American Elephants

•Obama did a big land grab of 1.35 million acres in Utah for the new Bear Ears Buttes monument and about 300,000 acres in Nevada, a total of 553 million acres of state lands, using the 1906 Antiquities Act, more than any other president.  More than 80 percent if the state of Nevada, and 65 percent of Utah is now “owned” by the federal government. The problem is that the federal government cannot manage to take care of the national parks and monuments already on the books.

Progressives believe deeply in federal government control invested in their hands. Their dream is to have all the annoying people confined in high-rise cities, and the land between in National Park land. What they have in mind for the farms that supply the food for America and much of the world is not clear.

•Obama freed Bradley Manning, now known as Chelsea Manning,who has completed just 7 years of his 35 year prison sentence. “Manning was stationed in Iraq as a low level intelligence analyst” the Wall Street Journal reminds us, which gave him access to huge amounts of classified documents. He leaked nearly 750,000 documents to Wikileaks, thousands of State Department cables and quantities of military information the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange worked with several news organizations to publish the material, to much bragging about transparency. The thing is there was information about Afghans and Iraqis who were working with us, and the leaks could easily be death sentences for them. There were masses of military and operational information as well.Within 24 hours of being sentenced, Manning announced that he wanted to be considered as Chelsea, and demanded hormone treatment. Bodily dysmorphia is a mental disease. People cannot change their gender, and psychological help is more to be desired than bodily mutilation. Military and diplomatic leaders did not take a charitable view.

This was treason and violation of the oath Manning took. Obama has never understood military secrets, as is evident from his intention to have our Military fight, and then limited what they could do with overly restrictive rules of engagement.

•Just last night, Obama banned 3-way light bulbs, in the mistaken belief that imposing efficiency standards would save the climate. The new bulbs give worse light than incandescents, but they make way more money for GE and Phillips. The 2007 ban affected most light bulbs, but exempted bug lights, 3-way bulbs which have 3 different brightnesses, and some decorative bulbs.

The Department’s reasoning: “DOE expects these sales will likely increase since these lamps could be used as replacements for other regulated lamp types.” In other words: People might start buying these bulbs because they want regular light bulbs rather than expensive LEDs or crappy fluorescents.

This goes along with low-flow showerheads and toilets, supposedly to save water which we are supposedly running out of—but then we are supposed to have too much water in the ocean as rising seas inundate our coastal cities. Does that make sense?

•On his final day, the Obama administration added nearly 1,500 pages of new regulations to complete the rush of regulations he has added since the November election. The government published 1,464 pages of regulations on November 18, ten days after the election. The cost of rules finalized and proposed earlier in January would cost $111.2 billion, but it’s only money. Donald Trump has said he would repeal any “job killing” energy regulations on his first full day in office, which he thinks of as Monday, so we will see.