Canadian Kochtopus:The Brothers Koch Astroturf Brokeback Mountain

(Note: All geeks and policy wonks may skip directly to the link in the last paragraph in this post.)

All the go-getters (John Wayne, Steven Segal, Charles Manson, Navy Seal Team 6, etc.) agree: To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. So, if:

A)  your omelet is a tar sands witch's brew of high-pressure, corrosive, abrasive bituminous gunk cooking at 150+ degrees at 1400-1600 PSI in a brand new pipeline that has already leaked 10 times in the last year (and we're not counting the 800,000-gallon tar sands crude makeover of the Kalamazoo River last July which nobody saw because they were too busy watching pelicans die in the Gulf) and you

B)  want to make another omelet/pipeline, only this time by ripping apart the vegetation holding down porous Nebraska Sand Hills above the biggest underground aquifer (the Ogallala) in the USA, well, then,

C)  you'll need a lot of eggs.

Which means you'll have to strip mine a LOT of Alberta, Canada's boreal forest.

And, unnaturally, you'll have to create a few toxic holding ponds — say 65 square miles' worth, which, unfortunately, tend to kill migrating birds, pollute watersheds, and make cancer rates spike scarily among the natives.

(These little side effects are probably why, among other reasons, the New York Times last month urged Hillary Clinton's State Department not to approve that new pipeline, AKA the TransCanada Keystone XL.)

Alberta, of course, is where Brokeback Mountain and dozens of other movies with spectacular scenery of the Canadian Rockies were filmed. Obviously, tar sand moonscapes, — sorry, we mean "fields" — aren't nearly as photogenic as the scenery in back of Jack and Ennis was.

Trucks carry loads of oil-laden sand in Alberta, Canada.
Photograph: Jeff Mcintosh/AP

Regrettably, that dramatic visual difference can create a perception problem and a speed bump for pollution perps like the Koch Brothers, who already handle 25% of unusually filthy tar sands imports into the US through their Minnesota subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources and who could make a lot more money if they could just get their free-market, pollution cost-shifting mitts on more.

Not to worry. The Koch Brothers are already the King, Queen and Royal Family of USA astroturfing, so why not parlay that Three-card Monte experience into a Canadian franchise?

Oh, look, they already did and here are the deets, kids...