Absurdicus makes a plea

Our friend Absurdicus is back with a comment on the Big Blue Lie Machine Post. It is too long to repeat here and keep to our short post format, so we will pick and choose:

Apparently my entire argument is lost because of my mistake of elevation. God forbid I would assume elevation above the earth was not normalized to elevation above ground level.

Go use Google Earth now. You will find it to be addictive. Your real mistake was to respond to what we wrote without even looking at what we were writing about. Had you done that you would have had to assume nothing.

Absurdicus is now the first individual that we know of to admit that the Roan Plateau is no Garden of Eden, no pristine untouched land worthy of saving because of its uniqueness:

Despite my basic math mistake, the argument that at 1000 feet a piece of land should be drilled on just because it doesn't look "pretty" is still my argument. Please address my point, that just because it looks ugly at any distance it should be drilled and drunk up like a milkshake.

Frankly, we didn't know that was your argument.

No one, not Bill Ritter, not John Salazar, not Ken Salazar, not the Sierra Club, not Trout Unlimited, not the Wilderness Society, not the Denver Post, not the Rocky Mountain News, and especially not Mark Udall nor any other individual or organization involved with pushing the environmental agenda has had the intellectual honesty to make that argument.

Instead, they use words and photographs intended to fool the public into believing that the land is something it is not. We never would have thought to look at the land using Google Earth but for the obviously deceptive video ad that we wrote about in Looking More Closely at The Udall Commercial - Part 3. We've driven through that part of Colorado many times and it is a lot of things, but it is not wet.

Absurdicus, we don't know how to respond to your argument. It is one that needs to be had in an honest way by the politicians who represent us, unencumbered by the false propaganda that is pumped out daily.

Instead, we have the politicians like Mark Udall and Bill Ritter as well as the newspaper editorial boards who should be demanding and engaging in an honest discussion unwilling to do so out of fear that they would lose in that environment. There can't be another reason.

The politicians spend their time pushing the false propaganda and taking big campaign donations from the organizations which generate it. The organizations collect big donations for supposedly "protecting the environment" when they are often doing no such thing.

There will never be a response to your argument from us or anyone else because none on your side, probably including you, will allow it to be held under conditions we could respect.

Roadless "Backsliding"

Recall that yesterday we commented that Taylor West gave Politicker a laundry list of the reasons that Mark Udall just couldn't be concerned about left wing attacks on military recruiters in Berkeley and Times Square:

"Mark Udall believes Congress has much more important work to do – on everything from the lagging economy, to skyrocketing oil prices, to getting our kids covered with health care, to ending the war in Iraq in a responsible way – than micromanaging the budgets of cities for the sake of political gamesmanship," [ Taylor ] West said in the statement.

What is the biggest potential problem facing Colorado, and is it on this list? How about 1.5 million acres of dead and dying trees? If those trees catch fire, mountain homes and towns could burn, the watershed would be badly damaged, if not destroyed, tourism would die, and hunting and fishing ruined for our lifetime.

Why is that problem not on the list? Did Taylor West just forget, or is her boss, Mark Udall, telling her to ignore it? To fix the problem, to the degree that it can be fixed would require building forest roads to allow fire breaks to be built.

They are apparently doing that in Idaho but the environmentalists are none too happy:

“Back off. Just drop the whole mess,” says Craig Gehrke, regional director of The Wilderness Society in Idaho. “Just stick with the 2001 rule. This whole fight for roadless areas is needless.”

Idaho’s petition cuts out about 500,000 roadless acres, but the state promised to keep protections in place for the remainder of 9 million acres. [ Craig ] Gehrke worries wildfire provisions weaken the proposal, though, by giving the state more “wiggle room” to blaze roads.

“They’re backsliding on it,” he says.

Idaho is trying to do the smart thing, but the environmentalists on Bill Ritter's staff are trying to keep Colorado roadless and vulnerable:

A similar battle is taking place in Colorado. Environmentalists are pressing [ Bill ] Ritter, who has spoken in favor of roadless protections, to stick with the federal rule...

Colorado’s former Gov. Bill Owens, R, submitted a roadless plan that was praised for protecting most areas. Environmentalists blasted his successor, Bill Ritter, D, though, accusing him of weakening roadless protections when he decided to largely stick with that plan...

And, where is Mark Udall on this issue. He opposes roads, and collects hefty donations from roadless advocates. Care to guess why Taylor West left this Colorado centic issue off of the list of important things that Congress had to do?

An Ignorant Denver Post Editorial

The Denver Post published an amazingly ignorant editorial today that it called "With Friends Like These, The West Doesn't Need Enemies."

The bark beetle tree kill in Colorado has been historic in magnitude. With all this tinder lying around on federal land, you might think the government would be redoubling efforts to haul out dead trees, make the forests healthy and support fire management activities.

Unfortunately, that's not the reality reflected in President Bush's budget request for 2009.

His budget actually cuts funding by 11.2 percent for the region of the Forest Service that includes Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.

To hear the Denver Post tell it, this is all President Bush's fault. It conveniently leaves out the fact that President Bush or his successor could direct the entire Federal budget toward getting rid of the dead trees and not a single tree would be removed.

Why? The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and their congressional toadies like Mark Udall, Ken Salazar, and John Salazar have laws in place which prevent the building of forest roads necessary to do the work.

If the Denver Post did a Lexus-Nexus search, it would discover that the victims who lost their homes in last summer's Lake Tahoe fire were blaming the Sierra Club for going to court to stop the construction of forest roads. The roads were needed for the thinning that would have saved their homes and at least one life. The problem wasn't a lack of Federal funding. It was a lack of common sense by the Mark Udall's of the congress.

Mark Udall not only doesn't want new roads to be built, he wants existing roads closed. In 2007 he proposed an amendment to do just that.

Yes, the west has friends that it can do without. Ken Salazar, Mark Udall, and John Salazar along with their eco terrorist sponsors in the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society are much higher on that list than President Bush or his successor, Republican or Democrat ever can be.

Wake up, Denver Post, and put some pressure on these turkeys. Your editorial was a cheap shot that gives the real culprits a free pass. It was pure ignorance.

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Not Clear Cutting Forests

No, this isn't a proposal for slap-dash clear cutting of forests.

One of the things that is so frustrating about watching Mark Udall and his environmentalist extremist allies in the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society is their refusal to do any kind of cost-benefit analysis on the things they propose.

We are reminded of this by a Walter E. Williams essay on Costs vs. Benefits that never mentions the word "environment" or "global warming." Instead, it tries to teach the basic concepts of cost benefit analysis:

If we look to benefits only, we'll do darn near anything because there's always a benefit. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that there were 43,443 highway fatalities in 2005. If we had a maximum speed law of 15 mph, the death toll wouldn't be nearly as high, probably not even as high as 500. You say, "Williams, that's a crazy idea!" You're right, but let's not call it crazy; it's more accurate to say: saving some 43,000 lives aren't worth the cost and inconvenience of a 15 mph speed limit.

Now, take Mark Udall's support of roadless wilderness.

What is the benefit? It is primarily aesthetic. If there are no roads, there can be no lumbering. If there is no lumbering, there can not be ugly areas of clear cutting. Yes, clear cutting is ugly but it can lead to healthier forests that are less likely to burn. Which is uglier, a 60,000 acre burned forest or a few 300 acre clear cuts? Which is uglier, a 600,000 acre fire that burned so hot that it fused the soil or a few roads that allow thinning and even clear cutting over a few thousand acres?

What is the cost of these aesthetic benefits? Higher lumber prices, lost jobs, and destroyed local economies that then have to be subsidized by either the Federal or state government. Who pays those costs? It is almost never the people who benefit. Higher lumber prices are a well disguised regressive tax on the poor whose housing costs are forced up to acommodate the more wealthy population's desire for aesthetics. Yes, the wealthy pay more taxes, but their costs never match the hardship their policies impose on others.

A secret cost, again never paid by those who benefit, or admitted by politicians like Mark Udall is the cost in lives expended fighting forest fires that could have been contained by well planned clear cut fire breaks.

Here in Colorado, the costs are enormous. We have 1.5 million acres of lodge pole pine forests that are infected with the pine bark beetle, with projections that by 2012 every mature lodge pole pine in the state will be dead. This is the direct cost of Mark Udall's no roads-no thinning policy, but he is not paying the cost. Instead, he is reaping huge donations from the west coast "environmentalists" who won't be coming to Colorado to look at their handiwork.

Where Is Mark Udall's Common Sense and Compassion?

It used to be the environmental organizations and their toadies like Mark Udall who accused the timber industry of slash and burn tactics against our forests.

Now, they are being accused of slash and burn tactics against the economies of areas which used to rely on the timber industry and are now being asked to live off tourism revenues in burned out areas that no one wants to visit.

This is one of a series of articles and essays we are bringing forward to show just how dangerous, ruthless, and callous the environmental extremists like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and their congressional allies like Mark Udall and John Salazar have become. What is happening in Oregon will happen here in Colorado.

Environmental groups and their allies [ like Mark Udall ] argue that tourism can take the place of the millions of lost timber dollars and revenues from these O&C public lands. But tourism jobs and revenues often simply cannot replace the family-wage jobs and tax revenues that have historically come from timber production on these lands...

Environmental groups have successfully fought efforts to salvage and replant burned areas in Oregon, even when it would benefit forest health. Tourists are not interested in seeing dead, dying and bug infested forests.

The author of this article can only be described as bitter toward the "environmentalist extremists." Before Mark Udall tries to get himself elected to the US Senate, he needs to explain how it is good public policy to allow well paid lawyers and environmental groups to destroy people's livlihoods when they don't pay taxes in the state they are laying waste to.

Wealthy, tax-exempt groups such as the Wilderness Society also work to restrict public access to public lands like the O&C Lands. They work to prohibit the construction of roads into public areas for recreational or economic use. To the Wilderness Society and its executives, and other wealthy groups such as the Sierra Club, the public should be excluded from public lands and those areas shouldn’t be a tax base for local Oregon counties. Ironically, recreationists like hikers and fishermen often access public areas on old logging roads, built by those in the wood products industry.

Mark Udall is the Worst Kind of Rubber Stamp

We saw a Google Digg Alert claiming that Mark Udall is not a rubber stamp. That sounds really good because voters shouldn't want their politicians to be rubber stamps. Bob Schaffer certainly wasn't a rubber stamp when he was in congress.

The problem is that Mark Udall is a rubber stamp for the environmentalist extremist movement.

We have a growing crisis in Colorado with our mega acres of dead trees. Common sense says that we should be clear cutting fire breaks to keep the whole state from going up at once.

The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club say that we shouldn't. Burn, Colorado Burn, is their mantra. Mark Udall is a rubber stamp for this insane position. Mark these words: Mark Udall's position will cost fire fighters lives.

Does he care? Not that we can tell.

Mark Udall Must Have Been Last In Line For Brains

It took the Wilderness Society less than 24 hours to attack Mark Udall's legislation, even while admitting that they hadn't read it:

Such waivers, known as categorical exclusions, have been misused in the past for widespread tree cutting, said Michael Francis, director of the national forest program for the Wilderness Society.

But isn't that the point? We want the dead trees cut down now, not after years of courtroom wrangling.

It turns out that Mark Udall remains intent on preventing the establishment of clear cut fire breaks. He told the Wilderness Society:

"These lands that fit in the categorical-exclusion category have to be very close to a community, and they have to be part of a community's wildfire-protection plan," Udall said.

The Udall bill allows the exclusions for land within 1.5 miles of an affected area. The Wilderness Society supports only a half-mile limit, Francis said.

"When you start going out, you're not getting any protection, and you're spending an awful lot of the taxpayers' money," Francis said.

We think that a failure to have clear cut fire breaks at the Hayman fire area has cost the taxpayers in excess of a quarter of a billion dollars so far. Michael Francis has no interest in protecting the taxpayers when he can protect dead trees by claiming to protect the taxpayers.

Udall admits that his bill won't allow for either fire breaks more than 7000 feet from a community or the roads that would support them:

The bill keeps in place protections for land in wilderness areas, where new roads can't be built or where the land is fragile, Udall said.

Colorado voters will be well rid of Mark Udall. He totally lacks common sense. Fragile land that is encrusted by a hot forest fire doesn't support any kind of life. Ask the folks who live near the Hayman burn area.