penny press 27 march 9, 20172017/03/09 · the penny press,march 9, 2017 page 4 radio —...

Penny PressNevada, USA Volume 14 Number 27 MARCH 9, 2017

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Credits:Publisher and Editor: Contributing Editors:Fred Weinberg Floyd Brown Al Thomas Doug French Robert Ringer John Getter Pat Choate Ron Knecht Byron Bergeron

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THE PENNY PRESS,MARCH 9, 2017 PAGE 2

By PETER HONGSpecial to the Penny Press

Recall the flak Mitt Romney took in 2012 for declaring war on Big Bird when the candidate suggested that he would cut federal subsidies

for PBS? Well, Sesame Street may be on HBO now, but the fight over defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is being rekindled. And it’s about time.

The CPB was incorporated fifty years ago as a private, nonprofit corporation; in fact, its website proudly proclaims it as “A Private Corporation Funded by the American People.” (emphasis

mine)The CPB was created at a

time when broadcasting options in America were limited. In 1967, before cable and the Internet, most Americans had access to only ABC, NBC, and CBS.

Today, the average U.S. household receives nearly 200 TV channels, not including a glut of terrestrial and online listening and viewing options.

In spite of this record-breaking broadcasting surplus, NPR and PBS still receive over $400 million in federal funding each year. This is particularly galling, given that America’s gross national debt as a percentage of GDP has nearly tripled from 38 percent to 106 percent over the life of publicly subsidized broadcasting.

Federal funding not only

comes from taxpayers, but gives NPR and PBS a built-in advantage over their competitors when it comes to raising money. Yes, like their “commercial” brethren, publicly subsidized broadcasters unabashedly sell sponsorships to corporations (horror of horrors) and foundations. And, as anyone who has sat through a PBS fundraising campaign knows, they raise individual contributions from “viewers like you.”

Confession time: I use publicly subsidized broadcasting. I watch documentaries on PBS, and listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” and old time radio shows on NPR. I even listen to the drive time “news” shows when the bias does not lead me to drive off the road.

I also pay for it by giving money to my local PBS and NPR affiliates,

which allows me to show off my gift tote bag without guilt. After all, payment for services or goods that I choose to use is the American way.

The problem is you’re paying for it too, whether you use the products and get the tote bag or not. To the tune of about half a billion dollars a year, your tax dollars pay for a product that you may not use, simply because you’re not interested in the auctioning off of the original mold used to make penicillin.

Or you may actually find some of the content offensive or insufferably biased. Consider this NPR annotation of President Trump’s recent address to Congress, which reads more like talking points from the DNC than a news report. Appropriate for Rachel Maddow or progressive talk

Penny PressNEVADA USA 16 PAGES VOLUME 14 NUMBER 27 MARCH 9, 2017

Penny Wisdom

Don’t make America Great Again. —Chuck Schumer

The Conservative Weekly Voice Of NevadaInside:A Life Sentence InFt. Leavenworth

See Editorial Page 6

RON KNECHT PAGE 5FRED WEINBERG PAGE 6ROBERT RINGER PAGE 7NATALIA CASTRO PAGE 9SEND THE BILL PAGE 10ROBERT ROMANO PAGE 11CHUCK MUTH PAGE 14

No More Tax Money For NPR and PBS

Commentary

Continued on page4


radio — absolutely! But this time, your tax dollars paid for it.In a 2012 report, “Alternative Sources of Funding for Public

Broadcasting Stations,” the CPB stated that ending federal funding for publicly subsidized broadcasting would severely diminish, if not destroy, public broadcasting service in the United States. That’s right: the CPB actually argues that it cannot make up for any loss in federal funding — no matter how many tote bags they offer.

Yet, according to its own published “Audience Profile,” NPR brags to commercial sponsors that its audience skews heavily toward the wealthy and powerful. NPR listeners are:

• 74 percent more likely than other Americans to earn greater than $100,000 in annual income;

• 133 percent more likely than other Americans to be top management; and

• 148 percent more likely than other Americans to be C-Suite executives.

In other words, you may not watch PBS or listen to NPR, but your

boss might and your boss’ boss probably does. And the CPB wants you to keep paying for them.

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) has reintroduced legislation (H.R. 726 and H.R. 727), which would defund the CPB and NPR. Upon introducing the legislation, Lamborn said, “Republicans and the new Administration need to demonstrate that we take our fiscal responsibility seriously. American taxpayers do not want their hard-earned dollars funding superfluous government programs just because that is the way things have always been done.”

Also circulating are reports that the Trump Administration plans to ax federal funding for publicly subsidized broadcasting. In other words, help may be on the way, beleaguered taxpayer!

In his address to Congress, President Trump proclaimed “the time for small thinking is over.” Publicly subsidized television and radio in an era of cable, Internet, and record deficits is an early and easy test of this declaration.

Are Republicans prepared to cut the cord?Peter Hong is a contributing reporter at Americans for Limited Government.

Cut The Cord To PBSContinued from page 3

Long-Run Decline in Entrepreneurship Is Ominous for Nevada

This is the eighth column in a series presenting findings and conclusions of Nevada’s 2016 Popular Annual Financial Report (PAFR), posted at controller.nv.gov. Here, we address critical problems facing economic growth in Nevada.

Between 2011 and 2015, Nevada’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew meagerly from $119.3 billion to $126.2 billion (in constant 2009 dollars). Adjusting for population growth, that’s an annual

per-person growth rate of -0.15 percent, ranking 44th among the states in that period. This continued negative growth comes on the heels of an economic recession in which Nevada saw the largest per-person decline in GDP of any state. Between 2007 and 2010, Nevada per-person GDP shrank by an average of 5.76 percent annually versus a national shrinkage of 1.26 percent.

This continued negative growth on a real, per-person basis means the quality of life for Nevadans continued to deteriorate many years into a normal expansion period. These objective data belie news headlines that trumpet the successes of so-called economic development victories, including deals to attract Tesla Motors, Faraday Future and other ventures to Nevada.

What gives?Although these deals make

headlines, studies indicate that nearly

all net new job creation is attributable to startup enterprises, and Nevada’s rate of entrepreneurship has been in decline for decades. Startup density, measured by the number of business starts per 100,000 persons, fell roughly 30 percent between the mid-1990s and recent years, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Non-governmental data sources, providing a longer time series, indicate that startup density has fallen 61 percent since 1977.

As regulations imposed by federal, state, and local authorities have accumulated, startup density has fallen. Regulatory and other barriers to entry tend to discourage would-be entrepreneurs while favoring the competitive position of established firms. This dynamic also has important implications for the distribution of income and income mobility since entrepreneurship is traditionally a means for individuals from lower income classes to rise to the top income classes.

Occupational and other licensing laws that are here more onerous than in other states place artificial barriers before enterprising individuals, limit their earning potential, diminish contributions they can make and discourage talented people from immigrating to Nevada. Nevada retains dubious licensing schemes for occupations like interior design and music therapy that exist in only a handful of states. For instance, 47 states impose no special licensing requirements for interior designers, but Nevada requires practitioners to complete six years of education and apprenticeships, pay fees, and pass a state-administered test before contracting for services.

Further, many of Nevada’s licensing laws fail to make clear that they apply only to for-profit endeavors. Thus, they may incriminate citizens for behaviors generally believed to be legal. NRS Chapter 640C, for instance, appears to make it a criminal offense for an

individual to give his or her spouse a massage without first obtaining a license from the State Board of Massage Therapists.

While laws like these needlessly limit the upward mobility and opportunities available to most of Nevada’s citizens, the state’s approach to economic development has focused on providing incentives to select private firms with political influence like Amazon, Tesla Motors, Faraday Future and the Oakland Raiders. In addition, the legislature has crafted legislation in recent years to authorize outright cash grants of state funds to private firms, preferential “economic development” utility rates and transferable tax credits that can be sold for cash in secondary markets and used to satisfy most state tax liabilities of the holder.

Financiers and investors become reluctant to support ventures that compete with state-supported entities and more likely to back recipients of state support even if their prospects are less promising on a pure market basis. The result is a suppression of genuine entrepreneurship and slower economic growth as Nevada, along with the nation, has moved increasingly toward corporatism and cronyism.

Nevada must restore hope for its future generations by abandoning these interventionist and corporatist policies and sweeping away unnecessary barriers to organic entrepreneurship and business formation. The promise for Nevada’s future is found in the dreams, talents and creativity of its people and not in the political deals made by politicians with their cronies and other special interests regarding tax dollars, tax abatements and regulatory favors.


The Penny Press Tips Its Cap To:In the immortal words of American legend Darrel Waltrip, Boogety, Boogety Boogety, let’s go racing boys. Las Vegas will get its second NASCAR cup race in 2018, something the venue and the market has deserved for years. And may we point out that there is NO tax money in the Speedway which was built entirely with private money. Take that NFL.

The Senate which voted mostly along party lines to kill a federal rule that gives a voice to the Washington bureaucrats on the use of public lands in Western states — including 47.5 million acres in Nevada. Republicans sought the rollback of the planning rule imposed by the Obama administration, arguing that it shifted the decision-making of use of lands in the West to bureaucrats in Washington.

The Penny Press Sends A Bronx Cheer And A Bouquet of Weeds To:Sens. Michael Roberson, R-Henderson, and Ben Kieckhefer, R-Reno, are sponsoring Senate Bill 243.which calls for the majority of the Clark County School District Board members to be appointed. We’re sure these two clowns would like to be appointed by their patron saint Governor Sandoval as well, but this is America and we can guarantee that any five Nevada voters are smarter than these idiots. www.pennypressnv.com

Tips Of Our Capand

Bronx Cheers

Commentary: Ron Knecht & Geoffrey Lawrence

RON KNECHT and GEOFFREY LAWRENCE

After watching the media and Democrat Party circus from the time Donald Trump finished his speech to Congress last week until Monday morning, I think it high time for the President to say what is on the minds of at least 50 per cent of America.

It is high time for him to tell Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to perform anatomically impossible acts in public. Perhaps in less sanitized terms.

At least 50 percent of America would loudly cheer and the din from the orangutan-like left would render themselves marginalized.

The maxim in Washington since Schumer was a social-climbing Congressman is that the most dangerous place to be in the nation’s capital was between Schumer and a television camera.

Ever since he replaced Harry Reid, they should declare that space a no-fly zone.

Pelosi is so far past Reid’s dementia-filled final two terms that there should be a bill offered in Congress called the Pelosi bill which specifies how to involuntarily retire an Alzheimer’s victim which happens to be sitting in Congress. It happens more often than you might think.

What Trump needs to do is to catch the Obama administration holdovers who are clearly leaking classified information and conduct daily perp walks out of the various agencies they work for. A few life sentences should put the fear of God into people who don’t take the safety of American troops and intelligence operatives seriously.

And if FBI director James Comey isn’t up to the job, hire Chuck Norris. Or Joe Arpaio.

The truth is that eight years of Barack Obama has the lefties in the so-called “intelligence community” thinking they could get away with anything.

Traitors like Edward Snowden are now called “whistle-blowers”.

Trump needs to trim the tens of thousands of people in those organizations down to those who respect the oath of office they took when they took the job.

And he needs to make this the same sort of priority as repealing Obamacare.

Because the fact is that these people are all Obama and Clinton apparatchiks who want Trump to fail. And, further, they really don’t appear to care very much about the United States’ interests, either.

The truth is that the so-called Russian investigation will go absolutely nowhere because if, indeed the commies really wanted Trump over Clinton, they badly miscalculated.

A pro-Russian administration looks exactly like our last eight years.

An administration which looks like it would make Vladimir Putin uncomfortable looks exactly like the current administration.

The left seems so deranged that it has completely lost sight of that reality.

The left seems to think that running a public relations offensive is the same thing as hacking votes.

In order for that to have had any effect, American voters would have had to be so stupid that their minds could be bent by a Russian TV operation which virtually nobody watches.

We’ll, personally, feel a lot better when we see some high profile arrests over the stealing and making public of classified information.

Fear of spending the rest of your life in the Federal Prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, reinforced by an actual example or three, will make this problem go away.

FRED WEINBERG


OPINIONFrom The Publisher...

Put The Fear of God Into Government Lefties


Trump, His Agenda, and the Radical Left

While it appears that the Dirty Dems are intent on digging themselves an even deeper hole, I agree with Steve Bannon that Trumpsters would be making a big mistake to assume they will ever give up. Even if the DDs end up with less than 40 seats in the Senate and a much smaller minority in the House in 2018, you can be certain that they will fight on.

Why? Two main reasons: stupidity and hatred. Stupidity, of and by itself, would be bad enough, because you can’t reason with stupid people. But when you add hatred to the mix, it becomes uncontrollable and highly combustible.

I (by sheer accident) happened to watch a few minutes of the Dirty Dems’ election of a new party chairman last Saturday, and the best way I can describe it is to say it was creepy. It made me feel like I was being invaded by germs and gave me the urge to take a long shower to wash them away.

Some character by the name of Tom Perez beat out anti-Semitic commie Keith Ellison, which, quite frankly, disappointed me. I’ve always believed that if Ellison became the new co-face of the Democratic Party (along with Granny Pelosi), it would spell disaster for the Dirty Dems in 2018, let alone 2020.

But the good news is that, in a display of warm and fuzzy Democratic Party unity, Perez got the Democratic National Committee’s 435 members to agree to make comrade Ellison “deputy DNC Chair,” whatever that means. Upon hearing Perez’s words, Ellison hugged him so hard that it appeared something sexual might be going on.

The bottom line is that after narrowly escaping the death knell of having Ellison replace the universally loathed Debbie What’s-Her-Name, the Dirty Dems managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory by allowing him to slip in through the back door. Throw in Pocahontas to finish out the triad, and the Dirty Dems have a guaranteed lost cause on their hands.

It’s hard to imagine the new Democratic Party leaders appealing to blue-collar guys and gals in rust-belt areas like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in a creditable way, but if they have the chutzpah to try, my guess is that they’ll be run out of those states on a rail. After decades of having their votes taken for granted, the blue-collar workers of America have caught on to the Democrats’ “vote-for-us, then get lost” game, thanks to Donald Trump’s shining a bright light on it.

But no matter how many more seats the Dirty Dems lose, their hatred and stupidity are sure to drive them on. Like cockroaches, history has clearly demonstrated that they can never be defeated, thus those who place liberty above all other objectives should heed Steve Bannon’s words and focus on containment rather than victory.

Remember, the communist fairytale has been trudging forward since Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, nearly 170 years ago. In fact, there’s strong evidence that Cro-Magnon man, and possibly even Neanderthal man before him, engaged in some form of communal organization.

That said, it’s imperative that those in Trump’s inner circle continue to hold his feet to the fire and press him hard to keep as many of his campaign promises as possible. Unforeseen circumstances and the relentless dirty tricks and criminal activity of the Radical Left (including the Demomedia Party) make it certain that a number of Trump’s promises will not be kept, while a number of others will be delayed for a very long period of time.

That’s why it’s so important for Trump to fulfill his most important promises as quickly as possible, and I would put the following items at the top of the list:

• Cut taxes. This move should be significant in size and set into motion as quickly as possible, as it will have the most immediate impact on the economy. Which is crucial, because if the economy booms, it will have the Dirty Dems insanely thrashing about for phony and crazy talking points even more than they are now.

• Drastically cut regulations. Perhaps even more so than tax cuts, dramatically reducing the number and scope of federal regulations would almost certainly cause an unprecedented economic explosion. The long-term goal should be to completely shut down as many regulatory agencies as possible, with the EPA first on the list. This is all part of the broader objective of drastically reducing the size and scope of government.

• Restore law and order, which includes moving forward with the Mexican border wall, cracking down on illegal immigrants from the south, and defunding sanctuary cities. While illegal immigration could be instantly and immediately eliminated without a wall (Do I need to explain why?), the optics of a wall are

essential to the red-meat crowd and devastating to the globalists.• Constantly increase the intensity of extreme vetting for Middle East refugees.

This is really just another facet of law and order. It’s not only a matter of security, but also an important issue when it comes to deflating the dreams of the one-world-government guys. At the same time, of course, the Trump administration will certainly continue to work on getting his executive order(s) approved by a federal court (probably the Supreme Court).

• Dramatically build up the military. Very costly, but, in the long run, a peaceful world could actually be cost efficient.

• Completely repeal Obamacare and replace it with a free-market-oriented healthcare plan. I’ve got my fingers crossed, but with all the politics involved, this this could take more time to accomplish than the 200 days the Trump team is touting. If so, it’s absolutely essential that there be very visible and ongoing progress made to offset the loud, nasty, never-ending lies the Dirty Dems will be promulgating about people losing their healthcare. (The constitutional fact that healthcare is not a right is an unwinnable argument in our firmly entrenched entitlement society, so it’s a waste of time to even discuss it.)

• Freeing the energy industry is near the top of the list as well, but it need not be discussed here given that it’s already well underway. The massive number of jobs it will create will smother the shrieks of the global-warming crowd, which includes both the low-information true believers and the shameless liars in their ranks. As to infrastructure, the country is falling apart, literally, but realistically all we can afford to do right now is continue to nip away at the problem and hope to address it “big league” a few years down the road when we have some of the other urgent matters under control.

Unfortunately, while all this is going on, the Trump team will have to expend a great deal of time and financial resources fighting political attacks on at least four fronts. These include the Fake News Media, the Fake Conservative Media (George Will, Bill Kristol, et al), the crazed Radical Left base of the Democratic Party (Pocahontas, Pelosi, Schumer, the aforementioned Keith Ellison, et al), and the McCain-led liberals in the Republican Party (Lindsey Graham, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, Maine senator Susan Collins, et al) who will do anything to stop Trump from succeeding.

The latter is the most dangerous group, because if these fake Republicans continue to vote with the Dirty Dems, the Republican Party’s majority in both the Senate and the House will be nothing more than an illusion. Which is why Trump must act quickly. The longer it takes to show tangible results, the greater the danger that the McCainites will gain steam and get an increasing number of finger-in-the-wind Republicans to jump ship.

Having said all this, it is once again important to face up to the reality that it’s a virtual certainty Trump will continue to increase the national debt, in which case the hypocritical Dirty Dems are sure to make it a major issue, which it is. For most of my life, I’ve been in favor of slashing the budget and paying down the national debt, but the time for doing that has long passed. I realize it sounds like heresy, but George Bush began putting that hope out of reach, followed by Barack Obama’s putting it completely out of reach (by design).

As a footnote, I should point out that the one big difference between Obama’s budget deficits and those that Trump will be running up is that Obama’s spending went toward anti-American policies, while Trump’s deficits will be the result of pro-American policies. In any event, since solving the debt problem is no longer a realistic goal, the objective should be to use new debt for pro-liberty, pro-security, pro-economic-growth purposes and deal with the problem down the road.

The most likely solutions for dealing with an unpayable debt are: (1) default; (2) giving up part of our splintered nation (preferably California) to the owners of our debt; or (3) runaway inflation (which is, in effect, just another manner of default). Personally, I still favor getting rid of California.

One last point: Much as it pains me to go along with prevailing wisdom, I believe the time has come for Donald Trump to recognize that he doesn’t have time to lower himself and constantly do battle with the media, Hollywood, and other miscellaneous lowlife. I think a one- or two-sentence smack down every now and then is more than sufficient.

The greatest pain Trump can inflict on his critics is to ignore them, because it would make them even more irrelevant than they already are. And, as a bonus, I can guarantee him that when you ignore your detractors, it’s an incredible high that’s impossible to describe. Do it, Donald … please do it. ROBERT RINGERRobert Ringer (© 2017)is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.

Commentary: Robert Ringer


Commentary: Natalia CastroHouse votes to end unauthorized rogue EPA

In fiscal years 2014 and 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tricked the American people into rallying behind a regulation, The Waters of the United States, that took away jobs and harmed businesses.

After engaging in “covert propaganda and self-aggrandizement”, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office reported that the EPA violated critical anti-lobbying law — enacted in annual appropriations bills — to push regulations onto the American people; now Trump is undoing Obama’s damage and Congress is bringing transparency back into government.

U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), authored and had the House pass legislation, H.R. 1004, The Regulatory Integrity Act of 2017, through the House which will require executive agencies to update the status of upcoming regulations consistently on a public format. The law puts the requirement on agency heads to “make publicly available in a searchable format in a prominent location either on the website of the Executive agency or in the rule making docket on Regulations.gov” each pending regulatory action as well as “a list of each public communication about the pending agency regulatory action.”

The law requires executive agencies to maintain public access to this information for a minimum of 5 years after the regulation has been finalized, ensuring the people have access to accurate information on the regulations they will be asked to submit to.

The Waters of the United States rule proposed by the EPA serves to redefine what constitutes rivers, streams, lakes, and marshes fall under the jurisdiction of the agency as “navigable” waters under the terms of the Clean Water Act to the extent that every puddle on your property could be covered.

The rule dramatically increases EPA oversight and did so under the justification in part that the “final rule reflects consideration of the extensive public comments received on the proposed rule.”

However, this “public comment” was far from what the EPA described. The New York Times revealed in May 2015, through a series of social media campaigns the EPA, without fully disclosing its identity, helped tip the scales throughout the comment period, pushing positive information about the water rule to the public

and encouraged newly turned environmentalists to comment on the need for the program.

As the EPA boasted over one million comments with a nearly 90 percent positivity rating, Republican Senator James Inhofe blasted the agency’s involvement, “There is clear collusion between extreme environmental groups and the Obama administration in both developing and promoting a host of new regulations.”

The Government Accountability Office report explained that while the EPA could not quantify the exact cost spent on social media campaigns promoting this rule but that “staff is paid for time spent developing and posting a message but time is not tracked by platform or project.”

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform noted in their report on H.R. 1004 that the most egregious element of the EPA’s actions was that “through these campaigns the EPA oversimplified an immensely complicated rule in order to solicit support for its rule, leaving the public misinformed.”

The EPA tried to fool the American people into legislation that former House Speaker John Boehner at the time said, “is being shoved down the throats of hardworking people with no input, and places landowners, small businesses, farmers and manufacturers on the road to a regulatory and economic hell.”

Luckily, President Trump has made rescinding this exact regulation a priority. Just this week, Trump signed executive order Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the “Waters of the United States” Rule, to review the EPA’s overreach.

Trump announced, “EPA’s so-called Waters of the United States Rule is one of the worst examples of federal regulation and it has truly run amok and is one of the rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land…The EPA’s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands and regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter.”

As Trump removes the “navigable” waters rule the Obama Administration wanted, Congress is working to prevent government from attempting to fool citizens like this in the future.

Now by passing the Walberg legislation, the House is preventing this blatant public misinformation. By forcing agency heads to provide information regarding pending regulations to the public in a clear and concise way, Congress is following through on what Trump has begun; removing executive overreach and bringing government back to the people who provided consent to be governed. NATALIA CASTRONatalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.


North Dakota should send $33 million bill for pipeline protesters to Tides, Rockefeller foundations

The left is destroying their own causes; as they frame themselves as selfless environmentalists, following their funding shows these radicals’ true aims. Now, as North Dakota deals with the $33 million of costs associated with law enforcement and also damage that the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors have left behind, the corporations funding these ventures should be held accountable as well.

The Dakota Access protestors did not come out of nowhere, left-wing charities have been funding protests like these for years. Now in North Dakota, this same group is funding disorderly conduct and disrespect for the law.

Warren Buffett, a strict adversary of pipeline growth, has funneled well over $30 million dollars into the Tides Foundation, the group then disperse the funds among selected NGOs carrying out anti-pipeline campaigns.

The group primarily responsible for the rally behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is none other than the Indigenous Environmental Network, a pawn of the left.

Tom Shepstone explains in his Sept. 2016 analysis “A little research indicates one of the entities leading the charge is a group called Indigenous Environmental Network. Unsurprisingly, it has received funding from the usual fractivist funding suspects. They include the Earth Island Institute (funded, in turn, by the Rockefellers), the Tides Foundation, the Rose Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (funded by Tides and the Rockefeller Family Fund, among others).”

Shepstone explained, “Not only is the pipeline not on the reservation’s land, it parallels an existing natural gas pipeline already built there in the ’80’s. The Indigenous Environmental Network is also part of something called the Sustainable World Coalition… It’s not about the climate, the environment or Native Americans. It’s all about the money and power, which is why Warren Buffett also invests in Tides and other groups to fund opposition to Dakota pipelines that would compete with his Burlington Northern railroad to haul oil. It’s because of these people that groups such as the Indigenous Environmental Network even exist and why the debate over the Dakota Pipeline is such a fiasco.”

Meanwhile, groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network claim to be led by “tribal grassroots members”, despite their lucrative assistance.

It’s not just in North Dakota, either. As Vivian Krause a frequent writer for the Financial Post

about this engrained corporate corruption writes, the left-wing opposition to pipelines extended to the Canada oil sands and the Keystone XL pipeline. Wrote Krause, “A large part of Tides’ funding comes from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These are The Big Five. They give away about $1.2 billion every year. If these foundations decide to undermine a foreign industry, they probably can.”

That is exactly what they have done. Tides, with the help of big name charities and business men, has taken control of the debate on the pipelines and spun it into an indigenous issue. By Krause’s calculations, Tides, a co-funder of the Rockefeller oil sands campaign, has distributed $19 million to anti-Keystone XL pipeline groups from 2008 to 2013 alone, including funding tribal groups like Idle No More. Overall, left-wing foundations have devoted more than $75 million to those operations, according to Krause.

The Tides Foundation for example, got its money’s worth in 2014 when, as Toronto Sun reporter Ezra Levant explains, the left wing lobbying group based out of San Francisco wired $55,000 to the bank account of Allan Adam, from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation chief in Northern Alberta, to oppose the construction of oil sands.

While these protestors fight their “environmentalist” aim, they have actually destroyed the environment of the area they claim to be eager to protect.

The protestors have burned tires, releasing toxic chemicals into the air; dug latrines in the flood plain, washing waste into the Cannonball River; and killed cows and bison, hardly environmentally appropriate at all. Altogether, the damage these protestors have caused runs a bill the state estimates will cost $33 million in damages.

The Tides Foundation and its affiliates are not just paying for protests, they are building a franchise of illegal and reckless activity. North Dakota should send them the bill.

With over 700 already arrested, 90 percent with previous records, these protestors have taken it to the next level of civil disobedience. Individuals have heckled police officers, tied themselves to construction equipment, and when forced to evacuate, set fire to their sites and became violent.

These were the same tactics used in Canada by local tribal groups with great effect, often leading to property damage and arrests, and indicate an international strategy by these foundations to destabilize an entire industry. It need not be tolerated. There is no First Amendment right to destroy property.

The foundations funding this protest can and should be held accountable to the entire state affected by this chaos. By creating a problem in South Dakota, these organizations have helped create a lawless area of senseless social justice advocacy which is costing the state millions. If Tides, Rockefeller and other foundations are willing to fund these protests, it is about time someone made them fund the cleanup. NATALIA CASTRONatalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.

Commentary: Natalia Castro

Was the DNC ‘hack’ staged?Lost over the weekend amid President Donald Trump’s very serious and important allegation

over Twitter that former President Barack Obama’s administration had engaged in surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016 was another tweet from Trump that goes to the heart of claims that Russia had anything at all to do with the supposed hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta emails.

The second tweet on March 4 stated, “Is it true the DNC would not allow the FBI access to check server or other equipment after learning it was hacked? Can that be possible?”

Here, Trump was referring apparently to a CNN report from January that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) refused to give the FBI access to its computer servers after it claimed in June it had been hacked by the Russian government.

Although the DNC tells the story a different way, with DNC deputy communications director Eric Lake offering to Buzzfeed News, “The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and US Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers.”

But, either the FBI tried to get access to the servers, and was refused, or the FBI simply never requested access. Either way, per the CNN report, “The FBI instead relied on the assessment from a third-party security company called CrowdStrike,” which had performed its own audit of the DNC server.

This raises the obvious question of how the U.S. government ever proved on its own that Russia was behind the hack — if there even was a hack — if it never accessed the DNC computers. For, this goes to the heart of all claims central to Russia and the 2016 election.

Namely, if Russia was not behind any hacking of the DNC or John Podesta, then the Trump campaign could not have possibly colluded with Russia in such efforts.

Enter into the mix Wikileaks once again with its bombshell disclosure of CIA cyber warfare hacking tools and capabilities, which, besides Edward Snowden, appears to be the most impactful dump of classified information in U.S. history. Included in the disclosure is the ability of the agency — and presumably other hackers — to mask who is performing a hack.

According to Wikileaks’ press release, “The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch‘s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.”

On its face, the revelations on UMBRAGE appear to contradict a key finding from the CrowdStrike audit of the DNC server last year, which relied on an analysis of the techniques used by the supposed hackers.

Wrote Crowdstrike, “we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected. Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services.”

But if those techniques can be co-opted by other hackers or intelligence agencies — as the UMBRAGE program appears designed to do — it appears that the list of potential intruders on the DNC server should have been longer than just Russia. How does analyzing techniques tell you who perpetrated a hack?

Because, not only did the U.S. government apparently not physically investigate the DNC servers, it should have known full well that the hacking techniques identified by Crowdstrike as being used by state actors could be mimicked.

Add to that the fact that the DNC servers were already compromised in Dec. 2015, not because of a hack, but because of its internal voter and donor database software, NGP VAN, kept dropping its firewall. The problems were so bad that opposing campaigns could access each other’s files. Josh Uretsky was Bernie Sanders’ national data director but was fired after he accessed and stored files from the Clinton campaign he was able to access via NGP VAN before a software patch was issued. Has the FBI investigated these internal vulnerabilities? Might they explain how somebody internally might have gotten to the files that did wind up on Wikileaks?

So, what made everyone think it was Russia?Bear in mind that right before the supposed hack was reported, on June 12, 2016, Wikileaks

founder Julian Assange told ITV in an interview that “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great, Wikileaks has a very big year ahead… We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication, that is correct.”

Just two days later, on the Washington Post on June 14, 2016, it was preannounced that the hackers had accessed opposition research on then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, which stated, “Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.”

Sure enough, a day later, on June 15, 2016, the WordPress blog by Guccifer 2.0 appeared, taking credit for the DNC hack described in the Washington Post story. The blog posted some of the documents including the opposition research as proof of the hack. Critically, Guccifer 2.0 claimed, “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.”

Here Guccifer 2.0 was going out of its way to associate itself with Wikileaks, not the other way around. Wikileaks never confirmed that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of either the DNC or Podesta emails.

It was always peculiar that Wikileaks’ supposed source for the organization’s biggest story ever had preempted Wikileaks’ disclosure by more than a month claiming responsibility. Guccifer 2.0 also left behind a trail of bread crumbs that make the hack look Russian. For example, it was revealed that metadata in one of the files posted by Guccifer 2.0 was modified by a user whose name in Cyrillic was “Felix Edmundovich,” an apparent reference to a founder of the Soviet-era secret police.

So, what if the DNC supposed hack and Guccifer 2.0 was actually staged to make it look like Russia was responsible in order to get out front of Assange’s pending leaks against Clinton?

Former United Kingdom Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has maintained that there was no hack for months. “Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks,” Murray is quoted as saying in an interview with the Daily Mail published Dec. 14, 2016.

Later, at a tech conference in London in Sept. 2016, Guccifer 2.0 claimed he or she had accessed the DNC servers via the same NGP VAN breach that Uretsky had been fired from the Sanders campaign over.

Add to that, then, the Christopher Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign — eventually published and discredited by Buzzfeed — that only started linking the Trump campaign to the Wikileaks disclosures after the DNC emails had appeared on Wikileaks in July. Somehow, Steele’s sources had no idea what bombshells were coming from Assange in the initial memos, but suddenly, in late July after Wikileaks published the emails, he had already gotten to the bottom of it. Not only was Russia behind Wikileaks, but the Trump campaign was colluding with them. It was too good to be true.

At some point, the FBI apparently offered to commission Steele to continue his Russia, Trump reporting, according to a Feb. 28 report from the Washington Post. In a March 6 letter by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to FBI director James Comey, Grassley blasted the agency for getting involved in politics — and using unsubstantiated opposition research by the Clinton campaign to apparently initiate a national security investigation into the Trump campaign, then the opposition party.

“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” wrote Grassley.

Indeed, it offers the appearance that the Trump campaign was framed — by the Clinton campaign using vendors like Steele and CrowdStrike — for crimes that were never committed. What’s worse, the FBI appears to have relied on these Democrat sources for material related to Russia — without apparently verifying it for itself.

But then, then information was used to engage in surveillance against the Trump campaign — or at least spy on Russian contacts with the Trump campaign — which were then leaked to the media to create the appearance of collusion. FBI probes were launched into one-time campaign advisor Carter Page, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. These men’s reputations were destroyed at the altar of this madness.

So far, the Russia supposed hacks of the DNC and John Podesta emails have been compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But who were these hackers? What were their names? Which branch of the Russian government did they represent? What city were they operating out of? Were there any operatives in the U.S.?

Or don’t we know? Consider that. The Clinton campaign and the Obama administration have virtually destroyed U.S-Russian relations — with both governments sitting atop thousands of nuclear weapons — bringing us to the brink of war, with claims that were never proven. It has become an article of faith. Something politicians say to sound tough but who have not at all made the case publicly to justify escalating tensions in theaters like Syria or Ukraine.

This is all making war more likely. And one way or another it’s time to come clean.If the government can’t prove the case against Russia — if the supposed hack was not even

physically investigated by the FBI — then for the sake of diplomacy alone, the claim ought to be disavowed. Those intelligence assessments by the Obama administration should have never been made public. They, lacking proof, added nothing but poison to the discussion, and their continued exhibition to date in news reports purporting to show fantastical connections between Trump and Russia contribute nothing but further deteriorating the possibility of relations.

To be fair, we don’t know what we don’t know. But given these glaring inconsistencies in the record — plus the specter that the Obama administration used the national security apparatus against the opposition party to win an election and afterward to overturn it and now to simply save face — the House and Senate Intelligence Committees must consider and investigate the possibility we’ve all been had. ROBERT ROMANORobert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.


Commentary: Robert Romano


Watching Outfor Our Country, County and CityLIKE A HAWK!

KELY 1230AM

Ely’s Radio Station293-1875 Georgetown Ranch

Heckuva Job Demos…SJR2, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), is Nevada Democrats’

proof-positive demonstration that a 120-day legislative every other year session is too long and should be cut back to around 20 days.

The ERA dinosaur was rejected by the Nevada Legislature in 1973, 1975 and 1977 before being rejected by Nevada voters in 1978 by a 2-1 margin. It’s been dead nationally since 1981.

Nevertheless, Senate Democrats resurrected the measure this session and passed it on Wednesday with only one Republican foolishly voting for it – Sen.Heidi Gansert (RINO-Reno). Gansert also happens to be the only Republican illegally serving in the Legislature while simultaneously working at a six-figure “juice” job in the Executive branch.

The meaningless, useless, senseless political theater bill now goes to the Democrat-controlled state Assembly where it will sail through without a problem. At which point…nothing.

It will do nothing. It will mean nothing. It’s just…well, nothing. It doesn’t even go the governor for signature, as it’s a resolution on a federal constitutional amendment that’s been dead and buried for over three decades.

Heckuva job, Nevada D’s! Let’s just sine die today. CHUCK MUTH


Commentary: Chuck Muth Every week in Nevada, someone is trying to screw us.

Most of the time, we elected that someone.

That's why we conserva-tives NEED a WEEKLY voice.

That's why the Penny Press has made sticking up for us little guys a whole new Nevada tradition.

Penny Press775-461-1515

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Carson Citywww.LaMejorReno.com


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penny press 27 march 9, 20172017/03/09 · the penny press,march 9, 2017 page 4 radio —...

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