The Bush Administration's last 200 days are going to be hard ones. You've seen the stories about how the man himself has become irrelevant (I think he spends his time judging beautiful baby contests and raising money for Satan now), but the sleaze-balls he's appointed to head the various agencies will be spending their last months in office trying to make big scores for their future employers. The Washington Post gives us an example this morning:
MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.
The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.
"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter.
Read the first paragraph of that story again. Not thousands of acres; hundreds of thousands of acres.
Kudos to the Post for running this story. It's anybody's guess how much of this is going on that we won't even hear about until after the election.
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