In the closing days of his Administration, President Bush removed gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list.Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, has decided to support President Bush’s position on the issue and leave the wolves off the list, prompting outrage from the eco-nuts in Obama’s base.How long before we see Ashley Judd attacking Obama in web ads?UPDATE: Steve Altman in the comments points out an interesting development: Only two days after his much-publicized lifting of a federal funding ban on research involving human embryos (therefore causing Christopher Reeve to walk again), he has signed into law essentially the exact same ban as part of the Omnibus Spending Bill. So he’s basically wasted everybody’s time with a bunch of posturing while accomplishing precisely nothing for his base.
Speaking as a former Coloradan who remembers when Secretary Salazar was Colorado Attorney General Salazar, I’m not at all surprised by his action; he represents a Western sensibility on the environment, one that seeks to balance environmental concerns with the needs of people, not the views of the East Coast elite. I don’t always agree with his positions, to be sure, but I expected him to chart a balanced, thoughtful course at Interior, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to make me think otherwise.As for the Obama administration’s sleight of hand on ESCR, that’s no vast surprise either; I wasn’t aware that that language was a standard part of the national budget, but since the whole thing combines passing the buck to Congress with a symbolic action that produces no practical effect, two things which we’ve seen over and over again during the first two months of this administration, there’s nothing startling here.