Update via NY Times: Pressure brings (some) Good news!

Remember the RNC? “Drill Baby Drill!” was the rallying cry. Now the Bush Administration, behind the backs of their own National Park Service, just passed some shiite on…get this…Election Day, when we were all a little bit distracted. They’re rushing the ruling through, giving only a month before the public protest period runs out. That’s only a few weeks away.

So what do we do? Click here and sign.

On the other end of the spectrum (addiction vs. looking ahead) MSNBC lefty pundit Rachel Maddow pointed out: “Once it’s done, it’s done—you don’t get pristine back.”

My idol/father-figure/namesake of my half-hound all-love mutt, Robert Redford, was interviewed by Maddow last night. But first, an excerpt from Redford’s NRDC and Huffington Post article (which already has 538 comments to my 53, damn him and his looks and his fame and his gravitas).

Video at bottom. Redford:

Part of the change Americans just voted for in overwhelming numbers was to move away from the failed energy philosophy of “drill, baby, drill” to a more farsighted strategy, emphasized by Barack Obama, based on clean, renewable energy and efficiency. Yet on the very day that we raised our voices for change, the Bush administration dragged us in the opposite direction.

The Bureau of Land Management cynically chose November 4 to announce a last-minute plan to lease huge swaths of majestic wilderness in eastern Utah for oil and gas extraction one month before President-elect Obama takes office.

As its clock runs out, the Bush administration also is trying to open-up drilling all over the Rockies and Alaska, to green-light oil shale leasing, and to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Though sad, it’s no surprise, coming as it does from the same crowd that designed a misguided national energy policy in secret meetings with the oil, gas and coal industries.

The BLM didn’t just try to slip the audacious Utah lease maneuver past the American people on an historic election day, it actually hid the ball from its sister agency, the National Park Service, and…for the rest, click here.

Video: