Whose woods these are I think I know. Tree-huggers have an ever-changing set of tree-owners to contend with (WSJ):

Private partnerships, real-estate investment trusts and other financial investors are snapping up millions of acres of forest land -- not just in America but in New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil and beyond. They are buying from giant paper companies such as International Paper Co., which are under pressure from restless shareholders to boost their profits by cashing in on forest land that for decades has just sat there.

The result is an enormous land transfer now under way. The paper companies long were the nation's largest private owners of large tracts of standing timber. "For 100 years, the industrial users owned this land. A 1980 map of landowners in Maine would be almost the same as the 1900 map," says William Ginn, an official of the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group.

Now the national map changes almost monthly. It's a phenomenon that has financial ramifications as well as environmental ones, such as the possibility that financial investors who get in a bind might over-log or overdevelop the land.

Today, nearly $30 billion of American forest land is in the hands of financial investors, according to Hancock Timber Resource Group, a large timberland investment manager. That's six times what such investors' timberland holdings were in 1994, Hancock Timber estimates. And these investors have poured billions of dollars more into forests abroad.

Western society, which irrationally prides itself on rationality, consistently puts its fate in the hands of financial speculators whose interests are counter-societal and extremely narrow.

Communism failed and capitalism will too, but for totally different reasons. Capitalistic economies of scale are rapidly becoming tyrranies. We need a new economic system that rewards the work and innovation of individuals and groups over the legal entitlements of fictitious entities like corporations.

{ 8:39 AM }

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What do you think of Enron? The long, slow march to the Enron trial begins (Carrie Johnson, WaPo):

This week, pale brown envelopes will appear in the mailboxes of 400 Texans, containing a juror questionnaire and marking the beginning of a race for control of the courtroom and public opinion in a trial that defines an era of corporate wrongdoing.

Inside each envelope is a document that could be key to the outcome of the fraud trial of former Enron Corp. leaders Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, who will stand trial in January with former accounting chief Richard A. Causey on charges that they conspired to mislead the public about the financial health of Enron, once ranked as the country's seventh-biggest publicly traded company.

Enron's 2001 collapse was the first in a series of corporate disasters that resulted in record-breaking bankruptcies, pinstriped perp walks and lost investor confidence. It wreaked havoc in Houston and beyond, costing thousands of employees and investors their retirement savings. The Justice Department created a special prosecutorial task force to deal with the fallout after the entire Houston U.S. attorney's office removed itself from the investigation because so many of its lawyers had financial or family ties to the company.

How a Texas jury assesses the evidence against Enron's former leaders will determine its answers to key questions, including just how much executives are expected to know about their company's finances -- and whether the final chapter of an era of financial scandals will close with a bang or a whimper.

Jury selection is a key step for both sides as they try to bend the process in their favor. "Attitudes toward what jurors regard as corporate greed have an impact on the way they hear evidence," said George Washington University law professor and former prosecutor Stephen A. Saltzburg.

Defense lawyers already have gained one advantage by putting more than four years between the bankruptcy and the trial, scheduled to begin with jury selection Jan. 17. But public opinion suggests that the memory of corporate scandals has not faded. Almost half of respondents to a Pew Research Center poll last month said they felt unfavorably toward U.S. companies -- a 20-point rise from March 2001, nine months before Enron filed for bankruptcy protection.

What's significant about the four years that occurred between the bankruptcy and the trial? It happens to be the length of a presidential term, the same one that was bought with the generous assistance of Enron.

As Patrick Fitzgerald pointed out in presenting the initial results of his grand jury investigation, we could have been here a year sooner if we hadn't been stymied. Yesterday Harry Reid made the same argument with his closed session of the Senate to provoke the similarly stymied pre-war intelligence investigation. That too could have happened a year ago.

Everything that exposes the necrotic gangrene of this administration was timed to hit the air this year and not last year. Thanks for your vigilance, CBS, The New York Times, and the whole press corps!

{ 9:25 AM }

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Cheney lied. 1,590 died. Cryptome lays out a brilliant photographic timeline, coordinating the exact number of day-by-day US military deaths to significant events in the Fitzgerald grand jury investigation.

{ 12:52 PM }

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God 1, Baptists 0. See what happens when you put faith above science:

A pastor in Texas has been killed by an electric shock after grabbing a microphone while performing a baptism in water.

The Rev Kyle Lake, 33, was partly submerged at University Baptist Church in Waco — only 14 miles from President Bush’s Crawford ranch — while baptising a woman in front of 800 people. He reached out to adjust a microphone when he was killed.

The church, co-founded by David Crowder, one of the biggest “rock stars” of Christian music, is popular with students from nearby Baylor University, the oldest higher-education institution in Texas and the largest Baptist university in the world.

“He was grabbing the microphone so everyone could hear,” Jamie Dudley, a church business administrator, said. “It’s the only way you can be loud enough.”

Doctors in the congregation rushed to help Mr Lake, who collapsed after being struck by the fatal jolt of electricity. An emergency medical crew tried to revive him. He was taken by ambulance to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Centre, where he was pronounced dead.

One of Kyle's followers said, “I think we all gravitated to him because he looked cooler than all of us, but he was really smart."

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

{ 10:47 AM }

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An unpleasant aftertaste. Supreme Court neo-nominee Samuel Alito doesn't like water (WSJ):

One potentially hot-button case was a 2001 opinion joined by Judge Alito that set aside Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up ammonia from a fertilizer plant that polluted drinking-water wells in Lansing, Mich. In that case, the majority found the agency lacked a "rational basis" for the remediation it required of W.R. Grace & Co., the fertilizer-plant operator.

A dissenting judge wrote that while EPA's order may have suffered from "poor draftsmanship,' judges are not "expert environmental toxicologists" and should defer to the agency. Yesterday, the advocacy group Earthjustice issued a statement claiming Judge Alito repeatedly has sought to scale back congressional power "to enact laws that protect our health and environment."

No matter how thrillingly pro-business Alito's record is to the Bush base, they will never be able to turn him into anything but Bush's second choice. The untethered Bush selected his sycophantic nanny Harriet Miers to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat. It was only when fanatical Christians put Bush's thumbs in the screws that they got their dream date: Scalito.

Incompetence is a form of pollution, and with Bush we get it both ways: in the water and in the White House. And therein lies the problem of Republicans — even when his followers come to sip from the fountain of Bush, there will always be ammonia in the water.

UPDATE: A side note about ethnicity. I too am Italian-American, and dispute the GOP talking point that the term "Scalito" is an anti-Italian-American slur. It isn't. It is a purely anti-conservative slur. Italian-Americans didn't put George W Bush in the White House in 2000 — Scalia did.

Conversely, the nomination of Scalito, given his lack of a uterus, could be viewed as a slur against American women.

{ 9:21 AM }

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Harriet Miers, April Foley, and other Bush dates. I never thought I'd be quoting Robert Novak:

At the same time Miers was twisting in the wind, Bush created a parallel situation at the Export-Import Bank that is the talk of the bureaucracy and Capitol Hill. The three-year term as the bank's CEO for Philip Merrill, an experienced government official and businessman, expired Jan. 20 and was extended six months to July 20. The post has been vacant since then because Bush's choice, April Foley, has had difficulties getting through the clearance process and has yet to be formally nominated.

Foley is a former Ex-Im director, but her resume shows no executive experience, either corporate or governmental. Her last available campaign contribution disclosure form, in 2002, lists her as "housewife." But she was one of George W. Bush's girlfriends when they both attended Harvard Business School.

Does this mean Bush must have dated Michael Brown at some point?

We first noticed April Foley back in April 2003, when it was already clear that Bush's teeny-tiny social circle was defining the character, or lack thereof, of his administration.

{ 11:21 AM }

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