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Oregon once aimed to be the greenest state in America. Its leaders adopted the nation’s first bottle deposit. They controlled urban sprawl. They declared ocean beaches public property. But in the last four years, Oregon’s most powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with climate change, wolf recovery, disappearing bird habitat, cancer-causing diesel exhaust, dwindling groundwater, industrial air pollution, oil spill planning and weed killers sprayed from helicopters. What changed Oregon? Money. Lots and lots of money. […] The consequences of Oregon’s logging practices are clear. State and federal scientists have blamed major population declines in species including the coastal Coho salmon, northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet on timber harvesting and state policies governing it. The Oregon Department of Forestry found 242 plants and animals listed or at risk of listing under the Endangered Species Act as of 2012. The trend was getting worse. Then the state agency, whose mission includes promoting the timber industry, stopped publishing the numbers and deleted past reports from its website.

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

“In early January, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which is expected to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of noncommercial FM stations.” A good overview of LPFM and how the recent legislation happened.

How the two astronomical numbers most often thrown out by the intellectual property lobby are utterly bogus. Interesting: "When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else."