[Mitch King, regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] said for Wyoming to be on board with the current delisting proposal -- out for public comment now -- a plan would have to be submitted by May.

But Wyoming Attorney General Pat Crank said the state won't and can't have a new wolf management plan by May.

"It's pretty ironic that after stonewalling us for three years, they're asking for something by May," Crank said.

He said the state is "charging ahead as hard as we can" with its lawsuit to force the federal government to accept Wyoming's 2003 wolf management plan. Approval of a state wolf plan is necessary for wolf delisting to proceed in Wyoming.

The 10-seater Britten Norman Islander aircraft was delivered to Iran's Civil Aviation Organisation last week, said Dean Ghobadi commercial director of PAAviation, which provides aviation products and services to Iran.

...

"This hasn't happened since 1979," said Ghobadi. "The Iranians are delighted and have expressed interest in a further five aircraft".

He said the multi-purpose aircraft could be used for civilian skydiving training, as an air ambulance, as a regional commuter plane, for transporting VIPs or for coastal patrols.

The sale, approved by the British government, comes at a time of heightened tensions between London and Tehran following Iran's capture of 15 British Navy sailors and marines in the Gulf last week. [emphasis added]

Gore's problem may stem from the attitude inherent in his remark before a Congressional Committee quoted further down in the Rasmussen article: "Global Warming is 'not a partisan issue; it's a moral issue.'" Wrong, Al. It's neither. It's a scientific issue.

And, considering the Rasmussen Poll, most of us apparently know it.

When I first viewed Gore's Oscar-winning movie, it was that very thing that immediately occurred to me: why am I listening to a politician talk about this? Why not a scientist or scientists? You could cut the inauthenticity of the whole enterprise with a knife ...

... After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore's narcissism - not exactly the result intended. ...

Cover photo: One of the premier examples of the snubby revolver breed is this "Fitz Special," a .45 Colt New Service revolver customized by the legendary J.H. FitzGerald for the late Col. Rex Applegate. Colonel Applegate carried this rare revolver instead of his official sidearm throughout World War II and as a personal defense weapon for many years after the war.

BILLINGS, Mont. -- There are now at least 1,300 wolves prowling Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, far more than anyone imagined when the species was reintroduced in the Northern Rockies 12 years ago.

The wolf population has, on average, grown by about 26 percent a year for the past decade. The latest estimates, which summarize counts completed at the end of 2006, show they aren't slowing down."

I keep thinking we're at the top end of the bubble," said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "I can't see that there's room for any more, but we'll see."

...

The fastest-growing area for wolves last year was in Wyoming outside Yellowstone National Park. The number of wolves jumped by 31 percent, going from 134 in 2005 to 175 in 2006.

With that increase, 123 cattle were reportedly killed by wolves, more than has ever been recorded in Wyoming since the reintroduction. In response, 44 wolves were killed*, which is also a record for that time period.

...

The number of elk, which are wolves' primary winter prey, has declined 50 percent in the area since 1995. A decreasing prey base and increasing wolf density is likely to mean a decline in wolf numbers over the next several years, biologists said.

...

The latest proposal is to delist wolves in Montana, Idaho and all of Wyoming except for the northwest corner.

If the proposal goes through, Montana and Idaho would take over full management of wolves in those states and would be allowed to use hunting as a way to manage their numbers. In all but the northwest corner of Wyoming -- where they'd still be managed by the federal government -- wolves would be treated as predators and subject to unregulated killing.

"All we have to believe is the planet is worth saving, and we can do something about it."

Simon-Peter is one of approximately 1,000 "global-warming messengers" for The Climate Project, Gore's Nashville, Tenn.-based organization. The messengers were trained in early January in Nashville by a faculty that included Gore, University of Michigan climate scientist Dr. Henry Pollack, and Kevin Coyle, Vice President of Education for the National Wildlife Federation.

Simon-Peter provided the Soroptimists with handouts that prescribe a personal course of action, like installing more efficient light bulbs, purchasing alternative energy credits and purchasing a fuel-efficient vehicle.

The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say I read a science-fiction novel that says it's not a problem. You take action.

Gore told lawmakers they should cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases by 90 percent in the next four decades to avoid a crisis.

[Sen. James Inhofe] asked Gore whether he would sign a pledge to use only as much electricity at his Tennessee home as the average American uses, instructing Gore to only answer "yes" or "no."

"We buy green energy," Gore said, referring to energy produced by windmills and solar cells. "We do not contribute to the problem."

At the time it was caught, [squid expert Steve] O'Shea said it would make calamari rings the size of tractor tyres if cut up _ but they would taste like ammonia.

...

O'Shea said the squid is priceless to scientists, and would be worth many millions of dollars if insured.

I'm sure enjoying the calm, reasoned, and on-topic discussion of this issue!

The Editors should go back and re-read the 1st Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law.." right? Well, Congress had nothing to do with Zumbo losing his job. Outdoor Life employed him because his writing sold magazines. Advertisers sponsored him because his writing sold guns & outdoor gear. When the readers started cancelling their subscriptions and threatening to boycott his advertisers he was dropped like a hot rock by his publishers. They weren't trampling on his 1st Amendment rights, they chose not to employ someone who had become a liability to them. If I recall correctly, the Casper Star has done exactly the same when that shoe was on their foot.

"Yes, as a matter of fact my mom did drop acid. Why do you ask?"

I don't know a lot about climatology. But I know a lot about media bulldozing operations, and I see one of those in action at the moment on this subject. (Kind of like this one).

However, my own position is that it doesn't matter much in terms of policy. We should be trying to mimimize the burning of fossil fuels regardless of whether it's a cause of global warming or not. The rather patent hucksterism -- and outright bullying -- of some global warming advocates, though, will probably hurt that cause more than help it over the longer term.

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.

...

The default assumption predisposes them to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault; if peasants in Latin America are living in squalor, it is our fault; if there are climate changes that have any bad effect on anybody, it is our fault.

CHEYENNE -- A total of 42 people from Canada, the Republic of the Congo and throughout the United States, including Wyoming, have applied to be named chief executive officer of the Wyoming Business Council, the co-chairman of the board says.

A.N. WILSON -- While China builds five power stations a week, and while India carries on its programme of industrialisation to keep up with its great rival and to combat its own desperate poverty, British citizens will be made to feel naughty for having a summer holiday which involves a cheap air journey, or for loading the kids into the back of the car for a day out with granny.

...

If China continues to build power stations at its present rate, within a couple of years, it will be emitting more greenhouse gas than has ever been produced in the history of the human race.

In 2005 alone, it produced the equivalent of all the power plants in Norway and Sweden.

Britain and the United States became, in their day, world superpowers by the building up of huge industrial might. In so doing, they made themselves rich, and this wealth had a hugely beneficial effect upon the lives of the great majority of its citizens, including those who worked in industry.

On the other side of the coin, of course, we all know that the great industrial towns of the North of England, for example, were major pollutants of the atmosphere, that many workers in coal mining, steel-manufacture or the potteries led miserably short lives, their lungs choked and the countryside all around them wrecked.

The Chinese and the Indians are now undergoing their great industrial revolution. How dare the rich nations, they ask, turn round and accuse them of polluting the planet when the countries of Al Gore (with his energy-consuming mansion) and David Cameron (one of the mostst privileged men in Western politics) are now basking in the effects of 'their' phase of pollution?

This is the really major problem facing the world today.

STATELINE, Nev. - Mammoth Mountain urges its visitors to park their cars and take advantage of an extensive bus network. The Vail resorts, including nearby Heavenly at Lake Tahoe, run their lifts with wind power. In Colorado, the Sunshine Express high-speed quad at Steamboat operates on sunlight.

The ski industry is going green to help offset the pollution that feeds global warming _ a phenomenon that challenges the resorts' very existence with the threat of later snowfalls and earlier snow melts.

RAPID CITY, S.D. - Actor Nicolas Cage and a film crew are expected to arrive next month to film portions of the sequel to the 2004 motion picture "National Treasure" at Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

The producers of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" have not yet gotten a filming permit from the National Park Service. Gerard Baker, Mount Rushmore superintendent, said he is still reviewing the plans but thinks there will no problems getting a permit.

CODY -- A University of Wyoming economist has found a 28 percent drop in Park County winter tourism since 1999, a figure that differs sharply from a National Park Service analysis showing tourism to be flat over the same period.

In a report released last week, David Taylor said the decline has "increased the seasonality of the travel industry in the county" and made travel-dependent businesses more vulnerable.

Opponents of a proposal by the Park Service to close Sylvan Pass to winter vehicle traffic have cited Taylor's findings as a good reason for Yellowstone National Park planners to reconsider their decision and discuss keeping the pass open.

Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash said the two studies appear to use different methods but called Taylor's numbers "helpful" and "substantive."

Part of a Park Service report released in December examined the potential economic effect on gateway communities of proposed winter-use changes.

Declining snowmobile entries "have not detectably impacted the overall winter tourist economy in the counties as measured by monthly lodging tax collections," said the report, which specifically examined Park County numbers.

While Taylor found lodging tax collections down 28 percent in the 2005-06 season from the 1998-99 season, the Park Service report showed the numbers to be essentially the same.

SHERIDAN (AP) -- The Sierra Club is urging is members in northeast Wyoming to oppose construction of a planned coal-fired power plant near Gillette.

Adam Rissien, associate regional representative of the Sierra Club in Sheridan, said his group has sent out an alert encouraging its members to oppose Basin Electric Power Cooperative's application for a state air quality permit.

"We're basically opposed to any new coal plants, especially these old style, 19th century pulverized coal plants," Rissien said.

The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has recommended the permit be issued, saying the proposed plant would be one of the cleaner ones in the nation.

Megan McArdle -- ON GLOBAL WARMING Let me clarify a little my position. I think there are a lot of questions about global warming: how much, and what, should be done. However, I regard two questions as basically no longer worth debating, at least by people with my level of science education:

1) Is AGW happening?
2) Should we do something about it?

Unfortunately, I think that politics renders the questions that are worth arguing, pointless; we won't find a political solution to the problem because . . . mmmmmm, leather seats. I'm hoping instead for a technological breakthrough that renders the question largely moot. Meanwhile, I'm buying real estate in the Canadian hinterlands. [emphasis added]

GLENROCK -- Beaming town officials welcomed rifle and ammunition manufacturer A-Square Company to Glenrock Wednesday, during a press conference and lease-signing ceremony at city hall.

The firm plans to relocate its Bedford, Ky., rifle division to Glenrock. Company founder Art Alphin said with a bit of luck, local operations could begin in May.

...

Glenrock Mayor Steve Cielinski said his community is a good fit for a rifle manufacturer.

"We've been kind of a shooting mecca for the state," he said. "A lot of small shooting industries have been located here."

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. [Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University], who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”

...

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,” he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes.”


...

Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem” that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,” he added, “does not help.”

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

As we plan a response to global warming, many good thinkers are grasping at simple solutions to a very complex problem.

Take nuclear power, for example. Some of the nation's most respected environmental leaders, who a year or two ago would never have endorsed the reincarnation of the nuclear industry, now say it is a necessary step to slow climate change.

But as we discuss what to do about climate change, government officials, technology experts and the public all should keep a few basic facts in mind:

Virtually every energy technology available today produces greenhouse gas emissions, including nuclear power. The myth that nuclear power or "clean coal" technologies are carbon-free illustrates how many of the nation's thought leaders are using first-grade math on the complex calculus of climate stabilization.

According to CDOT's "Why Speed Limits?" establishing "realistic" speed restrictions is more vital than trying to control drivers. Studies demonstrate that most citizens will drive at a speed warranted by conditions and ignore the speed limit when it is too low or too high.

"A realistic speed limit is voluntarily obeyed by the reasonable majority," it states.

"Reasonable" and "realistic" are the key words here. Words that government agencies rarely use.

John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" deserves its place in Colorado ... in Muzak form on supermarket speakers or during a marathon Time Life infomercial hosted by Air Supply.

...

Now will Colorado be the first state to pick a song that endorses the high life?

...

Some readers, no doubt, will claim that Denver was referring to a spiritual awakening that can happen in the glorious Rocky Mountains. When Denver croons about friends around a campfire "and everybody's high," he merely means folks are high on life.

Fact No. 2: No one was high on life in the '70s. They were just high.

Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular coyote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence.

The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! -so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depressses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sagebrush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again- another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sagebrush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now.

But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much- especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind him, and marking his long wake across the level plain!

And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him- and then that town dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub- business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day"- and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a coyote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I do not wish any of that pie."

The coyote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding deserts, along with the lizard, the jackass rabbit, and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcassses of oxen, mules, and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned Army bacon.... He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.

We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the coyote as it came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the mail sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a limitless larder the morrow.
-- Mark Twain

And just in case we have to revisit HillaryCare in the future, we should remember this little lesson in what kind of medical care we can expect from the guvment.

BOULDER, Colo.- A substitute music teacher has been arrested after allegedly whacking a 10-year-old student on the head with a viola bow after telling the class they were "the worst players I've ever heard."

Newspaper and television reports said the trouble began when Carla Shinners, 63, a teacher for more than 30 years in the district, was interrupted by a call on her own cell phone. She allegedly began swearing Feb. 12 at the Creekside Elementary School, where she had earned the nickname "Mrs. Grumpy Lady."

WASHINGTON - Montana and Wyoming would get a smaller share of $3.1 billion in homeland security grants under a proposal that has pitted lawmakers from rural states against those from more urban areas and sparked a California senator's dig at the West.

...

"We (in California) have the nation's largest ports, iconic bridges, towering skyscrapers, enormous infrastructure, and the busiest border crossing in the world," [Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.] said on the Senate floor. "Texas, with 23.5 million residents, has great cities, towering skyscrapers, vital industries, and a vast international border. Wyoming - I don't want to pick on Wyoming. Love it. But as a state, it is like a national park."

...

The debate stirred up state rivalries. Feinstein said California, the most populous state, received $2.50 per person in homeland security state grants last year and Texas received $2.25 per person, while Wyoming's share amounted to $14.75 per person.

Beer has food value,
but food has no beer value!
-- Second Street Brewing, Santa Fe

Donald Sensing -- Does Gore have an actual Secret Service detail? Anybody know? John’s email makes another thought occur to me: just what is sucking up all the juice in the Gore house? Multiple home movie theaters? Twelve deep freezers? Three heated pools? What?

BILLINGS, Mont. -- The war on wolves took a strange twist in the winter of 1905.

After two decades of paying bounties for hundreds of thousands of dead wolves in Montana, the Legislature approved a new law -- "to provide for the extermination of wolves and coyotes" -- dabbling in the emerging practice of biological warfare.

The idea was simple and cheap: capture wolves and coyotes, infect them with mange and send them back into the wild.

...

Now, 102 years after the Montana law was passed, the same disease is threatening wolves in the country's signature population in Yellowstone National Park.

Earlier this winter, wolf biologists found the aging alpha male of Mollie's pack stricken with mange. About 40 percent of his body hair was gone. The 9-year-old wolf hasn't been seen for weeks and may already have died, park officials said.

It's unclear exactly how he got it but, now that it has arrived in Yellowstone, there's a concern that it could take hold in the park population where wolves intermix regularly, said Doug Smith, leader of the Yellowstone wolf project.

CHEYENNE -- In addition to adopting a $470 million supplemental budget this session, the Legislature created a slew of new laws, with topics ranging from tax breaks to the official state grass.

...

Wyoming Business Council

* What the law does: Eliminates the sunset date for the Wyoming Business Council, which was set to dissolve on July 1, 2008.

* Who it affects and when: Wyoming Business Council employees and state economic development activities.

* What it costs: There is no cost.

CHEYENNE -- Gov. Dave Freudenthal signed a bill Friday that gives his administration authority to negotiate with the federal government the boundaries of a permanent wolf management area in northwest Wyoming.

...

"Always before, the discussion was, 'Well, we can talk about it, but we've got to see what the Legislature wants to do and whether they'd support it,"' Freudenthal said. "This puts us in a position where collectively the legislative branch and the executive branch have said to the federal government, 'If you'll respond on these kind of issues, this bill can become law, and these can become the terms under which we can proceed to move forward."'

Mitch King, regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver, said he's excited by Freudenthal's signing of the bill.

"That's taking us a bold step forward, and I think it's a good move by the state of Wyoming," King said. "I know there were a lot of folks who argued against, it, but I think this kind of opens the door and allows us to move ahead. I think the ball's kind of in my court now."

"Full planes send flier ire higher"