Los Payasos - Government At Work

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A Federal Aviation Administration employee from Southern California took illegal perks from his job — including a plane, yachts and heavy-duty trucks — and an investigation continues into how widespread the practice was, federal prosecutors said Thursday. Steven Bradley Smith, a field technician with the FAA in San Diego, abused an internal computer system to claim surplus items from other government agencies, according to charging papers unsealed Thursday in federal court in Tacoma, Wash. "There's a great concern about who knew what about this — about whether it's something that was systemic, or one guy who managed to find the seam in the zone defense of the FAA," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Jennings told The Associated Press. He said he could not comment further on the investigation. The computer system is run by the General Services Administration and is designed to allow federal agencies to list items they no longer need, so that other agencies can acquire them free of charge. Prosecutors said Smith should not have been authorized to acquire items but managed to anyway — purportedly on behalf of the FAA — using another agency's code number. Among the 215 items Smith obtained since 2004 were a Cessna 210 from the Forest Service, a Boston Whaler from the Coast Guard, several computers and a 44-foot Navy yacht that had been used by the ROTC at the University of Washington, the charging document said....[link]

Changes to Species Act Are Said to Be Near The Bush administration is "close" to finalizing a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be harmed by agency projects, according to the Interior Department. In an interview yesterday, Interior spokeswoman Tina Kreisher said the Office of Management and Budget was reviewing the rule, which could be finalized in a matter of weeks. "I believe that we're close, but there's no final determination from the OMB," she said. For more than 30 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service have reviewed any federal plans that could potentially protect endangered animals or plants. Under the administration's proposed rule, these independent scientific reviews would no longer be required if the agency in question determined that its activities would not hurt the imperiled species....

Killer wolves removed in Montana Two ranchers north of Reed Point were issued permits last week to remove a pair of wolves that have killed sheep on their property. Federal Wildlife Services officials confirmed that a pair of wolves killed three sheep and injured a fourth, which was euthanized, on a ranch north of Reed Point Nov. 9. The ranch is adjacent to a sheep operation where wolves have killed a total of 16 sheep and a goat in six incidents over the past two months, despite the efforts of herders and guard dogs. The federal officials believe that a pair of wolves was involved....

Young NM Boy Recovers From Mountain Lion Attack A young boy was dragged away and clawed by a mountain lion. Six months later, he has recovered and his parents said they couldn't be more grateful. The scars on Jose Salazar's head are still visible. A mountain lion dragged him by the head down a trail in the Sandia Mountains on May 17. Jose's dad chased and caught up with the mountain lion and the big cat eventually let go and took off. After surgeries and a stay in the hospital, Salazar's family said he is happy and healthy. While Salazar is focusing on sports and school now, he said he still has some memories of the attack. "I just heard a growl. I just looked back and saw it and I tried to run away, but it was too late. It just pounced on me," Salazar said. The Salazar family went to Alamogordo in October to tell Jose's story before the State Game Commission. They said they hope it will lead to action in addressing the number of mountain lions in the Sandias....They'll just have to keep on hoping, because the Game Commission has done the exact opposite. It's pretty clear what the Game Commission's priorities are, who they are politically beholden to, and public safety be damned.

Outsiders Target Indian Land for Risky Business Deep in the foothills, miles above California’s Sacramento Valley, the 640-acre home of the Cortina Band of Wintun Indians lies empty except for six houses, a graveyard, and the spot where the band’s ceremonial roundhouse once stood. A sign at the gate warns off outsiders, but on a recent afternoon there is no one inside to drive visitors away. All but 20 or so of the band’s 160 members live elsewhere. Most are scattered throughout California and the West. Some moved as far away as Tennessee and Canada. In 2007, the band began leasing nearly 70 percent of its land to be used for a landfill by a joint project between a Canadian venture capital company and a California waste hauler. The company plans to truck in 1,500 tons of municipal waste a day and bury it deep in Cortina’s canyons. The Cortina landfill is one among dozens of projects across the country for which developers and Native Americans are using Indian sovereignty to bypass state and local regulations and build projects that other communities shun – projects ranging from landfills, big box stores and a massive power plant to casinos, motorcycle tracks and billboards....

Wild Horses There are about 33,000 wild horses on the open range. To control the herds and keep land open for cattle grazing, the federal Bureau of Land Management has rounded up many more horses and tried to put them out for adoption. But adoptions are not keeping up, and some 30,000 horses remain in holding pens. Until the past few days, the bureau had been planning to cull another 6,000 horses from the wild by killing them. Fortunately, the bureau has halted that rush to euthanasia after Madeleine Pickens — the wife of T. Boone Pickens, the oil tycoon — offered to create a one-million-acre refuge for the wild horses already in captivity. Mrs. Pickens plans to sterilize the horses on her land and says she will take any additional horses the federal government wants to cull from the wild herd. Sterilization is the best solution for long-term wild horse management. The federal Bureau of Land Management is finally coming to understand that and is now working with the Humane Society on very promising contraception studies in two herds. The bureau also needs to consider buying back some of its range permits from cattle ranchers. We suspect that in this economic climate, some ranchers would be glad to part with them. The bureau then could leave wild horses on the range — instead of capturing them and paying to feed them — until aggressive contraception comes into play....

Wilderness bills will have new allies, new foes next year Now that two Idaho wilderness bills are officially dead for the year, the Republicans behind the proposals are planning how to get ideas crafted during the Bush era to pass through a Democratic Congress and White House. Sen. Mike Crapo's Owyhee Canyonlands plan to protect 500,000 acres of wilderness and help ranchers in Owyhee County was one of more than 100 provisions in a sweeping lands bill now delayed until January. And Rep. Mike Simpson's proposal to protect 319,000 acres in the Boulder and White Cloud mountains in Central Idaho never even got a start in the Democratic-controlled House. "You never rule it out," Simpson said this week. "Weird things happen in the last days of session, but it looks unlikely right now." Both Simpson and Crapo are confident they'll do better in 2009 - but though they'll pick up new allies on some aspects of their bills, they'll see new pressures as well. Each bill is built on a fragile coalition of traditional land users, conservationists and local governments - but each has been attacked by conservatives concerned about property rights and by the environmental left. New people - and environmental advocacy groups - will have more power, but appeasing the new majority could cost Crapo and Simpson the Republican and Western support they worked to cultivate....

Wash. farmers fight proposed 30K-head feedlot Sure, it's a saga many years old, but a new twist is brewing on Washington's rural nonirrigated lands, where fourth-generation farmers plant wheat and pray for rain. Sometimes there's a harvest -- sometimes not -- but they soldier on in homesteads whose only water supply comes from wells deep underground. Some now fear their wells could dry up if a 30,000-head feedlot moves onto neighboring land in southeast Washington's Franklin County. "Our main concern is our water. If we go dry, we have no recourse," said Blaine Dougherty, who with his brother still farms the land his grandfather bought in 1938. Under laws dating back 60 years, the state allows some wells to be drilled without a permit, as long as water usage is held to 5,000 gallons per day. They include livestock watering, small industrial uses, domestic use or noncommercial watering of a small lawn or garden. But in 2005, Attorney General Rob McKenna issued an opinion that barred the state from limiting the amount of water that ranchers draw daily for their livestock. Critics immediately argued it opens the state's water resources to unlimited use by large dairies and feedlots....

A buck goes nuts in a Town & Country strip mall According to Town & Country police, at approximately 6 p.m. on November 1, a ten-point buck sauntered into the middle of the busy strip mall on Manchester Road. Walking past retailer Home Decorators Collection, the deer stopped momentarily to observe an ornamental deer statue on display in the window. "The deer turned towards the door and tried crashing into the door as if wanting to attack the deer statue," states the police report filed the following day. "[D]ue to the impact with the door the deer broke off its entire right antler...the deer did not make it through the door but bent the door jamb." Injured from its battle with the deer decoy, the buck stumbled its way to the adjacent Home Depot and walked through the store's automated doors. As frightened shoppers hastened their way toward the exits, the deer staggered through the lumber department and into the rear of the store....

Literary Marksmanship AMERICAN RIFLE A Biography By Alexander Rose Delacorte. 495 pp. $30 The title of Alexander Rose's marvelous book says it all: Although "American Rifle" is ostensibly about the history of a piece of machinery, a tool, a killing instrument, it is only in America that the rifle has become an ineradicable part of the culture and can be written about as if it were a living person. "My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother," runs an old hymn still memorized by both Army and Marine recruits. That hymn was intended to serve as an instructive and inspirational credo for young men joining the armed forces who, increasingly, no longer came from a rural or ranching background in which boys started shooting as small children with a BB rifle, got a .22 for their 10th birthday or sooner, and were taught how to shoot and look after a gun by their father, uncle or grandfather, in a rite of passage as old as the republic. In the Old World, firearms were a class indicator: prerogatives of the military or, when intended for sporting purposes, of the landed aristocracy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout Europe and Great Britain, poaching was a capital offense; the ordinary non-landowning man had no need, and no right, to keep a firearm at home, and hanging judges gleefully sentenced those of the starving rural poor who killed a pheasant or a deer. The biggest difference between America and Great Britain was not just the abundance of wildlife, but the all-important fact that in the Colonies it didn't belong to anybody; a good marksman could put meat on the family table every night without being hanged for the act. The firearm above the fireplace became a symbol of self-sufficiency, of freedom, of a potentially classless society (at any rate, one without a hereditary aristocracy), of sturdy independence and of self-defense....

USDA Panel Approves First Rules For Labeling Farmed Fish 'Organic' For the first time, a federal advisory board has approved criteria that clear the way for farmed fish to be labeled "organic," a move that pleased aquaculture producers even as it angered environmentalists and consumer advocates. The question of whether farmed fish could be labeled organic -- especially carnivorous species such as salmon that live in open-ocean net pens and consume vast amounts of smaller fish -- has vexed scientists and federal regulators for years. The standards approved yesterday by the National Organic Standards Board would allow organic fish farmers to use wild fish as part of their feed mix provided it did not exceed 25 percent of the total and did not come from forage species, such as menhaden, that have declined sharply as the demand for farmed fish has skyrocketed....

Planting a new purpose The Rocky Mountain Seed Co. building on 15th Street between Market and Larimer streets is one of downtown Denver's few remaining reminders of the city's agrarian roots. In October, JohnstonWells Public Relations moved into the Victorian-era building, which had housed The Rocky Mountain Seed Co. for 87 years before it vacated the property in 2007. The seed company is now headquartered near Interstate 25 and Washington Street. The historic building's new inhabitants set out to transform what once was a dusty retail space outfitted with 1,200 drawers, bins and cubbyholes of various shapes and sizes into a colorful modern office punctuated by an extensive folk art collection. The redesign plans also were mindful of the building's egacy. But other historians mourn the loss of a link to Denver's agricultural past. People often think of early Denver as a mining hub, but the city also served as the supply center for farms in eastern Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Kansas and the Dakotas, according to Tom Noel. The University of Colorado history professor known as "Dr. Colorado" is also a LoDo tour guide and author of several local history books. Larimer, Market and 15th streets were home to nearly a dozen wholesale, distribution and packaging companies for produce, seeds and meats. Farmers in trucks used to line up at the Rocky Mountain Seed Co. while walk-in customers chatted with the staff about what crops grew best in this region or how to handle hail and storm damage....

Tel Che'e: Apache warrior turned legend Somewhere along a remote creek bed, somewhere in Central Arizona, sometime in the early 1860s, an unknown prospector lay dead. Over his body stood an exceptionally large, broad-shouldered and slightly stooped, 20-some-year-old Apache. From the dead man's clothing, the Apache plucked a single pearl button. Then, along with his companions, he headed off to one of his remote mountain sanctuaries. The scene was not unusual. There were a lot of bodies littering the landscape at that place and time. But the Apache warrior, who would soon fashion the pearl button into an earring, was. His name was Tel Che'e. The whites who later came to his ancestral land, unaccustomed to his indigenous people's foreign dialect, called him Delshay, Deluche, Delche or Del-che-ae. Other Apache chiefs would achieve greater notoriety, but none would bear the enmity of the U.S. military to the degree eventually reserved for Tel Che'e....

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens loses re-election bid Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday's count. That's an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted. Stevens, who turned 85 Tuesday, also revealed that he will not ask President George W. Bush to give him a pardon for his seven felony convictions.

The Environmental Motor Company When is $25 billion in taxpayer cash insufficient to bail out Detroit's auto makers? Answer: When the money is a tool of Congressional industrial policy to turn GM, Ford and Chrysler into agents of the Sierra Club and other green lobbies. That's the little-understood subplot of the Washington melodrama over a taxpayer rescue for Detroit. In their public statements, proponents describe the bailout as an attempt to save jobs, American manufacturing and the middle-class way of life. But look closely and you can see that what's really going on is an attempt to use taxpayer money to remake Detroit in the image of the modern environmental movement. Given a choice between greens and blue-collar workers, Congress puts the greens first. This political contradiction has come into sharp relief since President Bush offered a significant compromise late last week on the use of taxpayer cash. Earlier this year, Congress had approved $25 billion in loans to the car companies for "green retooling," and the White House said Friday that Detroit could tap that money quickly for more general purposes with a couple of conditions. The companies merely have to present a business plan to the Energy Secretary showing how the cash would keep them "viable," which is to say competitive as profit-making concerns. This could be a proposal to renegotiate labor contracts, or perhaps a merger proposal, or other plan of action. But here's the real catch for Congress: Mr. Bush said Democrats would also have to remove the green strings that they themselves had attached to that $25 billion. Democratic leaders refused....

War on the Range A new range war is spreading across the Rocky Mountain West. And this time, it's pitting ranchers against a modern-day nemesis: the gas industry. At the center of the conflict is an explosion of drilling for coalbed methane gas over the past decade in iconic Western places like sage-covered buttes and mesas -- wide open spaces that, until recently, ranchers pretty much had to themselves. The number of active gas wells in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado has shot up more than fivefold to about 18,000 from 2,550 in 2001. In Colorado, the number of permits for primarily new gas wells has jumped sevenfold to 7,000 a year from about 1,000 at the beginning of this decade. And in Wyoming's fabled Powder River Basin -- where Buffalo Bill Cody and other Old West legends once rode -- the number of gas wells has more than tripled to about 30,000 from about 9,000 eight years ago. Coalbed methane as a whole now accounts for nearly 10% of natural-gas production in the U.S. Along the way, many ranchers have complained of their cattle operations being seriously disrupted -- and in some cases ruined -- because of so much development activity. Some have formed groups to study the impact, lobbied for more regulation and filed lawsuits to hold producers more accountable. But most ranchers have had little choice but to let the drilling rigs in; the 1872 Mining Act gives precedence to mineral rights over surface users of the land. "As a rancher, I want my business protected from the impacts of the oil-and-gas industry," Chris Velasquez, a rancher in Blanco, N.M., said last April before the House Committee on Small Business, which was looking into the effects of oil-and-gas development on hunters, ranchers and others in the West. The 56-year-old rancher said he had to give up the last 22,000 acres of a federal grazing lease where his family had ranched for more than a century because the roads, pipelines, well pads and quarries put in there for drilling had made running cattle uneconomical. Among the problems: In 2001, 20 of his pregnant heifers aborted their calves after drinking contaminated water from a well-disposal pit....

Drilling process causes water supply alarm In July, a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wyo., and pulled up a load of brown, oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people. The results sent shock waves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies. Sublette County is the home of one of the nation's largest natural-gas fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing, which shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release the gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Today, fracturing is used in nine of every 10 natural-gas wells in the United States. Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents has raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation's increasingly precious drinking-water supply....

California’s Tougher Renewable-Energy Targets A Mixed Blessing for Greens California now has the nation’s most ambitious renewable-energy targets. Many environmentalists might wish it didn’t. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger set California’s renewable-energy target at 33% by 2020; right now, the state’s target is to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Gov. Schwarzenegger’s executive order clears the way for the state legislature to draft new laws making the target binding.Why might that be bad news for environmentalists? Because increasing the use of renewable energy means the state must build new transmission lines to carry the juice, even if those pass through environmentally-sensitive areas that could still be preserved if renewable-energy targets were lower. In announcing the new goal, Gov. Schwarzenegger specifically targeted environmental opposition to new projects: “[W]e won’t meet that goal doing business as usual, where environmental regulations are holding up environmental progress in some cases. This executive order will clear the red tape for renewable projects and streamline the permitting and siting of new plants and transmission lines.”

Ranchers brace for change in Washington The outcome of the Nov. 4 election hung like an ominous storm cloud this week as members of the Idaho Cattle Association gathered in Sun Valley for their annual convention. Convention speakers on Monday afternoon predicted that Democrats' riding to a more powerful majority in Washington, D.C., will mean more regulation, additional listings under the federal Endangered Species Act and expansion of national monuments and wilderness areas. For ranchers in Idaho and elsewhere in the West, the specter of change seems most tied to efforts to protect wildlife that conservationists and some federal biologists consider imperiled, such as gray wolves and greater sage grouse. Andy Groseta, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, predicted that the Bush administration will hand off a court-ordered review of whether to list sage grouse as threatened or endangered under the ESA to the incoming Obama administration. Such a listing, which the federal government earlier rejected, could extend across Idaho and 10 other Western states. Ranchers should also fear an increasingly powerful animal rights lobby, Groseta said. Well-financed, these activists' primary mission is to destroy the country's cattle industry, he claimed....

'Rules of the road' set for oil shale drilling The Bush administration gave energy companies steep discounts in the royalties they will be required to pay as it established the groundwork Monday for commercial oil shale development on federal land. Interior Department officials said the 5 percent royalty rate during the first five years of production was needed to spur drilling while still giving taxpayers a fair return. But that rate is much lower than the 12.5 percent to 18.8 percent the government collects from companies harvesting conventional oil and gas on public lands. Monday's announcement sets parameters such as the royalty rate and lease sizes, but it will be up to the incoming Obama administration to decide whether to proceed with leasing. Officials on Monday said commercial leasing was five to 10 years away. The announcement by the Interior Department comes months after Congress — pressured by the White House and Republicans to increase domestic energy — failed to renew a ban on issuing final oil shale regulations....