Obama and His Comrades Have Set a Trap for You

It is becoming more evident every day that the left-wing of the Democratic Party is delighted that the price of gasoline and diesel fuel is now between $4.00 and $5.00 per gallon.

According to Barack Obama, high gas prices don’t really constitute a problem for Americans. He stated recently that the reason for our anger is “the rapid increase in prices, not the prices themselves”. Obama claimed that Americans would have accepted a “gradual adjustment” to the current cost.

For years now, in response to the demands of environmental extremists, liberal Democrats like Obama and some RINO’s have pursued policies designed to raise prices and punish Americans who consume petroleum in their daily lives. We have been prevented from drilling wherever domestic oil supplies might be found, and we have been forced to become completely dependent on foreign, often unfriendly, sources of oil – jeopardizing our national security and turning our dollars over to those who are trying to kill us.

Rightly or wrongly, and whether we like it or not, the United States has become a suburban nation where we live in suburbs, we shop in suburbs and we work in suburbs. We must use our automobiles, and this means we must have gasoline to run them until, 25 or 50 years from now, hydrogen or some other, economical alternative fuel becomes available. Corn-based ethanol is now seen to create more problems than it solves.

Now that the American public has risen in anger about the high prices of gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil and natural gas, these same Democrats in Congress are trying to escape blame and head off an expansion of domestic drilling by trying to confuse us about the facts. They are throwing out every deception that they can think of: speculators are to blame, they say; the oil companies are gouging us, they say; 68 million acres already available for drilling, they say.

Oil company profits are huge, but so are the companies, and their profits are in line with many other industries; the 68 million acres under lease have largely been explored and come up empty; excess speculation is a factor, but the basic underlying problem is that the International Energy Association (IEA), the best, non-partisan source of oil market data and forecasts, has, for the first time ever, forecast that demand will exceed supply by the end of next year.

Each of these deceptions proves to be a case of smoke and mirrors when examined: the fact is, they, the Democrats, are to blame, and legislation authorizing drilling must happen now. If this happens, financial speculators will dump their contracts, and the price of oil will come down immediately.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 2:55 AM
By Tom Raum
Associated Press

Oil and gas prices that have doubled in the past year have squeezed aside the war in Iraq as the No. 1 issue this election year, and the parties are blaming each other for the price spike, and for apparent congressional paralysis.

Obama and McCain have made high gas prices a top issue in their campaigns and have offered dueling remedies. Their positions are being echoed daily by their surrogates on Capitol Hill. And each makes it sound as if only his proposals would chart the path to lower fuel prices and a final cure for what President Bush once labeled the nation's addiction to foreign oil.

This debate is certain to get louder before the election.
In a USA Today-Gallup Poll released yesterday, nine in 10 people said energy, including gas prices, would be very or extremely important in deciding their vote in November, tying it with the economy as the top issue.

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Misconceptions about drilling in the Arctic
Herald Tribune May 18, 2008 (letter excerpts)

“In the summer, ANWR is a muddy plain; in the winter, it is frozen tundra. Nobody lives there. The wildlife is less dense than the area of the North Slope, where oil drilling and production occur today….

The entire hydrocarbon resource, if it exists, can be produced without roads and with surface disruption of no more than a couple thousand acres. Such is the state of modern oil-field technology.

If the people we sent to Congress had passed the proposal for drilling in ANWR when it was first proposed 10 years ago, we would now be enjoying the consequences (lower gas prices) of the resource, if it even exists.”
Weldon G. Frost

The writer is a retired petroleum geologist. He resides on Longboat Key.

We are paying a terrible price for the unreasonable demands of the environmentalists. My life and my standard of living is more valuable than that of the ubiquitous snail darter.