NYT: Ambitious Bush Plan Undone by Energy Politics

President Bush stood at a gasoline station near his ranch in Texas today and said he had been calling for an energy bill to modernize the nation's electricity grid "for a long time."

Mr. Bush is quite right. A comprehensive energy policy was part of his platform as a candidate for president and seemed prescient from his very first week in office, when he was forced to ensure there was enough power in California to ease the state's rolling blackouts. By May 2001, largely because of the California crisis, Mr. Bush had released his energy plan.

But the president's ambitious policy quickly became a casualty of energy politics and, notably, harsh criticism from Democrats enraged by the way the White House had created the plan. Although the policy included recommendations to improve the nation's electric grid that everyone agreed on, they were lost in the shouting and have been dormant in Congress for the past two years. ---

Democrats also criticized the methods of the task force itself. In a move that is still being fought in court today, Mr. Cheney, a former chief executive of Halliburton Inc., an oil services company, consulted privately as the task force went about its work with people from his old industry. One of them was Kenneth L. Lay, chairman of Enron. ---

Ride Don’t Drive It’s Global Cool

did the White House write that article????

Expecting laws to be written by an open, publicly accessible process!

Do they think this is a democracy or something?

eom

Just WHAT part?

They make me nuts and no one seems to think that complaints about them are anything but harrassment by the Dems.

was to suggest that the DEMS were whiny obstructionists to the great white (republican) hope, GWBush.... I thought it was about as pro-Bush a take on the whole thing that it could(probably WAS) written by Lying Ari Fleischer....

see those meetings brought up again, that I focused in on that. To me they are the eptiome of everything about this administration, their underhanded, arrogant disregard of all other interests but their own.

Bullshit!

I hope they are prepared to explain to their children why they will be saddled with working until they are 110 to pay the deficits these buttholes and their corrupt legions are placing on the next generation, while choking on their fumes. God help us when this appears in the "liberal" NYT!

Think I'm pissed? Damn! You'd be right.

books in their children's schools will tell them:

"Our nations great economy and environment were severely damaged by President William Clinton in the 1990s, and despite valiant efforts by a young rancher elected President, George "Dubya" Bush, a selfish, obstructionist Democratic minority in Congress forced the nation down the path of defecits and pollution. That is why we are fighting the great wars on three fronts and working the standard 68 hour work week. God bless the New American Republic."

wouldn't vote for money for LOANS to improve the power grid, and they had to tie it to some crazy Enron scheme to put the whole nation on a grid, so that power could be bought and sold like cattle at great profits to middlemen who could manipulate almost the whole nation,,,,

Yeah, just fergit about this...Bushie was just a victim of politics,,,

Here's an excerpt:

And the White House response? Both Bush and his Republican allies and henchmen ignored the advice -- and actually killed modernization proposals.

The most egregious obstructionism occurred in 2001, when Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) tried to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have channeled $350 million in federal loans and loan guarantees to public and private-sector firms toward electric power grid improvements. Not grants, not subsidies, but badly needed loans and guarantees.

But the Bush Administration lobbied heavily against the measure and the Republicans voted it down on three separate occasions -- on a straight party-line vote in the House Appropriations Committee, on a straight party-line vote in the House Rules Committee, and on a party line vote in the full House of Representatives.

http://www.mediawhoresonline.com/


The NYT is full of sh*t? What a shock.

Not one word about what's in this Bill. It's a HUGE bill and the only thing the media has ever reported is ANWR. Not the 50 nuclear plants, not the total deregulation, not the cuts in federal oil/gas royalties, not the exemption of MTBE producers from environmental damage and cancer lawsuits, not the billions in oil and gas subsidies, not the lack of improved CAFE standards, nothing. It reports nothing. One of the most important pieces of legislation that will affect this country for decades, and all we get is 'energy politics'.

and this article says Bush was "prescient from his very first week in office" when decided to not fix grid - and GOP on party line vote voted grid fix down 3 times -

because he wanted to tie it to rape of Alaska.

Cause rape of Alaska might not pass if it was not tied to something we really needed -

so ELISABETH BUMILLER and JEFF GERTH - 3 years later - see that decision as "PRESCIENT"

What GOP Media Whores these two are.

Damn good thing the New York Times is a left leaning paper and not a suck up to Bush like the Washington Post and the New York Post and the Washington Times and the Chicago Tribune, and the rest of the US Media.

Halliburton goes to Washington and buys a law that says the US Gov will give them 700 bazillion dollars to put up new lines. They only actually have to replace a couple of miles a year to get their ticket stamped and the $$$ start flowin' in. ("And the government didn't have a thing to do with it." - D. Cheney) We could call this law the We Want to Keep Puppies and Kitties from Being Stomped on Act of 2003. It makes Karl Rove's mouth water to muse about the headlines: "Democrats refuse to oppose Stomping of Puppies/Kitties..."