KALISPELL, Montana (Reuters) – Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer on Sunday questioned Exxon Mobil Corp’s contention that its oil pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River was concentrated within a 10-mile area.
Exxon said the spill, which occurred early Saturday near Billings, Montana, released into the river between 750 and 1,000 barrels of oil, which equals up to 42,000 gallons.
The company also has said the spill appeared to be concentrated within a 10-mile stretch of the river between Billings and the nearby town of Laurel.
But Schweitzer said the oil’s spread in the Yellowstone — which is the longest undammed river in the United States — could be more extensive.
“This is a lot of wild country, and they haven’t any idea whether it’s 5 miles, 50 miles or 100 miles, they’re guessing,” Schweitzer, a Democrat, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
An ExxonMobil pipeline running under the Yellowstone River in south central Montana ruptured late Friday, spilling crude oil into the river and forcing evacuations.
The pipeline burst about 10 miles west of Billings, coating parts of the Yellowstone River that run past Laurel — a town of about 6,500 people downstream from the rupture — with shiny patches of oil. Precisely how much oil leaked into the river was still unclear. But throughout the day Saturday, cleanup crews in Laurel worked to lessen the impact of the spill, laying down absorbent sheets along the banks of the river to mop up some of the escaped oil, and measuring fumes to determine the health threat.
FILE – In this June 14, 2011 file photo, the Fort Calhoun nuclear power station, in Fort Calhoun, Neb., is surrounded by flood waters from the Missouri River. The pictures of a Nebraska nuclear power plant were startling: Floodwaters from the swollen Missouri River had risen nearly to the reactor building, with the potential to climb even higher.
A Montana Republican has introduced a bill that would create a volunteer armed militia called a “home guard,” that would answer directly to the governor or local sheriffs during emergencies.
State Rep. Wendy Warburton (R) introduced House Bill 278, which she said was “just about local volunteers being prepared in case of emergency to support the National Guard, support the sheriff, support the governor as needed,” the Associated Press reports.
The governor would be required to “recruit, mobilize, administer, train, discipline, equip, and supply the organized militia,” which the AP estimates would cost the state $45,000 a year.
Legislators in at least ten states have introduced bills in the past few years to allow state commerce to be conducted with gold and silver.
As we reported, Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin (R) recently reintroduced legislation to force his state to conduct all monetary transactions with U.S. gold or silver coins — including the payment of taxes.
The Georgia bill has a long way to go before become law — but it’s by no means the only state that’s considering a future in gold. Lawmakers in Montana, Missouri, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington have proposed legislation, mostly in 2009, to include gold and silver in its accepted currency forms.
Constitutionaltender.com, a site dedicated to tracking and promoting these bills, explains:
The United States Constitution declares, in Article I, Section 10, “No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”. But, in fact, EVERY state in the United States of America DOES make some other “Thing” besides gold and silver coin a “Tender in Payment of Debts” — some “Thing” called “Federal Reserve Notes.” Thus the need for the “Constitutional Tender Act” — a bill template that can be introduced in every state legislature in the nation, returning each of them to adherence to the United States Constitution’s actual legal tender provisions.
The American Police Force (AFP) website: Here (Take a look and enjoy the show.)
AFP employees are not municipal police, they are MERCENARIES and they have been patrolling the streets with ‘POLICE decals’!
Wake up America! NOW!
American Police Force is taking over towns
29. September 2009
American Police Force Takes Over a Montana Town
The logo for the American Police Force looks very much like the Serbian coat of arms.
Five years ago, the city government of Hardin, Montana decided to build a large jail — 144,000 square feet, 464 beds — in an attempt to capitalize on the detention boom. A development agency called the Two Rivers Authority (TRA) was created; it issued $27 million in bonds to pay for the project.
Several months ago, the TRA negotiated a deal — the details of which remain secret — with a private security firm called American Police Force (APF), which was incorporated in Santa Ana, California last March.
In addition, APF promises to shower the city will all kinds of amenities — computers for the local schools, donations to the local food bank, tricked-out cars for the local police force…. Whoops, did I mention that last item out loud?
Hardin has no police force; it receives police coverage through the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office. So it caused a stir last Thursday when APF officials arrived in Hardin in grand style — a convoy of black Mercedes SUVs bearing the logo of a non-existent “City of Hardin Police Force.”
The APF hired Becky Shay, a reporter from the Billings Gazette who had covered the story of the Hardin jail, as its new spokesperson (for the enviable salary of $60,000 a year). It also began negotiating an employment deal with mayoral candidate Kerri Smith. Her husband, Greg Smith, is the Executive Director of the TRA and the fellow responsible for working out the deal with APF. Greg Smith was immediately put on “administrative leave” and has effectively disappeared. (He didn’t answer messages I left at his business telephone number.)
Local residents are understandably curious about this mysterious private “security firm” that appears to be taking over their town.
There was initial speculation that American Police Force (the organization’s website conveniently went dark as this story broke) is a tentacle of the mercenary firm once known as Blackwater and now called Xe (pronounced “Zee”). A press spokesperson at Xe informed me that she had never heard of APF before news broke of recent developments in Hardin.
The Obama administration is raising the stakes in a fight over states’ rights and firearm ownership by arguing that new pro-gun laws in Montana and Tennessee are invalid.
In the last few months, a grass-roots, federalist revolt against Washington, D.C. has begun to spread through states that are home to politically active gun owners. Montana and Tennessee have enacted state laws saying that federal rules do not apply to firearms manufactured entirely within the state, and similar bills are pending in Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and South Carolina.
Yet the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Explosives now claims that that not only is such a state law invalid, but “because the act conflicts with federal firearms laws and regulations, federal law supersedes the act.”
Tennessee’s law already has taken effect. The BATF’s letter on July 16 to firearms manufacturers and dealers in the state says “federal law requires a license to engage in the business of manufacturing firearms or ammunition, or to deal in firearms, even if the firearms or ammunition remain within the same state.”
A similar letter was sent to manufacturers and dealers in Montana, where the made-in-the-state law takes effect on October 1, 2009. Neither law permits certain large caliber weapons or machine guns, and both would bypass federal regulations including background checks for buyers and record-keeping requirements for sellers.
While this federalism-inspired revolt has coalesced around gun rights, the broader goal is to dust off a section of the Bill of Rights that most Americans probably have paid scant attention to: the Tenth Amendment. It says that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Read literally, the Tenth Amendment seems to suggest that the federal government’s powers are limited only to what it has been “delegated,” and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1918 confirmed that the amendment “carefully reserved” some authority “to the states.” That view is echoed by statements made at the time the Constitution was adopted; New Hampshire explicitly said that states kept “all powers not expressly and particularly delegated” to the federal government.
Proposed bill slams Fed, allows payments in precious metals
Montana State Rep. Bob Wagner
A bill being considered in the Montana Legislature blasts the Federal Reserve’s role in America’s money policy and permits the state to conduct business in gold and silver instead of the Fed’s legal tender notes.
Montana H.B. 639, sponsored by State Rep. Bob Wagner, R-Harrison, doesn’t require the state or citizens to conduct business in gold or silver, but it does require the state to calculate certain transactions in both the current legal tender system and in an electronic gold currency. It further mandates that the state must accept payments in gold or silver for various fees and purchases.
While Wagner was unavailable for comment, the bill’s language clearly alleges the nation’s current financial system, with its reliance on the private Federal Reserve system for money supply, is a danger to American freedom.
“The absence of gold and silver coin, whether in that form or in the form of an electronic gold currency, as media of exchange,” the bill states, “abridges, infringes on and interferes with the sovereignty and independence of this state … and exposes this state and Montana citizens, inhabitants and businesses to chronic problems and potentially serious crises that may arise from the economic and political instability of the present domestic and international systems of coinage, currency, banking and credit.”
World’s only private resort for billionaires goes bankrupt
World’s only private ski and golf resort for billionaires, Yellowstone Club (Montana, USA), has gone bankrupt. The club, which has Microsoft founder Bill Gates among its members, is unable to call in its credits, RIA Novosti reports. The company, which serves billionaires, has thus failed to withstand the financial crisis.
The most expensive and luxurious resort in Montana has filed for bankruptcy on account of its debts evaluated at $343 million. The debts had been saved as a result of the aggressive expansion politics and an intention to build additional offices in Scotland, Mexico and on the Caribbean islands.
Yellowstone is the location of the most expensive house in the world – the estate of logging tycoon Tim Blixseth worth $167 million. Blixseth founded the club in 1999. The resort has “cheaper” offers too – priced from 4 to 16 million dollars.
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