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Grassroots conservative activists who run a reboot of Ronald Reagan’s political action committee want to know why the government allows one failing company to buy another failing company while both get taxpayer subsidies.

They also want to know why corporate executives with friends in high places have not been subjected to more scrutiny after receiving a multimillion-dollar compensation package at a time when their company remains heavily subsidized at taxpayer expense.

“This is the quintessential insider deal,” one taxpayer advocate said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Citizens for the Republic, a nonprofit, grassroots lobbying group, posed the two questions in a July 15 letter to members of the House and Senate as the lawmakers left Washington for summer recess.

The group calls on Congress to investigate the CEO and the chief technology officer of SolarCity, a renewable energy company based in San Mateo, California. The two SolarCity executives happen to be brothers; Lyndon and Peter Rive also happen to be first cousins to Elon Musk, chairman and co-founder of SolarCity.

Musk is also chairman and founder of Tesla Motors Inc., an electric car company based in Palo Alto, California. In June, Tesla Motors offered to buy SolarCity.

Musk is …read more

Feathers are flying over whether the federal government is overprotecting a rare bird in Colorado, in what critics grouse is an example of lawyers making millions while abusing the Endangered Species Act.

Trial lawyers who collect taxpayer-funded fees under the law file so many suits that they undermine local conservation efforts in Western states, according to government officials, industry advocates, and legal analysts familiar with the situation.

In Colorado, the situation prompted Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, to sue the Obama administration early last year.

Over 25 years, Colorado officials spent more than $40 million to preserve the habitat of a paunchy, ground-dwelling, chickenlike bird known as the Gunnison sage grouse.

Colorado officials worked in partnership with ranchers in Gunnison County, who voluntarily entered into conservation easements on their property that protected the bird while allowing for robust ranching activities.

In the past few years, the Gunnison sage grouse population not only has stabilized but increased in the part of southwestern Colorado where they’re concentrated, local government figures show.

Even so, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service saw fit to list the species as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in November 2014.

Kent Holsinger, a natural resources lawyer based in Denver, says he sees …read more

State government figures spearheading an effort to obtain documents from scientists and researchers who dissent from the Obama administration’s position on climate change are being asked, once again, to come clean about their relationships with environmental organizations.

But this time around, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey have only two weeks to comply with a demand for information from a House committee that the two Democrats have resisted previously.

That’s because the demand comes in the form of subpoenas issued Wednesday to Schneiderman, Healey, and eight environmental advocacy groups. The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology took the action after being rebuffed in previous efforts.

In response, a spokesman for Schneiderman lashed out at the committee as “radical Republican House members” with “zero credibility” who are trying to “block a serious law enforcement investigation.”

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the committee chairman, saw it differently.

“The attorneys general have appointed themselves to decide what is valid and what is invalid regarding climate change,” Smith said in a press statement. “The attorneys general are pursuing a political agenda at the expense of scientists’ right to free speech.”

Smith added:

The committee has a responsibility to protect First Amendment …read more

Conservative critics of President Obama’s nominee to head the Library of Congress were blindsided Wednesday when a key Republican engineered her lopsided confirmation by the full Senate despite concerns she is, in the words of one opponent, “an unqualified, far-left progressive.”

The Senate voted 74-18 to confirm Carla D. Hayden, who leads Baltimore’s public library system, as the 14th librarian of Congress.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., rushed Hayden’s nomination to the floor even as Blunt’s office declined to answer The Daily Signal’s inquiries Wednesday morning about the status of the nomination.

Critics said Hayden falls short of the scholarly credentials traditionally expected of the nation’s librarian of Congress.

However, Blunt, chairman of the Rules and Administration Committee, scheduled a June 9 committee vote that recommended Hayden’s confirmation to the full Senate.

“Hayden has made a name for herself in the far-left community as a radical activist,” the conservative group Concerned Women for America wrote Blunt and the committee before that vote. “This position is not one for radical activism, but for academic honesty and integrity.”

Before the Senate vote, Hans von Spakovksy, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, called Hayden “an unqualified, far-left progressive.”

“Republicans should be very concerned about what her confirmation …read more

House Republicans are pressing efforts to safeguard the First Amendment rights of scientific skeptics who dissent from what they consider the Obama administration’s alarmist position on climate change, according to letters to 17 state attorneys general.

The series of letters, sent Friday and signed by 19 of the 22 Republican members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, renew an earlier request to the state attorneys general for information detailing their communications with environmental organizations.

They also ask for communications between employees for the state attorneys general and the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, or the White House.

“The committee intends to continue its vigorous oversight of the coordinated attempt to deprive companies, nonprofit organizations, and scientists of their First Amendment rights and ability to fund and conduct scientific research free from intimidation and threats of prosecution,” the letters say.

The top state law enforcement officials on the receiving end are given until the close of business June 24 to provide the House committee with “all documents and communications” between their offices and environmental activist groups pertaining to their potential prosecution of nonprofit groups, companies, and individual scientists for not toeing the official line on global warming.

“I’m glad to see this …read more

No historical evidence locates Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on what is now Liberty Farm in Fauquier County, Virginia, on the evening of July 18, 1861, three days before the First Battle of Bull Run.

So why would a prestigious state preservation group represent that as a fact?

The current owner of the farm, Martha Boneta, has sued the Piedmont Environmental Council, a nonprofit land trust, accusing the organization of knowingly making a false historical claim when selling her the property.

The environmental council, Boneta claims in the lawsuit, told her the celebrated Civil War general bivouacked on the open fields surrounding the farm.

Liberty Farm, also known as Paris Farm, is located about an hour’s drive outside Washington, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the rural village of Paris. Boneta purchased the property in 2006, 145 years after Jackson’s supposed overnight stay.

>>> Farmer Says Green Group Urged County to Harass Her With Zoning Citations

While negotiating the real estate transaction with Boneta, according to her suit in Fauquier County Circuit Court, the environmental council presented her with a document describing Jackson’s movements and coordinates in July 1861.

After a “strenuous march” from Winchester, Virginia, Jackson and his …read more

A large California teachers union and its national affiliate are forcing nonunion teachers to pay for political activism, according to a disclosure form acquired by The Daily Signal.

Under a category called “human rights,” both the National Education Association and the California Teachers Association require nonunion teachers to finance LGBT leadership training and other political goals that may run counter to the teachers’ convictions, The Daily Signal’s analysis of the disclosure form shows.

The form shows that unions charged $1.1 million in “human rights” costs to nonunion teachers as well as members in 2013-14, while identifying another $1.2 million in the same category as not chargeable to those who weren’t members.

A separate page lists $20,228 in chargeable costs for “Women and LGBT Issues” as a line item under the category of human rights. The same page includes a line item on “unconscious bias training” for which nonmembers must cover $5,436.

The teachers unions also spend a pretty penny on annual conferences described as focused on education, some of which appear designed instead to further political causes.

For the 2013-14 school year, the teachers unions charged nonmembers as well as members a total of $49,739 for an “Equity Human Rights Conference,” nearly twice …read more

The incestuous relationship between eye doctors and contact lens manufacturers opens the door to unsavory practices …read more

The incestuous relationship between eye doctors and contact lens manufacturers opens the door to unsavory practices …read more

Calling community activists: If you’re a committed, left-leaning activist who’d like to take part in “grassroots campaigns to protect the health, economy, environment, and livelihood of Ohio communities,” then Ohio Citizen Action has got a job for you.

And it’s one that pays reasonably well, with benefits on top. This could be an especially nice deal for recent college graduates looking to help create a little drama in Cleveland when the Republican National Convention convenes in July.

Just google Craigslist and Ohio Citizen Action, and you get an advertisement that declares: “Change the World and GET PAID … $80/day (Downtown Cleveland).”

You’ll learn the nonprofit group seeks candidates who “possess strong communication skills and a genuine commitment to the environment, progressive politics, and the empowerment of our fellow OH residents.”

The ad, specifying Cleveland, says positions are full time and pay $80 a day, with bonuses available at 20 days.

Applicants should expect to work from 2 to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. And yes, they should be committed to community organizing with an eye toward “environmental justice” and “sustainable energy.”

“Getting paid to participate in a supposedly ‘grassroots’ campaign is a contradiction in terms,” quipped Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal …read more