Well, are you celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday today? Or still mourning for POTUS James Earl Carter? Or celebrating and rejoicing in the inauguration of Trump 2.0 – the new regime of The Donald? Or just celebrating the ending of Uncle Joe’s four years of – well, the list is too long to go through now.
But this is a good time to talk about the personality traits or characteristics of politicians.

Now, we won’t be so crude as to ask that if the ISS had deorbited and hit the Capitol Dome at 12 noon today, whether the Fifty States and the world (maybe even the Solar System) would be better off or not. We’re sure you have your own thoughts about that.
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Who can justify this?
The federal government owns a little more than one-fourth of the total land area of the United States.
That’s right. According to multiple sources (non-governmental), the FedGov owns about 640 million acres of the 2 billion acres that makes us the landmass of the 50 States and the various territories. Actually, that is 28%. That converts to a nice round ONE MILLION SQUARE MILES. (By the way, this does not include highways, streets, or most airports and seaports: those are owned by local and state governments.)
Various FedGov agencies control most of that: the Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service (both forests and grasslands), the National Park Service, and the US Fish & Wildlife Service. But hundreds of other FedGov agencies control large chunks of land. Among them? The Tennessee Valley Authority, General Services Administration, US Postal Service (yeah, right – they “aren’t” a government agency), Bureau of Reclamation, Federal Reserve (ditto on “aren’t”), and of course the Department of Defense (a “tiny” 27 million acres, including US Corps of Engineers land).
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