Free Republic

The Democratic Party believes that it owns the African-American vote, and it also looks to women for much of its support. This support requires serious reconsideration. The Colorado Democratic Party, as represented by State Rep. Joe Salazar, has said openly that women are too mentally unstable to handle firearms responsibly. "There are some gender inequities on college campuses, this is true, and universities have been faced with that situation for a long time. It's why we have call boxes, it's why we have safe zones, it's why we have the whistles. Because you just don't know who you're going to...

This cartoon/leaflet, which is explicitly placed in the public domain, relates to State Rep. Joe Salazar's (D-CO) statement, "It's why we have call boxes, it's why we have safe zones, it's why we have the whistles. Because you just don't know who you're gonna be shooting at," Salazar said in the debate last Friday. "And you don't know if you feel like you're gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone's been following you around or if you feel like you're in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop ......

Lawyers for the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will square off Friday before a federal judge in Oakland in the first round of a legal battle to continue the commercial oyster operation in the Point Reyes National Seashore. At stake is Salazar's decision in November not to renew a 40-year lease that gave oyster farm operator Kevin Lunny the right to commercial operations in 2,500-acre Drakes Estero, a five-fingered estuary that features extensive eelgrass beds and a harbor seal colony. The decision, hailed by wilderness advocates, gave Lunny's company 90 days to shut down a business...

With the imminent return of Ken Salazar to Colorado, and talk of his future political aspirations bubbling up in the papers, we thought it a good time to recount a brief history of Secretary Salazar’s failures at the Interior Department. ... First and foremost amongst Salazar’s fiascos is the BP oil spill. The Deepwater Horizons disaster is firmly etched in the American conscience as an example of bumbling incompetence and haphazard, if not non-existent, leadership. Salazar mucked up his role so badly that unnamed White House sources spanked him publicly in The Washington Post as an “erratic spokesman” who was...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Interior Department's plan for managing a vast petroleum reserve on Alaska's North Slope calls for a roughly 50-50 split between conservation and oil development plus accommodation for a pipeline that could carry offshore Arctic Ocean oil to the trans-Alaska pipeline. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday announced that the plan will allow for development of nearly 12 million acres within the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, an area roughly the size of Indiana. Salazar said in his announcement that the plan will guide the transition from leasing and exploration to responsible production and transport of the...

Shame on the Interior Department for trying to drum a family-owned enterprise out of business. After a seaside area has been designated as wilderness, when is it considered pristine enough by Washington's standards? Is it after airplanes have been banned from flying over it? After electricity pylons and telephone cables have been removed, cars and bikers prohibited, the roads torn up? When hikers are forbidden access to trails, and kayakers, sailors and snorkelers banished from the water? When eucalyptus trees and other foreign species are eradicated? Or only after Miwok Indians' arrowheads have been excavated and placed in a museum?...

An historic Northern California oyster farm along Point Reyes National Seashore will be shut down and the site converted to a wilderness area, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday. Salazar said he will not renew the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. lease that expires Friday. The move will bring a close to a yearslong environmental battle over the site.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar rejected a proposal to extend the lease of a popular oyster farm at Point Reyes National Seashore on Thursday, effectively ending more than a century of shellfish production on the 1,100 acres where Europeans first stepped foot in California. The decision will allow the National Park Service to turn the picturesque bay where Sir Francis Drake landed more than 400 years ago into California's first federally designated marine wilderness area.

The Gazette U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Tuesday he "regrets" threatening to punch a Gazette reporter for asking him last week about problems in the government's wild horse program. Salazar visited Fountain on Nov. 6 as part of a tour through Colorado in support of President Obama's re-election campaign and Gazette reporter Dave Philipps asked him to answer a few questions on video. Philipps, a prize-winning investigative reporter, had tried to reach Salazar for months through his press secretary to comment on a story Philipps wrote for ProPublica without response. The story detailed how a Colorado man...

Gas prices have more than doubled since Barack Obama took over the White House. But that didn’t stop him from cutting off drilling in August in half of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Obama Administration planned for higher gas prices and fewer jobs through their many job-killing decisions. The Wall Street Journal reported, via FOX Nation: President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly...

Obama Administration is poised to implant a National Ocean Policy that will involve mandatory ocean and coastal zoning, led by nine regional planning bodies, overseen by a White House-led "National Ocean Council".... that last summer proposed to reduce the impacts of stressors such as resource extraction, to address (man-made) climate change. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has reversed plans for expanded offshore development, citing the National Ocean Policy Executive Order as justification. One office of (the) Administration is justifying its actions based on another office that no one knows anything about.

The decision apparently was made Friday that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would arrive at Mount Rainier National Park Monday night and visit with park staff and community partners on Tuesday. Salazar was returning from Alaska and was next scheduled to be in Milwaukee today. So the decision was made to make a visit to Mount Rainier That left his advance planner scrambling to find a place for the secretary to spend the night. She found out, like so many other tourists, that find rooms at the last minute can be difficult at best. As Salazar explained to the crowd of...

Western lawmakers are crying foul over new Interior Department guidelines that resurrect the controversial Wild Lands policy that was killed by Congress in April 2011. Bureau of Land Management manuals uncovered by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) include language nearly identical to the draft proposal put forth by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in December 2010. The “Wild Lands” policy was intended to identify and manage wilderness areas while circumventing the normal — and transparent — congressional process. Pulling manuals from the BLM site on July 31, the lawmakers compared the policies and found the new language...

Charges of cover-ups, data manipulation, and junk science; noncompliance with congressional requests and mandates; putting a chokehold on energy: Interior scandals stack up. ... Scandal-wise, congressional spotlight-wise, and perhaps soon headline-wise, is Interior Secretary Ken Salazar the new Holder? The Interior Department has become synonymous with evading congressional requests in the investigation of how the Obama administration bent scientific reports to support its drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. The department’s inspector general who was supposed to ensure oversight of that process is even being investigated herself on allegations that she tampered with a...

We've had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations ...but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1% already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90% — to pay more for what he calls "the privilege of being an American." Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children's camp costs...

Could a second Obama cabinet member be found in contempt of Congress? The possibility arose on Friday when House investigators escalated their efforts to make Interior Secretary Ken Salazar comply with a subpoena pertaining to the drilling moratorium that he imposed after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. After the spill, Salazar had released a report recommending a moratorium — a report protested by the very group of experts that it cited, who said their opinions were misrepresented in order to justify the moratorium. “For more than three months, the [Interior] Department has flouted a duly authorized and issued Congressional subpoena...

A trio of senators have won their request for an investigation into Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s inspector general regarding a potential cover-up of documents that led to the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill. Sens. David Vitter (R-La.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency in a May 24 letter to investigate the Interior Department’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall, whom they say “failed to ensure an independent, impartial and complete investigation into the Administration’s offshore drilling moratorium and...

When the steel claw of an excavator slashes into the berm of the Great Works Dam on Monday morning, it will mark the start of a multimillion-dollar project to allow endangered and dwindling species to return to their historic spawning grounds along Maine’s longest river, the Penobscot. When the project is done - scheduled for 2015, after an additional dam is razed and another bypassed - it will open access to 1,000 miles of habitat for the native fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon and short-nosed sturgeon that journey from the Gulf of Maine to breed in the cold, fresh waters...

Secretary of the Interior Salazar, on Tuesday signed the Record of Decision, for Anadarko Petroleum Corp.'s proposed Greater Natural Buttes project, in which up to 3,675 new gas wells could be developed in the existing gas producing area of Uintah County, Utah over a 10-year period. "The President is (after 3 years is) focused on expanding production of natural gas as ... cheaper and full of new jobs," said Salazar. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, praised the agreement. "We appreciate Anadarko's willingness to meet with us, listen to our concerns, and adjust its project to eliminate and mitigate impacts,"

Washington, D.C.- Nevada Senator Harry Reid issued the following statement after U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar dedicated the Silver State North Solar Project, the first large-scale solar energy project to be built on public land in Nevada: “I commend Secretary Salazar and the Obama Administration for their commitment to Nevada’s clean energy future by helping to move the Silver State North Solar Project quickly through the environmental review process. This important clean energy project will generate affordable electricity for thousands of homes with no air pollution or waste production.  Developing similar projects in Nevada should be an essential...