Free Republic

The Supreme Court has been under attack since the 2020 election, with protests outside the homes of judges, an unprecedented leak, and now scrutiny in the professions of family members. SCOTUS released its report earlier this month into who might have leaked the draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito concerning returning the question of abortion back to the states. The report did not find the leak, but one lawmaker has expressed an opinion on the matter.Now there is a question about the professional work of one of the justices’ wives. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife could face...

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s choice to head her transition team is stoking anger and loathing among left-wing anti-fracking activists and anti-trade groups. Clinton’s choice to handpick former Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado to lead her transition team is leaving critics of the TPP trade policy and anti-fossil fuel activists scratching their heads, as the former secretary of Interior has expressed support in the past for the trade deal and fracking. Neil Sroka, the communications director of Democracy for America, told reporters Saturday that the choice to pick Salazar does not necessarily serve as a death knell to Clinton’s...

The Loathsome Cowboy rides again. Ken Salazar, President Obama's disgraced ex-interior secretary and former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton's White House transition chair on Monday. The pick confirms that a Clinton presidency would not only be Barack Obama's third term ideologically, but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption. Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama's interior secretary in 2013 "to spend time with family," Salazar threatened violence against a local Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon hat-wearing bureaucrat's cronyism-tainted deals. At issue: How...

We now know how much Sen. Mark Udall was willing to sell Colorado out for- $15 million (give or take). The eco-extremist Tom Steyer is hoping to have a $100 million dollars to spend in just seven races this election cycle. That means if Steyer distributes his hoped for funds evenly, it only took less than $15 million dollars for Udall to choose a San Francisco eco-extremist’s wishes over what is best for Colorado ... Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is nothing but an extremist issue pushed by those on the margins of the Democratic Party. The chance to...

An example of the tension between Western Democrats and the Obama administration surfaced Monday when Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper told a rural audience that Washington bureaucrats are pushing a “slanted version” of the sage-grouse issue to political decision-makers. Mr. Hickenlooper, a Democrat who’s running for re-election in 2014, said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is receiving one-sided advice from staff at the Fish and Wildlife Service over the issue of whether to place the Gunnison sage grouse on the endangered-species list. “She has an open mind, right, she’s not well-versed in this issue, and she recognizes that,” said Mr. Hickenlooper in...

A decision this week by Shell to shutter its oil shale operation in Colorado to pursue other ventures in Jordan and Canada highlights the difficulties faced by developers in the state as they wrestle with uncertain rules under the Obama administration. Royal Dutch Shell was one of the most successful companies in the state in its efforts to develop a cost-efficient technique to extract oil from shale rock. But the final act of Ken Salazar as Interior secretary earlier this year to rewrite industry rules left companies in limbo with undeterminable royalty rates, and blocked them from obtaining leases for...

Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar made an appearance at the Steelworkers Hall in Pueblo on Sunday to speak on behalf of state Sen. Angela Giron, D-Pueblo, as her recall election campaign hits the home stretch. ... Salazar spoke to a group of about 30

A former top aide to then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is at the center of a controversy over a suspended federal water-conservation program. Rebecca R. Wodder, a senior advisor to the Interior Secretary on rivers, declined to appear before the House Natural Resources Committee Wednesday afternoon. As the hearing began, a white placard bearing Wodder’s name in black type was placed at the eastern end of a mahogany table and in front of an empty chair. “Unfortunately, the Department will be unable to send a witness to the hearing,” committee spokeswoman Mallory Micetich said an Interior Department official told the committee....

In 2005, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist threatened to end the filibuster for judicial appointments by forcing a mid-session rule change on a majority vote, an act that would have ended two centuries of precedent. Before he could act, though, the Gang of 14 arose, led by Republican John McCain, to preserve the senatorial tradition, brokering a deal that left conservatives fuming by depriving Frist of his partisan majority. Eight years later, with Harry Reid threatening to take the same action on executive-branch appointments, where is that Old Gang of Ours? According to NBC, at least McCain might be riding...

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...

Something’s amiss at the Department of Interior. Eight government scientists were recently fired or reassigned after voicing concerns to their superiors about faulty environmental science used for policy decisions. Which begs the question, “Are some government agencies manipulating science to advance political agendas?” Fictional book authors operate in a convenient world, unconstrained by facts and experiences of the real world. The antithesis of works of fiction are scientific findings solely based on provable facts and experience. For agenda-driven environmental science, facts can sometime prove inconvenient. It’s far easier to advance an agenda with agreeable science, even if that means creating...

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.

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...

The Obama administration's loathsome cowboy, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, won't take no for an answer. He's been smacked down repeatedly by federal courts for imposing a draconian, junk science-based moratorium on the oil and gas industry. Yet, the job-killing zealot and his boss just introduced another ruinous offshore drilling ban two weeks ago. The White House rationale for the renewed crackdown? Because we said so. Thomas Pyle of the D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research reports that the Salazar scheme "reinstitutes a 30-year moratorium on offshore energy exploration that will keep our most promising resources locked away until long after President...

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...

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...

What's green and blue and grabby all over? President Obama's new pressure campaign for Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that "no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to the Third World." According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the "central, and abiding, defect" was "its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states --...

“OSM tried to change the baseline assumptions that went into the job losses,” Sosa said. “They talked about averaging out the coal production over a number of years, analyzing coal production (in 2008) as if regulation was already in place. All so the numbers would seem lower.” Another source familiar with the congressional investigation into the controversy said OSM was trying to downplay job losses in order to get the rule through.