The Pelosi Premium

William Katz at Urgent Agenda reports on this:

Investor's Business Daily gets to the heart of the gasoline-price issue in exposing the "Pelosi premium." We can solve this problem, but we're being stopped by environmentalism's fundamentalist fanatics:
The price of gasoline when the Democrats took control of Congress was around $2.25 per gallon.

The average price of regular gas crept over the $4-per-gallon barrier over the weekend, as measured by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

That represents a more than 75% increase in the retail price of a gallon of gasoline on Pelosi's watch. Call it the "Pelosi premium" we're all now paying.

It's a problem driven by domestic supply restrictions imposed by the Democratic Congress in the face of growing worldwide demand. The Democrats preach energy independence while they do everything in their power to prevent it. If the American people truly want change, this would be it.

And...

The U.S. Congress has voted consistently to keep 85% of America's offshore oil and gas off-limits, while China and Cuba drill 60 miles from Key West, Fla. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that the restricted areas contain 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

There are 3,200 oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana. During Katrina, not a single drop was spilled. More than 7 billion barrels have been pumped from these wells over the past quarter-century, yet only one thousandth of one percent has been spilled.


Katz: What is sickening here is that the very people who scream of their love for the poor are themselves gouging the poor, making them pay absurd prices for fuel in order to live their pure, aren't-I-wonderful, environmentally pure lives. Ask the independent cabbie in Harlem what he thinks of five-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. But, of course, these superior creatures in the environmental movement would never talk to a cabbie in Harlem unless he was hauling them to a fundraiser at the Waldorf-Astoria.