If Lies Were Fuel, Our Vehicles Would Run Forever

(It gets a little tiresome trying to come up with plays on words having to do with the number one topic on everyone’s minds, so I just came out and said it – oh, and by the way, while we’re all bitching about the price of gas, myself included, anybody remember the war?).

So President George W. Milhous Bush thus spoke the following here…

"If congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act."

I’ll bet that’s sure to get all of the congressional “Bush Dogs” to howling; I mean, gee, they just handed FISA to him on a silver platter – why not just let him gut the Rocky Mountain West while they’re at it to mine for oil in shale so that 35 percent approval rating can shoot all the way up to 36 (as noted here)?

And how sad is it that Little Tommy (“Suck. On. This.”) Friedman is actually the voice of reason here (re: his New York Times column yesterday)…

This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program. I bet there aren’t 12 readers of this newspaper who could tell you his name or identify him in a police lineup.

Just to let you know, he is Stephen L. Johnson, though I'm sure Friedman is right (and the Wikipedia article states that Johnson is currently "attempting to block the efforts of 17 states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel economy").

But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

That bill is H.R. 6049 — “The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008,” which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables.

These critical tax credits for renewables are set to expire at the end of this fiscal year and, if they do, it will mean thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars of investments not made. “Already clean energy projects in the U.S. are being put on hold,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

And by the way, Down With Tyranny! brings us some important information here as to why the price of gas is so high (love the pic, by the way)…

Unregulated speculation in oil futures is driving up gas prices and keeping them high.

The Gramm-Enron legislation of 2000 exempted electronic trading of energy commodities from regulation. "The Enron loophole," as it is called, was the product of former Texas senator Phil Gramm. It exempted energy futures trading from the Commodities Futures Modernization Act just in time for his wife Wendy, who was on the Enron board of directors, to benefit from the artificially created energy shortages in California that brought Enron down.

These "dark markets" traders, exempt from Commodity Futures Trading Commission rules, make huge amounts of money at the expense of the nation's economy and our family budgets. President Bush knows this. Sen. John McCain knows it, too. He opposed the recent $307 billion farm bill because it contained legislation that would end deregulated speculation. Gramm is his economic adviser.

And Obama is trying to close the “Enron loophole” as noted here (and to learn more about the campaign, click here – he’d better not cave on FISA also, though…waay too funny to hear McBush complain, by the way).

And by the way, I meant to link to this earlier (sounds like the war was a bit of payback for these people who were given the boot by Saddam Hussein, but we knew that all along of course).