Hal Herring

16 Of The Best Westerns Ever Made: What's Your Top Ten?

Dave_Maccar — Fri, 11 May 2012 08:39:36 -0400

Share your Top 10 Westerns list in the comments section!

Seeing the Big Picture in the American West

Sarah Smith — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:31:11 -0500

Toxic Petroleum Sludge Headed for Colorado's South Platte River

Dave_Maccar — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:44:20 -0500

by Hal Herring

A flyfisherman hunting late-season carp on Colorado's Sand Creek has discovered a plume of "black gunk" spilling into the water, and EPA clean-up officials are on-scene trying to stop the petroleum sludge from contaminating the South Platte River.

EPA Emergency Response Manager Curtis Kimbel, quoted in the Denver Post, said the "gasoline-like substance" contained the carcinogenic chemical benzene, and was migrating from SunCor Energy's refinery, underground beneath land owned by the Metro Wastewater, and "daylighting" at Sand Creek.

Here's a link to the fishermen's full story, complete with his acount of how difficult it can be to get a response to a threat our waters.

From the post at flycarpin:
This morning at 9:00AM it smelled like a gas station at the Sand-Creek / South Platte confluence. There was also an oily sheen across the entire Sand-Creek side of the South Platte current. Every carp in the area (something on the order of 60?) was tightly grouped (alive but not very active) in a 20 foot section as far from Sand-Creek as they could get. And yes, I am very aware that it always smells nasty in the area. This was definitely very different.

I walked several hundred feet up Sand-Creek and there was an oil sheen the whole way and there was even a weird milky chocolaty sludge trapped in the small back-eddy below the confluence. My fly smelled like gasoline. My fingers smelled like gasoline. I could see micro-currents and upwells in the water column that you usually just can't see. Something was terribly wrong.

Day Three: Exploring Idaho’s Clearwater Basin

Online Editors — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:41:39 -0500

by Hal Herring

Hansen Meadows is about five miles away. We’re on a fairly level trail that skirts the toe of mountains that wall the north side of the valley. Gary Peters is leading on his mule, pointing out some of their hunting country as we travel. The creek is far away, but we can hear it sometimes through the harsh jumble of deadfall and obstacle course of thimbleberry, fireweed and young lodgepole.

It’s been 100 years since the 1911 fires, and a glance at the mountains all around shows the lodgepoles that were born in 1911. They’re now dying from old age and beetle infestations. A lodgepole is a tree that it truly native to the Western mountains. It has adapted to the one constant of the Western mountains: fire. That’s because lodgepole cones are serotinous, meaning they will only release their seeds and start new trees after being burned. A big black bear spooks out of a patch of elderberry on the hillside and glides downhill into the bottomland tangles, moving with a grace that seems impossible for its size.

We bail off the trail as the country suddenly opens, ride across a wide sucking bog of horsetail and break through a fortress of willows. We emerge into the warmth and heat and tall grass of Hansen Meadows. I tie Ruby quickly because I’m anxious to get at the water, which runs deep and fast and green right along the grass – the ultimate place to throw a big hopper. As I’m rigging up, I notice a strange camp in this wild place. There is a fire ring and a bizarre, labor-intensive wikiup big enough to shelter two people. The wikiup is made of small sticks, birch and willow branches bent and fastened with bits of nylon cord and cordage made of bark and twisted grasses.

I crawl inside. There is nothing special, but I like the idea that someone was patient and here long enough to build this structure. I wonder who built that wikiup, where they came from, where they went. It looks too elaborate to be made by a child, so the builder might have been someone traveling with children or someone who retained a child’s sense of wonder. I’m reminded of an old Louis L’Amour western I read as a kid. The hero is on the run and finds a secret cave in the far reaches of the desert. There is a fire pit and a cup hanging from a stick, left for some fellow traveler to use inside the cave.

But to heck with that, it was time to fish. And the fishing was very good right off the bat. Cutthroats are among the world’s most beautiful fish. I landed and released a couple of 13- and 14-inchers that rose to a big gray foam hopper cast right under the overhanging grass.

For all their beauty, cutthroats are unsophisticated fish. They live in an unforgiving world. The cold, clear water they call home is locked away in ice for much of the year, and then flushed hard with snowmelt for months. It gets dangerously low in most years by the end of August (this past year was an exception, with record snowpack in these mountains). A cutthroat has to seize the moment and attack in order to survive and breed. Caution is not a virtue. That is one reason why cutthroats often fade away quickly in easily accessible areas. A good fisherman with a can of worms and no scruples can singlehandedly clean out a whole creek.

There are holes on that stretch of Kelly Creek that look like something from a fisherman’s dream. Places where you cast your hopper from far away, delivering it to the tail of the pool upstream and take a 14-incher. Places where you can release a fish, cast just upstream from where that one hit and take another. Some of the best fish lie in the churn, out in the current, in what at first seems like the most unlikely holding water. It’s exhausting fishing, but it’s full of glory.

Brad Brooks, a fanatic hunter and fishermen who works for the Wilderness Society, reminded me that before the construction of Dworshak Dam Kelly Creek, cutthroat fishing was just as spectacular as it is today. However, the annual runs of monster Chinook salmon and steelhead overshadowed it. The tiniest tributaries would boil with big fish that had only recently been keeping company with sharks and tuna in the Pacific Ocean. That idea seems impossible nowadays, considering how much of our natural wealth we have squandered. Yet, just looking at the river and those cutthroats, an embarrassment of riches remains. We stopped fishing around 3 p.m. and headed back to camp.

I had another day in that valley, or at least the better part of one, just to roam around and look at things before the long ride back up to the ridges and the trailhead. I noticed that, for all the incredible array of flowering plants in that valley, I didn’t see any honeybees. Instead, I saw a different set of pollinators: a dozen smaller bees I’ve never noticed anywhere else, and a whirl of butterflies, moths and bats flying in the bright sunlight. I don’t know if that has any significance, but it was new to me.

There will be continued debate as to how much and how to protect Kelly Creek; whether there will be an allowance for chainsaws in the new wilderness to clear trails, where the roadless boundaries will be established and set. It seems that a growing number of Idahoans agree that what is currently found here is worth keeping for the long run. As both Scott Stouder and Brad Brooks explained to me, “It’s not a political issue any more at all. Idahoans know why we love this state, and why so many people want to come here to live and visit. It’s not just about good-looking potatoes. It’s this, right here, that people want, and what they cannot get anywhere else.”

Day One: Exploring Idaho’s Clearwater Basin

Online Editors — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:00:58 -0500

by Hal Herring

Gary Peters, a Montana outfitter, has been riding these trails in Clearwater country since 1989. He breeds, trains and maintains a string of some of the best hunting and packing mules in the West. Peters has the calm, soft-spoken demeanor that is the trademark of a true stockman—of a person who spent most of his life in the woods taking on the responsibility for caring for his guides, clients, and string when they’re far from any kind of help. It’s a burden that he seems to bear without much trouble. He and his crew have weathered some major adventures in Kelly Creek: from blizzards and aggressive bears to human mishaps and the shear challenge of making a living doing what they love. Some of Peters’ toughest times came with the recovery—some would call it an “explosion”—of wolves in Clearwater country.

“There were packs here with 20 wolves in them,” says Peters, with no trace of the fury that is often the norm when Idaho elk hunters discuss the wolf issue. “We’d come down the trail, and the snow would just be churned up with wolf tracks.” Elk numbers and hunter success plummeted during those years. The Clearwater elk herd was once Idaho’s largest. The wolf recovery came at a bad time for that herd, and the wolves hit them hard.

The open country and re-growth from the 1911 firestorm made this area an almost perfect habitat for elk. But time heals the country and when the timber came back, the canopy closed over the old burn scars and shaded out the forage. The good winter range shrank and the replacement range was far away through dangerous country. Elk hunting was tough, and got tougher. But for diehard Kelly Creek inhabitants like Peters, cutting and running was never an option. He and his crew held on. The number of elk is slowly coming back up and the number of wolves is declining. The mud in the trail shows the heavy splay footed tracks of a cow and calf moose on the move. Bear hunting, which was always good, has never been better. And the cutthroat fishing is among the best on earth. As with most people who make their living in the woods, Peters is wary of any new regulations or restrictions for the place he knows and loves best. “What I want,” Peters says, “is for this place to stay just like it is now.”

It’s late July and we’re riding in a long line across brush fields flush with Indian paintbrush, horsemint, purple cone and foam flowers. A doe flushes below us and draws a quick stare from my mule, a small and bombproof traveler named Ruby. As the doe leaps away, a giant buck in velvet stands up from the lush tangle of grass and flowers. Peters grins and says nothing. My other companions —Scott Stouder of Trout Unlimited and his wife Holly Endersby—and I stare drop jawed as the buck disappears into a little grove of Douglas fir down creek.

It’s funny where and how life will take you. Stouder grew up in a logging family in Oregon and was a professional logger most of his life. He ended his professional logging career when he was 41 years old, after a long stint cutting big timber on steep ground in Alaska. “I just decided that it was time, after all those years, to try something new,” he says. He became a freelance writer, ran some hay ground, built up a small packstring of his own and spent a heck of a lot of time hunting and roaming Idaho’s backcountry. He then focused on conservation work, which seemed a natural progression for someone who had been a subsistence hunter his entire life; he depended on the country for both a job in timber and for food.

“One fall weekend, when my brother and I were in high school,” he tells me, “my dad came to us and asked us, ‘Okay boys, are we going duck hunting in the morning, or fishing for steelhead?’ Then he made some quick calculations. The limit on ducks was six, and there were three of us, so that would be 18 ducks, or maybe 36 pounds of meat. The limit of steelhead was 10, and they’d weigh maybe six or eight pounds apiece. Well, that would be 50 or so pounds of fish. ‘So, boys, we’re going steelheading!’”

Endersby was a high school principle when she started hunting 13 years ago, at age 50. “I started thinking a lot about where my food came from about then,” she says. “And I was driving all the way to the city to buy grass-fed beef or free-ranges chicken or whatever, and then paying all that money for it. I decided that was not right for me on several levels. I was still kind of passing the responsibility on to somebody else to do my killing for me. So I decided to take up hunting, and I found out that it was perfect for me. I loved it, and I still do.”

She strongly believes that wilderness and wilderness hunting is “the gold standard” for the hunting and conservation of watersheds and landscapes that provide the best fish and game. Her work at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers seemed a natural fit. “I’m a 63-year-old grandmother, and I’ve made a personal decision to stay in shape so I can do these things that I love—to hunt way back in, handle the stock, hike a long way. I know it can’t last forever.” Like Stouder, she says, “When I can’t do it anymore, I’ll be more than happy to pass it on to the hunters and fishermen that can.”

The opposition by some hunters against increased wilderness protection baffles her sometimes. “Even if you don’t go far into these areas,” she says, “they still serve as the refuge for game herds that then travel across more accessible hunting lands. Wilderness is the pump that puts bigger herds out there where people who only hunt closer to roads will have a chance to take an animal. Without it, you lose hunting opportunities across the board.”

I first came to Kelly Creek in 1993, the year without a summer, when it sleeted on us on the Fourth of July. I was working as a contract sawyer, cutting down yew trees down for an anti-cancer ingredient found in their bark. I was living in a camp on Lolo Creek, 25 miles of winding dirt road from the nearest cold beer in the town of Pierce. A buddy of mine told me about Kelly Creek’s crystal clear water, monster cutthroats and vast unspoiled river down from the confluence of Cayuse Creek. I drove there on a rare day off, gazed at the waters from the bridge and watched some grand hatch of bugs swirl in clouds over the water and high into the air. I never forgot.

Now I’m back—on a good mule, with good people and a flyrod. We rode for the better part of the day, about 12 miles or so. Peters’ camp on the North Fork of Kelly Creek is about 15 miles upstream from that bridge I stood on many years ago. I can smell the cold water, the hot sun on the lodgepole pines, the mint crushed under the mules’ hooves and the osier dogwood. It felt like I was coming home.

Best Wild Places: Clearwater Basin, Idaho

Online Editors — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:31:39 -0500

by Hal Herring

Few feelings in life can match it when you are going out there.

The narrow trail unfolds before you, cut into a steep sidehill that descends down—down a half-mile into a thicketed creek bottom, where through breaks in the willows and head-high elderberry and nettle, you can see the creek, tumbling whitewater and bits of long, green pools where you know the cutthroat trout have never seen a fly or a bait. The trail goes on and on, and around a bend, still high above the valley, there’s a long roll of last winter’s snow on the ridge far above you.

The view opens out. Forever.

The wild slopes of brush reaching to the heavens are crowned with endless lodgepole pines. The creeks down there meeting, building a river in a wide-forested valley center-shot with a torrent of whitewater shoals, canyons, deep blue holes, endless meadows and parks that look like God’s own version of elk country. The view goes on into a mist-shrouded distance, beyond your eyes’ ability to take it all in—no road to shatter the mystery of big wilderness. It’s a place where you travel on the terms of the land. This is Kelly Creek, central Idaho. When I think of backcountry bear hunting, Westslope cutthroat trout fishing, elk hunting or wandering in silence and utter freedom, this is the landscape that fills my imagination first.

I took a trip to Kelly Creek this summer with Scott Stouder, of Trout Unlimited; his wife Holly Endersby, of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers; and Gary Peters, a Florence, Mont. outfitter. We went there to fish, walk the old trails up the tributaries and ride some of the high country. Kelly Creek is part of the headwaters of the famed Clearwater River—the cold, silt-free waters that call those giant sea-run steelhead up the Clearwater every year.

This is the Idaho side of the Great Burn country, where monstrous forest fires rage—beginning in the drought year of 1910 and continuing through the even drier and hotter Dust Bowl years of the early 1930s. Firestorms of an intensity never witnessed by human beings before or since turned more than three million acres of forest into cinder. No roads were push into this region of the country because it was burned so hard that there was no timber to harvest. About 1.2 million acres remain roadless here, one of the planet’s last great expanses of truly wild country—set like a foundation stone as part of two million acres of public land. No place offers more opportunities for the American hunter and fishermen. Alaska may have bigger expanses, but much of that will be accessible only by costly boat or float plane trips, and much will be locked in frozen limbo for most of the year.

The Clearwater country holds the northern Bitterroot Mountains, which are well watered by rain and snow, awash in flowers, grass, creeks teeming with fish and thickets trembling with wildlife and birds. It is a rich, low altitude landscape tied together with ridges and valley trails that make for reasonably easy traveling for the strong and the willing. For Scott and Holly, who live southwest of here on the Rapid River, this country has become the focus of a big part of their working lives: teaming up with a diverse band of Idahoans—hunters, wildlands advocates, snowmobilers and Congressmen—to establish a permanently protected 250,000 acres of wilderness.

“A long time ago, Trout Unlimited realized that without real protection for the headwaters of these major river systems, they would always be playing catch-up in a rigged game,” says Scott. “They recognized that it was not necessarily trout fishermen that were in the backcountry, where all these creeks began. It was mostly elk hunters, bear hunters, people looking for trophy muleys. Those were the people who most wanted to see these places stay the way they are now. So they started looking to hire some hunters to work with them. And that’s how they found me. I’m not saying I don’t like to fish. I do. But my real love is elk hunting. That’s what Holly and I do every year, and that’s why we have the pack string, the mules and horses, and all the gear. We’re hunters and we know lots of other hunters who want to see this country protected for future generations of hunters.”

Scott and Holly are both in their early 60s. They say they know that there will be a day, in 10 or 15 years, when the wilderness will be too much for them.

“When that time comes, I’ll know that it’s out there for a new generation of elk hunters,” Scott said. “If we can get this protection in place, if I can rest knowing that it will always be out there like it is now, I can go to my grave a contented man.”

We saddled up on the Montana side of the line, at the end of the road on Schley Mountain and set off. Come and ride with us.

Why I Think The Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act Is A Good Idea

Online Editors — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:35:51 -0400

by Hal Herring

“I truly believe that the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage proposal is one of the most thoroughly thought out plans I have ever seen. It doesn’t offend anyone or any group in any way. It truly leaves one of the world’s grandest remaining landscapes intact for future generations to experience and enjoy.” -Roy Jacobs, hunter from Pendroy.

Have you ever driven south along the Rocky Mountain Front from Babb, Montana, with Chief Mountain towering from the plains, the peaks and snowfields of Glacier Park staggering off to the west? Or drift down the near-empty highway, pulling over to glass for grizzlies in the distant aspen thickets bonsai’ed by fierce wind, cold temperatures, snow and summer’s parching heat? You can stop in Browning for gas and a Coke before travelling across the ether-clear Badger Creek to the Two Medicine River. Then you can head to the willow-enclosed Dupuyer Creek, passing the signs beckoning you westward at every washboard turnoff -- Swift Dam, Blackleaf Canyon, Ear Mountain, Teton River, Sun River. It's a country vast enough for a lifetime of exploring and then some.

The communities are out east, supporting farms large and small. Fairfield, the malting barley capital of the nation, lies here amid oceans of hard, red wheat blowing in the wind. West is another kind of wealth: the truly wild crossroads where the prairies meet the mountains. It is excellent cattle country, with protein-rich native grasses watered from high mountain snowpack. Montana’s biggest elk herd lives there, along with mule deer and pronghorn. And in the strange swamps called fens that dot the landscape, whitetail bucks are growing old and hermit-like in places almost impossible to reach. In a world of whirling, sometimes out-of-control change, a lot of Montanans and people who love this place from all across the nation come to the Front to experience the American West at its most untamed. The common denominator of those who know the place is a simple request: please don’t change it.

Although it has been opposed by some more-polarized environmental groups, the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act stands the best chance of achieving something close to that goal. The Front is the place where my wife and I are raising our family. It's where we fish and hunt with our children, study the night skies and the day breaking on the white cliffs of the mountains, where we struggle with winter and try to pay the bills and listen to the wind blowing over some of the best country left on earth. It is no accident that the Front is the way it is. People have taken good care of the land here, and the Heritage Act is a continuation of that stewardship.

I am in the backcountry all this week but I wanted to share this announcement with readers. I'll be writing on the details of this cutting-edge conservation strategy -- looking into the hunters, backcountry horsemen and ranchers who created it, and why they felt that it was critical to do so -- in a future blog post. In the meantime, you can read about the bill here.

New Protections for America's Duck Factory

Sarah Smith — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:32:50 -0400

by Hal Herring

Part of the wonder of waterfowl hunting is the wild nature of the birds themselves: tough, wary birds that come from so far away, headed south to places unimagined. The flocks of mallards and gadwalls whirling over your decoys in Missouri or Tennessee began their lives on austere prairie potholes, lakes gouged out by glaciers in times when, although we were still duck hunters, we were wearing hides instead of Gore-Tex and toting atlatls instead of Berettas, Brownings and Mossbergs.

That pothole region of North and South Dakota is now called America’s duck factory, producing up to 50% of our waterfowl in the short, beautiful northern summers. And, thanks to the efforts and money of waterfowlers, and the commitment of prairie landowners, a tremendous effort is underway to protect those wetland resources using a new model of land conservation.

This effort underscores the irreplaceable nature of the money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund and other state and federal conservation programs. Most of all, it is Exhibit A in the power that hunters have to protect what they love through collaboration, the tried-and-true dollars from federal and state waterfowl stamps and the hard work put in--year after year--by the folks at Ducks Unlimited. Please read on, and be inspired.

Special Report: Roadless Rule Upheld

Dave_Maccar — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:00:38 -0400

by Hal Herring

Every one of us who loves to hunt, and who appreciates living in a nation where the rule of law protects that we which we cannot protect by our own efforts, has something to celebrate today. On October 20th the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The ruling could not come at a better time: this is opening weekend for us here in Montana, and in every state across the nation, hunters are sighting in, checking packs and tree stands, sharpening knives and greasing up boots, getting ready for or already immersed in the greatest and most intense time of the year.

The ruling upholds a law that powerful special interests in the timber, mining, and energy arenas sought to overturn (please check out the attached document with a list of the groups who sued to overturn it). These special interests did not oppose the Roadless Rule because there were tremendous supplies of minerals or timber, or energy on the lands in question, or because there were not already millions of miles of trail open. These interests opposed the Roadless Rule because (as we have seen with the theater-of-the-absurd “debate” over reducing federal deficits by cutting the miniscule amounts invested in conservation) they oppose, on ideological grounds, any questioning of the monarchical rule of unquestioned development and the dominion of the few, no matter the costs.

What was always shocking to me in this case was that the organized opposition to the Roadless Rule bulldogged the term “multiple use,” even while advocating for uses that would rapidly create a single-use landscape.

The Roadless Rule is now and has always been about multiple use. It does not prevent access to these last unroaded areas of our public lands, and it does not make them wilderness areas. The rule merely restricts building new roads into them. Land managers can undertake habitat restoration for wildlife and fish in these areas, there are and will be ATV trails to access them, trail building and clearing contractors can still use chainsaws in most of them. These are our public lands, our last best chance to keep our hunting and fishing heritage intact as more and more of us -- and this definitely includes my family and me -- lose our access to more and more acres of private land, and cannot afford to buy or lease our own.

As Joel Webster, who has worked on the roadless issue for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership for some exhausting years now, told me, “One of the things that always struck me, when you listen to the people who opposed the original Roadless Rule, was how they always tried to paint these places as inaccessible, as if they were out of reach, or locked up, when the opposite is true. We drive there, park and start walking in. We’re talking about places like the Little Missouri National Grasslands in North Dakota, some of the best big muley hunting left anywhere on public land. Places like Unit 55 in the Wallowas, the best public lands elk country in Oregon. There are 49 million acres in 37 states that are inventoried as roadless, and it’s the best hunting left available to all of us. It’s not that complex, it’s not locked up. You park and walk and hunt and fish.”

The photo here shows a buck Webser killed in a roadless area in the Northern Independence Mountains of Nevada during the early season rifle hunt just days ago. That backcountry habitat will be conserved by the 10th Circuit roadless ruling.

Click here [http://roadlessland.org/] to see a great map of roadless public lands across the U.S. Take note of Vermont, New Hampshire, Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina. It’s NOT just about the big Wide Open West, its about the last 12,000 acres of roadless wild lands in my home state of Alabama, too. http://roadlessland.org/

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership And The $1 Trillion Question

Sarah Smith — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:42:01 -0400

by Hal Herring

This morning, I received a press release from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership about a new study defining the economic benefits and effects of outdoor recreation, conservation, and historical preservation efforts in our country. It reports that “the great outdoors and historic preservation generate a conservative estimate of more than $1 trillion in total economic activity and support 9.4 million jobs each year. “

I hope people will take the time to actually read and ponder what is revealed here. So much of it, if we think about it, is common sense-- we all know (or are) someone who owns or works in an outdoor store, or as a guide or outfitter, or who has recently bought a boat or upgraded fishing tackle or guns. The money is there, it’s moving through the economy, and it is dependent on having healthy and protected lands and waters to use that tackle or shoot those guns (imagine the miniscule percentage of the economy in France, or China that is generated from hunting and fishing- then look at the US figures in the linked study).

We take it for granted that our homes don’t flood, never really looking upstream at all the wetlands that soak up those floods before they get to us, never imagining that someone might just decide to fill those “useless” swamps to build a new parking lot, and send that torrent right down on us.

Those wetlands have a value as flood control (even if the owner won’t let you hunt the ducks that use them, and even more so if they will), and so do the woods where the trail camera snapped a photo of that giant whitetail buck, or that mysterious cougar-like creature that inspired you to buy four more trail cameras. At its most basic level, it’s called ecosystem services, and it is why we have drinking water, why it does not flood us out every time it rains, why we have everything from crappie to a 20 ounce ribeye cut from a cow that grazed public land somewhere.

We have logging. We have coal mining. We have the wonderful Bakken Oil and Gas Field, we have the Barnett Shale boom, the Marcellus, the promising Haynesville. We are pumping more domestic energy than at any time I can remember in our history. Those are good, concrete sources of economic vibrancy, plenty of good jobs and more to come, lots of supply and demand in everything from trucks to work gloves.

We have these great sources of wealth and energy security, and we’ll continue to develop them. But to deny, as we see political leaders do every day, as I see reasonably intelligent people that I know very well, doing, that protecting lands, waters and habitat costs money instead of saving and producing money is simply incorrect.

I am weary of the talk of trade-offs. This is a time and place in history where in essence, we have it all. And we can keep having it all, have even more of all of it, if we know what it is worth, and demand that, as citizens, we do not allow the ignorant or the short-sighted to murder Peter on the false promise of raising the money to pay Paul. To me, that’s what this study can help us avoid. It’s non-partisan. It’s knowledge. Check it out.