I’ll git you my little pretties! Heheheheeeeee!
When one visits Jeanne Shaheen’s website and reads her "solutions" for the US’ energy woes, you can only conclude that she is basically offering nothing but higher taxation, which gets passed onto the consumer, and perhaps lengthy litigation, helping nobody but lawyers. Don’t take my word for it— read for yourself:
A New Energy Direction
Jeanne Shaheen believes we need a comprehensive approach to energy that addresses both the short-term crushing high prices and our long term energy needs. It’s a national security imperative, an environmental imperative and an economic imperative.
Jeanne Shaheen wants those jobs, that prosperity, and that economic security to come to New Hampshire.
Jeanne Shaheen wants to redirect the billions of dollars in tax breaks Washington is giving to the oil companies – they don’t need them, they’re making the largest profits in the history of business – and instead use that money to expand tax credits for energy efficiency and alternative energy like solar, wind and forest byproducts, invest in research and development of new energy technologies, and build a 21st century transmission system.
New Hampshire has abundant timber resources and an entrepreneurial spirit second to none. Our goal should be to make New Hampshire the alternative energy capital of New England, and that’s what Jeanne Shaheen will fight for in the United States Senate.
That’s it. Her whole plan, in its entirety, lifted straight from her campaign web site. The point that struck me the most, aside from her vague promise to "smartly" increase domestic energy supplies, whatever that means, is the one she makes regarding her desire for jobs to come to NH.
When I moved here to the Lakes Region in the 80’s, I had a front-row seat to the demise of the nuclear industry here in the US. There were several local companies that employed many hundreds of weldors and machinists that manufactured key components needed in an atomic power plant. At the same time, the political battles over the construction of Seabrook raged on. Led by Michael Dukakis over the border in Massachusetts, the fight formed mainly along partisan lines, with Democrats opposing the nuke plant and most Republicans in favor– Just like today!
With their comrades across the country, including radical groups like the Clamshell Alliance, the anti-nuclear forces combined and proved successful in putting a halt to any future expansion of the nuclear power industry, including a second unit at Seabrook. And the hundreds of welding and machining jobs supporting many thousands of people in Laconia and vicinity abruptly disappeared. And guess what?
At that time a younger Jeanne Shaheen was right in the thick of the onslaught against the industry and the jobs it supported.
The NHGOP has just released several YouTube videos showing Ms. Shaheen on WMUR-TV’s ‘Close Up’ program back in the late 1980s. In them, Shaheen is shown debating former New Hampshire House Speaker Marshall Cobleigh. At the time of the original airing, according to state party chair Fergus Cullen,
she was organizing the radical anti-nuclear community in support of former Portsmouth Mayor Paul McEachern’s 1988 gubernatorial campaign. Shaheen served as the campaign manager and senior advisor to Paul McEachern, an extreme nuclear opponent, in both his 1986 and 1988 bids for the corner office.
In this one, she pooh-poohs the notion that we need to be free of our dependence on oil from the Mid-East. [Note: The "John Sununu" to whom she is refering was Gov. Sununu, the present US Senator’s father]
What’s notable is the fact that, when you compare the events that have unfolded since the time of this particular debate, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen couldn’t have been more wrong, and the clear-thinking Republican Cobleigh more right. Why should we think she would be any more on the ball today?