Sometimes, not often enough but sometimes, the bad guys get their just deserts. (And yes, that's deserts not desserts in case you wondered. But I digress.)

...the next 11 months promise to be even worse than the last 85!

By my oh-so-sophisticated calculations we have now endured 85 months of the Bush assault on our environmental laws, our environmental agencies, and our environment itself.

That leaves eleven months to go, and the administration seems hell-bent on ratcheting up the pace of its assault as the public becomes a tad outrage-weary and hopes that whoever eventually wins a ticket to the White House can't possibly be as bad as what we've suffered through for seven long years.

Do I exaggerate? Here's a bit of what happened in Month 85:

• The Army, having promised to reopen Native Hawaiian sacred sites on the Makua reservation on O'ahu, breaks the promise
• The Environmental Protection Agency is slapped down by a court for refusing to regulate mercury from power plants
• The Fish and Wildlife Service refuses to protect the disappearing mountain plover
• The Forest Service issues rules to make logging the national forests easier and participation by the public more difficult
• The Fish and Wildlife Service is rebuked for trying to strip protection for marbled murrelet habitat
• The National Marine Fisheries Service is ordered to reinstitute protection for wild coastal coho salmon in Oregon
• The Fish and Wildlife Service delays protecting polar bears in the Chukchi Sea until it can lease the area to the oil companies
• The Fish and Wildlife Service grants permission to Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana to resume wolf hunting even before the agency removes the wolves from the endangered species list
• The Forest Service announces plans to reopen roadless areas in the Tongass National Forest to logging
• The Department of Energy refuses to impose stiff standards on home heating appliances even though such a step would make a considerable dent in global warming
• Finally, the Fish and Wildlife Service approves a plan to extract copper and silver from beneath a wilderness area in Montana, putting at risk a tiny population of grizzly bears.

Get the picture? Stay tuned. There's more of this to come, much more.