Here is one of many reasons why merely defeating Obama isn’t good enough. Only a Conservative President will suffice. From Right Pundits, March 2010:

Clinton and Carter were grab happy – Carter for land, Clinton for land…and other things. According to a Washington Times article by Sen. Jim Demit, Carter snagged 50 million acres in Alaska, despite strong opposition from the state, and Clinton snatched 5.9 million acres across the country creating 19 new national monuments.

But Obama has big plans for his 10 million acres. He’s going to save the prairie chickens in New Mexico, a “center of climate change scientific research” in Nevada, and an oil-rich plot of land in Colorado because it’s under the threat of being developed for actual usage.

Clinton’s land grab stole 1.7 million acres from Utah — land that has a massive “clean coal” field, which could produce 100 million tons of clean coal over 45 years. And it was purely political.

Michelle Malkin has been keeping up with the Obama Administration’s land grabbing and Independence-minded people fighting to put a stop to it.

Since day one of the Obama administration, I’ve chronicled Loathsome Cowboy Ken Salazar’s War on the West, War on Jobs, and War on Science/Rule of Law. The last straw was his attempted Wild Lands grab. GOP leaders rose up with farmers, ranchers, and Western governors to stop the scheme in its tracks. Utah and Alaska have filed suit. Wyoming joined the litigation this week.

And now, Salazar has officially announced the backpedal:


“On December 22, 2010, I issued Secretarial Order 3310 to address the BLM’s management of wilderness resources on lands under its jurisdiction. Under Secretarial Order 3310, I ordered the BLM to use the public resource management planning process to designate certain lands with wilderness characteristics as “Wild Lands.”

On April 14, 20II, the United States Congress passed the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 (Pub. L. 112-10)(2011 CR), which includes a provision (Section 1769) that prohibits the use of appropriated funds to implement, administer, or enforce Secretarial Order 3310 in Fiscal Year 2011.

I am confirming today that, pursuant to the 2011 CR, the BLM will not designate any lands as ‘Wild Lands.'”

That may put a temporary halt to the Obama Administration’s land grabbing. But it may not. As you may recall, the Obama Administration is in contempt of a Federal Court Order to re-open the Gulf for off-shore drilling and end the moratorium.

Regarding George W Bush, Tom DeWeese wrote in March, 2001:

For those who thought the election of President Bush was the solution to America’s property rights problems, think again. The issue of property rights is rapidly emerging as a major battleground for those who remain legitimately fearful of the federal appetite for more and more land. This runs counter to the basis for our entire economy, the right to own and manage land for its development and use.

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton has stated that the Bush administration will not overturn any of former President Clinton’s arbitrary designation of millions of acres of federal land as “national monuments”, putting them off-limits to mining, timber, grazing, and other commercial activity.

Instead, the Bush administration offers vague promises of working with western lawmakers and private property owners to ‘adjust the boundaries’ and ‘alter the rules’ governing commercial activities.

This is Beltway talk for doing nothing. The federal government currently owns an estimated quarter of the entire landmass of the nation. It is land Congress has mandated for ‘multiple use’ to insure that the vast natural resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and timber can be accessed to meet our current and future needs. This do-nothing property policy, coupled with an apparent lack of an energy policy, exists despite the obvious need to vigorously reverse the restrictions put in place by the Clinton administration.


Map via Frank Jacobs, Strange Maps blog/Big Think

As you can see, Big Government Liberals have been grabbing tens of millions of acres of land for decades. Energy-rich land. Natural resource-rich land. For purely political reasons. And Big Government Republicans have not returned that land back to the states and private citizens. Simply slowing down the land grabs will not do. Simply putting a stop to the land grabs will not do. As soon as a Liberal becomes President again, ever more land will be stolen from the states and from We the People. It is imperative that a Conservative be elected President in order to actually reverse the land grabs and return the land to its rightful owners (which is NOT the Federal Government).

UPDATE: Very related, Jazz Shaw reports on the Obama Administration’s outside-the-Legislature-where-it-belongs power grab and war on the coal industry.

While much of our attention on matters of domestic energy production has been focused on questions regarding oil and natural gas, (and to a lesser extent, nuclear) which, as Ed pointed out earlier, might be more plentiful than we currently imagine, the EPA has certainly been a bunch of busy beavers on other fronts as well. Even though cap and trade went down in flames through legal routes, as The American Legislative Exchange reports, the commission has been using extra-legislative procedures, cloaked under the guise of the Clean Air Act, to to effectively declare war on the American coal industry.

Do read the rest of Jazz Shaw’s article. It’s very informative. And Ed Morrissey’s article Jazz Shaw linked is likewise very informative. Do read Mr Morrissey’s entire article. His sourcing and quoting suggests we may be at the beginning of the fossil fuel era and not approaching its end. His conclusion? “As I said earlier, the energy crisis in this country is entirely self-inflicted, mainly because the demagogues and Chicken Littles have controlled the narrative for far too long.”

Just more evidence that simply stopping the Big Government and radical Leftist power-grab and land grab is not enough. Just throwing Obama out is not enough. We need a Conservative to actually reverse the Big Government, anti-Freedom, anti-Individual agenda, not just stop it.
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