$4 A GALLON GAS PRICES/THIS SUMMER?

A year ago, we were worrying about $3 per gallon gasoline as we planned our summer vacations and day trips.  Well, folks..those were the "good old days".  THIS spring we're facing the real possibility of $4 per gallon gasoline...and like the roulette wheel, with gas prices just as BIG a gamble..."where it stops nobody knows."

As you fill up your tank this week...and hear the familiar "ka-ching" as it FLIES past $3, $3.10, or even more with every gallon....remember the election last November.  The idea was, last fall, to "throw the bums out".  It was all about "reform" and "fairness".  And at what's happening to OUR disposable income with every dollar increase we're paying for gasoline.  From House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to most members of last fall's much-heralded "new" Congress...what did Speaker Pelosi call them?  The most ethical Congress in a hundred years?

They all voted against, or in some way opposed, drilling for new sources of crude oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (land we taxpayers OWN, by the way); they were against the building of any new refineries; and they opposed off-shore drilling, even exploration.  They SAID it's all about "conservation"....Truth is, it's all out of Al Gore's play-book for FORCED conservation...which means for most of us working folks...doing with LESS, while paying MORE.

U. S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson told MSNBC last week...there are enough UN-USED oil reserves in the ground, underneath our own state of Alaska, to END our pathetic dependence on foreign oil.  And no matter what the environmentalists, those so-called "reformers", like those who were swept and RE-swept to power last November try and tell us...the people who live in Alaska are NOT opposed to using these vast un-tapped resources.  And why should they be opposed?  The whole area in Alaska, which has enough crude oil buried beneath it to FREE us from oil "robber barons" like Venezuela's thug dictator Hugo Chavez (who now controls 100 percent of Citgo, by the way)....is smaller in size than Washington's Reagan National Airport...and sits in a whole area that's smaller than South Carolina.

As for harming the pristine BEAUTY of the land in Alaska...Senator Hutchinson, who is from Texas and who knows oil drilling, points out that TODAY'S so-called "oil drilling" is all done UNDERGROUND, through a tentacle-like network of state-of-the-art machinery and connections...all UNDERGROUND.  The days of the old "dust bowl" oil wells and derricks are no more...the polar bears and caribou would hardly know we're there.

Adding insult to injury, those "reformers" who now LEAD the United States Congress are the very ones who have NOT allowed a single crude oil refinery, not a ONE, to be built in the United States in the last 31 years.  The last new refinery began operation in Garyville, Louisiana in 1976.  In these last 31 years, countless MILLIONS of additional people all over the world are driving, burning gasoline.  It's said that one-in-ten now has a car in China...they're not riding bicycles and pulling rickshaws anymore.  With no new sources of crude oil and no new refineries allowed, at least on American soil...demand is HIGH, supply is LOW, and we're at the hopeless mercy of Islamic radicals in the Mid-East and anti-american thugs like Hugo Chavez.

Let there be NO mistake.  Early in 2001, President George W. Bush did what he was elected to do.  He assigned Vice President Cheney specifically to the job...and together they presented to the American people, and to our Congress, a real plan for energy independence and for affordable crude oil prices...depending for the first time on our OWN resources. Then the so-called "reformers" who now lead the Congress began the"politics" of it all and they pronounced the President's plan dead-on-arrival.  We elected them and LET them do it, then RE-elected them and added to their ranks...and we're about to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline because of it.

Those same "reformers", and more like them, were given a "vote of confidence" by the American people last November...mostly because of an unpopular war in Iraq.  And because of that same unpopular war, where vast sources of oil and energy are AT STAKE in Iraq, these "reformers" are likely to be given another "vote of confidence" in 2008.  We're reminded of the old Pete Seeger folk song..."When Will They Ever Learn"....the "they" being US working....and voting....Americans, who could by the end of this summer be paying $4 a gallon for gasoline to drive back and forth to our jobs.

It's not a matter of 'Democrat versus Republican".  It IS, folks...a matter of EXTREMISM versus COMMON SENSE and REALITY. For those of us who drive to our jobs everyday, feed our families, and support this nation...OUR reality starts in our pocketbooks....and we need to REMEMBER when we vote in 2008....what those so-called "reformers"....those who got elected to "throw the bums out" last fall...are doing to us....with every expensive "ka-ching", ka-chiung" we hear at the gas pump.