EPA plans to spend $2.2B to protect Great Lakes

The federal government plans to spend $2.2 billion to clean up pollution in the Great Lakes and halt the spread of invasive species over the next five years. That plan, announced Sunday, marks a "significant investment" in fighting some of the biggest environmental threats to the nation's largest freshwater lakes, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said. The EPA will use the money to prevent beach pollution, clean up toxic hot spots, and fight Asian carp and other invasive species. That effort "will leave the Great Lakes better for the next generation than the condition in which we inherited them," Jackson said. Among the EPA's priorities is cleaning up long-polluted sections of the lakes. In the 1980s, the U.S. and Canadian governments identified 31 toxic hot spots on the U.S. side; since then, only one has been fully cleaned up. The EPA now plans to finish work at four others by 2014, though spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said the agency hasn't figured out which. The plan also takes a "zero tolerance" approach to invasive species such as Asian carp, which could crowd out native fish and imperil the Great Lakes fishing industry if they reach Lake Michigan...read more

Parks open to holders of concealed guns

U.S. national parks will open Monday to holders of concealed firearms as a hard-fought law passed last year takes effect, but both sides expect more battles over exactly what the legislation means in practice. The law - probably the biggest legislative achievement for conservatives in what was otherwise a year dominated by President Obama's agenda - says national parks will be governed by the same rules as the states in which they are located. That means about 370 of the country's 392 National Park Service properties will permit visitors to carry firearms. But the Park Service says exceptions are in place and that another federal law requires guns to be kept out of federal facilities. That means firearms are still prohibited at any building where park employees regularly work, including office buildings, maintenance sheds and, most contentious of all, visitor centers. "I think you're going to have people on both sides of the issue test this in what is or is not a federal facility," said David Barna, a spokesman for the National Park Service. Gun rights advocates said they are pleased that weapons will no longer be off limits but that the Park Service should not poke exemptions into the law...read more

NM panel mulls Arizona Water Settlement Act

A panel discussion on the basics of the Arizona Water Settlement Act revealed that opinions on the topic are as fluid as the Gila River itself. The discussion, held Thursday at Western New Mexico University's Global Resource Center Auditorium, featured panelists Peter White, staff attorney for the New Mexico State Engineer's Office for 27 years; Charles "Tink" Jackson, district manager for the State Engineer's Office in Deming; Allyson Siwik, executive director of the Gila Conservation Coalition; Hugh B. McKeen, Catron County rancher and commissioner; and Anthony Gutierrez, Grant County planner. The Arizona Water Settlement Act is the culmination of legislative battles that have raged for more than 50 years between California, Arizona and New Mexico over water rights and entitlements. It also will impact how and how much water southwestern New Mexico could use in the future. The Act allocates some $66 million for any water utilization project that meets a water supply demand in southwest New Mexico. The spectrum for proposed projects, according to the Act, runs the gamut from infrastructure, conservation/water demand management projects to educational campaigns. There is another $128 million available for construction of a water development project to divert and consume 14,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Gila River and its tributary, the San Francisco. A "stakeholders" group that includes a number of representatives from local, state and federal agencies as well as private interests will make the decision on what projects might be funded...read more

Helicopter warfare: Feral hogs in their sights

Early on a cold morning in northern Haskell County, two helicopters set off to find feral hogs. Next to the pilot in each two-seater helicopter is a gunner, armed with an assortment of laser-sighted rifles and shotguns to shoot the hogs they find. When a sounder — or group of hogs — is spotted, the pilot follows the fleeing hogs, which can run as fast as 30 miles per hour. The hogs generally run in a straight line, allowing the gunman to pick them off one by one from the helicopter flying only about 20 feet above the ground. Feral hogs have caused so much land and crop damage that Haskell County farmers turned to aerial management as the best way to effectively bring down their population. Over three days last week, about 300 hogs were killed by the hunters in the helicopters. Previously, the hunters reported, they killed as many as 125 in one hour in Haskell County. But there are still thousands more hogs in the area — and millions in the state...read more

NY Times Article On NM Spaceport

Take Highway 51 east out of Truth or Consequences, a small city that years ago assumed the name of a game show on a dare. Drive through miles and miles of desert, then turn right at an old train depot whose bustle has long since pulled out. Keep going. After eight miles, turn left on a dirt road that leads deeper into the sage and yucca vastness of New Mexico, past a ranch that used to be a stage stop on an ancient trade route called El Camino Real. Soon after, you will come to your destination: the future. Here, where rattlesnakes hibernate and rabbits scurry, there unfolds a two-mile runway designed to accommodate spaceships. And right beside it, past those giant rumbling tractors of sci-fi design, the groundwork is being laid for a hangar large enough to store spaceships between launchings. This is not a secret government project, or some NASA reception hall for alien dignitaries. This is Spaceport America, a $198 million endeavor by the State of New Mexico to plumb the commercial potential of the suborbital heavens — a place once known only to astronauts, dreamers and the occasional chimp...Read more

COMMENT: Never thought I'd see a NY Times article datelined Upham, NM.

Film chronicles end of sheep operation

The aluminum-walled sheep wagon hasn’t moved for years. Elaine and Lawrence Allestad used to use it when they took their sheep up into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Now it is parked in front of a two-story house in a subdivided cow pasture. The Allestads sold their 5,000-acre ranch near Rapelje and their grazing allotments in the wilderness in 2006, marking the end of an era for sheep grazing in Sweet Grass County. Lawrence Allestad’s family had run sheep in the area since the early 1900s, and as many as 30 bands of sheep once grazed in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness at one time. Now, a documentary following the Allestads’ sheep operation in those final years entitled “Sweetgrass,” by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, is making waves in cinematic circles nationwide. The New York Times called it “essential,” “graceful” and “astonishingly beautiful.” “Impressive,” the New Yorker review said. Castaing-Taylor spent three summers with the Allestads, filming and helping with the sheep drives. In all, the film took eight years to complete. When he began filming in 2001, he did not know 2003 would be the last summer sheep would be grazed in the wilderness area. But Castaing-Taylor, an anthropology professor at Harvard University, did know he was capturing a disappearing the way of life...read more

It's All Trew: Law and order used to be so very different

History tells of a time in early Donley County, Texas, when the rustlers and ne'er-do-wells became so numerous, they threatened the outcome of a trial of one of their peers. Rancher Charles Goodnight, tired of suffering cattle losses to the thieves, heard of the threat. He rode into Clarendon with a tough-looking bunch of cowboys wearing sidearms and carrying rifles across their saddles. They took up positions around the courthouse during the night. The next day's trial went off without a hitch, with the thief convicted and sent to prison. One citizen observer commented later as how "the population of Donley County 'dropped considerably' thereafter in a short period of time." A big-time feud between competing free-range ranchers in South Texas once threatened a small community. A plea for help was sent to the Texas Ranger camp located about 100 miles distant. Help came as fast as a horse could travel as one scrawny, big-hatted Ranger rode in and placed his jaded mount in the livery stable. The community groaned as the skinny runt sat down on the courthouse veranda, believing their plea would be in vain...read more

Song Of The Day #245

Ranch Radio will get your heart started and your foot stompin' this Monday morning with Bob Will's 1942 recording of Cherokee Maiden.

It's available on several of his collections, which you can view here.

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

The perils of counting cattle

Julie Carter

The probability factor for knock-down drag-out fight in corrals zooms to 100 percent when him-and-her cattle counting is involved.

"Differing slightly" is a smooth term for what happens when he expects her to count and she expects him to help or accept her count as correct. Neither of which ever happens.

Counting cattle appears to be a simple process of pointing and starting with the number one and progressing to a finally tally. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, let me say that of all the skills required to work cattle, counting is one that is always taken for granted.

No one ever asks if you can count, they just expect that you will. And it's never an issue, until of course, you've done it wrong.

In every counting situation, it helps to know how many there are supposed to be. It's been suggested by better cowboys than me that the best way is to count at least twice and get an average. You might end up with 37-1/2 but that's a number.

A couple of broke cowboys bought a huge roan saddle horse at a horse sale in Amarillo.

Because neither had enough money to individually pay for Roanie, they partnered on him.

The day Jess got his turn with the new purchase, he was supposed to help his bride count a big string of wheat pasture cattle.

There were about 450 head on three sections of undivided wheat pasture and when they got them pushed to one side, they headed them down the fence.

The cowgirl was counting them at the corner and her able partner was supposed to keep them coming and count anything that went behind her.

When she finished her count, she turned to ask for his to add to the total.

What she saw indicated he'd never even started his job.

The cowboy and his new roan horse had ridden off and were doing little turns, circles, stopping and other assorted horse training maneuvers.

After the fight, the cowgirl hired some reliable help and the next day got a good count on the herd.

Another time, they were riding through a big string of cattle on a couple sections of wheat. He was to count one side and she the other.

Her horse had to stop and water the ground, so she got a ways behind.

When she caught up, he managed to take the time out of his busy schedule to raise hell with her, but in doing so, lost his count.

They managed to settle on a plan. One day she counted and the next it was his turn.
Florida cattle are treasure to count. When they arrive in the West, most of them have never seen men or horses.

Often described as wilder than "outhouse rats," getting them to slow down enough to count them was a feat and if that happened, then they wad up in a ball, all looking at the rider with no intention of stringing out for the count.

Darrell always had a lot of Florida cattle and would gather up everybody within a million miles to come help receive them.

The trucker would turn out the first bottom compartment of the trailer and it was pretty standard that they all had to be roped and tied down because they simply would not stop running.

The theory was that the next compartment would stop to see what was tied down.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

One cowboy suggested that the words women use that don't really mean what they say were created in the corrals during counting.

The definitive use of "Whatever!" "Fine!" and "Never mind!" suggest a few rocky days ahead.

When the boss asked me that dreaded question, "How many did you get?" I categorically always answered with all the sincerity I could muster, "All of them."

Julie, never good at counting, can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net

Song Of The Day #244

Our Gospel tune for this Sunday morning is Jesus Will Save Your Soul by the great bluegrass due Don Reno & Red Smiley.

Holder admits nine Obama DOJ officials worked for terrorist detainees

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in. Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department." In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing. He says nine Obama political appointees at the Justice Department have advocated on behalf of detainees, but did not identify any of the nine other than the two, Katyal and Daskal, whose names Grassley already knew...read more

TSA makes disabled boy, 4, take off leg braces

Did you hear about the Camden cop whose disabled son wasn't allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces? Unfortunately, it's no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden's emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan. Ryan was taking his first flight, to Walt Disney World, for his fourth birthday. The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk. Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple of hours before their Southwest Airlines flight was to depart. The boy's father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector. The alarm went off. The screener told them to take off the boy's braces. The Thomases were dumbfounded. "I told them he can't walk without them on his own," Bob Thomas said. "He said, 'He'll need to take them off.' " Ryan's mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic. No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own...read more

TSA to swab airline passengers' hands in search for explosives

To the list of instructions you hear at airport checkpoints, add this: "Put your palms forward, please." The Transportation Security Administration soon will begin randomly swabbing passengers' hands at checkpoints and airport gates to test them for traces of explosives. Previously, screeners swabbed some carry-on luggage and other objects as they searched for the needle in the security haystack -- components of terrorist bombs in an endless stream of luggage. But after the Christmas Day attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit, Michigan, the TSA began a program of swabbing passengers' hands, which could be contaminated by explosive materials, experts say. The TSA will greatly expand the swabbing in the coming weeks, the agency said...read more

Officers lose 243 Homeland Security guns

Nearly 180 Department of Homeland Security weapons were lost -- some falling into the hands of criminals -- after officers left them in restrooms, vehicles and other public places, according to an inspector general report. The officers, with Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "did not always sufficiently safeguard their firearms and, as a result, lost a significant number of firearms" between fiscal year 2006 and fiscal year 2008, the report said. In all, 243 firearms were lost in both agencies during that period, according to the January report from Inspector General Richard Skinner. Of those, 36 were lost because of circumstances beyond officers' control -- for instance, ICE lost a firearm during an assault on an officer. Another 28 were lost even though officers had stored them in lockboxes or safes. But 74 percent, or 179 guns, were lost "because officers did not properly secure them," the report said...read more

Police push for warrantless searches of cell phones

This is an important legal question that remains unresolved: as our gadgets store more and more information about us, including our appointments, correspondence, and personal photos and videos, what rules should police investigators be required to follow? The Obama administration and many local prosecutors' answer is that warrantless searches are perfectly constitutional during arrests. "There are very, very few cases involving smartphones," Chris Feasel, deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said in an interview on Wednesday. "The law has not necessarily caught up to the technology." Feasel said the county's position is that a search of a handheld device that takes place soon after an arrest is lawful. "It's an interesting issue that may decide the future of how courts handle these kinds of cases, especially smartphones and iPhones," he said. Attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco civil liberties group that's representing Taylor, have asked the court to suppress any evidence obtained from the search of his iPhone. They say the search was "unconstitutional" because it was done without a warrant--and they say it also may have violated a 1986 federal law designed to protect the privacy of e-mail messages. Privacy advocates say that long-standing legal rules allowing police to search suspects during an arrest--including looking through their wallets and pockets--should not apply to smartphones because the amount of material they store is so much greater and the risks of intrusive searches are so much higher...read more

School used webcams to spy on students

A suburban Philadelphia school district used the webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit. Lower Merion School District officials said the laptops "contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops," and that the feature was deactivated Thursday. Angry students had already responded by putting tape on their laptop cameras and microphones. Sophomore Tom Halpern described students as "pretty disgusted," and noted that his class recently read "1984," the George Orwell classic that coined the term "Big Brother." "This is just bogus," said Halpern, 15, of Wynnewood, as he left Harriton High School on Thursday with his taped-up computer. "I just think it's really despicable that they have the ability to just watch me all the time." The school district can activate the webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit...read more

Deep secrets: Former cold war agent gagged by the CIA

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63 days at sea on what he described last week as a “marvellous engineering effort and a marvellous security effort to keep it under wraps”. The broad outlines of the historic intelligence feat have been written about and debated for decades, have been publicly acknowledged by governments in both Washington and Moscow and have inspired countless conspiracy theories and malevolent accusations. Yet the man who knows most about the Hughes Glomar Explorer recovery ship and its effort to retrieve the Soviet Golf-II submarine K-129 is still being gagged by the CIA...read more

Is Joe Stack a Wake-Up Call to America?

"In my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say." ~ Joe Stack On Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010, 53-year-old, financially strapped software engineer Joseph Stack crashed a small plane into an IRS office building in Austin, Texas. He left behind a wife, a stepdaughter and a suicide note he had posted on his software company’s website. By the following day, the various media pundits on the right and left had already dismissed Stack as a fringe lunatic, and anyone who agreed with Stack’s diatribe against an unjust government was labeled a crackpot. However, while you can – and should – disagree with the method of Stack’s madness, Americans shouldn’t be too quick to discount the source of his frustrations. Stack is representative of a burgeoning class of disaffected Americans who are waking up to the reality that the American governmental system no longer works as it was intended – that is, it no longer works for them. In its place, a government of elites comprised of politicians and unelected bureaucrats has emerged that views the average American as little more than a source of tax funds and labor to keep the massive machinery of government operating. We have shifted from having a government that is "of the people, by the people, for the people" to one that is largely seen as predatory, a "government of wolves."...read more

Brady Campaign State Scorecards: Most States Have Weak Gun Laws

Most states have weak or non-existent gun laws, helping feed the illegal gun market and allowing the sale of guns without background checks including at gun shows, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Forty-three states fail to close the loophole that allows criminals to buy guns at gun shows without Brady background checks. Scores range from the first-ever “zero,” earned by Utah, to 79 for California. “Most states, unfortunately, are doing very little to protect citizens from gun violence. Most states are allowing dangerous people to have easy access to guns,” said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Few states have laws addressing the critical issue of gun trafficking such as requiring background checks on all gun purchases at gun shows. The Brady Campaign is advocating for legislation to close the gun show loophole at the national level...read more

Go here to see how your state ranks.

COMMENT: Congratulations Utah for having the best gun laws in the nation! New Mexico is right up there with a 4.

The Chemist's War

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government. Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."...read more