Hooves off: A Utah judge has determined that Kane and Garfield counties can't use state money to pay lawyers hired by ranchers to sue for federal grazing permits that environmentalists bought and don't use, in order to keep the ranchers from buying them and using them. Sound confusing? Suffice to say that your tax dollars will no longer be spent to fight for the right to trample land in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

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Hands off: This Is the Place Heritage Park is no place for office buildings, the state Board of Parks and Recreation ruled Thursday. The money-hungry foundation that operates the money-losing park in Salt Lake City had hoped to lease 12 acres of the 430-acre park for $400,000 a year to the University of Utah's ARUP Laboratories for a three-story administration building and parking lot. Now it will have to find a new way to cut its losses. Money is nice, but a spot of history, and open space, is priceless.

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Hatch off: Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was grilled by the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, with one exception: Our own Sen. Orrin Hatch. While the rest of the committee had Gonzales for lunch, Hatch did everything but invite Gonzales to dinner, making excuses for the embattled attorney general, and asking probing questions like: "How many employees do you have at the Department of Justice?" Had the inquiry been a police investigation, Hatch would have been what you'd call the "really good cop."