Feds to double habitat for spotted owl to 9.6 M acres in California, Oregon and Washington

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- The last building block of the Obama administration's strategy unveiled Wednesday to keep the northern spotted owl from extinction nearly doubles the amount of Northwest national forest land dedicated to protecting the bird by the Bush administration four years ago. ✧ Still, conservation groups that went to court to force the overhaul said key gaps remain, such as an exemption for private forest lands and most state forests. ✧ The full critical habitat plan will not be published until next week, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 9.6 million acres of Oregon, Washington and Northern California will come under its provisions, almost all of it federal lands. ✧ The amount is down from nearly 14 million acres proposed last February but still exceeds the 5.3 million acres proposed in 2008. The biggest cut came in private timberlands -- 1.3 million acres. State forests covering 271,000 acres remain. ✧ Following a directive last February from the White House, officials revised the latest plan to make room for thinning and logging inside critical habitat to reduce the danger of wildfire and improve the health of forests. Read more at The Willits News... Read More......

Connie Mack: Trying to Balance the Budget a Few (Trillion) Pennies at a Time

By Ashton Ellis - What if a bill could provide a fail-safe way to reduce federal spending by one percent a year, cap spending at a historically sustainable level and balance the budget in eight years? ✧ If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. But it does need a grassroots movement to demand a vote on it in the House and Senate. Read more at Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF)... Read More......

Lost opportunities in rural Oregon?

THE OREGONIAN, 7/8/2009 by Tom Partin, Guest writer (Hat tip: John Bell) - I was born in Prineville and grew up in rural eastern Oregon in the 1950s. Prineville at the time had four active sawmills and several secondary wood manufacturers. Unemployment was low and jobs were readily available. Rural Oregonians and the forest products industry weren't looked upon as second-class citizens. We were proud of our work and what we contributed to the wealth of the state. We had the opportunity for an education, a career and advancement if we had the desire and worked hard.

But after nearly 60 years of believing that rural Oregonians still had those opportunities, I no longer think it's true. Something's changed in Oregon, and maybe in the country, regarding opportunities for the independent people living in rural communities. Those people have become some of the most forgotten and discriminated against in our society.

Many of Oregon's rural communities were built around and thrived with the timber industry, which started to expand and prosper after World War II. The federal government in effect made a contract with rural Oregon: It would manage our national forests and federal lands, and in lieu of paying property taxes those forests would help provide jobs and pay a portion of the timber receipts back to rural counties in the form of road and school funds. It was a win/win/win -- for our forests, our rural communities and for Oregon.

Those rural communities flourished for most of the 20th century. Timber was big business. In fact it was the state's largest industry. Rural Oregon was proud of its role in the state and contributed to economic health just like its urban counterparts.
But beginning in the 1990s, federal forest policies began changing. Planned harvest from public timberland was greatly reduced -- by more than 80 percent. But even those intended harvest levels were never reached, and elected officials have done little to help deliver on that promise of sustainable harvests from federal forests. There have been many missed opportunities the past 15 years that could have restored harvest levels and helped struggling rural communities. But partisan politics and misinformation have prevented any meaningful actions in the forests and idled dozens of sawmills.

The seemingly well-meaning forest management legislation that has been proposed in recent years has been misguided. Instead of opening up areas for expedited harvests that would contribute to healthy forests, these laws would merely take another slice out of forest management options by limiting the ages of trees that can be harvested and by putting more forestland off-limits. The limitations would also curtail a segment of the industry infrastructure that relies on some larger trees from federal forests, thus further breaking down the contract with rural America that our government once honored.

Rural Oregon residents, the federal forests and the forest products industry are much like a garden that needs to be tended. If you cut off the spigot of management dollars and treatment, as has happened for the past decade and a half, they will decline and die. We need our government and legislators to understand that only a healthy forest-products industry will deliver rural Oregon towns from double-digit unemployment -- not promises based on tourism or other such panaceas. Our forests need to be managed, not just set aside to burn. They need the spigots of active management turned back on to allow them to flourish along with the forest products industry. And our rural citizens need the opportunity to once again have family-wage jobs and opportunities and hope for the future.

Tom Partin of Lake Oswego is president of the American Forest Resource Council Read More......

Action Item: Oppose Clean Water Restoration Act (S 787)

OREGONIANS IN ACTION: The United States Senate is considering adoption of S 787, also known as the Clean Water Restoration Act, an innocent sounding name for a bill that would have significant impacts on all private property owners across the United States.

If approved, S 787 would amend the Clean Water Act by extending the authority of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency, the two federal agencies charged with enforcing the Act.

Currently, the CWA regulates point source pollution discharges into "waters of the United States." The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the phrase "waters of the United States" to exclude isolated waters, such as ponds, intermittent streams, and wetlands which do not have a "significant nexus" to a navigable waterway. These bodies of water are not regulated by the CWA.

S 787 would change the CWA to significantly broaden the scope of the bill. If S 787 passes, it is hard to conceive of any kind of surface water source that would not be considered a "water of the United States." This could potentially mean that all land use activities near any type of surface water would require a federal permit. It could also be far less draconian than that. But the possibility of the federal control which S 787 could create makes it a very dangerous bill, and one that every property owner, as well as every state and local government that wants to retain control over land use matters in their jurisdiction, should oppose.

This is not the kind of legislation that will help Oregon property owners or Oregon's economy. The bill is scheduled for a vote in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this Thursday, despite the fact that the Committee has not held one hearing on the bill. Senator Jeff Merkley is on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Please call Senator Merkley's office and tell them that you oppose S 787 and that the federal government has no business regulating land use. That is an area for state, and preferably local, control. Demand that Senator Merkley call for hearings on S 787, and that he work closely with industry and property owners to understand that impacts that S 787 could have on small businesses and property owners.

Senator Merkley's number is (202) 224-3753.

Dave Hunnicutt
President
Oregonians In Action

Hat tip: Linda Weimee Read More......

Auto team drives imports

WASHINGTON, 2/24/09 - The vehicles owned by the Obama administration's auto team could reflect one reason why Detroit's Big Three automakers are in trouble: The list includes few new American cars.

Among the eight members named Friday to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and the 10 senior policy aides who will assist them in their work, two own American models. Add the Treasury Department's special adviser to the task force and the total jumps to three. Read more at Detroit News (Hat tip: Jeff Limón)... Read More......

Stocks jump after Bernanke says recession may end

NEW YORK (AP), 2/24/09 - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has given Wall Street a double dose of reassurance. Bernanke told Congress Monday that the recession might end this year, and that regulators aren't planning to nationalize banks. Read more at Breitbart... Read More......

States' Rights & Sovereignty

In response to increasing federal encroachment, a growing number of states have passed and proposed resolutions to assert the Tenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Visit INFOWARS to see what other states are doing... Read More......