Oil!

The Carney camp took advantage of Exxon's recent record setting quarterly earnings to bring to light Chris Hackett's personal holdings in oil companies and campaign receipts from various oil companies' political action committees.

It appears that the Carney campaign is looking for this to be a reoccurring campaign issue.

Each time an energy development comes to print, Carney seeks to publicize Hackett's connections to big oil--either through his personal investments or campaign workings. The Carney campaign is using every opportunity it can to paint Hackett as a lackey of "Big Oil."

This time around, the campaign highlighted a $5,000 PAC donation in May from Exxon Mobil as well as other personal donations from oil executives. This all is supposed to make Hackett less credible on the energy issue.

Carney hasn't offered many energy solutions. He enjoys going after the oil companies and using the "Use It or Lose It" slogan as a major component of his campaign's platform. For those unfamiliar, the "Use It or Lose It" argument suggests that oil companies have existing onshore leases and opportunities to drill for oil, but have failed to do so because by not drilling, they are able to drive up the price which in turn allows their bottom lines to increase. It all feeds into the oil company conspiracy theory that liberals love, but unfortunately, it is--at the very least--an overly exaggerated claim.

Said campaign manager Vincent Rongione, “Clearly, Chris Hackett is deep in the pocket of Big Oil. Whose side is Hackett on? … Chris Hackett doesn’t understand the toll record high gas prices are taking on middle class families — once again, he says one thing and does another. He should let us know, whose side is he on?”

However, if Carney is accusing Hackett of being bought and sold on energy, one needs to look no further than FISA to see a synonymous situation with Carney. Many organizations accused Carney of surrendering to retroactive immunity for telecom companies because of their big contributions to his reelection campaign. In fact, one of the top contributors to Carney is Comcast with roughly $21,000 in donations. Comcast even refused to air Blue America's ad against Carney unless it was censored, and that's just one of the major telecom companies which has donated to Carney.