Free Republic

<p>By Emily Gurnon -- Bee Correspondent - (Published May 5, 2002) More than two years after anti-logging protester Julia "Butterfly" Hill descended from her redwood tree home, the Pacific Lumber Co. said it is gearing up for a new set of clashes around its plans to log in certain areas of Humboldt County.</p>

Hinton, West Virginia: Same Old Government Land Grab More Articles April 30, 2002 By Tom DeWeese Hinton, West Virginia, is a small rural community of approximately 5,000 people. Most residents have lived their entire lives in the town or surrounding countryside. Many live in the same houses built by long-departed relatives. Hinton is paradise and they don’t care to live anywhere else. Ann Roach is a new comer. Just a few years ago she discovered Hinton while on a "Mystery Tour" aboard an Amtrak train journeying through the countryside to view the Fall foliage in the valley of the New...

<p>As if home prices weren't high enough, an upcoming rule regulating radon in drinking water might raise the cost of your next home. Oddly, a provision of the 1996 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act enables the Environmental Protection Agency's drinking water office get in the business of regulating indoor air quality.</p>

<p>A professional society of wildlife biologists is investigating its members who submitted false samples of lynx hair during a national study to determine whether the actions violated ethical standards.</p> <p>The Wildlife Society will examine the actions of three federal and state employees who submitted samples from captive and stuffed cats for laboratory DNA analysis. The lynx is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.</p>

This week’s eco-horror claim is that the most commonly used herbicide in North America supposedly deforms the sex organs of frogs. "Male frogs exposed to very low doses of a common weed killer can develop multiple sex organs, sometimes male and female, researchers in California have discovered," the Associated Press reported this week. A University of California team led by Dr. Tyrone Hayes reported in the April 16 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concentrations of the herbicide atrazine as small as 0.1 part per billion caused the deformed sex organs. But let’s hold off on worrying about kissing...

We have seen the results of ignoring early signs of terrorist threats; why are we now disregarding the growing danger of eco-terrorism? For years Islamic terrorists attacked Americans throughout the world, and we failed to heed the warning signs: the bombings of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, of our embassies in Africa in 1998, of the USS Cole in 2000, of the World Trade Center in 1993. This past Sept. 11 they provided undeniable evidence of their destructive hatred. As we combat them abroad, however, we must recognize the deadly threat posed by another homegrown source—one that since 1996...

<p>Once upon a time in the Land of Make Believe, a man named Scott Angus says he spotted a turtle basking in the late afternoon sun.</p> <p>After picking up the animal and seeing its reddish, orange legs and the small pyramid-shaped designs on its shell, Angus concluded the critter was no ordinary turtle, but a wood turtle -- a threatened species in New Jersey.</p>

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Thomas Jefferson. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." Hosea 4:6 "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." George Washington. "The First Rule of Cheating is - - Don't Get Caught." Well, what happens when Green militants invade government, bend official policy to promote Gaia paganism, use government money and police power to enforce green corruption, hide their agenda from the public through media complicity, and then get caught?...

There is no evidence that Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) employees who charged Lin Drake of Cedar City, Utah, with violating the Endangered Species Act (ESA) ever heard this poem: “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.” Nonetheless, the poem encapsulates their case against Mr. Drake. For it was those employees who saw prairie dogs on Drake’s property, prairie dogs that were never there and that have, mysteriously, gone away. In January 1995, Drake bought property in nearby Enoch, Utah, intending to develop a...

In December 2001, The Washington Times reported that employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had planted lynx fur on rubbing posts in two national forests in Washington State to make it appear as if lynx were there in order to compel closure of those forests. Western U.S. Representatives were livid; Congressman Scott McInnis (R-CO), Chairman of the House Forests and Forest Health Subcommittee, launched a congressional investigation. Months later the story is still making news, most recently when environmental groups defended the FWS employees and attacked the investigation as “a witch hunt.” Days ago, The Washington Post...

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the real threats to our nation has been a reduction in the media coverage of the endless end-of-the-world scenarios put forth by the vast network of environmental organizations, the Greens. On March 22nd, buried in those newspapers that published the story, was an article by Paul Recur, the Associated Press science writer. He reported that scientists at the Lament-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York had teamed with colleagues from the Swiss Federal Research Institute to publish a study that noted that whatever warming is predicted is perfectly natural. The report...

Nearly one quarter of the 55 species at the heart of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan haven't been documented recently in Pima County. Only eight creatures on the county's "priority vulnerable" list are considered endangered by the federal government. And 15 of the 55 species are types of talus snail - a sexually ambiguous mollusk that may lie dormant in rock slides for more than a year. The list of 55 species - which is guiding the county's proposed wildlife preserves and land use restrictions - is made up of plants and animals that most Tucsonans will never see. Is...

For you hunters and outdoors people, Friday night will be interesting. 20/20 will air a report concerning the Lynx hoax perpatrated by none other than extreme activists employed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In an attempt to shut down huge tracts of Western Forests to outdoorsman and loggers, these so called biologists planted lynx hair in their specimen traps while supposedely doing species studies. Since a Lynx would be considered endangered, that would shut down all areas to road travel. These whackos actually obtained Lynx hairs from taxidermy-mounted specimens of Canadian and Alaskan Lynxs. A strong supporter...

<p>P.T. Barnum allegedly once observed, "A sucker is born every minute." He would have doubled that estimate if he had heard about the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Quadrupled it if he had heard how Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) agents applied on the Oregon-Northern California border last summer. Those agents turned off irrigation taps for Klamath Basin's drought-stricken farmers in the belief that low water levels would cause "irreparable damage" to the three threatened/endangered species of fish — the Lost River sucker, the shortnose sucker, and the Klamath Basin coho salmon — that reside therein.</p>

<p>Forest Service officials knowingly used faulty data of spotted owl habitat to block logging in a California forest, according to court documents obtained by The Washington Times.</p> <p>The Forest Service did not have a "rational basis" for halting the timber sale to Wetsel-Oviatt Lumber Company, said the previously undisclosed ruling by Federal Claims Court Judge Lawrence S. Margolis.</p>

<p>As Congress foams at the mouth over financial fraud perpetrated on Enron shareholders and employees, it’s allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to perpetrate a much more costly fraud on all of us.</p> <p>"Study Ties Pollution, Risk of Lung Cancer" proclaimed the Washington Post in a front-page, above-the-fold headline this week. "Soot particles strongly tied to lung cancer, study says" blared the New York Times. "The results are likely to influence political debate and lead to tougher regulations," reported the Wall Street Journal.</p>

Washington (CNSNews.com) - As concerns about eco-terrorism mount on Capitol Hill, there is more finger-pointing aimed at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which admits to having provided financial support to a group allegedly connected to the terrorism.But while PETA acknowledges that some of its money has in the past gone to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and to the legal defense funds for several Animal Liberation Front (ALF) members, the organization denies that any of its money "goes toward illegal activities."The ELF and ALF are both loosely knit underground organizations that have taken responsibility for acts of ...

<p>Committee Republicans expressed incredulity at the news that the US Fish and Wildlife Department biologist and others in his agency subsequently received merit bonuses and that the Forest Service officials got only ''verbal counseling'' - essentially a stern talking-to.</p> <p>''The fact that these malfeasant bureaucrats got ... a pat on the back after engaging in totally unethical conduct is, in my estimation, a singular outrage,'' said Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican. ''At the end of the day, it says a great deal about the cultural mindset of the two agencies.''</p>

<p>The General Accounting Office reported yesterday that government scientists knew they should not have submitted falsely labled samples into a national lynx survey and that some supervisors were aware but took no action.</p> <p>"They all admitted they knew it wasn't in the protocol, they weren't allowed to do this," said Ronald Malfi, acting managing director of the GAO office of special investigations.</p>

See Part 1 of series: The Green Matrix. I don't think any story on any issue has been as frustrating to me as the investigation into the manipulation of data in "the case of the missing Canadian lynx." It is frustrating because the dots are all there but the investigating agencies of the federal government – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, Interior Department, Office of the Inspector General, Government Accounting Office, up to and including the Department of Justice – just can't put it all together. The dots connect to a bigger scandal that involves how the federal ...