Oil Hypocrisy

As the White House goes to court to defend its self-imposed drilling moratorium, it floats the idea of tapping our strategic petroleum reserve to lower rising prices. How about the oil offshore and in Alaska? Listening to mainstream punditry, you'd think $4 gas is due solely to Mideast unrest and global demand. Those are factors, but so are our self-imposed restrictions on supply. The administration at least acknowledges that the law of supply and demand exists, with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley telling NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that the White House is considering tapping into the nation's strategic petroleum reserve to counteract upward price pressure caused by fear of supply disruptions from Mideast unrest. "The issue of the reserves is one (option) we are considering," Daley said. All matters have to be on the table." All options? Does that include opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, ending a de facto drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico and lifting a seven-year ban on drilling off our coasts? We think not, for as Daley was uttering those words the administration was speaking out of the other side of its mouth by going to court to appeal a judge's order to act on several Gulf of Mexico deep-water drilling permits. That appeal was made Friday, the same day the national average for a price of self-serve unleaded hit $3.51, up 32.7 cents from two weeks earlier...more