Rethinking the ‘big oil’ criticism
I don’t understand people who are shocked that oil companies want to sell oil. Telling "big oil" to spearhead alternative fuel development is like telling NFL team owners to come up with some other game to replace our dependence on football. How utterly totalitarian. Exactly the way Hugo Chavez runs Venezuela!
If world oil producers and refiners were characters in a movie, then so called "big oil" like Chevron and Shell wouldn’t merit speaking parts. U.S. oil companies control and or pump a very small percentage of the world’s reserves. And it is not in any oil company’s interest for its product get priced beyond the ability of people to buy it at the pump. Instead it is the environmental extremists and the elected officials whom they have successfully bought or intimidated who welcome high gas prices as an opportunity to lecture the rest of us on conservation and how evil we great unwashed troglodites are for driving cars that actually burn gasoline. Saying we can conserve our way out of this latest liquid fuel crisis is like trying to convince a starving man he can fast his way out of hunger.
Tim Callanan
Berkeley County Councilman, District 2
As we approach the end of my first year on the Berkeley County Council, I would like to report that we have made significant progress on addressing public policy issues important to the residents of Daniel Island and the Cainhoy peninsula.
When I campaigned for office last year, I focused on three issues: taxes, citizen representation and public safety.
Taxes: Good tax policy is the result of two main ingredients—efficiency and equity. Efficiency involves constantly looking at each government department aqnd determining how things can be done better and at less expense to the taxpayer. A good example is the work I am doing with Cypress Gardens, the county’s only park.
Golf Cart issues
For the second time this week I have seen a child under the age of 10 "drive" a golf cart down the street where I live. On one occasion, I saw one of the carts finally come to a stop in the middle of an intersection, presumably because the child’s legs were too short to reach the pedals and the adult with them was too busy on the cell phone to notice.
Police cannot regularly patrol neighborhood streets so chances are slim they will ever see children at the wheel of these motorized vehicles., I believe the driver of a golf cart on a city street is required to possess a valid driver’s license and be over the age of 10. Today I saw a young boy being towed on a roller board by a golf cart "driven" by another youngster.
Rep. Jim Merrill
Hanahan, Daniel Island, Mt. Pleasant,
N. Charleston, Goose Creek, Charleston
Only 12 full scheduled days remain in the 2008 session of your General Assembly, and as usual this time of year, the workload is picking up dramatically. Several significant pieces of legislation moved in the House this week including a bill restricting illegal immigration, a new state budget, and two bills regarding alcohol use.
For the sixth time in two years, the House has approved an illegal immigration bill. The latest bill requires all employers to use the federal e-verify system or a valid S.C. drivers’ license to check the legal status of their employees. We eliminated a proposal that would create a new state I-9 form and a new bureaucracy with an as-yet unknown number of new state employees.
