This morning our friend Hal at Blueman in a Red District posted about Republican "Pandermania", providing a visual record of the definition of "pandering." An important piece of the picture was photos of a smiling Congresswoman Bachmann presenting oversized checks to local organizations, with the funds drawn from programs she'd voted against.
Former infantry sergeant Kimball contrasted her pandering with Walz's economic summits, town hall meetings, and tireless efforts to secure educational and health care benefits for his fellow veterans.
One good turn deserves another. We present another smackdown of Republican pandering: No excuses for bad energy policies, a column by Jerome Christensen, in today's Winona Daily News. Christensen begins:
“For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.” attributed to H.L. Mencken
So now we’re nostalgic for two-buck-a-gallon gas — half a dozen years ago, who’d of thunk it? But never fret, Congressgirl Shelly’s gonna make all your hi-test dreams come true — no excuses.
Sorry, I can’t help but be amused by the latest bimbo eruption out of the 6th Congressional District — since the folks up there sent Michele Bachmann to Congress, it’s clear that all the crazies in Stillwater aren’t locked up in the state prison.Her latest shtick is something she’s calling the “No more excuses” energy act — a hodgepodge of legislative improbabilities that essentially says we have lots and lots of oil and energy in this country and all we have to do is stick a big straw in the ground, suck it out and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail gas will be two bucks a gallon again. . . .
Y’see our girl Shelly sort of has it almost half right — there’s way more oil tucked away in Colorado oil shales and Canadian tar sands than the Saudis ever sat on — and that’s not even touching all that coal and natural gas or the oil waiting offshore just off our coasts. We have lots and lots of energy right here in this country — no trouble there. The trouble is with that straw.
That’s the part that’s not so simple as Shelly sees it. The oil is there and we know how to get it — trouble is, the getting it is expensive. It’s not we’re like looking at some sort of petrochemical malted milk — and all we need is the evil, liberal, America-hating Democrats to vote for Bachmann’s bill so our benevolent friends at Exxon can go get it.
Getting all that energy means cooking it out of solid rock, washing it out of tons of sand or dropping a pipe down through a mile or two of sea water before drilling through a few miles of rock to get to the juice to make that Hummer hum. That’s not saying we can’t get to it, or even saying we shouldn’t try — but what it is saying is that nobody’s going to do it for two bucks a gallon. C’mon, give it a thought. If there was profit to be made at that price wouldn’t somebody have been tapping into it — if not here (because of those evil Democrats, of course) then somewhere in the wild, wooly gas-thirsty world where environmental regulations are looser and you can still see the air before you breath it?
But they didn’t. And they won’t, not until the price stays high enough, long enough to make it profitable. No matter what pandering politicians want us to believe — four months ahead of Election Day.
There's more fun where that came from; go read the rest at the Winona Daily News. Christensen correctly labels the No Excuse for an Energy Act as pandering.
And it's interesting that he mentions Exxon, because the energy behemoth will be a part of our tale of a pandering press release--up soon.
Update: The Locust of Evil takes a look at The "Comprehensive" Energy Plan of Brian Davis.
Photo: Michele Bachmann and the BFF she endorsed, Brian Davis; both support the "No Excuses for an Energy Act."
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