The feds hold “in trust” 57.5 percent of Utah, 84.5 percent of Nevada, 69.1 percent of Alaska, 36.6 percent of Colorado, 50.2 percent of Idaho, 41.8 percent of New Mexico, 42.3 percent of Wyoming, 48.1 percent of Arizona and even 45.3 percent of California.

Today, the feds continue to administer all this land in Western states through many federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Here are a few examples of the lousy management job the feds are doing.

Federal data, despite Obama’s assertion to the contrary in debate No. 2, shows that oil and natural gas production on federally administered lands declined 13 percent from 2010 to 2011. Oil and gas production on private land is soaring, thanks to new technology and new discoveries.

Obama has taken credit for the overall increase in production while trying to hide that the increase would be a lot higher if federal lands were allowed in on the boom and states got a share of the royalties paid by the drillers.

In another example, millions of acres of federal forest go up in smoke every year – not because Smokey the Bear is not doing his job but because federal agencies are run by and for anti-timber, anti-ranching, anti-road and endangered species zealots who prevent good forestry practices.

After the devastating recent forest fires in New Mexico, the Forest Service even blocked recovery logging of still usable trees to clear the land for new growth. By contrast, good practices on the Apache reservation forest land (not subject to Forest Service rules) spared that forest from the recent devastating fires.

The stupidity of these policies has come to the attention of an al-Qaida website that describes how to strike America by igniting American forests, an indictment of both the Forest Service and the open border.

Here’s another example.

Mining of “rare earths,” the scarce minerals in every computer, smart phone and military weapon system, has been shut down on federal lands. A dozen rare earth mines on federal land in New Mexico have been closed to “protect the environment,” leaving us dependent on mines in China to meet our needs for these critical minerals.

Rep. Ivory’s contention is that these “federal” lands (other than national parks, national monuments, veterans memorials and other special cases created by Congress) belong to the Western states by law and that sale of these lands would produce a boom in the private economy and an increase in state revenues for schools, roads, health programs and whatever else cash-starved states would like to do to create a better life for their citizens.

Ivory relies on a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court case (Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs) where the Court unanimously ruled that the state of Hawaii had the right to dispose of federal lands within its boundary for private development.

The U.S. Constitution (Article IV) provides that Congress has the power to grant federal lands within a new state to that state.

After the original colonies became independent, every new state was created by Congress through an enabling act, which promised that title to lands held by the federal government within the state boundary would be given to the state to help fund public expenses.

The Court cited a long history of federal land becoming state land after statehood. Lands held by the feds east of the Mississippi River were granted to the states formed out of those lands in the 1830s and ’40s.

The vast Louisiana Purchase resulted in the creation of many other states. Congress granted some of them (North Dakota, for example) nearly all federal land within the state boundaries. This is why North Dakota is nearly all privately owned and why the Bakken Oil Boom is possible today.

All other Western states have the same enabling act language that North Dakota has.

This case is the foundation of Ken Ivory’s campaign for the rest of the Western states, and why, he says, this effort will succeed where previous efforts, like the 1980s “Sagebrush Rebellion,” failed.

This year, Rep. Ivory introduced, the Utah Legislature on a bipartisan basis passed, and the governor signed, House Bill 148, which places a Dec. 21, 2014, deadline on Congress to transfer control of federal lands to the state of Utah.

National parks are exempted, as are national monuments except the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which was created by Bill Clinton to keep $2 trillion worth of high-quality coal off the market as a favor to some Indonesian coal interests.

Ivory’s Utah bill sets up a showdown with Congress, which, since 1976, has said that no more federal lands would be transferred to the states.

Other Western states have taken notice of Ken Ivory’s stand. The New Mexico Legislature will see a similar bill introduced in January. In Nevada, a similar bill has already been introduced.

In Arizona, a bill to require Arizona to sell all federal land within the state passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer, who didn’t object to state control of these “trust” lands but wanted more flexibility in the use of the land. The governor rightly was concerned about protecting the rights of existing private uses such as grazing on federal land. A new bill acceptable to the governor will be introduced in the next session.

If the federal government wants to block oil and natural gas production, block “rare earth” mining, limit grazing, steal water rights and leave the West a scorched earth of preventable wildfires, the Western states want the land they were promised to reverse those policies and build a foundation of a new prosperity.

Suppose it’s now time to evaluate that executive’s performance during his first four years to determine whether to renew his employment contract.

Applying standard executive evaluation criteria, you should rate performance against promise, leadership, team building, dedication to the job, overcoming obstacles, accepting consequences of, and learning from, mistakes and sharing credit for success.

The U.S. was on the rocks four years ago and, in the election of 2008, the country turned to just such a charismatic, inexperienced leader full of hope and change who promised by the end of his first term, to cut the deficit in half, to lower the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent, to create a new economy based on millions of “green jobs” and to stop the Bush wars.

All these promises were greeted with acclaim by voters scared and made poorer by the recession Obama inherited. To our dismay, these promises have not been kept. Most people are not better off than they were in January 2009 and the wars drag on.

The annual budget deficit is still adding more than $1 trillion every year to the national debt, and Obama’s 10-year budget forecast predicts trillion-dollar deficits each and every one of those 10 coming years with no end to this folly short of national bankruptcy.

Obama has spent $5 trillion more in the last four years than the government took in. That’s $4 billion in new debt every day! What did we get for more debt than it took to win World War II?

Only last month did the unemployment rate miraculously decline to the 7.8 percent rate it was when he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009. Twenty-three million Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, wages are stagnant and household median wealth has melted 39 percent since the “recovery” started

Hundreds of billions of dollars we didn’t have were invested in new green energy companies (85 percent of them with ties to Obama campaign contributors), too many of which have gone bankrupt throwing thousands of American out of work. The Obama investors got their money out, the workers lost everything. Solar panels are now almost all coming from China where those green jobs went.

And Obama is still criticizing Bain Capital?

There’s much bragging about “saving the auto industry.” The Obama-directed bankruptcy of GM left senior citizen bond and shareholders with nothing, but gave control of the company to the United Auto Workers union. Since then, GM has invested most of its money in new plants in China.

And Obama is still criticizing Bain Capital?

Worse, Obama continues to blame his predecessor for the failure of the very policies Obama promised would cure the economy of the devastation brought on by the evil Bush.

Part of the problem, as Obama described to Barbara Walters early in his term, is, “I think there’s laziness in me.” To Andrea Mitchell’s shock, John Sununu described Obama as “lazy and detached.” So it seems.

Obama just won’t stay on the job. He has turned Air Force One into a commercial airliner, attending more fundraisers than the last six presidents put together. He has boasted of telling Michelle on Saturdays that he is going to the Oval Office to work when he’s really going there to watch “Homeland” reruns. His golf outings have set a new presidential record.

More recently, Obama complained to a pizza delivery guy in Vegas that preparing for the last debate was “a drag.” Watching his performance in that debate was a drag for liberals. Bill Maher wondered if the president had used his million-dollar campaign contribution to “buy weed.”

Then there’s the foreign policy debacle.

Seems now it was the incessant bragging about killing Osama bin Laden, and not some Internet video, that stimulated al-Qaida to prove they were still around with the 9/11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed our ambassador.

In retaliation, Obama mega-contributor movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is releasing a new brag film about killing bin Laden two days before the election. Ambassadors beware.

Everywhere in the world, America is disrespected and in retreat. Our military is worn out from incessant war, and announced budget cuts will embolden every ambitious nation, until lately held in check by potential U.S. action, to expand their power. Think China versus Japan, Iran versus Israel.

It seems that bowing to foreign leaders, vowing to listen to their gripes and demands and encouraging the overthrow of friendly leaders has not made us any safer than when Jimmy Carter tried this approach in the ‘70s and got the Iranian hostage crisis in response.

What will be the reply to Obama’s weakness? A mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv?

Just like most Americans can remember Ronald Reagan’s ‘80s as years of prosperity brought on by lowering tax rates, restricting government interference in the economy and encouraging rather than demonizing business, so too can most Americans remember when peace through strength defeated the Soviet Union without firing a shot.

No politician likes to be reminded that they work for us and not the other way around.

Obama clearly doesn’t want you to look too closely at his many failures and come to the conclusion that we can do better.

But if this were an employee evaluation based on the kind of criteria common to jobs you and I hold, the employer would be looking to do better, much better.

Example: The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, has defended the constitutional right to put a crucifix upside down in a bottle of urine and call it “art” or festoon a picture of the Virgin Mary with dung and hang it in a taxpayer-supported “art” institute.

The left has constantly berated conservatives for purportedly limiting civil liberties. Witness the left excoriating George Bush over the “Patriot Act.”

Today, liberals are eerily quiet as Barack Obama moves to ban “blaspheming the prophet” and claps an Internet video backer in jail to placate radical Islam.

Nakoula Nakoula (or whatever he is calling himself today) may well have violated his conditions of parole after serving a 21-month sentence for bank fraud, but the secret hearing on the “parole violation” also allowed Obama to broadcast to the Muslim world that the perpetrator of the “disgusting” video has been jailed as Egyptian President Morsi and other Muslim leaders have demanded.

But now the ACLU has blown the whistle on Obama’s widespread snooping of Americans’ electronic communications.

Obama has used the Patriot Act (expanded during his term) to seek a 60 percent increase in the number of warrants issued during the Bush years to pry into your phone conversations, Internet searches and email content.

The ACLU has revealed that its Freedom of Information Act requests show that the Obama Department of Justice used “pen register” to capture outgoing data from a phone or email account and “trap and trace” to capture incoming data techniques 23,535 times in 2009 and 37,616 times in 2011

Worse, Obama has expanded the warrantless searches of Americans’ electronic communications.

Section 212 of the Patriot Act, as renewed for another four years in 2011, now provides for increased duration of these searches of Americans’ electronic communications.

Semi-annual reports on the targets of these intercepts, also required by the Patriot Act extension, have not been filed with Congress.

While Obama publicly proclaimed his rejection of the Bush “torture” under the Patriot Act, he has quietly expanded the Bush policies of communications intercepts.

Democrat Sens. Wyden, Feingold and Udall warned in 2011 that the extension of the Patriot Act as proposed by Obama would authorize more warrantless intrusion into private communications than Bush ever did. Their fears have proven well founded.

Section 215 of the renewed Patriot Act allows the FBI to obtain “business records,” including dumps from private computer databases, with limited judicial oversight.

The acting assistant attorney general for national security, Todd Hinnen, told a House committee that Section 215 had been used to obtain driver’s license records, hotel and rental records, credit card use records and the like with no warrant because this is “not a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”

Sen. Udall warned in 2011 that the FBI can “collect business records on law abiding Americans” with no connection to terrorism.” It can, and it does.

The FBI and other federal agencies like the National Security Agency, or NSA, today are using section 215 as a data vacuum cleaner to obtain records from pharmacies, bookstores, retailers, credit card providers, telephone companies, etc., all in the name of “anti-terrorism.”

While the original target was terrorism, nobody in Congress thought they were granting the federal government such sweeping authority to snoop into the private records of Americans regardless of any connection to terrorism.

The failure to file the required reports with Congress leaves unanswered any question of the appropriateness of the targets or the scope and duration of these warrantless searches.

This election season has seen much debate on the merit of Obama’s economic policies. With continued high unemployment, sluggish economic growth and crushing federal deficits, the focus has been on the actual results of over $5 trillion of new federal debt.

More recently, the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens followed by anti-American demonstrations across the Muslim world, has evidenced a collapse of the Obama foreign policy.

But little notice has been given by the Obama cheering media to Obama’s failure to close Gitmo or Obama’s accelerating assault on the protections of the Bill of Rights.

If Obama were a Republican president, I bet this issue would be getting the attention it deserves.

I had been invited to be a guest panelist on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

I found myself the token conservative, the pin cushion, the foil for the snide and snarky, the stand-in for evil Romney. The audience was packed with Obamanites howling for conservative blood. It was a great night.

While I was fully aware of Maher’s politics and “humor,” I had been lured into this by the promise of a balanced panel: Maher and one other liberal and me and one other conservative.

The actual panel consisted of Bill Maher, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, and a TIME magazine reporter named Rana Foroohar, who had earlier equated Glenn Beck listeners with the terrorists who killed the U.S. ambassador in Libya.

Salmon Rushdie was also a guest on the same show. As a measure of how the show went, the chief of security personally walked me to the after-party room while the man the Islamists have sworn to kill was escorted by the females from the Maher staff.

Maher’s staff was professional, thorough and welcoming. I was made to feel at home but had no illusions about what was to come when Chris Matthews snarled a brief hello as he brushed by me to the makeup room.

At the start of the show, as expected, Maher and company were still chewing on Romney’s 47 percent comment from last May. How horrible to write off half the American people. How awful to stigmatize veterans, Social Security pensioners, poor people, etc. How out of touch, etc.

I made the mistake of replying with facts. Romney was responding to a question about his prospects to win the election, not how he would govern.

And every American ought to be concerned about the rise of dependency on food stamps and welfare, caused by the failure of Obama’s economic policies, indicated by persistent high unemployment, falling incomes and shrinking household wealth during the so-called recovery.

That response set off a Chris Matthews firestorm. Liberals hate facts that contradict the party line.

While I expected the rebuttal, “Look what he inherited from Bush,” I didn’t expect Matthews to falsely claim that Obama inherited unemployment over 10 percent. Unemployment in January 2009 was actually 7.8 percent and has not been that low since.

Then Matthews really lost it, bellowing you people are just racists who hated Obama from the first day. I haven’t heard the “you people” phrase since Ross Perot used it in front of an African-American audience in 1992.

According to Matthews, any criticism of Obama is racist. End of story. He added that Mitch McConnell’s early vow to defeat Obama indicated that Republicans hated Obama from the beginning.

Maher had to remind Matthews that Democrats hated the “nincompoop” Bush from the beginning, too.

Matthews then flashed another red herring. He asked why you people defined success by money earned. Aren’t teachers a success? Soldiers fighting in Afghanistan? It didn’t matter that Romney had never defined success as solely measured by money made. Chris was on a roll.

Rana Foroohar chimed in, claiming that social mobility, the opportunity for success, was dwindling in the U.S. She dismissed the reality of the “bootstraps” concept in a city full of rags-to-riches stories in a country that attracts millions of immigrants seeking that opportunity.

Like I say, it was quite a night.

Then Matthews really got personal. Your crowd inherited everything. You were born sliding into home. You’re playing a racial game.

I, not too gently, told Chris that I had come from humble beginnings and had worked for what I had. More importantly, Romney, when he did inherit his parent’s wealth, gave it away. What he has today he earned, too.

Maher then took the show in an unexpected direction when he asserted that Islam was different. In no other religion, Maher said, do you find about half its followers willing to kill people who don’t share the faith.

That inflamed Matthews against Maher, leaving me out of the crossfire for a moment.

In the after-show party, Maher expressed surprise that Matthews was so hard core. Maher told me that Matthews had a centrist reputation in past years and suggested that Chris had moved left to keep his job at an increasingly leftist MSNBC.

I went home to San Diego thinking that my experience was what awaited Mitt Romney in his upcoming debates with Obama.

American leftists in and out of the Obama administration are denying responsibility for the Arab Spring uprising (that they encouraged) turning into a nightmare for the U.S., blaming the whole thing on an unreleased 13 minute movie trailer.

Similarly, Obama first praised and then went silent on the Occupy Wall Street movement when the backlash from American public opinion threatened his re-election.

In fact, the two movements were spurred on by the Obama left with the same goal in mind – radical change.

Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt, encouraged Muslims to topple authoritarian regimes all across the Muslim world.

Obama first denied the American view, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, of the universality of God-given individual rights, saying, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.”

He then went on to advocate “human rights,” including a “government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people,” widely seen as a direct criticism of Egypt President Hosni Mubarak.

In short order, Mubarak, an American ally for more than 30 years, was overthrown by the Arab Spring while Obama smiled from the sidelines.

An election to form a new government was won by the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-American organization founded in the 1920s and dedicated to Shariah law and a worldwide Islamic state.

The new Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi, sacked pro-American Egyptian generals and placed the military under his authority.

Last week, a mob shouting “Obama, we are a million Osamas” breached the American Embassy wall in Cairo, tore down and shredded and burned the American flag and raised the black flag of radical Islam without any resistance from security or the new Egyptian regime.

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown and killed in 2011 when he threatened to massacre rebels in Benghazi.

Following the election of a new supposedly moderate Libyan regime, an Islamist militia mounted a 400 man military attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi last week, killing our ambassador.

Obama saved the rebels from slaughter, only to have a group of them slaughter Americans representing his government.

Now Obama would have the world (or at least the American voter) believe that this murderous radical rampage is simply the result of disgruntled movie critics.

How involved is the Obama left in the radicalization of Islam and the anti-American violence that has followed?

Consider a June 2012 speech at Springfield College by Wayne Rathke, described as “the founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN (1970-2008) and Chief Organizer of ACORN International.”

Rathke describes his efforts to spread the ACORN community organizing model into foreign countries. He then describes the similarities between Occupy and the Arab Spring.

Occupy Wall Street had numerous connections to the Arab Spring uprising.

From resolutions of support from the OWS General Assembly to the hacktivist collective Anonymous aid to the uprising in Tunisia and then Egypt, the ties between OWS and the Arab Spring are numerous and influential.

It is not a coincidence that the Guy Falkes mask worn by Anonymous and other OWS activists was prominent in the mob that stormed the Embassy in Cairo last week.

In his speech, Rathke said he called for a delegation of “community and labor organizers” to go to Cairo during the Arab Spring uprising “to seize the opportunity of the movement moment.”

For what purpose?

“Those of us who believe in empowerment and the necessity of social justice and change in the world know we need a movement that is a prairie fire burning everything in its path so the rebuilding of change can happen quickly. We also know we have to keep organizing every day to take advantage of such movements (as the Arab Spring) when they erupt so that the changes can be deep and long lasting.”

A prairie fire is indeed burning through the Muslim world, led by Islamic radicals, encouraged by the American left and deadly to Americans in its path.

It’s no coincidence that Wayne Rathke was the most frequent visitor to the White House in 2009, according to White House visitor logs.

Obama’s foreign policy looks like a failure – a weak, apologetic echo of Jimmy Carter. On closer examination, the firestorm of anti-American violence may be the planned, and certainly the predictable, result of that policy.

We should all worry for our brave military personnel in the never ending war in Afghanistan where American dead average one per day.

For what purpose have these Americans died? At first, war aims seemed clear, the sacrifice necessary.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Afghan Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attack, who was sheltered there. President George Bush, with the consent of Congress, ordered the American military to invade Afghanistan, destroy al-Qaida and topple the Taliban regime.

Within a short time, bin Laden apparently escaped into Pakistan, al-Qaida was damaged and scattered but not destroyed and the Taliban regime was toppled but began a long guerrilla war against the Western alliance led by the U.S.

Today, nearly 11 years later, the aims of America’s longest war ever are missing in action. Hundreds of billions of dollars we did not have are gone. Worst of all, Americans are still dying in Afghanistan.

Last week, in a terse statement like so many these days, the Pentagon announced that PFC Shane W. Cantu of Corunna, Mich., died of shrapnel wounds on Aug. 28 in eastern Afghanistan. He was 10 years old when 9/11 happened.

Afghanistan is the “good war” President Obama supported in 2008. The war goes on, but to what end? To build a Western-style democracy in a primitive, fundamentalist, illiterate tribal society? To train an Afghan military capable of protecting the opium profits of the “President” Hamid Karzai’s family and the precious metal mines run by the Chinese?

President Obama has pledged to withdraw American troops at the end of 2014. What will be accomplished to justify American deaths between now and then? It turns out that Obama has promised Karzai that thousands of American troops will stay beyond 2014.

In retrospect, Bush should have followed his “mission accomplished” ceremony by bringing the troops home and leaving the Afghan population to decide its own future, promising that if that future included terrorism directed at us, we would be back to stop it.

Except for the grieving families and friends of our war dead, Americans today have largely turned away from this war. Puzzled by the drawn-out conflict and the lack of clear goals to justify the sacrifice of blood and treasure, feeling powerless in the face of bipartisan indifference to this ongoing tragedy, Americans have given up thinking about Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan has become, in the words of military historian Max Boot, the “who cares” war. For the majority of Americans not touched by the dying, the war seems hardly to be happening at all.

Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly is senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. His son, Lt. Robert M. Kelly, died in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan in 2010.

In a recent speech, Gen. Kelly lamented that “America as a whole today is certainly not at war, not as a country, not as a people. Only a tiny fraction of American families fear all day and every day a knock at the door that will shatter their lives.”

That knock came last week for the family of Jeremie S. Border, a 28-year-old Army Special Forces staff sergeant from Mesquite, Texas.

And it came for the family of Army Staff Sgt. Jonathan P. Schmidt, 28, of Petersburg, Va. And for Marine Lance Cpl. Alec R. Terwiske, 21, of Dubois, Ind.

At the political conventions, Gov. Romney accepted his party’s nomination with a speech that did not mention Afghanistan.

One week later, President Obama, the commander in chief, accepted his party’s nomination for another term with a speech that mentioned Afghanistan once in passing, promising again to end the war at the end of 2014 and again neglecting to mention his pledge to Karzai to keep American troops in that country indefinitely beyond 2014.

Prolonged war will destroy our republic. In the meantime it will needlessly kill the best of this generation.

Seeking to deflect political fallout from rising gas prices, President Obama has proposed releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Obama has also been lobbying European Union countries to release their reserve oil to increase supply and bring down prices and, by depriving Iran of oil revenues at the higher prices, increase the effectiveness of the sanctions against Iran.

At the same time, the New York Times reports that oil imports from Saudi Arabia have increased this year by 20 percent. That’s the Obama plan. Increase oil supply from the reserve and from a country vulnerable to Iranian interference. This Obama plan makes no sense.

The president apparently believes that more oil supply from the reserve and greater dependence on Saudi oil will bring down prices but more oil supply from Canada will not.

In a well-known story, TransCanada proposed to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to increase oil exports from Canada to the U.S. by more than 800,000 barrels a day. This new oil from Canada was planned to go to gasoline refineries in Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas, increasing the supply of gasoline for American motorists and truckers.

The Keystone project would have created more than 20,000 well-paying jobs and lessened our dependence on Venezuelan oil, which is currently used in Texas refineries.

A coalition of 11 labor unions, a dozen state governments and many business organizations lobbied for federal approval, which was required because the new pipeline would have crossed the Canada/U.S. international border. The State Department had recommended approval.

President Obama vetoed the project, putting environmental ideology ahead of jobs and ahead of energy dependence on a reliable ally.

Since Obama’s action, Chinese government-owned oil companies have been only too happy to begin buying Canadian oil companies in a blatant move to lock up the oil that would have gone to the U.S. The Canadian government has opened negotiations with the Chinese and is preparing to build a new pipeline from Alberta to the Canadian west coast to export the oil to China.

So far, it’s a lose-lose for America.

But all may not be lost yet. TransCanada rival pipeline owner, Enbridge, Inc., has proposed another way to bring more Canadian oil to the U.S. that does not require federal approval.

Enbridge has an existing pipeline from Canada into the U.S. under an existing permit which allows for expansion of the volume of oil in that pipe. By investing $8.8 billion in new pipe capacity in its pipe network in the U.S., Enbridge plans to add up to one million barrels a day of that Alberta, Canada, oil to supply the same refineries in Oklahoma and Texas that were the target of the Keystone XL.

No further federal approval is required. Environmentalists are livid.

So while proposing to release oil from the Petroleum Reserve (oil which will have to be replaced by open market purchase after the election) to increase oil supply and bring down oil price, Obama is now searching for a way to stop the Enbridge pipe expansion.

Saturday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times (a reliable mouthpiece for Obama) featured a front-page article in the business section exposing the Enbridge plan, detailing the few spills Enbridge had in its 60-year corporate history and calling on the federal agencies to do something to stop the import of Canadian oil.

The Times article lamented, “The task of determining the safety or wisdom of Enbridge pipeline routes falls on a patchwork of local, county, and state jurisdictions throughout the Midwest and East most of which lack intensive pipeline experience.”

Translation: These locals want the jobs and the revenues from the pipeline and can’t be trusted to stop it.

Only Obama can stop this nefarious scheme. The Times article ups the pressure on Obama, noting that, as of yet, the EPA and the National Transportation Safety Board have “declined to comment on Enbridge’s new plans.”

Will Obama once again step in to stop an increase in Canadian oil, preferring instead to plunder our Strategic Reserve and go deeper into oil dependence on Venezuela and Saudi Arabia?

Stay tuned.

A secret threat assessment, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” was distributed by Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, to more than 850,000 U.S. state and local law enforcement officers in April 2009.

The assessment warned of the rise of “Neo-Nazis” and “militias,” a warning that some see as valid today in light of the Sikh temple massacre in Wisconsin. But the language went way beyond warning about violent hate groups.

The secret assessment also branded political opponents of the policies of the new Obama administration as “rightwing extremists,” defined as any American “antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms and use.”

The assessment advised “intense scrutiny” by “our state and local [law enforcement] partners” of anyone who disagreed with Obama on amnesty for illegals, greater dependency on federal welfare programs or gun control.

The secret assessment asked these “state and local partners” to work with DHS to identify “with greater regional specificity the rise of rightwing extremism in the Unites States …” In other words, keep an eye on our political opponents.

Worse, the assessment targeted all our returning war veteran heroes as potential terrorists, potential Timothy McVeighs, even though military training does not include making fertilizer bombs.

The assessment admits that membership in “rightwing groups had declined,” but “returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”

No examples were given; it was just a hunch.

The secret assessment was never meant for public view. I published the secret assessment in WND and at RogerHedgecock.com on April 13, 2009.

A firestorm of political backlash resulted from this disclosure, eventually forcing the DHS to retract the assessment as Americans of all political persuasions were appalled that the new “hope and change” administration would so blatantly use the DHS to intimidate political opponents.

Last week, Daryl Johnson, the DHS analyst who wrote the assessment and was an intelligence analyst with U.S. Army and DHS credentials, was interviewed by Amy Goodman as a hero at “Democracy Now.”

Johnson had left DHS to form his own consultant company in 2009. He has written a book on his experiences at DHS, which he is promoting by now claiming he left DHS because his assessment was retracted.

But Johnson also revealed more about the motivation for the assessment.

In the interview, Johnson describes how in early 2009, newly appointed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “wanted to know what was an extremist” and whether there had been a “rise in right wing extremism and whether it was the result of the election of an African-American president and what we were going to do about it.”

Here is the very origin of the pernicious re-elect Obama theme: “Vote for Obama, or you are a racist.”

But Johnson also explodes the left’s myth about Timothy McVeigh. Asked about McVeigh’s ties to “rightwing supremacist groups,” Johnson admits there were none but McVeigh was certainly “anti-government.”

Johnson decries the public disclosure of his assessment blaming “conservative radio shock jock Roger Hedgecock” as the source of the disclosure. Johnson claims the political backlash against the assessment’s targeting of Americans opposed to the Obama agenda caused him to leave the DHS.

I am not a “jock,” either in the athletic or vinyl record sense. It’s always a “shock” when “progressives” are revealed for what they really are.

I am a patriot gladly willing to blow the whistle on the document that could have formed the basis of an American Gestapo at Obama’s DHS.

It’s not a hypothetical question. Obama’s second-term policies are already running “off Broadway” in Democrat-governed Maryland, Illinois and California. These second-term policies are the first-term failures on steroids, and they are failing, too.

Those states, and the large cities where Democrat mayors rule, are increasing taxes on the “rich,” suffocating business in a tsunami of regulations, permits and fees, declaring sanctuary for illegals, promoting food-stamp dependence, using SSI disability to supplement unemployment insurance and promising massive public work projects that cannot be funded.

Maryland and Illinois have repeatedly raised taxes on the rich only to see the number of “rich” tax filers decrease as the “rich” flee the state taking their businesses, investments and jobs with them.

California applies the top state income tax bracket (9.3 percent) to the filthy rich, defined as those greedy people making more than $47,900 per year.

Notwithstanding the current “fairness” of the California soak-the-rich income tax, Gov. Brown is campaigning for a yes vote on his tax increase proposal on the November ballot to make the rich pay an even fairer share.

The re-elect Obama media refuse to cover the agony of the California small-business owner who’s writhing like a butterfly pinned to a board with government, like a small boy, ready to pull the wings off.

In California, business must now reduce CO2 emissions. Cap-and-trade is California law now.

Utility companies must generate electricity using planet-friendly alternative sources of energy. But solar plants in the Mojave Desert have been opposed by environmentalists as destructive to the desert tortoise habitat. The enviros want everyone to buy an electric car but will oppose any method of generating the electricity to charge the batteries in those cars.

With Obama’s 2008 election, thousands of wannabe Obamas, lunatic leftists all, have poured out of academia, Soros-funded “think” tanks and publications like Mother Jones into every agency of government to inflict pain on the producers, the workers and the citizen to benefit the takers, the derelicts and the illegals.

Too many of these worthies are in public office in California.

California is a sanctuary state. Federal immigration law is not enforced by California law enforcement.

Illegals in California get free medical care, free schooling for their kids, housing assistance and welfare benefits, including free cell phones and free refrigerators.

Illegals vote, or have their vote cast for them, without fear of prosecution.

The amnesty Obama blatantly promised the “Dreamers” (and every illegal is now a “Dreamer”) in return for their votes is today’s reality in California.

California spends $6.67 billion on welfare, more than any other state. With about 12 percent of the U.S. population, California has 34 percent of all welfare recipients in the country.

Welfare spending in California amounts to $179 for every man, woman and child (and everyone in between) in the state compared to $17 in Idaho. About 4 percent of California residents receive welfare; about 0.2 percent of Idaho residents do.

Nationally, 31 percent of welfare is in cash grants, 69 percent non-cash services. In California, 56 percent is cash, 44 percent non-cash. California welfare recipients get cash grants for job training, and cash grants continue even in the unlikely event that they do get a job.

The maximum cash grant in California is $638 a month in addition to food stamps, cell phones, refrigerators, rent assistance, child care, public transit passes, etc.

The state paid $153 million last year for child care for welfare families. Unlike most states, in the unlikely event that parents lose their eligibility for this gravy train, their children (up to 18) still get the “free” cash and other goodies.

Todd Bland, the head of CalWORKS, California’s welfare program, is quoted as saying that the state is committed to a “safety net for children of parents who cannot or will not help themselves.” The California welfare bureaucracy is determined to protect its middle-class jobs by ensuring generation after generation dependent on welfare.

In Obama’s first term, he ignored Congress and ordered Clinton’s welfare reform, and specifically the work requirement, watered down. Attending dance class now qualifies as “searching for work” and validates continued welfare payments.

In California, welfare payments continue – job or no job, job search or no search.

Californians are living in Obama’s second term. These “second-term” policies are killing California. The result is permanent high unemployment, businesses fleeing the state, higher taxes, increased regulation, pothole-filled streets and decaying schools.

Only the November election stands between you and these second-term policies afflicting your state.

In Seattle, Wash., last month, Brenda Charlston received a voter registration form in the mail from the Voter Participation Center with all the blanks filled in for “Rosie Charlston,” her black Labrador who died in 1998.

The Obama supporting center says it has mailed some 5 million forms using commercially available databases to target Democratic-leaning groups such as unmarried women. What did they use in the Brenda/Rosie mailing? The dead dog mailing list?

In June, in Buford County, Va., Tim Morris received a filled-out voter registration form for “Mozart Morris” addressed to “Mo,” his dog that passed away two years before. Again, the form came in the mail from the Voter Participation Center.

In Bernalillo County, N.M., an anonymous Republican registered his dog as a voter at a voter registration booth at the University of New Mexico to show how easy it would be to defraud the system. Election officials claim they followed the law and referred the case to state prosecutors for criminal investigation of the dog owner!

Election officials throughout the country report a surge of voter registrations from animals, dead people and noncitizens.

Republicans believe Obama is depending on these registrations to win the election and want laws requiring voter ID at the polls. Democrats charge that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote to increase the odds of a Romney win.

This Democrat charge formed the basis of a lawsuit by Obama’s Department of Justice to block a Texas law that requires voter photo ID to vote. Texas is one of 26 states with such laws.

The DOJ claimed the requirement would bar eligible voters from voting and that the cost of getting the proper ID amounted to a “poll tax.” The Texas law provides for a free state ID to anyone lacking a driver’s license or other photo ID.

A study by a DOJ expert produced a long list of Texans who lacked government-issued photo ID and, it was alleged, were thereby disenfranchised. The list and the study were a fraud.

The list turned out to contain the names of 50,000 dead people, 330,377 seniors who can vote by mail without ID, 261,887 voters who included a driver’s license number on their voter registration form, 800,000 Texans who were, in fact, registered to vote and who did have a government issued photo ID.

The list also contained the names of Texans with U.S. military ID (acceptable for photo ID to vote), former Texas residents who had moved to other states, disabled voters who were exempt from the Texas photo ID law and noncitizens.

Strangely, the list of those who “lacked government issued ID” included former President George W. Bush, two state legislators and the wife of another, former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, current U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and even the Texas director of elections, Keith Ingram – who was listed not once but twice!

However, even the Texas attorney general has yet to find the names of any dogs, living or dead, on the list.

Obama’s DOJ also went after Florida for passing a similar law. It seems that Obama voters who were dead, felons or noncitizens would not get to vote.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott ordered county election officials to examine the integrity of the voting rolls. In the first review, the names of 83,000 dead people were discovered still registered to vote.

The dead deserve representation given the estate-tax debate, but the law does not yet allow them to vote.

DOJ also objected to Florida’s insistence that felons be barred from voting.

Noncitizens were also found on the voter rolls, and Gov. Scott fought to get access to the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database. SAVE will allow Florida to purge the voter roll of noncitizens.

In a strange, parallel world, the Obama Agriculture Department requires ID on every cow, and now on every chicken, on every American farm.

Obama wants to trace the movement of farm animals but not illegal aliens; he wants to ID every farm animal to protect the public health but does not want to ID voters to protect the integrity of elections.

With the memory still fresh that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a handful of voters in Florida, the determination of who gets to vote in 2012 could decide who will be the next president.