Fire as a Motivator: Bush has signed the Healthy Forests Initiative, which will allow cutting in national forests in order to avoid the kind of fire damage that hit California this year. The Wilderness Society, in its expert (read: biased) analysis of the act, complains that:

The McInnis/Walden bill abolishes citizens' statutory right to appeal ForestService hazardous fuels projects provided by the Appeals Reform Act. Sec. 105(c). Instead, it simply directs the Forest Service to establish an undefined "administrative process that will serve as the sole means by which a person...can seek administrative redress" of such projects. Sec. 105(a). Because of the bill's extremely short deadlines for filing lawsuits (see Sec. 106, below), this "administrative process" could not possibly provide a meaningful opportunity to appeal project decisions.

This, of course, is because green groups sharing the opinion of the Wilderness Society (any logging is bad logging) used the previous public-appeal process to halt forest management practices that might have made the Western fires less damagine and widespread.

Most news stories are also going with the big-money angle, like this:

Since 1999, the timber industry has contributed $14.1 million to political campaigns, 80 percent of it going to Republicans, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Bush has received $519,350 from the industry in that period.

Ah, that's right: The appearance of impropriety. Release the hounds! Oddly, these same news organizations never mention aviation-industry lobbyist Linda Daschle (or her Senator/hubby Tom) in their articles about Boeing's recent troubles.