February 12, 2010

Texting While Operating 4,000 Pound Lethal Weapons?

I was driving home from work the other day, listening to Wyoming Public Radio air a story about a bill to ban texting while driving.  Listening to the radio while driving is a divided-attention task which can be distracting, like if I accidentally tune in to Rush Limbaugh and turn my eyes off the road while I desperately try to silence the inflammatory rhetoric before I lose my self control.

I remember watching a young Indonesian woman, dressed for the office, driving around a curve on her motorcycle, blasé and self-confident, steering with one hand and texting with the other.  Although I was impressed, that’s a strategy for a short life span.  Since then, I realize this is happening everywhere.

So, part of the story was a concern by legislators that if a person were stopped and ticketed for texting while driving, and that person chose to challenge the ticket, the police might need to subpoena his phone records to prove the case.  Apparently some legislators feel this would be an invasion of privacy.

Let’s ask the people who get run over by texting drivers if they feel that their privacy was invaded.

Let’s ask the texting driver who was wandering all over the road, creating a reason for the officer to stop him,  how he will feel after he runs over a pedestrian or crushes a car full of people: is there a “right to privacy” which allows people to behave like that?

Prosecutors and investigators gather evidence all the time to prove criminal behavior; what is sacred about a phone bill?

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February 11, 2010

I-80 tolls: A Stupid Idea

In my former life I was an attorney for the Wyoming Dept. of Revenue, which operated the ports of entry at places, inter alia, Evanston, Cheyenne and points east.  I once held a truckload of  National Enquirers at the Cheyenne port for 12 hours because the truck had expired codes.  The Chicago market was waiting.  I talked to a lot of cocky attorneys. We got our money.

I-80 serves two classes of traffic: intra state and interstate.  Semi traffic on I- 80 is relentless, and most of it is crossing the state.  They are carrying 70 to 90 thousand pounds per truck.  (I don’t follow the details any more, so maybe these numbers are antiquated.)  Whenever a semi approaches a port of entry, it either reports in via the pre-pass automated system or it pulls in, goes over the scales, and pays manually.  In any event, it pays.

I am willing to let the intrastate traffic use I-80 and only pay fuel tax (a few cents per gallon), which is one of the lowest taxes in the nation.  We should increase the fuel tax.  That way all users pay for highway repair.  This takes care of the intrastate users.  And if you want to haul an overweight load, pay more.

Gone are the days of the interstate truckers with two sets of books.  We have computers. They appear to be useless in catching Nigerian terrorists, but they might work for California-to-Chicago truckers who use I-80.  They check in at Evanston and report whether they are dumping their load in WY or going on to NE.  Instead of building toll booths, just add to their transit fee.  If they lie and say they are dumping in Rock Springs and 12 hours later pass the Pine Bluffs port, the computer will catch them.  (Maybe.  The Port of Entry  people would need to be alert.)

Or, we could build huge toll stations all across I-80.  We would have to pay for construction and 24-hour staffing. Which union would vie for that contract?  Okay, maybe you like unions; I am not judgmental sometimes, but union wages and benefits = operating expenses.  Then the truckers try to dodge the toll stations by beating the tar out of our secondary highways, so we could erect weigh stations on those highways, which means more expense.

And the toll stations back up traffic, inconveniencing families and business travelers.  Further, why should families in their Toyotas pay a toll for maintenance of highways pounded by interstate truckers?

The solution:  just charge more at the ports of entry.  Yes, you will miss a few targets, but no system is perfect.

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February 10, 2010

Protect Wyoming Reserve Funds

Gov. Dave Freudenthal
Dear Dave,  Hold the line on the public fund reserves; Wyoming cities and counties crave money like junkies crave heroin.  Everyone trashes Congress for spending while they all have their hands in the jar and their snouts in the trough; the same people implore Cheyenne to spend money like Congress does.  Conservative principles of limited government are honored mainly in the breach.

Municipal money lust is no reason to exhaust reserves which may be desperately needed in a few years to maintain basic government services.  Is there a legislative equivalent of a chastity belt?  Probably not; in a world of separation of powers at the state level, the executive branch has to be the chastity belt.  What an irony; a runaway Republican legislature tries to pilfer the public treasury while a Democratic executive bars the door.

This is policy, not personal.
Sincerely, RT

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February 9, 2010

Greater Sage-Grouse One

The name for this column is a fun double or triple pun:  the author is supposedly sage but inclined to eschew political correctness.  Nonetheless, the Greater Sage-grouse, Centrocercus urophasianus,  a big fat slow-flying bird (which in my opinion bears no more resemblance to chickens than plump pheasants or partridge) requires much serious analysis.

What and who am I to comment on Greater Sage-grouse?  Well, first I know how to properly hyphenate the name.

I have been a game bird hunter for many decades, but I decided five years ago to stop shooting sage-grouse.  Four reasons: First, I make enough money that I do not need to eat sage-grouse to survive; what a relief.  Second, they don’t taste very good; I can find a lot of ways to set a better table.  Third, they reproduce slowly and are under a lot of stress and why should I add to their stress level?  Fourth, the game and fish agencies allow shooting of hens during hunting season, a practice which is not allowed for the introduced Chinese Ring-necked pheasant; why do we protect pheasant hens and slaughter sage-grouse hens?

I bought an irrigated farm/ranch in central Montana, with a partner, and we jumped into a plan to pay for the ranch with cattle and improve sage-grouse and wildlife habitat at the same time.  My degree in botany and a few years of studying sage-grouse behavior as an amateur birder helped a little.  Not!  I was way over my head.

I learned a lot:

1. It is very hard to keep a grazing tenant happy while fencing his cows out of the best creek bottom bird habitat.
2. It is very hard to keep your partner who works for National Wildlife Federation happy while letting the grazing tenant actually graze the cows on the rest of the habitat.
3. It is very difficult to get the organizations which espouse setting aside agricultural habitat for birds to actually put their money to use for such set-asides.
4. There is nothing more fun than walking through an alfalfa meadow in August that did not get mowed, and seeing dozens of sage-grouse chicks and pheasants run around eating bugs and stuff.

Later, we must examine:

• Industry impacts on sage-grouse
• Overgrazing impacts on sage-grouse
• BLM policies on grazing and sage-grouse
• Sod-busting and sage-grouse

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The Sage Grouse is a moniker for a critic who is only sometimes sage but often a grouse.

History: I (a mainly Irish person) was born in the South (if you don’t understand the need to capitalize that word, you need to talk to my mother, who now denies that she taught me that the South won the Civil War).  My minister father tried, with some success, to integrate white churches in the Mississippi delta in the late 1950s; this was followed by a move to Wyoming to get away from death threats.

We kids grew up in Buffalo, I attended college at liberal schools in Minnesota and Montana, worked on radical antiwar and antipoverty causes including liberal Missoula newspaper “Borrowed Times”, studied biology and botany, came back to Wyoming in 1975 to work for penurious wages for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, beating on power companies for years while living in Sheridan and Douglas.  In revenge for those lawyers slapping me around I went to law school, changed some perspectives (old friends say understatement here), married a journalist with ink in her veins, went to the Attorney General’s office to work on tax and water issues, argued a case in the U.S. Supreme Court wearing cowboy boots, moved from Cheyenne to Buffalo again to mix up a general practice for a while, moved to Gillette and now focusing on oil and gas and related land use issues, incidentally seriously irritating some in the environmental community.

Meanwhile, supported local organizations helping poor and children and disadvantaged, hiked and skied for a while, bought a ranch in Montana to improve bird habitat, chased exotic birds on several continents, helped the local bird banders, wrote a book on birds and another on easements, all the while trying to make original, independent judgments about people, landscapes, wildlife, causes and effects.