Free Republic

VALENTINE, Neb. – “Land: see Snatch.” On first look, the Biden Administration’s “30 x 30” plan looks like a scheme cooked up by Hedley Lamarr, the main villain from Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.” However, far from the comedic genius of the late Harvey Korman, the new Federal land grab is a serious threat to private property owners in the United States. And it’s moving fast.. Just a few days into office, President Joe Biden released a flurry of executive orders, among them being through Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” (86 Fed. Reg. 7,619), which...

The Hage family last Thursday filed a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, appealing a claims court judgment that stripped away part of their $14 million award in a suit against the U.S. Forest Service over grazing rights in Monitor Valley. Nye County Commissioner Lorinda Wichman said Tuesday she’s afraid the ruling by a court of appeals for the federal circuit overturning part of the judgment in the Wayne Hage case — that only hand tools are allowed to be used to maintain roads in the national forest — could jeopardize the $250,000 the county spent on the...

Grand County companies whose owners signed a letter to President Obama supporting federal protection for 1.4 million acres surrounding Canyonlands National Park are facing an economic boycott that some say has been spurred by the locally-based Sagebrush Coalition. The coalition’s Facebook page includes a list of local and national companies that signed the Nov. 13 letter from the Outdoor Industry Association urging Obama to create the Greater Canyonlands National Monument. ... Sagebrush Coalition president James Tibbetts ... opposes monument status for land around Canyonlands National Park because it isn’t necessary. “We’ve used it all these years and we haven’t ruined...

Utah - The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office has launched an investigation into the unlawful closing of a county road on BLM public lands. At the February 27 meeting of the County Commission, Commissioner Bruce Adams said the county claims the road and directed the county road department to destroy the berm “that has been placed in the middle of our road” and do whatever is required to make the road passable. Adams also asked that the road department track all costs on the project, in the event a citation is issued, to determine the restitution that would need to...

Richard Beardall is getting exactly what he wanted: a trespassing ticket from federal land managers for ignoring the rules and riding his ATV on a closed road in the San Rafael Swell. Beardall, three other ATV riders and a Jeep, moved a 10-foot barricade near an old uranium mine and made a half-mile roundtrip along the access road to the Muddy River on Saturday. The Bureau of Land Management closed the area to recreational vehicles in 1993 due to riparian damage, said Price, Utah-based BLM manager Roger Bankert. Beardall, president of the Americans with Disabilities Access Alliance knows that, but...

A southern Utah county has taken its fight to manage roads in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to a federal appeals court, claiming that federal officials improperly closed routes to traffic. Lawyers for Kane County argued Wednesday before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver that the county managed the roads for years before the nearly 2-million-acre monument was designated in 1996.

Anyone who reads Chapter 7 of Agenda 21, and then reads their local comprehensive land use plan will immediately recognize that most of the provisions of the local land use plan come directly from Agenda 21. More often than not, the elected officials who adopt these plans have never read Agenda 21, and many have never even heard of the U.N. document, signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1992. The facilitators and professional planners have heard about Agenda 21, but frequently claim that the plan they are working on has nothing to do with the U.N. or Agenda...

A group of concerned citizens who call themselves the Sagebrush Coalition approached the Grand County Council this week requesting help to save public access on Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service roads. “We’ve got a lot of problems in the county,” said Ray Tibbetts, a former county commissioner and member of the coalition. “We as citizens out here need your help. Everybody’s trying to close the roads on the mountains, on the public lands.” The coalition’s plea spurred on other citizens, who said they initially had no intention of addressing council, to voice their concerns about limited access...

Reporting from Camp Hale, Colo. - As soon as Renee Legro saw the sheep, she screamed. The herd, 1,300 strong, has been coming for 30 years to graze in this valley on the backside of the Continental Divide. But as Colorado has become an adventure sports destination, the once-empty valley has filled with hikers, campers and mountain bikers like Legro, and she was about to tragically embody the collision of the old West with the new. Legro, 33, screamed because she knew what came with the herd -- guard dogs. Shortly after she rolled down a hill and came upon...

When the new West is won, will there be cowboys? In light of what her neighbors are up to, Double O Ranch owner Vicki Olson isn’t so sure. “I guess the point that I keep hammering at is that if they succeed, that means all of us third- and fourth-generation ranchers are gone,” Olson said. She is the average Montana rancher, 56 going on 70, working a spread gouged from the pebbly soil by her grandparents 100 years ago. Her neighbor, the nonprofit American Prairie Foundation, is methodically acquiring ranches and crafting a 3.5-million-acre wildlife reserve out of private property...

Some Using Armed Guards, Trip Wires To Safeguard Plots. Not far from Yosemite's waterfalls and in the middle of California's redwood forests, Mexican drug gangs are quietly commandeering U.S. public land to grow millions of marijuana plants and using smuggled immigrants to cultivate them. Pot has been grown on public lands for decades, but Mexican traffickers have taken it to a whole new level: using armed guards and trip wires to safeguard sprawling plots that in some cases contain tens of thousands of plants offering a potential yield of more than 30 tons of pot a year. "Just like the...

New England’s fishing activists, including a large contingent from Gloucester, headed to Washington, D.C. Wednesday, Feb. 24 to participate in the United We Fish rally. Armed with their reasons why the regulations placed on the fishing industry should be re-examined, the Gloucester activists packed their day with meetings, and delivered their message to the open ears of Washington lawmakers. Despite the cold temps and constant threat of rain and snow, a crowd estimated at 5,000 people attended the protest. “I was impressed with the rally,” said Jack Flaherty, a Gloucester fisherman who drove to D.C. with friends. “The biggest crowd...

An inspector general's report ripped NOAA for unfairly targeting the northeast fishermen. "I don't know if you know, it but we are in panic mode," said one local fisherman. An industry in peril. Fisherman told one of the highest ranking members of NOAA who is in charge of fishing regulations that the rules are killing them. "You're going to see a lot of guys go by the wayside," said a Gloucester fisherman. "It's a shame because we put a lot of sacrifice into this, so to see it all go away is going to be a shame." Dr. Jane Lubchenco...

Grab yourself a cup of coffee and head on over to TKS for the best summation of Able Danger as things presently stand. Or stay here and I'll summarize it for you. In very, very brief summation: The 9-11 commission did know about Able Danger; some of its staff were briefed on it twice, and the information got to some but not all of the commissioners What seems increasingly likely, based on the TKS summary and others, is that the commissioners who knew of Able Danger dismissed it because its Mohammed Atta timeline didn't agree with theirs. That in and...

A News investigation of the charges before a CU panel reveals strong evidence of possible misconduct by the professor ... "You are not qualified to assess my scholarship ... I'm not going to spend the rest of my life talking about my ancestry." — Ward Churchill Shadows of doubt A News investigation finds problems in all four major areas before CU panel. The charge: Fabrication The charge: Plagiarism Did Churchill commit plagiarism by publishing the work of others as his own? Our findings: An essay he "prepared" for a book was actually taken from a Canadian scholar. The charge: Mischaracterization...

One of the nation's largest wind farms will soon be constructed... 200 giant turbines will dot the high plains landscape over a 30 square-mile area. Some will stand more than 300 feet in height. The new wind farm is expected to generate enough electricity to power more than 90-thousand homes. Headed by Greenlight Energy Inc. of Charlottesville, Virginia. Xcel Energy plans to purchase electricity from the project.

CRITICS OF PROPOSED US offshore wind farms have recently lauded efforts to develop deep-water offshore wind energy technologies that would allow wind farms to be built far from shore. They suggest that advances in research and development are proceeding at such a rapid pace that thousands of wind turbines could soon be operating off the northeast coast without encroaching on anyone's view or posing any threat to the environment. Clarification about the current state and potential of deep-water offshore wind energy appears timely. The US Department of Energy estimates the wind energy potential off the United States coast to be...