If you were listening last week, Local Views was aborted midway. All you missed were some wise cracks about the gubernatorial election, John Doolittle and spinach. If you really want to catch those, they’re on the Rabble Rousing web site.

This week has been typically bizarre in topical news. Starting with the local, the front page of The Union on Wednesday featured a story about the former Chevy dealership in the Glenbrook Basin, but it wasn’t about the move by Walgreen’s to put a new store on the property; it was about the current use of the property for something resembling what’s been going on there for decades–selling cars. Individuals with cars for sale are parking them there for all to see. It’s cheaper than a classified ad, and probably at least as effective, but the property owner is moving to kick ‘em out.

This is a common practice, finding a good public place to park your car with a "for sale" sign in the window. When people do it on property owned by some government entity, they get kicked out quickly, but on private property, the owner has to complain before the trespassers can be towed away. The reason for this little game, of course, is protection of commerce. People who have a licence and a storefront for selling cars feel threatened by people who can sell a car without paying a dealer, and government is always concerned about the well-being of retail business. One of the rarely spoken but critically important elements of a capitalist economy is that when money changes hands, one or more strangers gets to take a little bit of it before it gets to the rightful recipient. Anyone who’s ever bought or sold a house knows this concept well. Things like bartering, working for trade and even cash transactions between individuals are a threat to that system. Not paying retail is downright un-American.

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Notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s passionate defense of his unsuccessful murderous intent toward Osama bin Laden, the story of the week was the decision by a federal District Court judge to send a couple of reporters to jail for refusing to reveal the source of information they reported, information which everyone concedes is true. I’ve long known that some people always are resentful when the truth is told, but now they’ve succeeded in making it a crime. The truth which was told in this case was a revelation of some things that were said to a grand jury investigating the provision of so-called performance enhancing substances to professional athletes. Grand jury testimony, of course, is supposed to be secret, so the real lawbreaker was the person who told the reporters about it. Since the reporters won’t rat that person out, the judge says they go to jail instead.

The obvious irony is that not one professional athlete ever has gone to jail or even been charged with a crime for using these substances, but the journalists who reported about it are on their way to the can. I’ve always thought that the steroids scandal was a non-story, approximately as important as who your favorite Hollywood celebrity is dating or divorcing this week, but now it’s become a turning point in the history of the US Constitution. If you can be sent to jail for telling the truth, you might as well take your copy of the Constitution and attach it to that little roller next to your toilet. The free press and freedom of speech are officially flushed.

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Here’s another vicious attack on the free flow of true information. Three days from now, the US Environmental Protection agency is closing its headquarters library in Washington, and its regional libraries already have been closed. All the information ever collected by this agency now is hidden from the view of the public and even from the agency’s own employees. The libraries consist of 16,000 books and technical reports, 5500 hard copies and hundreds of thousands of microfiche documents. The agency’s excuse for hiding all this information is budget. It just doesn’t have the money to make this information available. It costs nothing, of course, to put some file cabinets and a microfiche viewer in a public room somewhere. This move effectively eliminates any possible public scrutiny of the federal agency which is responsible for things like monitoring air and water quality and enforcing laws against pollution. Repeating what we’ve said many times before, it’s never true that government doesn’t have the money to do what you want it to do. It’s just that government chooses to spend the money for something else.

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And while we’re on the environmental beat, here’s a story describing a unique approach to sidestepping the protection of an endangered specie. The US Fish and Wildlife Service created a bird sanctuary in a coastal area of North Carolina to protect the habitat of a bird called the red cockaded woodpecker. The feds also let it be known that it was considering expanding that sanctuary, an act which would place restrictions on logging and development. In response to that information, many people in the south coast region of the state have been clear cutting their land. If you don’t have any woodpecker habitat, you can’t be subjected to any restrictions for protecting woodpeckers. These are people who would gladly live without trees to protect their property rights.

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This is not exactly topical, but it’s in the news because the first phase takes effect in January. To put it simply, you’ll soon have to get a passport if you want to return to the US from any foreign country you’ve visited, even Canada and Mexico and even if you live on the border and cross it every day. The law takes effect in January for children and a year later for everyone. It costs about a hundred bucks to get a passport, but this isn’t a taxation law. The feds are talking about issuing "pass cards," plastic passports with magnetic strips. This is about electronically monitoring the movements of every citizen who travels in and out of the country.

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