more Klamath

Turns out that, according to Loaded Orygun, one of the prime beneficiaries of Cheney and Rove's suckerfish strategy was intended to be Gordon Smith, who was up for re-election in 2002 and is up again in '08.

G-Smith is one of those blue state senators who happens to be Republican. So he sides with his party for about 5 years and then transforms into a quasi Democrat for election year. This year, for instance, he suddenly decided to speak up against the war (until he voted to fund it without a timeline, he's not a liberal Democrat).

Allegations of Bush administration political meddling in water resource politics have been around for a while, yet an investigation by the Interior Department's inspector general surprisingly turned up nothing. The fact is that up to tens of thousands salmon--presumably many of them wild--died as a result of a decision that coincidentally benefitted a few Republican lawmakers in 2002. People care about their salmon in the pacific northwest, though, so this is a fairly significant issue. There'll likely never be any direct connection established between the politicians and the largest salmon kill in history, but it would be nice if someone asked the question "Senator Smith, if you'd have known then that the consequences of diverting Klamath water would have decimated coho runs, would you still have supported that idea?" You know, just to hear what he has to say.