An opinion in the LA Times by Terry Tempest Williams-
Oil lays waste to the West. The greed, speed and scale of development in wild lands is an open wound on America. By Terry Tempest Williams. Opinion. Los Angeles Times. December 7, 2008.
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My comment.
The lease sale set for Oct. 19 has now excluded a few parcels next to national parks, but again it is tokenism in a giveaway of your national heritage to the oil and gas companies. If these sell, they can’t be reversed by a new administration.
To be given to the gas and oil companies. Copyright Ralph Maughan
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project and the creator of The Wildlife News.
Just as our public land at Gettysburg (here in Pennsylvnia) is part and parcel of our nation’s heritage, so are the majestic public lands of Utah. Terry Tempest Williams is right, as always. Only a huge national uproar can stop this giveaway.
I have long believed that the Bush administration is a collective of psychopaths, they neither understand nor experience shame and recognition of wrong-doing. This is only one example in eight years of a maniacal rationale based on raping and pillaging the wealth and health of a once great nation for personal and political gain.
Perhaps these folks should become “people without a country” in that they become banished from setting foot on US soil ever again. If Guantanamo prison is closed for use in withholding “enemy combatants”, maybe we should keep it open for these guys and simply change the definition of terms, as they have conveniently done, for such a purpose as to protect the nation from thugs of their ilk instead. It might be easier for secret service to protect them from us!
Just a thought…