Free Republic

Former Vice President Dick Cheney can be a polarizing figure even six years out of office. The Wyoming State Bar invited Cheney, a prominent Republican with deep Wyoming ties, to be keynote speaker at its annual convention next week. Some lawyers are objecting—both to Cheney’s selection and to how the bar announced his appearance. The state bar is a quasi-governmental entity that administers the legal profession using some taxpayer money. In its announcement of Cheney’s speech, it published an unedited biography submitted by Cheney in which he criticized President Barack Obama, saying he weakened the United States’ security posture. …

More than a half-million acres of land across nine Western states is being proposed for designation as critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 546,335 acres of critical habitat is up for listing in 80 separate units in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. The bird is a neotropical migrant that winters in South America and nests along rivers and streams in western North America. ... The Service is seeking information concerning the western yellow-billed cuckoo’s biology and habitat, threats to the species and current efforts to protect...

Between 1989 and 2010, Congress rejected nearly 700 cap-tax-and-trade and similar bills that their proponents claimed would control Earth’s perpetually fickle climate and weather. So even as real world crises erupt, President Obama is using executive fiats and regulations to impose his anti-hydrocarbon agenda, slash America’s fossil fuel use, bankrupt coal and utility companies, make electricity prices skyrocket, and “fundamentally transform” our economic, social, legal and constitutional system. Citing climate concerns, he has refused to permit construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and blocked or delayed Alaskan, western state and offshore oil and gas leasing and drilling. He’s proud that...

(Reuters) - Scientists excavating an ancient Wyoming sinkhole containing a rare trove of fossils of Ice Age mammals have unearthed hundreds of bones of such prehistoric animals as American cheetahs, a paleontologist said on Friday. The two-week dig by an international team of researchers led by Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen marked the first exploration of Natural Trap Cave at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming since its initial discovery in the 1970s. Meachen said the extensive excavation that began late last month uncovered roughly 200 large bones of animals like horses that roamed North America...

Twelve states filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Friday seeking to block an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to regulate coal-fired power plants in an effort to stem climate change. The plaintiffs are led by West Virginia and include states that are home to some of the largest producers of coal and consumers of coal-fired electricity. The suit was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The other plaintiffs are Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The E.P.A. rule, announced by President Obama on June...

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - The world’s authority on Yellowstone’s Super Volcano says it’s more than twice as big as scientists once thought. Does that mean it’s more likely to blow up soon? Penny Preston found Dr. Robert Smith at his home near Grand Teton, and found the answer. Millions of people visit Yellowstone each year to see its geysers, fumeroles, hot springs, and mud pots. It’s the largest concentration of thermal features in the world. The park sits on top of the world’s largest active volcano. The Super Volcano. Its most recent eruption was more than 600,000 years ago. All...

Crescent Point’s Torquay Discovery Reignites Southeast Saskatchewan. Just when you thought The Bakken couldn’t get any better—it does. Oil producers are now “cracking the code” on the Torquay, or Three Forks formation below the Bakken, and coming up with incredible economics—these wells are paying back in only seven months. This news has completely re-invigorated the Canadian side of the Bakken. And on the US side, the Three Forks is causing industry to leap-frog estimates of the amount of recoverable oil available–by about 57%! It’s hard to imagine that the #1 oil play in all of North America could have such...

An Army veteran, who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq, barred from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at one of our nation's universities? That's sure to raise hackles on social media. Campus Reform reported on Cory Schroeder, a student senator at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and a six-year Army veteran, and his desire to recite the pledge before student government meetings. The pledge is not part of the weekly routine. Schroeder was said to have been told by "multiple" fellow senators in the Associated Students of the University of Wyoming that the subject was "very touchy" and...

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

The Mount Vernon Assembly – Indianapolis FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Skip Brown skip.brown@iga.in.gov 317-232-9521 The Mount Vernon Assembly to Meet at Indiana Statehouse June 12 and 13 INDIANAPOLIS (June 9, 2014) – More than 100 state legislators representing 33 states will meet at the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis on June 12 and 13 to continue establishing the rules and procedures needed for a future state-led convention for proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as authorized by Article V of the Constitution. The meeting is a continuation of efforts that began in December 2013 at George Washington’s historic Mount Vernon estate...

There is little doubt among the students in Brandon Cone’s engineering class at Campbell County High School that a war is being waged against coal. The children of the mechanics who fix the mines’ great diesel trucks, the welders who staff their machine shops and the railroad employees who see the final product shipped across the country and beyond have obvious pride in the local industry. “We power a lot of the country just from Gillette,” said Corey Silver, a junior whose father works at the Cordero Rojo mine, a comment widely echoed by his peers. The students’ pride in...

Members of the Small Business Committee in the House of Representatives urged the Environmental Protection Agency to go back to the drawing board on a proposed rule aimed at clarifying bodies of water that fall under the Clean Water Act. In March, the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed a rule to define what “waters of the United States” fall under federal jurisdiction. The rule would include smaller bodies of water including streams, riverbanks, wetlands and floodplains that may have access to larger bodies of water. Republican lawmakers have opposed the rule since its inception, saying the...

On Sunday May 19th, storm chasers captured a low precipitation (LP) supercell near Newcastle, Wyoming. A supercell is a thunderstorm that is associated with a mesocyclone, which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Supercell thunderstorms can persist for many hours and are responsible for nearly all of the significant tornadoes produced in the U.S.

When Andy and Katie Johnson built a pond on their property in 2011 to provide water for their cattle, they never dreamed it would result in threats of $75,000 a day in fines from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Johnsons believed they had done everything necessary to get permission for the pond, where the tiny Six Mile Creek runs through their property south of Fort Bridger, Wyo. The Wyoming State Engineer's Office provided the permit and even stated in an April 4, 2013 letter to the Johnsons: "All of the legal requirements of the State Engineer's Office, that were your...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sitting in the headquarters of the Wyoming Liberty Group, Susan Gore, founder of the conservative think tank, said new national science standards for schools were a form of “coercion,” adding, “I don’t think government should have anything to do with education.” Ms. Gore, a daughter of the founder of the company that makes Gore-Tex waterproof fabric, was speaking here weeks after the Republican-controlled Legislature made Wyoming, where coal and oil are king, the first state to reject the standards, which include lessons on human impact on global warming. The pushback came despite a unanimous vote by a...

...About 83 percent of the land identified for the project is privately owned, the companies' proposal said. The federal government owns the mineral rights under about 65 percent of the land, the plan said. The other owners of mineral rights are described only as non-federal entities. The project could hurt the struggling sage grouse population in the area, Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with WildEarth Guardians, said in a press release.

Yesterday, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki declared himself “mad as hell” over the allegations of wait-list fraud in Phoenix, where 40 veterans passed away before accessing medical assistance while the office falsified records. Shinseki also pronounced himself saddened by the consequences of the VA’s failures, and pledged to get to the bottom of them — and allegations at five other offices that arose from other whistleblowers ... At nearly the same time as Shinseki testified yesterday, the Ocala News (Florida) reported that a seventh VA office in Gainesville had discovered a secret wait list that had 200 veterans waiting for medical...

Denver officials plan to deploy as many as 70 snowplows to prepare for the Monday commute. A powerful spring storm dropped more than a foot of sloppy, wet snow in parts of Colorado and Wyoming on Mother’s Day, causing crashes and leading to road closures, and forecasters warned that conditions could get worse as temperatures plummeted overnight.

Wyoming is the first state to reject adopting new K-12 science standards proposed by national education groups. The Wyoming Board of Education decided recently that the Next Generation Science Standards need more review after questions were raised about how the standards address man-made global warming. Wyoming is the nation’s leading coal producing state. …

The American coal industry is accusing the Obama administration of using the Environmental Protection Agency to end the use of coal despite the president's claim of having an "all of the above" energy policy. ... the EPA's MATS rules, which go into effect in January 2016, will devastate coal production in America and .. about 60 gigawatts of coal-fired generation coming off-line .. One of Monseu’s issues is the way she said the administration is targeting coal, which currently fuels around 40 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. "Increasingly we face a situation where policy is dictated not...