SARAH PAC: "LOADED FOR BEAR"

Loaded for Bear



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NEWSMAX EXCLUSIVE: TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL REPUBLICAN WOMEN & WE CAN SEE THOSE SEEKING ASYLUM FROM OUR WINDOWS

http://www.newsmax.com/Pages/landingPages/magazine/top25Women

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TEA PARTY GROUP WEIGHS CANDIDATES FOR ALASKA'S UNITED STATES SENATE RACE

TEA PARTY GROUP WEIGHS CANDIDATES FOR ALASKA'S UNITED STATES SENATE RACE

The Associated Press, 07/31/13

JUNEAU, ALASKA — A leader of a national effort to coax Sarah Palin into the Alaska U.S. Senate race says Palin will need to decide in the "near future" whether she's going to run.

Niger (NY'-jer) Innis, with the Tea Party Leadership Fund, says he believes that if she got in the race, she'd be "quite formidable" in raising money and competing with Democratic Sen. Mark Begich.

Palin recently told a radio host she has considered running for Begich's seat, because people have asked her to. But she also said she would like to see new candidates enter the race.

The Republican candidates so far include Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell and Joe Miller.

Innis says the group would be exploring getting involved in the Senate race in Alaska even if Palin doesn't run.

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U.S.A. SENATOR LISA MURKOWSI (R-AL) BUFFETED ON ALL SIDES, EXPLAINS WHY SHE BROKE THE FILIBUSTER & VOTED FOR OSAMA'S AL QAEDA TERRORIST DEFENSE TEAM TO LEAD THE UNITED STATES ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, & FIREARMS DEPARTMENT

U.S.A. SENATOR LISA MURKOWSI (R-AL) BUFFETED ON ALL SIDES, EXPLAINS WHY SHE BROKE THE FILIBUSTER & VOTED FOR OSAMA'S AL QAEDA TERRORIST DEFENSE TEAM TO LEAD THE UNITED STATES ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, & FIREARMS DEPARTMENT

By Michael Memoli, August 1, 2013, LOS ANGELES TIMES

WASHINGTON -- It wasn’t long after Lisa Murkowski voted to continue a filibuster of President Obama’s nominee to lead the ATF that the Alaska Republican found herself surrounded in the well of the Senate, as colleagues from both parties made a determined case for her to change or maintain that vote.

The stakes were high, and the lobbying effort reflected it. No Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives director has been confirmed since a 2006 law required a Senate approval for such nominees, but the Democratic majority thought circumstances had changed sufficiently to pave the way for B. Todd Jones, the agency’s acting director for two years.

Senate leaders, including New York Democrat Charles E. Schumer and Texas Republican John Cornyn, held firm on either side of Murkowski. Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined the conversation, as did two of their top aides.

At one point Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called upon Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to intervene, and to remind Murkowski of the tenuous peace that he had helped broker just weeks earlier to prevent a change in Senate filibuster rules. The deal also was meant to ease the confirmation of several Obama nominees.

After nearly half an hour, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) felt the need to intervene, and pulled Murkowski away from the scrum and off the Senate floor.

“I was concerned that she was being pummeled by both sides, and thought she might need a little break,” Collins said later, adding that it was an opportunity to “have just a nice little chat” with her friend about a recent dinner Murkowski had hosted as part of a semiregular gathering of the women in the Senate.

When Murkowski returned to the floor nearly half an hour later, she changed her vote and rebuffed the filibuster, which put Jones on the path to confirmation later that evening.

In an interview after Wednesday’s votes, Murkowski said that she didn’t feel “pummeled,” as Collins worried, or she “would have excused [herself] far earlier."

“The fact of the matter is, as long as I was learning information and listening to both sides of the argument then it was productive for me,” she said.

Murkowski said that she and Collins had indeed talked about the meal she hosted. Murkowski had proposed a potluck dinner because her husband, who usually does the cooking, was out of town.

“I was advised by my assistant that the women of the Senate don't do potlucks. To which I responded, ‘Of course we do,’” Murkowski recalled.

Each of the 17 attendees that night brought a home-state product, and told “a lot of good personal stories” related to them. “We've all agreed it was the best women senators' dinner yet.”

But Murkowski acknowledged that she and Collins weren’t just talking about the salmon entree. Collins was one of just five Republicans who to that point had broken with the party to support ending the filibuster.

The crux of the issue for Murkowski was her understanding that Jones was the subject of an ongoing investigation stemming from his time as a U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Grassley, who led the Republican opposition to Jones’ confirmation, cited an allegation that Jones had retaliated against a whistle-blower in the office who had raised concern about Jones’ relationship with federal, state and local authorities.

Collins said that she, too, had concerns about the nature of the investigation, and would vote against confirming Jones when the final confirmation vote took place. But, she later told reporters, “I think that there are too many filibusters in the Senate, and that we need to move forward on bills and nominations and need to let the Senate work its will.”

Before Collins took Murkowski aside, the Alaska senator had heard from Democrats who explained that the investigation had concluded and was now in a mediation phase. The conversation with Collins helped Murkowski make the decision to change her vote so that the filibuster would end, and an up-or-down vote on his nomination could take place.

“I think it was an important conversation to have with my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee -- those that have been involved with the vetting,” she said. “That changed the direction for me.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who had also joined the Senate floor lobbying session, explained later that Murkowski was also warned about the possible consequences of an Obama nominee being filibustered so soon after the recent agreement by Republicans to allow a slate of other nominees to advance.

“If there was ever a test of whether the Senate can move forward in a bipartisan way, this afternoon was it,” she said. "We thought we were close to 60. There was a lot of discussions on the floor. Sometimes that gets done ahead of time. This time it was there for all the world to see."

Murkowski said in the interview that she had “tended to give pretty wide berth to the president on his nominees,” but initially thought an investigation of Jones would have provided reasonable cause to block him.

She had been supportive of the recent deal to prevent filibuster rules changes, and was one of six Republicans who helped advance another controversial Obama nominee, Thomas E. Perez, to lead the Labor Department. Just Tuesday, Murkowski was the sole Republican to vote to confirm two new Democratic nominees for the National Labor Relations Board.

“I recognize that these agreements are always tenuous. My commitment has been to figure out a way for this body to function. And just as this body needs to function, the administration needs to have people in place to run their agencies,” she said. “So this nomination process that we’re going through right now is one where I’m not the president -- I wouldn’t have chosen them -- so I’ll have an opportunity to vote against them. But we do need to try to figure out a way to move the process forward so that nominees do get that fair shake.”

Murkowski did vote against Jones in the final confirmation vote, as did all but one of her Republican colleagues. But he was confirmed to the post, 53 to 42.

After the vote, the president applauded “the bipartisan group of senators who broke through the gridlock to give Todd Jones the up-or-down vote he deserved.”

michael.memoli@latimes.com

On Twitter: @mikememoli

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ROGER CLEMENS GOES TO BAT FOR YANKEES' ALEX RODRIGUEZ

ROGER CLEMENS GOES TO BAT FOR YANKEES' ALEX RODRIGUEZ

Clemens says he's 'glad' that Rodriguez was his teammate.

BY MICHAEL O'KEEFFE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2013

It's expected that Alex Rodriguez will be suspended before the end of the week.

Major League Baseball appears set to suspend Alex Rodriguez this week, a punishment that will likely mark the end of the embattled superstar’s controversial career.

But at least Roger Clemens still has his back.

“A-Rod was my teammate in New York,” the poster boy for the Mitchell Report on baseball and steroids told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “I’m glad he was my teammate.

“I did things to make him feel comfortable. I did that for all of my teammates. I think I was a pretty solid teammate.”

Clemens, accused by federal prosecutors of lying to Congress when he claimed during a 2008 hearing that he had never used steroids or human growth hormone, was acquitted last year of perjury-related charges. He spoke to AP in Boston, where he was at Fenway Park to mark the 25th anniversary of the Red Sox club that won the 1988 American League East title.

Clemens declined to discuss his thoughts on MLB’s Biogenesis investigation.

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U.S.A. SENATOR TED STEVENS WHOSE PLANE WAS SABATOGED BY U.S.A. PROSECUTORS APPOINTED BY OBAMA WHILE NASA'S SEAN O'KEEFE & HIS FAMILY SURVIVED, GAVE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A FIRST-RATE FISHING MANAGEMENT POLICY

U.S.A. SENATOR TED STEVENS WHOSE PLANE WAS SABATOGED BY U.S.A. PROSECUTORS APPOINTED BY OBAMA WHILE NASA'S SEAN O'KEEFE & HIS FAMILY SURVIVED, GAVE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A FIRST-RATE FISHING MANAGEMENT POLICY

JULY 25, 2013

COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE

The approach of Ted Stevens Day in Alaska on Saturday brings back many memories from a lifetime working in fisheries. When Ted Stevens was appointed to a Senate seat in December 1968, I was working on my bachelor’s degree in biology. Today, I am writing as director at the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau. In looking back at Ted Stevens’ legislative career (1968-2009), I was reminded of how dramatically it had affected me and everyone else involved in U.S. fisheries.

Never was there a more appropriate namesake for a federal fisheries research facility than Ted Stevens. The legislative record leaves no doubt that Ted Stevens’ vision and tenacity are largely responsible for the laws and government institutions that presently secure the economic, environmental and cultural benefits of our nation’s oceans for all future generations.

Let us never forget that the future of living marine resources off the coasts of the U.S. was far from secure when Ted Stevens first became a member of the U.S. Senate. Beginning in the post World War II era, an army of diplomats, legislators and scientists worked diligently to forge international agreements to control and reduce impacts of high seas fishing.

Nonetheless, most waters off Alaska in 1968 were still wide-open killing fields where the fishing was mostly done by foreign fleets.

Foreign fleets stalked Alaska’s salmon, fishing an estimated 10,000 kilometers of gill net in the western Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. One of the darkest periods for Alaska’s salmon occurred in 1973, when the often mighty Bristol Bay sockeye salmon return was reduced to a total of just 2.4 million fish, including an inshore catch of only 761,000. In the Bristol Bay of today, a sockeye salmon catch in the neighborhood of 15 million, like this year, is considered small. In 1973, it was clearly time to do something, but what could be done without the international agreements so many had been seeking?

Sen. Stevens had the clarity of vision to identify a unilateral 200-mile fishing limit as the means to control foreign fishing fleets off the coasts of the U.S., introducing S46, a bill to extend jurisdiction from three to 200 miles in 1971. Although S46 was unsuccessful, in 1975 Sen. Stevens got the support from Sen. Warren Magnuson, of Washington state, who co-sponsored the Fishery Conservation and Management Act enacted by Congress in 1976. Sen. Stevens introduced the motion that renamed the bill the Magnuson Act. Today, it is known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Clearly Sens. Stevens and Magnuson were two among the many leaders of their generation to realize the importance of implementing policies to protect living marine resources and promote domestic fisheries, but they are to be remembered as the two who laid the foundation on which that house was built.

The act of 1976 was a big step in the journey from the uncontrolled, damaging exploitation of the first three post-war decades to the carefully controlled, sustainable harvests of today. The act marked the beginning of a much bigger story that can’t be told here.

What can be said is that, during the next three decades, Sen. Stevens relentlessly pursued the creation of Alaska’s modern commercial fisheries. Those same fisheries make Alaska the prime example of the world’s best-managed fisheries and best-protected living marine resources.

At the end of the senator’s legislative career, Alaska’s commercial fisheries had become a very special, and perhaps unique, public-private partnership in which the entrepreneurial expertise of the nation’s fishing industries is enabled by a federal-state regulatory framework. The public-private partnership and the federal-state regulatory framework have made it possible for the wealth of our nation to be built from the bounty of carefully protected marine ecosystems.

The partnership is certainly building wealth for the nation in Alaska. Alaska topped all other states in both weight of fish landed (5.4 billion pounds) and in the value of those fish ($1.9 billion) in the most recent statistical year (2011) for the nation’s commercial landings. The regulatory framework is also protecting marine ecosystems through application of ecosystem-based management principles.

To take but one example from among the many possible, in 2009 the North Pacific Fishery Management Council closed the waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas between three and 200 miles offshore to all fishing, citing the need to acquire the information necessary to prevent overfishing and protect the health of the entire marine ecosystem before any federal fisheries could be conducted.

So is it really fair to say that federal and state policies are primarily responsible for the drastic reversal of fortunes for Alaska’s fisheries and associated living marine resources that occurred after 1976? What about climate change? How about advances in the science applied to fishery management decisions? As a fisheries scientist, student of climate change and former fishery regulator, I am here to tell you that neither climate nor science, together or alone, could have achieved and sustained such radical improvements.

As demonstrated daily in other parts of the world’s oceans, modern industrial fishing fleets have the capacity and the technologies to take all that nature can produce, and more, even under the most favorable climate regimes. In the absence of a working regulatory framework that is enabled by a public-private partnership, science is not even factored into harvest regulatory decisions.

Without the protections afforded by the three to 200-mile fisheries zone enacted in 1976, now called the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the level of landings in Alaska’s fisheries, including salmon, that we enjoy today would never have been possible.

Phil Mundy is director of Auke Bay Laboratories, which is headquartered in the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau and is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The lab has served Alaska and the nation from Juneau since 1958 as a division of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Mundy has worked as a fisheries scientist for a variety of other public and private entities. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

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WELL ... LET'S CELEBRATE WILL ROGERS & SEE HOW FAR THE U.S.A. CONGRESS GOES WITH YET ANOTHER FAILED FBI INVESTIGATION * SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

http://www.willrogers.com/

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