I paid $4.05 a gallon for gas yesterday.
$4.05!
Imagine that!
I’m not sure what we can do about it, but I know what we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t go to The Tea Party for answers.
Why do I say that?
Remember “Drill, Baby, Drill?”
That was the phrase adopted by the then-vice presidential Republican
candidate and perennial Tea Party pin-up girl, Sarah Palin. (Yes, that’s
right. She adopted the phrase; she didn’t originate it. Caribou Barbie coming up with an original thought???? Let’s get serious!)
Anyhow, during that presidential campaign, good ol’ Sarah claimed
that all we had to do in order to reduce gas prices in this country was
to increase domestic drilling. And then The Tea Party took up the
mantra, and “Drill, Baby, Drill” began showing up on bumper stickers
attached to huge SUV’s across the nation.
Well, guess what?
We did increase domestic oil drilling! But it took Barack
Obama to do it! Since President Obama took office, the number of
domestic drilling rigs working in this country quadrupled. (That is
according to Baker Hughes Corp., one of the largest oil drilling
companies on the planet.) Today, there are over 1,272 such rigs sucking
oil out of US soil, as opposed to a little over 300 when “W” left
office.
And yet, I paid $4.05 a gallon for the stuff yesterday.
Guess “Drill, Baby, Drill” wasn’t the answer after all, huh?
 
Okay. So that didn’t work! So, what the hell do we do now?
Well, let’s all go off half-cocked and ill-informed once again, and jump on the Keystone Pipeline bandwagon!
Sounds good to all of my Tea Party friends…all two of them.
The Keystone Pipeline will move crude oil from Canada. This oil will
be obtained from sand and tar by methods which are EXTREMELY
environmentally questionable. It will then be transported via the
proposed pipeline to Gulf of Mexico refineries that are currently
producing gas and diesel products for the mid-western U.S. States.
According to the conservatives who are backing this controversial
pipeline, this project will lower United States gas prices because it
will flood the market with much more crude.
Okay.
So, do you know how much of the Keystone Pipeline oil products will be sold in the U.S.?
Any idea?
Not one drop.
That’s right; none of it!
Every gallon of petroleum products produced from this pipeline will be exported to Europe and Latin America.
So, in other words, the Keystone Pipeline is going to actually REDUCE
the amount of gasoline and diesel fuel available in this country
because the Gulf refineries that are currently producing these products
for the Mid-West will stop that production and start producing petroleum
products for Europe and Latin America instead.
Whoops!
Sorry about that!
The problem with thinking that more oil on the market will lower the
cost at the pump is the fact that oil prices are no longer by driven
primarily by the rules of supply and demand. They are driven by a number
of different forces, one of the biggest of which is oil speculation. If
oil speculation could be curtailed, many industry analysts believe that
gas prices would drop almost immediately by 15%.
So this week, President Obama outlined a package he was sending to
Congress that contains stricter guidelines for oil speculation and much
stiffer penalties for those who violate those guidelines.
A large portion of oil speculators are Wall Street bankers.
Can you guess which political group is coming out against the legislation????!!!!!
Man! You just can’t make this stuff up!!!!!!!
 
Such short-sighted thinking producing faulty, simplistic answers to
extremely complicated problems is not rare these days. Seems like a lot
of people follow the “Don’t confuse me the facts; my mind’s made up!”
line of reasoning.
For example, I have a very good friend of mine who thinks that Obama
was born in Kenya, and he would vote for Mickey Mouse over a
Harvard-educated black man.
We’ll call this guy Dick. (Not his real name. Just my view of his political thoughts.)
Dick is dead-set against ObamaCare.
Dick thinks that nothing is wrong with the current healthcare system in the United States, and President Obama’s socialistic healthcare policies will be the demise of civilization as we know it.
Well, recently poor old Dick was told by his doctor that he may be
suffering from lung cancer. You know where Dick went for further
evaluation on the matter?
Not your local hospital here in the good ol’ U.S. Of A., but . . .
The freaking Dominican Republic!
That’s right! Even though Dick believes that our healthcare system does NOT need to be reformed, HE DECIDED TO GO TO THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC to be treated for this extremely life-threatening disease!
Go figure, huh?
Dick’s going to the Dominican Republic for medical treatment! And
yet, he thought that Michael Moore was an un-American jerk for doing a
similar thing in his documentary named Sicko. (In Sicko Michael Moore gathered up a group of 9/11 First Responders who were
suffering horribly with serious respiratory maladies from their
exposures incurred on that infamous day. These people could no longer
afford their healthcare in the United States. So Michael took them all
to Cuba where they were treated successfully and got medications for a
miniscule fraction of what it would cost them in our country.)
Amazing, huh?
 
One last thing.
I got the following email from another Tea Party friend of mine this
morning. (It was this email that actually prompted me to write this
post.)
Here it is:
 
Interesting read.

I  DON’T KNOW HOW ALL OF THIS IS GOING TO PLAY OUT!!!!      ONE BIG MESS, WE ARE IN!!!!!   Obama’s Air Force One (WAIT! Who’s AFO? INCREDIBLE!!! He has turned Air Force One into a campaign slogan carrier… Not only the Obama Campaign logo on the tail, but it bears his Campaign Slogan and removing the American Flag! I do believe in most States there are laws against something so blatant an abuse of power, using public funds for campaigning. Atop this “personalization of Air Force One”, Obama has logged more miles than any previous President. We have a “triple A” president; Audacity, Abuse, and Arrogance… He should pay for the cost of repainting/restoring the craft…. this guy HAS to GO! Obama Removes American Flag from His Plane… WHO’S PLANE? Barack Obama recently finished a $500,000 total overhaul of his (HIS?)Boeing 757. And as part of the new design, he decided to remove the American flag from the tail. What American running for President of the United States would remove the symbol of his country? And worse, he replaced the flag with a symbol of himself. Please forward this if you’re not ashamed of your country and our flag. If you do not forward this to everyone you know nothing will happen. If Obama is elected president of the United States we are in trouble. If you think the Liberals can lead our country just look what Pelosi and Reid have accomplished for us… “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!” If you have doubt about this message, check it out at SNOPES   Did you read the last sentence of the email? It says to check out the validity of the assertions in the email by going to Snopes.com. I did. Guess what? THE WHOLE DAMNED THING, ACCORDING TO SNOPES, IS FALSE!!!!!!!!! Check it out for yourself! Go to the link below: www.snopes.com/politics/obama/airplane.asp What a world, huh???!!!!