Md. gov candidate suggests Iraq War vet opponent not up for 'real job'

A Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland is defending comments he made Monday in which he suggested his opponent, an Iraq war veteran, was not up to the task of a “real job.”
Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler drew ire from a veterans’ group after he made the comments about his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, at an event held by the Tech Council of Maryland.
During the event, Gansler was asked what the state had learned from the rollout of ObamaCare. Maryland’s state-run exchange has been particularly troubled, and earlier this month the exchange’s board of directors voted to replace technology in the system with one used in in Connecticut's exchange instead of fixing its current system or partnering with the federal government.
Gansler said the website’s woes prove Maryland needs someone who has leadership experience and worked with budgets, someone, he claimed, unlike Brown.
“I’m running against somebody who has never managed anybody, never run anything, his ads are about how he’s a lawyer in Iraq, and that’s all fine and good but this is a real job,” Gansler said.
Gansler was referencing a recent campaign ad by Brown, in which he talks about serving in the Army ROTC, the Army Reserves and being deployed to Iraq.
Gansler’s comments were slammed by a veterans’ group VoteVets.org, whose chairman told the Baltimore Sun his comments were “slime ball politics.”
“Doug Gansler needs to stop smearing those of us who served in Iraq as not having had a ‘real job,’ "Jon Soltz, whose group has endorsed Brown, said. “It’s a horrible insult to all those men and women who put their lives on the line, and especially those who died, in service to this country."
Gansler said in a statement to FoxNews.com his comments simply needed to be clarified.
“I have the utmost respect for his military service and for veterans,” Gansler said. “The point I was trying to make is that Anthony Brown's only attempt to lead as Lieutenant Governor was the unmitigated debacle of the health exchange website that denied Marylanders access to health care and cost taxpayers nearly $200 million.”
Brown and the state’s current Gov. Martin O’Malley have blamed the website’s vendors for the problems with Maryland’s state exchange. He and Gansler face off in the primary June 24.

Feds draw criticism for selling Wyoming horses for slaughter

(Bailey) Where is Reid and his smart mouth on this issue?

The Bureau of Land Management rounded up a horse herd that had roamed for decades on federal land in northwest Wyoming and handed the horses over to Wyoming officials.
They, in turn, sold the herd to the highest bidder, a Canadian slaughterhouse.
Wild horse advocates are incensed, saying they should have had a chance to intercede in the March roundup and auction. But the BLM says that the horses were abandoned, not wild, and that it publicized the sale beforehand.
"It would take very little to do this in a more effective way so that horses are not just sent off to slaughter indiscriminately," said Paula Todd King, of The Cloud Foundation, a Colorado-based advocacy group.
According to the BLM, the Wyoming horses weren't officially wild and protected by the Wild-Free Roaming Horses and Burro Act, the federal law for maintaining many of the horse herds, some of which have roamed free in the West since the days of Spanish explorers more than 300 years ago.

"It would take very little to do this in a more effective way so that horses are not just sent off to slaughter indiscriminately."- Paula Todd King, of The Cloud Foundation

The BLM bans wild horses from being sold for slaughter. Anybody who adopts a wild horse from the BLM must agree to provide it a home.
The horses in the Bighorn Basin's sagebrush hills descended from stray rodeo horses owned by Andy Gifford, a rancher and rodeo livestock contractor, in the 1970s, BLM spokeswoman Sarah Beckwith said.
Gifford had claimed the horses as his but never rounded them up before he died in 2009. That, plus the fact that the horses never interbred with wild horses, officially classified them as strays.
"Nobody had a permit to have these horses grazing on public lands," Beckwith said.
King questions that policy. "How long does a horse have to live wild and free before it's considered wild?" she said.
Area ranchers and farmers had long complained that  the herd grazed down pastures and damaged cattle rangeland.
On March 18 and March 19, a BLM contractor rounded up the 41 horses and handed them over to Wyoming officials. Within hours, the horses were sold for $1,640 to Bouvry Exports, a slaughterhouse based in Calgary, Alberta.
The BLM follows state laws for handling stray livestock, Beckwith said, and it had no option but to hand over the horses to the Wyoming Livestock Board. The state took three bids for the horses, state Brand Commissioner Lee Romsa said.
Bouvry Exports shipped the horses out of state, Romsa said. Phone messages for Bouvry Exports weren't immediately returned.
BLM officials had printed notices about the upcoming roundup in local newspapers and posted notices in local post offices.
The roundup wasn't unprecedented. Last summer, a federal judge allowed an American Indian tribe to sell 149 mustangs over the objection of critics, who claimed that the unbranded animals were federally protected wild horses.
The mustangs were among more than 400 on U.S. Forest Service land along the Nevada-Oregon line that the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe claimed belonged to them.
In the end, King said, more than 160 were sold to people who planned to take them to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, but local residents and rescue groups raised money to buy 150 of the horses to spare them.
The BLM rounds up stray livestock perhaps three or four times a year in the West. Usually they are cattle or sheep. Impoundments of large numbers of stray horses are far less frequent, said Robert Bolton, a senior rangeland management specialist for the BLM.
"That's a pretty sizable number, and they have been out there a long time," Bolton said of the Wyoming herd. "Normally, most of our impounds have been in the low numbers."

Easter

ABC News

Why did a news outlet cancel this church's Easter ad?

A New York City news organization has apologized after it canceled a church’s advertising campaign promoting its Easter Sunday services – just three days before Good Friday.
The Journey Church, a Christian evangelical congregation, paid $1,400 to run a series of ads on the Capital New York website. Capital New York is a sister publication of Politico. And for the sake full disclosure, I attend The Journey Church.
The advertisement read: “You’re invited to discover #HOPE at The Journey Church this Sunday April 20. Click here to discover how you can find hope when you feel like giving up.”
Pastor Kerrick Thomas tells me the advertisement ran on Capital New York’s website earlier in the week – but on Wednesday the church received an email notifying them that the ad was being pulled.
“Capital is implementing a new policy company-wide that we won’t be running any religious-affiliated campaigns moving forward,” the email read.
It certainly seemed rather convenient that the company’s new policy was implemented just days before the holiest of holidays for Christians. Heaven forbid Capital New York soil their fine reputation by taking money from Christians.
“It stings a little when someone says they won’t work with you because you are religious or Christian or a church,” Thomas said. “But we are going to love everyone and keep moving forward to have an impact for Christ in New York.”
The news organization’s decision put the church in a jam.
“As a church we have limited resources – so we have to be strategic when we invest in outreach,” Thomas said. “We thought working with them could be a cool way to bless New Yorkers. The fact that it was canceled the week of Easter made it impossible for us to use our resources to try something new in such a short amount of time. We really felt like it wasted our time and a great opportunity at Easter.”
But fortunately, this Easter story has a happy ending.
About an hour after I started sniffing around and asking questions, Capital New York suddenly had a change of heart – a come-to-Jesus moment.
The company reversed course and apologized.
“The Capital New York brand is very young and there was some confusion around the advertising policy,” read a statement the news outlet sent me. “In this case, the Journey Church ad should not have been pulled.”
Pastor Thomas confirmed that he received an email as well – offering to run the church’s ad without charge.
So, let’s review. A wrong has been righted. Apologies offered. Forgiveness granted. And all’s well that ends well. Happy Easter, America.
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”.

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.

‘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."