Gassy At Last

It's a miracle!  It's a miracle!  Who would have ever imagined that taking substantive steps to increase the domestic supply of petroleum would favorably affect the dollar and the stock market by causing the price of oil to decline?:

Overseas stock markets were higher and Wall Street index futures pointed to a solid open as the cost of oil retreated further and traders turned a bit more hopeful about the economy.

Light sweet crude oil for September delivery was down $2.17 at US$126.25 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after dropping more than $3 in the previous session as Hurricane Dolly looked likely to avoid oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Crude now is down by more than $20 a barrel from its July 11 peak above $147 - a surge that had raised worries that inflation would cripple the economy.

And all because President Bush lifted the Executive ban on off-shore drilling - the one imposed by his father, ironically enough.  He made the government slightly smaller, and the economy benefits as a direct result.  Amazin', ain't it?

Dubya's order also opened up federal "on-shore" lands for energy exploration, one of the biggest examples of which is the 800 billion barrels of crude locked within oil shale deposits in the mountain West:

In remarks last month calling on Congress to expand domestic energy production, President Bush noted the “extraordinary potential” of oil shale resources on public lands in the West. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. holds more than half of the world’s oil shale resources.

The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Shale formations in that area hold the equivalent of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Federal lands comprise 72% of the total surface of oil shale acreage in the Green River formation.

By Ensign Ed's envelope arithmetic, that's over a century's worth of oil at our present rate of domestic consumption.  Plenty of time to transition to nuclear fission, develop nuclear fusion, and work on the technology to make the collection and storage of solar power as practical and economical as fossil fuels.  And in the near-term, to enable us to stop subsidizing the war being waged against ourselves and our allies by the criminal aggressor regimes in Iran and Venezuela (and the plutocrats of Saudi Arabia, if they're a burr under your saddle).

It's such a no-brainer that Republicans are actually coming out of hiding to jump on the bandwagon before it recedes out of range:

Four-dollar-a-gallon gas has done something that few Republicans thought possible just a few months ago: given them hope.

United behind a renewed push for offshore oil drilling, Republican members of Congress and the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, think they have found their best political issue of the 2008 campaign.

McCain strategists and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill say the issue, which polls suggest Americans favor by healthy margins, lets Republicans demonstrate their plans to address the anger over high gas prices as well as the broader economic distress that many voters feel.

Because most Democrats, including Senator Barack Obama, are opposed to increased drilling, McCain and the GOP have already begun casting their rivals as unconcerned about gas prices and unwilling to wean the country from foreign oil.

This is a level of cluelessness and inflexibility (and complacency) on the majority's part that has to rival the mindset that the GOP lugged into the 2006 midterms.  Regrettably it comes too late in the '08 cycle to encourage more and better candidates to get into competitve races that might have been Republican pickups, but it could end up averting the Donk wipeout that everybody has been expecting.

The thing to look for is whether the minority will flog this issue with the ferocity and ruthlessness success will require in a media atmosphere of deafening, wall-to-wall Obamaphilia.  Especially if oil prices continue to coast downward, and/or if the Dems wise up before it's too late.

If the scared, timid, craven Pachyderms can recognize a wedge issue when they see one, the Donks will really have no excuse if they let it bludgeon them into electoral death.