Bruce Westerman: “As I was listening to my friend from Colorado's comments, I was reminded of a saying that a graduate school professor…”

“As I was listening to my friend from Colorado's comments, I was reminded of a saying that a graduate school professor who taught statistics used to say: Numbers and people are a lot alike. If you torture them long enough, they will tell you anything you want to know. This study that my colleagues talk about references a cherry-picked 10,000 comments that were analyzed, and according to the BLM just over 8,000 were actually unique comments. That means that 2,000 of the comments were identical comments. These are comments that get submitted when you put clickbait out there and say, ``Send this comment in,'' and you just hit the button from your favorite radical environmental group, and it goes into the BLM or to the other Federal agency. Also, you know, I would expect the results to actually be even higher because it is kind of like asking: ``Do you like ice cream?'' or ``Do you like chocolate?'' or ``Do you like candy?'' When you say, are you for conservation and protecting the land, yeah, most people I think are for that. However, when you look at what this rule does, it is anything but that. It locks up land and takes it away from the multiple uses that Congress has designated that this BLM land is for. {time} 1545 Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Curtis), the sponsor of the legislation.”