Obama talks out of both sides of his mouth

Michael Flynn (AP pix)

Former President Barack Obama on Friday in a private conversation said that the “rule of law is at risk” due to the Justice Department dropping charges against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, a former Army lieutenant general, according to Yahoo.

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places,” Obama was quoted as saying.

Flynn was not charged with perjury but with lying to the FBI, which is what James Cartwright — a retired Marine Corps general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a key member of Obama’s national security team in his first term was charged with.

Days before leaving office in 2017, Obama pardoned Cartwright prior to sentencing, according to The New York Times.

Rule of law? No precedent?

Hat tip to PJ Media.

James Cartwright (AP pix)

Pessimists always get to say ‘I told you so’

Whether the government dictators decide to restart the economy tomorrow or six months from now, there will be a spike in coronavirus cases and deaths and the fearmongers will delight in saying, “I told you so.”

They are just delaying the inevitable, though possibly flattening the curve a bit by stretching out the frequency of contacts and thus cases of COVOD-19. Is it worth it? What is the return on disinvestment and joblessness?

Another sure thing that everyone knew is also turning out to be not so sure: We need more ventilators.

AP is reporting today:

Generally speaking, 40% to 50% of patients with severe respiratory distress die while on ventilators, experts say. But 80% or more of coronavirus patients placed on the machines in New York City have died, state and city officials say.

Higher-than-normal death rates also have been reported elsewhere in the U.S., said Dr. Albert Rizzo, the American Lung Association’s chief medical officer.

Similar reports have emerged from China and the United Kingdom. One U.K. report put the figure at 66%. A very small study in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease first emerged, said 86% died.

The reason is not clear. It may have to do with what kind of shape the patients were in before they were infected. Or it could be related to how sick they had become by the time they were put on the machines, some experts said.

But some health professionals have wondered whether ventilators might actually make matters worse in certain patients, perhaps by igniting or worsening a harmful immune system reaction.

But everyone has been clamoring for ventilators. Maybe other things the experts know for certain are not certain.

Of course, Dr. Anthony Fauci has provided his daily ratcheting down of the projection numbers, saying, the final toll currently “looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000” that U.S. officials previously estimated.

And Knut Wittkowski, former head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, says the coronavirus could be “exterminated” if most people were permitted to lead normal lives and only the vulnerable are sheltered:

[W]hat people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why. But, what happens is if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary.

With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated.

Do the math

Don’t blame it on the tax cuts.

The Treasury Department reports that the federal deficit since the fiscal year began Oct. 1 has reached $530.9 billion.

Revenue is up 1.8 percent to $2 trillion, but spending grew 7.6% to $2.57 trillion.

Someone might want to tell all those Democratic presidential candidates that the tax cuts are not the problem. It’s the spending, stupid.

Lisa Benson cartoon

 

 

Editorial: If Davis name must go, use Shoshone name for peak

Wheeler Peak (right) and Jeff Davis Peak (left) Photo by Stavros Basis

The Nevada Board of Geographic Names voted unanimously this past week to, well, literally “white out” from Nevada maps the name of another historic figure whose actions do not comport with the current politically correct world view.

According to an Associated Press account, the panel has recommended to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to change the name of Nevada’s third highest mountain peak from Jeff Davis Peak to the Shoshone name Doso Doyabi — pronounced DOH-soh doy-AH-bee — which means “white mountain” and frankly sounds like the generic label given any mountain that remains largely snow-capped much of the year.

The push to change the name came a couple of years ago at the same time a number of monuments to members of the Confederacy were being taken down and there was a clamor to restore original American Indian names. The Obama administration issued an executive order renaming North America’s tallest peak in Alaska from Mount McKinley — named for the nation’s 25th president, Republican William McKinley, who was assassinated in office in 1901 — to Denali, the original Athabascan name.

The 12,771-foot Jeff Davis Peak is in White Pine County inside the Great Basin National Park.

The monicker was first attached to what is now Wheeler Peak, the tallest point in the park and the second tallest in Nevada. It was named Jeff Davis by Lt. Col. Edward Steptoe of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1855 while Jefferson Davis served as secretary of the War Department, a half dozen years before the Civil War began.

After the Civil War, during which Davis served as president of the Confederacy, an Army mapping expedition headed by Lt. George Montague Wheeler, named the peak for Wheeler and the Jeff Davis tag was shifted to the shorter nearby peak to the east.

At one point in the discussion there were calls to rename the peak for Las Vegas civil rights leader James McMillan or Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who fought for the Union in the Civil War but had no real link to Nevada any more than Jeff Davis did.

The AP reported that Christine Johnson, the collection manager for the Nevada Historical Society who serves as a non-voting member on the state naming board, said the name Doso Doyabi was supported by the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and members of other area tribes.

In a letter from the Duckwater Shoshone elders, tribal member Warren Graham said reinstating the mountain’s original name would honor the tribe’s cultural heritage.

“These places were called something else before they were renamed” by Euro-American settlers, Graham wrote. “Some of these names are disappearing along with our elders and it is good that these names are not forgotten.”

Jack Hursh, a cartographer and publications specialist at the Nevada Bureau of Mines & Geology who serves on the naming panel, e-mailed the AP to say, “The Doso Doyabi name is a Nevadan name proposed by Nevadans.”

Though we are reticent to whitewash history with such name changes, returning to an original Shoshone label is preferable to attaching someone else’s name, lest they fall out of favor in the future.

As Jefferson Davis once said after the war, “Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to make your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished — a reunited country.”

We urge the national board to finalize the change and put this to rest.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

The rest of the story …

The Las Vegas newspaper carried about a quarter of Scott Sonner’s AP story about the new corral on the California-Nevada border that might allow the Forest Service sell more than 250 wild horses for slaughter.

For the rest of the story, go to the Elko Daily Free  Press.

There you will learn, no surprise, that a couple of self-styled horse hugger groups have already sued to try to prevent any slaughter.

“A hearing is scheduled Jan. 31 in federal court in San Francisco on a motion filed by the Animal Legal Defense Fund and American Wild Horse Campaign seeking an injunction to block the sale of the horses captured in the Modoc National Forest in October and November for possible slaughter. The new pen is in the forest, about 170 miles northwest of Reno,” AP relates

Wild horses being warehoused at Palomino Valley near Reno. (Photo by Jo Mitchell)

Horse slaughterhouses are prohibited in the U.S. but are legal in Mexico and Canada.

The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act states: “The Secretary shall cause additional excess wild free-roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost efficient manner possible.”

But every federal budget since 2009, has stated, “Appropriations herein made shall not be available for the destruction of healthy, unadopted, wild horses and burros in the care of the Bureau or its contractors or for the sale of wild horses and burros that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.”

The Forest Service has argued that the new pen in the Modoc National Forest allows it to bypass such restrictions at existing federal holding pens.

“The agency denies claims by horse advocates it has made up its mind to sell the more than 250 horses for slaughter,” Sonner writes. “But it also says it may have no choice because of the high cost of housing the animals and continued ecological impacts it claims overpopulated herds are having on federal rangeland.”

Justice Department lawyers were quoted as saying, “What has changed is that the Modoc now has its own short-term holding facility … which is not subject to congressional restrictions.”

The range is overpopulated and the market for wild horse adoptions is dwindling, but the horse huggers continue to litigate while the horses starve on the range and cost $50 million a year to warehouse.

Bill would require corporations to disclose harassment and discrimination settlements

What’s that old saying? When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

On Valentine’s Day Nevada’s first-term Democratic 3rd Congressional District Congresswoman Jacky Rosen, who happens to be running this year for Dean Heller’s Senate seat, filed a bill that would require all publicly traded companies to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission details about settlements involving sexual harassment and discrimination. It appears to be an effort to pry lose information about legal settlements like those kept secret about casino executive Steve Wynn.

The bill is titled Sunlight in Workplace Harassment Act (H.R. 5028).

Rosen and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has introduced a companion bill in the Senate, put out a press release today.

“The flood of allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful individuals has created a moral imperative for all of us to shine a spotlight on these abuses of power in the workplace,” Rosen was quoted as saying. “This is a real problem for workers in Nevada and across the country, and Congress has a responsibility to take a leading role in putting an end to workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. Requiring public companies to report these settlements will help lead to greater transparency, safer work environments, and a more robust discussion of how to prevent workplace misconduct and hold people in power accountable.”

Perhaps the legal system is just not transparent enough. Why not a bill to limit sealed settlements?

The bill would require corporations to disclose “measures taken by the covered issuer and any subsidiary, contractor, or subcontractor of the covered issuer to prevent employees of the covered issuer and any subsidiary, contractor, or subcontractor of the covered issuer from committing or engaging in sexual abuse, covered harassment, or covered discrimination.”

Contractor or subcontractor covers a lot of ground. Disclosure presumably could include: “We fired the S.O.B.”

The bill also prohibits the disclosure of the name of any victim of sexual harassment, abuse or discrimination. So much for the right to confront witnesses against you. It is silent on whether the name of a harasser, abuser or discriminator could or should be revealed or not.

Sen. Warren was quoted as saying, “Our bill will help unmask secret settlements that provide cover for the powerful to get away with abuse, harassment, and discrimination, while simultaneously protecting accusers’ privacy. Congress has a responsibility to pass it right away.”

 Meanwhile, another Wynn Resorts shareholder has filed suit agains the board of directors for failing to disclose earlier information that resulted in the decline in value of company stock. The AP story lede states: “The board of directors of Las Vegas-based Wynn Resorts is facing another lawsuit from shareholders who allege they breached their fiduciary duties when they ignored what has been described as a longstanding pattern of sexual abuse and harassment by the company’s founder, Steve Wynn.”

The story quotes one of the litigants as saying, “These board directors and officers were duty-bound to protect employees and the company, yet they failed to confront allegations of predatory behavior.”

A little transparency is all that is needed.

Marching till one falls off the edge of the earth

One of the many March for Science scenes. (AP pix)

March for Science? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

You can march for peace, march for a candidate or march for the exercise, but marching for science is like marching for gravity. Science is. Science is a systematic study of stuff. Marching doesn’t change anything, doesn’t accomplish anything.

And it was just a bit ironic when the AP story on the various marches for science quoted an Earth Day founder as saying the event in Washington was “magical.”

It was also a bit odd that the headline on the story and a cutline used the phrase “march for science,” but the story never did.

Maybe the label was just shortened, because the real purpose seemed to the summed up by one self-identified “scientist,” who was quoted as saying:

“Most people don’t know how much funding for the sciences supports them in their lives every day. Every medical breakthrough, their food, clothing, our cellphones, our computers, all that is science-based. … So if we stop funding scientific discoveries now, in 10 years, whatever we might have had won’t be; we just won’t have it.”

So, it was really a march for science handouts from taxpayers. Never mind that vast majority of scientific breakthroughs throughout history were privately funded.

For a change, President Trump’s comment on the occasion actually made sense. His statement said that “rigorous science depends not on ideology, but on a spirit of honest inquiry and robust debate.”

Settled science. Now there’s another oxymoron.

 

 

 

Wild horse lawsuit dismissal outcome is in the eye of the beholder

The lede on the AP story about the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting a lawsuit intended to force the federal agencies in Nevada to actually to do their jobs and reduce the wild horse overpopulation reads:

“Wild horse advocates in Nevada scored a victory Monday in an ongoing legal battle with rural interests they say want to round up federally protected mustangs across the West and sell them for slaughter.”

The lede could just as easily have reported that Nevada ranchers had the value of their grazing rights unconstitutionally taken due to a hair-splitting technicality, a sort of Catch-22. The suit from the Nevada Association of Counties, the Nevada Farm Bureau Federation and others asked the courts to requiring federal agencies to follow the wild horse and burro law, because its failure to do so is starving the very wild horses the law was intended to protect, as well as damaging range land used for grazing and taking private water rights. (9th Circuit wild horse opinion)

Just as a Nevada federal judge had ruled, the 9th Circuit said the plaintiffs failed to cite a “final action” by the land agencies that could be challenged:

The district court did not err in dismissing NACO’s APA (Administrative Procedure Act) claims. Federal courts lack jurisdiction over an APA claim that “does not challenge final agency action.” … Here, NACO has failed to identify a specific final agency action … or discrete action unlawfully withheld … that allegedly harmed it. Instead, NACO seeks judicial oversight and direction of virtually the entire federal wild horse and burro management program … in Nevada. This sort of programmatic challenge is foreclosed under the APA.

That is because there is never a “final agency action.” Everything is fluid, flexible, changeable, appealable. What the Bureau of Land Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service do is deny and delay.

It is not entirely the land agencies fault. They are aided and abetted by Congress.

The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, which NACO and others say is being ignored, specially says, “The Secretary (of Interior) shall cause additional excess wild free roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost efficient manner possible.”

But the federal budget every year since 2009, has stated, “Appropriations herein made shall not be available for the destruction of healthy, unadopted, wild horses and burros in the care of the Bureau or its contractors or for the sale of wild horses and burros that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.”

The BLM itself reported in September that the population population of free ranging wild horses and burros was 67,000, even thought the range could sustain a population of no more than 26,700 animals, which means that there insufficient grazing for the horses as well as cattle and sheep.

The AP story quoted two different horse-bugging groups but could not find any ranches to quote.

Nick Lawton, a lawyer for one of the horse lovers was quoted as saying, “We’re pleased that the courts continue to dismiss attempts by these grazing interests to use the judicial system to rewrite federal law that Congress designed to protect wild horses from capture, not to favor the livestock industry.”

The original lawsuit pointed out, “Free-roaming horse and burro herds in Nevada are frequently observed to be in malnourished condition, with the ribs and skeletal features of individual animals woefully on view and other signs of ill-health readily observable.”

Now, who is being humane?

Stallions fighting (Getty Images file photo)

 

 

 

For lack of a copyeditor a bear was killed

This AP story is all over the internet today:

“LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Nevada man is expected to return to court in Las Vegas next week in a grizzly 2011 murder case after the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that his earlier guilty plea was illegal.”

A murder can be grisly or horrifying, but a grizzly is a type of brown bear.

A grizzly bear in Yellowstone. (NatGeo pix)

 

Judge again slaps down PERS for trying to hide retirement records from the public

A Carson City judge has slapped down the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System for refusing to release the names and pensions of 57,000 public retirees under the state public records law, according to The AP.

The Nevada Policy Research Institute sued PERS back in July for again refusing to release those records. The Reno newspaper successfully sued for those records in 2013.

District Judge James Wilson ruled Tuesday that the PERS claim that making these names public would subject the retirees to cybercrime was “hypothetical and speculative.”

After the 2013 ruling, PERS altered the way it kept records, claiming it only had records filed by using Social Security numbers, which are “non-disclosable” by law.

”By replacing names with ‘non-disclosable’ social security numbers in its actuarial record-keeping documents, PERS has attempted to circumvent the 2013 ruling of the Nevada Supreme Court requiring disclosure,” explained Joseph Becker, the director of NPRI’s Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation at the time of the suit.

In 2015 NPRI requested retirement records to include on its TransparentNevada.com website — a free resource for public-sector administrators and taxpayers interested in learning about the cost of public sector compensation.

The lawsuit itself argued the information was clearly subject to the public records law, which was intended to “foster democratic principles by providing members of the public with access to inspect and copy public books and records.”

Additionally, the suit noted that in 2015 state Supreme Court ruled: “When an agency has a computer program that can readily compile the requested information, the agency is not excused from its duty to produce and disclose that information.“

“Despite having the clear ability to provide the public with useful and complete records, PERS has deliberately subverted transparency by altering its record keeping, and refusing repeated requests for full disclosure,” NPRI and CJCL noted at the time.