Free Republic

Two allotments delayed pending more studies. A coalition of environmental groups have forced public land managers to delay a grazing permit decision on Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Grand Canyon Trust, Western Watershed Project, Wild Earth Guardians, National Resource Defense Council, Wildlands Defense, the Sierra Club and Durango-based Great Old Broads for Wilderness collectively filed a 27-page protest against the proposed Flodine and Yellow Jacket grazing allotments on the monument ... they want the two allotments permanently closed to grazing ... The groups challenged a recent decision plan by the BLM to issue 10-year terms for the allotments, located...

Bowie Resource Partners plans to lay off nearly 100 people at its Bowie #2 Mine near Paonia in the latest setback to coal employment in the North Fork Valley. The company said Tuesday that it anticipates laying off 78 workers and 19 contractors from the mine, where 181 full-time employees and 19 contractors work now. ... it is continuing to evaluate the market for the mine’s coal after losing a contract to sell to the Tennessee Valley Authority a year ago. The loss of that contract caused Bowie to eliminate about 150 jobs at that time. Bowie operates three underground...

Despite a long process involving collaboration between local officials the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Western Colorado, the federal land agency is proceeding with the closure of roads that have been traveled for 50 or more years. The road closures comprise a portion of the BLM’s Resource Management Plan (RMP) for Mesa County, of which, 73 percent is controlled by the federal government . ... public roads, used by off-roaders, hunters, farmers, ranchers and, during wildfire season, firefighting crews. ... Jody Green, a member of Public Lands Access Association and long-time activist working to preserve access into federally-managed lands,...

In 1818, when only 8 years old, Gioacchino Pecci began his studies with the Jesuits at a school in Italy. Seventy-three years later, as Pope Leo XIII, he published Rerum Novarum, an encyclical letter simultaneously defending the rights of working people and private property.As this pope saw it, they were inseparable."It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive for his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his own," he wrote."If one man hires out to another his strength or his skill, he does so for the...

John Adams said, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God … anarchy and tyranny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.” I am not a politician or public figure. I am one of many Americans whose property is under assault by government. I am a student of self-governance living in New Jersey. My state and local governments make a habit of redistributing privately held property among the private parties it chooses. This is absolutely forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. If it can happen here in my...

Americans now comprehend fully the disdain the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for truth-telling, the rights of others, and the environment. Forget the last six spiteful years; the Colorado mine disaster suffices. The EPA’s wanton malfeasance — experts warned of a catastrophic blowout — unleashed three million gallons of orange arsenic-, cadmium-, and lead-laden wastewater into an Animas River tributary trashing public, private, and tribal lands and waters in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation. Even so, the EPA has nothing on the U.S. Forest Service. In documents filed days ago in a federal district court in Arkansas,...

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

NCBA will engage EPA in lawsuit alleging overreach in Waters of the U.S. rule, group says. Concerns of cattlemen regarding the U.S. EPA and Army Corps of Engineers Waters of the U.S. rule released last month are coming true, National Cattlemen's Beef Association Vice President of Government Affairs Colin Woodall said Tuesday, but that's actually generating more support for repeal efforts. We just got some more feedback this last weekend that it's the determination of the EPA that any stock tank or pond that runs around in a flooding type event would be considered a 'water of the United States,'"...

As of early 2015, almost ten years after the Supreme Court upheld the Kelo condemnations, the properties that were the focus of an epic legal battle remain empty and undeveloped. Several plans to redevelop these lots have fallen through. The only creatures making regular use of them in the intervening years have been a colony of feral cats. These failures were not simply caused by adverse publicity resulting from the public backlash against the Supreme Court ruling or by the recession and financial crisis that began in 2008. As a 2005 New York Times article noted, the failure was a...

The Iowa Supreme Court has affirmed the right to be drunk on your front porch. The court ruled Friday in the case of Patience Paye, who appealed her 2013 public intoxication conviction. Paye called police after fighting with her boyfriend and met officers on the front porch of her Waterloo home. While investigating the domestic assault complaint an officer questioned Paye about whether she'd been drinking. A test revealed her blood alcohol concentration at 0.267 percent, more than three times the amount considered drunk for driving. She was charged and convicted. But she appealed, saying her front porch isn't a...

A Senate committee voted along party lines Wednesday to overturn the Obama administration’s new regulation asserting control over small waterways like streams and wetlands. The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), would repeal the waters of the United States rule, also known as the clean water rule, and give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specific guidelines to re-write it in a way that Republicans find more acceptable. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed the bill by a vote of 11-9, with only Republicans supporting it. Republicans complained that the rule released late last month by the EPA...

Despite the fact that in 2014, Money magazine named McKinney, Texas, a small suburb located just outside of Dallas, "the best place to live in America," for the past few days the town has been inundated with media attention in response to circulated images of a white police officer cursing, pointing his weapon at and physically assaulting black teenagers as young as 14 in an attempt to break up a pool party at a subdivision. A teenager at the party filmed and uploaded video of the incident to YouTube on Saturday and it quickly went viral. The police were reportedly...

McKinney Police Corporal Eric Casebolt has resigned after video showed him pushing a 15-year-old girl in a swimsuit to the ground and pointing his firearm at other teens. Casebolt's lawyer informed FOX4 of Casebolt's decision. The video of the Friday incident involving Casebolt at a McKinney neighborhood pool went viral and had initially landed Casebolt on administrative leave while police officials conduct an investigation.

Control the water, control the land This is the largest, illegal, private property land grab in U.S. history Good EPA “laws” (read: “rules”, “regulations”) are long extinct, but if you had to pick one it would be the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) passed by congress four years after the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (Images for cuyahoga river fire burning—it wasn’t the first time) because of the pollution in it. The Act authorized the clean-up of this kind of mess in America’s navigable lakes, rivers, and streams, and prohibited further dumping of dangerous industrial chemicals, waste, and other...

The Obama administration is expected to announce final details of “Waters of the United States” rule this week that could impact any property owner with water or a ditch that occasionally fills with water on their land. Moreover, the regulation could even conflict with two Supreme Court rulings. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers have sought to provide more clarity to what bodies of water are protected under the 1972 Clean Water Act, which has previously affected rivers, lakes and the streams that flow directly to them.

The setting aside of critical habitat for the endangered jaguar in New Mexico was an “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious” action by federal authorities and needs to be overturned, a new lawsuit says. ... In March 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set aside nearly 1,200 square miles along the U.S.-Mexico border as habitat essential for the conservation of the jaguar. Federal officials acknowledged last year when they made the designation that no female jaguars or breeding had been documented in the U.S. in more than 50 years. ... Reed Hopper, another attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, said the federal...

A plan that will close nearly 2,000 miles of public roads that have previously been open for use by the people of Mesa County is creating a public backlash against the Grand Junction field office of the federal Bureau of Land Management. The BLM’s resource management plans (RMP) regulate the access and types of traffic allowed on roads on public lands. Road maintenance and seasonal closures are also detailed in such plans. But the most recent RMP in Mesa County indicates the BLM’s intent to limit access to public roads which have traditionally been open to motorized, horse, and foot...

A township view 200 years in the making has changed, after a historic tree town officials thought was protected by municipal ordinance was lawfully cut down by a developer. The swamp white oak tree at 29 Ocean Street had been designated a "bicentennial tree" in Millburn – one that town officials believed to be at least 200 years old. It was one of 23 trees designated as such in the town's 2014 Environmental Resource Inventory Report. The township had an ordinance prohibiting the removal of the historical trees, and named trees to the protected list via resolutions. "I looked at...

<p>Land Grab: The Bureau of Land Management plans a Bundy-like seizure of New Mexico land for a national monument that will restrict Border Patrol access and provide an open corridor for drug and human traffickers.</p> <p>In August 2002, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Ranger Kris Eggle was killed in the line of duty. Allegedly the killers were drug smugglers crossing through the Arizona park, which shares a border with Mexico. Since Eggle's death, Organ Pipe has been called the most dangerous park in America.</p>

Texas is larger than most countries in the United Nations, some not much bigger than the postage stamps they print for collectors, but each with a vote that can cancel ours out. Texas is about to a vote against the U.N.’s sovereignty-destroying Agenda 21, so named because it claims to be setting a “sustainable growth” agenda for the 21st century. Agenda 21 is in fact a global power grab similar to climate-change treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. It uses the imaginary threat of unsustainable growth which allegedly threatens to plunder the planet’s finite resources, like climate change allegedly threatens planetary...