Wednesday, January 28, 2015

You'd think Alaska was under attack

In his campaign for the Senate last year, Alaska's junior senator said he will stand up to Obama.  Well, the president is giving him plenty of reason to stand up. but so far there's been only one such incident when Dan Sullivan spoke to the Senate about, guess what, gun control. And what did he want to control? No he isn't going against all his Republican cohorts to actually control weaponry in the U.S., unless you happen to work for the Environmental Protection Agency or the Bureau of Land Management.

Those are the people he wants to take guns away from. It all began with a confrontation a few years ago when EPA officials had a dustup with a group of miners in Interior Alaska over pollution issues. Some guns were drawn, the folks complained the federal officials overstepped their authority and after an investigation, it was deemed the feds acted properly. So now, that's Sullivan's vital issue, he wants to send federal employees all over Alaska into bear country unarmed. Mind you every damned drunken nutcase in Alaska can take a gun anywhere he wants but those dangerous federal officials are going to have to use sticks and stones to fend off attacking grizzlies.

Meanwhile President Obama launched a major initiative to protect some of Alaska's most precious country from drooling oil drillers wringing their hands to get into the ground in the Arctic.

First he proposed designating 12.2 million acres of the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, effectively removing it from access by those attacking oil drillers. That of course drew outrage from Alaska politicians who can only see dollars and economic growth. Keep in mind these same politicians approved an incentive program for the oil industry which when it was finally analyzed appears to have doled out more money to the industry than the state took in from royalties. And we wonder why there is a budget crisis in Alaska. And our senator who was going to stand up to Obama? He showed up in a picture peeking over the shoulder of the state's other senator, Lisa Murkowski as she protested the move.

Murkowski incidentally is so in the pocket of the oil industry she supports the Keystone pipeline and somehow has managed to rationalize a reason why building a pipeline for the dirtiest oil in the world from Canada across the Untied Sates to salt water in the Gulf of Mexico for export overseas, would be of some economic benefit to Alaska.

And while Alaskans were screaming from the treetops about ANWR (where there are no treetops) in what could be construed as something like a basketball juke and drive to the basket, while Alaskans were taking the fake, Obama in an executive order placed 9.8 million acres offshore in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas as marine wilderness. It looks like that would be at least near the area where Shell spent a whole season unable to drill in the Chukchi Sea and then almost lost its drilling rig during the trip south after the season.

If you read the Alaska news outlets or listen to the television talking heads you would think every single Alaskan opposes these moves, at least in what the politicians are quoted as saying. Not so. There are plenty of us cheering for the president and who want those places preserved, others of us who have experience with oil spills who want no part of a spill in Arctic waters and even more who just like the pretty, wild country and its wildlife. And that's not to mention preserving the traditional lifestyle of the Eskimos who live along that coast.

Along with that there are probably even more who would like to see the junior senator just STFU. We might wonder if one of those EPA guys gets lunched by a grizzly would the government be liable for damages. Maybe Junior would like to establish a multi-million-dollar escrow account of his own money to support their widows and children.

Wilderness designation plan for ANWR
Protection for marine wilderness
Chukchi Sea biological hot spot preserved
Alaska Dispatch News report
Junior senator wants to disarm EPA and BLM

COMMENTS:

Janice Edwards Excellent article, Tim. Thanks for breaking it down for your neighbors in the lower 48.
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If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

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