Rep. Richard Pombo's an idiot...

From The Sacramento Bee via Truthout:

Rep. Pombo's Yard Sale
The Sacramento Bee
Editorial
Tuesday 27 September 2005

With TR's legacy on block, GOP is silent.

Here's a bizarre thought: If we don't drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we have to sell off national parks to help balance the national budget.

That grotesque notion has slithered full-grown from the dim recesses of Rep. Richard Pombo's brain. The Tracy Republican is chairman of the House Resources Committee, the most important House committee on public lands issues.

The whirring sound you hear is Theodore Roosevelt, the founder of our national parks and national wildlife refuge system and a Republican of a different sort, spinning in his grave.

Pombo drafted a 285-page bill dated Sept. 9 that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf off America's 26 coastal states to drilling (something opposed by most officials in both parties in California). His bill calls for selling off national parks; selling naming rights to visitor centers, education centers, museums, trails and amphitheaters; and selling $10 million in advertising in maps and guides and on all buses, shuttles, vans, trams and ferries.

According to news accounts, Pombo's spokesman said the proposal is intended only to influence lawmakers to support the item allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That proposal by itself is bad enough. Americans use 7 billion barrels of oil per year. The US Geological Survey estimates the refuge has 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil (or a mean of 7.7 billion barrels). Economically recoverable oil is less.

Why drill in one of the nation's most pristine wildernesses in order to get a year's or less supply of oil, distracting us from where we need to go with energy policy? But that's not the issue of the moment.

Pombo's bill requires 15 sites to be removed from the national park system and made available "for sale or for energy or commercial development." One of them is the Eugene O'Neill National Historical Site in Danville. Across the country, there's Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, Texas; Fort Bowie National Historical Site, Arizona; Frederick Law Olmsted National Historical Site, Massachusetts; Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, District of Columbia; Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, South Dakota; Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, Pennsylvania; Thomas Stone National Historical Site, Maryland. The list includes seven sites in Alaska: Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve; Bering Land Bridge National Preserve; Cape Krusenstern National Monument; Kobuk Valley National Park; Lake Clark National Park and Preserve; Noatak National Preserve; and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.

Oh, and there's this little gem: Pombo's bill would instruct the secretary of the interior to remove Theodore Roosevelt Island from the national park system and "make it available for immediate sale for purposes of commercial and residential development." Talk about adding insult to injury.

Pombo would drill and sell our assets to gain one-time money in order to fix a budget hole. And when the deficits continue next year and the year after? How many parks and how much public land does Pombo intend to despoil or sell?

The good news is that a Sept. 25 draft of the bill removed the national park sell-off. Still, the idea is out there and will probably rear its slimy head again. Pombo has shown that he's willing to sacrifice our public lands rather than be a steward of them. No Republican leader has risen to denounce the idea, so it seems safe to assume that he is not the only member of his party who finds this appalling notion acceptable.

Are there contemporary Teddy Roosevelt Republicans out there somewhere? The nation could sure use their services these days.

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