Black Bear Blog’s Top 10 Stories Of 2008 – Author’s Choice
January 1, 2009
At the end of each blogging season, I like to go back and revisit all the stories and articles I wrote. Many of them are still etched deeply into my brain, while others have been mostly forgotten. While some of my picks may not be the most popular story of the year, I believe them to be relevant to me, the Black Bear Blog and my readers as they might impact us as American citizens.
Before I actually begin recapping the top 10 stories of 2008, I want to take a moment to remember a dear friend we all lost this past year. Sayward Lamb was a character, a character in the good sense of course. Always with a grin, a hearty laugh and never short of a story to tell, he lived a full and complete life and impacted everyone who ever had the pleasure of meeting him. We all miss you, Sayward.
I’ll begin with the number 10 story and progress to the top story of 2008. Before I do, I couldn’t help but mention the “Listerine” story. A story that, to me, has little if any significance to human life, the afterthought story I put up about using Listerine as an insect repellent garnered an unbelievable number of comments from readers.
Story #10 – North Dakota Hunters for Fair Chase’s attempt to outlaw elk ranches and fenced hunting.
A group calling themselves hunters felt compelled to force their ideals down the throats of others by proposing a citizen’s initiative that would for all intent and purposes outlaw farming of animals such as elk and deer. For some odd reason of which nobody would offer an explanation, the group steered clear of bison ranching. The initiative, if passed would also have outlawed “high fence” hunting. High fence hunting has always carried some degree of controversy but most feel a person’s choice to hunt (or whatever you choose to call it) on a hunting preserve should be an individual choice and not something that needs legislating.
NDHFC began a campaign that was lacking in support and controversial, calling on the Humane Society of the United States for help, both financially and in collecting signatures. Everyone knows the HSUS is the largest anti-hunting organization in America of which no bona fide hunting organization would ask for help.
When the dust had settled and signatures on the petition were counted, NDHFC fell short on the minimum number of required signatures to force a vote in the general election. Hopefully they will become nothing but a little dust in the wind.
Story #9 – World’s Tallest Snowwoman. My tiny hometown of Bethel, Maine was once again put on the map, if only the map of Guinness Book of World Records. From out of a pile of natural and man-made snow, volunteers contributed hours of hard work to create Olympia (named after Maine’s senior U.S. Senator, Olympia Snowe). Bethel was first added to the Guinness Book of World Records, when Angus, King of the Mountain was born. Olympia towered over the village having officially been recorded at 122′ 1″ tall.
I gave the story a fair amount of coverage and with the help of a live webcam located in a building across the street, people from all over the world could log in and check the progress as often as they wanted.
Here in Florida, my granddaughter in her third grade class, participated in a program called Flat Stanley. Flat Stanley is a paper-faced character the students are encouraged to send to different places around the world. Flat Stanley collects pictures, stories and information and returns to the school with the report. My granddaughter’s Flat Stanley traveled to Bethel, Maine and returned with exclusive photos and information few others were privy to, thanks to Great Grammie.
Story #8 – Lyme Disease – While most people don’t sit around talking about Lyme disease, it’s growing rapidly. The disease itself comes from the tick but that tick is transported by deer. Deer are overly abundant in some locals, Connecticut being one of them. With the close proximity of deer, carrying infected ticks, and humans, the risk of humans being bitten by an infected tick increases drastically. Lyme disease has no cure and can be debilitating.
The Connecticut Coalition to Eradicate Lyme Disease, dared to do what others didn’t. They suggested a drastic reduction of deer numbers, actually supporting the use of hunters and hunting to accomplish the task. This group dared show evidence that reducing deer numbers down to “normal” densities would not only reduce incidents of disease but could rid areas completely. Of course offering a sensible solution met with resistance from the preservationists.
Story #7 – Maine Moose Lottery Televised Coverage
Some would not consider this a top ten story but from my perspective it was simply because of the logistics to pull this off for a very first time going mobile with streaming video and audio for the Black Bear Blog. With the help of Bob Adams and Julie-Lynn Belon of the Kittery Trading Post, this event was huge for us.
I timed our arrival believing I had ample time to set up, test things out and then schedule interviews etc. but that didn’t work out as hoped. With Milt Inman, Chief Photographer for Skinny Moose Media and a trusty assistant, Gregg Inman, we got set up and managed to get in a couple of brief interviews before the actual show of the selection process.
The broadcast lasted nearly 6 hours with well over 6,000 viewers who logged on and at least viewed some portion of the show. We left with a wealth of knowledge, eager to try this again.
Story #6 – Winter of 2008
In parts of this United States, namely portions of the Rockies, Michigan and Northern New England, a winter like no other took its toll on some wildlife. In Maine it was estimated that the severe snow depths, reaching in excess of 250 inches in places, killed at least 50% of the whitetail deer herd.
Story #5 – New Jersey Bears
It seemed there was no end to the foolishness of managing, or lack thereof, of New Jersey’s black bears. First there was a bear hunt, then there wasn’t, then there was, then there wasn’t and now there’s not and bears are showing up everywhere. This year alone bear/human encounters/complaints skyrocketed, 
yet Governor Jon Corzine insisted his state did not have a bear problem. The problem, in his eyes, is people don’t know how to get along with bears.
New Jersey went several years without a bear hunting season. Eventually bear populations grew and the state, pre Corzine and the anti-hunting administration, had a bear hunt to thin the numbers. Animal rights and anti-hunting groups lined up to sue and hide behind lies of saving the bears. The bear hunt was canceled. A year went by and a bear hunt was held after the courts ruled the state had a legal bear management plan that included hunting as a viable part of that plan. That was 2005. No hunt for bear has happened since.
Gov. Corzine, crafted his own little anti-hunting puppet, Lisa Jackson to do his bidding and was put in charge of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The fish and game is a division of DEP. As a side note: President-elect Barack Obama has selected Lisa Jackson to be the head of his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (doesn’t bode well for hunters).
When Jackson took office the first thing she did was toss the court-approved Bear Management Plan in the garbage and declared the days of hunting bears in New Jersey are over. Since that time, private property has been destroyed, people’s homes have been invaded and people put at risk from an overabundance of bears. All the while the governor and his regime insist there’s no problem.
Some within the New Jersey legislature are demanding that Corzine do something about this time bomb that will eventually explode when a bear decides to seriously harm or kill a human. And whose fault will that be.
The New Jersey bear situation is a problem and is ongoing with little hope that Corzine will change his mind. The question I suppose now becomes who will be the governor’s next puppet to head the DEP?
Story #4 – Global Warming
Have we turned a bit of a corner on this absurdity of man-made global warming?
While I didn’t write about man-made global warming as much as I talked about it on the radio and video broadcasts, it still got plenty of attention. It seemed that our media worldwide fell in love with Al Gore and his scam and con job of man-made climate change. And while polar bear loving Al Gore was sealing financial deals to line his bank accounts, going green took on multiple meaning.
It appears now with more and more real scientists speaking out against man-made global warming, some in the scientific community are insisting this nonsense cease immediately. But not our politicians. They, like most of what they do, haven’t a clue nor do they care but if enough of us can keep rattling cages, we can successfully get the process of scientific research into climate change back on track.
Story #3 – The Election: Obama’s Stance on Second Amendment and “The Bitter People”.
As we have wound down from one of the strangest elections in my lifetime, many can’t wait until January 20, 2009 to arrive to they can officially begin their worship of a man they know nothing about and don’t want to. They say love is blind and it must be true love for the millions of voters who turned out to vote. They voted because they wanted change.
One aspect of Barack Obama that I hammered on during the campaign was his history, stance and lies on the right to keep and bear arms. Every politician since Adam and Eve has lied during their campaigns and this campaign was no different. It mattered not what Obama said. It mattered not what he had done, what his voting history told us. It mattered not about his past and those he chose to associate with. The voters wanted change.
But what almost, not quite and actually now that I think about it, it didn’t amount to a hill of beans, was Obama’s elitist comments made behind what he thought were closed doors about people being bitter, clinging to their guns and religion. In case you missed my story on the bitter people, click here.
And we can never forget that for the first time that I can remember, we had a vice presidential candidate that actually did believe in the Second Amendment. She was far from being a bitter person. None of this mattered again because people wanted change. They haven’t any idea what kind of change so long as it’s change.
Story #2 – Wolves/Endangered Species Act/Polar Bears
I decided to lump these all together as one story because they belong all together as one story. First let’s recap the continuing saga of gray wolf reintroduction and the up and down court ride of listing and delisting.
It is my belief that wolves were illegally dumped on the doorsteps of citizens in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and used deliberated practices of deception to achieve this goal. Promises were made and probably during that time a bridge or two in New York City changed hands once of twice.
Those intent on bringing wolves back promised that once a prescribed number of wolves were recorded, protections would be ended and the states could manage the wolf and have the ability to stop wolves from destroying private property.
Once official wolf numbers exceeded the promised numbers by at least five-fold, the wolf is still protected by the federal government under the Endangered Species Act. Earlier in the year, the Department of the Interior announced it was removing the ESA listing of wolves. They had accepted the three states’ – Idaho, Wyoming and Montana – Wolf Management Plans. That lasted only a short amount of time as once again the preservationists/animal rights/anti-hunting groups lined up like sheeple to an Obama rally, suing the federal government to stop the needless slaughter of wolves.
Coming as no shock to anyone, an activist judge who knows as much about wolves as I do about thermonuclear energy, granted a temporary injunction that placed the wolf back under protection. This was soon followed by the USFWS asking Judge Donald Molloy to withdraw the original proposal to delist.
As you can imagine, this story has no ending. The USFWS is poised to make another announcement, perhaps only hours before George Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, removing the wolf from protection again. We can only speculate (it’s a sure thing) that once this happens the gaggle of groupies will descend on Judge Molloy’s office crying for help for the poor soon to be slaughtered wolf.
In the meantime, properties are being destroyed and documentation is now pouring in of the decimation of elk herds in parts of Idaho, Montana and within Yellowstone National Park.
The second part of this broad story is the Endangered Species Act itself. Written in 1973 and amended in 1978, the Act’s intention was to prevent the “needless” extinction of species because of the actions of man. The Act has been twisted and turned and manipulated into a giant legal and political leverage tool used by special interest groups to promote their agendas at the expense of the animals we intend to protect.
Even though the Ninth Federal Court of Appeals unanimously voted to notify the courts that science will be used in passing judgment on endangered species cases, it surely had no affect on two judges who have managed to totally screw up the ESA.
When Judge Donald Molloy ruled to put the wolf back under federal protection, he created his own science in many ways. The Environmental Impact Statement that was written and approved before wolf reintroduction began, essentially said nothing about the need for wolves from the three areas where wolves were dropped, had to interbreed before a sustainable wolf population could happen. He called it genetic connectivity. This was at least one half of his basis for placing the wolf back under protection.
Shortly after this happened, in a lawsuit taking place in the District of Columbia, judge Paul Friedman decided to put the wolves in the Western Great Lakes back on federal protection as well. His reasons were very odd, to say the least.
He said in his own ruling that he didn’t have to put the wolf back on the Endangered list but he was going to because he thought it would be “easier”. Now that’s scientific. Worse yet, he created the biggest quagmire about Distinct Population Segments.
It has been the practice for some time for the USFWS to create segments where certain species live and areas where efforts are needed to recover or protect species. The feds have routinely created boarders to define these areas and as such call them Distinct Population Segments. This is what happened in the Western Great Lakes. The feds created a DPS, with boundaries, in order to remove gray wolves from protection in that area because they deemed, according to the policies specified in the ESA, the wolf “recovered”.
But Judge Friedman ruled that the ESA does not provide a definition of a DPS, therefore the USFWS had no legal authority to create a DPS. Little did he know with his own ruling that he just rendered all previous Distinct Population Segments of all species that are created, null and void. Essentially this makes the ESA and all that it controls a useless document. Isn’t science wonderful?
The Act needs serious amending if not a complete overhaul. It needs definitions, restrictions and allowances so that our scientists can actually work at recovering and protecting species. But each and every time there is any effort at all to change the ESA, it meets with great resistance from the lobbyists of the special interest groups who don’t want their sugar daddy taken away.
And finally the third part of this story is about the polar bear. This year the polar bear was listed as threatened by the Department of Interior because of melting sea ice. This became a no-win situation for everyone, including the polar bear.
The Bush administration got suckered into believing that climate change was permanently destroying polar bear habitat – ice. Not wanting to anger too many people, they thought listing the bear as threatened would pacify the environmentalists and not anger those of us who really wanted to protect the bear. Lawsuits have followed.
Then, like they had some kind of magic wand, the DOI, led by Dirk Kempthorne, declared that nobody was going to use the threatened status of polar bears as a political manipulation tool to regulate global warming.
Now that real science is coming around to shoot down the scare mongers of global warming, the way the ESA has been interpreted, the bear will never be removed from the ESA list, even though the ice is growing again and the population of polar bears is the highest its been in decades.
Story #1 – District of Columbia vs. Heller
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution proclaims: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” People have argued for decades about the meaning of this Amendment, even to the point of how capitalized words are used.
What began as a lawsuit against the District of Columbia by a security guard, Richard Heller, to restore his constitutional right to “keep and bear arms”, ended up in the United States Supreme Court in what is perhaps the greatest ruling since Roe vs. Wade or Brown vs. Board of Education.
The Second Amendment has taken more abuse than perhaps any other Amendment we have, often energized out of fear and emotion because this right involved guns.
One of the arguments involving the Second Amendment is whether a “militia” means that only state sanctioned militias or guards have a legal right to possess a gun. Some argue that only the states have a right to regulate firearms. As a result of the many years of unsettled legal discussions, it was now going to be left up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Going into the oral arguments of the case, broad agreement seemed to be that SCOTUS would rule one way or the other as to whether the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right or a collective right as such the militias. Most thought the Court would vote in favor of an individual right and we were not disappointed.
What we all mostly wondered was whether or not the Court would take it upon themselves to define, “reasonable gun regulations”. We may never have a definition of that and case upon case will be heard in the lower courts within many states of the Union.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion of a 5-4 vote. Justice Scalia, in presenting years of historic evidence as to the “intentions” of the framers of the Constitution, declared the Second Amendment as a right of individuals to keep and bear arms. What was left quite foggy was what kind of arms can individuals possess and what are “reasonable” gun control laws.
In the District of Columbia, a person virtually was barred by D.C. laws from owning a gun of any kind and in particular a handgun. D.C. law also provided that for those who were properly licensed to own a “hunting” gun, that gun had to be inoperable in the residence of the owner. The Supreme Court also ruled that law was unconstitutional because it robbed a person of their God-given right to self protection.
It has been nearly seven months since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for an individual right and that a ban on owning a gun and having it in your home was unconstitutional, and still the District of Columbia has yet to comply with the court ruling as they stall laying claim they are trying to work out an agreeable gun control bill. That in itself tells us that the District of Columbia has no intention of adhering to the law and will come up with their version of what the Second Amendment should be and let it be fought in the courts again as to what “reasonable” gun laws are.
Although District of Columbia vs. Heller was not a ruling that restored 100% our right to keep and bear arms, it was a major victory that gave us a starting point and a legal platform to work from. Let’s hope this new administration, along with a strong democratic hold on both Houses, will not head us in the opposite direction.
Tom Remington
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There you go again. I don’t have time to read all of your opinions, especially in light of the fact that the little I have read reveal that they are often not attached to any facts. My google news search catches you from time to time. So just saw one item that I’ll tough on and again leave you to continue what you do best. Talk without substance.
Correction. While it may be your ‘opinion’ that wolves were illegally dumped on the people of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana (if a guy like you who knows little, can pick up on such a thing – should be easy to win that point in courts, eh), it is not a matter of opinion in the case of Montana. Especially Northwest Montana where wolves were not reintroduced, but have instead slowly come back on their own. It could be argued that eventually (how long it would take might be an arguing point) wolves would have recolonized the Northern Rockies on their own.
I only make these comments because I think facts and information matter. Values are our own, and if you don’t value wolves that’s one thing. But sure would be nice if everyone argued with the facts. I’m sure you either don’t care, OR just won’t get it – again. But maybe some of your readers will pick up on it. Anyone can have a blog, and run on about anything in any way they want. There are no checks, no accounatability. But for sure, at the end of the day, I know that just because you think something Tom, doesn’t make it true. Happy New Year
Sam – It’s unfortunate that you don’t have the time to stick around and read what I write. Then instead of being so bold and insulting to show your own ignorance of any topic you are wishing to make comment, you would have realize that most of what I write is based on fact and I provide the links and resources from where that comes.
It is quite insulting to show up to anyone’s blog and make accusations when you are too damned lazy to first verify what you are accusing others of being.
Odd that you chose to leave a comment on an article which is a recap of 2008 stories. Again if you are so lazy and only interested in insulting people, you could have followed the links I provided and gone and read the many, many articles, all based in facts along with resources, to support them. (Including all the court cases about illegal dumping of wolves, etc.) But your like all the others. You know what you want to know and aren’t interested in the truth. That’s too bad.
You know nothing of what I write here and yet you are so wise and righteous that you can come here and insult me.
Get a life!
There’s that willful apathetic ignorance again, Contempt prior to proper research and investigation in seeking truth, facts, and real evidence. Sadly most u.s. subject serfs are completely clueless of reality and their own surroundings…kinda embarassing actually.. Those wolves and the entire ESA program is in violation of the Supreme Law of this Nation…the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights…FACT…and the unratified 17th Amendment and those illegal treatises it provides Congress with to skirt the law and allow U.N. subversions such as the ESA, which is a part of AGENDA 21 and the United Nations Charter itself to control our Agency known as the Interior Department, Forest Service, FWS, and ESA….Maybe Sam should go chase down a few CONGRESSIONAL GLOBES and READ those (If the dumbshit knows what those are) and see the many debates which support what I’ve just stated in this reply….AND maybe he could show us where in the CONSTITUTION the FOUNDERS made allowances for EUROPEAN think tanks and their governments to make rules affecting the populances of the states of America….THE WOLF PROGRAM IS NOT LEGAL….and the FUNDS used to set up the PROGRAM were slight of hand borrowing at best….NO TAX-PAYER funds had congressional approval for the plan. No vote was ever taken by the people to approve the plan. SINCE when is DICTATION the American way ? NEVER.
GET A LIFE.
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