11 November 20
RSN Is a "Lousy Business Model"
We hear it all the time: RSN is a "Lousy Business Model". It's true and what's more, we are proud of it!
What we do is not, "a business model" it is a community service model, and an organizing model. That's the key: We need money, but we're not in it for the money. We did not start this as a business, we started this because we are angry about what is happening to our country, and other countries as well, and we want to do something about it.
Believe this: RSN is a thorn in the side of the corporate media, not in spite of our Reader Supported non-business model, but precisely because of it. Think about that.
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10 November 20
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Reader Supported News
RSN: Norman Solomon | Dear Joe, It's Mitch McConnell or Your Base. You Can't Have Both.
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Near the end of his well-crafted victory speech Saturday night, Joe Biden decried 'the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another.'"
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Bill Barr. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Team Trump Sh*ts on Barr's Bogus Voter-Fraud Crusade
Asawin Suebsaeng, Erin Banco, Spencer Ackerman, William Bredderman and Sam Stein, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "It was a memo so outrageous, it caused a top Justice Department official to quit on the spot. But for Donald Trump's dwindling band of loyalists at the White House, it still wasn't enough."
On Monday, Attorney General Bill Barr “authorized” Justice officials to investigate allegations of voter irregularities. But his memo doing so practically admitted there was little-to-no evidence for any such election fraud. The document warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries” and that “nothing here should be taken as any indication that the Department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election.”
The memo sparked a new wave of criticism that the president and his allies were willing to sacrifice the country’s democratic foundation in the pursuit of power. Even those steps weren’t enough to satisfy Team Trump, however. Shortly after Barr’s declaration broke, officials close to the president and working on his re-election effort said they thought the memo could give the president and Rudy Giuliani another element to incorporate into their messaging war against the results of the free and fair election, but that it wouldn’t prove to be the legal game changer that they needed.
Four officials working on President Trump’s flailing post-election effort and a senior White House official told The Daily Beast on Monday evening that the Barr memo was, at best, too little too late, a letdown, or just, in the White House official’s words, “nothing to write home about.”
“This is not what some of us wanted. This is not what I wanted,” said a senior official on the Trump re-election effort, following the news of the DOJ memo. “This will give the president [and others] something to play with for a while, but until Bill Barr actually puts up or shuts up, we’re still where we [have been].”
Another senior aide on the Trump campaign, reacting on Monday evening, said they had doubts that the memo would be “material,” since “U.S. Attorney investigations take forever.”
While Barr’s memo may have left Trump’s political orbit wanting, at the Justice Department one prosecutor who spoke on condition of anonymity called it “shocking” that Barr would issue it “with no evidence of fraud whatsoever.” Barr’s memo was sent out widely, to all U.S. attorneys; the Justice Department’s criminal, civil rights and national security divisions; and the beleaguered FBI director, Christopher Wray, whom President Donald Trump has put under extraordinary political pressure.
It was enough to trigger the resignation of the Justice Department’s election crimes branch hours later, according to The New York Times.
“A nationwide call smacks of desperation,” the prosecutor told The Daily Beast. “They’re looking far and wide because they don’t have anything specific. If you had good evidence of fraud in Pennsylvania, or Georgia, you would focus there. DOJ hasn’t lent itself so far to any of the pending [Trump campaign] claims yet, indicating that nothing they’ve seen so far has a shred of merit they’re willing to tie themselves to.”
But the prosecutor said the memo could do real damage by its authorization of “overt investigative steps.” That means “encouraging prosecutors to do things that the public will notice,” throwing “red meat to the stop-the-steal base over the coming weeks even if doing nothing to change the outcome.”
At a minimum, Barr’s memo “lends further legitimacy to Trump’s attack on the results of the election,” the prosecutor continued, “That’s all bad for getting Americans to trust their democracy and respect the results of the election.”
The FBI declined comment. Trump campaign and White House spokespeople did not immediately respond, either.
The Barr memo capped a frantic day with escalating attacks from Trump and Republicans on the nation’s electoral system. And it foreshadowed a piqued and likely divisive chapter ahead as one of the two major political parties in American proves largely unwilling to accept the choice of the voters.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) on Monday largely accepted President Donald Trump’s framing that something nefarious had led to him losing the states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by relatively narrow margins. And he called for the courts to adjudicate any allegations of malfeasance. In Georgia, the two Republican Senators now heading to runoff elections launched a remarkable attack on the state’s Republican Secretary of State, over unclear insinuations of electoral improprieties—a charge the Secretary of State dismissed in an equally remarkable pushback. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, continued to dispatch surrogates across the country to raise specious allegations of out-of-state and dead voters casting ballots, computer malfunctions, and votes being cast without election watchers present.
Collectively, the charges seemed designed to create the appearance of controversy and scandal where none actually yet exists. The past several days have seen multiple legal attempts to slow or stop counting of certain batches of ballots fail not just in Nevada but Michigan and Pennsylvania—though that did not stop the Trump campaign from filing a new federal action in the Keystone State Monday night.
Internally, Team Trump and its allies had hoped that the Barr could fill that void. For days, outgoing President Donald Trump and several of his senior staffers and longtime confidants have been privately insisting that the Department of Justice hasn’t been nearly aggressive enough in intervening on Trump’s behalf in ongoing matters in key states, according to two sources familiar with the situation. “Why isn’t [DOJ] on this?” the president asked, during one of many outbursts last week regarding his and the GOP’s entirely groundless claims of Democratic theft of the 2020 presidential election.
Barr seemed to recognize that. Before issuing his memo on Monday, he met with McConnell on the Hill. According to a source familiar with the matter, the department had received and was looking into a referral from the Nevada Republican Party alleging thousands of cases of voter fraud and an affidavit from a Pennsylvania postal worker obtained by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) alleging voting irregularities. According to two other officials, the department in recent days has largely viewed the president’s election legal battles as solely a campaign issue.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” one senior Republican official told the Washington Post. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
Daniel Stewart, former counsel to GOP Nevada ex-Gov. Brian Sandoval, argued to The Daily Beast that—even if all the allegations in the affidavit were true—it’s impossible that issues described would account for Trump’s 36,000-vote deficit in the state. Trump’s performance in the state was generally consistent with past results and party enrollment figures, he noted, indicating that nothing too weird happened in Vegas last Tuesday.
Neither Stewart nor the Georgia Secretary of State ruled out the possibility of a few individuals getting caught and prosecuted for some kind of voting misconduct. But both defended the integrity of the elections in their respective states.
“Nothing I've seen, even if all the claims were true, would change the outcome of the election—would come close to changing the election,” said Stewart. “You got to be pretty crazy to argue that there was fraud on a scale that means Trump won Nevada. That just defies belief.”
As for the Barr memo, according to an individual familiar with election investigations, the FBI normally takes the lead in investigating the election fraud allegation in coordination with the U.S. attorney’s office. At a certain point thereafter, the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Election Crimes Branch (ECB) would be consulted. The DOJ manual lays out a relatively clear pathway for the ECB on investigations related to the “corruption of the election process” and that office normally counsels attorneys not to take big investigative steps before the election has concluded and results have been certified. But in his statement Monday night, Barr said attorneys could bypass that general guidance and begin to investigate because “such a passive and delayed enforcement approach can result in situations in which election misconduct cannot realistically be rectified,” according to Barr’s note.
This is only the latest attempt by the Trump administration to inflame a self-serving hysteria over phantoms of voter fraud. In 2017, the administration created a commission on voter fraud, only to see it shutter after being unable to find evidence of it.
That has not stopped Barr from echoing Trump’s claims. He spent much of post-pandemic 2020 insisting as a matter of “common sense” that mail-in voting would open the door to fraud, another baseless claim. In September, Barr insisted falsely that mail-in voting posed the end of a “secret ballot,” misrepresenting publicly the double-enveloping and other election-integrity measures in place. That same month, the department had to admit that Barr “inaccurate[ly]” presented a story about indicting a Texan for falsifying 1,700 ballots.
President-elect Joe Biden, flanked by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, is likely to face a divided Congress. That's something he'll need to consider as he sorts through which parts of his agenda to push first. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
ALSO SEE: Pentagon's Top Policy Official Resigns
After Clashing With the White House
Biden's First 100 Days: Here's What to Expect
Elena Moore, NPR
Moore writes: "President-elect Joe Biden will take office in January with a lot of promises to keep. He has pledged to enact new policies swiftly that veer the US off President Trump's current path."
Biden ran a heavily policy-focused campaign, releasing dozens of lengthy and ambitious plans ranging from large-scale economic and environmental initiatives to broad actions on racial justice, education and health care. A significant amount of Biden's agenda also centers on reversing or updating positions taken by the Trump administration, especially on immigration and foreign policy. Biden heads into office with strategies to address the COVID-19 crisis and the search for a vaccine as well.
The sheer volume of Biden's plans could make it a challenge to execute them all. On immigration alone, he has proposed more than a dozen initiatives to complete within 100 days of taking office, a feat that could prove difficult to execute.
As the president-elect sorts through which priorities to push first, he'll need to consider that he is likely to face a divided Congress. Control of the Senate is still up in the air, with two Georgia runoff elections set for January, but Republicans are poised to maintain control. Democrats also have a slimmer majority in the House of Representatives, where the GOP made gains contrary to most party leaders' and analysts' predictions.
The political dynamic on Capitol Hill means Biden may have to pull back from some policy proposals that many on the left of his party have been pushing on health care and the environment. He will likely need to focus more immediately on issues that could attract bipartisan support, such as providing COVID-19 relief and improving U.S. infrastructure.
NPR has taken a look through some of Biden's promises and short-term goals for his presidency, some of which are laid out on a new transition website. Here's what might be coming:
What Biden says he'll do on Day 1 or beforehand
COVID-19: Assemble a coronavirus task force during his presidential transition
Days after becoming president-elect, Biden announced a team of advisers that will spearhead his pandemic response once he takes office. The task force will be led by Dr. David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner; former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine.
"The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations," Biden said in a statement Monday morning.
COVID-19: Push for immediate coronavirus legislation
As part of this initiative, the president-elect has also promised to begin working on a new coronavirus aid package before officially taking office, vowing to coordinate with state governors, mayors and other local politicians.
"I'll ask the new Congress to put a bill on my desk by the end of January with all the resources to see how both our public health and economic response can be seen through the end," he said at an event in late October.
Biden's proposed COVID-19 response plan calls for expanding coronavirus testing resources as well as for increasing the country's capacity to make personal protective equipment by leveraging the Defense Production Act. He has also backed legislation that would create a separate COVID-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force, which Vice President-elect Kamala Harris proposed in the Senate in the spring.
As part of a COVID-19 relief package, Biden has in the past called for at least $10,000 in student loan debt to be canceled for all Americans.
COVID-19: Release a vaccine distribution plan
Biden has said he'll start working to install "an effective distribution plan" for a potential COVID-19 vaccine on the first day of his presidency. His plan would spend $25 billion on vaccine production and disbursement, and calls for an eventual vaccine to be free for all Americans.
Biden has expressed skepticism over the Trump administration's promises to provide a vaccine quickly. Trump has said he will have a vaccine ready for distribution by the end of 2020.
COVID-19: Listen to science by rejoining WHO and keeping Fauci as a close adviser
As president, Biden says he will mend the U.S. relationship with the World Health Organization, rejoining the body on his first day in office. Trump pulled out of WHO over the summer.
Biden also said that he plans "immediately" to ask Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, to stay in his post as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a job he's had since 1984.
Trump had hinted that if he won the election, he might fire Fauci.
Economy: Reverse Trump's corporate tax cut
Biden has pledged that on his first day as president he will raise corporate income taxes to 28% — compared with the current 21% rate set by the GOP-led tax cuts of 2017. Also, this promise falls under Biden's larger proposed tax plan, which stresses that Americans making less than $400,000 would not pay more in taxes.
Environment: Make the U.S. an international leader on climate change
In one of his longest-standing campaign promises, Biden heads into office planning to reenter the U.S. immediately into the landmark Paris climate accord of 2015. Trump's move to pull the U.S. out of the agreement became official this month after a mandatory one-year waiting period that started when the president formally notified the United Nations.
Racial equity: Extend the Voting Rights Act
Biden has pushed for the passage of laws to strengthen the Voting Rights Act. Legislation to do so passed the U.S. House last year but not the Senate. Biden advocated for extending the original 1965 legislation following the death of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
Immigration: Comprehensive immigration changes
Biden has said that on his first day as president he will produce comprehensive immigration legislation that creates a pathway to citizenship for 11 million migrants living in the U.S. illegally. It would also provide a pathway to citizenship for people commonly known as DREAMers, who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Biden has additionally pledged to make the DACA program permanent on his first day in office, a move that comes after years of Trump administration attempts to rescind the program.
Immigration: Stop family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border
The president-elect has vowed to stop the practice of separating immigrant families trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico. On Day 1 as president, Biden has said he plans to pass an executive order establishing a task force focused on reuniting children and parents separated at the border.
Immigration: End Trump's executive order banning travelers from some Muslim-majority countries
Biden says he will "immediately rescind" current restrictions that bar people in some Muslim-majority countries from traveling or immigrating to the United States. He supports legislation that would outlaw such restrictions and has vowed to sign off on it as president.
What Biden says he'll do during his first 100 days
Immigration: Reverse a slew of Trump policies, including the construction of a U.S.-Mexican border wall
Within the first 100 days of his administration, Biden says he wants to reform the U.S. asylum system and the treatment of people at the border with Mexico, specifically calling for a stop to the Trump administration's Migrant Protection Protocols as well as to the policy of "metering" asylum cases.
The president-elect also pledges to take away funding toward continued construction of a wall along the southern U.S. border. But Biden says he wouldn't take down parts of the wall that have already been built.
The president-elect's immigration plan also would increase government supervision over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Protection, calling for the need to hold personnel "accountable for inhumane treatment." This comes as a whistleblower complaint was filed in September concerning medical conditions at a Georgia immigrant detention center.
Criminal justice: Increase police reform
In response to the national outcry that erupted over police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans, Biden said he will institute a national police oversight commission within his first 100 days of taking office. It's part of a larger plan to help overhaul policing, including investing $300 million into community policing measures across the U.S. and tasking the Justice Department with investigating possible issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct.
Criminal justice: Enact comprehensive criminal justice reform
As the first step in a set of goals addressing prison reform and crime prevention, Biden says he will quickly push Congress to pass the SAFE Justice Act, proposed by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va. The legislation would include taking steps to reduce the use of mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent offenses and institute policies geared at lowering recidivism.
Foreign policy: Repair alliances and plan a global Summit for Democracy
Biden has said he intends to "pick up the pieces of Donald Trump's broken foreign policy," vowing to reach out to U.S. allies soon after taking office. Within his first year, Biden wants to plan an international summit where democratic leaders will discuss ways to push back against corruption and authoritarian practices as well as expand human rights.
Biden also wants to organize a "climate world summit" to assist nations with high carbon emissions to take climate action. Questions remain about how either summit would be doable during a global pandemic.
Other potential early policy steps
It's not clear when we might start seeing some of Biden's big plans for the economy, environment, education system and health care take form — especially as the president-elect may enter the White House with a divided Congress. That said, these plans were substantial parts of his campaign, and his administration is likely to begin addressing them.
Economy: Make major investments in the U.S. economy to boost domestic growth
Biden hopes to create 5 million jobs through a series of large investments geared at benefiting different business areas. His proposed "Made in America" plan would pour $400 billion into procurement measures to boost domestic manufacturing as well as an additional $300 billion into research and development.
Environment: Start on a $2 trillion climate plan
The president-elect also heads into office with an extensive set of environmental goals proposed through his clean energy plan, which includes getting the country to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The proposal calls for a $2 trillion investment, throughout his term, to boost reliance on clean energy and climate sustainable practices. Biden also says that 40% of the funding will be used to support communities disproportionately affected by climate change, as laid out in his environmental justice plan.
Health care: Build on the Affordable Care Act if it isn't too late
A large part of Biden's health care proposal offers a new public option plan that builds on the existing Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. But the ACA's fate remains in question during the rest of Trump's term and into next year.
On Nov. 10, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments against the ACA from the Trump administration and multiple states. If the justices side with Trump next year when they make their decision, Biden's plans for health care could completely change.
Education: Make first moves in a large education agenda
Biden has laid out extensive plans for changes to higher education as well as pre-K through high school, but he has not expressed many clear deadlines during his first year.
Notably, the president-elect has expressed support for the College for All Act, proposed in 2017 by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., which would eliminate tuition at public colleges and universities for families making up to $125,000. Biden also is advocating for private historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions to be tuition-free.
Gina Haspel. (photo: Getty Images)
CIA Director Haspel's Fate Uncertain After Trump Fires Esper
Zachary Cohen, CNN
Cohen writes: "President Donald Trump and some of his conservative allies have become increasingly frustrated with CIA Director Gina Haspel in recent weeks, accusing her of delaying the release of documents they believe would expose so-called 'deep state' plots against Trump's campaign and transition during the Obama administration, according to multiple current and former officials."
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General view of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, U.S., November 10, 2020. (photo: Hannah McKay/Reuters)
Two Conservative US Supreme Court Justices Suggest Obamacare May Not Be Thrown Out
Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung, Reuters
Excerpt: "US Supreme Court justices on Tuesday signaled they are unlikely to strike down the entire Obamacare healthcare law in a legal challenge brought by Texas and other Republican-governed states and backed by President Donald Trump's administration."
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Women with banners against femicides at a protest in Cancun, Mexico, Nov. 9, 2020. (photo: EFE)
Mexico: Cancun Police Shoot Down Feminist Protest
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Mexico's Police Monday shot down a feminist protest organized in Cancun to reject two women's femicides that took place last weekend. Police brutality left three reporters injured, one of them by gunshot."
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Wolves. (photo: Grist/Michael Cummings/Getty Images)
Colorado Voted to Bring Back Wolves. Why Was the Race So Close?
Emily Pontecorvo, Grist
Pontecorvo writes: "The presidential election was deemed a 'nail biter,' with the outcome teetering on a 'razor's edge' for days after the ballots were cast. But in Colorado, where Democrats claimed a decisive victory for Joe Biden and newly elected senator John Hickenlooper, voters were biting their nails for another reason: wolves."
On the ballot this year was Proposition 114, a historic measure that would require Colorado officials to restore and manage gray wolf populations in the western portion of the state. But while a 2019 survey of Colorado voters indicated overwhelming support for the initiative, with 84 percent of respondents saying they would vote in favor of it, the results show a different story. As of Friday afternoon, the state election site was reporting a 50-49 split, with a little more than 33,000 votes tipping the odds pro-wolf.
Two groups opposing the measure conceded the race, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced it would begin creating a plan to carry it out. But why did a seemingly sure bet turn out to be the most divisive issue on the ballot?
“Clearly something happened in the past year or so,” said Rebecca Niemiec, a social scientist who studies the human dimensions of natural resources at Colorado State University and led the 2019 research on the ballot initiative.
A decision to reintroduce wolves has never been put to the public in the U.S. before. Past efforts to restore wolf populations in the Northern Rockies and other parts of the country have been managed by the federal government under the Endangered Species Act. But after almost 25 years of failed attempts to convince federal and state officials to help the species return to Colorado, wolf restoration advocates like Rob Edward turned away from the government and secured enough signatures to put the question to the populace.
“It’s kind of a Hail Mary. If we lose, that’s the game,” said Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, recalling his early thinking behind the ballot measure.
Gray wolves once roamed throughout North America but were hunted to near extinction in the 20th century. They were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1973 — a designation recently reversed by the Trump administration — and today occupy only about 15 percent of their former range in the lower 48 states.
In bringing gray wolves back to Colorado, Edward and other advocates dream of creating a connected corridor for the species in the Rockies stretching from the high Arctic all the way to the Mexican borderlands. Increased predation from wolves on elk and deer, he said, will come with a bounty of trickle-down ecological benefits, like more vegetation that attracts beavers, which will in turn engineer wetlands that create better habitat for trout and other species.
But the prospect of a wolf reintroduction has long worried many of the state’s ranchers, who fear attacks on livestock, and hunters concerned that elk and deer populations will dwindle. Though the wolf management plan proposed in Proposition 114 is required to include compensation for lost livestock, Bill Fales, who raises cattle in Carbondale, Colorado, and grazes them on U.S. Forest Service land, said he’s heard from ranchers in other states with wolf compensation programs that it can be hard to give sufficient proof to authorities to collect the money. He’s also afraid that the stress of having wolves around will cause his cattle to lose weight, hurting his bottom line.
To Fales, that’s not just a problem for his family. If ranchers are pushed out of the state, he said, “there’s a zillion consequences for all of Colorado. I think we provide a lot of good scenery, a lot of clean air, a lot of biodiversity. We’re growing an awful lot of plants that suck up carbon dioxide and release oxygen.”
Complicating things further, the science behind each side’s claims is contentious. Multiple studies have confirmed the ecological benefits of wolf reintroduction, but some researchers question whether other factors besides wolves were also at play. Data on impacts to livestock is inconsistent, with verified kills relatively low, but self-reported kills and indirect losses — like Fales’ concern about weight loss — are higher.
Emotions run high around the issue. Niemiec said wolves symbolize deeper, societal-level debates over changing values and cultural trends. The ballot initiative was largely decided by people in growing urban centers like Denver and Boulder, rather than those in rural areas that will live closest to the predators. In response to that imbalance, Edward said that 70 percent of Western Colorado is public land. “People in other places have the same right to say what goes on there,” he said.
Along those lines, wolves also bring up long-standing conflicts over how public lands are used. Whereas advocates talk about restoring the balance of ecosystems, preserving wilderness, and correcting a past wrong, Fales thinks those concepts are fantasy.
Last time there were wolves in Colorado, the human population was a fraction of what it is today, he said. “Things are radically, radically different. We have interstate highways and roads, trails, all over throughout the federal lands. You can’t turn back the clock and go back to the Garden of Eden.”
Despite the controversy, several surveys dating back to 1994 all found majority support for wolf reintroduction in Colorado. Niemiec acknowledged that surveys are just one way to look at public opinion and don’t always perfectly correlate with voting behavior. She offered a few hypotheses for what led to Tuesday’s razor-thin margins: For one thing, she and her coauthors observed a trend of media coverage in 2019 that gave more space to anti-wolf than pro-wolf arguments, and said that could have continued leading up to the vote.
Niemiec also cited an event in early 2020 when a pack of six wolves was spotted in Northwestern Colorado. Opponents to restoration argued this was evidence that wolves would eventually return to the state on their own, while advocates countered that there would not be enough unrelated wolves to create a stable population.
There’s no doubt that the global pandemic also affected the outcome. It’s possible voters lost enthusiasm for the plan after seeing that the governor’s office expects the state to operate on a deficit through 2023. Edward said the pandemic inhibited his team’s ability to do fundraising and fieldwork to raise support for the measure.
But he also said there was an 11th-hour, deep-pocketed push by the opposition. Campaign finance records show that an issue group called Coloradans Protecting Wildlife listed as being opposed to the wolf measure spent about $100,000 on advertising between October 15 and 28. Another group called Stop The Wolf Pac received more than $100,000 in contributions during that time, and Edward suspects its next filing will show that that money was spent on advertising as well. Edward’s group, the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, spent roughly $74,000 on advertising during the same period.
Tight margins or not, Edward and his allies have prevailed. The ballot initiative directs the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission to create a plan to reintroduce wolves, hold public hearings to gather input on the plan, and update it accordingly. It sets a mandate to get paws on the ground by the end of 2023. Past efforts to reintroduce wolves, like a famous project in Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, involved capturing the creatures from healthy populations in Canada and relocating them.
Moving forward, Niemiec said it’s critical that all stakeholders are engaged in contributing to the plan in a meaningful way. “These types of divisive issues can really contribute to the urban-rural divide,” she said. She and other academics, as well as several tribal council leaders, put together a policy brief with guidance for the public officials who carry out the ballot initiative. Their recommendations include hiring third-party facilitators and putting a focus on building empathy between groups. “The fact that the race is so close just speaks further to the need to engage diverse voices meaningfully.”
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