THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Because the Minerals Management Service went way beyond reasonable and rational disagreement of positions to willful refusal to even look at evidence that might get in the way of their corporate pimps and drug dealers.

Last year, for example, federal marine mammal experts warned the MMS that it had minimized the environmental risks of drilling when assessing the impact of auctioning leases in four areas in Alaska's Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

MMS officials did not respond, although they are required under law to either adopt the recommendations from the experts or explain within 120 days why they rejected them. Their draft analysis was not finalized before the administration postponed further action on lease sales in March.

MMS officials also ignored the advice of its staff experts. In 2006, then-MMS biologist Jeff Childs provided a detailed analysis of how the Exxon Valdez spill had harmed generations of fish in Prince William Sound, and how a future spill could do the same in the Beaufort Sea. But Childs's conclusion that "a large oil spill . . . is likely to result in significant adverse effects on local [fish] populations requiring three or more generations to recover" would have forced MMS to conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement before auctioning off a lease there.

"I have concerns about Jeff's analysis and will not insert it into the [Environmental Assessment] being sent to HQ at this time," wrote Deborah Cranswick, chief of the environmental assessment section at MMS, in a June 23 e-mail to her Alaska colleagues. "I believe that Regional management needs to review it first because Jeff has concluded new significant impacts from oil spills. This will trigger an EIS -- and thus delay the lease for at least a year."

Six days later, Paul Stang, Alaska MMS regional supervisor for leasing and the environment, sent a hand-written note to Childs saying, "As you know, a conclusion of significance under NEPA means an EIS and delay in sale 202. That would, as you can imagine, not go over well with HQ and others."

When Childs balked at deleting the finding, another manager rewrote it so that the lease process could move ahead without delay. The government held the sale in April 2007, receiving $42 million in bids from Shell, Conoco, BP, ENI Petroleum U.S., and Total E&P USA.

God forbid our corporate masters might face a delay or spend more money doing it right. More than most Bushies the MMS people knew what they were there for.