US Fish and Wildlife — even if on higher order — stabs dunes sagebrush lizard in the back

Anymore, NOTHING in the way of actions by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, especially Endangered Species Act listings, surprises me. 

In fact, over the lesser prairie chicken last year, I accused the agency of deliberately tanking ESA listings.

And now, meet the dunes sagebrush lizard. It's how I met online Fish and Wildlife "dissidents" Chris Nagano and Lyle Lewis, who gave me the backstory of how shamefully FWS was acting decades ago.

 

I have blogged more than once about former Texas Comptroller Susan Combs' voluntary, landowner-based plan for habitat conservation, or rather, "conservation," for the dunes sagebrush lizard, most of whose habitat happens to be in the oil-rich Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and whose voluntary habitat conservators, or "conservators," happen to be oilmen.

I first noted that is was the conservative half of a neoliberal idea that rancher/oil lover/Interior Secretary Kenny Boy Salazar loved, and agreed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in charge of Endangered Species Act issues, should accept. Shock me.

As part of that, I noted that Combs was being sued by two of the more activist, non-Gang Green environmental agencies, with Center for Biological Diversity in the lead, because the people and groups overseeing her voluntary "conservation" were about as transparent as most things involving Texas government.

Unfortunately, as I noted next, Combs got a federal judge to agree with her that the oversight agency, officially a private entity and therefore exempt from the state's Public Information Act, should stay that way and remain non-transparent.

And then, CBD and Defenders of Wildlife, a few months ago, lost in federal district court their attempt to reverse the Fish and Wildlife + Combs + oilmen agreement, discussed here with links.

Well, there's a backstory to this.

At about the time CBD and Defenders were losing their case in district court, Fish and Wildlife, documented here, was entering into a legal settlement with the former top official in Texas, who sued after being pushed out of his job.

And, why was he pushed out of his job?

Because he was fighting Kenny Boy Salazar and Susan Combs on the dunes sagebrush lizard, and saying everything about lack of enforcement and lack of transparency that I and the environmental groups were saying.

One person, however, did lose his job: Fish and Wildlife's top official in Texas, Gary Mowad, who ran afoul of his bosses after raising concerns about the decision to place the long-term survival of the lizard in the hands of those who opposed the listing. 

Mowad had told internal investigators that the federally approved plan to conserve habitat for the reptile through voluntary pacts between the state and landowners was not legal, verifiable or enforceable under the Endangered Species Act.

Oh, but wait, it gets better. 

He has civil service protection, so he couldn't be fired. Instead, like a surplus Japanese salaryman, he got the risutora treatment:

Within three months, Mowad was removed from his job in Austin and transferred to regional offices in New Mexico, where he had no significant work to do, according to testimony by him and colleagues before a judge in a whistleblower case. The power play, he said, forced him to retire prematurely. 

Fish and Wildlife has denied the allegations, but the agency decided to settle with Mowad last October for an undisclosed amount in spite of historically long odds against federal employees winning such cases. ... 

(N)o phone, no computer and no housing awaited Mowad when he arrived in Albuquerque in October 2012. And there was no significant work. He helped put out cookies and drinks for a meeting and afterward collected comment cards from the attendees. 

With no end date for the assignment, Mowad filed a 19-page request for a federal investigation, alleging reprisal for his claims of scientific misconduct within the service.

Those claims of scientific misconduct? Mowad had gone to FWS' Inspector General after it signed off on the Combs plan. And, why did it do that, only a couple of years after Mowad had been named top biologist in Texas for the agency and hired for his specific skills?

Bigger backstory, involving financial/service favors ... and who knows what else.

First, the backstory to the lizard's needs.

It was first identified for ESA listing in 1982. But, as with many other species, through a mix of understaffing and underfunding on one hand, and FWS foot-dragging on the other, it wasn't actually brought up for consideration until 2010. However, with the Permian Basin started to rebound from its latest, Great Recession-caused bust, that looked problematic.

Our story picks up again:

The Fish and Wildlife Service needed to sign off on the Texas plan, and Mowad was asked to assign someone to review it. But Mowad's first two choices — two of his most experienced biologists — were rejected by the agency's deputy regional director, Joy Nicholopoulos, a scientist who led the Texas office before him. 

The third choice? 

(Mowad) asked if Nicholopoulos wanted a biologist named Allison Arnold to lead the review and was told that she did. 

Here’s the real backstory. 

Mowad said he would not assign her without being ordered. The biologists he offered "would just do the science, let the science take 'em where it takes 'em," he testified. But in addition to having less experience, Arnold was living rent-free in a Driftwood house owned by Nicholopoulos, leading him to question whether she had undue influence over the staffer.

Then, Nicholopoulos’ boss, Bemjamin Tuggle, who had touted Mowad’s hiring for the Texas spot, upped the political ante.

"There was no way we were going to list a lizard in the middle of oil country during an election year," Tuggle said.

That comment, although Tuggle (a Shrub Bush appointee to his position) later claimed he was joking, is what led Mowad to talk to Fish and Wildlife’s inspector general.

So, it's clear that FWS higher-ups, however high the chain of higher-ups goes past Tuggle, had the fix in. And, because of this financial/rental arrangement, they knew who to pick to sign off on Combs' plan.

The rest of the story is worth a read in itself. It discusses Mowad’s whistleblower hearing, including noting that federal employees rarely win them, but that FWS had a documented history of retaliation against employees like this.

It's also an illustration of the bad ethics there, vis-a-vis the rental situation. If anybody should have been disciplined by FWS, both Nicholopoulos and Arnold should have been suspended without pay.

 

OK, that's largely from back in 2015, but you need to know just how oily FWS is. 

 

Oily? Yes, literally, as in placed like Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, whoring themselves out to the oil business. That's part of why I said Fuck the USFWS a year ago.

 

Oily on the management side? Mowad is not the only person to face retaliation from USFWS management. More on that in this piece. 

 

FWS finally gave an Endangered Species Act listing to the lizard in 2024, relatively late in the Biden Administration, and possibly because they knew Trump 2.0 would kill it. 

 

It was a punch-pulling listing, anyway, as I noted at the time. Why? It did not list a critical habitat for the lizard. It's pretty basic that you need to say what habitat of an endangered species is most important to it, right?

 

Well, that's all academic now. Last week, which I didn't notice until this week, Fish and Wildlife officially did another political cave-in, in response to a suit by the oily Ken Paxton, and agreed to delist it again as part of settling the suit. 

 

Here's the official tanking language:

But the service now believes it made a "serious and fundamental" error by improperly assuming that habitat restoration could not occur, and by discounting experimental efforts that "showed promise," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Wednesday court filing accompanying the settlement. 

That error "led to an incomplete and potentially inaccurate assessment of the potential and ongoing conservation efforts in New Mexico and Texas," the Justice Department said.

What lies. 

 

Above all, how can you assume that habitat restoration could not occur when per your 2024 press release:

The designation of critical habitat was found to be prudent but not determinable at this time. The Service has up to one year from the time of listing to propose critical habitat.

You never determined critical habitat! And, per Center for Biological Diversity and others, you were likely playing a stall game there, too.

 

What liars. 

 

Lewis notes the push from this surely comes from above USFWS' head, as in somewhere inside, near the top, of the Department of the Interior. (Doug Burgum's been as bad a Trump-tard as any other Cabinet member.)

 

That said, somebody at USFWS, even if an Anon Y Mous, holds for public consumption that it made a "serious and fundamental" error. In other words, Interior may be leading the push, but it has flunkies at Fish and Wildlife. It did 15 years ago, when Mowad called bullshit on management. Even if the push for his risotura came from higher up in Interior, somebody still wanted to do that. Look at other FWS people who have faced revenge.

 

Lewis notes that an Undersecretary at Interior reviews critical habitat designations. Here's DOI on that, not on the big picture, but some specific issues. From the Dear Leader era, too, take note. Tis also true, but? In 2024, again, FWS never proposed anything. I presume then Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, from New Mexico, might know what the dunes sagebrush lizard is, even if 350 miles away from Laguna Pueblo.

 

That said, that top management at FWS proposed changes to the ESA cuz oil drilling late last year. 

 

And, not directed at Lyle, but at the general oversight. First, where's the Forest Service fit? Last I checked, it's not part of Interior.

 

A president with cojones would either make all of USFWS an individual stand-alone agency like EPA, or at least its core protective services, or else carve them out of FWS and add them to EPA.

 

Remember the timeline goes back to the 1980s. Democratic presidents since then include Clinton and Obama as well as Biden. It's amazing that Democratic presidents, or agencies under their control, can often wait until the last year of a presidential term to take action. Obama did this on increasing the pay cutoff for wage vs salary, and with an immediate near-doubling without phase-in, in 2016. It's like he figured it would be overturned anyway and he was being a pretendian. 

 

==

 

And, per the various rulemaking changes to the ESA, how semi-toothless is it anyway? I may have to write something just on that.

Paxton's impeachment lawyer endorses Talarico

Dan Cogdell, who also represented Kenny Boy in his criminal securities fraud case, has done the switcheroo, as detailed here by NOTUS. The nut grafs:

Dan Cogdell, a Houston-based defense lawyer who represented the Texas attorney general in both the impeachment trial and a long-running securities fraud case, told NOTUS in a statement that his former client “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas.” 

“And unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now,” Cogdell said.

OK, let's look at the first.

Ken Paxton wasn't a choir boy when you represented him, so why are you switching now? Technically, the switch isn't totally new; the story says Cogdell donated to Talarico in March after the Dem primary. (He could have donated to Paxton as well, of course, and did so last year.)

The Trib weighs in with local background. Among that is that Cogdell voted in the Dem primary in Harris County.

That said, it also notes Cogdell has represented the East Plano Islamic Center. So, he's a gun for hire in his past legal career.

Side note: "Big John" Cornyn, he of VD Hooks' onetime bromance at the Monthly, attacked EPIC in the past just like Paxton. 

Anyway, this is "nice," but no more than that, as far as Talarico's election campaign. 

John Cornyn: Walking self-dead

Adding to my John Cornyn postmortem roundup of a week ago?

Rather than joining the so-called "YOLO Caucus," theoretically being liberated, he sucked up to Trump and Trump's proxy, Senate GOP leadership, all last week. The stalled-out immigration enforcement bill is one example of that:

In all, eight Republicans voted for at least one Democratic amendment to the bill, including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who, like Cornyn, lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent last month. Also among the defectors were GOP senators facing tough reelection fights in November, like Sens. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska; and moderates including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. Cornyn never did.

"Big John."

Maybe "Micropenis John" is more like it? 

As I noted in that postmortem last week, the idea that Cornyn was ever that far off the Trump reservation was a laugh and this just confirms that. 

If that wasn't enough? HE confirmed that:

Those who have grouped him in with the YOLO Caucus need to “get a life,” he told CNN.

So, here in Tex-ass, no more suck-ups, unlike the Trib's that I noted last week. 

 

Iran, nukes, Trump, Bibi

Let's get to the nuttiest thing of the last 72 or so hours first.

That's Larry Johnson's claim Iran either has or is about to have a nuke. And note those two tense agreements, as I quote his first graf: 

Pepe Escobar and I received the following intelligence report last Thursday, which was produced by a knowledgeable source with access. I am not reproducing the entire report, but want to highlight the issue of whether or not Iran now has, or soon will have a nuke. Let me emphasize that I firmly support past US intel community assessments that Iran, until now, had no interest in obtaining a nuke.

Even Sy Hersh isn't claiming shit like that. 

Speaking of, as I said in restacking?

There’s a BIG difference between "has" and "may have" in the first graf on Iran and nuclear weapons. The rest of Johnson's piece smells highly breathless; at least as “breathless” as some of Sy Hersh’s writings here on Substack.

Yes.

Then, The Dissident linked to it in his own moderately breathless piece. 

I had a longer comment/restack on that, to which I added an additional note, only on the restack, referencing his response to my comment. Here you are:

There's a big difference between the header saying Iran "has developed a nuclear weapon" and the subhed saying "Iran MAY Now Actually Develop a Nuclear Weapon." BIG difference. 

Johnson at your link also tries to go both ways, using both "has" and "may have" in the first graf. 

The rest of Johnson's piece smells highly breathless; at least as “breathless” as some of Sy Hersh’s writings here on Substack. And, it's not the first breathless thing he's uttered here or on You Tube in recent weeks. Or in the past decade. 

As co-founder of VIPS, I believe he signed off on the majority report about the 2016 hacking that believed all the "Forensicator" bullshit and that helped goose the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Per the one comment, Dissident said he'd edited; you wanna tell Larry Johnson to edit as well? 

== 

The Dissident has since responded to the version of this that was a comment on his site. He further explained the editing while noting Johnson’s claim is “unconfirmed.” The reality is Johnson’s claim is almost certainly fact-free on Iran “May Actually Develop” and totally fact-free on “Has Developed” and there’s no need to have given him the time of day.

And, yes, Larry Johnson is a nutter.

So's Pepe Escobar.

Beyond what I said about Johnson in that note, he also appears to be playing footsie at times with John Helmer of borderline antisemitism fame and other things.

And, as briefly referenced in my response to The Dissident, per a full decade ago and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Johnson is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, the majority of whom, via Patrick Lawrence, signed off on the Forensicator bullshit, bullshit called out by Duncan Campbell, bullshit that helped goose the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, bullshit for which, AFAIK, Johnson remains unapologetic. Per his Wiki, that would not be the only shark-jumping for which he remains unapologetic.

And, the nutter photo? Of Johnson as defender of Free Dumb? From his website, where the photo's a clickable link to this Free Dumb defender event. James Webb is the closest thing to a non-nutter on non-Nat-Sec Nutsacks™stuff of the names I recognize or took time to google. Man, there's grifting there if they're charginpg $999 a pop and getting people to pay.

Thirty-six hours later, The Dissident checked in with people like Mearsheimer and found out for himself the non-proliferation portion of the facts, which I already knew. I didn't even bother with him, because I knew the nuke angle itself was silly. As John said, Russia and China are opposed to proliferation and Pakistan is not a friend of Iran. John didn't even bother mentioning North Korea. He did note that, also contra Johnson, the idea of exploding a single nuke is itself laughable. You just threw away your deterrent. 

There's at least one commenter still defending Johnson on The Dissident's follow-up.  Actually, several more than one. One got butt-hurt when I mentioned Johnson's backstory, then said it was above not only his knowledge level but his interest, then got butt-hurt over my nom de plume to boot. I said "got it on you not wanting to learn more" and "I'm crushed."

Contra other commenters there, Ted Postol actually said that Iran could level up its current enriched uranium to bombs-grade for 20-30 weapons in weeks. Personally, I think months is more likely, and I doubt that Iran would actually build out the two-state U235/U238 bomb he describes. (Think of a thermonuclear without the second, fusion, stage.)  Other commenters there engaging in a bit of hand-waving on that, too.

Also, re Postol, launching the old-tyme gun-mechanism bomb from a ballastic missile has never been tested. 

Also also, two months ago, he was saying 10-11, not 10-20. See here. That said, he blames Biden for not resuming Obama's deal after Trump 1.0 killed it. 

And, per Trump on Press the Meat and NBC's fact check June 7, it cites other unnamed experts as "months or possibly more than a year" on timetable of creating a nuke that would fit on a missile.

Finally, per this piece, there's rumors the Pakistani foreign minister has said something about an Iranian demonstration and more. That right there stresses the need for accurate information, and it also indicates where Johnson's source is. Some blabber either at mid-grade in the ISI, or in some Western intelligence service monitoring the ISI, probably got some info 24 hours early. Besides, the ACTUAL rumor was that Pakistan's foreign minister shared info about Iran's nuke program in general.

==

Trump and Bibi?

Mearsheimer, June 2, appeared to halfway believe there was some semi-existential break between the two, after Trump gave Netanyahu an F-bomb yelling and told him not to attack Beirut.

Reality? Everybody from Zionist Trump-whisperer Barak Ravid on Axios to PBS have reported that yes, this happens but that both say it's no big deal.

For that matter, what if this was some sort of performance theater? 

Boy did I find the nutter on Substack

Samuel Abraham? Muted and will be blocked. A true nutter, this is what he had to say in response to my comment on The Dissident's piece about Tulsi Gabbard when I said Hindutva-fascism WAS the one constant bright line, per my old piece here.

Anyway, here he is 

Tulsi was actually a serving CIA psyop officer all the time on the radicalise Hinduism project run by CIA. The CIA Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation created the cult led by a Bengali Shudra with a double ended radicalise and debauch both the west and India aim. These Bengali Shudras ran the humungous Tantrik death destruction debauch drugs cult that ritually sacrificed 2 million human beings while the British were watching and then the same British put them down only to weaponise the Shudra Tantrik gurus as world teachers or Vishwagurus (which is a meme in India now) worldwide to bring Blavatsky Besant and Baileys end of the world total inversion of good and bad and morality and ethics with mass slavery age or NWO. The CIA using the ISI created and funded the University of Jihad in Pakistan to punish the Pashtun tribes for being the rare Indic people unbending to foreign rule like the Punjabis. When you see these malaria fever radicalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan among the Pashtuns it was created using Islamic textbooks financed by the CIA and authored by a white American professor at the University of Nebraska - not a Muslim. These CIA psyop officers are in the business of death destruction and mass deception.

Can't even try to argue with that. 

Related? This note:

The Hindu fundamentalist RSS and Muslim fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood were created by the same super witch crooked genius - Helena Blavatsky who literally had roaring adulterous wild sex with the founders of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the progenitor of the Hindu fascist RSS. Haha! -śome wild ass's orgasm they had! 

The world is a small place - at least everything including Nazism and Fascism started inside the venomous viper pits between the legs of Helena Blavatsky and her ideological sister Annie Besant. Lucifer does Lucifers things. Nobody fucks the devil for fun!

Wowza. 

But, he's not just calling out Theosophy. 

There's esoteric Nazi conspiracy theories, in another note of his: 

Hitler did not write most of his speeches or a word of the Mein Kampf - they were written by the Jesuit "priest" Stempfle. Neither did Marx write a word of the Communist Manifesto - it was written by a committee under the Jesuit "priest" Jan Paul Beckx. Why two mutually exclusive ideologies by the same papal order? The same reason why there is a left and a right in any "democracy" (but not meritocracy). The thesis antithesis = synthesis Pharaonic system of civilisation management called Hermetic Kabbala simply got too murderous and genocidal.

And, he follows Paul Thacker and other nutters, like a guy claiming an assassination conspiracy theory about John Lennon. 

I just had to separate this from my normal new list of Substack blocks. 

Trump's school privatization tax-credit voucher is flying under the radar

Shock me that Texas has opted in to this system, that like the current state voucher system, won't directly fund private schools but will instead fund a disbursement system.

There's plenty of room for grift, it should be obvious. That's on top of the grift that Strangeabbott's voucher system already incentivizes.

Then, per the story, there's the question about how declining enrollment will damage public schools. This is the crux of the potential problem: 

At the school-district level, however, the potential budget damage could be severe. Every student who leaves their local public school to take a subsidized private education will take their state funding away with them. School budgets are cumbersome to change, with many fixed costs, such as buildings and personnel. Even if the number of students at public schools drops suddenly due to Trump’s private school subsidy—along with the funding that accompanies them—it will take time for schools’ financial liabilities to go down accordingly. Principals and teachers get the same salary whether their school has 500 students or 300; buses cost the same whether they transport 100 students or 50; furnaces cost the same whether they warm 1,000 students or 300.

And, here in Tex-ass, that's Katy bar the door time for a TEA takeover. (The article is way out of date on staunch conservatives opposing state level vouchers, linking to a 2023 Trib piece.) The author is correct that rural schools will be hardest hit by this, as with the state voucher system.

NOT mentioned by Slate is another potential problem. What if a lot of people opt for the Trump voucher system but not a lot of new kids go to private schools? That's a lot of money washing around these distribution companies. Plenty of chance for yet more grifting and corruption.