Entries for February 17, 2006

Here is a Daily Telegraph article on Kate Hoey, Labor M.P. for Vauxhall (just across the Thames from Westminster) and chair of the Countryside Alliance, on the ineffectiveness of the New Labor ban on fox hunting, supposedly in effect for a year this week. More foxes are being killed and more people are going out hunting, Hoey notes.

Miss Hoey says the imposition of the ban has appealed to the "British rebellious streak" and people who had never hunted before have started riding out with hounds. Despite warnings from the alliance last year that the ban would lead to thousands of hounds being put down, she says that none has so far been killed and no jobs have been lost.

Evidently, no one has noticed that Kenedy County, Texas, the site of the Cheney hunting accident, is one of the lowest-population counties in the country. The Census Bureau counted 414 residents there in April 2000 and estimates that there were 407 in June 2004. Only two of Texas's 253 other counties have lower populations (2004 estimates): King County (323) and Loving County (52), the lowest-population county in the United States. Kenedy County is small enough that I would imagine everyone there knows the Armstrong family, owners of the ranch on which Cheney was hunting. To judge from news accounts, Kenedy County has its own sheriff but is under the jurisdiction of the district attorney of Kleberg County (31,357), which is just to the north and is the home of the headquarters of the King Ranch. Both counties are heavily Hispanic: Kenedy County, 78 percent (314 out of 404), and Kleberg County, 68 percent (21,242 out of 31,357) — if I'm reading the Census spreadsheet correctly.

In November 2004, Kenedy County cast 85 votes for John Kerry (50 percent), 82 for George W. Bush (49 percent), and 2 for other candidates (1 percent). Kleberg County, where 9,973 votes were cast, went 54-46 percent for Bush.

Yesterday evening at the Heritage Foundation I had the opportunity to meet with three visiting British Conservative M.P.'s. They're all frontbenchers: William Hague is shadow foreign secretary, George Osborne is shadow chancellor of the exchequer, and Liam Fox is shadow defense minister.

All are relatively young: Hague and Fox are 45, Osborne, 35. David Cameron, the party leader, who is only 39, was not there; he is on paternity leave. They have evidently been having a successful trip here. They saw Karl Rove in the morning and Sens. John McCain and John Warner in the afternoon; they're seeing Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England today (Donald Rumsfeld is out of town).