The same New York Times, which on Friday overruled the strenuous arguments of officials of the elected government and proceeded to publish detailed information about a vital program monitoring international transfers of currency;

Administration officials, however, asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value.

Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said: “We have listened closely to the administration’s arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration’s extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest.”

the same New York Times, which today divulged details of “closely held secret” plans of possible reductions in US forces in Iraq, supplied by “American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity;”

this same New York Times devoted a front page article in the Week in Review section to a prolonged meditation on the ethics of dining and the fate of the lobster (and a variety of other critters) destined for the dinner table.

Chin-stroking foodie journalist Michael Pollan got himself a Times magazine article, recyclable for his latest book, by purchasing a steer, and following its career on to feed lot and slaughterhouse. Frank Bruni, author of today’s “It Died For Us” lobster article, shares an anecdote of Mr. Pollan’s intended to allow Sunday Times’ readers to chuckle with a sense of superiority,

After the article appeared, Mr. Pollan received appeals from readers willing to pay large sums of money to buy and save the steer. One reader, he recalled, was a Hollywood producer who wanted to let the animal graze on his lawn in Beverly Hills, Calif.

“He kept coming after me,” Mr. Pollan said, describing a crusade that culminated in an offer of a meal at a famous emporium of porterhouses in Brooklyn. “He finally said, ‘I’m coming to New York, we’re going to have dinner at Peter Luger to discuss this.’ I’m like, ‘Excuse me, we’re going to have a steak dinner to discuss the rescue of this steer?’ How disconnected can we be?”

But we are all reading a newspaper guilty of a lot worse than popping a lobster into the cooking pot, or dining on beefsteak.

How disconnected is the Times?

How disconnected are all of us who buy it and read it, as it carries on its vicious partisan campaign against an elected administration, proceeding even to the point of repeatedly compromising National Security and endangering American lives?

Terrorists in Iraq, wearing no uniforms, recently violated the laws of war by the barbarous murder of two US soldiers.

AP:

The U.S. military recovered the booby-trapped bodies of two missing soldiers Tuesday, and Iraqi officials said the Americans were tortured and killed in a “barbaric” way. An insurgent group claimed the new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq executed the men personally…

“Coalition forces had to carefully maneuver their way through numerous improvised explosive devices leading up to and around the site,” the military said in a statement. “Insurgents attempting to inflict additional casualties had placed IEDs around the bodies.”

A number of the usual offenders from the Blogosphere have taken this occasion, when we should all be voicing our indignation at the conduct of the enemy, and wishing our troops success in hunting the malefactors down and exacting vengeance, instead to strike moralizing poses and quote grave legal opinions, informing us of imaginary obligations to avoid excessive injury to the enemy.

Stephen Bainbridge turns to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England:

Islamofascist terrorists will use torture regardless of whether the US responds in kind or not…

The Anglo-American tradition, according to the great English jurist William Blackstone, includes a “prohibition not only of killing and maiming, but also of torturing (to which our laws are strangers).” We thus ought to abstain from torture simply because a prohibition of torture is part of the moral and legal heritage we are fighting to defend.

Andrew Sullivan gets carried away with himself to the point of spouting treason, attributing to us moral equivalence with this particularly vicious and cowardly enemy.

One can only wish that Andrew Sullivan would go out to a workingman’s bar, and repeat exactly the same sentiments, in order to give some right-thinking American the opportunity to rebuke them in the most appropriate fashion.

My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves. What was once a difference in kind between us and our enemy is now a difference in degree. That fact profoundly weakens our moral standing in the world, the power of our cause, and impedes the long-run success in the war of ideas that the war on terror involves.

Gregory Djerejian contributes additional sanctimony.

Clearly, when American soldiers are tortured, murdered, and multilated by illegal combatants, the decision of just how the perpetrators should be punished, were the perpetrators of that outrage so unfortunate as to fall alive into the hands of US forces, ought to be the perogative of the local American commander. Politicians should not interfere, and the opinions of domestically-based law professors, corporate attorneys, and old ladies are completely beside the point.

The Laws of England and the Laws of the United States have not a thing to do with any of this. War takes place outside the jurisdiction of civilian law, and the murderers of Privates Menchaca and Tucker have no claim whatsoever to the privileges and immunities of the US legal system nor the least pretence to a right to be treated as prisoners of war.

They are unlawful combatants, and are eggregiously guilty of violating the customs and usages of war. Their lives ought to be regarded as forfeit, and the only questions a US commander on the scene ought to be asking himself in the event of their capture are: what form of execution would be regarded as most disagreeable by primitives infatuated with Islamic superstition? and, what would make the most dramatic impression, and provide the greatest deterrence to future outrages?

The British avenged the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 by tying the mutineers to the muzzles of cannons, which were then fired. Surely, we can do better today.

The dismal quality (“Little boxes made of ticky-tacky”) and mind-boggling prices of San Francisco area housing are famous. “They took the Earthly Paradise, and built New Jersey,” one appalled visitor recently remarked.

Ordinary people are completely priced out of this market, and the Sunday Chronicle reports the situation has inspired the traditional local activist response: Start a Web-Site!

Phil Zarboulas is mad as hell about Bay Area housing prices.

And he doesn’t want you to take it anymore.

What started as an open letter of frustration about the region’s exorbitant home values was reborn last month as www.boycotthousing.com, a Web site that urges people to stop buying Bay Area real estate, report overpriced properties and spread the word about cracked foundations, leaky roofs and rundown surroundings.

A software entrepreneur who was outbid several times during his two-year plus home search, Zarboulas admits he wants to hasten a slowdown in the market and thereby help regular folks (and himself) onto the home-ownership bandwagon.

Through the site — which seems a natural fit in the technology/real estate/advocacy-obsessed Bay Area — Zarboulas also hopes to educate overextended homeowners about the possible disadvantages of tapping equity that may not be real.

“There’s no fundamental reason why house prices are this high — it’s just a mentality,” Zarboulas, 40, said during a wide-ranging interview at a coffee shop in San Francisco. “We want to change that mentality.”

In a housing-strapped region with a population of nearly 7 million and growing, economists doubt Zarboulas’ site will have a measurable effect — not to mention the difficulty of organizing any kind of boycott on something as fragmented as a market with tens of thousands of housing sales each year.

But if even a relatively small slice of those sales are affected by his grassroots effort, Zarboulas is convinced a sense of reason could return to a market gone haywire.

Since its introduction in mid-May, almost 24,000 have visited the site and nearly 1,000 have signed up to voluntarily avoid purchasing a home in the Bay Area for some period, ranging from three months to more than a year.

Obviously, starting web-sites, signing petitions, even linking arms and singing Kumbaya, is not going to bring down Bay area home prices.

What would is what the Bay Area moonbat population would never consider for a New York minute: reducing the San Bruno Mountain-sized pile of building regulations, and opening up some of vast reservoir of safely squirreled-away “open space” where no one is permitted to build.

Unfortunately, the drastic shortage drives prices of existing homes into the stratosphere (Fido’s doghouse would go for $500K if it were on the Peninsula), and creates a gloating constituency of existing homeowners. “I’m on board, Captain, pull the ladder up,” is the real motto of the Golden State.

The SF Peninsula is not an enormously large place, but three preservation organizations alone have taken 125,000 acres, 200 square miles, of land out of circulation.

Peninsula Open Space Trust 55,000 acres

Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District 50,000 acres

Peninsula Watershed 23,000 acres

The corrupt United Nations, run by tinpot Third World dictatorships, is actively working (along with a number of prominent liberal international do-gooding organizations) to impose gun control on every country in the world, including the United States. Civilian disarmament resulting in governmental monopoly of force is a fundamental goal of leftwing statism.

A push for global gun control gets under way next week in New York City, when the United Nations opens a conference intended to curb the international arms trade.

Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) are pushing for a treaty to “protect civilians from armed violence.”

Those three groups — which have formed a coalition called the Control Arms Campaign — say their goal is to reduce arms proliferation and misuse — “and to convince governments to introduce global principles to regulate the transfers of weapons.” They are urging the United Nations to impose a “binding arms trade treaty.”

According to Amnesty International, nearly 2 billion people live in deep poverty, a problem made worse by the “uncontrolled proliferation of guns and other weapons that also fuels human rights abuses and escalates conflicts.” Amnesty International claims that weapons kill more 1,000 men, women, and children every day.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Amnesty International says on its website. The Control Arms Campaign believes a global Arms Trade Treaty is the solution.

But in the United States, defenders of the Second Amendment are insulted by what they see as a carefully timed assault on the U.S. Constitution.

They note that the U.N. Conference on Global Gun Control will run from July 26-July 7 — a time span that includes the Fourth of July, Independence Day.

The U.N. conference poses a direct threat to America’s constitutionally protected individual right to keep and bear arms, said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).

Gottlieb, who plans to attend the U.N. conference, is urging the U.S. government to reconsider its financial support for the United Nations, given its effort to undermine the Second Amendment.

“Had it not been for our tradition of private firearms ownership, our citizens might still be subjects of the queen,” Gottlieb said in a press release.

“Had it not been for America, all of Europe might be speaking German. Were America not the ‘great arsenal of democracy’ that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described in 1940, the world would be a far different place, and the sanctimonious bureaucrats at the U.N. might instead be working in labor camps.”

Gottlieb finds it troubling that as the United States celebrates its 230th birthday, global anti-gunners “want to create a binding international agreement that could supersede our laws and Constitution.

“We have done much for the U.N., and in return, the organization has hosted despots, tyrants and dictators whose record of human rights abuses, aggression and genocide speaks for itself. And now comes an attack on our Constitution, on our national holiday.

“America has always answered the call to help our international friends and neighbors,” Gottlieb observed, “but when our very way of life is attacked, maybe it is time to find more worthy endeavors for our material and financial support.”

At the United Nations’ first small arms conference in 2001, the United States rejected the idea of global gun control.

John Bolton – the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations – in 2001 was serving as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control. He told the U.N. conference in 2001, “The United States believes that the responsible use of firearms is a legitimate aspect of national life.”

Dennis Prager explains why liberals are more prone to believe in, and fear, Global Warming.

— The Left is prone to hysteria. The belief that global warming will destroy the world is but one of many hysterical notions held on the Left. As noted in a previous column devoted to the Left and hysteria, many on the Left have been hysterical about the dangers of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance of phone numbers (incipient fascism); secondhand smoke (killing vast numbers of people); drilling in the remotest area of Alaska (major environmental despoliation); and opposition to same-sex marriage (imminent Christian theocracy).

— The Left believes that if The New York Times and other liberal news sources report something, it is true. If the cover of Time magazine says, “Global Warming: Be Worried, Very Worried,” liberals get worried, very worried, about global warming.

It is noteworthy that liberals, one of whose mottos is “question authority,” so rarely question the authority of the mainstream media. Now, of course, conservatives, too, often believe mainstream media. But conservatives have other sources of news that enable them to achieve the liberal ideal of questioning authority. Whereas few liberals ever read non-liberal sources of information or listen to conservative talk radio, the great majority of conservatives are regularly exposed to liberal news, liberal editorials and liberal films, and they have also received many years of liberal education.

— The Left believes in experts. Of course, every rational person, liberal or conservative, trusts the expertise of experts — such as when experts in biology explain the workings of mitochondria, or when experts in astronomy describe the moons of Jupiter. But for liberals, “expert” has come to mean far more than greater knowledge in a given area. It now means two additional things: One is that non-experts should defer to experts not only on matters of knowledge, but on matters of policy, as well. The second is that experts possess greater wisdom about life, not merely greater knowledge in their area of expertise.

That is why liberals are far more likely to be impressed when a Nobel Prize winner in, let us say, physics signs an ad against war or against capital punishment. The liberal is bowled over by the title “Nobel laureate.” The conservative is more likely to wonder why a Nobel laureate in physics has anything more meaningful to say about war than, let us say, a taxi driver.

— People who don’t confront the greatest evils will confront far lesser ones. Most humans know the world is morally disordered — and socially conscious humans therefore try to fight what they deem to be most responsible for that disorder. The Right tends to fight human evil such as communism and Islamic totalitarianism. The Left avoids confronting such evils and concentrates its attention instead on socioeconomic inequality, environmental problems and capitalism. Global warming meets all three of these criteria of evil. By burning fossil fuels, rich countries pollute more, the environment is being despoiled and big business increases its profits.

— The Left is far more likely to revere, even worship, nature. A threat to the environment is regarded by many on the Left as a threat to what is most sacred to them, and therefore deemed to be the greatest threat humanity faces. The cover of Vanity Fair’s recent “Special Green Issue” declared: “A Graver Threat Than Terrorism: Global Warming.” Conservatives, more concerned with human evil, hold the very opposite view: Islamic terror is a far graver threat than global warming.

— Leftists tend to fear dying more. That is one reason they are more exercised about our waging war against evil than about the evils committed by those we fight. The number of Iraqis and others Saddam Hussein murdered troubles the Left considerably less than even the remote possibility than they may one day die of global warming (or secondhand smoke).

One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

You will be amused at this romance feature from the Sunday Times Style section. Sophia Raday, a typical Berkeley peacenik devoted to everything trendy leftie, recounts the story of how she fell for a West Point graduate, Oakland cop, and National Guard colonel.

MY husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange “simunitions” and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.

I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a “Bread, not bombs” button, end up married to The Man?

I like to tell people we met because he pulled me over, and I avoided the ticket with my feminine wiles. It’s not true, but our partnership is almost that unlikely. After all, I’ve been arrested several times in political protests and once for possession of marijuana. I’ve even trespassed onto a naval base to spray-paint protest messages over the sloganeering billboards.

My husband, on the other hand, subscribes to a magazine about wound ballistics, calls people he doesn’t like “communists” and distrusts anyone with a beard. He gets his hair cut at least twice a month. He loves to rub my hand over his spiky scalp while bragging about how especially “high and tight” it is this time.

The truth is, I met my husband on a blind date set up by a cousin who had gone to West Point with him. It amused me that on Tuesday night I was going out with a motorcycle-riding lesbian while on Wednesday I had a date with a soldier/cop. I wore a short skirt that showed off my long legs. When he arrived, I was charmed by his old-fashioned formality, how he called me “Miss Sophia” and pulled out my chair.

It was on our third date that I discovered he never left the house without a firearm. We went to see “Heat,” a crime drama with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and when we were driving home, I asked, “So when you’re off-duty, do you ever carry a gun?”

He laughed. “Always. Got one on my hip right now.”

I was delighted. This was high adventure. I liked having covert awareness of hidden things under his clothes. Dangerous things. And I liked the idea that I would try to tame him, that I would be the one to put a daisy in his gun.

———————————–

I mentioned this story to my wife, particularly noting the detail of the husband referring to people he doesn’t like as “communists.” My wife sniffed, and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

Marc Coffey identifies the top ten “Progressive” reactions.

Scrappleface

‘Twas the Night Before Fitzmas.

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Pretty girl casting admiring glance at good old Karl is identified at Wonkette.

——————-

* I know, I know, having to annotate this kind of thing is an open admission of just how out-of-it some my college contemporaries, and readers, really are, but I discovered today that it has to be done. “Fitzmas” is the Blogospheric term for what all the lefties want for Christmas: the indictment on any old day of the year of Karl Rove by Plamegame Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

despite Zarqawi’s death, reports the inimitable Scott Ott.

As Blackberry devices and cell phones on Capitol Hill hummed with news of the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi yesterday, Congressional Democrats vowed that despite the loss they would fight on in “the war on the war on terror.”

“Zarqawi will be missed because he put a human face on the futility of the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq,” said one unnamed lawmaker, who assured a reporter that “Democrats are still optimistic. We’re still looking for the silver lining.”

Rep. John Murtha, D-PA, a former Marine and vocal critic of the military occupation of Iraq, immediately denounced “the Zarqawi massacre” and suggested that the F-16 pilot who dropped the bombs had snapped under pressure and murdered the al Qaeda leader “in cold blood.”

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, demanded an explanation of the secret intelligence gathering techniques and surveillance used to find Mr. Zarqawi.

“I want to give the president an opportunity to explain the program to the Congress and to assure the American people that nobody’s civil rights were violated,” said Sen. Specter.

Meanwhile, Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and former presidential candidate Al Gore observed a moment of silence as they heard of the passing of Mr. Zarqawi, a fellow Internet pioneer.

Simon Heffer, though not religious personally, is still capable of outrage at the multicultural impulses of the former Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prince of Wales.

former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, made a predictable intervention in this debate (on Multiculturalism) from beyond the grave last weekend. He proclaimed that the coronation of our next monarch must be an “interfaith” event. The ceremony must, he added, have “very significant changes”, so that it is “inclusive” of other religions in Britain.

Lord Carey clearly has in mind what Private Eye would term a “Rocky Horror” coronation service. Never mind your archbishops, or even your Christians, your imams, your rabbis, ayatollahs, your assorted holy men and other diverse priests, layers-on-of-hands and speakers-in-tongues: in accordance with the professions of religious belief on the 2001 census forms, I expect to see a few Jedi knights in the sanctuary, while devotees of Ras Tafari smoke ganja at the high altar. And, as one of the realm’s noisiest atheists, I hope for a part in the proceedings, too, that I might feel “included”.

Having long regarded the Church of England as many people regard EastEnders, I have steeled myself not to intrude in its private grief, but to lament the largely self-inflicted decline of this great institution. Though it has, to my great spiritual regret, nothing to offer me personally, I can appreciate not merely the potential it has to succour and strengthen millions of believers, but also its role in our culture, our constitution and our nation.

However, intrude into the Church’s grief we now must: for Lord Carey’s successor on the throne of St Augustine, Dr Rowan Williams, who in many regards seems even more to inhabit the wilder shores of theology than Lord Carey, is having none of this nonsense. He has picked up on a threat issued by our probable next monarch, the Prince of Wales, in 1994 about how (in that very “last century” spirit) the Prince wanted to be “Defender of Faiths” when and if he became King.

Dr Williams said of the Prince in 2003 that “unless something really radical happens with the constitution, he is, like it or not, Defender of the Faith and he has a relationship with the Christian Church of a kind that he does not have with other faith communities”. That is self-evidently the case. Of course, were our Queen to emulate her late mother (and I fervently hope she does), there will be no coronation for another 20 or so years. Perhaps the needless vandalism of our constitution will have been completed by then. Perhaps there will be a different heir to the throne. Perhaps the moon will be made of green cheese. Until such times as these things happen,

Dr Williams’s view must prevail, and his predecessor would be best advised to keep his bizarre views to himself…

That is what inclusiveness means: it is how countries as diverse as France and America both do things. It is about having a standard template of Frenchness or American-ness, and welcoming people into that civilisation and those humane values by asking them to participate in them. We still, despite the attempts of such vandals as Lord Carey, have a core culture in this country. Christianity and the expectation that Christianity will, for historic reasons, prevail and be accepted as prevalent, are central to that culture. And few events in the nation’s life symbolise such an understanding more than the traditional coronation service.

The next coronation will be a formal renewal of our way of life and our values. It will formally recognise not only the legitimacy of the monarch in the eyes of God and the British constitution, but also of the identification of the vast majority of his subjects with the process of doing so. For that reason above all others it must be clear, comprehensible and in keeping with public expectations of such an event.

We are not a multicultural society. We are a monocultural one tolerant of other cultures, and whose clear identity is understood by the people, if not by their leaders. We are an old country with a strong sense of continuity. And anyone who trifles with such manifestations of our antiquity and stability does so at his peril.

American pioneers, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, made a practice of moving whenever a neigbor settled close enough that they could see the smoke from his chimney. Those old boys were smart.

In today’s metropolitan suburbs, regulation has burgeoned like kudzu. One pays more in taxes per annum than most members of my dad’s generation paid for their house. Those taxes are high enough and increase reliably enough that retirement and a fixed income will require moving for most people.

You get to pay something in the neighborhood of a million bucks for a lot of suburban properties these days, and then you need to get (almost impossible to obtain) permissions to remodel or build anything on your (so-called) own property.

Myself, I’m keeping my 300 acre farm in a rural township of Pennsylvania, where I can shoot guns, remodel my house, or erect a 200 foot replica of the Statue of Liberty painted fuchsia, and nobody can stop me.

Just read this eye-opening account from the Washington Post of life in today’s suburban hell:

Marianne and Marc Duffy say their dream home renovation in Chevy Chase has turned into a suburban nightmare. Their neighbors say the Duffys intentionally flouted building rules when they expanded their $725,000 house on Thornapple Street and have no one to blame but themselves.

Yesterday, a Montgomery County appeals board reaffirmed an earlier ruling that the Duffys had rebuilt their house too close to the street and to neighbors. The Duffys say the decision leaves them two choices: Move the house a few feet at a cost of $100,000 or continue an expensive battle in court….

The dispute has shed new light on the inner workings of the county’s Department of Permitting Services, which reversed course at least five times in the case, the Duffys said. The agency issued renovation permits to the couple last year but later pulled them back and ordered work stopped after neighbors complained that the Duffys had actually demolished and rebuilt the house. The couple are renting a house nearby.

The case has pitted the Duffys, both securities lawyers, against a group of prominent opponents, including two journalists — Mayer, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and her husband, William Hamilton, a Washington Post editor — as well as lawyer Michael Eig and his historic preservationist wife Emily Hotaling Eig, former ABC News reporter Jackie Judd and real estate agent Kristin Gerlach. Both sides had lawyers but recently decided to represent themselves.

Neither side has signaled a willingness to give up the fight, while acknowledging the strain the protracted battle, including six days of hearings, has put on their lives.

The dispute has roiled the neighborhood, sparked contentious discussions at Town Council meetings, generated letters to local newspapers and debates on talk radio, and fueled discussions about liberal conspiracies.

Moral? Don’t live near pretentious suburban liberals.

Sisyphus imagines today’s left responding to the WWII D-Day Invasion:

11. No blood for French Wine!

10. It’s been two and a half years since Pearl Harbor and they still haven’t brought Admiral Nagumo to justice

9. In 62 years, the date will be 6/6/6. A coincidence? I think not.

8. All this death and destruction is because the neo-cons are in the pocket of Israel

7. The soldiers are still on the beach, this invasion is a quagmire

6. Sure the holocaust is evil, but so was slavery

5. We are attacked by Japan and then attack France? Roosevelt is worse than the Kaiser!

4. Why bring democracy to Europe by force and not to Korea or Vietnam? I blame racism

3. This war doesn’t attack the root causes of Nazism

2. I support the troops, but invading Germany does not guarantee that in 56 years we won’t have a President who’s worse than Hitler

1. I don’t see Roosevelt or Churchill storming the beaches — they’re Chicken Hawks

Walter Olson (at Overlawyered) links Steve Bodio on simply astonishing new forms of pet ownership regulation adopted, at the behest of a sinister new alliance of NIMBY liberals and Animal Rights activist groups.

In the case of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Steve Bodio quotes the following membership alert received from a dog group he belongs to:

City Councilor Sally Mayer is again proposing sweeping changes that would drastically limit fanciers’ ability to breed and own dogs, while doing little to address the city’s problems with irresponsible ownership. The proposal is currently set for a vote at the May 1st city council meeting. Fanciers are encouraged to attend the meeting, which will be held in the Council Chambers on the basement level of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Government Center building at One Civic Plaza NW, Albuquerque. The meeting beings at 5pm.

“The proposal, known as the HEART ordinance (Humane and Ethical Animal Regulations and Treatment), contains draconian regulations, oppressive fees, and allows the government unfettered access to animal owner’s homes and personal information. Worse, the measure was put forth based on “findings” that were established without any studies being conducted and without any input from responsible dog owners and breeders.

“The measure’s restrictive provisions include:

* An annual $150 permit for each unaltered dog or cat over six months old.

* A $150 litter permit, which expires six months after the date of issue. Breeders would be limited to four litters per year.

* A limit of four dogs and two cats per household (or six cats) unless residents purchase a $50 multiple companion animal site permit.

* Allows one adjoining property owner to petition for the revocation of a multiple companion animal site permit. (I will come back to this one)

* Prohibits anyone with an intact animal permit from having a multiple companion animal site permit. [WHAT DOES THIS MEAN??]

* Requirements that owners microchip or tattoo their dogs and cats.

* Prohibiting crating of dogs outdoors and tethering for more than 1 hour per day.

* Mandates owners provide “environmental enrichment” defined as “toys and other safe products.that will stimulate mental, physical and grooming activities.”

* Requires any animal that is picked up by animal control to be spayed/neutered, even if the owner has an intact animal permit and immediately reclaims the animal.

“In applying for any permit, dog owners would be forced to comply with a long list of provisions, including submitting to property and record-keeping inspections.

“The proposal would also put severe restrictions on animal service businesses such as dog groomers and doggie daycares. Of interest to all dog owners, these businesses would be required to provide a list of all their clients and their contact information to the city. Generally the government must get a subpoena from a judge for client lists and company records.

“It is critical that local fanciers immediately contact Albuquerque’s city officials and convey their strong opposition to this ordinance. Area purebred dog owners, including members of the Rio Grande Kennel Club, are working to oppose the ordinance and to support fair and reasonable animal control legislation that does not penalize responsible owners and breeders. However, more help is urgently needed!

“What You Can Do:
AKC encourages dog owners to contact their city council member and express your opposition. To find out who represents you on the Albuquerque City Council tp://www.cabq.gov/council/ccmaps.html. It is extremely important that council members hear from their constituents!

“For more information, contact:

Patte Klecan
Rio Grande Kennel Club”

IT PASSED.

As Steve reports in the same posting, he had already run into the same thing in Bozeman, Montana.

And Los Angeles, he also reports in another posting, has passed a draconian dog ordinance:

Los Angeles County has passed an ordinance that requires all dogs to be sterilized and microchipped, effective June 3, 2006. It applies only to those dogs kept in unincorporated areas, but cities such as Los Angeles are being urged to enact similar requirements. Should the cities follow suit, 10 million people will be soon be so regulated, more than the population in *forty-four* states. Dogs may be exempt from this requirement if they are registered with an approved registry and are either titled, entered in an approved competition annually, or owned by an individual belonging to a dog club with *enforced breeding restrictions*. Animal rightists are currently fighting to further tighten these exemptions’ details. Required intact licenses for breedable dogs cost $60 per year; altered ones cost $20. Litters must be reported to the county, as must every puppy buyer’s identity. Additional requirements and penalties of this sterilize and track program may be found at http://animalcontrol.co.la.ca.us/html/Main1.htm. LA County says it’s hiring additional animal control officers to go door to door to enforce this anti-breeder ordinance.

And Chicago is proposing the same thing, says the Sun-Times:

Owners of Chicago’s estimated 600,000 dogs would be required to microchip their pets, limit tethering, pay stiff fines for letting them roam free and choose between neutering and sharply higher license fees, under a sweeping crackdown proposed by an influential alderman.

Grooming, boarding and doggie day-care facilities would be licensed and subject to strict operating standards under the legislative package championed by License Committee Chairman Eugene Schulter (47th).

A lifelong dog lover whose deceased Irish terriers Kerry and Conner were “part of the family,” Schulter said he’s driven by a desire to “create a safer and better environment” for Chicago’s dogs.

This alliance between the Aninal Rights extremist groups and conventional liberal politicians to microchip, sterilize and regulate out of existence the family dog is cause for real alarm. What if, for reasons of your own, you wanted to breed your mixed breed animal? What if you raise dogs, as Steve Bodio does, from an exotic foreign breed, not yet recognized by the AKC?

Steve Bodio identified one Sportsman’s Group trying to fight them on this: the Sportsmen’s and Animal Owners’ Voting Alliance.