Back to Basics

Montana Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg lent his support for ceding more power and authority to the federal government’s emerging police state by supporting HR 1505, the “National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act.” This monstrous bill empowers the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to confiscate to itself tens of thousands of acres of land across the US northern border. This is for “national security” reasons, of course. Gag!

My friend, Dr. Ed Berry, has written a very astute summary and analysis of HR 1505 on his web site, PolyMontana.com. I am going to be borrowing heavily from his research in this column.

Dr. Berry rightly notes that the DHS is the giant head of no less than seven federal agencies: Transportation Security Administration (TSA), US Customs & Border Protection (CBP), US Citizenship & Immigration Services (CIS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), US Secret Service (SS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and US Coast Guard (USCG).

Dr. Berry says pointedly, “FEMA is the one with the small cages to put you in if you do not behave. TSA is the one that gives you a useless body scan before you get on an airplane, bus, etc. DHS is the one adding its sensors to streetlights around America and the promoter of E-Verify and Real ID as a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system for every American.” And it is CBP that the DHS is using to seize property along the US northern border.

According to Denny Rehberg, the reasons the DHS needs to seize all this property are: 1) to stop the “turf war” between federal agencies, 2) Drug growers are hiding in our forests, 3) to catch criminals hiding in our forests, 4) to stop illegal aliens from coming in America.

Let’s first acknowledge that the federal government has absolutely no natural right or constitutional jurisdiction to claim (much less seize) land and territory outside of the District of Columbia. In many of the western states of the US, for example, the vast majority of land in any given State is now regarded as “federal” land. Ask yourself, where is the constitutional authorization for this federal land grab? When did the various State legislatures vote to give these properties to the federal government? When did the various State governors sign the State laws giving these properties to the federal government? When did the citizens of the various states vote to give these properties to the federal government? The answer is, nowhere, and they didn’t!

How is it, then, that we have elected representatives such as Denny Rehberg–people who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States–who are either so ignorant of the Constitution that they took an oath to uphold, or who are so flippant and careless about that oath, that they so quickly and routinely trample, not only the federal Constitution, but the natural laws and principles of God, and the sovereign rights and authority of the several states?

Now, let’s look at Rep. Rehberg’s reasons why he supports HR 1505 one at a time:

*To stop the “turf war” between federal agencies

This is a very specious argument, to say the least! No federal agency has any claim to State land! The land doesn’t belong to those miscreants inside the Beltway!

Map via Frank Jacobs, Strange Maps blog/Big Think

It happened with immigration.

It happened with health care.

And now, thank goodness, it is happening with the Obama land grabs.

States are rising up to challenge federal abuses. More power to them.

I’ve been reporting on the stealth Obama land and ocean grabs for the past year now. Quick review: Last August, I told you about the “Great Outdoors Initiative” to lock up more open spaces through executive order. This came on top on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop and Sen. Jim DeMint earlier this spring. According to an internal, 21-page Obama administration memo, 17 energy-rich areas in 11 states have been targeted as potential federal “monuments.” The Obama War on the West is a War on Jobs that extends from land to sea based on politicized junk science by executive fiat and czar evasion. In November, I noted the expansive Interior Secretary Ken Salazar/NLCS designation. And in February, I mentioned the federal wild lands grab slipped through by Salazar during the Christmas season lame duck session.

Late last week, the state of Utah filed a lawsuit to stop the wild lands gambit:

The lawsuit challenges Salazar’s Secretarial Order 3310, which gives broad latitude to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to re-inventory the public lands within its purview for potential wild land characteristics.

Herbert said this upends an ongoing and successful process to designate wilderness land already in place in the state.

“This order puts in jeopardy all that work, all that effort,” he said. “It says, essentially, let’s have a do-over.”

Herbert said it would also hinder economic development in the areas in question — which could amount to “tens of millions of acres,” according to Chief Deputy Attorney General John Swallow.

Currently, 1.6 million acres in Utah have been designated as wilderness.

Herbert was joined at the news conference by Swallow, county commissioners from Uintah and Washington counties, state public lands policy coordinator John Harja and environmental adviser Ted Wilson.

There are currently wilderness designation policies and programs in place in Washington and Uintah counties and others, with other counties planning to follow. Now, Herbert said the federal government seeks to use the order to start from scratch and to do so without going through the proper channels.

“This secretarial order was created out of thin air,” Herbert said. “There was no statutory order to it. It’s counterproductive to efforts we made in good faith. This is not good for Utah, not good for America.”

Alaska is joining the challenge:

Gov. Sean Parnell is going to court against the federal government again, this time in a Utah case that challenges the Bureau of Land Management’s “Wild Lands” policy…Parnell’s office put out a press release late Friday saying Alaska would join Utah in challenging the legality of the program.

In the press release, Parnell contends the new policy would create potential costs and delays in permits for development on BLM lands and would override existing land use plans.

Courtesy Jason Whitman Photography

If you want to know the fastest way to piss off a Wyomingite, or most people in the intermountain west, suggest closing off even more of our lands to multiple use.

In Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming we have already seen the devastation of a nearly a century of proper game management with the reintriduction of the wolf. The wolves were shoved down our throats even though we knew what would happen to our game herds if they were not managed properly. We fought the good fight to prevent their reintroduction, but we failed.

Just as we expected would happen, the Federal government has prevented each of the individual states from managing the wolves for the benefit of the entire ecosystem. They have constantly moved the recovery targets and used the Endangered Species Act as a bludgeoning tool to prevent proper management. When each of the states involved finally devised management plans endorsed by the USFW allowing for de-listment of the wolves, they were struck down by U.S. District Judge Molloy (a liberal appointed by the Clinton Administration).

I say all of that to say that Federal management of our natural resources in the west has been decidedly awful. In fact, everything the Federal government touches turns out to be a disaster. This is likely to be no exception.

DENVER – The Obama administration plans to reverse a Bush-era policy and make millions of undeveloped acres of land once again eligible for federal wilderness protection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday.

The agency will replace the 2003 policy adopted under former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Salazar said. That policy — derided by some as the “No More Wilderness” policy — stated that new areas could not be recommended for wilderness protection by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and opened millions of acres in the Rocky Mountain region to potential commercial development.

Apparently the Obama Administration is blissfully unaware of a concept we like to call “multiple use”. Lets all say that together… “multiple” “use”. Multiple use is the apparently antiquated notion (if you are a liberal) that Federal lands should be available for a variety of legal and responsible uses, including… gasp, commercial use. Secretary Salazar felt it was necessary to clarify their position:

That policy “frankly never should have happened and was wrong in the first place,” Salazar said Thursday.

Yes, it is wrong for the American people and American business to be able to use our own lands. The “wizards of smart” in the environmental movement don’t seem capable of understanding that multiple use is best use. We need to be able to responsibly log our national forests without having jobs, economies, and ecosystems destroyed because of chicken little paranoia about spotted owls. Much of the west has been devastated by the pine beetle, and guess who stood in the way of logging and managing the forest?

By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer

The Examiner’s Mark Tapscott wrote about this story over a week ago, but now Fox News is reporting on Tea Party activists in Texas uncovering vote fraud:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers.

True the Vote appears to have made some pretty significant discoveries, including one blockbuster revelation possibly connecting the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to vote fraud in Houston:

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Steve Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.

Caddle told local newspapers that there “had been mistakes made,” and he said he had fired 30 workers for filing defective voter registration applications. He could not be reached for this article.

There’s a lot more to the story at the link. It’s an inspiring example grassroots activism.

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God bless Texas

This documentary is one of the best pieces of evidence of election law violations by AKA Obama and his thugs stealing the primaries in Texas! . If you haven’t seen this documentary it is available on YouTube. This extensive collection of evidence was done by Democrats who were primary workers in Texas. Which just goes to prove that Democrats also recognize when they are being worked over by a Chicago con-man political gangster.

We Will Not be Silenced — A Documentary by Gigi Gaston

As Americans, we expect certain liberties and rights that were granted us by our forefathers, who wrote documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “We the people” expect that these fundamental rights will always be protected. However, in the current Democratic Presidential Primary, this has not been the case.

Over the weekend, I spotlighted the White House “Great Outdoors Initiative” and the administration’s campaign for federal land grabs-through-executive fiat.

The Obama War on the West continues.

GOP Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah has released the complete Bureau of Lands Management memo outlining a stealth federal land lock-up plan covering an area the size of Colorado and Wyoming combined. Via the Colorado Farm Bureau:

Bishop’s office has release the entire BLM document titled “Treasured Landscapes” of which only pages were released a few months ago. It lays out what some consider a sweeping and detailed plan for changing the way the federal government manages land over the next 25 years.

The document lays out a sea change in the way the federal government manages land. It proposed that rather than manage individual plots of land, regardless of size, the government should consider managing entire “landscapes, ecosystems, airsheds and watersheds.”

The document also gives a not-so-subtle clue as to the size of the land area it seeks to “protect”.

“Of the 264 million acres under BLM management, some 130-140 million acres are worthy of consideration as treasured lands. These areas, roughly equivalent in size to Colorado and Wyoming combined, are valuable for their unspoiled beauty…”

It took Bishop months to get the document, which lays out the context for the snippets released a few months ago.

“They have clearly been dragging their feet, and they don’t want to let us know what they’re trying to do,” Bishop says.

He is especially concerned about portions of the document that recommend using the Antiquities Act “should the legislative process not prove fruitful.” The act gives the president power to designate a national monument with no public or legislative input.

BLM dismisses criticism of the document by characterizing it merely as “brainstorming.” It’s become the standard alibi for Obama officials caught planning radical changes through regulatory means outside the legislative process.

And remember those “listening sessions” I reported on over the weekend? As if you needed evidence they were stacked and biased in favor of the anti-jobs, anti-growth enviromental radicals, the Grand Junction Sentinel reports:

Listening sessions held across the country, such as one last month in Grand Junction that was attended by Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell and BLM Director Robert Abbey, are intended to allow Americans a say in the way those lands and others are managed, the statement said.

The Moffat County Commission, which opposes plans by the BLM to cordon off the Vermillion Basin from natural gas drilling, wasn’t invited to the Grand Junction listening session, “So there you go,” Commissioner Audrey Danner said.

The agency’s description of the Vermillion Basin notes its whitewater river as one of the attributes that makes it worthy of more conservation-oriented management, and that is “absolutely incorrect,” Danner said.