Gold Butte protection a no-brainer

To the editor:

So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has introduced a bill to make Gold Butte a national conservation area, with thousands of acres of wilderness, no less (Friday Review-Journal). Some critics are already saying the whole idea is a fiendish and diabolical scheme, and that whoever came up with it must have been suckled by a sow and raised by an idiot.

That’s what was said about designating the Grand Canyon as a national park, and we all know how misguided that view was, but I predict that similar opposition, hopefully in a gentler tone, will be voiced against conservation-area status for Gold Butte.

As the late Arizona Rep. Mo Udall once observed, “I’ve been through legislation creating a dozen national parks, and there’s always the same pattern. When you first propose a park and you visit the area and present the case to the local people, they threaten to hang you. You go back in five years and they think it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.”

So it was for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, to cite a recent nearby example, and so it shall be for Gold Butte. Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, to just skip the opposition phase and go straight to the realization that it would be a benefit to all us local users of Gold Butte, and to businesses that would profit from the increased tourism that would bring?

It will never be the draw that a national park or monument would be, but I think most of us are OK with that. And when some of our casino and golf tourists spend an extra day or two in town to visit Gold Butte, that will pump that much more money into the local economy.

So I urge everyone to read the bill and let it assuage any fears. Let’s all get behind the effort to make Gold Butte a national conservation area.

TONY BARRON

MESQUITE

Media storm

To the editor:

It’s a pity the hurricane season starts in June. It’s said events will number in the normal to above-normal range, with some destruction, as in the past.

That would give the media the opportunity to increase coverage of hurricanes rather than give us governmental news. The inquest into the possibly unnecessary slaughter of four Americans in Benghazi is on the road to extinction, even with House Speaker John Boehner appointing five committees to research it. With too many hands in the pot, it will get lost in its own mire. Yet I want to know what the president was doing during that seven-hour attack.

The whys and wherefores of the monitoring of 27 phone lines of Associated Press employees appear to have been burned in the wiring. Sometimes animals (government) eat their own (AP).

There appears to be a congressional pursuance of the truth related to the IRS ambushing of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. How high can you go? But no IRS or Obama administration cohort appears to know anything or have done anything illegal, and everybody’s still getting paid. Will the congressional committee cave and go out with a whimper?

The president can give a lofty speech on drones, but nothing on what appears to be misfeasance, nonfeasance or malfeasance in office, and the press’s beat goes on.

So we Americans will be content to see and hear about the routes and paths of the upcoming acts of nature’s torrents.

ANNETTE COCHRAN

LAS VEGAS