Tuesday, November 15, 2005

FMNNClip: Oil's well that amends well ...

... but ANWR doesn't.

This is the FMNN piece that I mentioned at the end of my last piece on the non-existent "budget cuts." Somehow I missed its publication.

Teaser:

"In every up-or-down vote in the US Senate, opening ANWR for oil exploitation has gone down. The Republicans -- who complain constantly about 'liberal' end runs around the legislature's prerogatives -- resort to sticking the ANWR issue into unrelated bills in the form of amendments, in the forlorn hope that it will slide through with something so important that anti-drilling congresscritters will cave. I'm surprised they haven't attached it to a bill to pay the troops in Iraq yet. That's probably next. Or maybe not ... because what the Republicans may be saying with their latest shenanigan -- popping an ANWR drilling amendment into the bill to make some spending offsets for the purpose of hurricane relief (they euphemistically refer to these re-prioritizations as 'cuts,' even though they remove not one thin dime of spending from the budget) -- is that they like having ANWR around to use as a 'poison pill.'"

No comments: