First Paris Hilton's mom issued a statement last week saying the ad that Senator John McCain released featuring her daughter Paris was a "frivolous" waste of money.

Now Paris has released her own response to the ad.

Once again, the girl proves she knows how to turn controversy into conversation about her.

While McCain's Rove-school graduates have convinced him that he can win by mockery, he has turned the tire-gauge folly into something expected of playground bullies picking on the nerdy kid with the funny glasses.

After Exxon dragged the Alaskan oil spill through the courts for more than a quarter of a century, paying a pittance of what it caused in damages to people, small businesses, and the environment, why shouldn't Obama's cautious approach to offshore drilling be seen as a sign of good judgment?

But Obama's idea of hitting the oil companies with an excess-profits tax and giving that money to voters is just about as loopy. Why not hit the banks up, too? Their profits are just as obscene. And what about the big pharmaceutical companies? They aren't hurting.

This isn't Russia. We shouldn't be rushing to nationalize the country's most profitable industries.

Leave it to Paris to give us a bit of common sense.

She rightly points out that we need a strategy to get us out of this mess. And it will most likely require looking at energy much differently than we have in the past.

Everything should be on the table: off-shore drilling, nuclear, and more funding for emerging alternatives to fossil fuels.

And conservation - whether it's in the form of putting on a sweater as former President Jimmy Carter advised 30 years ago or filling the air in our tires properly as Obama spoke of last week - is probably the most immediate and significant way of reducing the price of gas at the pumps.

Oil is dropping in price because Americans have stopped driving as much this summer. It's pretty simple stuff.

Yet it seems to take a celebrity that is often portrayed as a simpleton to turn our attention toward the obvious.

Both candidates should be pink with embarrassment.