Kerry's Latest Email to Supporters: "Save" the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Like many other FReepers, I subscribe to Kerry's email list to see what he is spewing out to his supporters.

He wants to "save" the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That's right, those evil Republicans would destroy it - by permitting drilling on less than 1/10th of 1% of its territory.

This is the Kerry (King of the SUV) who wants us to be less dependent on foreign oil?

Oh, and for the humor-starved among us today, you'll get a chuckle out of his claim that the Republicans are trying to "sneak" the legislation through! Yes, everyone knows that public debate has been stamped out in the Senate!

We have only 24 to 48 hours to try and save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Republicans are trying to sneak legislation through the Senate approving oil drilling and they are incredibly close to winning. We have to stop them.

I am joining with Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) in offering a critical amendment to stop this sneak attack on our environment. We will fight on the floor of the Senate, but we need you by our side.

There are seven key Republican Senators whose votes will decide the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Before they vote, we need to make sure they know that their constituents are watching, and that they will not be able to support drilling without anybody noticing.

Here are two critical steps we can take together to support our amendment to protect this National Wildlife Refuge:

1. Join the Citizens' Roll Call First of all, take part in a massive fast-moving display of citizen support for the Arctic Refuge. Sign our Cantwell-Kerry Citizens' Roll Call now.

To make our Citizens' Roll Call impossible to ignore, we have alerted the media, environmental advocates and my fellow Senators to a scrolling display of the names and home towns of the roll call signers. It is posted on our johnkerry.com website, where we hope to soon add your name and a running tally of the number of citizens on our Citizens' Roll Call.

2. Bring the fight to the home states of the seven senators We need to launch emergency online advertising campaigns in the home states of those seven critical senators: Senator Coleman (MN), Senator Smith (OR), Senator Specter (PA), Senator Martinez (FL), Senator Lugar (IN), and Senators Gregg and Sununu (NH).

We need your help to bring our Save the Arctic Refuge message home in these six states. Help us fund an emergency ad campaign to make sure they know how strongly the people they represent feel about protecting the Arctic. Please make an emergency donation right now.

When Senator Cantwell, myself and other Senators stand up in support of the Cantwell-Kerry Amendment, we will have powerful arguments on our side. (I have recapped some of those arguments at the end of this email message)

But, to win, we need to be able to report directly to our Senate colleagues that massive numbers of citizens around the country - and in their own states - are rising up to demand that the Senate protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Bush Administration and its oil industry allies want to send a message that they can drill for oil wherever and whenever they want to - even if it means targeting a place as striking, pristine and irreplaceable as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

They don't care about putting America on a genuine path to energy independence. If they did, they'd support efforts to increase energy conservation and to create clean, renewable sources of energy that no terrorist can sabotage and no foreign government can seize.

Let me be very direct with you. It is going to take an immediate and impossible-to-ignore display of grassroots support to stop them. That's why your decision to sign our Cantwell-Kerry Amendment Citizens' Roll Call is so crucial.

P.S. Senator Cantwell, who comes from a state in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, has - at considerable political risk - courageously stepped forward to join me in leading this fight. We need you to help us win it.

HERE ARE YOUR SAVE THE ARCTIC REFUGE TALKING POINTS The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's 19 million acres comprise one of the last places on earth where an intact expanse of arctic and sub arctic lands remains protected. Drilling in the Arctic Refuge can't make even a small dent in meeting America's energy needs. U.S. Geological Survey scientists estimate that there is very likely only enough oil to supply America's needs for six months. And oil companies admit that, even that, won't be available for at least 10 years. An irreplaceable natural treasure, the Arctic Refuge is home to caribou, polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, golden eagles, snow geese and more. Millions of other birds use the Arctic Refuge to nest and as a critical staging area on their migratory journeys. Of course, the Arctic Refuge supports more than wildlife. For a thousand generations, the Gwich'in people of Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada have depended on it and lived in harmony with it. To them, the Arctic Coastal Plain is sacred ground.

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My mother, who's an insane, bleeding heart, rich, white, knee-jerk, liberal democrat sent me a similar letter from Robert Kennedy and the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) sniff, sniff...After I sent her the following column by Jobah Goldberg, she sent a quote from Reagan "If you've seen one redwood tree then you've seen them all" and then harumphed "I just hope there's some wilderness left when your kids grow up"

Sigh.....it's absolutely hopeless trying to deal with anyone who believes this crap.....

Harldy a pretty place: Use ANWR for oil exploration
July 24, 2001 Jonah Goldberg

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- "EVEN if there were oil, let's say, in Central Park, in the Everglades, in Yosemite Valley, in the Redwoods, do we want to develop oil there?" asked Deborah Williams in a recent broadcast of "60 Minutes." Williams, the executive director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, believes the answer is obviously "No."

Williams is one of the leading spokespeople against oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR ("Anwar"). And this argument has been offered, almost verbatim, by Jimmy Carter, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt and a host of others. It's a strong, persuasive argument. In fact there's only one problem with it: It's completely false.

How do I know? Well, because I've been there. I recently returned from a trip (for a National Review article) to several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle to see what has become the Dome of the Rock of environmentalism. I've also been to Central Park.

So, having been both places, let me tell you what's wrong with the comparison.

First of all, if New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani learned that there were between 3 and 16 (ital) billion (end ital) barrels of oil underneath Central Park, he would be out there first thing Monday morning laying down orange traffic cones to save parking spaces for the roughnecks.

But more to the point, Central Park is in many ways the exact opposite of the tiny sliver of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge being considered for oil development. Central Park is manmade, literally. The original land was filled with shanty towns sitting on mud flats and populated by dirt-poor Irish, blacks and Germans. Today, Central Park is beautiful and millions of people move through its 843 acres either by foot or by car every day.

Now, consider ANWR. It is in Alaska, a state whose entire population is roughly equal to the city of Milwaukee, Wis. At the same time, the 49th state is big enough to fit France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Italy (ital) combined (end ital) with room to spare. ANWR itself is huge by the standards of the lower 48, about the size of South Carolina, or the equivalent of more than 21,000 Central Parks.

The differences don't end there.

While preparing for my trip to ANWR, I'd read that this was the most beautiful place on Earth. This was the famous "American Serengeti," as the enviros call it. Senator Joseph Lieberman, denouncing George Bush and Dick Cheney, predicted that oil exploration in ANWR "would cause irreversible damage to one of G-d's most awesome creations."

So, I was a little surprised to discover that if you wanted a picture to go with the word "G-dforsaken" in the dictionary, ANWR would do nicely.

Actually, that's not fair. You see, the environmentalists and their compatriots in the media play a dirty trick on the public. Most of ANWR is beautiful. But the pretty mountains and lakes you see on the evening news are safe from oil exploration by law and by the fact that there's no oil there.

The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And that ain't beautiful. Believe me.

Winter on the coastal plain lasts for nine months. Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill. This is the time of year when the oil companies would do almost all of their work; when nary a caribou nor any other creature would be dumb enough to venture out on to the frozen tundra for long.

Regardless, ANWR's summer is no picnic either. The coastal plain is covered in a thick brick of ice for much of the year. When it melts, it creates, well, puddles. Lots and lots of puddles - and mud. This provides the lebensraum that mosquitoes and other flying critters need to stretch their wings.

In short, the section that Lieberman claims as one of "G-d's most awesome creations" is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine. Every moment I was outside, the mosquitoes swarmed around me like John McCain near a TV camera.

The myth has been perpetuated that wildlife on the "American Serengeti" is more fragile than a butterfly's wings, especially for the exalted caribou. But, in next-door Prudhoe Bay, the number of caribou has increased fivefold since oil exploration began decades ago.

One explanation for the caribou's success in Prudhoe is that the infrastructure gives the caribou an opportunity to hide from the trillions of mosquitoes, as well as the nostril flies (yes, they lay their eggs in the caribou's nose) and parasitic warble flies that make life a living hell for the animals.

Opponents of drilling in ANWR succeed by appealing to the imaginations of guilty liberal environmentalists. So they compare ANWR to places we humans go and enjoy, like Central Park, Yosemite and other of G-d's "most awesome creations."

If you don't want to drill for oil in ANWR that's fine. But don't slander G-d by saying this giant mosquito pool is among his finest works.

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