The 109th Congress – she of low-income aid slashes and bankruptcy noose-tightening, of welfare for the corporation but not the individual, of the most bloated and absurd energy bill ever to sail through the Beltway, of weekend emergency meetings to debate the vegetativeness of a single citizen’s state – the glorious 109th brought her illustrious career to an appropriate close last Friday with the approval of oil and gas development on 8.3 million acres of previously protected Gulf Coast waters. In the wonderfully understated words of the Christian Science Monitor: “Industry officials are pleased; environmentalists less so.”
For their part, Democrats have vowed to close loopholes that in recent years allowed as much as “tens of billions of dollars” in lease royalties owed to the U.S. government by oil companies to go unpaid. Meanwhile, I smell the premise for a wacky new Spring Break movie, surrounding a group of hot environmentalist chicks on a pilgrimage to Lauderdale to picket a new oil refinery, and the wet T-shirt contest they’re unexpectedly and through completely believable plot contrivance forced to participate in...