Keith Olbermann Suspends 'Worst Person' Segment In Wake Of Rally To Restore Sanity (VIDEO)

Even if that 3o-day excuse were true, it reflects very poorly on the administration. But as The Washington Post, in a good piece of reporting, noted on Tuesday: that excuse is false. An appellate court in 2008 rejected the 30-day interpretation now being asserted by Obama officials everywhere. That 9th Circuit ruling, in the case of Alaska Wilderness League, et al. v. Kempthorne, is really quite instructive to read, both because it illustrates how false is the excuse of Obama officials and, more generally, because of what it reveals about how completely co-opted MMS regulators are by the oil industry.



In that case, numerous environmental groups sued in order to challenge the Bush Interior Department's approval of a Shell Oil plan to drill multiple offshore exploratory oil wells over a three-year period in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. This is what happens frequently: environmental groups have to sue in order to prevent the Interior Department and the oil industry from working jointly to circumvent Congressional regulations for drilling projects. Just as was true for the BP Deepwater Horizon project, MMS in the Shell case had issued an exemption from the legal requirement that an environmental impact study be conducted before the drilling project could be approved, notwithstanding numerous, serious concerns raised even by Bush Interior Department officials about the impact of the Shell project.



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