3/2/2005
ANWR Watch
Bush, Cheney & Gale Norton start the big push for opening up the coastal region of ANWR to drilling: (Reuters)
The full Senate could debate the budget during the week of March 14, before a two-week recess beginning March 21, said Senate Republican leader Bill Frist.Nobel laureate and former president Jimmy Carter has said: "It will be a grand triumph for America if we can preserve the Arctic Refuge in its pure, untrammeled state."
The White House says it supports attaching ANWR drilling language to the budget.
The administration is so confident ANWR will finally be opened that it included in its 2006 budget request to Congress $2.4 billion in fees it expects the Interior Department to collect from leasing tracts in the refuge for oil drilling.
U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Energy Secretary Sam Bodman depart this week with a congressional delegation to ANWR led by the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, New Mexico's Pete Domenici, and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
For an opposing view we turn to Jonah Goldberg, writer for the prestigious internet:
In short, the section that Lieberman claims as one of "G-d's most awesome creations" is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine. Every moment I was outside, the mosquitoes swarmed around me like John McCain near a TV camera.file under: anwr
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