Bush's logging initiative draws fire in Oregon

[Judi Lynn]

Bush's logging initiative draws fire in Oregon
By Blaine Harden, The Washington Post
October 16, 2004

SISKIYOU NATIONAL FOREST, Ore. — The massive Biscuit fire that scorched this forest two summers ago has become a wedge issue in the presidential race in Oregon, a swing state where the contest remains too close to call.

President Bush used the Biscuit fire in 2002 as a smoldering launchpad for his Healthy Forests Initiative, a plan to fight future fires by logging burned trees, many of them in previously protected stands of old-growth timber. On an evening campaign stop in southern Oregon on Thursday, Bush was expected to again invoke the urgent need for salvage logging. The president's plan to cut trees — and create jobs — resonates widely in this heavily forested state, where the unemployment rate of 7.4 percent is the country's second highest and where recent polls show a statistical dead heat in the presidential race.

Campaign commercials in southern Oregon by Rep. Greg Walden, R, sponsor of the Bush forest plan in the House, focus on the urgent economic and environmental need for post-fire salvage logging. A series of full-page timber industry ads in The Oregonian, the Northwest's largest paper, have warned that without the president's plan to remove burned timber and replant trees "our grandchildren may find nothing but ashes" in the grandchildren may find nothing but ashes" in the half-million acres of forest damaged by the Biscuit fire. Local timber companies and executives have been large donors to the Bush campaign, according to a recent study by the watchdog group Common Cause.

Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., opposes the logging plan, calling it a "betrayal of the public trust" that gives timber companies access to fragile public lands. Environmental lawsuits have halted most of the planned logging.
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http://www.thesunlink.com/bsun/nation_world/article/0,2403,BSUN_19089_3259408,00.html

[TaleWgnDg]

1. GWBush truly has no clue . . . no friggin clue . . . none . . .

zed . . . zero . . . a complete incompetent baboon. oh, hell, he gives baboons a bad name.

. . . . . . .