Former Utah congressman Bill Orton died when his ATV flipped over and crushed him on a sand dune at the Little Sahara Recreation Area in Utah.  Orton, 60, was riding alone and wearing a helmet at the time of the accident.  He was killed instantly.

Orton was a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1991 to 1997.  He ran an unsuccessful campaign for Utah governor in 2000.

The sheriff said the popular park is “a fun but dangerous place to ride.  It’s a lot of rolling hills.  He went off a sand dune without realizing how far down he was going."

Several other riders Saturday were injured in ATV crashes and five had to be airlifted by medical helicopters to hospitals.

Story at FoxNews

This information was provided by the Land Trust Alliance:

Last Thursday, Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced the Rural Heritage Conservation Act, S. 812, a Senate bill to make permanent the enhanced tax deduction for conservation easement donations.

Senators Baucus and Grassley are the Chairman and Ranking Member, respectively, of the Senate Committee on Finance, which handles all tax legislation.  Having these leaders as champions gives this bill a big leg up from the start, but additional Senate co-sponsors are always helpful.  Click here for advice and facts you can use when asking your Senators to become co-sponsors of S. 812.

This new bill is similar to house bill H.R. 1831, which has an amazing 93 representatives as original co-sponsors.

(See more nature preserve news)

A Dozen Ways to Say Thank You

Thanking your elected officials when they do something right is an important step towards building a long-term relationship you can call on time and again.  If your Senators and Representatives are among the sponsors of these two important bills, please find a way to say thank you today!

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Three contractors were bidding to fix a broken fence at the U.S. Capital.  The first contractor told the Congressman, “I figure the job will run about $900.  That’s $400 for materials, $400 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”

The second contractor announced, “I can do this job for $700.  That’s $300 for materials, $300 for my crew, and $100 profit for me.”

The third contractor leaned over to the Congressman and whispered, “$2700.”

The incredulous lawmaker asked him, “How did you come up with such a high figure?”

The contractor smiled and said, “$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the second guy to fix the fence.”

More Funny Stuff

President Obama signed legislation today designating 2 million additional acres of public wilderness areas.  The federal “wilderness” designation provides the highest level of government protection from logging, mining and other forms of commercial use and development.

“This legislation guarantees that we will not take our forests, rivers, oceans … monuments, and wilderness areas for granted, but rather we will set them aside and guard their sanctity for everyone to share,” Obama said at a White House signing ceremony.  “That’s something all Americans can support.”

The 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act is a compilation of over 160 separate legislative proposals, extends across nine states.  It establishes 10 new National Heritage sites, creates 21 new wilderness areas, expands 19 existing wilderness areas in 10 national forests, and grows several national park boundaries.  One of the largest newly protected wilderness areas is 380,000 acres in the eastern Sierra Nevada and San Gabriel Mountains in California.  (More National Park News)

President Obama’s Speech

Following is President Obama’s speech, as provided by the White House:

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Iowa Senator Charles Grassley suggested Monday that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the company’s collapse by resigning or killing themselves.  During an interview with radio station WMT in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Republican lawmaker said:  “I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.  And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”

Grassley spokesman Casey Mills quickly responded with damage control:  “Senator Grassley has said for some time now that generally speaking, executives who make a mess of their companies should apologize, as Japanese executives do,” Mills said.  “He says the Japanese might even go so far as to commit suicide, but he doesn’t want U.S. executives to do that.”

The senator’s remarks added to the public outrage over the disclosure that AIG intends to pay its executives $165 million in bonuses after causing the company to fail and accepting billions in federal bailout money.  President Barack Obama criticized AIG for "recklessness and greed" and pledged to try to stop payment of the bonuses.

Story at FoxNews

Where were our fiscally-conservative Republicans when President Bush and the U.S. Congress took a budget surplus and turned it into a $1 trillion budget deficit, and doubled our national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion? 

The Republican concern for fiscal responsibility in the recent budget debate rings hollow.  I think it’s clear that NONE of our elected officials on either side of the aisle have any clue what it means to balance budgets and be financially responsible.

Brad Pitt can make any woman hot, even our esteemed House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi:

A quote from former Senator (R-Alaska) and convicted felon, Ted Stevens:

“The Internet is not something that you just dump something on.  It’s not a big truck.  It’s a series of tubes.  And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

At the time, Stevens was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and was pushing a rewrite of the nation’s fundamental communications act.  Would you want this man in charge of the debate on net neutrality?  This is why it’s important for everyone to pay attention to politics.  Quite often our political leaders are simply not qualified to make the decisions we’ve elected them to make.

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More stupid stuff 
More geek stuff

It’s official, trillion is the new billion.  The U.S. Congress is no longer spending our taxpayer money in terms of a mere ten digits.  With the recent flurry of government bailouts and stimulus packages, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all.

One trillion dollars; it’s a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator.  There have been attempts to put this number into perspective before.  A trillion one-dollar-bills laid end to end would reach the sun; or you spend one dollar per second for 32,000 years; or one trillion dollars in pennies would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses (the largest known dinosaur).  Fanciful as this may be, the real story behind one trillion dollars is in its economic impact.  Mint.com investigates what one trillion dollars can do.

One Trillion Dollars at Mint.com