In the general election contest many think that the Iraq War will trump all other issues. In the past week or so, I believe that has changed. No doubt about it, the price of oil, the falling dollar, and inflation are going to be the main topics. My guess is if McCain comes out strongly for exploiting the resources available in the US, he’ll win. Yet, he has not shown a desire to do so.

While McCain has been saying, “We can’t drill our way out of this problem…,” the fact is we can drill ourselves from reliance upon other countries, especially regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, while developing alternative sources for quite some time. As recapped here:

…Recent polling data from Gallup show the percentage of voters blaming oil companies for skyrocketing gasoline prices has dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent over the past year. At the same time, support for more drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas has increased to 57 percent from 41 percent.

And the candidates remain blind to these shifts.

Obama continues to lambaste oil companies while congressional Democrats push for cap-and-trade. They’re missing the point, big time. The public wants more energy and more fuel to cut high prices and spur economic growth. But the costly cap-and-trade plan would produce less fuel and less growth. It would only raise gas pump prices while mounting a Gosplan-type taxing, spending, and regulating program that would be the moral equivalent of Hillarycare on nationalized medicine.

Sen. McCain has an opening here. Yet he, like Obama, would have voted for cap-and-trade, which went down to defeat in last week’s Senate vote. And while Mr. McCain favors some off-shore production and has been strong on nuclear development, he is against drilling in ANWR Alaska.

Then there’s the oil nobody is talking about. The Bakken fields beneath North Dakota, Montana, and Canada hold an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil. In comparison, Saudi Arabia’s biggest field, Gahawar, has an estimated 55 billion barrels, while ANWR has an estimated 10.4 billion barrels.

Hat tip to Mark Perry at the Carpe Diem blog site for these figures. Perry also is reporting a Bureau of Land Management study showing 279 million acres under federal management where oil and gas could potentially be extracted. But more than half of this is totally off limits. Off-shore, where another 86 billion barrels lie in wait, is also restricted. Then there’s liquefied natural gas, oil shale, and the various coal-to-liquid carbon-capture and sequestration technologies that would be priced out of the market by cap-and-trade.

The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, but we can’t produce. We’re still the world’s third-largest oil producer, but we could be the Saudi Arabia of oil if our companies were free to drill. Oil CEOs like Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil and David O’Reilly of Chevron keep saying this. But politicians aren’t heeding their message…

Obviously with the price of a barrel of gas closing on $138 today, the increase price of shipping costs, production costs, are being added to everything we buy. In Europe the lorry drivers are striking, no longer able to make a profit with the costs there, for their taxes on petrol are significantly higher than in the United States. To think that type of response in the US will take $8 a gallon prices, well our patience isn’t that long. Now Senator McCain hints that he may back a windfall profits tax on the oil company, following the same plan to increase the costs to the consumer, as Senator Obama.

Truth of the matter is if there is punishment to be meted out it should be where the fault lies, which is with Congress which for the past 20 or more years has made it impossible for the oil companies to explore, much less develop our own natural resources.

The inflationary effects of the increased cost of oil has not gone unnoticed by any of us. There isn’t a product that we buy that doesn’t consume energy during production and shipping. The cost of imports will be even higher in the future, considering the cost of maritime fuel added to the cost of diesel to bring the goods from ports to stores. With the falling dollar and no action by Washington to stop it, history says we should be concerned about hyperinflation.

My hope, as pointed out by Kudlow is that the public is becoming concerned as the Gallup poll attests to. Hopefully they will make their feelings clear to their representatives and certainly in November.

Naturally, I’ve always enjoyed reading The Huffington Post because it’s a liberal-oriented website that also updates me on a lot of popular news stories. But I have to say that after this primary season, I no longer have respect for Arianna Huffington and her website.  

What should be a website catering to liberal opinion in general soon turned into a propaganda machine for—and yes I can call them this—pigs to write pro-Obama blogs (vomit) all over her website. I can honestly say that having read her website pretty much every single day of this primary, I can think of no more then 4 or 5 headlines that were “pro-Hillary”. And the few that were “pro-Hillary” were just AP reports saying that she won a particular primary.

Even when Hillary emerged victorious in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, The Huffington Post refused to have anything to do with it. They simply turned up the crank on their propaganda machine and treated Hillary, IMO, as bad as they treat John McCain.

The sinper-fire story was re-iterated over and over and over, yet anything to do with Rev. Wright was pure taboo. Despite the fact that Hillary has gained the popular vote and attracted tons of new people to the polls, The Huffington Post has acted as if she’s done nothing besides promote racism against Obama and hurt the party.

I can say that for the first time ever, I experienced that weird conservative “hatred” all of you seem to have towards the type of people that I agree with on the issues. It’s as if the people promoting Hillary have become the conservatives of the Democratic party (keeping tradition with a second Clinton).

I’m only looking in on one specific example. The entire media in general, minus CNN and FOX, were out to make him the next president since 2004. I’m not sure what drove most of the media outlets to promote him and rally against her, but it’s really pissed me off. I would have much rather seen the media stand back and report the facts as they are instead of giving us their opinion on who they feel should be the Democratic nominee.