Trump Visited Utah In An Attempt To Shrink The Monuments

Not sure if the tribes have filed yet, but here's the conservation group's lawsuit.  

Link is here.  https://suwa.org/conservation-groups-file-lawsuit-president-trump-illega...

The beginning of the story at the link... 

Washington, DC —Hours after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation taking an axe to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, conservation organizations filed a lawsuit attacking the order as an abuse of the president’s power. Earthjustice is representing eight organizations in a suit charging that the president violated the 1906 Antiquities Act by stripping monument protections from this national treasure: The Wilderness Society, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project.  The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Natural Resources Defense Council are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit and represented by in-house counsel.

“President Trump has perpetrated a terrible violation of America’s public lands and heritage by going after this dinosaur treasure trove,” said Heidi McIntosh, Managing Attorney in Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office. “While past presidents have used the Antiquities Act to protect unique lands and cultural sites in America, Trump is instead mangling the law, opening this national monument to coal mining instead of protecting its scientific, historic, and wild heritage. We will not let this stand. We will use the power of the law to stop Trump’s illegal actions.”

“Americans from across the nation should be outraged by President Trump’s unlawful attempt to eviscerate the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of our country’s wildest and most scientifically significant federal public landscapes,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Utah’s largest conservation organization. “No one will look back on this decision in 15, 25 or 50 years and say Trump did the right thing by protecting less of this magnificent place. And by promoting this illegal act, Utah’s parochial congressional delegation and local politicians have firmly come down on the wrong side of history.”

The Grand Staircase-Escalante contains dinosaur fossils found nowhere else in the world. Since its designation, 21 new dinosaur species have been unearthed by scientists in the monument, leading some to call these lands a “Dinosaur Shangri-la,” and a “geologic wonderland.” Grand Staircase holds one of the richest collections of fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period, which gives scientists and the public alike an unparalleled window into the dinosaurs that lived in these lands 10 million years ago. In mid-October, scientists airlifted one of the most complete tyrannosaur skeletons ever found out of Grand Staircase. These fossils are largely found in the Kaiparowits Plateau, where the coal industry has long coveted access for coal mining that would wreak havoc on this dinosaur treasure trove that belongs to the American people.

There's more at the link if you're interested.

The Associated Press did some fact checking on the speech the idiot gave.

The link is below, along with an example.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/ap-fact-check-trumps-curious-ca...

TRUMP: "As many of you know, past administrations have severely abused the purpose, spirit and intent of a century-old law known as the Antiquities Act. This law requires that only the smallest necessary area be set aside for special protection as national monuments."

THE FACTS: That's not exactly what Teddy Roosevelt's 1906 preservation law says. It states, in essence, that the federal government should not bite off more than it can chew when a president designates an area for protection. It doesn't demand that such land be kept to a minimum. Such protected land "shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected," it says.

Gotta share this photo, Oh so rich.

Went to SUWA's winter party tonight at a local brewery. A GREAT time.

And I got to meet a  wonderful artist by the name of Josh Scheuerman, who created an amazing mural of the Bears Ears and painted it on the side of a building opposite Fisher Brewery.

The SL Tribune did a story on it. Check it out. It's absolutely amazing.     

http://www.sltrib.com/news/2017/11/24/artist-native-americans-hope-new-b...

Cool thing is, employees of the brewery held up monkey wrenches while Orange Mussolini's motorcade passed the mural and someone snapped this photo.

If that link doesn't work, go here, http://www.sltrib.com/ , click on "Sections" on the upper left, then search for Bears Ears Mural. It's worth seeing. 

Screw it. Here ya go.It's 20' X 100'.

Scathing editorial in today's SL Tribune. "Anti-monument celebration was Utah at its very worst" 

Link doesn't want to work. Excerpts:

"But no one should be able to look at the celebration that unfolded Monday in our state’s Capitol building and see anything other than a disgraceful display of powerful people whooping it up over the pain they were inflicting on, among others, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans.

Of course, it isn’t the first time our president was heard to brag about something he’d done that he should have been ashamed of. But the sight of Utah’s governor, its U.S. senators and representatives and leaders of its Legislature grinning and clapping and otherwise having a good time was downright sickening.

Monday’s action grew out of the myth, spread at great taxpayer expense by some of Utah’s lawmakers and county commissioners, that the federal ownership of so much of the state is somehow unlawful or unfair. It is part of the widely perpetrated fraud of an idea that if the small towns and rural areas of Southern Utah were somehow freed of the yoke of federal land ownership they would magically begin to thrive.

It is a deliberate ignorance of the fact that rural areas across the nation are watching their youth move away, their schools and post offices close, the availability of everything from jobs to groceries to medical care dry up and blow away. And that happens just as much, if not more, in states that have little or no federal land.

The Utah leaders who took part in Monday’s grotesque display of hubris have lost all right to stand up for our unique status as a public lands state, or to have a seat at the table when thousands of crucial decisions about how those lands would best be managed are made." 

Which is why Utah needs citizens and congressional representatives from around the nation to stand to help protect these lands from these clowns.

Hey TOD, thanks for the contribution, but when I hit that link the Post asks me to subscribe to continue. Is there a way around that?  

Extraction firms of all types are supportive of the moves. That's why they cut GSENM by half. And uranium has played a role in the San Juan County economy for years.

The monument declaration by Clinton prevented a Dutch company (Andalex) coming in and selling the coal to China and Japan. They gave their water rights away when leaving (to Rep Mike Noel's water district). It'll be interesting to see if there's enough existing infrastructure or the ability to build it to help make a project viable and economically wise. I heard it was sketchy then and that was considering coal prices in 1996.

I don't think the folks making the decisions care about the dinosaur bones there, Stellar finds. http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/24/commentary-utah-may-... "Over the past 21 years, 21 new species of dinosaurs have been unearthed by scientists in the monument, leading some to call these lands a “Dinosaur Shangri-la,” or a “geologic wonderland. Grand Staircase holds one of the richest collections of fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period,"

In mid-October, they pulled the most complete tyrannosaur ever recovered in the American Southwest.  http://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2017/10/15/nearly-complete-tyrann...