Energy Bill Pushed Back. Worst. Senate. Ever.

It never fails.

If you ever find yourselves wondering why we're still sending $700 billion a year to hostile countries for oil, look no further than your elected officials - they will not get serious about domestic alternative fuel.

TheStreet.com's Eric Rosenbaum just posted an outright evisceration of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Reid has just pushed the Senate Energy Bill back.  Again.  This time because the points he had hoped to score against the Republicans by painting them as obstructionists looked less likely than he had planned.

The gist of the article is that Reid never really had any intention of passing an energy bill, the whole things was and is just another political ploy.  This is particularly distressing to those of us who are not braindead and would like to see a serious alternative energy plan sometime before we die.

They all suck.  Here's Rosenbaum:

Energy reform as political pawn is bad enough, but even worse, it can be argued that Reid failed to score the minor political points he had hoped to gain when he set up the alternative energy industry for the cheap kick to the head. In announcing that the Senate would pass on energy reform until at least September, Reid spun his words about obstructionist Republicans -- but political analysts saw through the rhetoric to the divisions within Reid's own party. The rhetorical flourishes obscured the fact that the Senate punt showed the strength of the pro-oil, pro-drilling bloc.

One political analyst for the energy sector who has been on the Hill for the past several weeks as the events unfolded, said after the Senate punt that all along his understanding was that the bill introduced would never pass, and Reid thought he would be able to paint the Republicans as standing in the way of that effort.

I'll break it down for you:

The BP Gulf spill lit a fire under the Dems to get the energy bill introduced.  The plan was to include unlimited liability caps for drillers.  The pro-driller GOP was expected to fuss over it and the Dems were gonna be all like "There go the 'publicans, sticking up for Big Oil again!"  Then he lost some votes within his own party so he pulled the plug on the whole thing.

Reid's gambit was timed perfectly for the Dems to score some points against the other guys before the mid-terms but everyone saw through it.

This is all fine and dandy, that's politics.  The problem is, lost in all the BS one upmanship is the fact that several great alternative energy initiatives that could put people to work in this country and keep energy dollars away from the mideast will now have to wait.  And wait.

I'm grossed out.

Source:

Today's Outrage: Senate Punts (TSC)

I don't just bitch and moan here, I do talk about solutions now and then.  Here's one:

Nat Gas Trucking Links (TRB)