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Foghorn Blaster
by Ken Mahal, NSC President
Originally published on  June 12, 2008 - reprinted with permission

 WHY CAN’T WE USE OUR OWN COAL, OIL AND NATURAL GAS?

   What is wrong with our country when we let as few as a dozen people in the Senate and House of Representatives stop us from exploring, drilling and piping oil and gas to our 300,000,000+ people of the United States of America? Did you ever think of how a handful of people in Washington don’t want us to continue to live the life style that we have created by and for this great nation of people? I got to thinking about this the other day when one of our Senators was putting the noose around our necks when it comes to having the use of our own natural resources. I say in this time of need with oil reaching for $150 per barrel it is time that we take our government back and do what we need to do. We have enough oil, gas and coal in this country to last for several hundred years and all I hear is that we need to develop renewable resource type of energy like wind, sun and geothermal. Well let them do it but at the same time stop this stupidity and get the energy flowing that is abundant in our own country and I say if the environmentalist who don’t like it here let them go to Dubai where they can spend their dollars in an oil rich island in the Arab peninsula where there is all kinds of energy. Of course it would be oil and there is a lot of sun so they could have their own little solar panels to cool their billion dollar condos. But back to some times when only 1 Senator is enough stop us from doing what we ought to do, use our own energy. Our own Senator Harry Reid is a good example of a man we sent to the Senate and reelected many years and now when he has the power to make things work he won’t even let us have a cheap clean burning coal power generating plant up North to help with our energy shortage. How can he want to hold us hostage to this crazy high oil from the Arab peninsula as well as from the nut case in South America? I am a patriot as we can safely say that 99% of our population is, so why oh why do we let these dozen members of Congress wreck our economy? It makes no sense at all to use up almost 10% of our gross domestic product (GDP) for over priced oil when all we need to do is get only a handful of people on the hill to over night call for an entirely different way of doing things. Which by the way is very simple, just announce that we are going to go gang busters all out to use the gas, oil and coal in our own country and do it now. I know that over night oil prices will drop like a rock of off the top Boulder Dam. If we do this and work around the clock overnight our entire economy would also start to purr. Just think of all of the equipment, pipe, trucks, housing and you name it that would be needed if we said we want the above done now and we want to do it 24 hours day and night to get the job done. When I think about the fact that we are letting a handful of people wreck our country it is really criminal. In some countries where the firing wall is used, well forget it. Pretty soon we retirees will spend all of our money on food, prescriptions and energy to heat and cool our homes and to drive our vehicles. Even the Casinos will see less and less of all of us if we don’t do something. We all know that our economy is built around these places and with the price of fuel how long do you think it will be before those who do come here will spend so much of their expendable cash before they get here there wont be much left to spend in the Casinos. Governor Jim and all of our State of Nevada legislators it is time that you help us stir up some action with our own members of Congress to let them know that what they are doing is killing our economy. You can help by getting out your campaign call sheets and get people to wake those people to also call our members of Congress. In fact every one who reads this article help by getting to anyone you know who can also help wake up the people in Washington who are responsible for killing our economy and by that we mean the economy of the entire United State of America not just Nevada.

This past week I went to Google and googled up oil and would you believe it right now there is a discovery of untold hundreds of millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of gas to be had in the areas of Baken field which is 200,000 square miles in North and South Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan in southern Canada. The Baken field is a three layer shale formation about 2 miles down with an estimate of some 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil plus of course all of the oil and gas in Alaska the Gulf of Mexico and most of our coastal areas all of which have been shut down by the action or lack of action by those handful or so in Congress we listened to including our honorable Senator Harry Reid. We also have enough coal for 150 years and do have the technology to clean burn it so, environmentalists; get off our back.

I remember after WWII when the Korean War came along we had a contract with the US Army to build an ammunition plant. I sat down with the Colonel and ask him a few questions and in no time at all we settled on the approximate size of the building and while we worked on the plans he worked on the internal assembly line and all I can say is that in three months we had a building in the ground and on the way with everything the Colonel needed as well. My point is that no one in the world can beat us in getting things done if we just give the OK to do it and then get out of the way and we get it done. The same goes for our energy needs, there is plenty of it in this country just let the hand full or so of Washington politicians give us the green light to do it and get out of the way and we will get it done. Now if the Harry Reid’s of our nation wont do it we have to do something about that problem and if enough people get riled up about the con job played on us in Washington I know that politicians will not take the heat, they will cave in and play it the peoples way if only the people wake up and express their anger at how we are being treated by Washington. My point in all of this that as soon as we would announce congress was behind this kind of a move and really did it we would see an over night drop in oil prices that when I was writing this oil was going up another $10 a barrel.