. Who knew?” “Mr. Secretary, why is there no milk, no dairy products of any kind?” “I sympathize, believe continued on page five
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