TOO MUCH NOOZ HAWKISHNESS

In an a genuine attempt to embrace President Barack Obama's message of bipartisanship, I have been attempting to refrain from my usual instinct to go one-on-one with the many conservative columnists and bloggers in Santa Barbara. I mean, hey, my guy won; I don't have to be arrogant about it. That being said, I do admit that some of the writers over there at Noozhawk really know how to push my buttons. In fact, it wasn't even one day after Obama defeated McCain that I had to read this kind of crankiness from them:

In his acceptance speech Obama acknowledged those of us whose vote he didn’t get. He claimed to want to earn our trust. Fine. We aren’t going to agree to socialism because we work hard for our money. Share the wealth of the shadow banking bandits — not ours — We-The-People. We want our borders secured and our country protected against radical Islam. We don’t think it’s fair to nationalize health care without nationalizing the legal profession ...

Okay, TL, let it go ... It's just a little ranting from a sore loser.

So, I tried to lay low for a while, hiding my eyes from such vitriol and just enjoying the Obama victory. But, no, the much too prolific (and curmudgeonly) Harris Sherline couldn't even give me a week to soak in Obama's inauguration before spending an entire column trying to rip it (and him) apart. It's just a speech, man; why all the rage?

Okay, TL, take a breath.

Let's be constructive and talk about a few of Mr. Sherline's complaints. We'll start with this:

Whose "collective failure"? The fault lies with our politicians, who have steadily expanded the role of government in the economy and have been unwilling to restrain spending.

You're joking, right? The main reason for our current economic nightmare is years of Republicans deregulating everything they could get their hands on. In other words, we're in this mess because government's role has been severely restricted; not expanded. And that spending you want restrained so much ... Well, let me remind you that Bush has raised our national debt more than all other presidents in history COMBINED. And wasn't it your hero, Reagan, who said deficits don't matter?

Anyway, here's the next quote I'd like to look at:

So far, his vision doesn’t seem to include fiscal restraint. With something on the order of $2 trillion of new spending in the offing, I don’t intend to be led somewhere I know is wrong.

Again, where was your anger when Bush was spending us into the ground, huh? I mean, NOW you guys care about fiscal restraint!? The fact is that almost any economist worth their salt will tell you that we have to pump money into the system right away to get the economy moving again. Yes, it sucks, but now is not the time to worry about deficits.

And then there's this gem:

It’s hard to know where to begin with this litany of ambitious goals. Who knows what any of this means, except perhaps his health-care prescription, which he seems to think should be some form of nationalized health care. This is a formula for a health-care disaster. Socialized health care has never worked as promised in any society, generally downgrading the quality of care and causing rationing.

As I've blogged about before, this is my favorite conservative talking point; it's one of those things that it is totally not true, but if you say it enough, people believe it. I don't want to get off on a rant about health care, but here's a quick quote from the recent MSN article on this subject:

Americans get the poorest health care and yet pay the most compared to five other rich countries, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Germany, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all provide better care for less money, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

"The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes," the non-profit group, which studies health care issues, said in a statement.

So, you don't want the government running health care, Mr. Sherline? Well, guess what, I don't want Wall Street running it either. We all know how well they do with our money.

Next one:

This is a repudiation of the use of torture and the presumed abuses of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). However, Obama does not offer any alternative to protect the nation? He has already signed an executive order to close Guantanamo — without having the slightest idea of what to do with the prisoners there and without any agreements with other nations to take them.

It's no secret that Guantanamo has done more to recruit terrorists than anything besides the Iraq war itself. And throwing someone in the slammer with no trial and (often) no evidence is un-American and unpatriotic. How would you like it, Mr. Sherline, if they did that to you? Obama's people are going to review the case of every person held at Gitmo (imagine that), and he will figure out what to do with each and every one of them. And for those who can't be set free or sent to other countries, what do you actually think will happen to them? Do you really believe they are going to be dropped in the streets of Santa Barbara or something? Please.


Finally, Mr. Sherline ends with this:

At the risk of being pilloried as another negative, nay-saying conservative, my take on Obama’s inaugural address is that it was long on platitudes and short on substance. The most important message he conveyed to me is his intent to turn America into another socialist state.

Here's what that sounded like to me ... I don't mean to be critical, but Obama is a Commie.

The reality here is that the negative, nay-saying conservatives have been in charge of all branches of government for most of the last eight years, and look where we're at as a country right now. I know you'd like us to lose our collective memories in regards to Bush's America, but that's not going to happen.

We tried it your way ... time for change.

THE TRUTH ABOUT "ABOUT OIL"

Why does it seem as if I spend most of my time these days trying to provide a liberal counterpoint to the increasingly Right leaning columnists inundating our local news sources? It started with Travis Armstrong at the The Santa Barbara News-Press. Then came The Daily Sound with its slow thinking Conservative Turtle. And now we have Noozhawk ... Over the last couple of weeks, local resident Harris Sherline has written two columns about our current oil crisis, arguing that the root of all evil is those pesky environmentalists and that the poor oil companies are really the victims in all this. Please read them yourself here and here to see what I'm saying.

I knew we were in trouble when Mr. Sherline started out his first column with the following:

Congressman Steve King recently observed that The Heritage Foundation has convincing empirical data "that the people that are advancing this cap and trade want to slow our economy down, want to reverse our economy, and they know that if they shut down energy, they back the economy off, and they are doing it all because they worship Mother Nature" (Glenn Beck, "Anwr or Bust!" May 21).

Here's some advice: If you want to provide a "fair and balanced" argument about energy, don't start off by quoting The (right wing think tank) Heritage Foundation and Glenn Beck. That would kind of be like me starting off a column on energy by quoting MoveOn.org and Michael Moore. I may generally agree with these two entities, but you get my point? And likewise with Glenn Beck: I mean, this is the guy who said the following to Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to Congress:

I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies ... I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Well, THIS American does not feel that way! Anyway, there are two major themes that Harris and others on the Right are trying to push lately regarding the oil crisis. First, there is this absurd idea that oil companies are not really making money. Here are a couple of statements that he points to:

» For American companies to compete successfully in the world’s oil market, they must be financially strong enough to carry out huge, complex energy projects that require enormous long-term investments. Exxon Mobil, for example, spends around $1 billion a day just for day-to-day operations and to make the necessary capital investments required to stay in business.

» "Since 2002 the U.S. oil and natural gas industry has earned about 8.1 cents per dollar of sales — exactly the same as all U.S. manufacturing, excluding autos. Not much of a windfall," the editorial said.

This so reminds me of pharmaceutical companies that try to convince us they are really broke due to the fact that they have to spend so much on R&D. Here's my counter: If that was the case, they wouldn't be called PROFITS now would they? The fact is that Exxon Mobile made like $11 billion in profits last quarter. And do you think they spent all that money looking for new oil sources or whatever? No, Exxon Mobil actually bought back about $8 billion of its own stock in the first quarter of 2008. Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I completely understand the oil business, because I don't. But please don't patronize me with this argument that oil companies don't really make money.

The second major point made by Mr. Sherline is that the reason we're paying so much at the pump is due to the fact that bird loving, tree hugging, hippy environmentalists are preventing poor Exxon from drilling on more U.S. land. Here's another excerpt:

» "The Interior Department notes that most of the oil and 40 percent of the natural gas under public lands is off-limits to drilling. That’s about 19 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas," the editorial said.

One wonders what the people who want to prevent us from developing our own energy resources are trying to accomplish. My guess is that, like so many other matters that are critical to the economic well-being of our nation, such decisions are made on the basis of politics, rather than what’s right or is best for all Americans.

As someone correctly pointed out in the comments section of this column, "First of all more than half of the oil leases given to the oil companies have not been developed. It is not due to environment constraint but because the oil companies have chosen to do so on their own accord." That's exactly right, and Joe Biden made the same point on Meet The Press last week. The commentor goes on to say, "the deregulation of the energy companies by the Bush Administration. (The Ken Lay Admendment). Has directly contributed to the futures trading speculation that has raised oil prices way beyond the level that supply and demand would dictate." Well said.

As I stated before, I don't pretend to be an expert in all things oil. But please don't try to sell us this false bill of goods. The reality is that we need to get off (what Bush called) our addiction to oil. And the solution to an addiction is not to get more of what you're addicted to from someone else. Plus, even John McCain's own experts say that opening more land to offshore drilling (for example) wouldn't even help gas prices for about a decade, if at all. No, what's definitely "best for all Americans" is for us to start focusing on conservation and alternative energy ... and we need to start now.

In his columns, Mr. Sherline likes to talk a lot about conspiracies. Well, if you saw the movie Who Killed The Electric Car?, you would know that there actually has been a conspiracy by the oil companies, auto companies, and some government officials to keep alternative fuels off the road.

But, in this case, the conspiracy is real.