HUNDREDS PROTEST THE UNWISDOM OF LAUSD’S PLAN TO ELIMINATE ADULT ED—COMPLETELY

In the budget presented to the LAUSD board last month, the $$ allocation for Adult Education was not just slashed, it was eliminated altogether.

On Tuesday afternoon, around 300 adult ed students demonstrated to protest the proposed vaporizing of the classes that more than 300,000 adults in Los Angeles County depend on for a multiplicity of reasons—highest among them, affordable job training and/or retraining for those out of work.

LAUSD has 35 adult education centers, which include 24 community adult schools, six regional occupational centers, and five skills centers, which offer hugely popular skills and jobs training courses.

Some of the skills center courses, in particular, are so coveted for the quality of their training classes, that they have huge waiting lists.

When I watched the State of the Union during which President Obama harped repeatedly on the importance of job training, I imagined adult ed teachers all over Los Angeles shouting back at their TVs: “Tell that to LAUSD!”

The LA Times has more on Tuesday’s demonstration.

Here’s what I wrote in 2009 about the reasons NOT to put adult ed on the chopping block.

SO FAR THE MUCH FEARED BOGEYMAN OF CALIFORNIA’S REALIGNMENT PROGRAM HAS BEEN “BENIGN,” ACCORDING TO LA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT

KPCC’S “On Central” has the story.

But the bullet points are: crime is still down and the jails aren’t being overrun. Obviously, this is early in the program. However, these are good signs that perhaps the sky isn’t going to come crashing down after all.

IS OHIO KEEPING AN INNOCENT MAN ON DEATH ROW?

The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Cohen examines the troubling death row case of Tyrone Noling.

Here’s a clip:

….There are several legitimate reasons why Noling deserves a new trial, especially in a state with a long history of wrongful capital convictions. There are a lot of flawed capital convictions all over the country — pick a state, any state, where the death penalty is still a priority for prosecutors and you’ll find such a case. But a closer look at this case reveals virtually all of the system’s main flaws at one time and in one place. The only thing missing from the story is racial bias, which likely would have only made things worse. (As of September 30, 2011, there were 148 inmates on Ohio’s death row, 65 of them white males like Noling.)

UPDATES ON OR7 AKA JOURNEY, OUR NEW LONE CALIFORNIA WOLF

It seems everyone is fascinated with OR7, the young grey wolf who wandered into California on December 28—the first wild wolf to be on California soil in 88 years

Patt Morrison is a devoted critter person, so it was natural that she would do a show on the wolf updating us on his most recent activities.

It seems OR7 has at least two Twitter accounts. (Here and here.)

And now both the New York Times and Time Magazine have done slightly giddy articles on Mr. OR7. (As well they should.)

WASHINGTON STATE AND COLORADO WILL LIKELY HAVE POT LEGALIZATION PROPOSITIONS ON THE NOVEMBER BALLOT

Reuters has the story. Here’s a clip:

Pot legalization supporters have argued for decades that prohibition has failed to curb pot use, and that the policy enriches drug cartels, hurts casual users and deprives governments of a potentially lucrative source of tax revenue.

Now, they see momentum on their side, pointing to an October Gallup Poll that found a record 50 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana use, up from 36 percent five years before.

The poll also found 62 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 back legalization, and that the young are driving the shift in attitudes.

“There’s a set of factors that suggest both the Washington and Colorado initiates have a better chance of winning than any of the initiatives that have happened before,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

“But that said, even with a majority of likely voters in both states saying they favor legal marijuana, we know in the final stretch there’s always a small percentage that get nervous or scared off or fearful of change,” he said.

This week the saga continued of the 2-year-old male gray wolf who wondered across the state line from Oregon into California, on December 28 (last Wednesday), ostensibly looking for a girlfriend—the first canis lupus to show up in our state since 1924. The hopeful wolf was unglamorously named OR7, by Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologists who trapped and GPS collared him last February (The better to keep track of you, my dear). This week he was nicknamed Journey as the result of a naming contest held by an Oregon conservation group, Oregon Wild, which feels that the more the creature is personalized the less likely he is to get shot.

OR 7/Journey’s growing fame was heightened on Wednesday of this week, when a possible photo of him of taken by an unmanned deer hunter’s trail camera back in Oregon surfaced, giving us a first view of our new wolf.

Unlike wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, wolves that return to California are protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act. Nevertheless, ranchers are reportedly already grumbling unhappily at the thought of wolves returning.

As of Wednesday, Mr. wolf was “staying out of trouble in a forested section of the Cascade Range in Northern California and appeared to be heading south,” Mark Stopher of the California Department of Fish and Game told the AP

“From Google Earth, it looks like it is habitat he can find both cover and food in,” Stopher said. “A lot of people would like to see OR-7 become an Oregon wolf again. To me, it’s a coin toss now what he is going to do.”

Evidently wolves usually mate in February (ish) but, according to OR-7’s stalker watchful biologist friends, he has yet to hook up. (Mainly because there are no other California wolves, a fact that no one seems to have mentioned to poor OR7/Journey)

The AP also reports:

OR-7 left the Imnaha pack in northeastern Oregon last September, shortly before the state put a death warrant on his father and a sibling for killing cattle. He is a descendant of wolves introduced into the Northern Rockies in the 1990s, and represents the westernmost expansion of a regional population that now tops 1,650.

Naturally, we will be keeping you up to date on the next installment of OR7/Journey’s journey.

(And, yes, the purposely fuzzy photo of the So Cal wolf taken in the Topanga hills is actually my couch-loving wolf-dog Lily.)

WLA STORY ON UNDERSHERIFF PAUL TANAKA GETS MORE SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES AND SUPERVISORS TO COME FORWARD
The 3rd part of WitnessLA’s Dangerous Jails series by the very excellent Matt Fleischer has caused more LASD insiders –many still working now for the department—to come forward with new information. “We want a department we can be proud of,” said one supervisor I spoke with Thursday night.

Yep. Us too. So please keep reaching out with your stories.

MAYOR CAN’T KEEP STORY STRAIGHT ON BIG BUCKS SETTLEMENT DEAL WITH OUSTED HACLA CHIEF RUDY MONTIEL

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed caught these dueling stories.

And, as the mess gets ever worse, we learned Thursday night from the LA Times that the interim chief was just asked to resign too. (Thankfully, no word on a giant golden parachute for this guy though).

Meanwhile, So Cal Connected, which has owned this story, keeps up the pressure, along with Controller Wendy Greuel.

LAPD USING DOWNTOWN PRIVATE SECURITY FIRM TO HELP POLICE OCCUPY PROTESTORS?

The LA Weekly’s Dennis Romero reports that, yes, as a matter of fact, the LAPD has used private security guards in some of its Occupy enforcement, but that it’s not typical. (Good thing, because it’s a sort of cringe-making notion.)

Anyway, read the story. Here’s how it opens.

In video of a police confrontation with Occupy L.A. protesters outside a Bank of America branch downtown over the weekend a few private security guards are seen, batons-in-hand, helping the LAPD form a skirmish line.

In fact officers can be seen pushing security guards into strategic positions as they face off against the so-called 99-percenters. The security employees push people back with batons and aim the business ends of the weapons at citizens. At least one guard even appears to participate in the arrest of demonstrator Anthony Loscano.

What gives? Did the LAPD just deputize a group of civilians? LAPD Lt. Andy Neiman tells the Weekly:

I have no idea why they were with us. Typically we do not integrate and mix resources when we’re in a tactical situation like that because of training issues and stuff like that.

These aren’t just run-of-the-mill security guards though. They’re the notorious “shirts,” employees of downtown’s business improvement districts, organizations that band together to increase security, clean up trash and lobby the city for improvements….

PS: Romero and his colleagues at the The Weekly’s Informer blog, Simone Wilson and Gene Maddaus, have been very much on top of things with their Occupy coverage, so keep an eye on them as the stories continue to unfold.

A WAR ON WOLVES?

In Thursday’s LA Times, sociology professor and author J. William Gibson has an op ed about what he calls The New War on Wolves. In it he gives up to date wolf killing and population stats for the gray wolves that were removed last spring from the endangered species list. (If you remember, the wolves weren’t delisted by the Department of the Interior, but by Congress (that notoriously knowledgeable group of wildlife biologists) that managed to get enough votes for the delisting provision only by attaching it as a rider to a must pass budget package last April.

Gibson explains the results—and also attempts to explain the the absolute blood lustt that seems to motivate certain hunters when it comes to killing Canis Lupus—an enmity that is not present in the attitudes toward other large predators like mountain lions and grizzlies.

Here’s how the essay opens:

As of Wednesday, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game reported that 154 of its estimated 750 wolves had been “harvested” this year. Legal hunting and trapping — with both snares to strangle and leg traps to capture — will continue through the spring. And if hunting fails to reduce the wolf population sufficiently — to less than 150 wolves — the state says it will use airborne shooters to eliminate more.

In Montana, hunters will be allowed to kill up to 220 wolves this season (or about 40% of the state’s roughly 550 wolves). To date, hunters have taken only about 100 wolves, prompting the state to extend the hunting season until the end of January. David Allen, president of the powerful Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, has said he thinks hunters can’t do the job, and he is urging the state to follow Idaho’s lead and “prepare for more aggressive wolf control methods, perhaps as early as summer 2012.”

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead recently concluded an agreement with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to save 100 to 150 wolves in lands near Yellowstone National Park. But in the remaining 80% of the state, wolves can be killed year-round because they are considered vermin. Roughly 60% of Wyoming’s 350 wolves will become targeted for elimination.

What is happening to wolves now, and what is planned for them, doesn’t really qualify as hunting. It is an outright war…..

Read the rest.

By the way, as those longtime WLA readers know, I am not the least emotionally objective on the issue of wolf hunting in the U.S. In Montana, I’ve observed wolves in the wild with biologists, and been with other biologists when they’ve tracked radio collared wolves from the air. My son and I shared our home and lives for 16 and a half years with a wolf hybrid, the late great Loup-Loup. Now Lily-the 15 month old rescue wolf dog is at my feet as I type.

Yet, I realize that—practically speaking— predator species like the wolf have to be managed and, as much as I hate it, that sometimes includes hunting. But so much of what drives this issue is counterfactual and just plain ignorant. Yet it’s such a hot button topic that politicians have kowtowed to it.

I am at least thankful that, as Gibson reports, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has had the good sense to work out some kind of nominal protection for the wolf packs in and around Yellowstone Park, thus protecting the Yellowstone Wolf Project, started in 1994, which is unique in all the world, but was in part destroyed in 2008 when wolf hunting was, at first, clumsily reopened.

60 MINUTES ADDS A LEGAL ANALYST TO ITS ROSTER

Evidently with the departure of the late Andy Rooney, CBS’s 60 Minutes felt it now has room for an analyst who….you know…analyzes things, that, like, matter. So they’ve added legal analyst Andrew Cohen to the mix. This seems like a good thing.

SUPREMES HEAR MONTANA’S WHO-OWNS-THE-RIVERS DISPUTE

The AP has a good report on it. (As does the PBS Newshour actually.)

Here’s a clip from Mark Sherman and Matt Volz writing for the AP.

A Supreme Court dominated by Easterners tried to make sense Wednesday of a Western water dispute.

The court heard arguments in a lawsuit between a power company and the state of Montana over who owns the riverbeds beneath 10 dams sitting on three Montana rivers.

The state says it’s owed more than $50 million in back rent and interest from the company, PPL Montana.

For an answer, the court is looking back as far as the travels of Lewis and Clark more than 200 years ago.

The outcome could affect property rights, public access and wildlife management along Montana’s rivers, as well as those in other states.

The power company is appealing a Montana Supreme Court ruling that the state owns the submerged land beneath the dams. The decision turned in large part on that court’s findings that the three rivers were navigable when Montana became a state, despite the presence of significant waterfalls on two of the waterways.

The justices were dealing with unfamiliar issues in an area without much in the way of prior decisions to guide them.

Justice Samuel Alito, from Trenton, N.J., repeatedly asked where to turn for help.

“I’m not a sailor,” said Bronx-born Justice Sonia Sotomayor, explaining that she’s not especially conversant in nautical terminology.

Sotomayor was trying to figure out whether it matters in deciding on navigability how far someone has to go to get around a waterfall….

A decision is expected by June.

Still light blogging this week, (although not as light as last week).

Back full force on Monday, Jan 10.

WHAT KILLED AIYANA STANLEY-JONES?

Former NY Times Pulitzer winner, Charlie Le Duff, writes about the death of Aiyana Stanley-Jones. But the story is about a zillion more things than the single tragedy of a little girl being killed when Detroit SWAT burst into the wrong apartment and shots for reasons that are still not adequately explained, except that the cops were busy filming a reality show, so maybe got over-hyped up on the Hollywood drama.

Le Duff, who has long been able to write like an angel when he wants to, (and he wants to here), has also woven into the story’s causal threads the multi-leveled miseries of Detroit, as he writes about what one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

Look: you just need to read the thing.

Here is how it opens:

IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.

His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit’s version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E crew filming an episode of The First 48, its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je’Rean Blake Nobles, 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID’d a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.

The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando—who’d been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT—burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

“They had time,” a Detroit police detective told me. “You don’t go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That’s how it’s supposed to be done.”

But the SWAT team didn’t wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death……

KPCC REACHES OUT TO INMATE FAMILIES TO EXPLORE THE IMPACT OF LONG AND FREQUENT LOCKDOWNS IN CALIFORNIA PRISONS

This is a chronic problem that has gotten worse with the state’s budget woes, as prison dorms and cell blocks are repeatedly put on lockdown after lockdown as a way of saving money in the face of staff cuts (in addition to all the other reasons that prisons are put on lockdown, sometimes questionably, often for way too long.).

Lockdowns mean no visits from family, no phone calls, restricted movement or activities—meaning little or no yard time or anything else that might be deemed constructive or rehabilitative.

I hear about lockdowns all the time anecdotally from family of inmates or from the inmates themselves (once the lockdown is lifted). But there is virtually no reporting on the phenomenon.

So to gather information, KPCC’s Sharon McNary is putting out the word on the web to families:

If you live, work or have loved ones in a California state prison, please help our reporters understand the impact of inmate lockdowns from your perspective.

What do you know about the causes and fallout of prison lockdowns? Who is helped or harmed when the movement, phone access, visitation and other activities of thousands of inmates are restricted for weeks, sometimes months at a time?

Your responses are confidential, nothing you share here is aired or published without your permission. A reporter or producer may call or write for more information.

I look forward to the stories that will come out of this reporting.

THE DAILY BEAST MARRIES NEWSWEEK? UM, OKAY, I GUESS.

Here is the wedding announcement issued by DB’s Tiny Brown:

Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties Tuesday evening, in a conference room atop Beast headquarters, the IAC building on Manhattan’s West 18th Street. The final details were only hammered out last night.

What does this exciting new media marriage mean? It means that The Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, owned equally by Barry Diller’s IAC and Sidney Harman, owner (and savior) of Newsweek. As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief’s chair at both The Daily Beast and Newsweek….

And so on.

As media theorist and prof Jay Rosen tweeted last night after the announcement: “Still waiting for the media reporter who would explain the logic.”

Yeah, I’m kinda there with Rosen on that matter.

Meanwhile, an amusing trending topic on Twitter Thursday night was #oddmediamergers.

JON STEWART AND RACHEL MADDOW FOR AN HOUR

As you likely know—or at least you oughta know—Jon Stewart was on the Rachel Maddow Show for nearly an hour Thursday night.

The full hour video may be found here.

I found it riveting.

A NOTE ABOUT THE ABOVE PHOTO: After spending nearly four months in a dogless household following the death of my beautiful 16 1/2 year old wolf dog this past July, I decided it was time to add a new four-footed beast to the family before I got too used to clean rugs and not having to wipe off muddy paws during the rainy season. Enter Lily-the-mini-wolf, who is 8 weeks old as of Thursday and has been residing at my house since late Saturday night.

Anyway, so there you have it. Thank you for listening.

ROMAN POLANSKI AND SAMANTHA GAILEY: A GIRL’S STARK WORDS STILL ECHO DOWN THE YEARS

This is exactly why narrative journalism matters. In Sunday’s LA Times, writer Joe Mozingo uses uses his excellent reporting and storytelling skills to unreel an account of the alleged rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gaily by Roman Polanski and the subsequent prosecution, or lack thereof. In a narrative that stretches from 1977 until now, Mozingo’s rigorous yet thoughtful article reminds us that Gailey’s clear, stark account of what Polanski did to her has never been refuted. Then he shows how adults with a plethora of competing interests have done much from the beginning to obscure and blunt the reality of what happened to the young Samantha Gaily.

Read it.

THE UNNECESSARY DEATH OF WOLF 427….AND OF A FIVE YEAR STUDY

As early wolf hunting season approached in Montana, several groups of biologists lobbied the state’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency in the hope of getting the FWP to establish a no hunting buffer zone around Yellowstone National Park in order to preserve the safety of the wolves being studied by well-known wolf biologist Douglas Smith—plus other scientists running related studies at universities such as the University of Oregon and UCLA. (Doug Smith has run Yellowstone’s wolf project since 1995, and his work is known all over the world.)

But FWP refused, saying the hunt was not aimed at the Yellowstone wolf packs, but at other wolves well outside the park that had caused problems by killing livestock.

The biologists were most worried about a group of radio-collared wolves known as the Cottenwood Pack, which Smith and his team had been closely monitoring for the past five years in a unique longitudinal study. FWP officials said all would be fine.

As it turned out, the FWP officials had no idea what they were talking about.

Within three weeks of the launch of early hunting season six Cottenwood Pack wolves were dead, among them the very unique alpha female of the pack known as Wolf 427.

It seems that certain hunters went looking specifically for the Yellowstone wolves, which given their experience inside the park, predictably had no fear of humans. The hunter who shot 427 reported later that when he raised his gun, the alpha wolf made no attempt to run.

“We didn’t think that wolves would be that vulnerable in the backcountry, so the level of harvest there has been a bit of a surprise,” says Carolyn Sime, FWP’s wolf program coordinator in Helena.

Right. (Love that use of the term “harvest.”)

The LA Times Kim Murphy has done a great job in following this story.

In what certainly appears to be a disturbing case of excessive force, San Jose police officers beat and tased a 20-year-old San Jose State University Student named Phuong Ho, after being called to the house shared by several students. The call to police occured after Ho and one of his roommate got into an argument and a steak knife may or may not have been brandished. According to the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News (which first broke the story on Sunday), the knife had long ago been put down.

The alleged beating was captured on the cellphone video above.

Mistaken identities: Charles Black is not the enemy

Unless you’re driving in your Prius 5 mph under the speed limit on your way to buy incense and tofu, you accept as fact that Charles Black uttered an unspoken truth of the campaign trail when he said a terrorist attack would be good for John McCain’s candidacy. That’s like saying $6 gas would be good for Obama’s campaign.

If you’re upset by Black’s unvarnished truth, try doing something worthwhile with your outrage and go read Dr. Seuss to the old folks at the rest home until your blood pressure stabilizes.

I would kill for the day when we can speak openly and honestly without fear of retribution from the right or the left and all the people who fall in between.

For more evidence that we aren’t there yet, read the delightful piece today by L.A. Times campaign reporter Jim Rainey on his pursuit of a sit-down interview with John McCain’s free-speaking 96-year-old mother. Read the whole entertaining column packed full of insightful snippets of Rainey’s phone conversations with Roberta since he decided to go-around McCain’s less-than-helpful handlers and try to set up the interview himself. The all-too-candid Roberta McCain finally tells Rainey: “They’ve got me muzzled. Now don’t you print that…I really don’t like to be interviewed.”

Note to McCain staff: Nothing this woman could say could possibly hurt your stinkin’ candidate. She could even say he hates a certain ethnic group, or race, or Texans, or thinks immigrants, legal or not, are second-class Martians. She’s nearly 100 years old. Talk about missing a big opportunity to defuse the issue of John’s age.

For more on the issue of free speech, and the lack of it, on the campaign trail, and Black’s honest words, see Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times and an op-ed column by Ezra Klein in the L.A. Times.

And, whatever you want to say about any of this, it’s OK.
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We’re surrounded by monsters

What a relief that Obama reneged on his pledge to limit his fall campaign to the paltry sums of public financing. It was a dumb promise when he made it and would have limited his ability for open combat with McCain the Monster. Public financing is a monstrously broken system. Most campaign-finance reform violates the Premier Monster, otherwise known as the First Amendment anyways.
Obama is now a free man and will raise a monstrous $300 million for the fall campaign. That’s nearly four times as much as the fairy-like $84 million he would have received in public money. Those extra bucks will make it easy to weather any public ridicule for breaking his word like someone out to achieve a goal at any cost, financial or moral.
But now that Obama’s shown himself open to reviewing his past words and deeds, he should make nice with Samantha Power and welcome her back in the fold as a foreign policy adviser. He was wrong to force her out and should make room for her and her divergent views.
We need more open debate in this country. Let’s stop penalizing people for speaking their mind, on or off the record, and that includes politicians, entertainers and radio-show hosts. Such debate isn’t easy to tolerate, particularly when it means giving voice to bull-headed forces of evil, which is exactly what the Supremes did in a decision yesterday, handing namby-pamby California unions their ass. I may have more to say about that righteous ruling later, but this post is dedicated to Obama the Money Monster.

And the wolf controversy goes on.

As you likely remember, the wolf was officially taken off the endangered species list on March 28 of this year. Since then over 40 wolves have been killed.

Last week, despite much protest against the idea, Idaho’s Fish and Game commission increased the number of wolves that may be killed in the state from 328 to 428. This is from the state’s total population of 700 wolves.

Meanwhile, in response to the request from a consortium of environmental groups to put the Rocky Mountain gray wolf back under Federal protection and to stop the killing, the feds tried to delay a hearing on the matter. But U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy went ahead and set the hearing on the request anyway, saying he was “unwilling to risk more deaths.” The hearing on the request for an injunction to stop the wolf hunting will be held tomorrow, May 29, in Missoula, Montana.

Yesterday, Salon magazine ran an interesting article by Katharine Mieszkowski on the issue of taking the gray wolf off the endangered species list called Killing the Wolves Again.

Mieszkowski opens with the story of the well-known wolf from Yellowstone’s Druid pack nicknamed Limpy because of an injured leg, who was killed the first day the ban on hunting was lifted.

Here’s a clip from the rest of Mieszkowski’s article:

….The wave of killing has raised the absurd specter that while the United States spent millions to bring wolves back to the region in the name of conservation, and to restore a fraction of the West to its former wildness, now the wolves will be slaughtered again. On April 28, a coalition of 12 environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, filed suit in federal court against the Bush administration, challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to remove protections for the animals. The lawsuit contends that because the wolves occupy several distinct areas, there’s not enough genetic diversity within the small number to ensure the wolf’s future. The states’ hunting policies will likely drive down that number even further.

“The states legally could kill down to a total of 300 wolves,” says Doug Honnold, a lawyer for Earthjustice, lead attorney on the case. “We could have 1,200 wolves killed before the federal government would say relisting this population is appropriate. People have worked so hard to promote wolf recovery, and just as we have victory within our grasp, or approaching our grasp, we’re throwing it away and heading in the opposite direction.”

More after the hearing.

Note: I’ve posted in the past about delisting the wolf here and here.

UPDATE #1: Hoping to head off any injunctions from federal Judge Malloy on Thursday, Wyoming Fish and Game set a conservative hunting quota of 25 wolves per year inside the state’s so-called trophy game zone. This compromise approach, limiting the kills to 8 percent of Wyoming’s wolf population, was quite different from the loathsome, in-your-face-screw-you-and-your-wolf-hugging quota set by Idaho F & G which (as noted above) set its quota at 428 kills—or 61 percent of its wolf population.

Now it remains to be seen what Judge Malloy will do.

I’ve been monitoring this issue with a sinking heart. And now it appears that worst fears are well on their way to coming true.

The gray wolves of the Northern Rocky Mountains were taken off the Endangered Species list on March 28, because their numbers across Idaho, Wyoming and Montana had reached around 1500. In the month since the ban on shooting wolves was lifted, 35 wolves have been shot. (And we’re not talking about ranchers protecting livestock here. Nearly all of the wolf deaths were caused by plain old hunting.)

Take for example the three-legged male Yellowstone wolf known as 253M and nicknamed “Liimpy”, a creature with a dark black coat and an off-kilter gait who used to delight tourists and locals with frequent glimpses. He was arguably the best known wild wolf in north America (Tales of his meanderings often turned up on local papers.)…and he was killed the first day the ban was lifted.

In response to the rush to shoot wolves, a consortium of 12 environmental groups filed a lawsuit on Monday in the hope of halting the killing.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Missoula, Montana, asks for reinstated protection for gray wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

As regular readers know, I have personal emotions tied up in the issue. I’ve tracked wolves in the wild with biologists, have a beautiful wolf hybrid dog named Loup-Loup, and give dog cookies to the neighbors’ two gorgeous nearly full blooded wolves when they come to my back door on mornings when I’m at home working. Yet, the fact that I like wolves doesn’t impair reason.

I’ve outlined the issue in more detail here. But this morning’s LA Times has a good editorial on how the wolf policy is going off the rails and what ought to be done to fix it. Here’s an excerpt.

The gray wolf of the northern Rockies was ready for delisting. [NOTE: I don't think so but honorable people could honorably disagree on this issue.] The population exceeded all goals for the program, and species should not be kept on a lifeline forever, if at all possible. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was remiss in this case, primarily because it failed to ensure that state regulations for the wolves would protect them. Obviously, with more than 2% of the population killed within a month, existing state management plans are inadequate.

Some residents of the three states — ranchers, hunters and people who just don’t like wolves — have been waiting for this chance. Protecting livestock is one thing, but hunters have been complaining that the wolves keep down the population of elk, which they would like to hunt themselves. Yet part of the reasoning for reintroducing the wolf was to restore the natural balance in which animal predators kept the populations of elk and deer in check.

The federal government will not intervene again on the wolves’ behalf until their numbers fall as low as 300. Taxpayers will then bear the burden of re-listing the wolves. That’s partly why environmentalists have gone to court over the delisting.

The Fish and Wildlife Service should re-list the wolves until it receives more reasonable management plans from the states involved, and should demand that the population fall no lower than 1,000. The wolves weren’t reintroduced to provide target practice for hunters.