Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. If it’s Tuesday, then your thread is open. What’s on your mind?
Now that gas is expensive again, expect to hear the tiresome refrain of “drill, baby drill” coming from the usual suspects. CNN Money published an article explaining how more domestic drilling will do nothing for gas prices.
The problem is this: While increased oil and gas drilling in the United States may create good-paying jobs, reduce reliance on foreign oil and lower the trade deficit, it will have hardly any impact on gas and oil prices.
That’s because the amount of extra oil that could be produced from more drilling in this country is tiny compared to what the world consumes.
Plus, any extra oil the country did produce would likely be quickly offset by a cut in OPEC production.
“This drill drill drill thing is tired,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, which calculates gas prices for the motorist organization AAA. “It’s a simplistic way of looking for a solution that doesn’t exist.”
The drill drill drill thing may be tired, but don’t expect rhetoric to conform to reality. Expect Republicans to do all they can to make high gas prices Obama’s fault.
Florida Representative Allan West is one of the Tea Party freshmen. He has some *ahem* interesting ideas.
Speaking before a group of conservative women last week, Rep. Allen West (R-FL), the firebrand freshman lawmaker known mostly for his hateful (and often illogical) rhetoric, accused Planned Parenthood and other women’s groups not aligned with his brand of conservatism of making the country weaker, growing the debt, and, “neutering American men.”
WEST: The women in our campaign printed up t-shirts that said “Women for West.” That’s what we need to do — we need you to come in and lock shields to strengthen up the men that will go into the fight for you — to let these other women know, on the other side, these Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women who have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness, to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient. That’s what we need you to do. Because if we don’t, then the debt will continue to grow.
You read that right. West said that American men are getting “neutered” by Planned Parenthood and Code Pink. Go watch the video at the link – he says some crazy things about Sparta, apparently based on the movie 300.