How long can Congressional Democrats hope to continue their anti-capitalist, anti-American agenda without facing accountability from the voting public? Current indicators are that they intend to hold firm on their signature issues, believing that the public will simply not recognize the correlation between their actions of recent years, and the horrendous economic fallout that ensued as a direct result. And nowhere can this relationship be seen more clearly than in the skyrocketing energy prices currently threatening to squeeze the vitality from the American middle class.

Simple economics, the principles of which are becoming painfully apparent to every American who stops to fill up the family sedan, dictate that when disproportionate multitudes of customers have to compete for a limited supply of fossil fuels, prices will rise. Thus all of the liberal/environmentalist efforts to curtail the availability of the world’s oil, specifically by hamstringing America’s ability to exploit its own natural resources, have only succeeded in driving up the cost of those resources for all who want or need them.

Concurrently, liberals are showcasing their disingenuousness by making two distinctly disparate claims regarding the economic repercussions of their actions. On the one hand, they castigate market speculators as the ultimate culprits of the current price spike. Yet in the very next breath, they deny any possible immediate benefits from renewed exploration, drilling and production by Americans. Rather, they insist that any advantage from expanded supplies would not be realized for at least a decade, as if those evil speculators could somehow remain totally blind to consequent changes in the oil market until newly produced American gasoline is running in the streets.

Even a cursory examination of the many contributing economic factors reveals how the current prices of diesel fuel and gasoline are being artificially inflated, and who is ultimately to blame for the problem. And the picture is not pretty.

From a worldwide perspective, the “free market” would currently yield a much lower price for a barrel of oil than recent numbers which exceed one hundred forty dollars. This fact being well understood among oil producing nations, particularly in the Middle East, where major oil producers banded together to form the infamous “Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries” or OPEC.

Under its auspices, participating nations agree to non-market driven limitations in their oil production, thus ensuring that any losses in profit from volume sales would be offset by increases in profit margins. This often tenuous agreement has at times completely collapsed, specifically when a member nation determines that it can reap significantly larger profits from selling a much higher volume at a lower price. Yet with worldwide demands as high as they currently are, the accord remains stable.

In essence, an artificial “monopoly” has been created among the member nations, whereby they can unilaterally determine what the rest of the world will pay for its energy needs. But for this monopoly to survive and thrive, it requires the defacto cooperation of all other parties involved. Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of this situation is that such “cooperation” is effectively coming from the Democrat controlled Congress of the United States.

By stubbornly refusing any consideration of exploring, drilling, and thus expanding American oil production, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA) and Senate Majority Harry Reid (D.-NV) along with their Democrat political machine in Washington, are effectively forcing the entire American oil industry into the role of collaborating OPEC members. In a sinister sense, America is officially refusing to increase the world production of oil, thus strengthening the OPEC monopoly and its ability to deliberately inflate the price of crude oil.

It makes no difference when paying the bill at the gas pump that Pelosi, Reid, and their liberal political cohorts are claiming to do their deed for the sake of the planet, as opposed to the Arab nations who simply want to maximize profits. The end product is the same. Americans are senselessly forced to crunch their personal budgets in order to keep the family car rolling.

Elsewhere around the world, the predictable fallout from liberal policy making hits much harder. Food prices are soaring, both as a result of higher costs to grow and transport edible crops, along with the insane practice of sapping food supplies in order to use basic grains for the production of ethanol in a dubious scheme to supplement gas supplies.

Meanwhile, those most responsible for the current energy calamity offer only environmental sanctimony, entwined in the hoax of “global warming,” as their justification.

However, some current signs indicate that the public may have grown wise to the environmentalist charade, which could produce an enormous backlash in the coming elections, if those on the right side of the issue have the wherewithal to properly portray the situation. The latest Rasmussen poll shows that public approval of Congress has dropped to the unbelievable number of nine percent. This represents the first ever dip into single digits since such polls were taken.

In other words, the American public is no longer buying the flowery liberal rhetoric and its empty promises of environmental utopia that somehow always degenerates into higher costs, less freedom, and of course, larger tax revenues for career politicians and their bureaucratic legions. Instead, the people of the heartland see an accelerating decay of their lifestyles and diminishing prospects of a better future for their children.

Congressional Democrats are banking on their ability to deflect scrutiny on the cause and effect relationship of their political alliances and resulting policies, along with the horrendous consequences reaped by middle America, at least until after the November elections. However, the public has begun to grasp the painful realities of the Democrat ruse, and is in no mood to accept any more of it.

America’s families suffer a loss of buying power, and American workers are barred from gainful employment among the abundant natural resources that exist across this land and just off its shores. In response, Representative Maxine Waters (D.-CA) expresses her desire for the government to nationalize the oil industry, and Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama reveals his contempt for middle America, which he believes is excessively lavish in its lifestyles and use of energy resources.

Consequently, even at this late date, a bold and aggressive Republican campaign offensive can properly characterize this issue along partisan lines, and put the Democrats to flight. On the other hand, if the average voter can successfully be prevented from “connecting the dots” for the remainder of the election season, Democrat ranks in the House and Senate will swell, and their hold on power will be cemented for the foreseeable future.

There is always one guy in a bar spoiling for a fight and will take any movement or glance, any sound, any word as his excuse at bellicosity. In the race mongering biz the equivalent would be people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, both men who take immediate umbrage at the un-umbragable, just so that they can use the excuse to extort money out of businesses or get their mugs splashed across the papers and TV. In Dallas County the loudmouth looking for a fight is Commissioner John Wiley Price who foolishly decided that the scientific term “black hole” was a racial epithet and verbally attacked another commissioner for using it.

Here is the whole, stupid, story:

During a special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets the discussion turned to the central collections office that is tasked with processing ticket payments and other paperwork. This discussion prompted Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, a white man, to say that central collections had become a “black hole” of paperwork as often times paperwork simply disappears there.

And now the stupidity:

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Commissioner Price and Judge Jones seem to be very stupid men.

For his part, Mayfield told them to lump it because not only is the term “black hole” a perfectly common idiom for what he meant, it is a scientific term for a collapsed star into which all matter is sucked, unable to escape. And nowhere, anywhere has anyone ever used the term “black hole” as a racial epithet. Any fourth grader or sci fi TV fan understands what a black hole is and none of them would peg the term to race.

I’d say that if this is the sort of stupidity that comes from a race monger like Price and Judge Jones, then we have arrived at a post racial period in America. If THIS is all they have to worry about for being “racist language” then we have, indeed, effectively eliminated racism in America.

Commissioner Price and Judge Jones should be ashamed of themselves.

OK, I am wondering here if the hanging of a black Southerner by the KKK in the American south would be reported by the Chicago Tribune in the same kind of vague language of “cultural” murder as a recent Muslim murder in Georgia was treated? More likely, of course, the story would be immediately pegged to the racist, white motives that actually led to the murder. In essence that is how the Chicago Tribune mishandled their reporting of another so-called Islamic “honor killing” that occurred in Georgia this week. They wrote about the “culturally rigid Pakistani” immigrants and said that “honor killings” occur with “other South Asians” without ever once mentioning that this is more often than not a Muslin practice. Instead of pegging this murder to Muslim “culture” the Tribune makes it a vague and nondescript “culture” so that the reader is unaware of the connection with Islam.

The Tribune reports that 54-year-old Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant and pizza shop owner, strangled his 25-year-old daughter Sandeela with a bungie cord as they argued about the arranged marriage she was forced into. All the facts about the case were in the story but one: the connection to Islam.

The problem comes where the Tribune and other western news services are completely leaving out the fact that this is an Islamic custom. The Trib did its level best to avoid using the words “Islam” and Muslim” and replaced them with “cultural,” et al, throughout the story.

The problem of “honor killings” and other domestic violence after failed arranged marriages is spreading as some culturally rigid Pakistani and Indian immigrants settle in different parts of the country…

Even laughably comparing this barbaric custom to what “European royalty” had once done.

Such cultural unions serve as social contracts among South Asians and other communities, where a marriage agreement is more about families joining forces than about two people finding love—akin to the arranged marriages of European royalty…

Last I checked my history books common Europeans didn’t regularly go around killing their daughters for marrying “wrong” and neither did their ages old Monarchs. Sure there are examples of such stuff, but it was not endemic in the culture of the west as much as it is in Islam.

This sad tale is repeating itself all across the west as more and more Muslims stream into democratic countries and their girl children become acculturated to a world of freedom and modernity instead of the cultural oppression common in the Muslim world. As these kids begin to grow up acculturating themselves to our ways and as our own societies drift from our own practice of expecting immigrants to become westerners these clashes of cultures grow.

But, repeatedly, the western media is not reporting this as a Muslim centric crime and is merely treating the news as some sort of “cultural” habit. This refusal to give the whole story does a disservice to the reader and gives this murderous practice cover in the west by allowing it to hide in plain sight, invisible until the next young girl is murdered by a warped and evil family member. It keeps western citizens from understanding from where this practice comes and keeps law enforcement in the dark about the potential activity.

As the misnamed “honor killings” pile up one after another, keeping the public ignorant of why they are happening is a crime in and of itself.