WTH?  What’s next?

Culled out: Obama moving to limit fishing access

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

This is an old strategy that was at the heart of the old Soviet system: solicit input, ignore it, impose whatever it was you were planning to do in the first place. (Since you DID solicity “input”, it is considered a “democratic” process…the people did get their say, not that it was really worth anything!)

There’s a precedent for this process:

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

There is more detail in the article, and others linked from it, on what’s going on…with the usual suspects…enviro special interest groups with their collective noses up the backside of the bureaucrats who will be generating the executive order Imperial Decree that the “Dear Leader” eventually signs.

Typical progressive arrogant elitism once again. B.O. really has THAT routine down pat!