Lamnidae

Seemingly, anything that involves current PSC member and candidate Brad Molnar quickly turns into a fiasco.  Not surprisingly, Molnar’s current race against Ron Tussing has also taken this turn. One interesting facet has been former Racicot communications director Mary Jo Fox’s involvement on Tussing’s behalf. Jumping party lines is no big news in Montana, for evidence, one needs look no further than Judy Stang’s sorry write-in efforts in SD 7. However, dropping bombs like this in the comments of a Billing’s Gazette article takes the practice to a whole new level. Ouch!

Mary Jo Fox (presumably):

Let’s compare these two candidates: Molnar has a high school education, has sold grain elevators as a career and was sued by the IRS for not paying taxes in 2000. The IRS had to put a lien against his property to get the taxes Molnar owed. It took five years to squeeze the money out of Mr. Molnar. When I worked in Governor Racicot’s office as communications director, legislator Molnar set up shop in an unoccupied office in the Indian Affairs wing of the Governor’s Office without permission. He rang up hundreds of dollars in phone bills which our Governor’s Office business manager eventually brought to the Governor’s attention. Governor Racicot had to demand from Molnar repayment to the state for the personal calls made at taxpayer expense. As a new member of the PSC, Molnar checked out the PSC office cell phone and proceeded to advertise rental properties on the phone’s voice mail. The chairman of the PSC had to take away the phone. It is now in the hands of legislative auditors. When Brad received an $800 emergency room bill, he chose to go to his daughter’s friend’s house and beat him up, trying to get the money. He was charged by Yellowstone County for assault. There seems to be an interesting pattern throughout Brad Molnar’s career. He has a difficult time parting with money unless it’s someone else’s. Perhaps that is why deregulation was so palatable to him. He sponsored the bill to allow Montana Power to sell off Montana’s dams and energy infrastructure. How much harm has that done to our electric bills in the past decade? Mine have doubled. And now Mr. Molnar wants us to believe there is nothing wrong with a PSC member soliciting funds from the companies who appear before him and those who depend upon him for rate decisions? Ron Tussing, on the other hand, was brought to Billings after a nationwide search for the best possible police chief. Tussing had served as the statewide law enforcement chief for Nebraska. He had served as a SWAT team leader for 11 years. He retired from the Nebraska force when he came to Billings. Tussing received a full college scholarship from the state of New York based on academic achievement. He graduated with honors and pursued a master’s degree in public administration. Tussing served as Billings’ police chief for more than 7 years. His department won many national awards. When the city council chose not to make a decision between him and Kristoff Bauer, the city council offered Tussing a settlement. Tussing decided not to sue Billings or the city council as so many others have done successfully. Brad Molnar, though has sued the taxpayers of Montana over deregulation of his own making. Ron Tussing was elected mayor almost three years ago. He has served well and has gotten along very well with fellow city council members, Tina Volek, city staff, unions, reporters, etc. He has served well and he’s paid his taxes on time and without complaint. I’d say Ron Tussing is a far superior choice to represent southeastern Montana on the PSC. He is not beholden to corporate interests and he would never solicit personal gifts from the companies he is sworn to regulate.

I’ve been enjoying watching Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and others like the rest of the world.  I was a little bummed to see U.S. Soccer go out so early, but I might still be holding onto the 2002 World Cup a bit too tightly.  Regardless, the far most annoying facet of the Olympics for me has been the sheer onslaught of deceptive advertising during the whole event.

We’ve got McCain ads declaring, “Washington is broken… John McCain wants to fix it.”  I don’t think I need to even get into how laughable this ad is.  Then we’ve got T. Boone Pickens imploring us to subsidize his natural gas play–covering it in a wind power beard.  There’s also Exxon-Mobil’s greenwashing ads, explaining how they’re saving the world from malaria (how else can we pillage Nigeria’s oil?).

However, the worst–by far–are the American Petroleum Institute’s outlandishly dishonest ads campaign that’s been impossible to avoid during NBC’s big hourah.  The campaign constists of four ads, the first two of which defend big oil’s unfathomable profits.  One touts the fact that lots of investment funds are gaining on the profits of big oil, so what’s the big deal about the fact that the rest of the economy is tanking due to commodities costs?  Then there’s the ad that talks about return on investment, and how big oil really doesn’t make as much as other industries (this must be why they need McCain’s proposed $1.2 billion in additional tax breaks).  All fine and dandy I guess… But when an entire segment of the economy has to go to television to defend their profits, you can almost be rest assured they’re full of shit.

The other two spots come from the opposite end of the spectrum, in that they directly acknowledge the energy crisis we’re facing.  In the most gag-reflex inducing ad of the entire Olympics, a woman who looks like she just left a board meeting explains that the U.S. will need 45 percent more oil by 2030.  She continues that we have extensive oil and gas reserves in offshore areas (map pops up showing U.S. coastlines)–enough, in fact,  “to power 60 million cars and heat 160 million households for 60 years.”

Denny must’ve slept with a huge grin on his face on the stinky couch the first night he saw these ads.  They dovetail perfectly with the one day long press theatrics he recently staged in Washington D.C.  More offensively, the ads quote the U. S. Energy Information Agency and the International Energy Agency in terms of future energy demand, but don’t get into the agency’s same findings that offshore drilling wouldn’t likely help a bit in addressing our crisis. The ads also leave out any distinction or discussion as to what they claim to be “recoverable reserves” and the actually amount of reasonably recoverable reserves are.  If there wasn’t a difference here, I imagine we’d see Exxon-Mobil spending more than 5.3 percent of its revenue on exploration.  In fact, over 80 percent of Exxon’s existing leases remain unexplored.  Just think what prices might be if they explored those existing leases and hadn’t closed half of the 300-plus domestic refineries in the last few decades.

Said ad claims, “With advanced technology and smart policies, together we can secure America’s energy future.”  The technology argument is largely a mirage, given that these companies fight added tech costs tooth and nail, and in fact, largely don’t even own the rigs that they use to drill for and pump the oil.  And what the hell does “smart policy” mean?  My only guess can be that it’s doublespeak for “utter deregulation.”

You’ve got to hand it to the API though, this advertising blitz during the Olympics is ingenious.  You get a daily captive audience, largely removed from the noise of the impending presidential campaigns.  Not only that but they can simultaneously defend their outrageous profits, while implying that Congress is actually the reason why we’re in an energy crisis.  And if their lies take hold in the spongy brains of enough Americans, they might just get the political cover for another political push for the cheaply attained oil in ANWR and other protected areas.  Nobody will mention that the life of this oil on the market will be measured in days, not months or years… The real measure would like be seen as just another billion or so in the quarterly profit statement from the Exxons and Chevrons of the world.

I hope Michael Phelps get the $40 million everyone claims his 8 medals are worth–someone’s gotta still be able to afford the gas.

The House Committe on Energy and Commerce recently sent letters to 34 internet service providers asking about what kinds of data collection they subject their customers to after privacy advocates expressed concern. Of the 33 responses they’ve received so far, 7 companies admitted to having tested widely decried deep packet inspection program NebuAd, including Montana’s own CenturyTel and Bresnan Communications. NebuAd has been pitched as a way for ISPs to make more money off their customers, as it tracks their web history, which ISPs then sell back to advertisers who make targeting decisions from the info.

Both companies claim to have notified customers via email, but I’d imagine those probably emails probably went only to customers using email hosted on the ISPs domains. I’m a Bresnan customer and I don’t recall having seen one. On the other hand, Quest, another ISP heavily used in Montana hasn’t done any snooping on its clientele–which is a bonus that almost offsets their lousy customer service. I’ll surely be letting Bresnan know what I feel about their use of NebuAd and I hope others will too.

Karen Ray, executive director of the Republican Party of Arkansas, sent staff home early “out of an abundance of caution” today after a gunman barged into the office of Democratic Party chairman Bill Gwatney and shot him multiple times in the upper torso, killing him.

This shooting is of course on the heels of a gunman shooting six parishioners–and killing two–at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church a few weeks ago. We might also have forgotten the man who last November kept police in a multi-hour standoff from inside a New Hampshire primary office belonging to Hillary Clinton.

What I’d encourage Karen Ray and all of her counterparts to do is not exercise an “abundance of caution” after someone is shot. Perhaps they should monitor the words of themselves, their hate-mongering radio hosts, and scapegoating candidates and elected officials so that they don’t encourage anyone else to pull another one of these tragedies. I’m tired of wingnuts shooting up progressives. As far as I’m concerned, there’s blood on the hands of every Republican who’s ever used fear or divisiveness as a substitute for real political discourse.

Montana Democratic Party chairman Dennis McDonald did a good job calling Rehberg’s rhetoric on gas prices what it is in today’s Missoulian: “a political stunt orchestrated by Big Oil…”  The key to Mr. McDonald’s piece are these words:

Simply subscribing to Rehberg’s newfound religion on energy is to ignore his voting record. In the past several months he has voted “no” to releasing oil from the strategic oil reserve, “no” to repealing taxpayer-funded subsidies for the top five oil companies, “no” to renewable energy, “no” to forcing Big Oil to start drilling on the 68 million acres of land they already lease, “no” on a crack down on oil speculators, “no” on a crack down on price gouging, and “no” to expanded drilling in Alaska’s oil reserve.

McDonald continues with an illustrative call for renewable energy and conservation, asking that we, “harnessing the wind above our cowboy hats and using many of the plants that grow beneath our boots.” He might’ve also considered that we harness the wind coming from Denny Rehberg’s mouth, but he’d probably had to have contributed more than a quarter million to his campaign account first to buy him away from big oil.

I finally got around to listening to Roy Brown’s interview with Montana Public Radio’s Sally Mock today, and wasn’t surprised to hear the candidate hem and haw about validity of human caused climate change. After all, what interest does an oil man have in staving off this global crisis? We’ve had example upon example over the past few years of oil companies putting profits before keeping this place habitable for future generations–with many going so far as to fund pseudo-science to contribute to the misinformation on the subject.

Anyhow, at approximately 1:32 in the interview I’ve linked to above, Oily Roy says, “I don’t personally… I’m not sure that anything we as humans can do can solve this problem.” He then concedes that he might be wrong, but apparently his doubt isn’t enough to justify a change in behavior. He goes on to justify his reckless position with the argument that schools will fall into disrepair if we don’t have revenue generated from developing natural resources. So I guess he does care about the kids… Just so long as they’re still kids. Who cares what happens to ‘em when they’re older and struggling to live on a boiling planet.

It was no secret that John McCain supporters were scarce at this summer’s GOP state convention, and even more scarce at the earlier rigged caucus. That being said, I was pleased to happen across this website today: Where is McCain? I learned that the last time McCain came to Montana to raise money for Conrad Burns, gas prices were $1.51/gallon. The site also details McCain’s repeated votes against encouraging alternative and renewable energy, increasing CAFE standards, and his small army of oil lobbyist campaign advisers. Good stuff!

Hunter points out today that despite two wars, the devastation of an American city, deadly infrastructure failures, tainted Chinese products, acts of terrorism here and abroad, catastrophic climate change, and general economic collapse, the Republicans have only seen it fit to return to Washington during recess twice in the last eight years.

Once to interfere with the very private medical deliberations surrounding Terri Shiavo, and now to stage some theatrics hoping to remove the last barriers to unbridled drilling for oil companies in a time when they’re already shattering profit records. It’s no surprise when someone like Roy Brown carries a little water for big oil, I mean he’s one of them–but Denny’s act is embarrassing. I can’t remember him every making such a noise about any issue on behalf of Montanans (and no, this drilling nonsense isn’t about us).

Giving Denny the benefit of the doubt, let’s say we do literally maximize the potential of all US offshore fields and get approximately 700 million barrels per year for 20 to 30 years. These 700 million barrels represent about 9% of our annual consumption, and this doesn’t even take into account the fact that all of this oil will go out into a global market before coming back. Even the very best estimates I’ve seen point to a domestic price drop of 9 cents per gallon for a few decades. Less enthusiastic estimates put price decreases in the 3 to 5 cent range.

Good to know that Denny’s out there bustin’ his hump on our behalf eh?

This evening I donned a gas mask and stopped by BS Cairn, as I was suffering a little indecision as to what I wanted to blog about tonight.  Coincidentally, a couple inconsistencies in Montana GOP rhetoric (at least in comparison to their actions) had been bugging me today, thus I was pleased to see Wiley take an elementary stab at cognitive dissonance. As Wulfgar pointed out in the comments, it was pretty funny to see Wiley toss out a few “campfire tales,” while the Montana GOP is providing a virtual smorgasbord of rationalization of bad choices lately.

First we saw Erik Iverson so stridently insisting that the Montana GOP was the “big tent party,” while using underhanded techniques to deny Ron Paul delegates, and relegating their Senate nominee Bob Kelleher to a sideshow status. On the other hand, today’s news of the Dem convention included numerous references to diverse views.

Then of course we’ve got Rep. Denny Rehberg, who’s the walking epitome of the expression “between the thought and the action lies a shadow.” The latest example being his sale of a vote on relaxing American trade embargoes on Cuba for a measly $11,500–despite this issue’s important to Montana farmers.

However, the crown in the field goes to Roy Brown, who we saw criticizing the state’s budget surplus the other day. Between this and his support for spending champ Gov. Mike Huckabee, one must wonder how serious Brown really is about his “out of control spending” concerns. After all, didn’t we already see this pattern happen once already in 2000 when we sent an oilman to the White House with a record surplus–only to find ourselves in financial ruin 8 years later? Given his party’s track record, one would think Brown would choose his messages a little better.

While I’m still a little angry this morning about the residents of my neighborhood closing the door on the Pov’s drop-in center, there is some good news to be found: the state of Montana is about twice as fiscally solvent as analysts had predicted for the year.

Most of us Dems have known for a long time that the idea of a fiscal conservative Republican Party is nothing more than a straw man. I’ve mentioned a few times how the economy does better when Democrats are in the Oval Office, so it makes sense that Montana should fare better with Gov. Schweitzer. Kinda makes you glad that an acolyte of big goverment’s best friend Mike Huckabee isn’t going to be sitting in Montana’s top office doesn’t it?