It would allow the Interior Department to sell tens of millions of acres....aim is to generate an estimated $158 million in revenue over the next five years to help curb the monstrous federal deficit.

$158M isn't enough to piss one drop on the federal deficit. Over five years? How much an acre are they planning to charge? Are we sure this shouldn't have read $158 BILLION?

"Enviros and fiscal conservatives in both major parties have been calling for mining reform for years, but Pombo's proposal isn't quite what they had in mind."

Perhaps it's a con game, as both parties may benefit. One of the 2 great French thinkers who studied early 19th century America, Frederic Bastiat, said that government cannot take the people's property from them, as that was plunder. From where I'm sitting, it seems that both parties plunder with impunity, as things are today.

I see the American system, and perhaps the two-party system, as two mighty redwoods, literally thousands of years old, as our system of government was specifically modeled on the Roman Republic...

(as opposed to the Empire).

The problem, with the two mighty redwoods, reaching far, far up into the sky, is that the two parties that presently are the caretakers of the two redwoods, the redwoods of liberalism and conservatism, have built a treehouse in the sky, a treehouse so far on high the ordinary people can't see without craning their necks and squinting mightily,

and it's awfully difficultt to see...

And it's just one treehouse!

So how do we shake the trees, so that they pay attention to the ordinary people below, without harming the two trees?

A rich man once told me he didn't believe in private property. He was either a liar, a jokester, or a fool.

If we still had honest conservatism and honest liberalism, the liberals would say

"we need to do this!"

and the conservatives would reply,

"hold on a moment- let's see if we can afford it,let's not go so fast!"

And neither would plunder.

We need a private sector, always.

We also need a public sector, always.

They are there to keep each other honest.

As James Watt indicated, the rapture is coming momentarily so why preserve anything when the fastest possible extraction of anything of value can be used the strenghten the influence of conservative religious rural communities and big corporations(which of course don't care about religion but will encourage it to keep the peasants in line). Jesus is coming momentarily to send all who haven't accepted rule by Pat Robertson and James Dobson to hell, so why preserve anything? This is the right wing; religious nuts and and corporate profiteers. I doubt the Senate will let this go through though; the poitical center of the body politic shows signs of stirring from it's 911 induced political coma.

Does this mean all those idiot "gravel mine" claims by desert streams that are also sources of water for mountain animals could be fenced and developed as private land, keeping hikers, horses and wildlife away from life-giving waters in arid places?

The inevitable resulting roadbuilding over wilderness habitat compounds the impact on wildlife. How did these crooks and pirates get to steal our public lands? The frontier is loing gone, guys. Protected public lands are like a garden of endangered wilds, not an outdoors to be fought back.

This is a truly terrible legacy for our generation if we let it go forward.

Is anybody organizing around this?