Tag: Department of the Interior

Colorado could wind up with a Salazar in President-elect Barack Obama's cabinet after all. The Denver Post and Reuters are reporting Monday that Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar is "the leading contender" to be secretary of the interior after earlier removing himself from the list of top possibilities. A source with Obama's transition team told the Denver Post last week, "It appeared that it was all but up to Salazar as to whether he wanted the post."

An 11th hour rule change in the waning days of the Bush Administration to allow visitors to carry loaded concealed weapons into national parks and wildlife refuges has generated tremendous hue and cry from environmentalists, park leaders and gun violence groups. While speculation has been raised about the likelihood of increased poaching and visitor squabbles being settled with Smith & Wesson peacemakers, rolling back the 25-year-old regulation that required guns to be unloaded and stowed away puts federal workers at much higher risk than Bambi.

Wednesday's news that U.S. Rep. John Salazar has won a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu is the Obama administration's pick to head the Department of Energy narrows the possibility Colorado will be sending anyone into the next cabinet. Don't count Coloradans out, however, as the unfolding Illinois governor scandal might dislodge a Chicago schools superintendent from contention as education secretary, smoothing the way for Denver Superintendent Michael Bennet's nomination.

Are there any prominent Colorado Democrats not under consideration for Obama administration appointments these days? The state might not have been "ground zero" for the presidential election — Ohio, Virginia and Florida took over that role after Colorado started leaning solidly Blue in mid-October — but to hear the chattering class chatter, the state has lately become an epicenter for second-tier cabinet picks.

While Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar's prospects for a cabinet position dim — he says he's not interested — Hispanic legal advocates says it's time the U.S. Supreme Court included a Hispanic justice, and the Democratic congressman's name makes the short list. “What more unifying appointment could there be than a Hispanic justice?” former Hispanic National Bar Association President Carlos Ortiz asks the Legal Times' Tony Mauro. "It’s not just the right thing to do, but we deserve it. I can’t imagine that the next appointment will go to someone other than a Hispanic.”

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.

Author and naturalist Edward Abbey didn’t even like people hanging out at Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, when he was a seasonal ranger there in the late 1950s. One wonders how he’d feel about the place being overrun by oil and gas wells.

While Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar's name has generated conjecture as a possible Interior Department secretary in a new Barack Obama administration, the first-term Democrat said Wednesday, "It's highly doubtful that I would serve in the Cabinet." Salazar said he likes his current job in a conference call with reporters.

The day after U.S. Interior Department officials detailed for Congress the sordid sex and drug scandal in its Denver oil royalty office, a spokesman for a group trying to roll back oil and gas tax subsidies in Colorado said public outrage can only help Amendment 58.

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.

Read more of Jeff's commentaries: • Matt Damon grills Sarah Palin • Setting aside politics on September 11 • There goes the neighborhood • Reid to Lieberman: No lunch seat for you!