Ted Stevens denied his monument in Alaska

Poor Ted Stevens. You'd think that at 82 years of age and after 25 years of beating his head against the same board he'd have learned, but apparently the support of Big Oil is worth so many years of self-flagellation. The hapless Senator wants desperately to leave the "Ted Stevens Oil Field" in place of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as his lasting legacy (to say nothing of the years of oil subsidies the citizens of Alaska will receive if any drilling occurs). But today the Republican-controlled Senate fell three votes shy of the sixty needed to block a threatened filibuster of the must-pass defense spending bill, and that bill will now be reworked without the ANWR drilling language.

So Ted and friends will need to find another bill to which they can hitch their fetid wagon, and the threat to ANWR will not diminish until Ted retires or, more likely, until he checks into the Great Oil Seep in the Sky that surely awaits him. 'Til that time he'll have to content himself with visions of the earthly disaster that is Prudhoe Bay.




"The 'Ted Stevens Oil Field' would be my gift to Alaska ... to all America!"