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11/06/2005:

"Blood on the Tundra, Betrayal in the Rotunda"

Oil's Victory in Alaska, with a Dem Assist
by Jeffrey St. Clair

For the past quarter century, there's been an annual ritual on Capital Hill. Each spring, with the regularity of migrating warblers, the oil lobby bursts into the halls of congress with a scheme to open to drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, perched on the northern rim of Alaska on the ice-bound Beaufort Sea. This seasonal onslaught prompts the big eco groups to frenzied action, unleashing a blizzard of emergency fundraising appeals adorned with shots of caribou and polar bears, pleading with their members to send money immediately in order to "save the refuge". Year after year, the face off has ended in a stalemate, with the politicians pocketing cash from both sides.

Now this dance is over. After emerging from their closed door session on the fabricated intelligence used to sell the Iraq war (supposedly evidence of spinal-column regeneration by Democrats), the Senate proceed to once again doom the nation's most treasured wildlife refuge. With a 51-48 pro-drilling vote yesterday on a deviously-crafted line item in the U.S. Senate's budget bill, the oil industry has seized its most prized trophy: access to reservoirs of crude beneath the 1.5 million-acre wildlife refuge on the Arctic plain.
counterpunch.org

Nimmo: Liberals and Conservatives: Two Sides of the Same Authoritarian Coin

As it turns out, Michael Moore owns Halliburton stock. Joseph Farah’s website expects us to be surprised and angered by such hypocrisy. However, this “revelation,” one of many featured in a book by Peter Schweizer, is not surprising, nor are other insights into the disingenuous behavior of Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, Barbra Streisand, Ralph Nader, and other so-called liberals and Democrats.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together who is capable of reading a newspaper realizes Mikey is a hypocrite—or more accurately, a conflicted liberal.

...Democrats and liberals seem incapable of understanding it does not matter if a Democrat or Republican is in office—there will be invasions, mass murder, corporate thievery, neolib foreign and economic policy, encroachments on the Constitution and liberty, and an ever-growing police state and police state outrages (the Democrat Clinton, after all, oversaw the incineration of babies at Waco). Moreover, as history demonstrates, more Democrats have started wars than Republicans. Of course, since many Republicans are now neocons (and many founding neocons are former Trotskyites), this has become a moot point.