To Drill or Not to Drill

What the hell is wrong with Democrats and their blind spot to drilling for oil in the USA? There was this idiot Democrat strategists on Neil Cavuto's show pontificating on how people are now starting to care about the environment now that oil is so high. Yeah and what is she sniffing? She goes on about some new car someone is coming out with--and what am I going to pay for it with? And hey, what about the fact that the Honda hybrid's ac doesn't work when you are stopped at stoplights etc(that's bad for people with breathing problems like my mother--maybe it makes a difference what you have the ac set on--but it wasn't our car--we weren't in control of the ac settings)

This Democrat strategist said earlier that we must ween ourselves off of not just foreign oil but all oil even though we are sitting on galleons of it. Fred Barnes wrote about this last week in the Weekly Standard:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the Mr. Magoo of American politics, stumbled onto the truth last week. He discovered the law of supply and demand. "We want to put [more oil] on the market to increase supply and lower prices," Reid said. "With oil and gas prices continuing to break record highs every day, much more needs to be done."

Indeed it does. But Reid won't allow it. His understanding of economics only extends to matters in which he might embarrass President Bush. The oil he wants on the market is the oil the administration is buying for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), now nearly full. Reid got his way. The administration now plans to stop oil shipments to the SPR next month.

Beyond that, Reid and his party are committed to suppressing increased oil production in this country, as they wait for that magical day when fossil fuels are no longer needed to supply the nation's energy needs.
[he goes on] Advances in technology, however, make serious offshore oil spills a thing of the past. One hundred eight platforms were destroyed and hundreds more damaged in the Gulf of Mexico by hurricanes Rita and Katrina without a single major spill. Californians may remember the damaging spill off Santa Barbara, but that was 40 years ago and was the result of ancient technology.

New technology also means the coastlines would not be marred by unsightly oil platforms. Drilling now goes miles deeper to capture oil once out of reach--and much farther offshore. The moratorium doesn't take this into account. It blindly bars drilling for 200 miles off the Atlantic and Pacific shores.

The United States is virtually alone in treating offshore production as taboo. Great Britain and Norway drill off their coasts without polluting the North Sea. Brazil has achieved energy independence not only by ethanol use but also by expanded offshore oil production. China is now drilling at Cuba's behest in waters halfway to the coast of Florida.

There's another compelling reason to boost domestic production. Oil from current sites is gradually being depleted. Unless new sources come on line in the next few years, America will produce less oil at home and become even more dependent on oil from abroad, the Middle East in particular.

Reid and Democrats, OPEC's best friends, aren't noticeably concerned. Their next step is to remove tax incentives to explore and drill for more oil. And Senator Hillary Clinton is eager to impose a new windfall profits tax on oil revenues. These measures have no purpose other than to punish oil companies. They are counterproductive.

Even Barnes isn't as optimistic as some about the amount oil available here, but the point is that the DEMOCRATS who are in charge of congress right now are the ones who want us to pay higher and higher gas prices even though they make these quasi-investigations by grilling oil execs. And what about that loon Maxine Waters? She wants to do what Chevas did and nationalize the oil companies--what would happen to all those stockholders (the little guys who have pension plans that have invested in Exxon and such).
later I will add some links to people who think there is the mother lode of oil finds in USA---auto save is squirrelly and it's bugging me.