Today we woke up early and went to the Oregon coast to see a few clearcuts. Acres of ancient forests cut down and completely devastated. The girl who has been my guide on this journey, Polly, started to cry when we saw it. I had more of an intellectual response and just started brainstorming about what could actually be done about this craziness. The pacific northwest has less than 5% of its ancient trees left now. they take hundreds of years to grow. So there is no chance of them growing back in our lifetime even if they were to stop all cutting from this point on. It would still take four hundred years to get the forests back. and all these logging companies don't care. In January George bush came to Eugene for one night for a fundraiser. He was given a campaign check for one million dollars from the logging industry. A few months later they had carte blanche to cut down as many large trees as they wanted to in the name of ‘preventing forest fires.’ crazy.

[I will say this about George w. Bush though, and I've said it before, lots of people do. he may be one of the worst things going in the history of mankind, but he doesn’t try to hide it. and remarkably he is rather forthright about it. as awful as he was in the debates, and he was truly awful in a remarkable way, as only he can be, he was very honest in his answers about things. when asked about the environment he never claimed to really care too much about it. he admits, not quite readily but damn close to it, that he is more in favor and concerned for business and jobs and the economy than he is about the environment. You gotta hand it to the guy, and everyone who was working for him at that time [most of them have now quit since his re-election – we can only guess why. God knows what insanity we are in for if his whole dame cabinet is quitting before his new term even begins.] He could have easily balked on the issue of the environment, but he didn't. he told it as he sees it. he thinks that environmentalists are extremists and that its just not that big of a deal. As much as I disagree with him and others like him, I like him for that.

He acted the same way when asked about America losing all of its jobs overseas. Unlike the democrats who tried to act like they were going to save the jobs and bring them all back home, Bush never once caved in. he looked right into the camera and told those people that their jobs were history and that he was going to try to help them get educated to get different jobs, that America needed to move on and keep up with globalization. Again, he never tried to pretend to people that he was going to try to help them keep their jobs from going overseas. The answers that were written for him in the debates were brilliant in how they managed to deliver a lot of the bad news of the republican agenda to the American people in a semi-digestible manner.

Same thing with his answers on same sex marriage. The justification for an idea as abominable as a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage on the grounds that it threatens family values or the ideal of marriage in any country in this day and age is ridiculous. And any thinking person can see that and knows it. You bring it up in any circle of semi-intelligent company anywhere in the world and it gets people laughing. This is a very clearly more a matter of evolution. Evolved citizens of the world versus minds just not as evolved yet. but again, what I loved about Bush and his administration’s answers during the debates and throughout his campaign was his willingness to put himself out there and tell it as he saw it. you have to be a complete loony to even come up with an idea as asinine as that one, but you have to have real courage and conviction as well. And I admire that.