Best Little Whorehouse In Denver

Charlie Savage advances the ball on this story of debauchery at the Minerals Management Service in the Department of the Interior. If we weren't talking about billions of wasted dollars it'd actually be funny.

As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct [...]

The investigations are the latest installment in a series of scathing inquiries into the program’s management and competence in recent years. While previous reports have focused on problems the agency had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury, and hinted at personal misconduct, the new reports go far beyond any previous study in revealing serious concerns with the integrity and behavior of the agency’s officials.

In one of the new reports, investigators concluded that Ms. Denett worked with two aides to steer a lucrative consulting contract to one of the aides after he retired, violating competitive procurement rules.

Two other reports focus on “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” in the service’s royalty-in-kind program. That part of the agency collects about $4 billion a year in oil and gas rather than cash royalties.

It's really an eye-opening report. The graft here is widespread, and these aren't rinky-dink companies engaging in this - Chevron and Shell are implicated.

Showing that impeccable timing that always seems to characterize Congressional Democrats, they today released their offshore drilling plan, which is tone deaf in so many ways:

• The price of oil has dropped 30% from its height, and the price of gas nearly 20%, without one drop of new oil being drilled, entirely due to lower demand and increasing transit ridership. Such conservation not only works, it works at a level that the pathetic amounts of coastal drilling never can.

• The federal agency that would be tasked with approving and managing all these new oil leases is having coke orgies with Big Oil.

Bill Nelson, at least, has stepped up and said that there should be no new drilling as a cause of this.

But of course, such a maneuver would mean that logic is taking over in the government.