Underwhelmed
Bill St. Clair at The Albany (NY) Times Union - Let restaurant owners decide smoking policies - The TU printed my letter today, slightly improved by their editing:
First published: Monday, August 26, 2002
An Aug. 21 Times Union editorial applauded two Colonie diners for going smoke-free and complained that the state Legislature should have mandated this.
Private property isn't popular anymore. Government taxes and mandates have turned property ownership into more like rental from the state. That's not right.
Private property owners have the right to make any rules they want about the use of their property. That means that restaurant owners may forbid smoking if they want, or require it. Or, they can do what they did for years, at customer request, before there were any smoking laws: establish separate smoking and nonsmoking sections. The owners of the two diners may have been acting in the public interest. More likely they were listening to the market and attempting to improve their bottom lines.
Mandating any smoking policy by law points a government gun at every restaurant owner. How dare you propose that. Let the market work its magic. It always works better than government guns.
BILL St. CLAIR
New Lebanon
bill@billstclair.com
I fired 15 rounds from the Marlin 444P yesterday. Got a reasonable group with 10 shots at 25 yards. Completely missed the target with 5 shots at 100 yards. I'll get it on target at 50 yards and set up a bigger 100 yard target next time, to sight it in. Feeding was rough, though it appeared to get better with use. Ejection was flaky. The last round wouldn't eject at all unless I turned the gun upside down before working the lever. Maybe I put the bolt back in incorrectly, but I don't think so. Less recoil than my .30/06. Made nice big holes in the paper. I'm underwhelmed. In good news, I am slowly learning to shoot traps: 17 & 21 yesterday.
Nat Hentoff at The Village Voice - The Soldier of the Constitution - according to Mr. Hentoff, retired California Congressman Don Edwards was a champion of the Bill of Rights.
I sure wish Don Edwards were still in Congress so I could see him on C-SPAN confronting John Ashcroft with a copy of the Constitution.
The current Congress--with such few exceptions as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Dick Armey of Texas, and the recently defeated Bob Barr of Georgia--is allowing crucial powers over all of us to accumulate in the executive branch. There are stirrings in some of the lower courts, but so far people are being locked up, without any rights, as if they were in China.
Harry Brown at World Net Daily - How to oppose terrorism - some good practical advice for countering terrorists where they live and stopping them from wanting to attack the U.S. What America should and should not do, short term and long term.
Recognize that 9-11 was a trillion-to-one shot that couldn't be duplicated in a million years. So don't turn America upside-down, causing billions of dollars in losses to companies and business travelers to prevent the repetition of something that most likely won't happen again anyway.
...
I'm sorry that I can't snap my fingers and undo 50 years of bad American foreign policy. Unfortunately, by continuing to tell the rest of the world what to do, President Bush is making a bad situation even worse.
So here's a final don't:
Don't lose your self-respect. It isn't necessary for you to speak out against the war, but don't embarrass yourself by joining in patriotic displays that are nothing but sound and fury.
If you deceive others or deceive yourself, you too will be a casualty of the so-called War on Terrorism.