Nancy Pelosi, whose name makes me cringe, pleaded last Friday for citizens to call President Bush and ask him to release the nations oil reserves to relieve some of the demand. She posted the White House number for all to see, hoping that harrassing phone calls might get some results.

The only thing that this proves, Nancy girl, is that you agree that the gas quandary we find ourselves in could be relieved by increasing the supply. Which could very well be done by drilling. Yes, it will take a few years for this oil to meet us at the pump. However “speculators,” who you’ve been pointing your blame finger at, will have every reason to now speculate a drop in gas prices. Speculation works both ways!

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member came on Your World with Cavuto last Friday and blasted Pelosi calling on all Americans to call her and, “tell her to knock off the diversions, do what has to be done, say “no” to the environmental wackos, and start to drill. We need energy independence. We have 86 billion barrels of oil offshore. We should start drilling right away. There’s over 400 trillion feet of — cubic feet of natural gas.

This is absolute madness that we are not drilling, not using our own reserves, that we’re just getting more and more in hock to Arab nations, sending money overseas, and having gas prices approaching $5, because Nancy Pelosi won’t even allow us to vote on the House floor to have drilling. And she knows, if it came to a vote, many Democrats would vote with us.”

“Call me…we’ll talk! 202-225-0100″

David Asman, filling in for Neil Cavuto asked King, “Congressman, she has the authority and the power to say whether or not we should have a vote, and she’s purposely avoiding doing that because she knows she would lose?”

“Right,” says King, “The Democratic leadership, led by Nancy Pelosi, is refusing to allow us to vote. In fact, they have pretty much suspended all meaningful business on the House floor because they know the Republicans want to use every opportunity we can to get a vote on drilling. So, they won’t bring up any bill even remotely approaching energy, because they know that they could be forced to face a vote. And they won’t do it. She won’t allow it to come to a vote. And there’s at least 20, 30, 40 Democrats who want to vote with us.”

Senate Majority Leader/Dictator Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

said Monday that he would not allow a vote on an amendment giving states new authority to seek oil off their coasts when he brings a Democratic energy bill to the floor later this month.

In a sign of escalating tensions, one senior GOP senator called Reid a “chicken” for deciding not to allow amendments on energy production, declaring him to be acting like a real dictator.

Reid criticized President Bush’s announcement earlier in the day to rescind a longstanding executive order banning offshore oil drilling, saying it was a gift to the oil companies that are not exploring for oil in 68 millions of acres available to them.

Harry, don’t be a knucklehead. They paid good money for those leases. If those areas were profitable they would be drilling overtime. You have to go where the oil is. And they know that. And don’t blame the speculators, give them a reason to speculate lower costs.

We need to bombard Pelosi with phone calls to just stop the insanity. All these Dem.’s are worried about is who’s stuffing their campaign accounts. She’s considering the impeachment of Bush? She needs to be taken to lunch at a quiet restaurant, given some FDA approved salsa and prompted to resign or be dragged down from her high horse.

Start the drilling already.

Once the drilling is commenced we can release the national oil reserves bringing with it immediate relief while we wait for the new “homegrown” to be refined. Speculators would then anticipate lower costs. And while all this is going on T. Boone Picken’s plan will have wind turbine generated electricity replacing natural gas and oil in our homes and natural gas vehicles replacing gasoline powered vehicles. And we’ll be well on our way to energy independence.

So, start the drilling already. Wait a minute…Simon says, “Start the drilling.”

Let your voices be heard by calling your Congressman or Senator at 202-224-3121 and urging them to lift the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Mike DeVine, aka Gamecock, wrote this great tribute to Mr Tony Snow. Please take the time to read it

Tony Snow was a Christian

It’s an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people.

The addiction has worsened for decades and now it’s reached a point of crisis.

Can’t we just produce more oil?

World oil production peaked in 2005. Despite growing demand and an unprecedented increase in prices, oil production has fallen over the last three years. Oil is getting more expensive to produce, harder to find and there just isn’t enough of it to keep up with demand.

The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone.

So what’s the good news? Check out T. Boone Pickens plan.

By now you’ve heard about oil man T. Boone Pickens. He’s the man with the plan that’s going to get us on track for energy independence. I urge you, therefore brethren…to just take five minutes and watch the video linked here and pass it on.

I hope my associate authors at F3Coalition will refrain from posting to give this story a chance to lead the blog page for perhaps a day; take a Monday off. Please, be a Patriot; let this one “ride” for a bit, ’til the word gets out.

Check out phase one of the plan…

Our deepest condolences to the Tony Snow family.

There are few speeches in American history that are more tragically beautiful than Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural. In the speech, he acknowledged what was at the source of the devastation of the great Civil War: national sin. And it wasn’t the Sin of the South, but the Sin of the North, too. He concluded this way:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln’s call for reconciliation with malice towards none and charity for all may have been a bit much and in some ways quite radical. It said to bind up the wounds and comfort the widows and orphans with no preference as to what side they were on. Confederate widows and union widows alike should be comforted. After all, we were one nation. Could Lincoln have lived out his great words of reconciliation? The world will never know. A little more than a month later, an assassin’s bullet not only ended the life of Lincoln, but our best chance for national reconciliation after the war.

After that, a radical Congress decided that rather than “malice towards none,” humiliating the South would be more in order, and so they kept much of the South under occupation up to a decade and disenfranchised Southern Whites. In 1876, this period ended and Southern Whites returned to power and blocked Black suffrage and Civil Rights. Again, the words of Lincoln were ignored.

To the great thankfulness of Americans anywhere, that period of government-sanctioned discrimination came to an end. From Jackie Robinson playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers to Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights March and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a great deal of success have been achieved towards ending discrimination in our land.

Yet, today we still see ideas of imposing racial quotas and making race a factor in areas such as college admissions. We see power players like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton continuing to have a voice in our national process through infamous “shakedown tactics” and their efforts to divide Americans against each other on the basis of race.

Stirring up racial passions is a key strategy for many. We’ve seen this in the recent death of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) who was portrayed as little more than a racial bigot who opposed integration. The entirety of his life was dismissed by many including his tireless fight for freedom overseas during the cold war, his efforts on behalf of the unborn, and that in his later days he hired African Americans to many positions on his staff including James Meredith, a Civil Rights activist the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. At the time, Meredith was criticized for working for Jesse Helms. Meredith said he offered his services to every member of Congress, only Senator Helms replied.

The reasons that people opposed Civil Rights legislation varied from those who were truly virulent racists like Bull Connor to those who opposed it out of a sense of constitutional interpretation, and those who opposed it out of a desire to preserve the old order with little malice.

The same can be said of the Civil War. The vast majority of Confederate Soldiers didn’t own slaves. Most believed they were fighting for their state, which to them was their country. Yes, there were racists who fought in the Civil War (on both sides). But, there were other figures as well. Stonewall Jackson broke the law and taught slaves to read. Want to really add a whole new level of gray to our understanding of the confederacy? Then ponder that there were Black Soldiers who chose to fight in the Confederate Army.

These facts were little comfort to African Americans suffering under the degradation of segregation and “Separate but Equal.” However, it does matter today. Because the big difference between us and President Lincoln is that he realized his vanquished enemies were men and not monsters. Not only were they men, they were fellow Americans who needed to be brought back into this great country.

The second inaugural’s humility was noteworthy. It was a call for reconciliation, a confession that the sin of slavery was not the property of the South alone but that the North shared in the guilt. It was a call to become one nation. We honor these words at the Lincoln Memorial, but as song writer Randy Stonehill wrote, “We take our loftiest intentions, and engrave them all neatly in stone, and once they’re safely up there we’d prefer that they just leave us alone.”

What are the results of 140 years of racial politics? A crisis of fatherlessness and failing educations systems that while harming people of all races, are particularly prevalent in the African American Community. We will either come together to address these common problems or we will perish