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We watch and cringe

Right now a massive $70 billion tax-cut bill is working its way through the Senate.

(You will recall that Congressional Republicans split the budget bill in two, so the first bill would be pure spending cuts -- thus getting them coverage in the press for "courageously" cutting spending to rein in the deficit -- and the second pure tax cuts, to please all their normal constituencies. The latter being much larger than the former, the net result is a massive expansion of the deficit.)

Energy prices being what they are, Congresscritters feel pressured to Do Something. Rather than any substantive changes in energy policy -- kind of blew that chance with the grotesque energy bill -- they're settling for symbolic smacks to the wrist of Big Oil.

I won't get too far into the weeds of various proposals, since none of them will survive House-Senate conference committee and none would make a very big difference if it did. I'll just do the bloggy thing and extract a few absurdities from the press coverage.

Here's one from The Wall Street Journal:

Manson retires

Assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks Craig Manson, whose memorable interview with Grist put our readers in full frosh, has resigned. Lord only knows how they'll be able to replace him.

A Bottle of Red, a Gas Tank of White

France’s wine glut turned into biofuel It was the best of times for French drivers; it was the worst of times for French oenophiles. Beset by fierce international competition and flattened domestic sales, France’s vintners this year will distill about 133 million bottles’ worth of surplus wine into ethanol, which will be added to gasoline […]

REACHy Keen

European Parliament passes major chemical registration and testing law The European Parliament has passed the landmark Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals legislation, widely known to wonks as REACH. If approved by the national governments of the European Union, it will turn traditional regulation on its head, putting the burden of proof on manufacturers — […]

Bisons to Kill

Bison reintroduced to Montana prairie, and hunted near Yellowstone Oh give us a home where the buffalo rooooaaam … Forgive us, we’re inspired: Even as we sing, 16 bison are being released onto about 30,000 acres of their ancestral Montana prairie in an attempt to reintroduce the species in the wild there. It’s just one […]

Global warming: A way for rich people to kill poor people

According to a study by the World Health Organization appearing in this month's Nature, global warming is responsible for 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses a year, primarily in poor countries that contribute very little to it.

Mining-law revamp could put millions of public acres up for sale

Greens beamed and GOP leaders bristled last week after language paving the way for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf was stricken from the House budget reconciliation bill. But many Democrats and enviros are now sounding the alarm over another provision in the bill, one that’s stirred […]

Three paths toward a green — and tasty — Thanksgiving

Of all the crimes against nature Thanksgiving inspires — SUVs clogging the highways, planes shuttling fliers around the country, factory farms churning out millions of frozen turkeys — the most grievous may be culinary. First, the above-mentioned turkeys typically taste like sawdust; cranberry “sauce,” a gelatinous goo that ominously retains the shape of the can […]

Arrested development

Interesting. I quit playing in the dirt with my toy trucks when I was... oh, about 6 years old.

A few weeks ago, the Forest Service announced a plan to control the proliferation of illegal trails created by off-road enthusiasts. Personally, as I said in an earlier post, I wish the government would just get out of the recreation business. I think it should be illegal to drive motorized vehicles off road on any public land. You can't dump garbage on public lands, why are you allowed to churn it into a mud hole with your 4x4? These people do a lot more tangible, direct damage to natural habitats than urban Hummer drivers. Most people are not aware of it because they do all of this damage off the beaten track.

Let the enthusiasts pay the market price for tearing up the planet. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who would love to charge them to use their property -- assuming, of course, that the government would create a level playing field by enforcing laws that protect wetlands and streams on these properties. You might even see a throttling of this growing industry by free market user fees, which could be quite steep, depending on competition, supply, and demand.

Nailing Connole because of his politics was the whole point

So how about this stuff with Josh Connole?

For those who haven't been following: In 2003, about 125 SUVs at SoCal car dealerships were burned and vandalized. Slogans like "Fat Lazy Americans" and "ELF" were left behind.

Of course, as we all know this is not mere property destruction, not mere crime, but "eco-terrorism."

So the FBI was brought in and they starting looking for likely suspects. They found a vegan, commune-living, Iraq-war protesting, electric-car driving, fossil-fuel hating activist, and arrested him. Except, oops:

"So they immediately started following him around and then when they arrested him they said, 'You've got some red paint on your pants and we think it matches (the paint used in the attacks)," [Connole attorney John] Burton said. "So they took his pants and flew them back to FBI headquarters for analysis, where it turned out to be catsup."

In the meantime, Burton said, Connole spent four days in jail, often chained to the floor and repeatedly urged by FBI agents to confess.

Meanwhile, the guy who really did it wrote a letter to the L.A. Times, mocking the feds for getting the wrong guy.

Now, from the tone of the coverage, I think the idea is that we're all supposed to be upset that the feds are surveilling people based on their political activity -- and in fact, that Connole was arrested based purely on his politics.

But that slightly misses the point.