Remember this one? Bush’s plan to combat wildfires is to cut down more trees.

“It is ironic,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a firefighter and director of the Oregon-based Western Fire Ecology Center, “that in this time of corporate and financial scandals, President Bush wants to completely deregulate the system. They speak with the corporate elite, but never the working people. Not one of the 17,000 firefighters out on the line was ever consulted about how to protect their communities.”

The President’s plan, said Randi Spivak, executive director of the American Lands Alliance, “would basically gut environmental laws, keeping the public and the courts out of the process. It proposes to pay for this work by removing the larger, fire resistant trees.”

Dr. Patrick Withen, a Ph.D. sociologist and veteran smokejumper who has fought fires in every Western state in the lower 48, said “the most effective place to fight fire is in a mature forest. Yet the administration is essentially trading logging [of the largest, most commercially valuable trees] for thinning. This is just increasing the fire danger.”

Of course this is from the same guy who tried to prevent crime by executing more people than any other governor in US history.