Newspaper column: Federal judge slaps down federal land agents

In a scathing 104-page opinion a Nevada federal judge lambasted the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service for behavior that “shocks the conscience” of the court, accusing federal officials of attempting to bankrupt the Hage family ranch by entering into “a literal, intentional conspiracy to deprive the Hages not only of their permits but also of their vested water rights.”

The Hage family, which owns the Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah, has been waging a court battle with the federal agencies for 22 years.

A couple of weeks ago Nevada Federal District Court Judge Robert Jones handed down an opinion in U.S. v. Estate of Wayne E. Hage (U.S. v. Hage). The judge did find that Hage cattle had in fact trespassed on federal land and ordered Wayne N. Hage — son of the late E. Wayne Hage who died in 2006 and Jean Hage who died in 1996 — to pay $165.88 in damages, as reported in this week’s newpaper column available online at The Ely Times and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Wayne Hage, left, his son Wayne N. Hage, and young Hage niece, Kristin, in 1999 during branding at Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah, Nev. (Photo by Ramona Hage)

During the course of the trial, according to Jones, the government invited others to apply for grazing permits on allotments held by the Hages, applied with the Nevada State Engineer for its own watering rights in an effort to interfere with the Hages’ rights, and issued trespass notices and demands for payment to witnesses soon after they testified in this case.

The judge ordered Hage to apply for a permit and for the federal agencies to grant it. He also enjoined the government from issuing trespass or impound notices to Hage.

In 1986, Hage stopped applying for special use permits to maintain his water sources and ditches on federal land, arguing he had an “absolute right” under Nevada water law to maintain them.

In 1991, the Forest Service twice impounded Hage’s cattle. When he could not get them back by paying the cost of impoundment, the government auctioned the cattle for $39,000 and kept the proceeds — a bit more than $165.88.

That year, Hage filed suit claiming a “taking” of his property rights under the Fifth Amendment.

At one point in the many iterations of the Hage litigation a federal court awarded the Hages $2.9 million for the taking of their water rights under the Fifth Amendment and $1.4 million in statutory compensation for improvements made in connection with the revoked grazing permit. With interest the total award amounted to $14.2 million. And that was four years ago.

An appellate court vacated the award, saying the case was not yet “ripe” because the Hages had failed to continue filing for grazing permits, even though it would have been a futile gesture.

The Fifth Amendment “takings” case has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is scheduled to decide this month whether to hear it.

Considerably more than $165.88 is at stake.

Read the entire column at the Ely or Elko websites.

 

Tea party members are fair game, but mosques are not?

We now know that tea party affiliated groups and like-minded conservatives who tried to qualify for tax-exempt status with the IRS were singled out for extra scrutiny.

Boston Mosque attended by the Tsarnaev brothers.

And while every phone call in the country and every computer keystroke is being monitored, we now learn that Muslim mosques are being singled out for no scrutiny at all.

According to an Investor’s Business Daily editorial today, mosques are off-limits. No more surveillance. No sting operations.

Since September 2011, such operations must be OK’d by a special secret panel.

IBD reported:

“Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

“If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.”

A recent survey of American mosques found 80 percent preach violent jihad or distribute violent literature.

But we can only profile conservatives and strip search grannies in wheel chairs at the airport. What a country!

Merkel reins back while Sandoval kicks it up — power bills that is

It’s really not math. It’s just arithmetic. It’s very simple arithmetic. It’s not as complicated as math.

Germans do it, but Nevadans don’t.

Merkel does the math

This week German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the spiraling cost of renewable energy is damaging to the nation’s economic competitiveness and must be reined in.

Sandoval flunks math

Meanwhile, in Carson City, Gov. Brian Sandoval signed into law a bill that will stick it to the customers of NV Energy. Senate Bill 123 dictates that NV Energy close its coal-fired power plants early and charge its customers every dime of the costs, including the cost terminating contracts and down to any coal left lying around. It also mandates, without regard to cost, the building of natural gas-fired power plants along with more “green” energy sources, even though “green” costs quadruple that of coal.

Nevada already has the second highest residential power bills in the West, imagine what they will be after we start paying for all those new power plants and more expensive generation costs.

What if you printed a bunch of newspapers and nobody read them?

According to a Scarborough Research report, as reported by Ad Age, the Las Vegas Review-Journal has one of the lowest readership levels in the country, with only 24 percent of adults reading the printed paper and only 8 percent reading a newspaper website, which I presume includes the Las Vegas Sun’s site.

Top newspaper readership approached 50 percent in their market areas.

This is odd since the R-J seems to be printing a lot more papers, which apparently under the current circulation counting rules includes a lot of neighborhood sections and free sampling.

In 2009 the R-J was 57th in circulation in the country, with 165,010 daily and 189,442 on Sundays. Now it is 23rd in circulation, with 252,047 daily and 194,057 on Sundays.

There seems to be a dichotomy. The more they print, the less it is read. Is someone cooking the books?

Readership graphic from Ad Age. Some map figures don’t match the text.

Harry is in a hurry to do what Harry wants to do, other bills can wait forever

Harry Reid still can’t utter two sentences without bashing Republicans. He doesn’t seem to understand how to win friends and influence people.

Gary Varvel cartoon

He keeps pushing the so-called immigration reform bill and wants to pass it by the Fourth of July, but he calls an amendment to require border security first a poison pill. Has anyone actually read the 2,000-page (including hundreds of pages consisting entirely of strikethroughs) bill? Try deciphering the point system for a pathway to citizenship. I guess we have to pass the bill to understand what is in it.

If Harry is in such a hurry for a vote, will he allow a Senate vote on the House-passed bill to defund Obama’s executive fiat imposition of the DREAM Act?

The last time the U.S. gave amnesty there were only 3 million illegals affected. This time it is 11 million. What will it be next time?

Harry had a different viewpoint 20 years ago:

Data mining not only violates the Fourth Amendment, but it doesn’t work

It is one thing to give up your liberty and privacy in exchange for security, but it is quite another to give up your liberty and privacy and not get any security.

”We have to make choices as a society … It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama told us.

Dzhokar Tsarnaev, not caught. (FBI photo)

Our NSA snooping through phone records and online data hasn’t stopped any attacks. Sure they trotted out that 2009 plot to bomb the New York subways as an example of the effectiveness of their dragnet, but that’s been found to be a bald-faced lie because it was the Brits who provided the information to foil that plot.

Did the data mining catch the Tsarnaev brothers who were making phone calls and posting radical comments online before the Boston Marathon bombing? No.

Did it stop the Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was swapping chatty emails with radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki? No.

Did it keep a guy who was communicating with Pakistani Taliban from parking a bomb-laden car in Times Square in New York? No.

Edward Snowden, leaker

Did it allow intelligence agents to listen in on phone calls placed by Americans overseas to family back home and encourage each other to listen into a call where “there’s good phone sex” or “some colonel making pillow talk.” Yes.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Obama reassured us.

The only thing the American taxpayers are getting out of the multimillion-dollar operation is the bill. What does it cost to store all that data and pay $122,000 a year to an untold number of 29-year-old high school dropouts?

The little mundane links across time

I think you can obtain a greater appreciation of and ties to those you admire from the mundane experiences shared across time than from the sublime ideas they espoused. 

To quote Thomas Jefferson is to drink at the finest fount of knowledge. ”(I)f we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

But I also found a kinship in reading about his affections for Bordeaux-style clarets and his quest to stock a fine wine cellar.

Then today I was reading about his sojourn in Paris and a party he attended in June 1785, where he heard a nightingale sing. His comment stretched across the centuries to this very spring. He said that “in all its perfection: and I do not hesitate to pronounce that in America it would be deemed a bird of the third rank only, our mocking-bird and fox-colored thrush being unquestionably superior to it.”

I concur: