Utah residents become next to confront Bureau of Land Management, in growing debate

A band of Utah residents rode all-terrain vehicles onto federally managed public land Saturday to protest the Bureau of Land Management closing off the area.
The protest comes weeks after Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s successful standoff against the agency over grazing rights and appears to be the latest episode in the battle across the West over states’ rights on federally managed public lands.
In Blanding, Utah, in the state’s scenic southeastern, the protesters and their supporters say the agency has unfairly closed off a prized area, cheating them of outdoor recreation, according to The Los Angeles Times.
However, federal officials say the region, known for its archaeological ruins, has been jeopardized from overuse.
Bureau of Land Management Utah State Director Juan Palma, in a statement, said the riders may have damaged artifacts and dwellings that "tell the story of the first farmers in the Four Corners region" of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado.
"The BLM was in Recapture Canyon today collecting evidence and will continue to investigate," Palma said. "The BLM will pursue all available redress through the legal system to hold the lawbreakers accountable."
Bureau of Land Management officers recorded and documented protesters who traveled into the closure area, he added.
San Juan County Sheriff Rick Eldredge said from 40 to 50 people, many of them waving American flags, drove about a mile down Recapture Canyon near Blanding and then turned around. Hundreds attended a rally at a nearby park before the protest
"It was peaceful, and there were no problems whatsoever," the sheriff told The Associated Press.
About 30 deputies and a handful of U.S. Bureau of Land Management law enforcement personnel watched as protesters drove past a closure sign and down the canyon located about 300 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
The ride was organized by San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman to assert local control of the region, known as Recapture Canyon.
Recapture Canyon is home to dwellings, artifacts and burials left behind by Ancestral Puebloans as many as 2,000 years ago before they mysteriously vanished.
The canyon was closed to motor vehicles in 2007 after two men forged an illegal seven-mile trail. But hikers and those on horseback are still allowed there, according to the agency.
Governments in Western states are trying to get more control over vast tracts of federally owned land in large part because they say the land could be strategically developed to help boost local economies.
Supporters of the decades-old movement also say local governments are better suited to manage the land, considering in part the federal government is understaffed to manage the acreage.  
Lyman and his supporters want the BLM to act more quickly on a years-old request for a public right-of-way through the area.
The Blanding protest being spearheaded by a local public official, not a resident, also appears to be a sign of the growing frustrations in a rural county composed of nearly 90 percent public lands managed by the BLM.
Environmental groups have spoken out in support of the BLM, saying that fragile Recapture Canyon must be protected.
Earlier this week, BLM officials notified Lyman that any illegal foray in the area would bring consequences such as citations and arrest. 
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert also urged people to uphold the law.
Earlier this week, two men wearing hooded sweatshirts brandished a handgun at a BLM worker driving an agency vehicle, holding up a sign that read, “You need to die.”
"You need to die." Utah ranchers and county leaders recently threatened to break federal law and round up wild horses this summer if the agency doesn't do it first.
Motorized access to Recapture Canyon and other areas in Utah's wilderness has been a source of tension for decades. ATV riders rode another off-limits trail in 2009 in a protest. The Bureau of Land Management gave information about the riders to federal prosecutors, but no charges were filed.

Obama Car

What causes the poor quality of medical care at the VA?

New Mexico VA Hires Surgeon Who Has Been Disciplined in 2 Other States For Operating on the Wrong Part of the Patient’s Spine!
Dr. Frank Allen Zimba has been practicing medicine for 31 years, is board certified in neurological surgery – and has a disciplinary history in two other states of operating on the wrong part of his patients’ spines.
The 57-year-old Texas native was hired at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque last August, even though disciplinary proceedings that resulted in a suspension of his Oklahoma medical license were pending.
The VA in Albuquerque isn’t saying whether Zimba has had any problems on the job so far – claiming it would be a personnel matter. But even if there have been, the state Medical Board has no jurisdiction to investigate.
That’s because under federal law Zimba is not required to be licensed in New Mexico, unlike most other physicians who work here. He only needs to be licensed in one state in the country, and he has licenses in Oklahoma, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
That left Zimba – who, through a VA spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed for this story – able to work at the Albuquerque VA Hospital during the six months his Oklahoma license was suspended.
Disciplinary records show Zimba was suspended for allegedly operating on the wrong part of a patient’s spine in February 2010. The suspension ended in March of this year.
Several years earlier, he was alleged to have performed surgery on the wrong side of two patients’ spines at a hospital in Jamestown, N.Y.
“They call it a never event,” said Oklahoma assistant attorney general Libby Scott, because it should never happen if hospitals follow procedures and properly mark the sites for surgery.
“But it could happen to good surgeons,” she added. Still, Scott said, three mistakes in a four-year period is troubling.
“Either this is the most unlucky guy in the world or there’s something wrong here,” Scott told the Journal last week.
In two of the three surgeries, Zimba also failed to tell the patients or their families afterward that he had made the errors, according to Zimba’s disciplinary records.
Zimba attributed the mistakes in New York to problems with the markings of the surgical sites. Either the markings weren’t there, or were incorrectly placed, he told the Oklahoma Board of Medical Licensure & Supervision in a 2009 statement.
“No medical harm befell either patient,” he added.
Scott, who advises the board, recalled that after the more recent error in Oklahoma, Zimba blamed a blue dye that was used to mark the spot for surgery.
“Either the dye moved or didn’t go in right, so he was on the wrong side … and no one really stopped him,” she added.
The patient, who was in the U.S. military, is suing Zimba and Southwestern Medical Center in Lawton, Okla., where Zimba was employed. The patient is alleging that he suffered injury as the result of negligence during the surgery.
Scott said hospitals have instituted “time outs” before a surgery, so that “before you cut, the whole operating room stops, they have a checklist to go over … to make sure everyone is on the same page and doing the correct thing.”
“Most people, when a bad thing happens it makes them so paranoid that they double check and triple check.”
The overlap
Zimba went to work for the VA hospital in Albuquerque after his disciplinary process began but before any penalty was imposed by the state of Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma medical board filed a complaint last June accusing Zimba of unprofessional conduct and asked him to respond at a July hearing.
The hearing was postponed, and in late August 2011 Zimba started work as a staff physician in surgery service at the VA hospital in Albuquerque.
This January, he entered into a settlement agreement with the Oklahoma board, which suspended his medical license retroactively from September 2011 to March of this year.
“He told us he had this job in New Mexico, and we told him we wouldn’t settle on anything less than a six-months suspension,” Scott said.
Sonja Brown, a VA hospital spokeswoman in Albuquerque, said she wasn’t able to disclose why Zimba was hired despite his disciplinary history.
She also declined to say whether he had performed within the standard of care since his hiring or whether he had been disciplined or otherwise suspended for any length of time.
Those issues “are confidential personnel matters that I am not able to disclose,” she told the Journal in an email.
Matters of jurisdiction
The New Mexico Medical Board oversees the licensing for more than 7,500 physicians. But it doesn’t investigate complaints about physicians who aren’t licensed here.
“The patient would have to file a complaint with the state licensing board with whom he/she is licensed,” said spokeswoman J.J. Walker in an email.
Zimba’s medical license is still active in Oklahoma, but Scott said her board probably wouldn’t investigate a complaint made by a New Mexico patient.
“Because our duty is to protect the public and citizens of Oklahoma, so … if it’s not an Oklahoma patient, it’s really not in our jurisdiction.”
As to the lack of oversight by a state licensing board, “That’s a problem obviously,” Scott said. “We have a lot of Indian facilities in Oklahoma, and most of them nowadays are requiring an Oklahoma (medical) license for that very reason.”
Brown, the VA spokeswoman, said VA policies and federal regulations are designed to “protect BOTH the patient and the practitioner.”
Under the in-house system, the VA physician’s supervisor investigates patient complaints and reports the findings to the facility leadership if a complaint is substantiated.
Brown cited a federal regulation that requires the VA to report to state medical boards any physician whose clinical practice “so significantly failed to meet generally accepted standards of clinical practice … as to raise reasonable concern for the safety of patients.”
Some examples: errors in medication, substance abuse, patient neglect, and unethical behavior or abuse of a patient.
New Mexico medical board spokeswoman Walker said Friday that no one in her agency could recall ever receiving such a report from the VA.
The New Mexico board maintains a public website that lists basic information about its licensed physicians, including disciplinary actions taken.
Back to Oklahoma?
Zimba told the Oklahoma Medical board on his 2009 license application that he served in the U.S. Army from 1976 to 1994 and graduated from the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
He also disclosed that he was sued for malpractice in 1997, a case that settled for $400,000.
Zimba’s disciplinary records also revealed that he had received a reprimand, probation, fines and one year of monitoring in 2008 related to the New York surgical errors.
His license in Oklahoma is up for renewal in September.
But if Zimba ever wants to return to work there, he must first appear before that state’s medical board, Scott said.
“We obviously were concerned … without some kind of re-education, would you want someone coming back like that? The board would have to decide … if they think he is competent or not.”

'GAMING THE SYSTEM': Email reveals VA push to manipulate wait time data

An email obtained by Fox News Friday revealed that an employee at a Wyoming VA hospital instructed his workers to manipulate records to make it seem like patients were being seen within the agency’s required 14-day window, which he described as “gaming the system.”  
Fox News has learned that the VA was informed of dubious scheduling practices at the Cheyenne VA Medical Center and at a community-based outpatient clinic in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is part of the Wyoming center, through an internal investigation in December 2013. The problems at and the investigation into the Fort Collins clinic were reported earlier this week.
However, the VA took no formal disciplinary action and did not order an independent probe into the matter until Friday, when Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki said he learned of the email. 
Now Rep. Jeff Miller, the chairman, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, is questioning why if the VA learned there were problems in December, the agency is only taking action now. He said Shinseki’s actions are “faux outrage at its finest.”
The June email signed by an employee named David Newman, a Telehealth coordinator at the Cheyenne center, describes to the workers methods they can use to manipulate records in the patient appointment system to comply with a VA policy that requires patients be seen within 14 days of their desired date of appointment.
"Yes, it is gaming the system a bit," the email reads. "But you have to know the rules of the game you are playing, and when we exceed the 14-day measure, the front office gets very upset."
Shinseki said in a statement that after he learned of the email on Friday, he ordered the employee who wrote it placed on administrative leave. He said he also ordered the VA’s independent inspector general to conduct a thorough investigation into the matter.
“VA takes any allegations about patient care or employee misconduct very seriously.  If true, the behavior outlined in the email is unacceptable,” Shinseki said.
Miller said that the VA has known about falsified records at the Fort Collins clinic, which he notes is part of the Wyoming center, since last year.   
“And yet, until today, department officials had not taken any steps whatsoever to discipline any employees or request an independent investigation – nor did they plan to do so,” he said. “Today’s announcement from Sec. Shinseki that he has placed a Cheyenne VAMC employee on paid leave and asked the inspector general to investigate appears to be more of a knee-jerk reaction to tough media questions than anything else.”
In response to the problems in Colorado, Denver VA spokesman Daniel Warvi told the Associated Press earlier this week that employees have been retrained and weekly audits are being conducted. He said no one was disciplined because the investigation found no deliberate misconduct, calling it a “training issue.”
The falsification of records is only one of the scandals engulfing the VA. The American Legion and some in Congress have called for Shinseki's ouster following allegations of 40 patient deaths at the Phoenix VA hospital due to delays in care, and of a secret list the hospital kept of patients waiting for appointments to hide the delays.
The White House has voiced support for Shinseki and he has brushed off calls to resign.
On Thursday, the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted unanimously to subpoena all emails and other records in which Shinseki and other VA officials may have discussed destruction of what the committee called "an alternate or interim waitlist" for veterans seeking care in Phoenix.
The Associated Press contributed to this report

Monica Goes Viral: Lewinsky revives her Clinton calamity for the social media age

Monica Lewinsky begins her return to the public arena by describing one of her many humiliating moments a decade ago, saying that today it “would have gone viral on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TMZ, Gawker. It would have become a meme of its own on Tumblr. The viralness itself would have merited mention on the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.”
None of those existed, of course, when the White House sex scandal exploded back in 1998. So now Lewinsky is seeing what it would be like to analyzed, dissected and ripped apart in the modern world of social media—by reviving and reliving the global embarrassment that will always define her.
That lead anecdote involved an HBO taping in which she was asked about being a “BJ Queen.” Lewinsky has obviously decided that in order to move past her humiliation, she first has to recycle it—and own it.
The onetime White House intern tries to meld her plight with the vast array of people who have been mocked online: “No one, it seems, can escape the unforgiving gaze of the Internet, where gossip, half-truths and lies take root and fester.” True, but in Monica’s case, most of what was said about her was true.
Now that I’ve read the entire Vanity Fair piece, I don’t quite get the conspiracy theory that the Clintons wanted this out and disposed of. First, the accused looney toon is not favorably disposed toward Hillary Clinton: “She wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress…I find her impulse to blame the Woman—not only me, but herself—troubling.”
Second, Lewinsky knows that by resurfacing after a decade, she is putting the focus back on Bill Clinton’s misdeeds, and his wife calling out the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” And whatever mistakes the thong-flashing, can’t-keep-a-secret Monica made, it was her boss, the president of the United States, who engaged in a classic abuse of power and misled the country about it.
Lewinsky even takes a whack at feminists for failing to give her “girl-on-girl support,” giving her paramour a pass because Clinton was “a president ‘friendly’ to women’s causes.”
Is there a self-serving element to all this? Of course. Lewinsky, single at 40, understandably frustrated by her failure to land a good job, is trying to turn her notoriety in her favor.
Besides, she says, her attempt to lay low has failed: “Every day I am recognized. Every day.”
Still, why now? Lewinsky says that everyone else is talking about her, so why should she stay quiet? She knew her White House exploits would be debated during a Hillary campaign—indeed, Rand Paul has already pressed the issue—and decided she wanted her voice heard.
The question now is whether Vanity Fair is just phase one of her media comeback. We could soon be seeing Monica Lewinsky making the television rounds, trying to move beyond her tawdry past by talking about it again and again.
Click for more from Media Buzz. 

Harry Reid

House panel subpoenas VA Secretary Shinseki for Phoenix hospital documents

A House committee voted Thursday to subpoena Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki for emails and documents tied to an alleged secret "waiting list" for sick veterans at a Phoenix VA hospital. 
The vote on the House Veterans Affairs Committee comes as Shinseki begins to face calls -- from Congress and beyond -- for his resignation. In an interview with CBS News, Shinseki brushed aside those calls, while acknowledging that the Phoenix controversy "makes me angry." 
Shinseki has placed top Phoenix officials on leave as the department tries to get to the bottom of what happened. As many as 40 veterans allegedly may have died because of delayed treatment at that hospital. 
The communications being sought by the House committee would deal with the destruction or disappearance of the supposed secret waiting list at that facility. 
Lawmakers said that a prior response from Shinseki did not adequately answer the committee's questions. 
Meanwhile, Shinseki, a retired Army general, told CBS that he sent inspectors to Phoenix immediately when he learned of reports about the deaths. 
"I take every one of these incidents and allegations seriously, and we're going to go and investigate," he said. 
According to the VA, Shinseki has also ordered a "face-to-face audit" for all clinics at VA medical centers. 
"Secretary Shinseki has directed the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to complete a nation-wide access review.  The purpose of this review is to ensure a full understanding of VA's policy and continued integrity in managing patient access to care," the VA said in a statement. "VA takes any allegations about patient care or employee misconduct very seriously." 
Earlier in the week, the American Legion called for him to step down over this and other controversies about veterans' care. At least two Republican senators have joined that call. 
The White House has voiced support for the secretary amid the calls for his ouster. 
Fox News' Steve Centanni and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

House Dems weigh boycotting Benghazi probe

(Bailey) Four Americans were murdered and they're thinking about boycotting. What a bunch of idiots!
 They're thinking more about covering their asses then protecting Americans.

House Democrats argued behind closed doors Wednesday about the proposed structure of a special investigative committee on the Benghazi attacks -- with some lawmakers arguing they should boycott the investigation altogether. 
At a press conference after the meeting broke up, Democratic leaders would not say definitely what they plan to do. 
"One day at a time," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said. 
Some rank-and-file members argue that by joining the select committee, they'd be improperly legitimizing what they view as a political effort. Others, though, argue that if they don't participate, they will not be able to shape the direction and narrative of the probe. Several sources told Fox News that based on Wednesday's meeting, it appears Democrats are leaning toward not participating. 
GOP leaders formally outlined the particulars of the select committee on Tuesday evening. They set the stage for a comprehensive probe that would investigate everything from U.S. response efforts to internal communications after the attack. 
"It's not going to be a sideshow, it is not going to be a circus," House Speaker John Boehner said. 
In a move that rankled Democrats, GOP leaders said it would consist of seven Republicans and five Democrats. 
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her deputy, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., objected in a letter to Boehner, calling for the panel to be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. 
They also called for Democrats to have a "real and equal voice" in issuing subpoenas, questioning witnesses and other areas. 
"In the draft resolution you provided today, you appear to have rejected these principles," they wrote. "If you truly want this new select committee to be bipartisan and fair -- and to be taken seriously by the American people -- we call on you to reconsider this approach before bringing this measure to the House floor for a vote." 
Pelosi and Hoyer did not go so far as to threaten to boycott the committee, as some rank-and-file Democrats have. 
GOP leaders say the select committee is vital, particularly in light of revelations that the Obama administration withheld relevant emails for months -- until they were released as part of a lawsuit last week. 
"I expect the members of this committee -- Republican and Democrat -- to exercise these authorities with a single-minded focus of getting the unvarnished truth about what took place leading up to, during, and following the terrorist attack on our consulate in Libya. The American people will accept no less," Boehner said in a statement. 
Republicans also defended the structure of the committee, noting that a prior select committee under the previous Democratic majority had nine Democrats and six Republicans. 
Among other priorities, the committee will seek to answer what was done in response to the Sep. 11, 2012 attack, including efforts to rescue U.S. personnel. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, died in the assault on the U.S. compound. 
The committee will have subpoena power and may order depositions to be given under oath. 
A final report is required, though some of it may be classified. The next step will be for the House to vote on the committee, and for members to be chosen. 
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., already has been selected to chair the committee.