Democracy for Vancouver

There are some sick fucks in this country with some serious entitlement issues:

Officials are investigating the deaths of six sea lions who appear to have been shot Sunday after climbing onto traps in the Columbia River.

Wildlife officials said that the bodies of the sea lions were discovered at noon Sunday on two floating traps just below Bonneville Dam.

“In each of the two traps were three dead sea lions,” Brian Gorman, regional spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said.
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Four traps were installed near Bonneville Dam in an attempt to protect endangered salmon.
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Both species are federally protected. Washington and Oregon have been authorized to trap California sea lions, then relocate the most serious predators. More than 60 of the California sea lions have been branded as frequent offenders eligible for removal.

Because, you see, we humans built the dams that devastated the salmon runs, so now we have to punish the sea lions for doing what comes naturally.

And for some fuckwits, trapping and relocating the sea lions wasn’t punishment enough - especially when the river fishing season was cut short and the ocean fishing season was canceled all together because our fucking dams kill too many fucking salmon.

Because those salmon are ours, goddamn it - dead or alive - and no glorified circus act is going to keep us from our god-given right to hunt and pillage.

And ranch on public wildlands without fear of wild animal predation:

The Bush Administration unilaterally de-listed the wolves of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming from the Endangered Species list on March 28, and since then at least 37 wolves have been slaughtered despite continuing bans on hunting in Idaho and Montana - and ongoing litigation to stop the de-listing by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Wyoming’s wolf management plan classifies wolves outside of the northwestern part of the state as predators, which allows unlimited, year-round shooting of them. Only in a small portion of the state where a string of federally designated wilderness areas surround Yellowstone National Park does Wyoming classify wolves as a trophy species.

In this area, the state will manage wolves through a set hunting season, which will include hunting quotas.

Idaho and Montana’s wolf management plans classify wolves as a game animal anywhere they roam. With last week’s delisting of wolves, hunters in these states may be able to pursue the wily predators as soon as this fall.

To ranchers, wolves are nothing but parasites; to others, they are objects of fear and loathing despite the non-existence of even a single report of human predation by a wild wolf in North America.

According to the NRDC, “The death toll could be even higher [than the 37 reported] since kills are not required to be reported immediately, and ‘shoot and bury’ tactics mean that some kills might not be reported at all.”

For some Americans (like Bush and Cheney), Manifest Destiny is not a history lesson, but a raison d’être. Their manhood is dependent on subjugation and violence, whether toward land that is unsuitable for ranching (all of the federal lands West of the Mississippi produce less beef than the state of Missouri alone), individuals that seek to protect that land, or the wildlife that has lived upon it for eons.

But according to the Bible, only humans matter, and Christian humans at that. The rest is here for us to consume or destroy.

And so slaughter is justified, in Wyoming and Iraq.

The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and a number of its ambulances, and near a group of children who were wounded as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.

The missiles that hit close to the Sadr General Hospital were American. After a night of clashes in the neighborhood, the Americans fired at least three “precision-guided munitions” at the small building next door to the hospital…

Haider Abbas, 10, was brought to the hospital with what appeared to be a gaping hole in his back and shrapnel injuries across his stomach. The boy screamed and whimpered in pain, barely able to answer a doctor’s questions.

“My friend brought me to the hospital, but we had to leave the other wounded kids behind,” he said. “The Iraqi Army refused to allow them to be evacuated, but my friend took me anyway.”

The doctor, Abdul Rahman Hadi, said the boy was bleeding internally. “He needs surgery quickly,” Dr. Hadi said. “The irony is that not one of his relatives has come because he is an orphan.”

Another victim of that attack, Ahmad Yahya, 31, whose leg was broken, said the Iraqi Army had blocked evacuation from the area of the attack. “I was with a group of about 15 children who were collecting the empty cans or the trash in Jamila,” he said. “I don’t know why this happened.”

Because the U.S. is run by rapacious cowards. It’s a cyclical feature of life here in the good old U.S.A.

If you’d like to voice your opposition to Congress, at least so far as wolf poisoning is concerned, you can use the NRDC’s form here.

You can voice your opposition to the slaughter - and any plans you might have for boycotting Wyoming’s tourism industry until it stops - to Wyoming’s Democratic governor Dave Freudenthal here.

Our son L. is desperate for a trip to Yellowstone, but that will have to wait until Wyoming comes to its senses.