This must-watch video is simply the best introduction to the San Joaquin Valley water politics I’ve seen lately.

Toward the end, there’s mention of California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intervention in the issue on behalf of a close friend and major political contributor, Stewart Resnick, who owns — among many other things — Paramount Farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Paramount, which farms about 120,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, is allotted 480,000 acre-feet of water each year. That’s enough to cover every inch of the land they farm four feet deep. It’s also about 47,000 acre-feet more than the entire city of Los Angeles used last year. Resnick asked Feinstein to help him keep his sea of taxpayer subsidized water, and she’s done so: she has prompted a “reexamination” of the science that says salmon need water to survive.

Those of us in the desert conservation community are waiting as the Senator’s staff draft what’s being hyped as a major desert land preservation bill. Given Feinstein’s Bush-like ability to jettison science when the profits of her benefactors are at stake, I don’t personally hold much hope that her desert bill will protect the desert.