Encore TV replays:
Saturday, 23 Aug. at 10 am
Sunday, 24 Aug., at 8 pm
Monday, 25 Aug. at 5:30 am
Republican Presidential nominee John McCain should be careful about whom he invites to speak during his own campaign events.
__Invited by the McCain campaign to be a local speaker during a panel discussion (held 24 June 2008) about a national energy policy, local land conservationist Michael Feeney seemed to grab more attention than either McCain or Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or so it seemed, considering that this was a Presidential election campaign event where usually the speakers and audience are selected to stay on message, lest the headlines become, as they did, more about the dissent instead of the political sales pitch the campaign event is intended to be.
__The event filled the house at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, although many political watchers wondered (not really) why such a small venue was selected, having a capacity of only about 300. With school out for summer, Santa Barbara City College was highly available for a crowd of 8 thousand that worked for Barack Obama, or even a UCSB gym that could hold 1000 as it did for Hillary Clinton.
__During this campaign event-discussion, Feeney "lambasted" and "excoriated" McCain (or so wrote ABC News) about relying upon and expanding nuclear power generation to solve the national energy crisis. Feeney also cautioned that storing and transporting all that radioactive waste still remains a severe problem with no solution. McCain's answer to that --to emulate the French-- really means shipping off the radioactive waste to somewhere else regardless if the Americans there did or did not want that nuke waste, the gift that keeps giving for millennia.__More offshore oil development and drilling also did not go over so well with the crowd of about 150 people who came to welcome McCain to Santa Barbara that Tuesday morning. John Abraham Powell of Get Oil Out (GOO) spoke about that and a rumoured choice for McCain's Veep selection. Santa Barbara City Councilmember Das Williams and local Democratic champion Barbie Deutsch also piled on about the irony of McCain promoting more offshore oil development here in Santa Barbara.
__And another crowd dis-pleaser: McCain's opposition to reproductive choice for women. Brianna Eardley of Planned Parenthood Federation described McCain's desire to appoint anti-choice Supreme Court Justices, while Santa Barbara City Councilmember Helene Schneider told of McCain's less-than-zero voting record about women's health issues.
__See the whole spectacle in this video episode of Off-Leash Public Affairs, which started the TV-17 replays on Saturday, 12 July 2008.
excerpted photo by Lauren Hanson or Mary Jones via Edhat
Watch the Video of this show!! (32 minutes, including bonus content of photo montage from the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara) For an alternative video host via Vimeo, select the Episode title atop this post.
