GOP senators ANWR their critics

While we're all counting and recounting all the ponies we think we're going to get on Indictmas Day, we should be careful not to forget the bigger picture: the swine still control all three branches of the federal government. And they continue to be dedicated to protectionism for their industry cronies (activist judges, eh?) and despoiling our planet.

Ms. Murkowski had followed the lead of her Republican colleague, Senator Ted Stevens, and her father, Gov. Frank H. Murkowski, in pushing relentlessly to overcome two decades of opposition by national environmental groups, for whom protecting the wildlife refuge has been a signature issue.

Virtually all those groups have been determined to prevent the industrial energy production complex that has grown up around the Prudhoe Bay oil fields on the North Slope of Alaska from sending its tendrils into the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain of the wildlife refuge.

The plain is a way station on the annual migration of thousands of caribou and many more migratory birds. It is also part of the range of musk oxen, grizzly bears, arctic foxes and a whole suite of other wildlife that regularly journey through the coastal flatlands at the edge of the Beaufort Sea.

Enjoy watching White House appointees twist slowly in the cold October wind. But don't forget that the GOP is still in power and still incapable of governing our nation or stewarding our natural resources.