Free Republic

Farmers in the United States have reached a breaking point. They now say that what the government has done has been so disastrous that they are willing to stand off with the Feds.Farmers in Oregon are protesting because they own the water in the Upper Klamath Lake, farmer Dan Nielsen told RT’s Ruptly video agency. He stood outside an American flag-colored tent that was set up next to the canal headgates, which control the flow of irrigation water from the lake. “It’s ours and the federal government actually just stole it. No due process of law, no compensation,” Nielsen said,...

Gov. Gavin Newsom has appealed directly to investor Warren Buffett to support demolishing four hydroelectric dams on a river along the Oregon-California border ... which would be the largest dam removal in U.S. history. The dams are owned by PacificCorp, an Oregon-based utility that is part of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate. The $450 million project would reshape California’s second-largest river and empty giant reservoirs. ... Newsom supports a 2016 agreement under which PacifiCorp would transfer its federal hydroelectric licenses for the dams to a nonprofit coalition, the Klamath River Renewal Corp., that was formed to oversee the demolition. ......

YES, Trump can send Federal agents to the States against protesters to protect Federal assets. BUSH DID!!! HOW soon we forget. Spring, 2001 Klamath Falls, Oregon. Gale Norton, head of Interior for the GW Bush Administration, shut off the water supply to hundreds of farmers in the Klamath Basin to save her nonsense Sucker Fish. She was a misguided enviromentalist of the right. Along with 20,000 patriots, we marched the streets of Klamath Falls, Oregon to protest the taking of property belonging to us. From there a few hundred took up residence at the Head gate landing of the irrigation...

A 29-mile convoy through southern Oregon, followed by a rally, followed by a direct appeal to the White House, and a decision by the Department of the Interior. That’s what it took to open up irrigation water for farmers in southern Oregon last week. It all started with one of the biggest protests you probably didn’t even notice. In a June 9 press release, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it had restored the 140,000-acre-feet of water originally promised to farmers in the Klamath Basin at the beginning of the season: Today, the Bureau of Reclamation confirmed the 2020 water...

If you were hunting waterfowl with a bow how well would you do? Would you need superior skills like Robin Hood. Ever wonder or did you have to retrieve your arrow after you missed that duck. Chances are you lost that arrow. In the early days of yesterday, the native American Indian (Klamath, Modoc tribe) hunted waterfowl with a skipping arrow. Just like tossing those thin stones where it skips across the water. These native indians did it with an arrow. If you missed the shot, the arrow can still be retrieved since it floats. One of the tactics that...

Klamath Basin Agreement proponents have lost not only their grip on reality, but also their traditional American common sense neighborly values Klamath Basin groups claiming to represent the majority of Klamath Basin residents, such as the Klamath Water Users Association (“KWUA”) and the Family Farm Alliance (“FFA”), have long perpetuated the lie that the Klamath Basin Agreements will benefit ALL Basin residents. The first two of these agreements had been initially proposed during the Bush administration in an effort assist Klamath irrigators resolve longstanding science and water delivery disputes with environmentalists and tribal communities. Now, these and several additional new...

April 6, 2016 In one of the largest river restoration efforts in the nation, state and federal officials, along with private industry, have agreed to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, potentially returning the river’s historic fish runs and advancing their recovery. The agreement, signed today by the governors of California and Oregon, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, and the president and CEO of Pacific Power, was characterized as an initial step in the long-term goal of restoring the river basin. The agreement supports efforts to recover fisheries and sustain the region’s farmers and ranchers,...

California, Oregon and the federal government are working on a way around congressional barriers to the removal of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. The states, the U.S. Interior Department and the owner of the dams, PacifiCorp, announced Tuesday that they have agreed in principle to pursue removal through the federal dam relicensing process. The move comes after a complex deal to decommission four hydroelectric dams and restore portions of the historic salmon river fell apart when Congress failed to act on a crucial piece of the pact by a Dec. 31 deadline. Republican members of Congress and local elected...

The agreement never sold well either in solidly Republican Klamath County or on the California side of the border, where the idea of removing dams and tilting the scale toward environmental and tribal purposes was regarded suspiciously. "They try to say the community is for it, and it's not true at all," said Klamath County Chairman Tom Mallams, noting that almost all successful candidates in the area run against the agreement. ... Among western Republicans, the idea of removing the dams has been viewed with great suspicion, even though the aged structures are relatively small hydroelectric producers, aren't used for...

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Klamath Falls Field office of the Lakeview District will be hosting an open house to learn about the Draft Resource Management Plan (RMP)/Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Western Oregon. The open house meeting will be held the evening of May 26, 2015, from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm at the Shilo Inn Suites Hotel located at 2500 Almond Street, Klamath Falls, Oregon. BLM employees will be on hand to answer questions, provide information and listen to concerns. There will also be a demonstration on how to use the interactive maps and other online resources...

It all started with the sucker fish. The con, that is. I can see it all now. A group of robber barons and their flunkies sitting down at a table and deciding just what ruse they will use to grab all of the water and land in the country, and for Oregon, it’s the sucker. Yes, the infamous Klamath Basin Sucker Fish. The fish that evidently, needs both high and low water levels, murky and clear water, and an overdose of federal government interference to survive, even though attempts to eradicate it have failed time and time again. It has...

Agenda 21 is alive and well in Klamath County, Oregon. Klamath Basin farmers are feeling the wrath of the Klamath Tribes in collusion with the Federal and Oregon state governments. Water is now basically off limits to ranchers unless they get approval from the tribes, and approvals are few and far between. ... The success of this plan spells disaster for not only the Klamath Basin family farmers, but for all family farmers, as it will be a precedent. Without locally grown produce and animal feed, we will be even more dependent on imported food at a much higher price....

Candidates squaring off in the Republican primary, seeking to unseat Democrat Jeff Merkley in November, all support turning Oregon federal forests over to local ownership. Jo Rae Perkins, former Linn County GOP Chair, noted 53 percent of Oregon land is owned by the federal government. “This land should not be owned by the federal government. It needs to go back to the state and back into private ownership. Let the people take care of the land,” Perkins said. “We’ve got environmentalists who don’t even live in Oregon who want to bring a lawsuit against every timber sale there is. And...

The California drought is stoking a congressional appetite for additional water storage, with new and larger dams back on competing menus.

Tens of thousands of acres in Oregon's drought-stricken Klamath Basin will have to go without irrigation water this summer after the Klamath Tribes and the federal government exercised newly confirmed powers that put the tribes in the driver's seat over water use — a move ranchers fear will be economically disastrous. Klamath Tribes Chairman Don Gentry and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Mike Connor said Monday that they were making what is known as a "call" on their water rights for rivers flowing into Upper Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon.

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...

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...

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...

The Department of Interior plans to destroy four dams on the Klamath River in Northern California so salmon can swim further than 180 miles up the river. But these dams provide water and flood protection to thousands of humans who also live along the river. Clean energy from these hydro dams supply electricity to 70,000 residents in the area. Despite a lack of scientific evidence that dam removal will help the fish, or any study on the human impact of dam removal, the DOI is pressing forward to have the dams destroyed. When their own scientist, Dr. Paul Houser, questions...

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder… The Obama Administration now wants to demolish three dams in northern California to supposedly save the salmon… But the whole reason to support the move was based on shoddy and inconclusive scientific data.