Yes, we CAN drill our way out of this

You must have seen or heard it. It’s been repeated ad nauseum by Democrats on floors of both houses of Congress, before TV cameras and radio microphones and at recent campaign events. “We can’t drill our way out of this.” The donkey party’s latest mantra has been hammered home by the usual suspects from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to Barack Obama. Like most Democrat talking points, it’s a falsehood.

Yes we CAN drill our way out of this. Just the announcement of our intention to drill in any one of the Big Three Forbidden Zones (off the Continental Shelf, in the Baaken or in ANWR) would have a considerable impact on the speculators who have been driving the price of oil ever skyward for the past several months. Hugh Hewitt makes the point:

No one wants to get caught holding the contract for high priced oil when new reserves are discovered.

In fact, the speculation which has driven up the price of oil is only made possible because we have tied our hands to prevent ourselves from exploiting our own considerable domestic supplies:

In the current oil market unreasonable speculation is simply a symptom of the problem. That problem being the lack of a stable supply of crude oil.
*
Current oil production levels are virtually identical to demand with very little excess capacity available in the event of an interruption. Political instability, weather hazards, refinery breakdowns, terror attacks, kidnapping/attacks on oil platforms and hostage taking, and other interruptions in production increase the risk that oil supply will not be able to meet the demand in the future.
*
That is where the market comes in. If you are a large consumer of oil you purchase futures contracts, offering to buy oil in the future, at a set price that the seller has to deliver at that price — no matter what interruptions occur between now and then. In order to make a profit traders have to build in a premium in the cost of oil to offset that ever increasing risk.
*
Increasing domestic production — Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less — would greatly reduce much of the speculation by mitigating many of the uncertainties. From the list above, if you developed domestic supply in various regions of the US (Both coasts, Rocky Mountains, Alaska, Plains) you would mitigate the major effects of weather, political instability, terror attacks, attacks on platforms, and many other interruptions because there would be additional supplies from the remaining stable US regions. Increasing refining capacity would help mitigate the effects of refinery breakdowns.
*
This fundamental misunderstanding of the oil markets and the refusal of the Democrats to allow increased energy production has empowered the speculators in ways not seen since the markets began trading, resulting in a direct increase in the price of gasoline. The Democrat’s tactic of deflecting blame to the oil companies only serves to increase the speculation as additional restrictions and increased taxes on domestic oil producers historically leads to reduced domestic production.

But no one that I know of is claiming that all we should do is drill for oil to try to make ourselves more energy independent. Most advocates for increased domestic drilling see it as just one tactic in a compresehsive strategic energy policy which also encourages building more nuclear reactors, synthesizing liquid fuels from coal and waste celluloic stock, continuing the refinement of hybrid electric vehicles and developing hydrogen as a motor fuel, just for starters. We think that it’s really cool that used cooking oil can be easily made into something that diesel engines can burn. We see clean burning natural gas and propane as the logical alternative fuels for buses and fleet vehicles.

Nor are we only talking about the supply side here. Many of us have little or no problem with increasing the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, our homes and our workplaces. As conservatives, we have long argued that higher prices will help to drive down demand, and we are seeing that happen in the real world right here and right now.

The truth is that Democrats are so beholden to the environmental special interests that they’ve painted themselves into a corner on energy matters. The donkeys are trying to swim against an increasing tide:

Most voters favor the resumption of offshore drilling in the United States and expect it to lower prices at the pump, even as John McCain has announced his support for states that want to explore for oil and gas off their coasts.
*
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey—conducted before McCain announced his intentions on the issue–finds that 67% of voters believe that drilling should be allowed off the coasts of California, Florida and other states. Only 18% disagree and 15% are undecided. Conservative and moderate voters strongly support this approach, while liberals are more evenly divided (46% of liberals favor drilling, 37% oppose).
*
Sixty-four percent (64%) of voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that gas prices will go down if offshore oil drilling is allowed, although 27% don’t believe it. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of conservatives say offshore drilling is at least somewhat likely to drive prices down. That view is shared by 57% of moderates and 50% of liberal voters.
*
Nearly all voters are worried about rising gas and energy prices, with 79% very concerned and 16% somewhat concerned.

Yes, it’s still “the economy, stupid” and especially pump prices for gasoline and diesel, not to mention the high costs the airlines are incurring for jet fuel. The GOP seems to be waking up to what conservatives already knew. Make energy your number one issue and offer doable solutions to the problems of energy security and high prices.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have sentenced themselves to doing hard time in Al Gore’s lockbox, and they’ve entrusted the key to the Sierra Club. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people, one which has consistently put its own selfish political interests ahead of America’s security and her citizens’ bank accounts.

- JP

Had enough “change” yet?

When the Democrats took over control of Congress in the election of 2006, consumer confidence stood at a 21/2-year high, regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent.

Since the Democrats took over, consumer confidence is down, gasoline has soared to $4.00 a gallon and the unemployment rate, as we learned this morning, has climbed to 5.5 percent.

Mutual and stock fund losses now total in the trillions, and an increasing number of home mortgages are in foreclosure.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to block homegrown efforts to drill for domestic oil, build new refineries, produce more clean-burning natural gas, increase our use of atomic energy and fully exploit our coal resources, including making motor fuel from coal. The United States will never become energy independent until we are allowed to develop the many sources of energy which are our own.

The voters opted for change in 2006, and the Democrats certainly gave it to them. Now Barack Obama and his band of merry pranksters that is the Democrat Party want voters to approve even more “change” in 2008. I don’t think our economy can stand it - do you?

- JP

The real battle now begins

To this point Obama has survived largely on the votes of young democrats that believe a politician when he talks about hope and change even if his true beliefs reflect neither.  That was fine for the primaries but how will Obama transform himself into a candidate that can win in November?  If you read most polls less than 30% of Hillary’s supporters would vote for Obama in November, how does he change that?  He must articulate similar positions that Hillary did, the problem is that by doing that he must abandon the hope and change mantra and thus alienate the young voters that got him where he is.

He has really painted himself into a corner because he can’t win in November without a greater share of Hillary supporters, he can’t get those without alienating at least an equal number of the young college types, and he will find it impossible to get conservatives to support him.  Most seniors seem to have supported Hillary, they vote more reliably than the young impressionable skulls full of mush that seemingly made Obama the nominee.  For Obama to win would mean that McCain will absolutely have to implode, not a far fetched possibility given his history, or democrat voters will have to fall for the greatest job of slick marketing and packaging in American History.

Obama is going to have to debate McCain at some point, and that is not what he is good at.  He’s good at prepared speeches, making young college girls faint (a trait even Bill Clinton didn’t possess), but he’s not shown that he can think on his feet or discuss foreign policy issues at a 10th grade level.  Ok given the state of education in this country perhaps he could have that discussion at a 10th grade level, but the point is the guy can speak, outside of that he’s not that intelligent.

It is my belief that most American’s will see Obama for what he really is, the 2nd coming of Jimmy Carter, if not we’re in for Jimmy Carter’s 2nd four years…

Racist church trumps scathing memoir

Just when the Democrats figured it was safe to come out of the Chicago churchhouse, Pfather Pfleger rose… er, sank to the occasion. Now the Dems and their pfrontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, can’t seem to get pfree pfrom the quagmire that is Trinity United Church of Christ.

They thought that had found the perfect “get out of manure free” card. What could be better to get the shamlessly racist church Obama has chosen to attend for over two decades out of the headlines than some new scandal-mongering aimed squarely at the object of the left’s obsessive derangement - Chimpy McBushitler? Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, nouveau riche with thirty pieces of silver from the book deal he had cut with a publishing house connected to leftist sugar daddy George Soros, had just started making the round of television talk shows to publicize his “scathing memoir” just chock full o’ “explosive” revelations about the Bush Administration. Hot on his heels was an army of Dem footsoldiers who, in a stretch which would impress even the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, were trying to use the flap the media was sure to generate over McClellan’s book to taint the campaign of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

If this sounds to you like a scheme worthy of a Roadrunner cartoon script, you’re right on target. Wyle E. Coyote, the perpetually hapless Dem, was yet again let down by what seemed to be a sure-fire solution from big brains at Acme Inc. And things seemed to be going so well, too. Both people and press were growing tired of hearing about Jeremiah Wright, and the Obama connection to unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn never sparked true outrage in any sector beyond the patriotic right. Obama’s daily gaffes didn’t seem to be hurting him much, either. So the Dems thought they had found a big story with legs which was a great twofer - it would give them a fresh club to beat President George W. Bush with, and they would use those of McClellan’s charges which were related to the Iraq war against McCain. Ah, but it only lasted about a day and a half. Along came Pfather Pfleger to cut the legs out from under the McClellan story, steal Scotty’s thunder and drag Obama’s First Church of Hatred kicking and screaming back into the limelight.

Fr. Michael Pfleger, ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1975, has pastored the mostly African American Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood since 1981. His social activism has put him in league with Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Blogger Sultan Knish calls Pfleger “the white Rev. Jeremiah Wright.” The good Pfather says that he’s known Obama for 20 years.

Indeed, it was at White’s Trinity United Church where Pfleger stepped into the limelight (not to mention the manure) of the presidential campaign.

Can you say “racist”? I knew you could.

After this bizarre display by the radical priest, the Obama campaign, professing “disappointment,” was forced to remove Pleger’s endorsement of Obama from the “faith” page of the Obama website. There’s been a lot of “cleaning up” on that website over the past weeks…

No, the lackluster McClellan just can’t compete with the likes of Pfather Pfleger, a true rock star. But Scotty’s story would have probably collapsed under its own weight, even without the antics of a pathologically progressive priest to help push it to the back pages. After all, Scott McClellan didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was just another disgruntled former employee:

He reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned, and he displays some bitterness about that as well as about being sometimes kept out of the loop on key decision-making sessions.

Also, the connection between McClellan’s publisher and George Soros leaves little doubt that Scotty and his book are just teeth on a cog in a much broader agenda. And if anyone still has any doubts, here’s what McLellan had to say about the 2008 presidential race:

Scott McClellan, making the media rounds to promote his book and push back against the ferocious counter-attack by Bush loyalists, declined to come out tonight for John McCain and said he liked what he had heard from Barack Obama.

*

“I haven’t made a decision,” McClellan told Katie Couric on CBS’s “Evening News,” when asked if he was backing the Arizona senator. McClellan paid homage to McCain, saying that the Republican nominee had “governed from the center, and that’s where I am.”

*

But without prompting, he said he was “intrigued by Sen. Obama’s message.”

Oh, well. Back to the Acme catalog. There’s just got to be something in there that will work next time…

- JP

How about a windbag prophets tax?

The Democrats are a political party so devoid of ideas that they can’t even come up with new bad proposals and are reduced to simply reinventing their old terrible ideas. A case in point is the so-called windfall tax on oil company profits. Both Dem contenders for the presidency favor a version of this old turkey.

Here’s the Barack Obama flavor:

Obama proposes oil companies be taxed on windfall profits from oil sold at or above 80 dollars a barrel, and the revenue be used to help relieve the burden of rising prices on working people, according to his campaign.

Hillary Clinton has gone past the proposal stage and has actually introduced a windfall tax measure:

Mrs. Clinton introduced legislation in the Senate today proposing [a] gas tax holiday and covering the cost of it through a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies, a campaign spokesman said.

Wait just a sec… Haven’t we been down this rocky road before? In the words of one of major league basesball’s most colorful characters, former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, “This is like deja vu all over again.” The AP’s Daniel Sorid writes:

…even liberals would have a hard time defending the country’s last experience with a windfall tax, in 1980.

*

What began as a compromise by the Carter administration to lift ceilings on oil prices grew into a bureaucratic nightmare that Congress in 1984 called the “largest and most complex tax ever levied on a U.S. industry.” The law produced nowhere near the revenue it promised, made the country more reliant on foreign oil, and generated reams of red tape, according to a 2006 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

*

The law was put out of its misery in 1988, two-and-a-half years before it would have automatically expired.

*

“It’s a terrible idea today,” said Phil Verleger, who helped design the windfall tax policy as the Treasury Department’s director of domestic energy policy from 1977 to 1979. “The windfall profit tax was a quo for a quid; the quid was price decontrol. There’s no quid right now.”

Well, Mr. Verleger, it was a bad idea then, too. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Let me repeat that for those you on drugs or afflicted with terminal liberalism. Ver. 1.0 of the windfall oil profit tax was a disaster for the nation from which it has never recovered. Domestic oil producers found it unprofitable to produce, and the United States became even more dependent on foreign oil than it had been. It  is a major contributing factor to the situation we find ourselves in today: between Iraq and a hard place.

Why, then, in the name of all that makes sense, should this nation go back to doing something that not only did not work the first time, but was a major source of many of the energy woes we are experiencing today? Cynical conservatives are tempted to say that it is because socialists, despite the nearly universal failures of socialism throughout history, just can’t resist trying it again, hoping the results will be different this time.

The real answer is just as cynical. The oil companies are simply too inviting a target for the political left. They are fond of repeating that the oil companies are making billions of dollars of profit. Never mind that Exxon-Mobil’s profit margin of 10.7% pales in copmparison to some other well-know American corporations:

If you’re after really big earners… check out Yahoo (a 45.5 percent profit margin), Citigroup (33.4 percent), Intel (24 percent), and Apple (22.7 percent).

Never mind that Exxon-Mobil paid nearly $3 in taxes for every $1 in income. The company’s first quarter tax bill was $30 Billion.

Never mind that among Exxon-Mobil’s larest stockholders are not just individual fat cat shareholders such as the the Rockerfeller family, but many pension funds and mutual funds as well. Penalizing the big oil companies will simply force them to protect their shareholders by passing along the tax increases to consumers, who always pay the ultimate price for the left’s attacks on capitalism.

Those of us who take the time and trouble to study history do so because it is such an excellent teacher. It was the American-born philosopher George Santayana who is credited with the quote which would seem to explain the Democrats’ myopia on oil company profits:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But it is another one of his quotes, and from the same source, which puts that first quote in context and best describe’s the Dems’ obsession with meddling in the affairs of the corporations they love to attack:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

These liberal Democats and their two favorite candidates for the leadership of the free world are fanatics. As a conservative, I can think of one tax which I would support - a tax not on windfall profits, but rather one on windbag prophets.

- JP