Rita,
Now, I’m going to tell you why this is actually shrewd, smart politics.
You’re wrong about Americans not favoring offshore drilling – they do, to the tune of 73%. Barack Obama has evidently been seeing the huge public support and the not inconsiderable jump in oil company contributions to McCain’s campaign over the issue of offshore drilling, so when framing the question in terms of how to tap into that market without looking like a chump, here’s his strategy:
Coupling with the coming public backlash over Congress’ inability to visit energy legislation before summer recess with the overwhelming public support for offshore drilling, Senator Obama said he would be willing to support *limited* additional offshore oil drilling if that's what it takes to enact a comprehensive policy to foster more fuel-efficient cars and develop alternative energy sources.
So, what are the limits?
Basically, what Senator Obama is proposing is a “win-win” scenario for him and Democrats in Congress. The proposal would lift drilling bans in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, but retain an environmental “buffer zone” extending 50 miles off Florida's coastline and in the South Atlantic off Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, but only if the states agree to the oil and gas development along their coastlines. These states would share in revenues from oil and gas development, but then places the onus for drilling legislation to them instead of Congress. It retains the ban in place along the Pacific coast, but also includes initiatives that Obama has been endorsing, like a $1000 emergency rebate funded by windfall profits on oil companies, repealing tax breaks for oil companies, and a commitment of resources for renewable fuels.
This is legislation that Obama will sponsor as a Senator at the beginning of the fall session, giving him more credibility on several fronts:
Given the obvious lead Senator Obama has in the likely Presidential win in November, it would be logical that the oil companies will hedge their bets on McCain and support Obama in the form of sizeable campaign contributions.
Now, before everyone accuses me of making lemonade, I have to say that I’m not thrilled about this.
The last thing that Senator Obama needs is to be labeled a “flip-flopper”. However, he has the ability to turn these negatives into positives and frame them in terms of “We the People” and not “I the Candidate”. I earlier sent a message demonstrating the capacity for our existing domestic drilling capabilities, and it is my sincere hope that Senator Obama is cognizant of such a scenario and takes that into account when proposing energy legislation.
It’s not all good. But it’s not all bad, either.
I’ve waited a few days to gather my thoughts on this issue before posting them here. I have found that in all things, reacting tends to have a detrimental effect overshadowing the more wise choice of acting, and so when I find myself outraged over a particular situation, it’s best to take a deep breath and fully evaluate it before diving headfirst into the deep end.
So with that disclaimer…
I am completely outraged at John McCain’s statement that “Barack Obama would rather lose a war to win a political race.” To me, it seems as if this was a direct attack on Senator Obama’s patriotism, an attack I might add, that Barack said in an earlier speech that he would not tolerate.
I’ve always respected Senator McCain – his heroic service to our country as a POW in Vietnam served as a reminder to all of us that sacrifice is sometimes part of service. As a Republican, I voted for John McCain in the 2000 Presidential primaries because I believed then as I do to this day, that on his worst day, John McCain is easily ten times the statesman than George W. Bush is on his best.
But this recent turn of events has cost John McCain my respect for him. All of it.
While I am now and forever grateful for his service to our country, his attribution of such naked, uninhibited ambition to Senator Obama is unnecessary, unconstructive, and to be frank, just plain mean.
Shame on you, John McCain. You of all people should know better.
It seems to have escaped most peoples’ attention that technically, we’re still in the Presidential primary elections. Neither the Republican nor Democratic candidate has won or accepted his party’s nomination; although we are down to the two logical and inevitable candidates for each, neither party has yet placed their official seal of approval on either.
Most people seem divided between Barack Obama and John McCain. Oh sure, there are the fringe groups that will embrace a Bob Barr or a Ralph Nader, but the choices for President in 2008 are from two and only two contenders. Indeed, the ambivalence toward these two candidates has the largest such rift in recent memory of a Presidential election. According to Rasmussen reports, the percentage of undecided likely voters has increased from 6% in early June to 11% in early July, which is amazing when you consider that the number presented is supposed to get lower as the election continues.
The candidates are going to blanket the airwaves with advertising, newspaper opinion pieces will not yield one solitary shred of insight because they are, after all, opinion pieces that have been written years ago with the names left blank for future reference. The Democrats want to shine a light on the total failure of the Bush administration, and the Republicans desperately need to make everyone afraid of the Democrats. So how does an undecided voter determine which candidate will be the better President?
Well as it turns out, I do have an idea about that: why not look at how each candidate has run their campaign to date? Surely, if the President or the Untied States is the most important job in the world, it would probably say a lot about how the person would actually do the job by judging how he goes about getting the job. Employers have been interviewing potential hires since before America was a country, and by and large, the interview process is the final litmus test of employee viability. I see no reason why we cannot view the presidential election process as the “job interview” for the Presidency.
Senator John McCain has not run a good campaign by any measurable standard. He has constantly tried to “reinvent” himself to the point that that an undecided voter simply cannot make up their mind about exactly who John McCain really is. Senator McCain cannot effectively communicate either. Watching him give position speeches is an exercise in frustration, largely because the things that Senator McCain has to say are of the utmost importance, but his delivery is like watching a train wreck in slow motion – you don’t want to watch, but you can’t turn away either.
Additionally, Senator McCain cannot keep his campaign on message. The revolving door which has been that of his highest advisers has gone through six major upheavals since being named the “presumptive nominee”, the latest casualty being Phil Gramm for telling Americans that our troubles are all in our heads and that we’re just a bunch of whiners. This, by the way, is the same Phil Gramm who opened the roads for the disastrous calamity that the Enron collapse inflicted on the American public, nearly claiming Tulsa’s own Williams Energy, and keeping this “Enron loophole” open to for current unregulated oil speculation which has contributed in no small part to the nearly 300% increase in crude oil prices.
Finally, Senator McCain cannot seem to make a single position statement without insulting his rival. Now that he has capitulated to the same campaign managers who managed to write entirely new volumes of dirty tricks to get George Bush elected, it seems his lofty goals of wanting to run a “clean” campaign have fallen along the wayside with his opposition to President Bush’s tax cuts.
For many, this is a great source of contention, because there are those who desperately want to believe in John McCain and his ability to lead our country. But watching his campaign self-destruct at nearly every start, those same people are left in wide-eyed bewilderment at the possibility he will run the country in the exact same manner, and for good reason, it gives them pause.
On the other hand, Senator Obama has run a campaign that is the very model of efficiency and integrity. Even those who openly oppose Barack Obama stand in awe at the deft ease with which he runs a tightly focused campaign, keeping all of his surrogates and advisors on message, and engaging his audiences to the point of involvement. His speeches and town hall meetings have a specific thematic message, and Senator Obama does not let anything distract him from the delivery of that message. And when faced with the various problems that do arise, he deals with them immediately, personally, and with an overwhelming sense of finality.
Senator Obama steadfastly refuses to engage in the personal attacks that have become the hallmark of America’s electoral process; he has not once ever denigrated his opponent, and in fact goes to great lengths to be courteous, respectful, and even complimentary in an environment that is anything but. Senator Obama also manages to keep campaign promises. One particular example is when he vowed that, as the Democratic nominee, he would disavow the DNC of lobbyist, special interest and political action committee money. True to his word, the day after being named the “presumptive nominee”, Senator Obama exerted his new power as leader of his party, and told the Democratic National Committee to eschew all contributions from Washington lobbyists and political action committees.
Political candidates say a lot of things, and it may just be a sign of apathy on our part when we allow these statements to go in one ear and out the other, stocking up on the grains salt we’ll surely need to go along with all the rhetoric and promises made every four years.
But the bottom line is that the election process itself gives us an insight into what kind of an official a particular candidate will be just by watching how they conduct themselves and their campaign. Given his performance so far in the Great American Job Interview, it is apparent to me that Barack Obama will make for a wildly successful President.
Barack Obama's "yea" vote on the FISA legislation demonstrates good sense. In fact, I'd say wer were witness to a Presidential candidate acting Presidential.Government is a balancing act, in this case balancing the necessity to protect Americans from another terrorist attack with the need to protect the privacy of Americans. Retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies complying with orders from their government would only have hurt the telecom industry by creating a mass of individual and class-action lawsuits, probably winning billions of dollars from the telecom companies, the majority of which would not go to the recipients of the judgment but to the lawyers bringing the suits. And that cost would immediately be passed on to you in the form of higher rates and fees, and remain there as a future source of profit for the telcos. The compromise was to set up oversight to the FISA court so that all "eavesdropping" has some form of merit, and brings back the necessity to provide some form of accountability which was completely lacking in the draconian Bush system. Think of the public backlash that Senator Obama would have faced if another terrorist attack on American soil were to occur, and he had not supported legislation that would have enabled authorities to prevent the occurrence.
It also seems to me that President Obama would be in a much better position to mandate specific legislation or modify the current system better than Senator Obama ever could. I have a feeling that he will do so, but he has to be elected first; if he doesn't, whatever is second just doesn't matter.This is the essential difference between being proactive and reactive, which boils down to which is the more noble approach: preventing a national tragedy, or chasing down and punishing those who commit a national tragedy after the fact. Both sides of that argument have compelling, valid points. On one side, we have those who believe our government has a fundamental responsibility to do everything in its power to insure the protection and safety of its citizens. On the other, we have those who believe that safety is the price of freedom, and those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither. Hillary Clinton's vote surprised me a bit, given her history of hawkish stances on national security issues. But I don't think Barack Obama will lose any votes by acting in the best interests of American security. The FISA legislation was a lose-lose situation for Obama. Had he voted against it, he would have been labeled as soft on national security and taken a great deal of criticism from the right. The McCain Campaign and his sycophants don't miss any opportunity to whine and complain, and we'd in that vein we'd hear no end of how Senator Obama is soft on terrorists, supports terrorists, loves terrorists; I can see the commercials in my head even as I type. Not to mention the outrageous comments we'd get in our inboxes, confirming Obama's "secret Islamic terrorist connections"... Well, I'm sure you all have good imaginations around how this would play out in the blogs.
Voting for FISA makes him seem against civil liberties and he takes a great deal of criticism from the left, and yet the worst thing to happen is he gets painted as a "flip flopper", which is a great deal better than "terrorism supporter". Senator Obama definitely had the Sword of Damocles poised over his head on this issue, but a little bad press is better than a lot of bad press. If he erred, he did so on the side of caution, and that makes him look Presidential in my book.John McCain didn't even vote on the issue, and regardless of which side of the political spectrum you occupy, this, and the Medicare bill, were vitally important votes. I find it very telling that the last time Senator McCain visited the Senate was April 8. In fact, of the 169 Senate votes so far this year, John McCain has only voted 36 times.
One of the things I’ve noticed during the Barack Obama campaign is his ability to energize young, first-time voters. Although I’m not young (42), I am energized, probably for the first time in a long time. But, I also know something about Presidential elections of the past, and the thing that immediately strikes me is that these young, new voters have a bad habit of not voting when it counts.
This is why I propose an “adopt-a-voter” program. Voters take a list of thirty to fifty first time voters, and “foster” them. Send correspondence, tell them why you’re contacting them, and then call them the week before voting, the day before voting, and the day of voting, all to insure that this high-yield resource stays an actual resource.
Comments?
There has been a great deal of conversation around the impeachment proceedings around Dennis Kucinich's impeachment vote.
There are two schools of thought on this issue.
On one hand, Bush is currently in the last vestiges of his Presidency, but he still has about seven months worth of office time left, during which time he can do something outrageous like bomb Iran for whatever reasons. Don’t think that is a silly comment; he’s done it before with Iraq, and for the past year Bush has been rattling that saber.
On the other hand, there is a fairly long list of “high crimes and misdemeanors” of which Bush stands accused, and some of these charges are fairly serious. And if Clinton can be impeached by lying about a blowjob, it only stands to reason that Bush could be impeached for knowingly lying about the reasons that led to the wasting of half a trillion dollars, and costing over 4,000 American lives.
But probably the strongest support for the impeachment proceedings is to act as a deterrent to other Presidents who will come after. This administration has exercised an unrivaled political power struggle, which with the help of a Republican congress, has tipped the balance of power into the executive branch to the point where 40% of the Bill of Rights is effectively negated. A great deal of this restoration of power will be handled by the Supreme Court, but with that being occupied by a majority of hard line conservative judges that support the Republican agenda, even that may further slow the wheels of justice, which already turn slowly.
The upcoming Presidential election is not even the majority of the problem. Congress has to be filled with a filibuster-proof majority in both houses siding with the President, which will allow a moderate agenda to be pushed through the legislative process, so the entire down-ballot races this year are arguably more important than the Presidential race, which is one reason I don’t support harvesting our Democratic senators to fill positions in the Obama administration; they’re needed exactly where they currently are.
Part of the process of picking up and moving on has to include punishing those who put us in our current situation, for no other reason than otherwise it will happen again. To prevent such a reoccurrence, certain legislation must surely be enacted, which I am confident that it will. Secondarily, we all have to accept some responsibility here in this issue, because it was the overwhelming public sense of fear that allowed the current administration to achieve the goals that has led to our current situation. People in general are easily misled, more so with frightened people. I don’t see any way of instilling a sense of bravery in Americans, so the only thing we can do is to punish those who exploit that ugly facet of America.
Keen observers have noticed their cars getting somewhat lower gas mileage over the past year. Some have attributed this to a normal side-effect of ageing vehicles, others with new cars didn’t notice it at all and thought it was the normal state of affairs. However, I have some news, and most of you aren’t going to like it.
Last year, the Bush administration introduced the Renewable Fuel Standards program under the Environmental Protection Agency. This was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was one of the last vestiges of a Republican-controlled Congress that allowed most Republican backed legislation to be enacted with little or no input by the Democrats. What this RFS program does is require that American refineries use a minimum amount of renewable fuel between 2007 and 2012. This “renewable fuel” is ethanol, and most states are now using a minimum of E10 in all their gasoline products, which is 10% ethanol.
Some people see this as A Good Thing, since ethanol is supposed to give us some freedom from imported oil and give us cleaner air, but as I’m going to show you, it ain’t necessarily so.
Going back to my opening statement, some drivers have noticed their automobiles getting lower gas mileage. One particularly keen observer noticed that his gas mileage went from an average of 32 miles per gallon to 29 miles per gallon. This person is very keen on vehicle maintenance and performance, and since he lives very close to the Wisconsin/Minnesota border, he was able to verify his results by recording his average fuel consumption with E10 from Minnesota, and comparing it to straight gasoline (E0) from Wisconsin. His findings showed that the E10 gasoline affected his gas mileage by 10%.
I’m sure that many are thinking the difference between 29MPG and 32MPG really isn’t that much of a difference, but let’s take a theoretical 320 mile trip. Using straight gasoline, that trip would require 10 gallons of fuel. Using E10, that same trip requires 11 gallons of fuel. Now pay attention, because here’s where the numbers start to do interesting things. Since E10 is 10% ethanol, the remaining 90% is gasoline, so this theoretical 320 mile trip still takes 9.9 gallons of gasoline! That means whether we use E10 or E0, we still use nearly the exact same amount of gasoline – the extra ethanol didn’t really do anything for us. And here’s the kicker: E10 costs almost exactly the same as regular gasoline!
Now this is just one example, and one might be inclined to think this might be an anomalous observation, unique to only one person. Luckily, the US Department of Transportation keeps records on the number of miles driven and fuel burned in all 50 states (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs06/motor_fuel.htm) and these numbers say quite a bit.
Using 2005 data (the latest numbers available), drivers in Minnesota drove 56.6 billion miles and consumed 2.7 billion gallons of fuel, making their fuel average 20.6MPG. Drivers in Wisconsin drove 60.3 billion miles and consumed 2.6 billion gallons of fuel, making their rating 23.3MPG. In other words the E10 state (Minnesota) got 12% less fuel efficiency than the E0 state (Wisconsin).
Wow.
The bottom line here is that ethanol as a fuel additive is a losing game. It doesn’t remove our dependence on foreign oil because we use only a fraction less gasoline to achieve the exact same results.
Today, 46% of all gasoline in the USA is at least a 10% ethanol blend, with that number reaching 100% by 2012 under current guidelines. The problem is that the ethanol is coming from corn; 98% of domestic ethanol is from domestic corn crops. There are currently 158 ethanol refineries online, 51 under construction, and hundreds more pending air quality permits from the various state Environmental Protection Agencies. With that kind of growth, ethanol from corn is likely to be our source of ethanol for many years to come because these plants can only convert corn into ethanol. Not cellulosic ethanol, or algae-bearing ethanol – these plants are essentially huge stills, designed to ferment corn and turn it into alcohol.
The problem of ethanol from corn isn’t that the corn we eat is being used to make fuel – it isn’t. The problem is that farmers are growing less of the food crops we use to make more of the ethanol-producing dent corn. Farmers are planting less sweet corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and even cotton to make room for the new cash crop: dent corn. When you combine a shortage of feed crops with an all-time high cost for fuel necessary to grow, harvest, and process those crops, you get a huge spike in food prices just like we’re seeing today, and the really bad news is that it’s only going to get worse.
Ethanol is a lie. There are other, more effective methods for turning vegetable matter into fuel, chiefly thermal depolymerization, which mimics the way mother earth converts decaying plant and animal matter into crude oil, except on a radically faster timeline. Think about that – we can take our grass clippings and chicken guts and make a light, sweet crude suitable for refining. I’ll bet you didn’t know about that. Most people don’t. Of course that won’t solve our energy crisis, no single solution will. But a common-sense approach to energy production that combines the best of all available and emerging technologies will certainly get us where we need to be.
It is my sincere hope that President Obama has a full understanding of the emergency situation the current ethanol policy has on the domestic economy, as well as the humanitarian crisis it is causing abroad. Whatever happens, the insane energy policy of the Bush Administration needs to be corrected in the next administration.
