Wyoming Politics
Old and Faithful Debate
Yellowstone Opens for Winter Season
The interior of Yellowstone National Park opens for the winter season today amid--surprise--much controversy surrounding the limits on snowmobiles allowed in the park per day. The Park Service's Final Rule implements a long-term winter use plan for Yellowstone, which will allow up to 720 commercially guided Best Available Technology (BAT) snowmobiles per day this season and 540 per day next season. The Wyoming attorney general office filed a petition for review of the winter-use plan soon after its release.
Wyoming officials say, even though the average number of snowmobiles in Yellowstone per day averaged 250 for the last three years, next season's cap of 540 is still too low. Environmentalists say the cap should be reduced even further. Yellowstone's wildlife denizens are largely silent on the issue.
In their petition, Wyoming officials decried requiring commercial guides for all snowmobile trips and also requested a "reasoned analysis" for changes made to management of avalanche-prone Sylvan Pass, which--thanks to helicopters and howitzers--will remain open to motorized oversnow travel this winter, presumably to the delight of Wyoming residents.
More on the most peaceful season to explore Yellowstone National Park after the jump.
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Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range
NREPA: Local Interests and Conservation HistoryWhat do the Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument all have in common? Besides their common designation as national parks and monuments, all these conservation areas were initially opposed by local people.
After the creation of Yellowstone NP in 1872, the Helena Gazette opined “We regard the passage of the act as a great blow to the prosperity of the towns of Bozeman and Virginia City….” Montana’s Congressional representatives were so opposed to the park that they introduced bills into Congress every session for twenty years to undesignate the park.
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“We cannot let Gary Trauner win"
Wyoming Rep. Barbara Cubin Will Not Seek Eighth Term
Representative Barbara Cubin, R-WY, announced Saturday morning that she won’t run for another term in the U.S. House of Representatives -- but not before she got one last zing at the news media, with which she has had a famously testy relationship during her political career.
After a blistering attack on the Democratic majority in Congress and Democratic candidate Gary Trauner, and a lengthy list of her accomplishments in Washington, Cubin noted the recent spate of news reports that predicted she would announce today that she’s not going to run for her eighth term.
“I am going to run again,” she said to a suddenly quiet roomful of Republican Central Committee members and assorted reporters. “I’m going to get this cast off my foot and get through physical therapy, and then I’m going to get in good shape again,” she said to rising giggles and laughs in the audience as they got the “gotcha” joke at the expense of the press.
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NewWest.Net/Politics
Lynne Cheney’s Memoir Halts Before Turbulent ‘60s
Casper’s hometown girl Lynne Vincent Cheney has penned a love letter to the past in Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, which covers the pioneer histories of both families that ultimately produced the “Second Family” in the Bush-Cheney administration.
Yet because the memoir stops in 1959 with high school graduation for Lynne and Dick Cheney, there’s only tantalizing clues and some irony in their 1950’s coming-of-age story, and silence about how they were shaped by the 1960s to become the iconic conservative couple of Wyoming and ultimately national politics.
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NewWest.Net/Politics
Rep. Cubin Voting Again, Misses Two of Five Voting SessionsAccording to the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, voted six times today – her third day of voting since she resumed voting on Wednesday of last week.
Cubin had missed about 46 percent of all votes in the House this year, before she resumed voting on Wednesday and Thursday last week, when one of her nine votes helped uphold President Bush’s veto of an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
While there were no House votes on Friday, there were 12 roll call votes on Monday and Tuesday of this week – all of which Rep. Cubin missed.
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NewWest.Net/Politics
Trauner Announces Bid for Wyoming’s At-Large House Seat
Gary Trauner, a Wilson businessman who lost a squeaker of a race last year against Representative Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, announced Monday he was going to run again for Wyoming’s at-large seat in the House of Representatives.
Trauner lost last year’s race by a mere 1,012 votes. He distinguished himself through his approach to campaigning, going door-to-door across Wyoming to 15,000 homes -- a style that was in marked contrast to Cubin’s campaign style. Cubin once famously said she’d “rather eat roadkill” than go door-to-door.
At his announcement today in Casper, Trauner said he’d been mulling over whether he should run again as the Democratic candidate when a recent incident pushed him into running again.
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State officials address backlogs & understaffing
Crime Lab Struggles to Keep UpWhile problems with understaffing, retention and training new scientists have contributed to half-year backlogs at the state crime lab in Cheyenne, the long delays raise the question of whether some habitual offenders are going unpunished.
“You know, the longer a perpetrator is out there, the more opportunity there is for them to commit crimes,” Forrest Bright, Director of Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), said when asked recently if repeat offenders were getting away with additional offenses due to his agency’s backlogs and personnel issues.
“Sometimes it’s the investigation,” he added. “Sometimes it takes time before forensics are discovered. That can take months or years.”
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Event Showcases Increased Attention on Cowboy State
In Wyoming, Thompson Shines in First GOP Forum
Three Republican candidates for president -- Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Sam Brownback -- all ventured into “Cheney country” this weekend, during a meet-the-candidates forum held at Swede Erickson Thunderbird Gymnasium at Casper College.
The Wyoming Republican Party has scheduled a Jan. 5 convention, allowing Wyoming to compete in staging the first presidential primaries and county conventions in the country.
“We’re going to break the lock Iowa and New Hampshire have on selecting presidential candidates,” said Fred Paraday, state party chairman.
It is widely believed that this move has brought increased attention from Republican candidates. Two other candidates – Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo -- had been scheduled to attend the forums in Casper and Riverton, but dropped out in the prior week.
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Guest Opinion
When Tasers Shock More than Lost VotesOn balance, the nightly televised news once again failed the nation last week, leaving open the question of who’s the bigger loser.
Given the opportunity to knock a softball out of the park in the bottom of the 9th and bring the long-suffering home team a much-needed win, Big Media whiffed. What’s worse is they got caught looking like overpaid chumps, like Jake LaMotta taking a last nosedive for a fat payoff, instead of going down swinging.
Of course, I’m talking about the mainstream packs’ fraud disguised as objective reporting on the Andrew Meyer's fiasco at Florida University on Sept. 17. Nearly to a news station and to an anchorman or woman it was about as bad and biased as it gets.
But let me say here that my complaint has nothing to do with whether Meyer's behavior was legal or illegal.
Further, this jeremiad is not about arguing against whether Glenn “No Neck” Beck or others believe Meyer to be a jerky, self-promoting publicity hound.
Those wrapped up in the self-deceiving schadenfreude of seeing a loud-mouthed Florida J-school student get what was coming to him – and now insist he needs to take ‘responsibility’ for whatever they or Beck might think Meyer was irresponsible in doing – are too busy getting their rocks off getting ahead of the story to get the story.
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Where's Osama?
9/11: The Little, Bigger Picture
A guest OPINION
Larger than huge, far exceeding the massive, worldwide anticipation for the release of J. K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter movie this summer was the big splash Osama bin Laden made this week, appearing in his first video since October of 2004.
Out of the limelight since releasing a sensational audio tape more than a year ago, the top terrorist on the planet dispelled recent rumors that he had died of kidney disease.
Startling new images of the al-Qaeda leader reveal that all that had dyed was his mostly gray beard from previous videos. And the change gives Osama a younger, more vigorous look than western viewers might have expected.
This amazing comeback by a long-forgot major public figure is as remarkable as any death-defying feat performed by the great Houdini. A flair for the dramatic would be understating Osama’s inestimable ability for gaining attention — as proven by the timing of his return to coincide with the 6th anniversary of his notoriously repugnant world stage debut.
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