At least McCain gets it on oil drilling

On a day when oil hit a record price of $140 a barrel, Sen. John McCain is calling for an end to a federal ban on offshore drilling.

Finally, one of the presidential candidates gets it!

Forget about OPEC. Forget about the Iraq War. Forget about Big Oil. Forget about growth in China and India sucking up the world's oil supply.

The main reason gasoline costs $4 a gallon in the United States is the 27-year-old moratorium imposed by Congress on offshore drilling by U.S. oil companies (and the failure of Congress to enact a cohesive energy policy).

Congress has been controlled by Democrats for most of the past 27 years and even when the GOP had the majority, Republicans never had enough votes to remove the ban on offshore drilling because the Democrats are being led around on a leash by environmental lobbyists.

McCain is calling for lifting of the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling and allowing individual states to pursue energy exploration in waters near their own coasts, according to The Associated Press.

"We've seen the impact of it in the form of food prices, in the form of gasoline, in the form of threats of inflation and indeed indications of inflation, and we must we must embark on a national mission to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil," McCain said.

The Democratic Party's ban on offshore drilling covers an estimated 80 percent of U.S. coastal waters, according to the wire service. While American oil companies are prohibited from drilling, other nations, including China, Cuba and Venezuela, are drilling for oil off U.S. shores.

That's our oil that Democrats are allowing our enemies to drill for so we can buy it back at inflated prices.

Senate Democrats last week rejected a GOP-sponsored plan that would have opened drilling off U.S. shores. Republican senators argued there are some 14 billion barrels of recoverable oil available in waters now off limits, according to the AP.

Democrats have also blocked drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

No reaction from the Obama camp on McCain's call to allow for more oil drilling, but I suspect Obama will "hope" that gas prices drop when U.S. drivers "change" their dependence on gasoline and start using magic pixie dust that Obama will promise all Americans if he's elected president. That pretty much sums up the Obama energy plan.

For more on efforts to force Congress to allow U.S. to drill for domestic oil, check out the American Solutions Web site.

And for more perspective, read the editorial, "Culpable Congress," in Investor's Business Daily.