Monday Mashup (4/11/11)

(Posting could be iffy for the whole week, by the way…just don’t know at this point.)

J.D. Mullane continued his harangue against President Obama yesterday on the pages of the Bucks County Courier Times (here, concerning Number 44’s trip to the Gamesa wind turbine plant this week)…

Gamesa employee Jerry Holt, who said he drives a large van to carry his big family, asked Obama if anything can be done to lower relentlessly rising gasoline prices. Oh, the president said, we might drill for oil a bit. But lower gas prices? In a word - nope. "(W)e can't just drill our way out of the problem," Obama said. Fuel efficient cars are the way to go, he said, which means Americans must switch to smaller cars. Some in audience applauded. "Now, I notice some folks clapped," the president said, "but I know some of these big guys, they're all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything." Speaking directly to Holt, Obama said: "Well, now here's my point. If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon, you may have a big family, but it's probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids. Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then." He continued: "None of this is going to help you this week, though. So, like I said, if you're getting eight miles a gallon, you may want to think about a trade-in." See, working stiff, if paying $4 a gallon is a hardship, that's on you because you haven't traded in for a $40,000 hybrid.

As noted here, there are 2009 Toyota Prius hybrid minivans out there priced at $22,000; granted that’s for a used vehicle and maybe with no options, but you can do the math here as well as I can compared to J.D.’s typical lunacy. And as for blaming Obama when it comes to gas prices generally, I think the following should be noted from here…

Blaming the president for rising gas prices is nothing new, and it’s a bipartisan tactic. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) blamed President George W. Bush for higher gas prices and for continuing to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as oil prices climbed. Just one problem: Even if domestic supplies were developed, American presidents couldn’t really control oil prices. The U.S. government has estimated that there are 18 billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the lower 48 states that are off limits to development. That may sound like a lot, but it is only about 21 / 2 years of supply for the United States, and it would take several years to allocate leases and drill exploratory wells. Even if the estimated 10 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were available for development, today’s policy decisions would have no impact on gasoline supplies for as much as a decade. Obama can’t dictate what you’ll pay for premium tomorrow.

Now I will grant you that if you looked through all of my 5500 or so (yikes!) prior posts at this blog, you probably could find at least one and probably more where I blamed Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History for gas prices. However, what I blamed him for primarily was the unrest he ended up causing in perhaps the most volatile region on earth, which (happily for him) is the region that also produces the most oil. And that drove up gas prices by threatening to restrict supply, though I will acknowledge that the human costs of his clueless meddling far outweighed any inconvenience we endured as a nation at the pump.

Next, I give you more Beltway conventional wisdom from The Robertses (here – more faux equivalency between those dastardly libs and those zany teabaggers)…

Some liberals want to emulate (teabagger founder) Judson Phillips and fire President Obama for failing to keep key campaign promises, such as closing the prison at Guantanamo or enacting a “public option” in his health care bill. But like Boehner, Obama could not keep some of his promises because reality prevented him from doing so. He could not close Gitmo because he had nowhere to put its inmates. He could not pass a public option because he didn’t have the votes.

Oh, there were and still are plenty of places to put the GITMO inmates. The problem is that spineless politicians of both parties would water wet themselves apparently than allow the detainees on our shores (which is particularly silly considering this). The reason I’m even bothering to say anything at all about this, though, is because of Steve and Coke Darling’s garbage about the public option. As noted here from September ’09 (while we were in the middle of watching Max Baucus let his fellow Senate Repugs take over the “sausage-making” process and very nearly kill the whole deal), Dr. Dean told us that he had 218 Dem House votes and 51 Senate Dem votes in favor of the public option, which (as noted here) enjoyed a 77 percent approval rating. The Dems had their opportunity for it, and they muffed it (and that includes Number 44). However, they did manage to pass reform of a fashion and sign it into law, which is commendable. But it could have been so much more, despite what the Robertses and their ilk would have you believe.

Finally, “The Pericles of Petticoat Junction” weighed in here on the current difficulties in the Middle East (and I wonder if Obama is going to get any credit for this positive development, by the way, forcing Gaddafi to accept the deal while working in concert with NATO – rest assured that I’m not holding my breath) – basically, V.D. Hanson is doing a country-by-country comparison to argue that Obama should have involved us in war with Iran and Syria instead…

”(Egypt) did not exercise so savage a degree of control as was the norm elsewhere in the Middle East.”

Somehow, I have a feeling that this lady would disagree, Hanson.