Free Republic

Former Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love earned ample support from Utah Republicans on Saturday to win her party’s nod for the House — and most likely become the GOP’s first black congresswoman.

A new report analyzing the financial ramifications of a takeover of some of Nevada’s millions of acres of federal lands suggests the state would benefit from such a transfer. A transfer of 4 million acres of U.S. Bureau Land Management land could bring in anywhere from $31 million to $114 million a year, based on a review of four Western states that have significant amounts of trust lands under their control, the report says.

Fighting to move beyond his father’s shadow, Sen. Rand Paul is crafting new alliances with the Republican Party establishment during a Northeast tour that began Friday in Boston. The 51-year-old Kentucky Republican, son of libertarian hero and former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, headlined an afternoon luncheon hosted by top lieutenants of former presidential nominee Mitt Romney—a private meeting that comes as Paul weighs a 2016 presidential bid of his own. To succeed in a national campaign, however, those close to Paul acknowledge that he must broaden his appeal beyond the tea party and libertarian-minded activists who rallied behind his father’s...

Over the past week, I had conversations with two long-time friends who are interracially married, over the ongoing controversy over gay marriage in Massachussetts and San Francisco. One is a next door neighbor in Louisiana, who is a white man married to a Vietnamese woman. The other is a black man from Seattle whom I have known since college, and he is married to a white woman from Alabama, and they are now living in Salt Lake City, Utah (we talked over the phone). Both men are very conservative Christians and very pro-family, and they feel deeply insulted when they...

Last week’s standoff at Bundy Ranch is still reverberating in Washington today. According to Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post, Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) has sent a letter to Mary Kendall, acting Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, asking her to investigate whether legislation pushed by the Koch brothers-linked American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been aimed at undermining the agency’s work.Two member affiliates of the Koch-supported Americans For Prosperity (AFP) organization gave their blessing as armed ‘Patriot’ militias showed up to confront agents of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) doing the dangerous, difficult job of removing Bundy’s trespass...

It’s time for Western states to take control of federal lands within their borders, lawmakers and county commissioners from Western states said at Utah’s Capitol on Friday. More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-, timber -and mineral-rich lands away from the feds. "It’s simply time," said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. "The urgency is now." Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was flanked by a dozen...

President Obama has warned that Iran is not open for business, even as the United States has loosened some of its punishing economic sanctions as part of an interim nuclear pact.Yet on Tuesday morning, Iran had an unlikely visitor: a plane, owned by the Bank of Utah, a community bank in Ogden that has 13 branches throughout the state. Bearing a small American flag on its tail, the aircraft was parked in a highly visible section of Mehrabad Airport in Tehran But from there, the story surrounding the plane, and why it was in Iran — where all but a...

On Tuesday morning, a plane owned in trust by the Bank of Utah showed up in a very visible area of the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What was it doing there exactly? Nobody knows, reports The New York Times. Under President Barack Obama, the United States has eased some of the long-standing punitive economic sanctions against Iran. Still, very little American — or European — economic activity is allowed inside the religious theocracy. The Bank of Utah is certainly no Wells Fargo. The Ogden-based community bank has all of 13 branches including...

A Utah businessman is rocking both state and national politics after claiming Utah Attorney General John Swallow helped him broker a deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make a federal investigation into his company quietly disappear, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Jeremy Johnson was allegedly told that the price would be $600,000, and claims to have made an initial payment of $250,000 when he was slapped with a federal lawsuit. Now he says he wants his money back. The Salt Lake Tribune points out that Johnson has no way of knowing whether the funds actually made it to...

A Pleasant View, Utah high school teacher is now on paid leave after she asked her students to come up with a bunch of slang terms for their genitalia as part of a course called “Adult Roles and Financial Literacy.” The genitalia brainstorm session occurred on Friday at Weber High School. The teacher is Ashley Williams, reports The Salt Lake Tribune. “We had some students who reported to administration that a teacher was having an exercise where they were put into groups, male and female, to come up with names for genitalia,” Weber School District spokesman Nate Taggart told the...

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz threw his support behind T.W. Shannon in Oklahoma's GOP senate primary, The Hill reported. Shannon is a former state House Speaker. This was the first primary endorsement made by Cruz, who has a strong following among tea party-aligned Republicans. The endorsement allows him to honor his pledge not to back insurgents in primaries involving Senate GOP colleagues, The Washington Post reported. Shannon is in an open primary. A special election in November will fill the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn two years before his term ends in 2016. Cruz plans to attend...

Police in Pleasant Grove, Utah, discovered over the weekend the bodies of seven dead infants in cardboard boxes, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. All seven of these babies were allegedly killed soon after being born by their own mother, a 39-year-old woman who has now been placed under arrest. The mother has been charges with six counts of murder. Police believe she committed these crimes over the course of a decade. This brutal loss of young life is shocking and deeply saddening. Yet as I read the story, I couldn’t help but consider this woman’s actions in the light of...

Warning follows threat from Harry Reid that grazing dispute 'not over' The chief of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association says his sources inside the federal government are warning that Washington’s weekend retreat in a dispute over grazing land in Nevada was just to distract and defuse – because a raid on the family’s ranch still is being strategized. And there probably would be violence involved, said Richard Mack, the former sheriff of Grisham County, Ariz. “I don’t think it would be possible” to launch a raid without violence, he told WND Monday. “I don’t the Bundys would lie...

ST. GEORGE – Gov. Brian Sandoval signed Assembly Bill 227 into Nevada law Tuesday, approving the creation of the Nevada Land Management Task Force. The signing of AB 227 makes Nevada the fifth state to look into the movement initiated by Utah lawmakers that urges the federal government to transfer management of public lands over to state control. In a press release issued by the American Lands Council, Nevada Assemblyman John Ellison, the primary sponsor of AB 227, said, “Gov. Sandoval and our state legislature have taken the first step in fulfilling our responsibility to our children and for the...

MANCHESTER, N.H. – The Republican presidential primary is up and running in New Hampshire, where conservative prospects lined up in Manchester Saturday for the first cattle call of the 2016 cycle. Speakers at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, which was sponsored by Citizens United and Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity, included Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, all of whom would be top tier presidential contenders should they run. Donald Trump also spoke. Huckabee seemed especially determined to show he could compete for conservative votes against politicians like Paul and Cruz, who have each...

FULL TITLE: 'We were worried about the children': Neighbor claims mother-of-three arrested after ex-husband discovers SEVEN dead newborns in garage battle substance abuse problem up until leaving home A Utah woman is believed by police to have killed SEVEN of her own children over the past 10 years. Megan Huntsman, 39, of Pleasant Grove, secretly gave birth to the infants, killed them and then stuffed their tiny bodies into boxes stored in the garage, police said. The skeletons in Huntsman’s closet were exposed Saturday by her ex-husband who was cleaning out the garage of a home they shared until 2011,...

The 2,500-seat Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts sold out March 31 for an appearance by Jon Huntsman as part of the Philadelphia Speaker Series. Two days later, Huntsman filled Boston Symphony Hall. Another Huntsman appearance at UCLA later this month is sold out. Without the benefit of incessant media attention some early 2016 prospects have been receiving, Huntsman’s visions and his authentic, inspiring way of conveying them has been attracting, and resonating with, capacity audiences. At the Kimmel Center, Huntsman drew laughs in lowering his hand slowly to the floor, a metaphor for the impact on his 2012 primary...

Enterprise, UT (Reuters) - A Utah county, angry over the destruction of federal rangeland that ranchers use to graze cattle, has started a bid to round up federally protected wild horses it blames for the problem in the latest dustup over land management in the U.S. :snip: Wild horse preservation groups say any attempt to remove the horses would be a federal crime. On Thursday county workers, accompanied by a Bureau of Land Management staffer, set up the first in a series of metal corrals designed to trap and hold the horses on private land abutting the federal range until...

GOP Senate candidate Ben Sasse announced Thursday he raised more than $850,000 in the first quarter of the year, significantly more than his main challenger in the race. Sasse made the announcement on Twitter. Another Republican candidate, Shane Osborn, announced earlier this week he raised more than $550,000 in the first quarter of this year. Osborn is a former state Treasurer and Navy pilot and his main rival is Sasse, who serves as president of Midland University. Last week, conservative group FreedomWorks withdrew its endorsement of Osborn and said it would support Sasse instead. They are among four GOP contenders...

In a major blow to former Republican state Treasurer Shane Osborn’s candidacy for Nebraska Senate, national conservative group FreedomWorks is withdrawing its endorsement and backing his main primary rival, Midland University President Ben Sasse, instead. At issue, FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said in a statement, is the unspoken support Osborn is believed to have from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “Both Osborn and Sasse are great people, and this was not a decision taken lightly. The question at the heart of this decision is, who would caucus with the Freedom Caucus, and who would fall in line with the...