Plus, it eliminates any penalty for McCain to pick Romney–they can’t use the Mormon issue anymore. And without the Mormon issue, Romney is one of the heavy favorites–he’d bring executive and economic experience to the ticket, he has more name recognition than Jindal or Palin, and he’s a conservative candidate with nothing really to do–leaving Palin and Jindal to build their own resumes where they are.

The idea of Reid on Obama’s ticket is just delicious.

Landrieu is up for re-election this year, and Louisianans LIKE to develop oil resources. This could be something her opponent could use against her! Isn’t a Senator supposed to use his/her own judgment, not vote because Kenny said so?

This is a win-win, as far as this current Nevada resident is concerned. We get rid of this guy as our Senator if they win, but they won’t win when the nation sees McCain blasting the defeatist ticket over a war that we are (please God) well on the way to winning. Also, maybe the greater exposure of a national campaign will finally expose the ridiculous nature of so many of Reid’s positions to a national market.

On the downside, if they do win, Harry is one heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Oh.

Maybe this isn’t really a good idea after all….

Unfortunately, we cannot just wait for car companies to bother to offer us alternatives. They’re deathly afraid of any change…not the engineers, but the incompetent exec’s. And every time the government offered incentives for R&D, that’s exactly what they got – useless R&D, or even good R&D, but zero production. Just goes to show you have to be careful what you ask for.

Now, if the government offered tax breaks to car manufacturers for, say, the first million alternate energy cars they put into production…we’ll see cold fusion powered flying cars within the decade!

Re Obama’s VP… wouldn’t even Maxie Mounds have more gravitas than Obama? Or at least certainly more gravity?

drunyan8315 on June 9, 2008 at 10:19 PM

“Respect my gravit-ah!”

Congrats CO, for electing a democrat governor and US senator, who are harming your state’s economy and your individual pocketbooks … really, it seems like it should be a slam dunk issue

funky chicken on June 9, 2008 at 10:06 PM

funny stuff that! Great read.

It never seems to occur to some that we can wean ourselves off foreign oil AND if they really like the idea of high gas prices forcing us to alternative sources, tax the hell out of it.

Fortune: Why do you consider developing oil shale such a high priority?

Sen. Hatch: We have as much oil in oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado as the rest of the world’s oil combined. Liberals and environmentalists can talk all they want about wind, solar and geothermal – all of which I’m for – but last time I checked, planes, trains, trucks, ships and cars don’t run on electricity. 98% of transportation fuel right now is oil. Ethanol is the only real alternative, and we’re seeing that ethanol has major limitations.

It’s pathetic. Environmentalists are very happy having us dependent on foreign oil. They’re unhappy with us developing our own. What they forget to say is that shipping fuel all the way from the middle east has a big greenhouse gas footprint too.

Fortune: With gasoline at $4, why this isn’t this more of a front-and-center issue for consumers and voters?

Sen. Hatch: I’m generally the last guy to lambaste the media, but generally you do not hear these facts. We’re sending $600 billion annually to enemies of our country. If one acre of oil shale produces 1 million barrels of oil, that’s 1 million barrels that we would not be importing from Russia and the Middle East. People are going to go berserk when they find out that all along we had the capacity, within our own borders, to alleviate our dependency in an environmentally friendly way.

Ironically, the local governments in Colorado’s oil shale areas do support oil shale development, but it’s being stopped by the ski-resort elites. A couple months ago, an article came out about how the city of Aspen was being besieged with building applications equating to about $2 million in development a day. Now if those nice, rich people in Aspen really cared about the environment, they might save an acre or two of those beautiful forests they’re building on and support some oil-shale development in the not-so-nearby and not-so-beautiful oil shale areas of Colorado.

Score! After you finish that, take a look at When Harry Met Jimmy (and Eric, too!), and McCain goes after Johnson

……

NEW YORK (Fortune) — You’d think this would be oil shale’s moment.

You’d think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast – 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone – it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

You’d think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale – a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen – into light crude oil.

You’d think all of this, but you’d be wrong.

Last month, the U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Committee voted 15-14 to kill a bill that would have ended a one-year moratorium on enacting rules for oil shale development on federal lands (which is where the best oil shale is located). Most maddening of all – at least to someone like myself not steeped in the wacky ways of Washington – the swing vote on the appropriations committee, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., voted with the majority even though she actually opposes the moratorium.

“Sen. Salazar asked me to vote no. I did so at his request,” Landrieu told The Rocky Mountain News. A Landrieu staffer contacted by Fortune doesn’t dispute this, but notes that Landrieu did propose a compromise which Republicans rejected.

She was speaking of U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who has emerged as the Senate’s leading oil shale opponent. Salazar inserted the aforementioned moratorium into an omnibus spending bill last December, and in May he proposed a new bill that would extend the moratorium another year.

Salazar’s efforts have essentially pulled the rug out from under Shell (RDSA) and other oil companies which have invested many, many millions into oil shale research since the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which established the original framework for commercial leasing of oil shale lands. (Last year, oil shale represented Shell’s single biggest R&D expenditure.)

Salazar says he’s simply trying to slow things down in order to ensure environmental considerations don’t get trampled in the rush to turn western Colorado into a new Prudhoe Bay. But, ironically, his bid to extend the moratorium comes at a time when his fellow Senate Democrats have been blasting Big Oil for not reinvesting enough of their profits into developing new sources of energy.

I recently spoke with Republican U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Wayne Allard of Colorado, the two lawmakers working hardest to end the oil shale moratorium. Here are some excerpts from the interviews:

I can’t link the article because it’s a cnn link. But google it….

Now that would be a dream ticket/or/nightmare!Haha.

They could run commercials throughout the entire campaign that would consist of just this:

Why not run them anyway, along with every other defeatist thing the Democrats have been saying against our troops from the beginning of the war?

Do it, Barry. Do it now.

Hmmm an Obma and Weasel ticket?

Gatordoug on June 9, 2008 at 8:13 PM

Yes, we know about Obama’s weaseliness, but who is he going to choose…(Oh wait! Now I get it!) Obama AND the Weasel! But wouldn’t that just be “Weasel and Weasel”?
Makes sense to me!

So then I visit HotAir to catch up and find this post.

You have no idea just how funny this post is after Mike Rowe has set the stage.