Drill Domestically, Probably Not!

Democrat politicians like to crow that expanding domestic oil production by expanding exploration and drilling will not be effective in reducing gasoline prices at the pump. Their contention is that it would take years for increased supplies of domestic oil from new drilling to actually get to the pumps, so why bother? That ridiculous, flat-earth assertion notwithstanding, the news today illustrates the folly of this argument.

The United States, in concert with other members of the International Energy Agency, has agreed to release as much as 60 million barrels of oil from strategic stockpiles. Responding only to the news that reported this agreement, oil prices plummeted nearly 5% in a single day, to the lowest price in the last six months.

If world oil prices could be affected so significantly by the news concerning a relatively small injection of supply from the IEA’s strategic oil reserves, what would the promise of hundreds of millions of barrels of oil flowing from new US wells for decade upon decade have of world oil prices. Of course, prices would continue to plummet to levels where Americans could once again afford to drive cars, buy boats, fly on jet airplanes and heat their homes without taking a second job.

Prices would fall THE SAME DAY congress opened up new discovery opportunities, because oil prices reflect what the future supply would be. If the oil futures market gurus saw the prospect of a nearly unlimited supply of safe, domestically produced energy available for years, prices would necessarily fall. And that price reduction would become relatively permanent. Oil prices would stabilize at an affordable level. Businesses, governments, and individuals could plan for future energy use, secure in the knowledge that prices would be low and stable. Oil prices, the millstone around the neck of American families and businesses since the 1970’s, would once again become invisible and nearly irrelevant to consumers.

A renewal of domestic exploration and drilling is, sadly, not likely to happen with a democrat in the White House. Cheap and plentiful gasoline is anathema to the Obama Administration, as cheap energy would surely lead to increased consumption of gasoline, causing the planet to disintegrate in a firey blaze from man-made Global Warming. But cheap and plentiful energy supplies would also lead to an explosion of economic expansion and growth, which would lead to a massive reduction in the stratospheric unemployment rates that are choking Mr Obama’s popularity.

With the solution to his plummeting popularity right in front of his eyes, Mr Obama’s rigid ideological adherence to the socialist, redistributionist, big government, anti-business solutions that have failed him thus far will prevent him from taking this ridiculously easy and productive path back to prosperity and popularity. For someone who has castigated his predicessor's "failed policies," Mr Obama's rigid ideological allegiance to his own failing policies will guarantee a weak democrat candidate in the 2012 presidential election. In the end that will be good news for the republic, if not our wallets.

Running Rings Around Corrupt Media

The recent release of over 24,000 documents detailing the email communications of Governor Sarah Palin serve to illustrate the woefully corrupt and derelict nature of the American news media. The release of email traffic, made due to a specific request by the Associated Press, generated a frenzy in the media to scrutinize each email to find the “story behind the story,” the smoking gun with which they could destroy the ascending political career of the conservative former governor of Alaska.

The news media, in their haste to find dirt on Ms Palin, enlisted the support of thousands of readers to pour over the emails. The enlistment of readers to do their legwork is an indication of the corruption of a once-proud industry. At one time, the media would actually do that kind of work itself. Back in J-School, they used to call it “Investigative Reporting.” Now, the corrupt media asks readers to do their work and mail in whatever dirt they can find.

Since the Palin emails were only released for public consumption in boxes in Alaska, hungry news organizations flocked to the state to make the pickup, and presumably quickly escape back to the lower 48. And what have the denizens of the American press found on the republican they apparently fear the most?

They discovered the fact that Sarah Palin was a hard working and totally engaged state governor. They did find one smoking gun email that revealed that Governor Palin actually entertained thoughts of securing the republican nomination for Vice President months before the actual event occurred. Imagine the horror of it! She is a politician who actually had ambition to ascend to a higher office. When does that ever happen? I am afraid to tell my children of the depth of this scandal. How would they ever understand?

What would have been interesting, though, would have been to see the attack dog media act with a similar zeal to vet candidate Obama prior to his election in 2008. While they had serious concerns over the fact that Governor Palin had not yet served a whole term in office, they gave Mr Obama a pass on his 100 plus day career in the U.S. Senate, preceded by terms in the Illinois state senate. They seemed entirely uninterested in Mr Obama’s professed drug abuse.

One remembers the derisive references to President George W. Bush’s brush with alcoholism as a young man. Though Mr Bush had passed nearly 20 years without a drink, he was still suspect to the American media. The clear implication of all those hard hitting news stories was that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic and perhaps we shouldn’t be allowing a booze-hound access to the nuclear trigger. Did the press even react to the clear admissions that Mr Obama made concerning his actual use of illegal drugs? An extended yawn was all they could muster at Mr Obama’s admission, in a story by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times on October 24, 2006, that “When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point.” Mr Obama’s derisive reference to former president Bill Clinton’s admission that he had smoked pot, but didn’t inhale resulted in a chorus of laughter from the adoring stenographers in the press.

It seems that a similar admission, in Mr Obama’s autobiography “Dreams of My Father,” that he had used marijuana and cocaine were also met with concerted disinterest by his fans in the media. They also failed to take any notice of his admission, in the same publication, that he did not ever try heroin, because “I didn’t like the pusher.” No reporter asked, “What if you had liked the pusher? Would you have used heroin then?” Not one reporter or commentator mentioned that perhaps having someone so comfortable with the use of illegal, highly addictive drugs might constitute a problem if he had his finger on the nuclear trigger.

The fact is that the American press could never tell the truth about Barack Obama, and still preside over his win in the presidential election. They knew they could never tell the American people the truth about his radical socialist associations, or his political goals to nationalize the health care industry, expand government unions, while systematically reducing American power and prestige in the world. Nor could they expose Mr Obama’s dangerous lack of understanding about how the free market capitalism has led to the highest level of affluence ever known on the planet. Had the American electorate known these facts about Mr Obama, he could not have won a race for alderman in Chicago.

One wonders what it will take for the derelict American press to acknowledge their mistake and recognize that every day the man spends in office is another day that America hurtles toward the abyss of economic destruction; it’s another day that the greatest engine of economic activity ever known sputters and approaches a stall; it’s another day closer to the political and economic ruin of our nation. It would take what it always would have taken: an honest press, dedicated to finding and reporting the truth to their customers, the American people (not the democrat party).

No, all it will just take to get the American media back to work reporting the facts and exposing the abuses of power to the American people is a republican in the Oval Office. If a republican finds his or her way to the Oval Office in the next election, the denizens of the press will again have work to do, if we still have an Oval Office after November 2012.