The way things are going there's not much good news to share. But this will put a smile on your face.  A case very much worth following is underway thanks to the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) on behalf of Common Sense Alliance over on San Juan County. PLF has filed a request for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court questioning San Juan County's demands that citizens give up the use of their property for buffers.  As most readers know all too well already, citizens have been confronted with the same demands here.  What you may not know is that Whatcom County Planning & Development staff and county legal are fully aware of the prior cases that the PLF has fought and won:  Koontz  and Nollan/Dolan - but they keep on plundering, turning a blind eye.  A fair-handed outcome of this new certiorari case could turn the tide.  It's worth the fight.

Read on below (and - please consider supporting the PLF for taking on incredibly important fights like this [here's another doozie].)  Thank heaven somebody has the noogies to take on these cases.

Washington state exaction scheme before
the U.S. Supreme Court
Brian T. Hodges, Atty. - ​August 19, 2016

San Juan County’s scheme to force shoreline property owners into dedicating water treatment buffers is now pending on a certiorari petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case, Common Sense Alliance v. San Juan County. As you may recall, in order to address a Washington state statute requiring that cities and counties adopt measures to protect the shorelines from new harm, San Juan County adopted an ordinance that requires all shoreline property owners to dedicate a “water quality buffer” designed to filter stormwater runoff before it reaches the shoreline—regardless of the fact that much of the runoff comes from neighboring properties and streets. Setting the wisdom of such a scheme aside, the county’s approach to the water quality assurance violates one of the most basic protections provided by the Takings Clause, the purpose of which is “to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear the public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.”Armstrong v. United States (1960). Thus, the importance or wisdom of a public policy goal is irrelevant to a takings analysis.

PLF’s petition argues that San Juan County’s water quality buffer constitutes the type of exaction that the U.S. Supreme Court has held subject to heightened security in Nollan v California Coastal Commission (1987), Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), and most recently inKoontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (2013). The petition drew impressiveamicus support. And in June, the Court ordered San Juan County to file a response to our petition.

Unsurprisingly, the County’s response dodged the question presented by our petition—whether a legislatively-imposed dedication is subject to Nollan and Dolan. Instead, the response argues that, for a variety of reasons, its buffer scheme should not be subject to constitutional scrutiny. According to the County, the buffer demand is an everyday land use regulation—like a setback or height restriction—and the government should be allowed to demand that homeowners dedicate land to mitigate for public problems without limit and without compensating the owners.

PLF’s reply brief (check it out), filed earlier this week, puts those tired arguments to rest:

The doctrine of unconstitutional conditions clearly applies here. Washington law recognizes buffers as a valuable, freely-alienable property interest. Wash. Rev. Code § 64.04.130; see also Klickitat County v. Wash. State Dep’t of Revenue, No. 01-070, 2002 WL 1929480, at *5-6 (Bd. Tax App., June 12, 2002) (Buffer area constitutes property; the holder of the conservation interest must pay property taxes). Therefore, a demand that an owner provide a buffer as a mandatory condition of permit approval appropriates a valuable property interest. See Lucas v. S. Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003, 1018-19 (1992) (conservation buffers deprive the landowner of a distinct property interest and may result in a taking). The buffer condition plainly puts that property interest to a public use.See, e.g., Casitas Mun. Water Dist. v. United States, 543 F.3d 1276, 1292 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (“[T]here is little doubt that the preservation of the habitat of an endangered species is for government and third party use—the public—which serves a public purpose.”). Thus, this case presents the precise type of condition that Nollan/Dolan demands be subjected to heightened scrutiny. Koontz, 133 S. Ct. at 2594-95.

We expect the Court to conference on this case in September.

WE wondered what had become of this troublesome ass who busied himself leaving a trail of tears down the west coast for four miserable years (Obama's Secretary of the Interior, 2009-2013).  We reported about the demise of a small oyster farm in northern California. There was the absurd classification of Chuckanut Rock, Lummi Rocks and Lummi Island's Carter Point as "national conservation areas" (NCA's) by the BLM, and the San Juan Islands as a national monument (worry how that's going down for the folks out there).  Anyway, it seems this notorious crony hack has resurfaced.

Hillary’s Headhunter: Sleazeball Ken Salazar
 National Review, Michelle Malkin
August 17, 2016
 
He’s threatened reporters, distorted scientific evidence, and ignored the law. Now Hillary has hired him — of course.
 
 The Loathsome Cowboy rides again. Ken Salazar, President Obama’s disgraced former interior secretary and a former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton’s White House transition chair on Monday.
 
The pick confirms that a Clinton presidency would not only be Barack Obama’s third term ideologically, but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption.

Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama’s interior secretary in 2013 “to spend time with family,” Salazar threatened violence against a Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon-hat-wearing bureaucrat’s cronyism-tainted deals.

At issue: How rancher and reported Salazar business associate Tom Davis profited handsomely from the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. Not long after Salazar took office, Davis paid $10 apiece for more than 1,700 federally protected horses who roamed on public lands. He then turned around and sold them for slaughter near the Mexican border for $154,000, despite having signed a contract prohibiting him from doing so.
 
When Gazette reporter David Phillips (now at the New York Times) asked about the controversy at an Obama Election Night event in November 2012, Salazar snapped: You know what, never do that. This is a — this is the Obama — You know what, if you do that to me again, I’m going to punch you out. OK? Don’t ever, ever, from the Gazette or anybody else do that to me again. Set me up. You know?
 
Caught on tape by Philipps and another witness, Knuckles Salazar issued an “apology.” But neither he nor Davis, who said he had previously hauled cattle for Salazar for years, ever answered for their actions. An inspector general determined Salazar’s department “failed to follow its own policy of limiting horse sales and ensuring that the horses sold went to good homes and were not slaughtered.” No penalties, no prosecution, no nothing. Ken Salazar is a liar.
 
He trampled the rule of law, defied court orders, and doctored scientific conclusions in the name of environmental protection. Have you forgotten? After the BP oil spill in 2010, the Obama White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater-drilling industry. The sweeping ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The order was supposedly based on recommendations from an expert oil-spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out Obama’s environmental team for misleading the public about the scientific evidence and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.” Salazar and eco czar Carol Browner oversaw the false rewriting of the drilling-ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Feldman singled out the Salazar-run agency’s culture of contempt and serial “determined disregard” for the law.

“Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness,” Feldman wrote, Salazar’s doctored report was “misleading” and the experts who wrote it called it a “‘misrepresentation.’ It was factually incorrect.”
 
Once again, Salazar evaded accountability despite continued obstruction and repeated refusal to cooperate with nearly 50 public-records requests from Congress regarding his post–BP spill decisions.

Ken Salazar hates American consumers and workers. He infamously told the Senate in 2008 that he would refuse emergency drilling requests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge even if gas prices reached $10 a gallon. He arbitrarily pulled nearly 100 oil leases in Utah — costing the state thousands of jobs — based on bogus eco-claims that were refuted by the Interior Department’s own inspector general. Offshore and onshore, Salazar waged war relentlessly on the energy sector and the American West.
 
Ken Salazar is a job-killing, truth-sabotaging, law-skirting, media-bullying corruptocrat who just won’t let go of power. In other words: a perfect headhunter for America’s Evita Peron.
 
 — Michelle Malkin is a senior editor at Conservative Review. Her email address is [email protected]

This piece, written by historian Victor Davis Hanson, was posted a few months ago.  It seemed rather dark.  But on reflection (it's very bright) WE thought it might help put the current state of national and local affairs in perspective.  The nature of mankind is tremendously important to understand.  Many mistakes have been made; all too many are repeated.  At a minimum, learn.  And again, never lose your perspective.

America In Free Fall
June 20, 2016 10:52 am
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas

Before the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), where Philip II of Macedon prevailed over a common Greek alliance, the city-states had been weakened by years of social and economic turmoil. To read the classical speeches in the Athenian assembly is to learn of the democracy’s constant struggles with declining revenues, insolvency, and expanding entitlements. Rome between the First Triumvirate (59 BC) and the ascension of Caesar Augustus’s autocracy (27 BC) was mostly defined by gang violence, chaos, and civil war, the common theme being a loss of trust in republican values. Russia was in a revolutionary spiral for nearly twenty years between 1905 and the final victory of the Bolsheviks in 1922, ending up with a cure worse than the disease. And Europe between 1930 and 1939 saw most of its democracies erode as fascists and communists gained power—eventually leading to the greater disaster of the outbreak of World War II.

The United States has seen periods of near fatal internal chaos—in the late 1850s leading up to the carnage of the Civil War, during the decade of the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939, and in the chaotic 1960s. Something similar is starting to plague America today on a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural fronts.

The contenders for president reflect the loss of confidence of the times. Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist. Yet scan the record of big government redistributionism here and abroad—from Chicago and Detroit to the insolvent Mediterranean nations of the European Union and failed states like Venezuela—and there is no encouraging model of socialist success. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination—if she is not the first nominee in American history to be indicted, on possible charges of violating federal intelligence laws, and perhaps perjury and obstruction of justice. Donald Trump has neither political experience nor a detailed agenda, but has charged ahead on the basis of his vague promise to “make America great again”—a Jacksonian version of Obama’s equally vacuous 2008 promise of “hope and change.”

President Obama, in response to attacks on his record by Trump—and by Bill Clinton, who has spoken of “the awful legacy of the last eight years”—is entering the campaign to brag about the current economy.

But to do so, President Obama must ignore a number of liabilities that are soon coming due. Under his tenure, he did not address the unsustainable actuarial realities of Social Security and Medicare. The federal debt doubled in a manner never seen prior and can be now serviced only through de facto zero-interest rates, which in turn ossify economic growth. Due to tax hikes, new financial and business regulations, and the socialization of the health care system, per annum GDP growth under the President’s tenure will go down in history as the worst since the Great Depression. He ignored the Clinton-Gingrich compromise formula of a quarter-century ago of balancing budgets by cutting defense, capping spending, and raising taxes. Instead, Obama slashed defense spending and hiked a number of taxes, but ignored entitlements, ensuring $500 billion annual deficits—deemed successful because they were less than his first-term normal of $1 trillion annual shortfalls. The President points to the 5 percent unemployment as proof of his success, but that figure reflects Obama-era methodologies of not counting all those who have given up looking for jobs. In May 2016, a record 94,708,000 Americans were no longer in the labor force—the highest percentage of non-working Americans since the Great Depression.

Abroad, it is hard to identify a single region or U.S. national interest where things are not worse than prior to 2009. In the Middle East, few believe that the Iran deal will prevent the theocracy from obtaining the bomb; indeed, Iran has never been more active in creating chaos and threatening war. American intervention in Libya, American withdrawal from Iraq, and American neglect of Syria helped to ensure a general Middle East implosion. Reset with Russia empowered Vladimir Putin’s ongoing agenda of reabsorbing former Soviet republics. China is building artificial island bases in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea to recalibrate the balance of power in Asia—on the understanding that American failure to challenge this bellicosity has translated into de facto acceptance of it. And due to financial disasters, unchecked immigration, and populist revolts against Brussels, the European Union in its present form seems unsustainable. The only mystery is whether its unwinding will come with a slow whimper or abrupt bang.

In President Obama’s interview with The Atlantic and his chief foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes’s disclosures to the New York Times, it is evident that the administration holds a general contempt for the American-led postwar order—and the Washington bipartisan and trans-Atlantic establishment (“the Blob”) central to its stability. By any fair measure, President Obama believes that the U.S. does not, and perhaps never has, possessed the moral stature or the wherewithal to lead the Western world, which should be more equitably left to regional powers such as China, Iran, Russia, and Middle Eastern autocracies to adjudicate the affairs in their own environs.

The result has been near anarchy, not just in the natural rise of anti-American rivals, but in the fright of former allies and neutrals who are being forced to make the necessary realist adjustments with old enemies—or in the case of many Westernized allies, to perhaps privately reconsider the once taboo idea of acquiring nuclear weapons for the sake of deterrence.

But perhaps the three most telling symptoms of the current chaos are race relations, immigration, and the status of our universities and colleges—three interconnected issues that often inspire riots, demonstrations, and suppressions of free speech.

President Obama has largely ignored the old ideal of the melting pot and in its place preferred a salad-bowl multiculturalism of competing ethnicities, tribes, and races, whose activism wins concessions from local, state and federal governments. Casual comments and references by Obama—like “bring a gun” to a knife fight, the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania, and “typical white person”—stoked racial tensions. So did Attorney General Eric Holder’s crude referrals to “my people” and a “nation of cowards.”
The Ferguson and the Baltimore riots, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the systematic carnage in Chicago all embody paradoxes: facts are sometimes less important than allegations; the police are the culprits of urban violence both for responses that are too aggressive and too passive; and in a static economy, inner city youth can’t find jobs because they have criminal records and lack the skills that would make them employable.
Apparently, the Obama administration never considered that a multiracial America united by one culture was an historical exception. Everywhere else, multiculturalism and tribalism without assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have proved to be an abject and usually violent catastrophe: most recently, in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Rwanda, and the Middle East. Europe’s attempt to emulate a multiracial United States is ending in utter failure with unchecked immigration, multicultural incoherence, and rising Islamism.

The recent California riots at Trump rallies, along with the widely reported crimes committed by illegal aliens in sanctuary cities, reveal the wages of unchecked immigration that is increasingly neither diverse and meritocratic nor legal and measured—the traditional requisites that promote rapid and full integration. Over one in four Californians was not born in the U.S.—a statistic that becomes worrisome when coupled with the state’s policy of sanctuary cities and new educational curricula that emphasize grievance and separatism rather than assimilation and unity. When rioting youths in San Diego, Fresno, and San Jose burn or deface American flags, as they have been doing in recent weeks, and wave Mexican flags instead, then we are witnessing a tragic farce, the consequences of decades of ethnic-chauvinism, multiculturalism, and cluelessness of the norms and realities outside of America.

American immigration policy is not so much “broken” as increasingly neo-Confederate and illogical. Three-hundred state and municipal jurisdictions have declared themselves, in good 1850s fashion, immune from federal law as sanctuary cities, while over 1 million illegal aliens have at some point been arrested, and make up nearly 30 percent of the federal inmate population. In Orwellian terms, illegal immigration largely from Latin America and Mexico, is called “diversity,” nullification of federal laws is known as “sanctuary cities,” and foreign nationals residing illegally are referred to as “undocumented migrants.” Ultimately the central paradox of immigration is the strange nexus of anger and grievance against the United States by immigration advocates—and the overriding desire nonetheless to enter and reside in such a purportedly unattractive place.

The universities in some sense are the embryos of social unrest. The 1960s free speech and free love movements, with their rampant drug use, advocacy of unchecked and raucous expression, and resistance to authority have strangely given way to today’s speech codes, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings. Yesterday’s “anything goes” hippie student is today’s Victorian prude who cannot quite square the circle of relaxed sexuality and drugs with the demands that the university act in loco parentis for perpetual adolescents.

This election year so far has emblemized the perfect storm of unrest and confusion—and an even more worrisome response to it. In the past, when 51 percent of societies no longer believed in or wished to defend their collective values and traditions, there were no longer reasons for them to continue. And so they did not—a warning we should heed.

George Monbiot is zealous about climate change, re-wilding, veganism, and putting an end to modern life as we know it. He's an author and blogger at The Guardian. WE think readers should become familiar with the guy because he's a creature who closely resembles the invasive species that has infested Whatcom County over the last twenty-thirty years. You know, the totalitarian ilk with visions of eco-villages dancing in their heads seeking zero-tolerance and the imposition of restrictive enforcement actions on everyone who sees our world in a different light.  He describes his mission this way, 
     "It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves."

He may walk his talk, driving thrifty cars on book tours, opining at TED conferences, and eating roadkill. In a free society the right to make personal choices should be equal and inalienable for all. But his vision of individual rights, like the vision of those now sitting on county council, is not so fair or just. The totalitarian elites feel justified in their actions with an immense and superioristic rush, knowing what's best and saving the planet from the masses, the cretins who dare to disagree.

George Monbiot Eats Roadkill to Save The Planet
Watts Up With That
August 12, 2016
 
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Prominent Guardian Environment Reporter George Monbiot, who sometimes shows up at prominent climate events, no doubt after a long journey by sail, has decided to eat Vegan supplemented with Roadkill to “reduce his impact” on the global climate.

I’ve converted to veganism to reduce my impact on the living world
The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify our presence on the planet. It is the amount of land an animal-based diet needs that makes it so destructive.
An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves, rather than feed them to cows and chickens.
​
This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming in Britain to be set aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200 million people. Extending this thought experiment to the rest of the world, it’s not hard to see how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live alongside us, but not alongside our current diet.
…
Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its wildlife and beauty. However, the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for some sewage fungus. I traced the pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency (the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.
…
I still eat roadkill when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/09/vegan-corrupt-food-system-meat-dairy

I quite like Monbiot, or at least I find him more entertaining than most greens.
Sometimes he shows a flash of common sense, such as when he defended nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima. Then he goes and blows it by saying something wild, such as telling everyone the corrupt media are keeping the end of the world a secret.
At least Monbiot is going to get enough protein, unlike some Vegans I know. The number of wild deer currently running around the British countryside, and all those impatient drivers trying to beat the rush, Monbiot is not going to starve – unless increasingly punitive British attempts to price driving out of reach of ordinary people finally succeed in clearing the roads of traffic.

Here's a quick discussion about competition and the self-sustaining nature of free markets, from the Right Angle trio.  It's a nice break.

WE focus on local.  It's a presidential election year, everyone here votes, so this video just released by Breitbart is relevant.

Brietbart News a few days ago, July 28, 2016:

PHILADELPHIA – Hillary Clinton said that “We are going to follow the money” in her Democratic National Convention speech Thursday night.

Clinton was referring to getting money back into our country through foreign trade. But that sound-bite might as well refer to the revelations that Clinton and her husband Bill chased money all around the world — including money from corrupt foreign governments."