In my daily skimming of leftyblogs yesterday, I noticed an item on a couple of leftyblogs. As Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” put it:

Bachmann slams Dems on bill she voted against:

And then Zack Stevenson of MNPublius (in the post “Bachmann vs. Bachmann“) reprised the story, using Birkey as his source.

Here’s Birkey’s money quote (emphasis added by me):

On Friday, Rep. Michele Bachmann slammed Congressional Democrats for not passing tax credits for solar and wind energy. On the Laura Ingraham Show, a conservative talk radio program, she called Democrats “strange” for not passing a bill that they actually did pass, but without Bachmann’s help…The Democrats did pass such a bill in the House, but without Bachmann’s help. In May, before her newfound campaign issue, she voted against it, Think Progress reports. The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 would provide such tax credits but has been stalled in the Senate by Republicans.

“Hm”, I thought. “Not one but two leftyblogs, and ThinkProgress! That’d be an odd, inconsistent stance for Rep. Bachmann to take, if it’s true”!

Of course, that final “if true” clause is always the clinker when you’re talking about leftymedia coverage of any issue; all the more so with Rep. Bachmann, given that:

1. No figure in Minnesota – not Kersten, not Brodkorb – provokes the derangement among the left that Michele Bachmann does, and…
2. …the Dems are waking up, I think, to the realization that energy is their achilles heel in this election; they can’t solve the issue and placate their base, so their only real option is to…
3. …use their paid propaganda streetwalkers – like their Center for “Independent” Media publication, like the Mindy – to try to obfuscate the issue.

So I figured – before dinging Rep. Bachmann for her apparent inconsistency, I’d check a few things out.

First and foremost: why would Rep. Bachmann vote against alt-energy tax credits before she voted for it? Would it be because…

• Rep. Bachmann has no idea what she wants, policy-wise? Seems less likely with Rep. Bachmann than with most Congresscritters, but heck- let’s put it on the list. Or maybe…
• …because there is some picayune bit of context that the Mindy and the MNPublius kidz didn’t feel compelled to tell you, the gentle reader? Some bit of key, vital information about the “Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008” (PDF pr HTML) that’d make it, I dunno, utterly noxious for a conservative to vote for? Some thing or things that’d make it much more attractive to withhold support of the bill, and push to implement the parts she supports, independently?

Always, always check out the second option before assuming the first. I did.

And, as it turns out, The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 has just a few bits and pieces to it that’d make it – I dunno – utterly anathema to a principled, consistent free-market small-government conservative.

For example, the bill includes about $55 billion in tax increases over ten years (mainly on capital formation – a huge no-no for conservatives) on top of a skeezy corporate estimated tax payment shift. Worse still, the tax increases are long-term, while many of the tax cuts in this bill – the ones that Birkey and Stevenson are whooping and hollering over – are just one-year extensions of current law. To a principled fiscal conservative, more long-term taxes are hardly a good trade for a brief hiccup in short-term ones. And it’s even worse than that; energy, especially alternate energy, is extremely R and D intensive; the focus on short-term extensions in existing tax cuts prevents American companies from planning for the near future, to say nothing of one that’s realistic in the world of research and development.

Dumb and dumber? The bill would apply Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements to all tax-credit bonds, whether created by this legislation or not. Mannah from heaven for Democrats, and feel free to argue their merits, but you can’t realistically expect a fiscal conservative to vote for more salary mandates that’ve been slipped into a bill with one item she supports, can you?

Dumb and dumberer? At the end of the day, the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008’s “incentives” are aimed primarily at energy sources and technologies that are, to coin a phrase, technological “shots in the dark”; sources that might someday prove capable of powering a growing, first-world economy, but equally may not (remember when ethanol was going to solve our problems?). Either way, there is one ineluctible fact that the “alternative energy über alles” crowd keeps ignoring; if our economy isn’t healthy, we will never develop viable alternatives; for the next decade or two or five, that signal fact is going to depend on having enough oil. There is no way around that fact. The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 doesn’t recognize this; Rep. Bachmann does.

Oh, yeah – and the bill contains tax perks for trial lawyers, movie producers, and a huge earmark for New York City (for transportation infrastructure projects, including mass transit, highways, railroads, airports, ports, waterways, etc).

Read it for yourself (PDF or HTML). It makes no sense to take (let’s be charitable) 2 steps forward and 20 steps back in the grand scheme of things. There’s just too much pork for the Congresswoman to vote for this thing. I, a genuine conservative and energy hawk, would have been upset with her if she had!

The Twin Cities’ liberal altmedia; all the news George Soros and Brian Melendez want them to print.