Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton has resigned from her post in the Bush administration after five years at  that post. An anonymous source claims Norton "is not leaving because of any problems" but simply "wants to go home for a while."

Proclaimed reasons notwithstanding, Norton leaves as the Abramoff scandal is progressively enveloping the White House - a scandal that has firmly ensnared the interior secretary.

Investigators have unearthed e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay's office tried to help lobbyist Jack Abramoff get a high-level Bush administration meeting for Indian clients, an effort that succeeded after the tribes began making $250,000 in donations.

Tribal money went both to a group founded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the Cabinet secretary Abramoff was trying to meet, as well as to DeLay's personal charity.

"Do you think you could call that friend and set up a meeting?" then-DeLay staffer Tony Rudy asked fellow House aide Thomas Pyle in a Dec. 29, 2000, e-mail titled "Gale Norton-Interior Secretary." President Bush had nominated Norton to the post the day before.

Rudy wrote Abramoff that same day promising he had "good news" about securing a meeting with Norton, forwarding information about the environmental group Norton had founded, according to e-mails obtained by investigators and reviewed by The Associated Press. Rudy's message to Abramoff was sent from Congress' official e-mail system.

Within months, Abramoff clients donated heavily to the Norton-founded group and to DeLay's personal charity. The Coushatta Indian tribe, for instance, wrote checks in March 2001 for $50,000 to the Norton group and $10,000 to the DeLay Foundation, tribal records show.

The lobbyist and the Coushattas eventually won face-to-face time with the secretary during a Sept. 24, 2001, dinner sponsored by the group she had founded.

 In the President's state of the union address he sets the goal of reducing oil imports from the middle east to 25% of what (I am assuming) are our current import levels.  Yet even Edward Murphy, the Refining Director of the American Petroleum Institute, admits that only 20% of our supplies come from the middle east; our largest supplier being Canada.

it seems that katrina relief funding is directly tied to arctic drilling, i.e. their relief package is structured around bidding revenue on drilling projects.

What to do?

This time, he's holding the Defense Spending Bill hostage.  

As disingenuous as it was to consider Arctic Refuge drilling in budget reconciliation, its proponents should not be permitted to trade one cheap trick for another. Their most recent statements claiming the Defense Appropriations bill a suitable vehicle are indefensible. An Arctic drilling provision would force a delay and likely doom passage of funding for our troops on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere.

Please give your reps and senators a call; and tell Stevens to !@#$%& grow up while you're at it.

Breaking news on MSNBC.

So here stands the GOP, naked, vulnerable, with its pants around its ankles not knowing what to do or where to aim. The story

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives abandoned, at least temporarily, a drive to open Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling after concluding on Wednesday the initiative was threatening passage of a huge bill to cut spending.

"ANWR and OCS will be out" of the legislation, said House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, an Iowa Republican.

Besides the Alaska oil drilling initiative, the House spending-reduction bill had also called for opening outer-continental shelf, or offshore areas, to oil and gas drilling.

Senator Russ Feingold has accused the Bush administration of "trying to drill their way out of the national energy crisis," the AP reports. His comment about the Bush administration hits the nail on the head. His constant, steady opposition to the ANWR bill is a big contrast to the moral decay of the Republican Party, whose members can't tell right from wrong.

The AP article notes that Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman made a campaign promise not to vote for the ANWR bill. However, now, he is waffling on the bill like a person who knows he is not supposed to lie, but who wants to do it anyway. Coleman is like the people who call Dr. Laura who waffle about cheating on their spouses or doing a headlong rush into a premarital sexual relationship or something of that nature.