Obama thinks the American people would have accepted a gradual rise in oil prices??

RE: "If this isn't made into a commercial, then the Republicans deserve to lose."

The Republicans deserve to lose for far more serious reasons. And they will.

Too many online meetings in one day for my brain. That should have read, insulate Americans from domestic price increases.

"It is a political problem and all it needs is a political solution"

Gee, Chuck, flunk Econ 101 much?

If this isn't made into a commercial, then the Republicans deserve to lose.

The Republicans deserve to lose for *so* much more than that.

A comment about gasoline prices is enough to make you go apoplectic, while the Republican candidate can't open up his warmongering mouth without proving that he's completely unfit for the mantle.

Why is it again we don't just split the country up? You guys can spend the next 20 years burning oil, buying sh*t at WalMart and blowing up brown people, and we can get on with the business of living.

How's that sound?

"Thanks in no small part to the political power of Americans of a Reformed perspective, the USA elected an oil man as President and an oil man as Vice-President twice in the last two years. Under their leadership, oil has slowly risen from $20 a barrel to a much more oil-man-satisfying $140 a barrel over seven years. And you haven't seen people junking their cars 'til now.

I don't know if President Al Gore would have mandated that all cars run on trash so that we'd now be evacuating Maine and Alaska due to global cooling. I do know Americans most certainly have accepted gradual increases in gas prices, and, as much as I like you column, I wonder what you're smoking."

You might want to revisit history there, Rob. It's the Congress who won't drill for oil, it's the fault of the Democrats. Not too much Bush can do if they won't lift the ban. Try to shift the blame all you want but yesterday's vote puts the lie to your premise.

Michele, first of all, thanks for your response, and I have to tell you I have had a chance to learn more about this bill in detail.

It's a stinker.

From my reading, it's not the taxation of the biggest oil companies that is drastically out of whack, it's the authorization of the President to declare emergencies and the authorization of suits against oil producing nations and so on.

I stick by my assertion that Americans have in fact adjusted to slowly rising gas prices for about eight years now. And it is poor people in places like Mississippi and Wyoming and Alabama and Texas who are really hit hard. There's something just plain wrong about this outcome. On the assertion that Americans have adjusted to slowly rising gas prices, however, Obama is right. $1 since last year, but $3 since 2000. The pain has been more recent.

And do you really suppose Michelle, nobody in the White House realized that every time there's a spoken threat of blowing up Iran, oil prices go up? If there had been drilling in ANWR or offshore, the Republicans (and to be fair, many others) could still have manipulated prices by general belligerence--and drum up votes and defense contracts in the process.

But you tell me, if you'd like to tell me, do we have insight into God's will as to the drilling under the seas and in the wilderness and everywhere else? Is it our right to take what we want from the earth regardless of any consequences? I'm listening. And thanks.

Seems like the lies just keep flowing from God's Own Party, Michele.

www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/40776.html

GOP claim about Chinese oil drilling off Cuba is untrue

By Erika Bolstad and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — As Congress has debated energy policy over the past several days, an unusual argument keeps surfacing in support of drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases?

Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

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We can be thankful that nobody has died because of this lie, Michele. Unlike some of the others that have been told by the GOP.

I only started reading this blog recently.

Am I to understand that somehow drilling for oil in ANWR is an issue of special significance to Reformed Christians, as contrasted to, say, finding oil in North Dakota or off Brazil? Can someone explain that one to me?