Ah Wilderness

You only go around once in life, went the Schlitz Beer commercial, you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can get. And when the party’s almost over, it’s time to squeeze the last drop from America before your term is up and the next crop of crooks bellies up to the bar. According to Reuters, The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, barely rejecting a Democratic-led attempt to strike the controversial plan from a budget bill.

So the relatively few barrels of oil will most likely be taken from the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and sold to the Far East and the oil barons will raise their already obscene profits a bit more while the cost of fuel in the US will not really be affected. Likewise, I’m betting that drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, off the beautiful, unspoiled beaches of Florida, will begin within a few years although the amount of oil extracted also hardly will be enough to matter and the wells would probably not produce for a decade.

I live at the edge of a small Federal Wildlife Reserve and I will count myself lucky if no natural resources more profitable than wildlife are ever found there, because our Born Again administration values nothing more than big profits for Big Oil.

But don’t worry; the final Budget Cutting bill will likely offset the gains with additional cuts in food stamps and Medicare. If you’re a Republican, this kind of bookkeeping should be easy to understand.