Add Possible Conflict of Interest to Mark Udall's List of Energy-Related Problems

The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports:

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Udall’s plans to encourage the use of renewable energy could end up benefiting several of the congressman’s investments, according to a review of his recent financial disclosure forms.

Udall’s May 22 disclosure to the Senate Ethics Committee reveals he has at least $31,000 invested in mutual funds and IRAs backed by clean-energy investments.

These investments could benefit from policies Udall has announced his support for both on the campaign trail and during his time in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The top holdings for Powershares WilderHill Clean Energy, in which Udall has invested from $16,000 to $45,000, include First Solar Inc., an Arizona-based firm developing solar-energy technology.

Udall has purchased $15,000 to $50,000 worth of shares in the Winsloe Green Growth mutual fund, which also has invested in the solar-technology firm.

Udall purchased shares in both investments Nov. 13, according to his financial disclosure.

Mark Udall's relations in the energy world have already evidenced public hypocrisy and possible coordinated smear attacks against his opponent. What abouta little conflict of interest to top it all off?

If this story were about Bob Schaffer, it would be a blazing headline in the Denver papers. Will the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News dig deeper into Mark Udall's energy-based hypocrisy and apparently conflicted interests?

Mark Udall's Hypocrisy on "Big Oil" Attacks Made Clear Through Wife's Investments

Today's Denver Post headline misses the point: "Udall's wife invested in renewables". From the story:

Maggie Fox last year purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of PowerShares Exchange Traded Fund Wilderhill Clean Energy, according to a financial disclosure released Monday.

Fox also held between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of Progress Energy Inc., a Fortune 250 energy company pursuing renewable energy technologies. Most of the electricity it produces, however, still comes from oil, gas and coal. [emphasis added]

Dick Wadhams raised the point, but the Post story let it go:

Wadhams said it was "deep hypocrisy" that Udall "attacks Big Oil while the Udall family personally profited from Big Oil stocks."

One watchdog-group spokesman, however, said there isn't a clear conflict.

The primary issue here is not about conflict of interest, but about public hypocrisy.

Both Aspect Energy where Bob Schaffer worked and Progress Energy from which Mark Udall's wife profited both produce most of their energy from traditional fossil fuels. Both companies also invest in developing renewable energy sources (Bob Schaffer himself was active in promoting renewable energy development in his role with CHx Capital, part of Aspect Energy). What's the difference between the two companies, beyond public relations and political consciousness?

How about the relative size of the two companies? Aspect Energy brought in about $360 million in 2007. Progress Energy reported $9 billion-plus in 2007 operating revenues, about 25 times larger. If Aspect Energy is Big Oil, Progress Energy must be Gargantuan Oil.

And Progress Energy, which provides utilities directly to Florida consumers, has recently sought a rate hike on the families and businesses who get electricity from its oil and gas production. Is Mark Udall's wife profiting off Big Oil exploitation of hard-working Americans?

Simply put, No, unless you buy into the populist demagoguery that Mark Udall and his pro-Democrat surrogates have been practicing. But the hypocrisy and duplicity of those complaining about Bob Schaffer's ties to "Big Oil" - and silent on Maggie Fox's ties to a bigger producer of fossil fuels - are now writ large over this campaign.

Is Calling Mark Udall a "Boulder Liberal" Namecalling?

Yesterday, Politicker reported that John Randall had called Mark Udall U-Turn Udall. That is unfortunate, but it should be noted that we are unaware of Randall ever before calling Udall a name.

It is interesting that only three folks have called Mark Udall a name, and all of them have called him U-Turn Udall. If a name could be made to stick, it is probably that one. So far, all of them have done it only once, and they each did it when speaking or writing on different subjects.

We hope it stops.

Today, the Longmont Times call has this very interesting quote:

For more than a year, [ Dick ] Wadhams and other Republicans have brandished the “Boulder liberal” label when talking about [ Mark ] Udall, but the Democrat’s campaign staff has dismissed the tag as narrow and misleading.

But [ Taylor ] West said [ Dick ] Wadhams and Schaffer “know that Bob Schaffer’s record is far out of the mainstream for Colorado. The only way they can deal with that is by calling names and making up labels.”

The problem is that "Boulder Liberal" is not a name, it is a label that liberal blogs and msm outlets have used in various forms for nearly a year to describe Mark Udall.

The Longmont Times Call itself reported that Mark Udall had said about himself and his connection to Boulder:

Said [ Mark ] Udall, who lives in Eldorado Springs: “It’s wonderful to be home.” He said Boulder County is “home base for me. This is the touchstone; this is where I take my inspiration.”

It is hard to understand how the Times-Call could imply that the "Boulder Liberal" tag is a Republican invention when Mark Udall clearly applies it to himself and does it in their own paper.

It is also hard to see how Mark Udall can claim to have clean hands in the name calling arena when absurdicus is hard at work using name calling as a substitute for honest debate.

Taylor West would like to believe that only her friends see Mark Udall fundraising letters. Mark Udall routinely calls Bob Schaffer an "extremist" and signs his name to those letters. Her feigned "shock" that someone would label Mark Udall something as mild as "Boulder Liberal" is nothing short of hypocritical.

He Was For It Before He Was Against It

Mark Udall must have been out playing golf when 300 plus members of Congress asked him to cosign the congressional amicus brief on the Second Amendment case that went to the Supreme Court. He couldn't decide whether to use a wood or a putter and in the end, he could only decide to pick up his ball and go home.

Read this statement from Mark Udall's official site. The reasoning sounds exactly like John Kerry's "I voted for the $87 Billion before I voted against it."

If the brief stopped there, I would support it without hesitation. However, it does not stop there. Page 30 of the amicus brief includes declarations that “the District’s handgun ban is unreasonable on its face” and further, that “The lower court’s categorical approach in holding a prohibition on handguns to be unconstitutional per se was correct.”

Clearly, Mark Udall thinks that it was reasonable for the District of Columbia to criminalize the possession of hand guns within its borders for everyone except retired policemen. His stated position is that we citizens have the right to have a weapon with which to protect ourselves except when we don't, and he would side with the Bill Ritter's and the John Morse's who are too quick to say that we don't ever have that right.

Justice Alito asked:

“How could the District code provision survive any standard of review when they totally ban the possession of the type of weapon that’s most commonly used for self-defense…?”

Most troubling is that, as a member of the Senate, Mark Udall would insist on confirming only clones of Breyer, Souter, Ginsberg, and Stephens who would, in the words of Justice Breyer, make the Second Amendment a dead letter. He would let those clones do his dirty work while he piously claimed to be "for gun rights before he was against them.

More on this later in the week.

OK, We Don't Have Enough To Do

We've noticed that Taylor West, Mark Udall's spokeswoman has slipped into name calling mode. She has called Dick Wadhams "top below-the-belt attack dog." and twice within the last week called Bob Schaffer an extremist.

Meanwhile, she is trying to claim that the Mark Udall campaign is taking the high road and the Bob Schaffer Campaign is taking the low road:

"Mark Udall will be running his campaign on ideas to move Colorado forward; with Mr. Wadhams on board, we can expect Bob Schaffer's campaign to be one of constant negative attacks, not ideas," said spokeswoman Taylor West.

Schaffer's campaign isn't calling Udall names. Mark Udall's idea is to call Schaffer three names a week as if that will win the election.

If this happens again, we're going to start the Mark Udall as a hypocrite scoreboard. We don't have enough to do.

The First Rule of Politics

Mark Udall demonstrated that he fully understands the first rule of politics: If you are going to lie, make it a whopper.

"We are in the midst of a very dramatic beetle-kill cycle in our lodgepole forests," he said.

Mother nature holds the upper hand, he said, but we must do everything we can to mitigate the impacts. Udall said several years ago he encouraged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to consider disaster mitigation for communities like Winter Park that are facing lots of beetle-kill.

He said, "FEMA's response was not much better for us than New Orleans."

Mark Udall is only this year sponsoring a bill to reverse the laws he helped put in place to restrict thinning, and then only within a mile of these communities. Neither FEMA nor the Forest Service can overcome the laws that the environmentalist extremists put in place to restrict thinning, and to claim that their "response was not much better...than New Orleans" ignores that fact in an act of pure hypocrisy.

The story got buried quickly, but last month the Lake Tahoe fire victims were publicly blaming the Sierra Club for going to court to slow the thinning and road building that would have saved their homes.

Just this year, Udall put up an amendment that would have closed roads on Federal lands to the public.

Mark Udall is acting like a little kid who has spent his lifetime strewing nails on the street leading to his home and now angrily blames the fire department for not responding quickly enough when he set his own house afire.