picking our pockets while we look at the smoke and mirrors!

While I was stewing about Pel's HoR all pork, gummint moving into your life stimulus my fat @ss bill -newly passed by the HoR; the Senate just seized 2 million acres for wilderness.

I bet you are thinking- but isn't wilderness a GOOD thing? Well sure it is; I certainly didn't want the gummint selling existing wilderness areas for golf courses and condos to fund the stimulus bill. But what the omnibus wilderness bill just passed did is take 2 million acres of National forest, and BLM lands, 700,000 acres in Calif and the rest scattered around I dont know where all --this means they were already protected government lands and make them 'wilderness'. Completely doing an end run around the intent that congress is supposed to debate each wilderness designation and decide if a patch of land needs and/or deserves the extra protection.

Wilderness designations mean that you can't ride your bike there anymore, let alone an ATV or in *MY* case there most likely wont be any endurance rides held on the trails. Because any kind of competition on 'wilderness' is verboten. I only say most likely because there are 2 rides that pre-dated wilderness designations that still cross sections of wilderness but they both had decades of history before the designation and 1 is the famous Tevis 100 mile point to point ride and the other is a 100 mile loop ride and both cross about 6 miles of wilderness on the historical trails and the loop ride very nearly lost its 6 mile trail through a corner of wilderness a few years ago, but I think there was a successful letter writing campaign to the NFS district manager --which means that ride could lose its access again under a new manager.

The regulations would have to be completely changed for a traditional endurance ride with shorter loops to be allowed to have any of the loops cross through a corner of 'wilderness'. Like ride managers don't have to work hard enough to get permits to have a ride on NFS or BLM public lands as it is. Sighhhhh.

Oh and this is going to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil how? One thing that BLM does allow is energy development. Nothing mechanized on wilderness. Not even a solar panel or wind turbine for green energy. Congress and the new administration could have worked with BLM managers to take a more protective approach, curtailing ORV use, and oil and natural gas development. But thats not complete control. Welcome to life with the U.S.S.D. party in charge.

OH yes, fuel IS going to go through the roof. And cities and states are all hot to move to monitoring odometers, if not putting GPS's on vehicles so that cheapskates like me that will not drive a car that doesn't get good mileage have to pay our share for road maintainence. Geeze, just suck it up and raise the gasoline taxes. --I'll tell you why they don't like that idea --its much easier to waive a licensing fee based on miles driven for your special buddies (ie voting blocs) but if the tax is at the pump its going to pretty much be applied universally and thats not likely to keep their voters happy. (they will come up with elegant labels but taxing based on GPS reports is about favors for key voters, make no mistake about that. ) Welcome to the age of Big Brother. George Orwell was only off by 30 years. Kind of makes me glad I never had kids.

Here's an article -very cheerleady but has most of the facts. I don't have a reference for the senate bill.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/15/MNO215B3BA.DTL