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Obama’s Interior Secretary Threatens Colorado Springs Reporter: ‘I’ll Punch You Out’

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Last week, during an Election Day event supporting President Barack Obama in Fountain, Colo., U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar threatened a local reporter following a seemingly routine interview.

“If you set me up like this again, I’ll punch you out,” Salazar told Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Phillips.

In an email to TheBlaze, U.S. Department of Interior spokesman Blake Androff confirmed that the altercation occurred. “The secretary regrets the exchange,” he wrote. The official did not provide any additional details.

Salazar had just finished answering questions about his policies for managing America’s wild horse population when the alleged incident occurred. Ginger Kathrens, executive director of the Cloud Foundation, was standing just feet away from Phillips when Salazar lost his temper.

“I was standing 3 feet away from Dave,” Kathrens told TheBlaze. “And when I turned, he kind of spat that at him and I thought, ‘Oh my God’…It was unbelievable.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Great Alaska Shutout

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President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.

The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.” Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his plan “will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives.” He added that the proposal will expand “safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that’s needed to bring supplies online.”

The problem is almost no one in the energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress—Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it “the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades.” This decision, they add, “will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska.” Mr. Begich is a Democrat.

The letter also says the ruling “will significantly limit options for a pipeline” through the reserve. This pipeline has long been sought to transport oil and gas from the Chukchi Sea, the North Slope and future Arctic drilling. Mr. Salazar insists that a pipeline could still be built, but given the Obama Administration’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline, Alaskans are right to be skeptical.

Read more from this article HERE.

Tentative oil plan for Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve

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The U.S. Interior Department opened the door to the possibility of an oil pipeline across the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska and to oil and gas leasing on 11.8 million acres of it.

The draft development proposal unveiled Monday by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar represents the federal government’s first coordinated plan for the 22-million-acre reserve, which has seen limited oil production in recent years despite controversy over potential threats to wildlife.

The reserve, which lies west of the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, is home to the famous Western Arctic caribou herd, numbering about 325,000, and a smaller herd of 45,000 caribou that migrates near Teshekpuk Lake.

The largest single block of public land in the country, the reserve contains an estimated 549 million barrels of economically recoverable oil and 8.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The compromise plan — unveiled after a long study that collected more than 400,000 public comments — would continue to protect some of the most ecologically sensitive areas, including Teshekpuk Lake, home to tens of thousands of geese and brant that migrate to the far north during sunny Arctic summers.

Read more from this story HERE.