The Bush administration opened up undeveloped areas of the largest U.S. national forest to logging on Tuesday, scrapping a Clinton-era rule aimed at protecting the wilderness.
The U.S. Forest Service announced that it will exempt the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska from a national rule prohibiting timber cutting in roadless areas. The decision means about 300,000 acres of dense, old-growth rain forest will be available for logging.
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Environmentalists portrayed the policy change as a violation of public trust. They said the road-building likely to accompany the new logging could affect 2.5 million acres of the forest.
"The Bush administration has turned its back on the public, good science and the law in its effort to clearcut the Tongass," Tom Waldo, a Juneau-based attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said in a news release.
"This is obviously a Christmas present from the Bush administration to the timber industry, which wants the right to clearcut in America's greatest temperate rainforest."
Here's a picture of the area, and Earthjustice's coverage of the administration's wilderness bushwhacking on behalf of the timber industry.
See also this New York Times editorial blasting the move as a "holiday gift to Senator Ted Stevens and Gov. Frank Murkowski, both of whom have lobbied for the resumption of the clear-cutting that has already stripped the nation's only temperate rain forest of a half million acres of old-growth trees."
There is not a single issue on which these people can make the right decision untainted by political posturing. Like King Midas in reverse — everything they touch, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the federal budget to energy and environmental policy, turns to shit.
During an April 2001 speech, Harry C. Stonecipher, then the president of Boeing Co. and now its chief executive, touted the "partnership" he'd helped to set up with the Air Force.
Stonecipher singled out for praise Darleen Druyun, then the Air Force's second-ranking acquisition official, who'd described herself as the "godmother" of Boeing's C-17 cargo plane.
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In his first month as chief executive, Stonecipher is trying to recover after two top Boeing executives - his predecessor, Philip M. Condit, and the chief financial officer, Michael M. Sears - left amid allegations that Druyun was recruited for a job as she negotiated a $21 billion contract for airborne tankers.
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Stonecipher, 67, also must contend with a separate Justice Department investigation into Boeing's possession of thousands of pages of proprietary Lockheed Martin Corp. documents that might have helped Boeing to win rocket-launch bidding while he was president in 1998.
The Air Force stripped Boeing of $1 billion in business after an inquiry in July, and the military will incur $223 million in extra costs as a result because it shifted launches to Lockheed Martin. The Air Force won't try to recover the money, a spokeswoman said.
What the fuck is wrong with the Air Force? I know $223 million is just lunch money for a crooked Air Force procurement officer and her new employer — but, jeez, don't appearances even count anymore?
Enron started the corporate crime cavalcade and for many people remains the most-identifiable image of businesses run amok. Thus, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the Enron debacle, seem like natural candidates to headline the feds' Most Wanted list of corporate criminals. They even star as ace and king of spades, respectively, in a Wall Street's Most Wanted card deck. But Lay, Enron's former CEO, and Skilling, its former president, have not been indicted.
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Corporate trials on the docket
Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco), continuing, state court, New York
Martha Stewart, Jan. 20, federal court, New York
Scott Sullivan (WorldCom), Feb. 2, federal court, New York
John Rigas and sons (Adelphia), Feb. 9, federal court, New York
Lea Fastow (Enron), Feb. 11, federal court, Houston
Frank Quattrone (CSFB), March 22, federal court, New York
Andrew Fastow (Enron), April 20, federal court, Houston
Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), spring, state court, Oklahoma
Richard Scrushy (HealthSouth), no date set, federal court, Birmingham, Ala.
That's a lot of corporate misbehavior to hit the news during primary season.
Some of them are major Bush fundraisers (Lay and the Gang of Enron) and some are Bush scapegoats (Martha Stewart). We'll be doing our part to keep the story of these thieving felons — and the proportionality of their treatment relative to the favor they enjoy within the Bush administration — front and center.
The Bush administration released a pair of much-awaited reports on the quality of American health care, after extensive revisions that made the findings more upbeat than some experts thought justified.
The two studies, produced by a research arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, went through numerous drafts and were exhaustively reviewed within HHS, officials said.
In several cases, language included in drafts prepared this summer was toned down, emphasizing improvements or challenges rather than problems that afflict the quality of care in public and private health systems in the U.S.
For example, early versions of the National Healthcare Quality report warned that the U.S. health system "is not capable" of preventing or managing diabetes, while the final report said the health system "must respond in order to prevent and manage" the disease. Both versions of the report acknowledged diabetes as a growing problem in the U.S.
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Some outside health-care advocates suggested that the two studies were toned down and delayed until after the Medicare overhaul and prescription-drug bill passed Congress for fear Democrats might seize on the reports to press for greater funding for quality initiatives, possibly complicating Republican efforts to pass the bill.
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The reports' tone differs markedly from several reports on quality issued over the past few years by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, which has spoken of a "quality chasm" that exists between everyday care and so-called best practice. The tone also differs from private research reports, such as that by a Rand Corp. researcher in the New England Journal of Medicine this June, which said Americans got, on average, 54% of recommended care, posing "serious threats to the health of the American public."
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Several health advocacy groups immediately attacked the tone of the reports. "The report is strikingly different in tone from the administration's approach to quality over the last three years," said David Schulke, executive vice president of the American Health Quality Association, a group representing health professionals. "This looks almost as if written by somebody else. The numbers are there, but the text is oddly cheery about some frightening statistics."
Mr. Schulke said the report trumpeted the fact that 69% of heart-attack patients get beta blocker drugs upon admission to the hospital, as opposed to emphasizing that more than 30% don't get the beneficial drugs even though beta blockers have been on the market since the 1960s. "To not mention that fully 30% don't get that life-saving therapy leaps off the page as an omission," Mr. Schulke said, adding that he was puzzled by the tone of the reports, since he considers Dr. Clancy and Secretary Thompson to be acutely aware of safety and quality problems in the U.S. health system.
"Is not capable" describes a real truth; "must respond in order to prevent and manage" avoids the real truth and instead describes a potentiality.
Grades of 69 (percent of heart-attack beta blocker recipients) and 54 (percent of Americans receiving recommended care) were considered failing grades back when I went to school, but that was long before the advent of Leave-No-HMO-Behind Medicare legislation and healthcare CEO protectionism.
The government on Sunday raised the national threat level to orange, indicating a high risk of terrorist attack, and said threat indicators are "perhaps greater now than at any point" since Sept. 11, 2001, with strikes possible during the holidays.
Americans were promised "extensive and considerable protections" around the country and told to stick to their travel plans despite intelligence indicating the al Qaeda terrorist network is seeking again to use planes as weapons and exploit suspected weakness in U.S. aviation security.
Some of the intelligence information gathered in the past few days suggests that "extremists abroad" are anticipating attacks that will rival or exceed the scope of those of Sept. 11, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said.
He also said officials did not see a connection between last weekend's capture of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the heightened security alert.
Orange is the color of being greeted as liberators.
