( DN Photo-Johnson )
The Richvale farmer and former assemblyman, speaking before the Red Bluff Kiwanis Club, began by collecting signatures for a constitutional amendment that would bar the state from borrowing further transportation funds from county and city governments.
But LaMalfa reserved the crux of his speech for nuclear power, which he hails as the solution to California's growing energy needs. Already an accepted source of power in Europe and Japan, repealing legislation that prevents the building of nuclear plants in California could give the state a clean, carbon-neutral source of energy, he said.
If used to power desalination efforts, the initiative could also be tied to fighting the drought.
"Why aren't we building a (desalination) plant next to four or five nuclear plants here in California?," he said.
Nuclear plants are controversial, but even efforts to install energy efforts thought to be popular with environmental groups, like wind and solar, have been fought by competing environmental groups when those projects threaten to disrupt natural habitats, LaMalfa said. "We're talking out of all three sides of our mouth here, basically," he said.
LaMalfa spent nearly as much of his time at the lectern trying to harness energy of a different kind - political energy from more than 3,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where Republican Scott Brown took a Senate election that he seemed unlikely to win just a few weeks ago.
Electing Brown sends a message to Congress that the people disagree with how health care is being handled, a process LaMalfa called "shameful."
Whatever you think of the health bill itself, holding a major vote on Christmas Eve was wrong, LaMalfa said, suggesting the Democrats were trying to pass the bill without public input.
Comparing himself to Brown, LaMalfa said a vote for him would be sending a message to the state government to stop spending. He closed his speech on a third kind of power - that of the voter.
Using the conservative Tea Party movement as an example of how citizens can change the debate, LaMalfa told the audience that they do not answer to the government.
Elected officials must answer to the people, not the people to the bureaucracy, he said.
