Posts Tagged → Obama
Obama kicks land conservation in the n*ts
Despite having spent my career in environmental protection, conservation, and especially land conservation, I am always non-plussed when someone waves a magic wand, declares some government-managed public land off-limits, and then calls it “conservation.”
I love land acquisitions for public parks, forests, and hunting areas. Adding to the existing roster of public lands gives us more flexibility with existing areas, more chances to explore multiple use.
In the past couple of weeks lame duck president Hussein Obama has waved a magic executive wand over millions of acres of federally managed lands out west, and declared them national monuments. Obama did not work with land trusts or ranchers to purchase conservation easements or fee simple land out west, thereby adding to the total acreage available for public use. No, instead, Obama did there what he has basically done in the Middle East.
He dropped a turd in the punch bowl, and left the party.
Except Obama is so arrogant, he claims it is a big success.
Nothing damages land conservation more than unilateral actions by Washington, DC, about resource-rich lands specifically purchased to support and benefit the American people. All of them. The magic wand executive-heavy procedure just alienates so many people, you have to wonder if it is by design.
After all, recall that under Obama, the IRS made war on land trusts and conservancies. Silly rules and regulations were enacted making land purchases and tax-exempt gifts and appraisals much more difficult to do across America. My own belief is Obama hates most Americans, and especially people with land, whom he equates to colonists of some sort. So he set out to punish them. All those rich land trusts run by wealthy white people…mmm mmm mmmmmm, no good. Waaaayyy too much “privilege.”
And so as much as Obama is giving a black eye to real land conservation, he is actually doing this to hurt the people he mistakenly equates with the racist notion of “white privilege.”
He is also doing what he did best, which is rule by fiat, like the tyrant he wanted to be and like those he relates to best elsewhere, like Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Waving the executive magic wand is ruling by fiat. In this day and age, every acre of federally managed land out west has some political land mine under it. You only start kicking it around if you want to stir things up. What a coward and home wrecker he is to stir it up and walk away.
I think Obama enjoyed kicking land conservation in the n*ts. Regardless of the damage it does to land trusts and valuable land conservation programs down the road. It is part of his scorched earth legacy as he leaves the White House.
The Sad Situation in Standing Rock
A person must be cold blooded to not at least feel sad for the Standing Rock folks.
This is a group of ancient people who have watched their culture, lifestyle, property, and land heritage melt away under the weight of newer tribes. They really don’t have much left, and now a pipeline threatens to take away even more.
The Dakota Access pipeline is important, heck, all the new pipelines are important because energy independence is critical to American political independence. The more America can rely on domestic energy, the less we need foreign sources of energy. The less we depend on those foreign sources, the freer we are to make tough but necessary decisions about domestic and foreign policy.
What saddens me is the win-lose situation in Standing Rock. The pipeline is presented as a take-it-or-leave-it outcome. Surely there is some other way to resolve this, other than ramming it through. After all, that has been a hallmark of the failed Obama administration and their legislative allies on so many other policy fronts, ramming decisions down everyone’s throats. It is a negative way to run government. It unnecessarily creates winners and losers.
Creating winners and losers is a recipe for serious problems down the road. Resentment runs deep. Grudges are created. Losses are forever mourned.
I know from experience that the Standing Rock situation presents us with an opportunity to create winners and winners.
How well do I recall sitting in a conference room at my office in downtown Harrisburg in 2001. Gathered around the table were representatives from Audubon, Sierra Club, recreational ATV riders, hunters, trail hikers, and the timber industry.
I had successfully negotiated the purchase of a privately owned 12,500-acre inholding in the huge Sproul State Forest from the Litke family. Donna Litke was a neat Pennsylvanian who loved her family’s rugged wilderness land in the northcentral country, but who also had a fiduciary commitment to her family to get the best financial results possible from any purchase. Her private land would become public land after we acquired it.
But Everyone wanted the whole property for their own interests. Or they wanted to block their political opponents from getting something out of it.
After hearing all the crabbing from all sides, left and right, environmental groups and industry, I decided that we would not acquire the property unless everyone got something out of the deal. Everyone needed to share in the success, or else we were not going to see the deal close.
So the day we sat down with a map of the Litke land, and began to discuss where certain activities could or would best take place, was the day we began to get to a win-win outcome. In the end every interest group got something out of the acquisition. Audubon and Sierra Club saw certain sensitive lands there set aside as natural and wild areas, where logging, road building, and gas drilling would not occur. We created a 1,400-acre ATV riding area on reclaimed and unreclaimed coal mining land there, too, the first one on public land in Pennsylvania, which today has generated substantial economic activity in ultra-rural Beech Creek.
Much of the Litke forest was set aside as “plain vanilla” State Forest, where people can walk, hike, camp, hunt, trap, fish, and cut timber. The streamside railway that came with it became an important rail-trail, drawing tourists (and their dollars) from far and wide.
And I did not learn how to do this cold. Rather, in 1995 to 1996, I had successfully used the same approach in the Middle East Peace Process agricultural projects in Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank when I was at US EPA, representing our agency in the diplomatic process.
Boy, you talk about competing interests! There was no shortage there, but in the end I was dubbed “Little Kissinger” for the sidebar negotiations I created, which got the overall projects back on track. Winners and winners.
My hope is Standing Rock will provoke the best in us. Barack Hussein Obama did nothing to help the folks there, until two weeks ago he made a purely political and symbolic decision against the pipeline. Obama has always been about winners and losers, heck he enjoys creating losers, so who can be surprised by his action here. Like everywhere else over his eight-year tenure, Obama squandered an opportunity to facilitate competing interests find common ground.
And that is what needs to happen at Standing Rock: Common ground.
Aren’t there potential solutions to this standoff that are win-win? I can think of three or four potential solutions that would probably be acceptable to the main parties.
We have a new president who understands the concept and importance of win-win outcomes. Hopefully President Trump appoints a solid and good-faith negotiator to resolve the head-on collision at Standing Rock, for everyone’s benefit.
Winners and winners.
Tinker Toys & Lincoln Logs
Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs are kids’ toys, used to teach elementary building concepts to little kids. The laws of physics are a core component of those lessons.
Apparently these basic rules have been forgotten by a huge portion of Americans when they are applied to building a nation.
America provides more liberty, freedom, and opportunity to more individuals from more walks of life than any other nation. The way it does that is through a carefully constructed and delicately balanced arrangement of written laws and social norms.
No house of cards, America is nonetheless like any human society. It’s relatively fragile, easily upset, prone to mistakes.
So what is up with the Black Lives Matter anarchists and their many enablers carefully positioned around the racist movement’s periphery. Don’t these people recognize that if you make war on all police officers, whose job it is to keep our society from literally falling apart, the basic underpinnings can come out?
Students of history wonder aloud about Nazi Germany, how such a refined and materially successful culture fell so quickly, to be replaced by the lowest savagery. Well, societal failure can happen anywhere. It can happen here in America, too, if serious citizens do not work hard to teach to newcomers and next generations the basics of what it takes to make this place run so well.
Instead, one political party is dedicated to a culture of anarchy, false grievance, and Santa Claus – like gifting of everything from cell phones to houses, gratis the over-taxed American taxpayer. BLM has had the backing of Obama and most of the members of his party.
This means one of two major American parties is dedicated to America failing. Perhaps this is the “transformation” Obama spoke of, but let’s face it: This is a recipe for wall to wall catastrophe.
America is like a bank account. You only get to take from it what you put into it. A culture of taking, taking, taking and demanding and foot-stomping is a giant withdrawal from the bank account. To the point where the account is becoming overdrawn.
Put another way, America is like a carefully arranged assortment of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. Once the bottom most foundational principles are removed, the whole thing will crash down.
Please don’t take America for granted. She can only sustain so many overdrafts and big withdrawals from her account before she fails. Lend a hand and keep the underpinnings held together. Vote for the only presidential candidate who can and will do that, Donald Trump.
And yes, I think it is sad that he is the smartest, most capable kid in the playroom. But that is the fact. Trump is not arguing against the laws of physics
It is time to beatify Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was the household name for lying scoundrel for about three decades.
The brilliant but personally flawed president secretly recorded White House goings-ons and had his fingerprints on a DNC office burglary. All in the name of politics. Nixon wanted to win and he wanted his opponents to lose. Despite numerous foreign and domestic policy achievements of note, Nixon obsessed over things great people are supposed to overlook.
Nixon was caught, and while facing a firestorm of media-driven criticism, he resigned. To avoid likely impeachment. By his own party.
Fast forward to now. Nixon was an amateur compared to the criminal behavior of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whose legacy now includes an actual Midnight Massacre in broad daylight in order to shield Hillary Clinton from criminal prosecution.
Anyone interested in facts can go read up on the Obama administration’s obsession with punishing government employees mishandling and revealing government secrets. Obama has been on a real anti-openness jihad. Little people of no great political consequences are in jail as a result.
But Hillary Clinton walks free, in an in-your-face politically motivated cover-up of her misdeeds while at the US Dept. of State.
Here’s the lesson: A lot of people have no shame, and they are ruthless. They want power over others, at all costs, and they and their friends will do whatever it takes to get there.
Nixon resigned. Obama would never resign. He will continue to smirk arrogantly in the face of the American citizenry, while a weak shell of a political opposition makes small noises in protest. All that evil needs to triumph is for good people to do nothing, and right now a lot of Americans are simply looking the other way. They let Obama and Clinton do whatever they want, with no consequences.
This is political absolutism, by Obama and by his enablers; it is not the rule of law. If the American people will not assert themselves now, free and clear of vague party affiliations, then this nation, as it was conceived, is doomed, and so is individual liberty along with it.
Meanwhile, Richard Nixon looks like a saint.
Memorial Day, aka Thank You Day
How Americans came to take their success and security for granted is a mystery. It is also dangerous, because much was lost to gain what we now are giving away for free, as if it is ours to give away at all.
Our security belongs to future citizens.
Are so many of our citizens really eyeballs deep in TV entertainment, to the point where they ignore the real problems around us?
All of the happiness, wealth, success, security we enjoy are attributable to mostly men who risked and sacrificed their lives and limbs that the rest of us can BBQ in the back yard in peace.
Obama’s apology to Japan for the US winning the brutal war that Japan started is representative of the weak and shallow thinking dominant in America today. It passes for “thoughtful,” but it is disrespectful to our servicemen who sacrificed for us.
On Monday, Americans officially remember the many men, and a few women, who gave everything so that our daily lives can be enjoyed peacefully. I thank you, each and every one of you, for what you did for me and my family.
This weekend is devoted to those departed and wounded servicemen.
In their honor, fly the flag, or salute it, or have your family say the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag as part of our collective remembrance and thanks. These are tokens of respect and appreciation.
Every action leads to opposite reaction
As anti-freedom gun-grabbers continue on in their march for government supremacy over the citizenry, they seem surprised when that same citizenry reacts.
Take Barack Hussein Obama, for example. Like Rapist-In-Chief Bill Clinton before him, Obama’s anti gun crusading has driven millions of Americans to either buy guns for the first time, or to buy even more guns and ammunition than they had before.
As the federal government and its Big Government allies in the mainstream media, academia, and activist groups amplify their assaults on citizen liberties, the citizens begin to coalesce into like-minded groups. In the beginning of America these were known as militia. Today they are simply loosely knit groups of advocates for the First Amendment, Second Amendment, and Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution. They are reacting to the illegal and unconstitutional pressures being brought to bear on them collectively and individually, pressures under the color of “law.”
Today I watched as Shira Goodman and a bearded man with her walked around the crowd in the Pennsylvania State Capitol rotunda, where the annual Second Amendment rally was held. Shira and I have debated on live TV before. She represents CeaseFirePA, an anti-freedom and Big Government group. I imagine she was counting the number of people at the rally. It is true that the number of people at any given rally are an indication of the political strength they represent.
The place was packed. From top to bottom, side to side, you could barely move. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people today. Contrast that with the 25 people who showed up for CeaseFirePA’s rally two weeks ago.
Shira looked sallow and grim faced. The bearded man with her looked frightened, and he tightly clutched some case he was carrying.
We rally participants were fired up, and when one of the speakers (Rep. Daryl Metcalf, I think) pointed out that today we had shown up unarmed, and rue the day when we do show up armed, we loudly roared our support.
The political Left has been on an anti-America warpath for so long that it appears they do not realize how far they are pushing so many citizens. For decades normal Americans have conceded little and big victories to the Left, often with a sense of resignation that “things are changing.”
What is different about the gun issue, now, and different about now versus twenty years ago, is that an entire two generations of Americans have watched the Big Government Left practically swamp the average citizen.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. The less our liberties and freedoms, the fewer our rights.
In a nation like America, based on laws and citizenship, the Left’s policy wins are increasingly perpendicular to the trajectory of America the nation and most of its citizens.
That is “the silent majority.”
Yes, it is true that millions of invaders have been ushered in by treasonous Federal servants, in an effort to tilt the vote balance forever in the favor of one Santa Claus after another, dispensing free things paid for by hard working taxpayers.
But the real result is a deep and building undercurrent of resentment. Call it the “Tea Party,” conservative movement, whatever, it is a groundswell of formerly free citizens fearful of losing the America they love and worked hard to create.
Statists like Shira Goodman and her friends at CeaseFirePA are so completely devoted to Big Government that they cannot comprehend a citizen rebellion. Like a horse, their blinders are so big that they cannot see what is happening around them. Sure, Marxists like Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center, another anti-freedom, anti-Christian outpost, are constantly cited by their Left friends in the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets. But that cat is out of the bag, and putting it back in is not going to happen without a hell of a fight and lots of scratches.
One wishes that all these crusading pushers would leave the citizens alone, so that we can go back to our lives, liberty, and pursuit of our happiness. But it ain’t gonna happen. These guys will just keep on pushing until the citizens have nowhere to turn.
And then look out.
Going where no Western man has gone before
Each day this past week I have waited for the other-other shoe to drop. And sure enough, each day some new incomprehensible surprise greeted us.
Obama’s most endearing trait is his public persona. His smoothness. His likeability. But what has come out more in the past week than in the past six years is how treacherous Obama is, how deliberately two-faced he is, how big of a blatant liar he is, how evil he is and how intent he is upon tearing down America and replacing it with…God knows what.
In his rapprochement with genocidal Iran and his war on Western Civilization Israel, Obama is dragging the United States into a place no Western human has ever gone before: Down.
Obama is dragging all of us into an abyss from which our nation will not climb out, if Iran gets to own nuclear bombs. And it is clear that Obama wants Iran to have them, just as it is clear that he resents Israel having them (note the release of Israel’s deepest nuclear secrets by Obama’s Pentagon this week).
Odd as it is, Obama’s supporters still include most American Jews, whose recent brushes with genocide would under normal circumstances remind them to place their sympathies elsewhere. However, political correctness is the new religion of the people formerly known as American Jews, and political correctness demands utter fealty to The Human One, whomever that may be at any given time, not The One who created Heaven and Earth. This is a sad development because so much of America’s intelligentsia is represented by the people formerly known as American Jews, such as academia and the media.
In going Down, instead of on the Upward trajectory Western Civilization has carried all of us over the past thousand years, minorities are most likely to suffer badly, one way or the other. One of the largest minorities in America today are Caucasians. How will they fare under the new America? Will there be a place for them? Will faux “White Guilt” force them to become willing slaves? Are they becoming that already, working as they do to support a tax-heavy government intent on wiping away their free speech and self-defense rights?
So many have placed their trust in a Muslim Marxist, whose mask is beginning to fall away, and yet they hope, in vain, that the dirty deeds he does now will not really exist later on. That’s the hope they voted for.
Just as surely as you can keep your doctor and your health plan, you can bet on everything working out just fine, folks. That’s the change we got.
Obama Administration bears responsibility for ambush of two cops
In Ferguson Missouri late last night, two police officers were ambushed and shot. Both are in critical condition.
Just last week the Obama Administration’s Department of Injustice issued an outrageous, cockamamie “report” that accused the Ferguson police force of racism, despite a lack of evidence to support such a claim. This was outgoing radical Attorney General Eric Holder’s gift to racists everywhere, who have tried to leverage every single justified police shooting into a judgment of American society at large.
Holder’s report gives succor to those who blame everyone but themselves for their problems, and it provides political cover for the Black Panther-type militarism that is sweeping large segments of America’s urban populations. The logic of Holder’s activism is this: If the police force is so racist, then it’s no crime to go out and shoot police.
We saw the same exact dynamic and result when New York City Mayor DeBlasio accused the NYCPD of being a bunch of racists, and then two police officers were immediately ambushed and killed by a racist thug who used DeBlasio’s own words to justify his actions.
Obama has introduced radicalism into every aspect of government action. He has filled senior government posts with people who have had a long history of militating against America as it was founded, constantly judging everyone around them, constantly harassing and accusing everyone around them, and this is just one more piece of evidence that Obama is at war with American citizens.
The blood of these two officers is on the hands of Barack Hussein Obama and Eric Holder.
My heart goes out to these two brave police officers; may they recover soon and completely.
What if concerned citizens blocked the FCC vote tomorrow?
What if concerned citizens went to the FCC headquarters and blocked the five members from meeting there and holding a quorum?
What if the American citizenry decided that they had had enough of Obama’s lawlessness, and they determined the only way to keep the FCC from taking over the Internet was to #OccupyFCC?
What happens when the FCC takes over the Internet, the FEC begins regulating what is posted on the Internet, and the government continues to dispense “waivers” to its regulations like it has with ObamaCare, except that in the case of the Internet the establishment legacy media are allowed to continue on in their partisan way, and everyone else must obey or be severely punished?
Will armed citizens storm the FCC building and take it over, or destroy the hard drives controlling the Internet, to get their freedom back?
These are dangerous times indeed. A lawless takeover of America is rapidly occurring on many fronts, with government coercion and control behind all of it. Americans in the past have not responded well to this sort of power grab. And by bringing in a tidal wave of illegal aliens to vote themselves more of our hard-earned tax money, well, that is the recipe for war. In fact, there are historic precedents for this throughout human history, where alien nations used surreptitious control from behind the throne to take over a competing nation they could not vanquish through warfare.
Obama did not love the America he became president of in 2008, there is no question about that. He is seeking to fundamentally transform America into something else, completely deviating from its founding principles, the principles that made our nation great and a beacon of freedom and hope.
To be fair, Obama is being aided by the weakest group of elected officials in our nation’s history. The Republicans in Congress are obsessed with their own personal power and prestige, their long careers, not with staying true to our Constitution, or to good government, or freedom of speech.
To quote many of my good friends, this situation is “unsustainable.”
The end of the Internet as metaphor
As intriguing as the thought of artificial intelligence may be, the truth is always so much more prosaic and humble.
The last frontier and the only real outpost of true free speech, the Internet was never broken, it needed no fixing. And yet the Obama administration, through the FCC and FEC, is planning on regulating it like a utility and then regulating its content.
If you have a website, like this blog, you will have to apply for a license, just like a radio or TV station. Imagine some government bureaucrat not liking the message of smaller, more accountable government on this or similar websites, and then not issuing the necessary license to have it in the first place. Your free speech, my free speech, is shut off, shut down, by the very government that is supposed to guarantee the First Amendment.
That is the FCC role.
And then if I write things that are supportive of one candidate over another, it’ll count as an in-kind contribution to that candidate’s campaign. Imagine an army of government bureaucrats monitoring free speech on the Internet, and writing down and tabulating what people say and write on their blogs as campaign contributions.
That is the FEC proposal, and it is none too supportive of free speech, either.
And mind you, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other establishment and legacy media will all get passes. They can continue to be active arms of one particular political party, and their writings, their endorsements, will not count as in-kind campaign contributions.
While all this government interference and control in our private lives seems insane to the normal freedom-loving American, it is, in fact, what is happening right now. “Net neutrality” sounds, well, neutral, and it is anything but that.
Tempting as it is to say “And then add this to the IRS political suppression and NSA spying scandals…,” the truth is that few people seem to care, no matter what Obama does. Americans are willingly giving up their freedoms, their control of government, their tax money, their security, to a man who clearly does not like America as it has been founded and run since 1776.
Apparently, government control of Internet content and our individual personal lives fits into that general malaise. Sad.
What is even sadder is that so many people so much want one particular party to have complete control that they will do all of this, plus grant amnesty to illegal aliens to overrun the established voters who built the nation. None of this is sustainable. No nation can withstand this.