[OESY]

Mr. Daschle would have more credibility if he hadn't pulled this political smokeout before. Last year he won points with South Dakota voters by inserting a provision into a spending bill that allowed for forest cleanup in his own state. He then quietly squashed similar provisions for the rest of the country as a private little favor to the Sierra Club.

Also searing.

[RonF]

Massive, out of control forest fires are not prevented by cutting down the healthiest living trees in a forest. Such fires are prevented by first allowing smaller fires to occur on a natural basis. Second, if a lack of such policy leads to excessive fuel buildup, catastrophic fires are prevented by picking up the dead wood that has fallen due to disease, high winds, natural death, etc. Unfortunately, such wood is often not usable for lumber, and thus removing it is unattractive to the lumber companies (for whom this legislation is written). And when trees are lumbered, the branches are removed from the trunks so that the trunks can be stacked on trucks and removed. These branches, called "slash", are often not cleaned up particularly well, which actually ADDS to the fire risk.

The endpoint is that the healthy trees are removed, the fuel overburden is unabated, and fire still sweeps through the forest. This time, though, there's fewer healthy trees left to repopulate the forest, as the lumbering companies have removed them. Since the lumber companies only take certain species of trees, the balance of species in the resultant forest is out of whack and they are less likely to reforest properly and provide the same habitat as they once did. "Healthy Forests" is a rhetorical deception; it will in fact leave us with no such thing.

Now, if you want to see how a problem like this should actually be handled, go to the Superior National Forest web site. This is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where a huge storm in 1999 blew over hundreds of thousands of acres of trees at once. Fearful that all that dead wood would burn up and totally destroy the entire area (heavily used by canoeists, fishermen, and others for recreation), numerous alternatives were considered. Logging the downed trees was considered but eventually found unattractive; conventional logging would require building roads thoughout the entire area, destroying the wilderness character, and helicopter logging was uneconomic. Instead, the area was divided up into sections, and the overburden is being burned off section by section in controlled fashion.

This would work fine for the forests in California, Arizona, etc., as well. But getting rid of the fuel overburden in those forests, which is what causes the fire risk, is not the priority of the Bush administration. Allowing lumbering companies to cherry-pick the best healthy trees, which does nothing to reduce the fire risk, is.

[Diogenesis]

[TroutStalker]

BTTT

[farmfriend]

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[Tuscaloosa Goldfinch]

If Republicans wanted to be as cynical, they'd let Mr. Daschle kill the bill and blame him for it. By just about every expert calculation, fire season will be in full burn about a month before next year's Senate elections.

I'm glad we aren't as cynical. All those people lost their homes, and some lost their lives. And their blood is on the hands of the environmentalists and their enablers.

[The Westerner]

This makes me SICK! Those freaking pyromaniac greenies (should be called blackies)...argh!

[Avoiding_Sulla]

The story of its derailment is one of Senate Democrats playing a double game -- with constituents who favor action on the fires on the one hand, and extreme green groups who pay election bills on the other.

Please note, folks, the underlined phrase. Ever since Paul Gigot became editorial director of the Wall Street Journal, taking over from the incomparable Robert Bartley, you can expect to see cutsey little phrases like that.

There is little doubt that the phrase is correct.

But just where is the most important "conservative" mainstream newspaper helping expose those playing this rotten, fuel providing, little game?

• What are the names of these extreme green groups who pay election bills?
• Why do they still have 501(C)3 tax exemptions?
• Who are their largest contributers to these extreme green groups?

  So many important questions, and the most important serious newspaper in the country has no front page exposure, explosive or otherwise, of these unholy alliances? Or has Mr. Gigot somehow not gotten around to discussing his insinuations it with the newsroom?

  Will somebody please remind me why the Wall Street Journal is a conservative icon? I would really like to know. They seem to be long on irritating us by telling us of the political shenanigans going on in the Senate but short on fingering the culprits (they imply they know who) pay the freight for the obvious obstruction. This all the while forests are placed off-limits, and decay and burn. And when deaths occur because the political class wants to make respective hay through delaying tactics, the deaths are tantamount to criminal manslaughter if not murder.

RonDog, you are free to link and excerpt this little rant of mine to your new thread. The main thread article above is too important relative to our complaints for me to insert this at your thread. So bring this to the attention of your new "friend," Mr. Block.

Look. He's of the hostile-to-us-non-elites TV medium.
By what magic do you suppose such a creature is about to be allowed to provide a different view of us?
Do you really think this man is one of a crew of new brooms who will clean up the seemingly-everyday-more-disreputable world of TV news and change it into even a fair minded medium, let alone a conservative ally?
How can you really think he's really your friend or capable of being our future friend if when even the WSJ can't or won't inform us with enough information that would provide us the means to demand that government financially ruin these miscreants and thereby defund their political stooges?

You have even claimed that Hugh Hewitt would be interested in Carry_okie's ideas. Yet that man has never referenced any of C_O's wonderful ideas, or hinted at even a single of his links between enviro-groups and their questionable government and business cronies and funders of those groups. Hewitt hasn't done it anymore than has Paul Gigot with extreme green groups, which is so typical of his cutsey little phrases that hint but don't reveal.

This is the kind of thing that makes me question the judgment of any person at FR who thinks any broadcast media, even that of "conxervative" talkshow hosts, are anywhere as really concerned as the average FReeper with the dirty dealings that go on at the higher, money-manipulating levels of our society.

That level, in case you haven't figured it out, includes those who pay talkshow hosts and TV media commentators and pundits who get multi-million dollar bookdeals.

And you know I have good reason for my skepticism when even the venerable WSJ can't be counted on to deliver all the facts we need to know.