Congress is busy working on speculators who might be running up crude oil prices. The media always leads an energy story with" who’s to blame". McCain is for and against so many issues you need a scorecard. Obama is only for windfall profits taxes and doing nothing. Lawmakers show absolutely no leadership. Record numbers of people have been cut off on electrical power and natural gas and no one cares. And, the worst is yet to come. Coal prices are at an all time high. Your home equity is at an all time low. Major oil companies are quietly leaving the U.S. Both Exxon-Mobil and BP have announced they are getting out of the retail business. B.P. severed 9,500 retail people this month. Next they will announce they are getting out of the refining business. They are tired of you, congress, and truthfully don’t need the U.S. anymore for anything.
Who is putting forth positive ideas? McCain wants to buy your votes. He wanted to forgive 18 cents a gallon this summer. Now he want to pay anyone who will create a battery that meets his specifications $300 million dollars. Senator, if anyone can invent that battery they won’t need my tax dollars as a thank you, they will be an overnight billionaire. That’s the best he can do? Pander for votes.
Who is talking about high speed trains? Who is looking at making more traffic light intersections four way stops? Who is looking at making most traffic lights red blinkers during non-peak hours? Who is looking at the construction cones that go up 2 months before the work starts and stay up two months after the real work is done. Millions of gallons are idled away at the convenience of the road contractors. Who is looking at taking out the summer blends which were no longer needed 10 years ago?
No one, that’s who. There are no thought leaders in Washington. There are blame placers. There are men and women who excell at playing politics—–messing with the other party. There are top notch campaigners. There are golden orators. There are spotlight seekers. There are bullet dodgers who avoid blame at any cost. That means no initiatives that might be criticized. There are great pollers who check the temperature of the prospective voter daily. There are many who excel at getting rich while earning $100,000 a year. Old timers can do all of the above.
No thought leaders, none. If there were we would be hearing a vast number of ideas to both boost supply and dampen demand. Meanwhile it gets worse and worse.
Folks, we need to keep working hard to try to get this turned around. Don’t get discouraged. Stay active. Get more active. Become as big a pain as the other side has been for the last 25 years. We got here because the environmentalists, the media, and the liberal elitists took over the country. We have a president who is trying his best to be the worst in my lifetime. Even now when he could be showing some mettle, he’s whiling away the last few months doing what he’s done for the past seven years. Nothing.
Today the results of a poll in California shows the majority want offshore drilling. If I saw that why didn’t McCain? The state of Alaska is suing the U.S. governement to drill in ANWR. One candidate or the other could blow the doors off the election with a strong energy campaign. Neither will.
Republicans are worried about Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party spoiling their chances in November. What chances? McCain is already 12% behind in the polls. And truthfully, who cares? They can’t get their act together any better than Bush has, so why worry about them. They have the golden opportunity. They can jump on energy and hammer the opposition, and they aren’t even capable of that. The Republican party is toast.
We have to keep pushing better ideas. The best souce of that in both parties right now is Newt Gingrich. His web sites can be assessed at americansolutions.com or newt.org. You can sign petitions and get good information about contacts to write or e -mail. It’s a growing group of Americans who are getting more and more organized to force action in the right direction.We can’t trust our leaders so we have to become the leaders.
Many of us don’t remember the Great Depression of late 1929, but fast forward to 2008, and I think you’ll find similar signs of what the world was like just prior to a global crash that lasted over a decade, before the economy’s began to recover.
I haven’t forgot about your blog, the election or the energy issues, but unfortunately I have been a bit preoccupied with spending my hard earned savings to help keep the economy going and doing my share to reduce my carbon foot print.
What started out to be a simple job of replacing the kitchen counter tops, has turned into be a total rehab and gutting of our kitchen and powder room. The US economy and the global environment should be much better off after Jodi gets done with this job. I think it would be much easier and cheaper to drill in ANWAR.
I’m sure the GNP and my contractor’s bank account should show a dramatic uptick when the July figures get reported.
Interesting piece. On the traffic issue, better than four-way stops are all-way yields. I tend to call it filter in turn. Basically we need only one rule: which side of the road to drive on. The rest can take care of itself. See http://www.fitroads.org
Martin:
The UK has traffic circles. Most of Europe has fewer traffic lights. In the US every business petitions for a traffic light to increase business. Residents petition for lights to make it earsier to get out of their subdivisions. If we eliminated 10% of them and put another 10% on blinking red at night it would reduce gasoline demand by millions of gallons.
Bill