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The federal government’s decision to ban energy development across a wide swath of Colorado and eastern Utah to protect the Gunnison sage grouse habitat has raised concerns the action would inflict economic damage. Although the Obama administration was not expected to make its decision as to whether the bird warrants the endangered listing until November, the Bureau of Land Management’s decision this week effectively puts an oil, gas and coal moratorium on 400,000 acres – roughly 90 acres per bird. The final decision was “pushed back until after the election, because when people understand the impact on jobs, people get...

Scandal: One of the seven people, including Lois Lerner who lost emails from the period of Tea Party targeting by the IRS, served as chief of staff to former IRS head Steven Miller. She also made 35 visits to the White House. The funny thing about emails is that they are never orphans. When you send one, there's always a recipient who has his or her own copy. The "lost" Lois Lerner emails had recipients. How about subpoenas to all of them during the Tea Party targeting period? That should help find what we need to know — or maybe...

Trey Gowdy had a defining moment when he had to explain to Congress and Barack Obama exactly what their job titles are supposed to be. Trey Gowdy lead the charge in passing a bill that directs Obama to follow the laws – ....

Decision would cut off ranchers' lifeline . A Western Slope federal parks official’s decision to limit access to Monument Road has touched off angry reactions from residents who depend on the route for their livelihoods. With little public input from Glade Park ranching community residents and without consulting with the Board of Commissioners in Mesa County, National Park Service (NPS) Director at the Colorado National Monument Lisa Eckert recently announced that vehicles containing “hazardous” cargo would be banned from using the route they have used for decades. Monument Road adjoins to Glade Park just a few miles inside the boundaries...

Another New Mexico county has joined a lawsuit to fight the listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species. Lea County in southeastern New Mexico joined three other counties in the state last week in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... U.S. Rep., Steve Pearce, R-N.M., .. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to cater to environmental groups and disregard science will devastate New Mexico’s way of life,” he said. “New Mexicans will pay the price in lost jobs, industry, ranching and oil and gas production.”

Scandal: The IRS descends into criminal enterprise, with word of a 26-month gap of lost emails from the very period it was illegally targeting Tea Party groups. Computer crash? Try obstruction of justice. Just as the claim that President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, inadvertently hit the "erase" button instead of "pause" gave impetus to the drive to impeach Nixon, so too should the IRS announcement that it can't find two years of Lois Lerner's emails lead to a criminal investigation of this administration and creation of a select committee. In April we wrote, "Lois Lerner Should Go To Jail."...

Corruption: A House panel votes this week to formally ask the DOJ to pursue criminal charges against former IRS employee Lois Lerner. It is time someone in this administration were held accountable for something. A staff report by House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa reveals testimony by IRS agents that the IRS has not deliberately targeted progressive groups. Now comes word that the House Ways and Means Committee is sending a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder accusing former IRS director of tax-exempt organizations Lois Lerner of committing at least three crimes in the IRS's targeting tea party and other...

New emails show that the woman at the center of the IRS scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups' applications for tax-exempt status targeted tea party applications specifically and directed they be held up. While a possible "wag the dog" attack on Syria and other "phony" scandals like Benghazi have grabbed the headlines, Congress has continued its investigation into the Obama administration's targeting of tea party groups that sprang up in opposition to ObamaCare by the agency charged with enforcing it, the Internal Revenue Service. [snip] In the February 2011 email, Lerner advised her staff — including then-Exempt Organizations Technical...

Federal authorities have issued a moratorium blocking oil, gas and coal leasing on 800,000 acres of public land in southwestern Colorado and eastern Utah that is habitat for the imperiled Gunnison sage grouse. ... restrictive measures that will impact jobs and economic development

Terror Group ISIS Declares Guns Illegal in Parts of Iraq They Control June 16 2014 by Dan Cannon Share This Post isis If you’re a terror group attempting a coup of an unstable country what’s the last thing you want to see? Probably citizens gathering and taking up arms against you. You may be able to scare some uniformed members of Iraq’s military who may not believe in their cause anyway, but eventually enough people are going to get fed up, organize, and fight back. ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) looks like they are attempting to nip...

As the Al Qaeda aligned ISIS jihadists roll on towards Baghdad, there are reports that at least 200 Americans were trapped and surrounded at the Balad Force Air Base. An anonymous contractor claiming to be among the besieged U.S. citizens posted this call for help on CNN’s “IReport” website yesterday: I am writing from ballad Iraq as a employee of sallyport, ksillc..there are approx 500 US citizens on balad air base north of Baghdad trapped..we are part of a little known F16 iraq support mission here…The company has reportedly for the last 3 days to fly us out, we are...

Many Republican supporters of loose borders, along with quite a few Democrats, vehemently deny that they support amnesty. They contend that merely asking illegal aliens to pay a fine and back-taxes in return for legal status is not amnesty. Fox News’s Brit Hume passionately denounced those who refer to some of the immigration proposals in Congress as amnesty. But amnesty means “an act of forgiveness for past offenses, especially to a class of persons as a whole.” What else would you call granting legal status, let alone the privilege of full blown citizenship, to millions of people who came to...

U.S. pushing local cops to stay mum on cellular surveillance Thu, 06/12/2014 Sun-Times wires WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal...

I’ve been trying to get to this story for a couple of days now, but there are so many tentacles to it I’ve had trouble making the time to put it together. In short, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the alleged ‘Coptic Christian’ who made the infamous Muhammad video that the Obama administration blamed the Benghazi attack on — well it turns out Nakoula is really a Muslim, not a Coptic Christian. And that’s been confirmed. It also turns out that the official terms of Nakoula’s parole in 2009 was bogus, and that the administration used his parole as leverage to help...

Education: Oklahoma joins South Carolina and Indiana in opposing one-size-fits-all U.S. education standards that have turned schools into leftist re-education camps, with political statements masquerading as instruction. Not as much attention has been paid to Common Core as has been paid to ObamaCare. But like the faux Greek columns in Denver at Barack Obama's nomination in 2008, they were supposed to be the twin pillars of his legacy. Both, however, are fake promises, Trojan horses for government control of key sectors of American society and our economy. Five years ago, 46 states gave up a big chunk of their sovereignty...

Still wondering why Lois Lerner took the Fifth or if there is indeed a “smidgen” of corruption in the IRS targeting scandal? It now appears that the IRS was not only engaged in an illegal witch hunt of conservatives applying for tax-exempt status, but that it was actively pushing criminal investigation of already approved groups. The latest revelations from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation of the IRS are that Lois Lerner sent the Obama Administration’s FBI a 1.1 million document file of then-current 501(c)(4) organizations. This file, given to the FBI just weeks before the 2010 elections,...

The Internal Revenue Service may have been caught violating federal tax law: In October 2010, the agency sent a database on 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups containing confidential taxpayer information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents obtained by a House panel. The information was transmitted in advance of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s meeting the same month with Justice Department officials about the possibility of using campaign-finance laws to prosecute certain non-profit groups. E-mails between Lerner and Richard Pilger, the director of the Justice Department’s election crimes branch, obtained through a subpoena to Attorney General Eric Holder, show Lerner asking about the format in which...

<p>The White House allowed the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to take part in a series of secure video conferences with State Department and intelligence officials and senior military commanders, according to a published report.</p>

Afghan presidential frontrunner escapes bomb attack KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two blasts struck the convoy of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah as it left a campaign event at a wedding hall in the capital Kabul on Friday, killing at least six people but leaving the candidate himself unharmed, the Interior Ministry said. Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi told CBS News' Mukhtar Ahmad that 22 more people were wounded in the attack, which saw a suicide bomber detonate his explosives followed by a roadside bomb blast. In a televised statement shortly after the attack, Abdullah, the presidential front runner and former Foreign...

White House Administration official apologizes for tweets suggesting Bergdahl platoon 'psychopaths' Published June 05, 2014 FoxNews.com WASHINGTON – An Obama administration official apologized Thursday after suggesting on Twitter that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s platoon might have been filled with “psychopaths” – in an apparent attempt to defend Bergdahl against criticism from his fellow soldiers. Brandon Friedman, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent out a series of tweets Wednesday night questioning those soldiers trying to “smear” Bergdahl for abandoning his post in 2009. The first said: “Here's the thing about Bergdahl and the...