Vince Carroll: Gas Prices Push Mark Udall to Reverse Position on Drilling

We here already have asked the question about Mark Udall's whiplash-inducing U-turn on domestic offshore drilling and energy policy. Rocky Mountain News editor Vince Carroll follows on the same theme, though with greater eloquence:

Two years ago, when a Rocky editorial called Udall shortsighted for voting against a bill to ease the ban on offshore drilling for natural gas (oil wasn't even on the table in order to eliminate fearmongering about spills), Udall wrote to say that we had "oversimplified the question."

Drilling "may be justified with the right safeguards," he maintained, but "that has not been properly established."

One would have thought that the vast experience of extracting natural gas in the western Gulf of Mexico had established that safeguards could be successfully imposed elsewhere, but the congressman was very picky at the time.

More to the point, perhaps, gasoline wasn't $4 a gallon.

The shifting winds of politics can do curious and strange things indeed, and none more curious nor stranger this year than Mark Udall finding the inspiration to support domestic oil exploration as Colorado voters have grown angry about high gas prices.

Will Mark Udall Renounce Big Blue Lie Machine Smear of Ethnic Minority?

The Big Blue Lie Machine is at work again. In particular, PlagiarismNowAction, a group that has done Mark Udall's dirty work in the recent past, is at it again. Their latest smear against Republican candidate Bob Schaffer is so dishonest and truth-challenged that Rocky Mountain News editor Vincent Carroll (who a couple weeks ago exposed the inaccuracies behind a PlagiarismNow-contrived label of Schaffer) has given it a thorough smackdown:

To this point, it must be said, the portrait of Schaffer is a paint-by-numbers smear, which my column disposed of two weeks ago (April 30, "Smeared with oil"). What distinguishes Huttner's latest attack and qualifies it for a Chesterton boomerang award is its claim that Schaffer "led the company's delegation in Iraq to lobby local speculators for oil contracts."

Local speculators? Savor that contemptuous description of the Kurdistan Regional Government and, by implication, the historically oppressed minority that it represents.

Aspect Energy, for which Schaffer worked, negotiated with Kurdish leaders for the right to explore for oil in the north of Iraq. The Kurdistan Regional Government is no more a "local speculator" in Iraq than Gov. Bill Ritter is a "local warlord" in the United States.

Huttner's use of "local speculators" was no accident. The term appears twice in his letter without any hint as to whom the "speculators" might be. When I e-mailed him in wonderment, he replied, "I'm OK if you prefer to use Kurdish government."

He's OK if someone else prefers the relevant fact. Just don't expect him to volunteer it.

It is true that the Baghdad central government is not happy with the Kurds for having cut a number of oil exploration deals with small- and mid-sized foreign companies; indeed, the oil minister considers them invalid. But it is equally true that the Iraqis have yet to reach agreement on a final oil and gas law, and that a draft completed last year has been slammed by both Kurds and Sunni Arabs (for different reasons). Meanwhile, the parties continue to talk.

The activists at ProgressNowAction are free to support the Arab vision of a state oil company controlling future production in Iraq - and they are equally free to suggest that such a future would best serve American interests, although it's hardly obvious that it would. But in his zeal to discredit Schaffer, Huttner simply airbrushed the Kurds out of existence - and crossed the line between aggressive opinion and outright propaganda. [emphasis added]

The Michael Huttner wing of the Big Blue Lie Machine doesn't have enough conscience to spare an oppressed ethnic minority in its deceitful attempt to politically smear Bob Schaffer and anyone that stands in its way.

The question is whether Mark Udall will renounce this vile propaganda or continue to let PlagiarismNow work on his campaign's behalf at all costs.

Mark Udall's Priorities Out of Whack as Skyrocketing Energy Prices Hit Coloradans

Vince Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News, having seen the animated Left-wing attack ads on his newspaper's website, took a minute to investigate the claims behind the facile label attached to Republican candidate Bob Schaffer:

Has it really come to this: that working for an energy company is now a liability - an actual badge of shame - for a candidate for public office in Colorado?

It's hard to believe most voters are so unsophisticated - about economics and the price of gasoline, among other things. In fact, I don't believe they are. But some people do.

The left-wing activists over at ProgressNowAction recently took out an ad on the Rocky Web site trumpeting the claim that GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer is actually "Big Oil Bob," a fellow somehow complicit not only in escalating gas prices but also in war profiteering in Iraq. And these sleazy themes may well become a staple promoted by independent political groups as we approach Election Day.

After Schaffer left Congress in early 2003, he did indeed go to work for Denver-based Aspect Energy. But far from being a member in good standing of Big Oil (not that it would be damning anyway), Aspect Energy is a medium-sized independent. It's an aggressively entrepreneurial outfit whose current hydrocarbon production, moreover, is 80 percent in natural gas, according to its Web site.

At first, Schaffer worked mostly on Aspect's charitable efforts, which focus heavily on education. Eventually he shifted to the business side, where he ended up, he told me, as vice president for business development.

ProgressNowAction professes outrage (it's always hard to tell if a political hit squad's indignation is sincere) because Schaffer "voted for over $33 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil" in 2001, naturally neglecting to mention that the price of oil averaged $23 a barrel that year, as opposed to the stratospheric level of today.

Meanwhile, Mark Udall is a ranking member of the majority party running the "worst Congress ever," a Congress that sits idly by while gasoline and other energy prices skyrocket. No drilling in ANWR. No new oil refineries. No new nuclear energy plants.

Even a very carefully studied and limited drilling exploration of the Roan Plateau (a moderate bipartisan approach supported by Gov. Bill Ritter and Bob Schaffer) is not good enough for Udall.

So while the Big Blue Lie Machine uses "sleazy themes" to tar Bob Schaffer, it's Boulder liberal Rep. Mark Udall whose energy policies are actually harming the pocketbooks of average Coloradans. As Investor's Business Daily astutely points out:

Failing to allow drilling in ANWR. We have, as Bush noted, estimated capacity of a million barrels of oil a day from this source alone -- enough for 27 million gallons of gas and diesel. But Congress won't touch it, fearful of the clout of the environmental lobby. As a result, you pay at the pump so your representative can raise campaign cash.

That hits close to home. Coloradans "pay at the pump" so Mark Udall "can raise campaign cash." But then again, we already knew that Udall's - and ProgressNow's - priorities were out of whack.