PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag oil

Now that the federal government is really serious about high oil prices we can expect a heightened effort to waste your tax dollars on dubious projects designed to distract the public’s attention. The government is hoping that you will not remember previous grand government-financed efforts to outperform what markets do better, more efficiently and without your tax dollars to grease the skids.

‘Evening News’ reporter uses Citgo station owner to attack oil companies, while ABC offers a more accurate perspective. As first-quarter earnings reports gush in to newsrooms, the media are again portraying stockholder-owned American oil companies in a sinister light while ignoring or downplaying socialist oil barons like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

I would be more interested in what the Democrats had to say about high gas prices if these were not the same people who refused to let us drill for oil in Alaska, imposed massive restrictions on building new refineries, and who shut down the development of nuclear power in this country decades ago. But it's too much having to watch Democrats wail about the awful calamity to poor working families of having to pay high gas prices.

Every few years, when geopolitics or other factors suddenly drive the cost of crude oil through the roof, industry insiders start looking to America's coastal waters for new supplies of oil and natural gas. It happened in the 1970s. It happened in the 1980s. It happened again last October, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- along with other factors -- conspired to push the price of a gallon of gasoline over three dollars for the first time.