Dakota Access Dumping Ground A pipeline can proceed but the protesters left a dirty mess...

Dakota Access Dumping Ground

A pipeline can proceed but the protesters left a dirty mess.

In this Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017, aerial image taken from a video by KXMB in Bismarck, N.D., law enforcement officers line up against protesters during the eviction of about 40 Dakota Access pipeline opponents. PHOTO: /ASSOCIATED PRESS

Feb. 7, 2017 7:20 p.m. ET

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finally granted an easement Tuesday that will allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The approval means that construction of the final 1.5 miles of the more than 1,700-mile pipeline can proceed. More important, the approval means that the era of arbitrary political interference with private infrastructure projects is over.

The pipeline’s last sliver had been held up for months by protesters who claim to oppose disturbing the area’s pristine natural resources. In reality, they oppose extracting any fossil fuels from the ground, and the Obama Administration indulged them in its final days.

Other evidence of less-than-pristine motives comes from the garbage dump the protesters left behind. A North Dakota Fox affiliate reported this week on the clean-up efforts for the makeshift encampments: Thousands of protesters produced enough garbage to fill an estimated 250 trucks with traush. The detritus—tarps, tents—has frozen into “massive chunks of junk,” said the report, and much of it is buried under snow.

The Army Corps closed the area and said in a press release that grass has been destroyed or removed from some 50 acres. The mess has to be cleared out before a spring flood sends toxic sludge into the nearby Cannonball River and Lake Oahe, the same lake the protesters said would be polluted by the pipeline. Moral grandstanding can be a dirty business, but shouldn’t the protesters pay to clean up their own mess?

Did you know this about 9-11? AFTER FLIGHT 77 HIT THE PENTAGON ON 9/11, THE FOLLOWING HAPPENED...

This is the first time I have heard about this....

Did you know this about 9-11?   AFTER FLIGHT 77 HIT THE PENTAGON ON 9/11, THE FOLLOWING HAPPENED A chaplain, who happened to be assigned to the Pentagon, told of an incident that happened right after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon on 9/11.   A daycare facility inside the Pentagon had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do.  There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs. There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers.   Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, "Well, here we are, on our own."   About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac ..   Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off. Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.   The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there.” There wasn't a dry eye in the room.  The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon.   It's the Military, not the politicians that ensures our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's the Military who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag. If you care to offer the smallest token of recognition and appreciation for the military, please pass this on and pray for our men and women, who have served and are currently serving our country, and pray for those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

I'll never look at rats the same way again !!!!!!!!

I'll never look at Rats the same way again Throughout the world, places that have been involved in war and/or civil strife often  have large minefields that still need clearing.  In 2013, it was estimated that there was  a global average of around nine mine-related deaths every day.   The situation is especially dire in Africa. Typically, clearing a minefield involves men in body armor walking in very precise  lines with metal detectors.  Anything (from a rusty nail to an old ammo cartridge)  that sets the detectors off must be investigated before moving on.  A new method  of bomb detection using rats, however, is flipping this process on its head.   A Belgian NCO called APOPO has developed a way to train African pouched rats  (named for the storage pouch in their cheeks) to sniff out bombs quickly and safely.       They used this rat because it has an incredibly fine-tuned sense of smell and a  long lifespan (8-9 years) to yield returns on the nine months of training they undergo.        They're called Hero Rats, and NOT ONE has died in the line of duty since the program  started in 1997.        The average mine requires 5 kg (roughly 11 pounds) of weight to trigger an explosion,  but even the biggest of these rats are only around 1.5 kg (3.3 pounds).        Since they're trained to sniff out explosives exclusively, they aren't distracted by  other metal objects the way human minesweepers are.        They can effectively search 200 square meters in less than 20 minutes.        A team of humans would need around 25 hours to do the same job.        Since they're in the African sun a lot, the Hero Rats get sunscreen to keep them cancer free.        If a rat does get cancer, it receives full medical treatment.        The rats are "paid" in avocados, peanuts, bananas and other healthy treats.        After about 4-5 years on the job (or whenever they lose interest in working),  they're allowed to retire.        Retirement consists of eating all the tasty fruit their little hero's heart desires.

The D's often say "It's for the Children" actually it's for their union pay/vote masters!

The Real Democratic Party

Why not a single Senate Democrat voted for Betsy DeVos.

The Senate made history Tuesday when Mike Pence became the first Vice President to cast the deciding vote for a cabinet nominee.

The nominee is now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The vote came after an all-night Senate debate in a futile effort by Democrats to turn the third Republican vote they needed to scuttle the nomination on claims that the long-time education reformer isn’t qualified. Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins had already caved, so Mr. Pence had to cast the 51st vote to confirm Mrs. DeVos.

She can now get on with her work, but this episode shouldn’t pass without noting what it says about the modern Democratic Party. Why would the entire party apparatus devote weeks of phone calls, emails and advocacy to defeating an education secretary? This isn’t Treasury or Defense. It’s not even a federal department that controls all that much education money, most of which is spent by states and local school districts. Why is Betsy DeVos the one nominee Democrats go all out to defeat?

The answer is the cold-blooded reality of union power and money. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are, along with environmentalists, the most powerful forces in today’s Democratic Party. They elect Democrats, who provide them more jobs and money, which they spend to elect more Democrats, and so on. To keep this political machine going, they need to maintain their monopoly control over public education.

Mrs. DeVos isn’t a product of that monopoly system. Instead she looked at this system’s results—its student failures and lives doomed to underachievement—and has tried to change it by offering all parents the choice of charter schools and vouchers. Above all, she has exposed that unions and Democrats don’t really believe in their high-minded rhetoric about equal opportunity. They believe in lifetime tenure and getting paid.

This sorry politics means that no Democrat could dare support Mrs. DeVos, even if it meant a humiliating about-face like the one performed by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. As the mayor of Newark, Mr. Booker supported more school choice and he even sat on the board of an organization that would become the American Federation for Children (AFC), the school reform outfit chaired by Mrs. DeVos.

As recently as May 2016, Mr. Booker delivered an impassioned speech at the AFC’s annual policy summit in Washington. He boasted about how Newark had been named by the Brookings Institution “the number four city in the country for offering parents real school choice.”

He described the school-choice cause this way: “We are the last generation, fighting the last big battle to make true on that—that a child born anywhere in America, from any parents, a child no matter what their race or religion or socio-economic status should have that pathway, should have that equal opportunity, and there is nothing more fundamental to that than education. That is the great liberation.”

Some liberator. On Tuesday Mr. Booker voted no on Mrs. DeVos.

His calculation is simple. Mr. Booker is angling to run for President in 2020, and to have any chance at the Democratic nomination he needs the unions’ blessing. He knows that a large chunk of both the party’s delegates and campaign funding comes from the teachers unions, and so he had to repent his school-choice apostasy.

The unions can’t even tolerate a debate on the subject lest their monopoly power be threatened. All that chatter about “the children” is so much moral humbug.

Mrs. DeVos is a wealthy woman who could do almost anything with her time and money. She has devoted it to philanthropy for the public good, in particular working to ensure that children born without her advantages can still have an equal shot at the American dream. She knows education should be about learning for children and not jobs for adults.

All you need to know about today’s Democratic Party is that this is precisely the reason the party went to such extraordinary lengths to destroy her. We trust she realizes that her best revenge will be to use every resource of her new job to press the campaign for charter schools and vouchers from coast to coast.