Fly fishing's toughest environmental writer published a short piece about the latest ridiculously flawed administration plan to restore Columbia basin salmon.

You can always rely on Williams to cut to the chase, which he does with the precision of a surgeon in this High Country News article outlining the futile, misleading attempts to blame salmon problems on predators:

Suppose the Bush administration prevails against squawfish, sea lions and terns. Is it then going to pacify the rest of nature? Will it attack cormorants, which eat more smolts than sea lions and terns combined? And what about orcas and those smolt-swilling walleyes and coastal cutthroat trout?

One gets the impression that if seismic activity threatened an obsolete dam, our federal government would try to rearrange earth#8217;s tectonic plates. On the Snake River, we can save dams or salmon -- not both. The administration knows this. Its war on predators is based on deception. There can be no end and no victory.

It's short, and because the article so nicely sums up the futility of the existing plan (the Underground's offering even money that Judge Redden goes nuclear on the government's latest plan), it's a two-minute education on an issue that is not going to disappear.

See you on High Country News, Tom Chandler.