Go Home And Do Us A Favor, OK?

Fresh from some more glowing hosannas in Philadelphia’s conservative newspaper of record here, Our Man Arlen Specter is back to bash the deliberative body of our government where he currently resides here for not “taking any action on the prices of oil or gas at the pump and other key issues,” as he states.

Gee, if you hate it in the Senate so much, Arlen, then why are you running for another term in 2010? You should be planning a bus trip with your neighbors at that “step-down” community to the Catskills instead, don’t you think?

Besides, as noted here, you voted against increasing taxes on oil company profits and rescinding their tax deductions, and you also voted against cloture on low-income energy assistance funding and alternative energy tax incentives (I see no mention of a 7/23 bill Oil Speculators bill).

But this appears to be part of the Repugs’ game plan of trying ceaselessly to pin the high price of gas on Democrats, and as I and many others have pointed out probably to the point where people are sick of reading about it, our current state is the result of bad-to-no planning by the supposed energy geniuses who run our country and took no note (or deliberately looked the other way) while India and China emerged as economic powerhouses that consumed more and more of the crude we’ve demanded for ourselves, with the all-too-willing assistance of their Repug acolytes in Congress and the White House who don’t mind our painful status quo one bit and underfunded alternative energy development and discouraged conservation because all they could see were dollar signs instead of families having to choose between petroleum and food, to say nothing of the attendant environmental wreckage of our planet.

(OK, rant mode off…).

And to contribute to the sorry political spectacle, we have this story of 24 Republican U.S. House representatives who insist on hanging around chambers in the never-ending search for partisan sound bites, including this jelly sack…

"Markets respond. The market is responding to the fact that we're here talking," said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz.

Well, I would be more prone to trust this explanation instead…

In New York Monday, crude oil prices fell below $120 a barrel for the first time in three months on US growth fears as data showed that real US consumer spending fell by 0.2% in June, as rising inflation offset the impact of $100bn in rebates for US taxpayers - including food and energy, prices rose 0.8% in June – more than the 0.6% increase in spending produced by the stimulus cheques.

So basically, the price of oil fell due to bad news (also, we’re getting near the end of the summer, people – we’re either in the midst of our vacation travel plans or we’ve already had them, or not, so not as much driving equals not as much gas equals not as much $$$ for our “friends” at Chevron, CITGO, etc., so the price goes down, just as it goes up in the spring before all that starts).

And I find it hilarious that House Repugs would criticize the Dem “leadership” for taking a vacation, since the 110th Congress (as noted here) had more roll call votes than any other Congress in our country’s history in 2007, whereas the dreaded 109th set a record for the fewest number of days in session in one year since the end of World War II.

But on second thought, maybe Shadegg and his pals should continue their fruitless little exercise anyway. It’s appropriate for them to be stumbling into each other in the dark.