U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the senior GOP partner pushing the “Gang of Ten” bipartisan energy bill, announced late Friday that the legislation would be placed on hold until after the November elections.

Debate over a $700 billion bail-out of America’s financial system will suck every cubic inch of oxygen out of this final week of Congress.

As it should. If you’re in your 40s or better, you can’t argue that the high cost of putting gasoline in your tank — when you can find it — pales in comparison to the gutting of your pension fund or 401(k).

In Georgia, the “Gang of Ten” proposal set the state’s two senators against most of its House Republican members. The Senate plan traded a Democratic goal, the funding of incentives for renewable energy, carbon mitigation and energy conservation, for a GOP insistence on offshore drilling in some coastal regions.

House Republicans, led in part by U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Roswell, insisted that election season was no time for deal-making.

The basic sin of the “Gang of Ten” energy plan, as Rush Limbaugh and Neal Boortz explained, was that it dulled a national wedge issue by acknowledging the power of Democrats in Congress, through their superior numbers, to set a limit on where oil wells might be sunk. That piece of tundra in Alaska, for instance, was to remain off-limits.

Indeed, GOP presidential candidate John McCain, to his own great benefit, reversed his opposition to offshore drilling and embraced “Drill here, drill now!” — the motto first espoused this spring by Newt Gingrich and his intellectual clearinghouse, American Solutions.

But even the former U.S. House speaker recognizes that a change in tone has occurred. His annual American Solutions gathering in Cobb County, scheduled for this Saturday, was intended to focus squarely on the oil issue.

That’s been superceded by the former House speaker’s outrage over President Bush’s Wall Street intervention. A spokesman said Saturday’s program would be tweaked to allow Gingrich to “directly take on the federal power grab.”

So we’re done fighting over oil and energy, right? Not hardly. Certainly not here.

Last week, billionaire entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens set loose a pair of operatives in Georgia. Hired out of the Brock & Clay firm of Marietta, the two have been assigned the task of identifying and building grassroots support for Pickens’ national energy plan.

The hedge fund master has a two-fold strategy to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. Pickens wants to construct hundreds of electricity-generating wind farms in a corridor that stretches from west Texas to North Dakota.

Since Georgia’s winds are largely confined to interior of the state Capitol, this venture does not concern us. “The bigger part of it is getting more automobiles into the natural gas realm,” said Brian Noyes of Brock & Clay.

A delivery system and a network of fueling stations available to the average driver would have to be constructed. That would require an underpinning of government regulation, national and state, which in turn would require voter enthusiasm.

Pickens’ presence in Georgia could shield Chambliss and Isakson from further darts thrown by their Republican friends — the ones who shout “Drill, baby, drill!”

The Texan has already launched a series of national TV commercials on energy strategy. “This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of,” says Pickens, no environmentalist.

Pickens’ effort is aimed at the next Congress and the next president. Chambliss is up for re-election. Even so, the senator, who calls Pickens a friend and an occasional hunting buddy, is to meet this week with the billionaire — in anticipation of the fight to come.

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Because you can’t stay awake past 10 p.m.: ‘I’m John McCain and I approve this message’

Sunday, September 21, 2008, 09:54 AM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Apparently, the economic collapse on Wall Street was moving so fast that NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” didn’t want to gamble on the topic for its opening skit. So instead, we got this:

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