Saturday, April 19, 2014

Western lawmakers strategize on taking control of federal lands

Officials from nine Western states met in Salt Lake City on Friday to discuss taking control of federal lands within their borders on the heels of a standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management.
The lawmakers and county commissioners discussed ways to wresting oil-, timber- and mineral-rich lands away from the feds. Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart said it was in the works before this month's standoff.
The BLM rounded up hundreds of Bundy's cattle, saying he hasn't paid more than $1 million in grazing fees he owes for trespassing on federal lands since the 1990s. But Bundy does not recognize federal authority on the land, which his family has used since the 1870s. 
The BLM released the cattle after a showdown last weekend with angry armed protesters whom Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid referred to as "domestic terrorists."
"What's happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem," Lockhart said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
The Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands, as it was called, was organized by Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory and Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, addressed the group over lunch, the Tribune reported.  
"It’s simply time," Ivory told reporters. "The urgency is now."  
Fielder said federal land management is hamstrung by bad policies, politicized science and severe federal budget cuts. 
"Those of us who live in the rural areas know how to take care of lands," said Fielder, a Republican who lives in the northwestern Montana town of Thompson Falls. "We have to start managing these lands. It's the right thing to do for our people, for our environment, for our economy and for our freedoms."
Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington also were represented, but none of the other states has gone as far as Utah, where lawmakers passed a measure demanding that the federal government extinguish title to federal lands.
The lawmakers and Gov. Gary Herber have said they're only asking the federal government to make good on promises made in the 1894 Enabling Act for Utah to become a state. The intent was never to take over national parks and wilderness created by an act of Congress, said Lockhart, a Republican from Provo.
"We are not interested in having control of every acre," she said. "There are lands that are off the table that rightly have been designated by the federal government."
Ivory said federal government's debt threatens its management of vast tracts of the West and its ability to make payments in lieu of taxes to the states, the Tribune reported. He said the issue is of interest to both urban and rural lawmakers.
"If we don’t stand up and act, seeing that trajectory of what’s coming … those problems are going to get bigger," Ivory was quoted as saying. 
The University of Utah is conducting a study called for by the legislation to analyze how Utah could manage the land now in federal control. 
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click here for more from The Salt Lake Tribune.

Friday, April 18, 2014

‘This thing is working’? Widows of Alabama county workers dropped from health plans

As President Obama touts rising enrollment in ObamaCare and declares "this thing is working," one Alabama county has reported another negative side effect from the law -- widows of county workers getting dropped from their insurance. 
A report by Huntsville-based WHNT said that more than a dozen widows of retired Madison County employees lost their coverage earlier this year. 
They originally had been covered under the county's self-insured plan. But, according to WHNT, officials learned that it would have been too expensive to keep providing that coverage and comply with the Affordable Care Act's coverage mandates. 
The county instead joined a statewide network that dozens of county governments already are in. That plan, though, does not offer coverage to husbands and wives when their government employee spouses die. 
WHNT reported that one county commissioner is trying to restore the insurance for widows of county workers, though it's unclear whether he'll be successful. 
"What I'm trying to do is get this coverage back to them," Madison County Commissioner Roger Jones said. "A lot of these people are on fixed incomes. Some of them are living on Social Security and very little else, and health insurance is very important to them." 
The widows reportedly still get 18 months of Cobra coverage once their old insurance expires. 
The Madison County case comes as the Obama administration aggressively steps up its defense of the law and its performance. At a surprise press conference on Thursday, Obama reported that 8 million people have signed up on the federal and state insurance exchanges. 
"This thing is working," Obama said, adding: "The repeal debate is and should be over." 
The 8 million figure is a marked improvement over sign-up figures in late 2013, when the exchange websites were emerging from the disastrous launch in October. Still, the administration has not broken down the numbers to get at the heart of how many people really have obtained coverage under the law. 
Many people were dropped from their old insurance policies last year, and then went into the exchanges. The administration has not said how many of the 8 million were previously insured, and how many were previously uninsured -- those figures would help paint a picture of the net gain in coverage. 
The administration also has not said how many of the 8 million have paid their first month's premium, and technically are enrolled. 
Republicans bristled at the president's tone in the White House briefing room Thursday afternoon. While the president cites the millions gaining coverage and new protections under the law, Republicans note that many also have lost their old policies despite being told they wouldn't. 
"While the President repeatedly pats himself on the back over the number of people that were forced to sign up for his insurance scheme, millions of Americans are experiencing real and significant repercussions," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said in a statement. "The President has now taken to mocking those that point out the negative consequences. The impacts are very real. 
"It's clear that the President remains totally focused on coverage instead of care. He is either ignoring reports from across the country -- or he isn't hearing them. Either way, he is out of touch with Americans who have lost their doctor, had their insurance cancelled and watched their premiums spike all because of this failing law."

Lois Lerner


Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Rep. Darrell Issa (D-CA) listens to his staff member during the Committee hearing on "Examining the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) Response to the Targeting Scandal" on Capitol Hill in Washington March 26, 2014. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS) - RTR3IO8U  

Oversight member on Lois Lerner coordination with DOJ: ‘Now I see why IRS is scared to give up emails’


Key members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed outrage at revelations made in newly released emails showing ex-IRS official Lois Lerner coordinating with the Department of Justice on prosecuting nonprofit groups.
One committee member said the emails prove why the IRS is “scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails.” IRS commissioner John Koskinen was recently threatened with contempt for stonewalling the committee’s investigation. Koskinen claimed in a hearing that it could take years to provide the documents requested by Oversight.
“The release of new documents underscores the political nature of IRS Tea Party targeting and the extent to which supposed apolitical officials took direction from elected Democrats,” Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa said in a statement. “These e-mails are part of an overwhelming body of evidence that political pressure from prominent Democrats led to the targeting of Americans for their political beliefs.”
“Now I see why the IRS is scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails,” said Oversight Economic Growth subcommittee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan.
“Not only do these e-mails further prove the coordination among the IRS, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Justice Department and committee Democrats to target conservatives, they also show that had our committee not requested the Inspector General’s investigation when we did, Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department would likely have been leveling trumped up criminal charges against Tea Party groups to intimidate them from exercising their Constitutional rights,” Jordan said.
The emails were obtained through a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, and were not provided to Oversight, which voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress. Lerner’s contempt charge currently awaits a full House floor vote.
“I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ … He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folks could talk to about [Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon] Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who ‘lied’ on their 1024s — saying they werent planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures,” Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to a colleague, just days before the IRS scandal broke.
“DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS …,” Lerner wrote.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/16/oversight-member-on-lois-lerner-coordination-with-doj-now-i-see-why-irs-is-scared-to-give-up-emails/#ixzz2zF3yJOh6

Todd's American Dispatch / Facebook removes my post about Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy

  • Courtesy of the author
Your friendly neighborhood columnist has once again run afoul of Facebook’s elusive community standards. 
Now before you call up the preacher and put me on the church prayer list – let me assure the posting was neither unseemly nor ungentlemanly. 
This time I was censored for writing something about Rancher Cliven Bundy.
I reached out to Facebook to find out which part of the message violated their standards. Never heard back.
I realized I had landed in the Facebook gulag when I tried to post our daily Bible verse.  However, I was unable to post anything because Facebook had taken great offense to something I had written.
“We removed something your page posted,” Facebook told me in a rather unpleasant message. “We removed the post below because it doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards.”
Now before you call up the preacher and put me on the church prayer list – let me assure the posting was neither unseemly nor ungentlemanly.
Nevertheless, it caused great consternation and angst among Facebook’s left-wing censors.
The following is the egregious text:
“Rancher Bundy should’ve told the feds that those were Mexican cows – who came across the border illegally to seek better grazing opportunities. It was an act of love.”
Thousands of you posted comments and many more shared that message. It’s now gone — blotted out by anonymous redactors.
I reached out to Facebook to find out which part of the message violated their standards. Never heard back. I suspect I should’ve used the term “illegal alien cows.”
It’s not the first time my postings have been bleeped by the Facebook Purge Police. Heck, I’m a serial offender. I’ve been banished, blocked and censored for writing about Chick-fil-A, God, the Bible, Paula Deen, Cracker Barrel rocking chairs, sweet tea, Jesus, the Gaither Vocal Band, the Gideons, the National Rifle Association and June Bugs.
Facebook never told me what was more offensive – the plump juicy chicken breasts or the June Bugs.
For the record, Facebook has the right to censor — it’s their company. And while they may censor conservative and Christian postings, Facebook is quite welcoming and affirming to leftwing diatribes against Republicans, religion and the Tea Party. I just wish the folks at Facebook were a bit more tolerant — and diverse.
So, there you have it, kind readers. Your friendly neighborhood columnist has become that neighbor – the one who mows his grass at midnight, the one who has a Buick up on blocks in the driveway — the rabble-rouser.
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. Sign up for his American Dispatch newsletter, be sure to join his Facebook page, and follow him on Twitter. His latest book is "God Less America”.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Sen. Reid reportedly calls supporters of Nevada rancher Bundy 'domestic terrorists'

 (Bailey) According to Mr. Reid, I and about 75% of Americans must be domestic terrorists. " What a Idiot this guy is."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reportedly said he believes the supporters who rallied around Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in his fight against the federal government are “domestic terrorists” and Bundy does not respect his country.
The Las Vegas Journal-Review reported that Reid, D-Nev., made the comments at an event Thursday hosted by the paper called “Hashtags & Headlines.”
Federal land managers backed down in a weekend standoff with Bundy after hundreds of states' rights protesters, including armed militia members, showed up to protest federal officials seizing his cattle. Some protesters had their guns drawn and pointed toward law enforcement, some of whom were also armed. But ultimately, no shots were fired and the Bureau of Land Management reported that officials left over safety concerns.
Reid had harsh words for these supporters, saying the government cannot stop pursuing the issue.
“They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” Reid said, according to the paper. “I repeat: what happened there was domestic terrorism.”
Reid said he has been told a federal task force is being set up to deal with the Bundy situation, adding Bundy does not respect the U.S. or its laws.
“Clive Bundy does not recognize the United States,” Reid said. “The United States, he says, is a foreign government. He doesn’t pay his taxes. He doesn’t pay his fees. And he doesn’t follow the law. He continues to thumb his nose at authority.”
Reid also suggested the supporters were dangerous to the community.
“They had sniper rifles in the freeway. They had weapons, automatic weapons. They had children lined up. They wanted to make sure they got hurt first … What if others tried the same thing?” he said.
Bundy has been at odds for years with the feds, who say he owes more than $1.1 million in unpaid grazing fees. BLM long ago revoked Bundy's grazing rights on that land after citing concern for a federally protected tortoise. Bundy, though, claimed ancestral rights to the land his family settled in the 19th century and has refused to pay the fees or remove his animals.
BLM officials have said they'll continue their fight through the courts. 
Click for more from the Las Vegas Journal Review.

Student Press Law Center The knowledge to speak responsibly, the courage to speak freely

If you want to get technical about it, the Civil War has been over for 148 years. Still, sporadic fighting breaks out occasionally — as it did in a South Carolina school district over the right to wear a Confederate flag to school.
When the encyclopedia of student free-speech law is written, an entire chapter will be needed just to encompass Confederate battle flag cases. Second only to Christian religious messages, Confederate emblems are perhaps the most oft-litigated flashpoint when schools’ interest in keeping order collides with students’ right of free expression.
The Richmond-based Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled March 25 that a South Carolina high school and middle school did not violate the First Amendment in banning, on the grounds of their potential to incite racial violence, a series of T-shirts that included the Confederate flag.
The 3-0 opinion theoretically may be appealed to the Supreme Court, but it’s unlikely the Court would be interested in entertaining it. So the legal skirmish — which originated way back in 2003 — probably is at an end.
While it’s conceivable that the Fourth Circuit reached the right outcome, its application of well-settled First Amendment legal principles lacks the intellectual honesty that should be expected of a federal appeals court. Simply put, the court made up its mind that the school should win and the student should lose, and then grasped for wisps of evidence that might support that preordained result. When courts fail in rigorously applying the Constitution to provide a meaningful check on government overreaching, much more than a rebel flag is at risk.
The result of the court’s ruling in Hardwick v. Hayward portends difficulty for any student in the Fourth Circuit states — South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland — to win a free-speech challenge, regardless of ideology, if the school labels the student’s message “disruptive.”
The case was brought by the family of Candice Michelle Hardwick against administrators from a middle school and high school in South Carolina’s Latta School District, after Candice was ordered on multiple occasions to refrain from wearing T-shirts with Confederate insignias to school. While some of the shirts simply displayed the Confederate battle flag, several others wedded the Confederate flag with a political message of displeasure over the school dress code (for instance, “Our School Supports Freedom of Speech for All (Except Southerners)”).
A federal district court threw out the Hardwick family’s complaint in 2009, failing even to mention the political content of the student’s protest shirts. The Fourth Circuit panel affirmed the district court’s dismissal.
Cases involving students’ personal expression on school property are governed by the Supreme Court’s Tinker standard, which permits schools to discipline students for what they say only if the speech will “materially disrupt” school operations. The Fourth Circuit recognized Tinker as the proper legal standard, but applied the standard with none of the skepticism that a proper Tinker analysis demands.
The Hardwick court went wrong in three damaging ways that, if applied in future cases, will significantly impair all students’ ability to defend their rights in the five states within the Fourth Circuit’s domain:
(1) The court afforded no weight to the political content of Candice’s speech.
Government attempts to inhibit political speech, including speech challenging school policies, are viewed especially skeptically, because of the obvious self-serving interest in discouraging dissent. The Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals applied appropriate skepticism in a 2008 ruling that struck down an Arkansas school’s punishment of students who wore armbands in protest of a restrictive school dress code.
But the Fourth Circuit lumped all of Candice’s banned T-shirts together, giving no recognition to the heavier burden that a public agency should face in restricting speech that questions government policies. The last of the shirts that Candice was forced to change bore simply a historically accurate picture of the state Capitol flying the Confederate flag. The state pulled the battle flag down in 2000, a matter of lingering political controversy on which students were entitled to comment.
(2) The court accepted remote and speculative evidence as “proof” that Candice’s T-shirts threatened disruption.
There is no indication that any of Candice’s shirts actually provoked any disturbance — in fact, she wore one of them several times without administrators even noticing — so the school’s case depends entirely on its forecast of future risk of disruption. But Tinker requires that preemptive censorship be based on concrete factual experience demonstrating that disruption is imminent. The Supreme Court counseled in Tinker that “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the freedom of expression.”
Here, the school was allowed to point generically to instances of “racial tension” rather than on incidents involving Confederate symbols. That a black student and a white student came to blows over the “N-word” does not establish that all controversy involving race is likely to incite violence.
And the school was permitted to reach back some 30 years to cobble together enough “racial incidents” (in the words of the court) to make the case for the likelihood of a disturbance.
To appreciate the feebleness of the school’s evidence, consider one of the primary “disruptive” incidents on which Judge Dennis Wayne Shedd relied in writing the panel’s opinion:
[I]n the mid-1980s, a white student and an African-American student attended the prom together, causing ‘small groups of whites and blacks . . . to stir up trouble,’ which included white students wearing Confederate flag apparel and African-American students wearing Malcolm X apparel.
In other words, the “trouble” consisted of – wearing protest clothing. It is audacious that, in defending a prohibition on protest clothing, a school would define the wearing of the clothing as itself being the disruption. It is astounding that three federal judges let the school’s attorneys get away with it.
The attitudes of students toward race 30 years ago are exactly as predictive of their current beliefs as are their attitudes about fashion, music or anything else. The students of the early 1980s were the children of parents who, for the most part, attended segregated schools. The difference between 1983 and 2013 is the difference between Phil Collins and Ne-Yo. Or between Strom Thurmond and Barack Obama.
No school district has optimal race relations, and none is without a history of race-fueled violence. If all it takes to justify censoring speech touching on issues of race is a handful of outbursts scattered across three decades, then every school will have a license to suppress discussion of sensitive racial topics.
Today’s casualty, a Confederate flag T-shirt, may be no great loss to an educated dialogue about race relations — but tomorrow’s casualty could be copies of the “I have a dream” speech, if there is evidence that, 30 years ago, a white student took a swing at a black student distributing the speech.
(3) The court sanctioned “offensiveness” as a basis for punishing even a political message.
Finally and perhaps most damagingly, the Fourth Circuit legitimized the imposition of a plainly unconstitutional dress code empowering principals to punish students who wear “derogatory” messages on their clothing, or messages that are “deemed to be offensive.”
This ruling directly contravenes the Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on student speech rights, Morse v. Frederick. In that 2007 ruling, the Court took pains to emphasize the narrowness of its ruling — that speech at school events advocating illegal drug use could be punished — by expressly rejecting a school district’s insistence that “offensive” student speech is unprotected by the First Amendment. “After all,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “much political and religious speech might be perceived as offensive to some.”
The Fourth Circuit simply got this one wrong. A dress code forbidding the display of “offensive” messages is itself offensive to bedrock constitutional principles. The Latta School District policy, and those like it elsewhere, invites viewpoint-based discrimination and gives students inadequate warning of what slogans might be punishable.
(Judge Shedd’s opinion cites the Supreme Court’s 1986 Fraser ruling as supporting the school’s determination that it could ban “offensive” T-shirt sayings. That is a dangerous and unsustainable expansion of Fraser. As the Second Circuit correctly explained in a 2006 ruling that also involved political speech on a student’s T-shirt, Fraser permitted schools to punish graphic and sexually explicit speech, not all speech to which listeners might take offense.)
While the practical result of the Hardwick case is unremarkable — courts elsewhere have upheld bans on Confederate-themed shirts, purses and other apparel where strong and recent evidence pointed to a likelihood of disruption — the court’s strained reasoning in Hardwick undermines the ability of students with more factually sympathetic claims to get their day in court.
On the very day that the Fourth Circuit released the Hardwick v. Hayward opinion, the First Amendment lost one of its most eloquent champions, author Anthony Lewis. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of one of the definitive histories of the First Amendment, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, Lewis paid special tribute in that 2007 book to the courageous judges who, over the last 125 years, have built up a body of First Amendment precedent highly favorable to wide-open debate, even when the rulings were highly unpopular and the speakers highly disagreeable. “Timid, unimaginative judges,” he wrote, “could not have made America as extraordinarily free as it is.”
The Fourth Circuit’s decision embodies just exactly that timidity that Lewis deplored — the willingness to put expediency ahead of principle when the law requires protecting speech we might prefer had remained unspoken (“the thought that we hate,” a line Lewis borrowed from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes). The Hardwick case is an unworthy memorial to a journalist and scholar whose work exemplified what the Supreme Court told us 44 years ago in Tinker — that America’s embrace of the “hazardous freedom” that permits wide-open debate on divisive political and social issues “is the basis of our national strength.”

http://www.splc.org/wordpress/?p=5001

NY students suspended indefinitely for displaying Confederate flag

FILE: Jan. 9, 2008: A Confederate flag waves over the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia.Reuters

Two Long Island high school students have been suspended indefinitely for allegedly bringing a Confederate flag to a sporting event.
Brother Gary Cregan, the principal at St. Anthony's High School in South Huntington, told WCBS-TV the boys walked into the after-hours sporting event with the flag draped around their shoulders.
"The African-American students who immediately saw it really exercised heroic restraint and fortunately a teacher immediately confiscated the flag and took the students out of the gym,” Cregan said. 
The two seniors were initially suspended for 10 days, but Cregan decided Tuesday they won’t be allowed back, the station reported.
Cregan wrote a letter to their parents, telling them that the use of symbols “designed to revive past injustices or to inflame discrimination or racial intolerance, is completely unacceptable and profoundly offensive," Newsday reported.
“I find it just very hard to even imagine why any student in 2014 would even consider or think that a Confederate flag would be anything other than a symbol of hate,” Cregan told WCBS-TV. 
While St. Anthony’s is a private Catholic school and generally not subject to First Amendment limitations, a New York Civil Liberties Union official said students be able to openly express their views, even those considered offensive.
“Our motto is more speech, not censorship or punishment,” NYCLU director Donna Lieberman told Brown told the station. “Helping children understand the impact of this patently offensive expressive activity.” 
Cregan said there are limits to students' free speech rights. 
“I certainly think this particular symbol of hate falls in the category of something that should be excised from our culture,” he said.
The students involved did not respond to WCBS-TV's requests for comment.

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