Minerals Management Service

Bearing his signature bolo tie and hat, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar traded quips with Jon Stewart in a jovial but news-free interview Thursday night on The Daily Show. “We’re cleaning up the mess” left by the Bush administration, the former Colorado senator told Stewart, acknowledging “maybe it’s quite a mess.”

Will he cowboy up or not?

Interior Sec. Ken Salazar is set to appear on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for one-on-one interview Thursday.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar wants the Justice Department to take another look into scandals at the Minerals Management Service with an eye to further criminal prosecution and plans to undertake a “fundamental restructuring of the MMS royalty program,” which last year reaped $23.4 billion from oil and gas companies that drill on public land. Salazar, the former Democratic senator named recently to the Obama Cabinet, announced his plans for MMS Thursday afternoon after meeting with the agency’s employees in Lakewood.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced Wednesday he plans to visit Lakewood on Thursday with a message of sweeping reform for the Department, which he said has been “tarnished by ethical lapses and criminal behavior that has extended to the highest levels of government.”

In scathing remarks delivered at the White House, the former senior senator from Colorado said he plans to meet with federal employees at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency that collects billions of dollars for the federal government from oil and gas companies that drill on public land. Salazar said he would make it clear he “will no longer tolerate” the “ethical transgressions” that led to last summer’s MMS “scandal involving sex, drugs, and inappropriate gifts from oil and gas companies.”

The watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch (CEW) this week unveiled its annual list of the top 10 ethics scandals involving public officials throughout the state in 2008. There was no shortage of civic shenanigans this year.

The Department of Interior has disciplined eight government employees for their role in a wide-ranging scandal that involved illegal drugs, sex with oil company employees and financial shenanigans at a federal agency in Denver charged with collecting energy royalties for taxpayers, The Associated Press reported Friday morning.

Stories about unethical behavior at the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service just keep coming. Back in high school I learned that Shakespeare’s plays always have violence, sex, or drugs in the first act, and this story has all three. It keeps the attention of even the least intelligent among us which explains why, my friends, this scandal ain’t going nowhere anytime soon.

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Just when you think you have seen it all.

State Democratic leaders sent out a press release this afternoon criticizing the Republicans for a “drill only” energy platform. Not wasting much time to marry Republicans to the latest scandal coming from Washington, D.C. that also has Colorado ties, House Majority Leader Alice Madden, D, took a shot across the bow.

Scathing reports released Wednesday charge officials with “a culture of ethical failure” involving sex, drugs and financial shenanigans at a federal agency in Denver charged with collecting energy royalties for taxpayers.