Bryan Fischer
Lynn Moses pardon request rejected by President Bush
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By Bryan Fischer
January 28, 2009

While Pres. Bush did the right thing in commuting the sentences of Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos (although they deserved an outright pardon), he chose not to grant a pardon to Idaho soldier Sgt. Evan Vela, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for following the orders of superior officer, orders which resulted in the death of an Iraqi civilian. Both Sen. Mike Crapo and Rep. Mike Simpson sent letters to the president requesting a pardon for Sgt. Vela.

And unfortunately, the president also chose not to pardon or commute the sentence of Lynn Moses, the Driggs developer who was sent to federal prison for 18 months for doing nothing more than fulfilling his contractual obligations to Teton County to maintain an intermittent stream bed as a flood control channel, in order to protect the city of Driggs from flooding.

Overzealous prosecution by the EPA combined with an activist judge — Lynn Winmill — resulted in this miscarriage of justice. As a result, Mr. Moses will miss his youngest daughter's entire senior year of high school, including her graduation.

Sen. Crapo, believing it to be the right and decent thing to do, sent a letter to the president requesting consideration of either a commutation or outright pardon for Mr. Moses, but to no avail, as the president proved unfortunately parsimonious with the power of the pardon in his last days in office.

Sen. Crapo correctly believes the EPA had no legitimate authority to prosecute Mr. Moses in the first place, since, as the Supreme Court made clear in its 2006 Rapanos ruling, the Clean Water Act gives it no jurisdiction whatsoever over intermittent streams.

If you'd like to review the Lynn Moses case, you can do so at the following link:

Feds send man to prison for protecting homes

WE TOLD YOU SO: MILITARY HAS TO BULK UP EFFORTS TO COMBAT SEXUAL ASSAULT


Our prime argument against the University of Idaho's plan — since happily abandoned — to put opposite sex students in co-ed dorm suites and dorm rooms is that such a move would create environments which foster unhealthy and dangerous sexual activity, including date rape.

As I have pointed out, you cannot put two rabbits in the same hutch and not expect at some point to get little bunnies, and it doesn't matter how many abstinence pledges the rabbits have taken.

Similar concerns underlie our opposition to the pell-mell rush of the military to place women in combat and in close proximity to male soldiers.

Predictably, such bone-headed public policies, which turn the military into a giant social engineering laboratory instead of a machine to protect the American people, have blown up in the face of the Pentagon.

Now we find that the Army has to hire 30 new special investigators, 15 new prosecutors and a dozen new trainers just to deal with an exploding number of sexual assault cases.

Fifteen percent of the 9,000 crimes investigated by the Army last year were sexual assaults, and all told, 1,800 soldiers have been punished for sex crimes since 9/11.

Whether U of I officials ever recognize it, the IVA has done them and their students a favor by persuading the school to adopt a more socially responsible housing policy.

DefenseLink News Article: Army Adding Legal Experts to Combat Sexual Assault, Harassment

NASA SCIENTIST NOW A GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTIC


As Al Gore braves the freezing cold of our nation's capitol to holler that the global warming sky is falling, and as BSU gears up to host an entire day of global warming alarmism, word comes that a leading NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John Theon, now retired, is publicly declaring himself a global warming skeptic.

Tellingly, he was higher up the NASA food chain than noted alarmist James Hansen, who claimed that the Bush administration was trying to muzzle him, hilariously making this claim in each one of his 1,400 on-the-job media interviews.

In fact, not only was Hansen never muzzled, he himself called for trials for global warming dissenters on grounds that they were committing "high crimes against humanity." Welcome to McCarthyism, environmental style.

His efforts, according to Theon, Hansen's former supervisor at NASA, "embarrassed" NASA since NASA's official position is that it does not know enough to forecast either climate change or man's impact on it.

Theon declares that "climate models are useless" since they do not take "very important sub-grid scale processes" into account. He adds, "Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy."

Theon joins a notable list of current and former NASA scientists who dissent from man-made climate fears.

Unfortunately for Mr. Gore, things have worsened since his hyperventilating "documentary" "An Inconvenient Truth" was released in 2006. The earth has cooled noticeably since then, Antarctic sea ice has grown to record levels, sea level rise has slowed, ocean temperatures have failed to warm, and over 650 international scientists rejected the U.N.'s global warming dogma in December. That list of dissenting scientists is growing by the day.

At the International Geological Congress in August of 2008, more than 2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to the U.N.'s position, and a 2008 survey of more than 1,500 Canadian scientists revealed that 68% of them disagree with global warming alarmism.

A November 25, 2008 article in Politico summed things up nicely by saying that the "science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation."

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: James Hansen's Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic

© Bryan Fischer

 

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