Categories: News, cabletelevison, CBS, John Roberts, wilderness, network television, public television, Talk Radio, Michael Savage

It may have seemed at first like a publicity stunt or a gift from above, but last year Coloradans at Vail and Beaver Creek mountains saw pink snow.

“When you skied a run, you turned and your tracks were pink,” Melissa Macdonald, executive director of the Eagle River Watershed, told the Vail Daily. It wasn’t to be confused with the ever-popular watermelon snow which is colored by algae and even tastes like the fruit; the pink in this snow came from red dust on the Colorado Plateau and blew in from southwestern Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

The dust kicks up when the soil in the plateau is disturbed. Once on the snow, it absorbs sunlight and causes the snow to melt sooner than it normally would. Chris Landry, executive director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, says the melt can be as many as 50 days early. This, of course, is not good for the ski industry. If snow melts too fast, it also threatens the water supply of the towns it rushes by.

“Who’s to blame for all of this dust?” Landry wants to know. “”Is it oil and gas? Is it grazing? (Open ranges for cattle, sheep and goats abound in the area.) Motorized recreation?.” The center is investigating.

The Obama Administration has so far left in place the destructive Bush/Cheney No New Wilderness policy of opening wilderness-quality lands to mining, drilling and off-road vehicles. No one expects these activities to be terminated, only regulated, but now any place is vulnerable.

Sad to say, if the commissioners of San Juan County, Utah, have their way, the snow in Colorado is going to get a lot pinker. In an attempt to pass legislation before the recently defeated Republican Senator Bob Bennett leaves Washington, county commissioners are rushing to cook up a “preservation” bill that would give off-road vehicles (the aforementioned motorized recreation mode) wide access to fragile back country which contains some of the world’s most spectacular rock art and Puebloan ruins not to mention natural formations like Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge and the Goosenecks of the San Juan River.

San Juan County is larger than Connecticut. People have lived there for thousands of years, but today the population is sparse—about two people per square mile. If , like me, you’ve spent most of your adult life in cities, it’s easy to be blown away by the enormity of the spaces, the dramatic rock formations, and the spectacular colors created by the play of light on the red rocks.

Not only do off-road vehicles disturb the thin desert crust and the desert “varnish” created by microorganisms, there’s the noise that disturbs listening humans and stresses wildlife. Off-road vehicles often bring riders who yield to the temptation to add their own marks to those created by ancient people. Last summer San Juan County’s largest town, Blanding, was full of federal agents who conducted arrests of prominent local citizens who trafficked illegally in Puebloan artifacts.

There has always been tension between preservationists and the politically conservative population of these states, especially in Utah. Many people feel that public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management rightfully belong in private hands. To some, any restrictions are an attempt to deny them a good time and the opportunity to profit from abundant mineral resources. San Juan County is not only home to the Valley of the Gods, a smaller, quieter version of Monument Valley, it has the nation’s only uranium processing plant and numerous oil fields.

“All politics are local,” once Speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was fond of saying. Sometimes, though, local politics have resonance across the nation, and the preservation of Utah’s Red Rock country is one of those. No fewer than 165 Representatives and 22 Senators have signed on to designate as wilderness this vast spectacular parcel of land, which includes much of San Juan County. Not surprisingly, perhaps, none of the sponsors are from Utah, although former Governor John Huntsman had supported it and it had looked as though environmentalists might be making headway with Bennett before his defeat.

It’s also worth noting that representatives of a broad spectrum of religious groups have urged the Utah legislature to advocate for the state’s wild lands as “places of profound spiritual importance to people of many faith traditions.” The group included Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, United Church of Christ members and, perhaps most significantly, Latter-day Saints (Mormons.)

The national bill, America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, deserves a fair and measured hearing, not a hastily drawn up license for exploitation. Conservationists still rue the day that the Corps of Engineers managed to dam the spectacular Glen Canyon, part of which is in San Juan County. There again, the argument was made that the newly created Lake Powell would be a source of recreation, water and electricity that outweighed the destruction of great natural beauty and the remains of long-ago settlements.

More information can be found on the website of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and I urge you to write to Nancy Sutley, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, 722 Jackson Place, NW, Washington, DC 20510 or email her at chair@ceq.eop.gov Please urge her to put a stop to this madness.

Years ago, when I was in a quandary about the direction of my career, I got some sound advice: Never fall in love with a corporation, because it’s constitutionally unable to reciprocate.

This week, the Supreme Court created a limited redress to that issue in Citizens United v the Federal Elections Commission, giving corporations unfettered permission to spend their general funds on the campaigns of politicians they favor, and turning them into “a real live boy” as Slate put it. Who says money can’t buy you love? If the Rehnquist court handed Republicans the presidency in 2000, it’s hard to believe the Roberts court hasn’t handed them the Congress in 2010.

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Even before President Obama spoke Tuesday night, the news had leaked that he had authorized 30,000 new troops for Afghanistan.

I didn’t think his speech would reassure me, but it did. A little. What a pleasure it is to hear a president with a sophisticated mind, an ordered thought process and the vocabulary to match them! For people like me, it’s the ultimate seduction.

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Link: http://gawker.com/5332558/whats-bad-for-the-gop-is-good-for-fox-news

Rupert Murdoch
Chair and CEO
The News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Murdoch:

The speech President Obama gave about health care last night was one of his best to my ears. It has been a long summer for us progressives, and some of us had begun to wonder if the candidate we worked so hard to elect had somehow lost his moxie or, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, we had been punked.

Since our politics spring from very different experiences, I have no idea how you view the president’s performance. But since you gave him your endorsement, I assume you saw something in the man that speaks of greatness.

Last night’s speech demonstrated for me that Obama still understands that change must come, and it must come under his watch. But I must confess that when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie,” to the president’s claim that health care reform would not extend coverage to undocumented immigrants, I held my breath while the president took his measure of the man and stood his ground.

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I find it painful to watch House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend herself. It’s not that I don’t believe that the CIA failed to brief her about waterboarding terrorist suspects. I do, especially now that former Senator Bob Graham has demonstrated that he was no where in the room three of the four times the CIA claimed it briefed him. And he has no memory of discussing waterboarding in the one top-secret hearing he attended (no notes allowed, all aides excluded.)

It’s a nasty business we’ve been involved with since 9/11, and the further we get from that horrific event, the clearer it is that our government behaved badly

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