Sean Hannity says the fires are the fault of the Democrats

[RebelOne]

Yesterday on the radio, Sean Hannity said that the environmentalists are preventing the thinning of the forests, which Bush wants. He said that all the environmentalists are Democrats, so the fires are due to them. Can you believe that? This man is a nut case.

[La_Serpiente]

1. WHAT THE #$%)

WHO THE HELL IS HE GOING AROUND BLAMING DEMOCRATS. HE HAS NO UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE AT ALL. HE SHOULDN'T COMMENT ON SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

[Ladyhawk]

14. I saw a hilarious bit on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Basically, the "reporter" said that Bush's main plan was that in order to save something you had to kill some of it off. He mentioned forests and Iraqis.

[terrya]

21. Sean is a male Ann Coulter, isn't he?

A loudmouth nutcase.

[RebelOne]

Definitely

[radwriter0555]

29. He's a MOULTER!

hahahahahahahahahhahahahahah!

[AWD]

30. No

The male Ann Coulter is not Sean Hannity. The male Ann Coulter is Ann Coulter.

[HFishbine]

31. I thought

Ann Coulter was a male Sean Hannity...

[LTR]

33. ROTF!!!

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZING!

[Monte Carlo]

2. The man has a mission, and he intends to do it.

That is, the root of all evil is the Democratic Party.

[Kinkistyle]

3. Easy Repug horse-logic

fire bad, trees are flammable, enviromentalists protect trees, many enviromentalists are also Democrats therefore Democrats are bad.

Easy peezy Republicaneezy

[La_Serpiente]

6. Are you really from Japan?

[Kinkistyle]

27. New yorker living in Japan

I'm a New Yorker studying in Japan. Its actually kind of refreshing to get out of the States for a while. The news here is much more balanced out here in Asia. You see a lot more humanist documentaries on TV describing the plight of the innocent bystanders out in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the way 70% or so of the population here disagrees with the war and with sending Japanese Self-Defense Troops to Iraq despite the ass-kissing of the current Prime Minister.

[Art_from_Ark]

36. Konbanwa from the Tokyo area

Which part of Japan are you in?

[izzie]

4. Well in Maine we are way ahead of him.

In '47 fires we blamed it on a women smoker.

[rooddood743]

5. Man, you just don't understand...

In order to save something, you have to kill it. Forest fires are caused by trees. If you take away the trees, there will be no more forest fires...duh!
Here, let me show you another example of this superior form of logic. Many Iraqi's lived under tyranny. We wanted them to be free.
(no, we did'nt care about WMD's or oil, silly rabbit.) Now, in order to release them from this tyranny, we had to kill many of them.

Can't suffer tyranny when you're dead! Man, I can't believe more people can't see the exquisite beauty of this way of thinking.

[La_Serpiente]

13. some information on forestry

The single biggest management problem with the lands that are presently burning is 100 years or so of attempted fire suppression, which has resulted in massive fuel accumulation and a transistion to dense, brush dominated forests filled with combustable litter. Western forests, especially the mediteranean chapperal and pine forests of southern Califora, where historically fire maintained, with an average fire cycle on the order of about every ten years or so (with lots of regional variation). That suppresed the brush and cleaned out the fuels, as well as stimulating new growth, sending a pulse of nutrients into the soil, and so on.

Fire suppression has disrupted that a natural fire cycle and created hideously dangerous conditions. The two primary justifications for fire suppression are 1) forest protection, and 2) human habitation protection. The first is based largely on protection of timber value, rather than habitat value, and is essentially bogus. As I said, it has resulted in conditions that are a ticking time bomb, and which virtually guarantee large scale forest destruction. The second justification is more difficult to deal with -- to some degree, building homes up in the canyons of the Southern California coast range is just a dumb thing to do, sort of like building on land that you know floods every 25 years or so, especially if home-owners insist on letting the chappperal grow near their houses, putting plants in their yards, etc.

The only way to alleviate this situation is to let the fires burn, and to set them intentionally whenever fuel loads begin to accumulate before they reach truely dangerous levels. This isn't popular with the owners of million dollar homes in the hills, or with their insurance companies, but nature isn't always accomodating.

As for the bark beetles, the Dendroctonus beetle outbreaks in some southern California forests have exacerbated fire conditions, but only because those conditions were already dangerously bad. Beetle outbreaks -- like low to moderate intensity fires -- are part of normal forest ecology. They are intensified by poor logging sanitation, which provides virtually unlimited brood habitat for colonizing beetles, and by many conditions which stress otherwise healthy conifers. In particular, the current outbreaks were certainly worsened, if not triggered, by drought, severe competition between trees in stands that would normally be maintained at much lower densitites by fire, and by damage caused by extensive human encroachment (e.g. forest fragmentation by roads and homes, tree damage during logging, poor logging sanitation, and so on).

Mechanically thinning the forest is not the anser -- doing so economically almost always increases fuel loads, at least in the short term, and leads to denser, more dangerous stands in the longer term. Timber sales always increases fuel loads, at least in the short term, and leads to denser, more dangerous stands in the longer term. Timber sales always take out the more merchantable wood, not the low volume brushy stuff that's the problem. The only real answer is regular fire. And the insurance companies be damned.

You can thank mike_c for this post from an earlier thread here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=186692


Here is another post by Clete in the same thread:

There is a film that is shown at the Museum of Natural History at Exhbition Park in Los Angeles that explains the process of seasonal fires in the canyons of California. You should go there and see it.

It's a natural process by nature to clear out the dead debris to make way for new growth on the old growth trees that survive the process just fine. The fires burn away all the old and diseased parts of the trees to encourage new growth much like pruning old and decaying parts of ones shrubs encourages new growth.

Fire also purges the diseases and pests that destroy the forests. Taking the good trees only makes the forests more vulnerable. Have you ever seen what happens when a logging company goes in and clear cuts a stand of trees? Well I have. The first thing they do is strip off all the parts off to the logs that they don't want. They leave in piles to dry out and this debris increases the fire vulnerability of the area. They also leave behind the diseased logs, which are of no use to them. People who live in the canyons know the danger.

Eventually, they might go in and plant seedlings, but instead of planting the variety that nature does, they plant only the species they want to encourage and usually they are genetically similar. IF a pest attacks a tree that is susceptible to it, another genetically different tree that has evolved a defense against that pest will survive and the damaged trees will be only a few. Not only that, varieties of the species often protect each other from diseases and pests.

This makes Bush's healthy forest initiative nothing but crock of shit and a big boon to the destructive practices of the logging companies. Sorry but Bush and the crooks in Washington have lied to you again and are now scape goating the very organizations who are trying to stop these practices.

[rooddood743]

16. Uh, dude...

I was just being sarcastic. ALthough I did'nt know all the stuff you just said, I just thought thinning of the forests was an idea to help the corporate loggers.

[La_Serpiente]

18. Oh sorry

I am pretty gullable :-)

[JHB]

7. Hannity the Inanity

inanity: 1: the quality or state of being inane as a: lack of substance : EMPTYNESS b: vapid, pointless, or fatuous character : SHALLOWNESS 2: something that is inane
3:

---(mostly) from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition

[rasputin1952]

20. One of the other things that describes Hannity well...

phlegmatic.

I've always liked that word.

:kick:

[kwolf68]

8. Hannity

Is there anyone less intelligent than this guy? He is a complete boob. Nothing he says should be taken seriously. He has not one original thought in his head and makes up for his limited smarts by being a dickhead. Otherwise, I don't see anything wrong with him.

[OldSoldier]

22. Bush

The dumbest man in public life is George W. Bush. Hannity is a very close second.

[hang a left]

9. I don't know where this genious is. But I am in Escondido

breathing in smoke and ash as we type. There ain't no forrests around here. Just desert hills. There are trees though. Maybe that is what he is talking about.

[Michael Harrington]

11. Thats what I was thinking...

Every image of SoCal I see is one of grass and rolling hills, with some trees but nary a serious forrest in sight.

It's just a matter of time until Hannity kills a hooker in a fit of suppressed rage, like the guy G.D. Spradlin played in The Godfather, Part II.

[RapidCreek]

26. Thanks for saying that...

I'd wondered when a Californian might point out that it is a fucking desert....not a pine tree jungle.

RC

[DBoon]

37. And the few forests we have

Aren't exactly of loggable quality. You have huge areas designated as "national forest" that are in fact scrub and chapparel. This stuff is designed to survive fires very well. The homes that ex-urbanites build near there don't survive fires.

Well that's the price they pay for trying to escape the big ugly city with all those dark-skinned people (yes, I DO believe that people buying new homes in these areas are basically trying to escape non-Anglos).

Maybe some day home construction will not be allowed in obviously hazardous areas. Maybe some day pigs will fly.

[0007]

10. This stupid son-of-a-bitch

is the total picture of ignorance, even the children know it and laugh.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

12. The Republican version of thinning forests

I've seen what they want. Here in the Ozarks that means Big Business muscling aside the small mill operators who have harvested wisely for generations and clearcutting great swaths of forest, leaving only a bare line of trees by the highways so the tourists will think the forest is still intact.

[0rganism]

19. "thinning forests" isn't profitable unless it's done that way, see?

That's the beautiful irony of the "thinning forests" bullshit.

"Oh, we'll go in and clear out some of those thickets, remove the underbrush, and you won't have any problem with forest fires."

I've seen it a hundred times in Oregon, I swear. And they're right: the second- and third-growth thickets NEED to be thinned out, because the dumbasses who replanted them put them way too close together to begin with. But you can't make any money from selectively thinning the "pecker poles" and clearing the scrub, well that's a losing proposition.

So the timber company gets to mix in a few clearcuts, some oldgrowth, and a subsidy or two with their "thinning operation", to make the shareholders happy. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.

And then, if they do it just right, entire hillsides erode into the rivers below, leaving a barren bedrock moonscape where they used to have a forest. No more forest fires tho, BECAUSE THE LOGGERS PUT THE FOREST INTO THE RIVER.

Humans are too stupid to be a dominant species.

[stanwyck]

15. Has Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell

not weighed in yet that these fires are the rage of God against the blasphemy of California's entertainment industry? Or, are they afraid people might get confused and think God was out to get the new governor? Just wondering. Afterall, Robertson and Falwell blamed 9-11 on U.S. tolerance of gays and feminists.

[Michael Harrington]

17. And it apparently spared the Reagan "LIbrary"

I'm waiting for an attribution of Providence for that little fact.

[rasputin1952]

23. I wondr what is in the "Reagan Library"?...

They sealed his papers, and he, like the bush brood, never met a book they couldn't read.

Pictures of Hollywood, Nancy and the dog?

:eyes:

[Michael Harrington]

25. You know the old joke...

I was actually reminded of it when I heard this story. I heard several versions of it. Gore Vidal told this one on Carson's show:

Did you hear the terrible news? Reagan's library burned down.

Both books were destroyed.

And he hadn't even finished coloring the second one...

[OneTwentyoNine]

24. Duuuhhhh....Uhhh, Sean ever heard of Chaparral??????

http://www.ci.riverside.ca.us/museum/plantcom/chap.html

Man what a stupid fuck. Hell... should California kill off everything and asphalt over to prevent another wildfire outbreak??

Like it or not his idiot listeners believe this SHIT. Where the hell is Democratic radio folks??


David

[Zomby Woof]

28. Can Clinton's penis be far behind?

Just a matter of time with these clowns.

[leesa]

32. Duj, idiot! There AREN'Tany forests out here. God Republicans are STUPID

[RebelOne]

34. See, just goes to show

that Sean Hannity sure knows what he is talking about.

[Faygo Kid]

35. He wants to be Limbaugh. He won't make it.

Rush was (thank God, with apologies to atheists on this board) one of a kind. Hannity will last through the election; in five years, he will be living in his mansion, never having to work again, and wondering, in the middle of the night, how someone as stupid as he could be filthy rich, when all he had to do was parrot the RNC talking points.

[revree]

38. FORESTS ARE NOT WHAT'S BURNING

It's rugged dry brush - and Eucalyptis trees in suburbs. NOT FORESTS, YOU STUPID REPUBLICAN ASSHOLE!

[LoneStarLiberal]

39. Send The Brush-Clearing Crawfordite Out There

HFI would not have prevented this, but when did a lack of reason ever slow down a Fox representative?

Here will be the next arguement for how this is all the fault of liberals and not the fault of greedy shitheel developers:

"I blame Gray Davis. Why? The undergrowth grew while he was in office.

It is obviously all this fault. Arnold will get out there and TERMINATE that undergrowth, no doubt."

I have an idea: Since our Fearless Flight-Suited Chickenhawk Leader gets wood at the opportunity to "chop some brush" on his pig farm in Crawford, we need to send him out to California to get on that darned undergrowth!