Wife and I were discussing Obama’s energy plan yesterday evening, and I mentioned that he wanted to drain Crude Oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She immediately went to the same place I did: “That’s like spending our emergency fund for no good reason.”

That is, of course, exactly what Obama’s plan (and a similar plan that’s been mentioned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) is. Beldar has more, including a vivid description of the reasons why the Reserve was created in the first place (and an explanation about why Obama’s aides’ “explanation” of his plan doesn’t really make it any less risky).

Many Americans, I fear, won’t really understand how dangerous this plan is. After all, there is a huge block of our populace who feel there is no need for an emergency fund — and, this time last year, I was one of them. These people assume that the money will keep flowing, that because they can make the payments (assuming everything remains the same), they can simply ignore the need to have anything socked away for a rainy day.

It’s my understanding that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were exactly this sort of Americans. Despite having had the income of two Harvard-educated lawyers, Michelle has said publically that they were “struggling” until Barack’s book deal went through. Given that their incomes were probably higher than that of my wife and I (and I would not classify us as “struggling” by any means, though we’re far from rich), the only reason^[a] that I can think of that they would be struggling is that they weren’t managing their money well.

I’m not trying to denigrate the Obamas for their money management abilities — I am well known among my friends for having lousy money-management abilities — but two lawyers (especially Harvard educated lawyers, one of whom graduated magna cum laude) who are struggling to make it (and, apparently, only succeeded because one of them got a lucrative book deal) do seem to have some resource management issues.

With that in mind, it comes as no huge surprise that Obama’s “energy plan” involves burning off a portion of our reserves to get immediate relief without a backup plan^[b] to restore the reserves. Obama’s long-term solution is also reflected in his money management skills of the past — he wants to research alternate energy and hope we find a solution quickly. In other words, he’s hoping for a windfall to save us.

The rational approach here is not to ignore research into alternative energy sources, but to do such research responsibly. We should not turn our backs on energy sources that we know are available (drilling in locations where oil is available and accessible, build nuclear power plants), as those sources are going to have to carry us until our research pans out.

Still, as Obama himself has pointed out many times before, these sources are not going to pan out immediately — we need the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to get us through any rough times we may encounter before we’re ready to move away from oil completely. To suggest that we should drain them now to lower gas prices in the short term is simple irresponsibility from the Obama campaign, and is little more than a thinly disguised bid to “buy” votes.

1. Actually, I can think of a second reason — Michelle was lying about “struggling” in order to seem as though she could empathize with the average American. I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt in assuming that she was telling the truth. [↩]
2. i.e., drilling in locations where we are reasonably certain that there are accessible oil supplies [↩]

I don’t like McCain, and have absolutely no intention of ever voting for him (he put his name on the McCain-Feingold “Screw the First Amendment” Act, so he’s persona non grata to me), but this seems pretty flimsy:

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

The attack on Harold Ford, as far as I can tell, centered around his playboy reputation. The interpretation of it being racist seems to have been centered around “pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.” That’s not anything I would’ve called racism, but I’m kind of oblivious to most racial stereotypes, so maybe it’s more overt than I realize.

Contrast that to McCain’s ad. Here’s the summary from the NY Times piece linked above:

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The McCain ad doesn’t even have the pre-existing prejudices mentioned above to make it seem racist. Instead, according to the New York Times, it is racist because it is “similar” to an ad that was racist. The Times can’t even explain why the ad is racist on its own merits, so instead, they use the alleged racism of another ad that is completely unrelated except that white women happen to be featured in both ads.

This is similar to saying that every member of the KKK breathes, therefore anyone who breathes is racist. It’s farcical — and this is supposed to be one of the most influential newspapers in the world? Please.

The problem here is that the charge of Obama’s inexperience and lack of substance is pretty hard to defend against, so the Times has to come up with something to counter it. That they’re stretching themselves this far shows exactly how vulnerable Obama is to this sort of criticism.

Not that that will stop the Times (and most other mainstream media outlets) from fawning over Obama. After all, he took a whirlwind tour of a few nations and, according to many journalists, this somehow “countered” McCain’s accusation of Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. I’ve been out of the country, but that doesn’t mean I have any experience building policy for relations between the United States and Mexico.

In 2006, the FBI got a search warrant and searched the office of William Jefferson (D-LA), looking for evidence in their investigation into whether he had accepted bribes. This sparked a huge firestorm, with legislators claiming that the separation of powers principle (and the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constutition) made such a search illegal. Ultimately, the search was deemed illegal, and Representative Jefferson was allowed to look through the materials taken and decide which “pertained to his work as a legislator^[a].”

Before the three-judge appelate court overturned his decision, though, Judge Thomas F. Hogan ruled that the search was legal (this wasn’t particularly surprising, since he issued the warrant). In his ruling, Hogan explained why he felt the search was legal:

“If there is any threat to the separation of powers here, it is not from the execution of a search warrant by one co-equal branch of government upon another, after the independent approval of the third separate, and co-equal branch,” he wrote. “Rather, the principle of the separation of powers is threatened by the position that the legislative branch enjoys the unilateral and unreviewable power to invoke an absolute privilege, thus making it immune from the ordinary criminal process of a validly issued search warrant.”

Emphasis Mine

That sounds pretty solid to me, and I like the idea that two branches of the government have the power to investigate the third much more than I like the idea that members of the legislative branch are, essentially, immune to prosecution (or, at least, immune to having evidence gathered from their workplace), regardless of how many other branches of the government might suspect something fishy is going on.

Keep that in mind when you read this article, which details a vote to cite Karl Rove for Contempt of Congress. The White House claims that Congress has no authority to force employees to testify. Democratic Congressmen, obviously, disagree.

Let’s review. According to Democrats, the executive and judicial branches, together, do not have the authority to actively investigate corruption in the legislative branch. On the other hand, if anyone from the executive branch declines to roll over and confess to whatever the hell they want him to^[b], the legislative branch can cite them for committing a crime.

UPDATE: Big Lizards has more on the same topic:

That, of course, is just how the Democrats see things… today. But a few short years ago, when they were in the White House and the GOP controlled both chambers on Capitol Hill, they had a very different idea: They believed that the Executive should be supreme, and the Legislature and Judiciary subservient. President Bill Clinton repeatedly invoked “executive privilege” to shield his administration and especially himself from congressional scrutiny.

The unbroken thread that connects these two positions is that Democrats believe they, as a party, should always command all power in the United States, while their “enemies” (the Republicans) should be utterly impotent. By contrast, Republicans have consistently argued that no branch should be superior to the others; that the Founders were right to make the branches coequal… and they should stay that way.

Read the whole thing.

1. Needless to say, anything that evidenced bribery would certainly have pertained to his work as a legislator, so the ruling effectively removed any evidence that the FBI could have found from any court proceedings. [↩]
2. Note that Rove has testified, and flatly denies that he was involved in any of these decisions by the Justice department [↩]