The Rest of the Story

Just as Bob Schaffer did when he read the first half of Mark Udall's resolution to prevent George W. Bush from invading Iraq, Bob Schaffer has been pushing a video on YouTube showing only the first part of his answer to the original question. We bring you the rest of his answer, and it isn't pretty.

Big Oil Bob's Big Oil War Profiteering

While we tend to find the rhetoric of "war profiteering" to be a bit overheated, the fact remains that Bob Schaffer went to Iraq at the height of the war to negotiate contracts with the Kurdistan regional government against the wishes of President Bush, the State Department, and the Iraqi national government.

Liberal activist group Progress Now asks the question: Would you support a candidate who voted for the war and then went to Iraq to profit from it?



We believe that there are lots of companies and people who profit from war, and that is at least a somewhat unavoidable consequence of privatizing our military to corporations like KBR. More important to us as independent, security-conscious voters is the possibility that Bob Schaffer's actions of supporting a regional regime inside of and in opposition to the national regime in Iraq will destabilize the country, prolong the war, and cause needless loss of American soldiers as well as civilians.

Rebutting Bob Schaffer's Sleazy Attack

Vince Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News gets it exactly right.

Carroll begins:

Republican Bob Schaffer has spent the week suggesting that his opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Mark Udall, is a hypocrite because he sponsored a resolution in 2002 denouncing Saddam Hussein in the strongest terms, stipulating that he possessed a variety of terrible weapons and describing Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The resolution was even billed as a "preliminary authorization for the use of force against Iraq."

If you fail to look closely, you could easily conclude that the supposedly anti-war Udall was actually on the same page as the congressional majority that ultimately did authorize war - and that Udall's vote against their resolution amounted to splitting hairs.

That's rubbish. Schaffer should cut it out.

Here's where Mark Udall stood on the war in 2002 and where he stands on it today:

DeGrow's Bleating Demonstrates His an Schaffer's Ignorance on Oil Shale

Like a couple of '49ers, Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer have jumped on the oil shale bandwagon pointing to Shell Oil's in situ process experiment as "proof" that oil shale development is ready for prime time. Only it isn't proof, and Shell is the first to admit it.

Let's look at the actual facts:

* Shell Oil only proved that the process is possible on about one acre of land. There is no proof that their freezing/heating process is scalable to commercial production levels.

* According to a RAND Corporation study, Shell's process would require 3 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. To put that in perspective, it's about a Lake Dillon of water every year for each million barrels of daily oil production.

* The process is also energy-intensive, requiring the ground around a drilling site to be frozen, and the ground within the site to be heated for several years. Several coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants would have to be constructed, each of which would have its own water requirements.

* Infrastructure to transport the needed water and power, refine the extracted oil, and treat the produced wastewater would have to be constructed.

Add to this that Shell is one of the leading opponents to commercial leasing because it will take at least five more years to even make the decision whether their experiments were successful. They, understandably, don't want to be forced into the land speculation business only to find the value of their holdings collapse if the process turns out to be unfeasible.

So ask Western Slope residents where they'll come up with 8-10 Lake Dillons per year of water, and where they'd like to have those coal power plants, railroad tracks, pipelines, refineries, waste processing plants, and high-tension wires placed. Because all of that will have to be figured out if (and only if) Shell can make its process commercially scalable. The only other option is strip mining, which has similar water requirements and produces waste of a larger volume than the shale that's mined.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The Ben DeGrow spaghetti factory has been running at full tilt, throwing every noodle it manufactures to the wall and finding nothing will stick.

Let's go through the distortions one-by-one:

1. Calling for increased fuel efficiency and an orderly transition to alternative fuels does not raise the price of gasoline, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow says it does.

2. Mark Udall is not opposed to developing domestic petroleum resources, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer says he is. What he is opposed to is raping the most ecologically and economically sensitive land when the oil companies have already leased 68 million acres and aren't drilling.

3. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will never make a noticeable dent in gas prices, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer say it will. Bush's own Energy Information Adminsitration says that best case it will reduce gas prices by a penny in ten years. Even John McCain is opposed to drilling in ANWR.

4. Oil shale is a boondoggle. Always has been, and by all accounts always will be. Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer dancing around like a couple of drunken '49ers every time the topic comes up doesn't change that fact.

5. Drilling on the Roan Plateau will not affect gasoline prices at all, because you can't make gasoline out of natural gas, no matter how many times Ben DeGrow suggests that it will.

6. And finally, if Bush had not run up the national debt through wars of choice and giveaways to the oil and pharmaceutical companies, we'd still have a strong dollar. Experts say that if the dollar were as strong against the euro as it was ten years ago, oil would be trading at $80/bbl. What does Ben DeGrow and his Senate candidate have to say about that?

Unincorporated Boulder County Liberal

Bob Schaffer must think that if he says "Boulder liberal" three times and clicks his heels that Jack Abramoff and Bill Orr will go away.

Not that there's anything wrong with hailing from Boulder, home of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, Jon Caldara of the Independence Institute, and other notable conservative individuals and organizations. But when Bob Schaffer uses the term "Boulder liberal" and simultaneously claims through his henchman Dick Wadhams that Mark Udall moved to Eldorado Springs to avoid his "boulder roots," but also that Udall's house is not in Eldorado Springs but in Boulder he is just plain wrong.

Lynn Bartels: "Here's the kicker: Udall has never lived in Boulder's city limits."

Never. Not before, not now. Schaffer and Wadhams have access to the same maps everyone else does. They know better. They are not merely incorrect, but they are lying. Spreading a falsehood with the intent to deceive.

If there's one word that sums up Bob Schaffer's candidacy, it has to be 'dishonest.' Schaffer has been obfuscating his own positions, lying about Mark Udall's, and wasting so much oxygen on the deliberate falsehood of "Boulder liberal" that we wonder if there is any truthfulness at all in his campaign.

Bob Schaffer has a well-documented, fringe-conservative record. It's a record that served him well as professional politician since age 25. Until Schaffer edited his bio to make himself look like a moderate (with no evidence to back that up), his claim was that Republicans have lost because they aren't right-wing enough. Schaffer should run on his record. He's going to have an uphill battle if everything that comes out of his mouth is unsupported by facts.

A Idiot

One of Bob Schaffer's bloggers has taken us to task (breaking his no name-calling pledge in the process) over our supply and demand analysis. Their primary argument is that electricity prices are regulated, therefore supply and demand don't apply.

Were it true that prices were fixed by the government, they would be right. However they are not. When the electric utilities want to change prices to respond to market forces (such as supply and demand), they apply to the PUC for a rate adjustment, and in almost every case the PUC approves it without question. So the price may not swing wildly on an hourly basis (thank goodness) but it does change in response to market forces.

But take a look at alternative energy and you'll find that those rates are not subject to the PUC. From Xcel Energy's Windsource signup page: "The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has approved the use of market pricing concepts for Windsource rather than the regulated rate methods." In other words, with renewable energy comes a free-market pricing model.

So if you're a lover of the free market and Colorado's scenic environment and you want to help curb global warming (the existence of which Bob Schaffer's supporters at the Independence Institute continue to deny, even as Bush himself has acknowledged it is a serious, manmade problem that needs addressing) then you should look at Windsource and other renewable energy programs.

Does it cost more? For now, yes (about $14/mo for the average electric bill). Wind farms aren't built for free. But we are happy to pay a little more in the short term to help build the renewable electricity infrastructure. It creates jobs, helps the environment (not just global warming but things like acid rain and asthma-causing soot pollution), and reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. When the infrastructure is built out, costs will come down. And programs like Windsource are opt-in. Can't afford the $14? That's OK, don't pay it.