When a local union with 9 employees in a workforce of 92 can shut down an operation, then we are no longer free.
Just two examples. There are so many more that I could write a book...
Remember in 2008 when oil prices peaked at $140? How it must have been Bush's fault because all his buddies were in the (big) oil business. So now what? Well, it certainly can't be Obama's fault. But he'll get to the bottom of it, for sure.
Investors Business Daily gets it right:
In his radio address last Saturday, President Obama bragged that his attorney general had just two days earlier "launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators.
"We're going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain."
Last month, the president promised that his administration was "taking various measures to deal with oil prices, and (is) watching out for price-gouging."
This is the sort of rhetoric that beleaguered consumers, aching from soaring fuel prices, are vulnerable to. Obama is giving them a straw man on which they can vent their frustrations. But their focus should be on the presidential candidate who said while campaigning in 2008 that under his environmentalist regime, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
On the day Obama took office, gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. On Tuesday, according to the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average was $3.87. While electricity prices haven't yet necessarily skyrocketed, gasoline prices sure have.
Obama could have prevented this. But he's done nothing to push crude supplies up and thereby bring gasoline prices down. In fact, it appears that his goal is to reduce domestic supply. Among the energy roadblocks his administration has thrown up:
• An illegal moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
• The rescission of permits that had already been issued for drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.
• The withholding of air permits for drilling, prompting Shell to walk away from an estimated 27 billion barrels of Arctic oil.
No, the oil in those reserves would not be in tomorrow's pipeline. But the promise of more oil in the future has an effect on prices today. The opposite — a future of artificial scarcity — is the reason oil is currently trading at elevated levels.
Despite its denials, the administration has also increased gasoline prices through its promotion of a weak dollar. Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars, those who sell it on the open market demand more dollars for the same amount of crude because those dollars are worth less.
This administration includes an energy secretary who has pined for European — meaning $8-a-gallon — gas prices. But the White House would rather the public remain ignorant of its role in driving prices higher. So it cynically kicks off probes of investors and oil industry executives that will turn up absolutely nothing.
And then when Bill Maher gets on Leno and says that "tea-baggers are corporate America's idiots" and Keith Olbermann thinks that S.E. Cupp should have been aborted, just because she disagrees with him, I'm about ready to scream.
It's gotten so ridiculous that it's hard to take. But we need to keep up the good fight against the left before they bury us all, as promised in 1961.
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