Sunday, September 11, 2005

show-me showdown: oil spill

Election season has begun, and it looks like we have the makings of a doozy in the race for US Senator. Claire McCaskill's only been in the race against Jim Talent seat for, like, five minutes, and already it's a dead heat. Early spin is it's a referendum on Bush, and Bush is about as popular a kid with gas.

Speaking of which...

The Washington Post reported late last month that Bush is running on empty because of, among other things, "spiraling gas prices." Which makes Talent's ride with the fumes-burning president all the more perilous, because our incumbent Senator happens to serve on the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Here he is talking about the high cost of gas.

The Senator is already feeling some heat about the situation. On August 31, the same day the Post blamed Bush's unpopularity on high gas prices, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that:
Several hundred members of the United Auto Workers protested outside the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse [in] downtown [StL].

Most protesters had gathered carried posters criticizing President George W. Bush and accusing Missouri Sen. Jim Talent and other Republicans of contributing to the skyrocketing gas prices.

Amid protest signs calling Bush the "best president the oil companies ever had," Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., D-St. Louis, told the demonstrators, "He's going to take care of those guys who took care of his election."

Which is a fair shot, near as I can tell, insomuch as Talent backed Bush's energy policy in 2003, though I haven't yet dug into that policy and how it led to the current situation (I will; I plan to do some real digging around this race and hopefully use this blog to spread some dirt on both candidates, neither of whom I'm particularly fond of).

I looked up his contributions on Open Secrets expecting to find proof that he's a total whore of the oil industry. And he may well be, though Big Oil ranks only 13th among industry contributors, just behind "Republican/Conservative," with $149,824 since 2001. <

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