The Obama administration's policies are causing Americans to pay far more for gasoline and other fuels than necessary. America is awash in fossil-fuel energy sources with almost 30 percent of the world's coal and 80 percent of the world's oil shale - which contains an estimated three times the recoverable oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Canada, with its oil sands, has the world's third-highest oil reserves, after the United States and Saudi Arabia. New technologies that enable low-cost natural gas production from shale mean that many countries, including the United States, will have gas for centuries at current production rates. Most countries try to produce oil, gas and coal and sell it on the global market as a way of increasing the real incomes of their citizens, but not the United States. The Obama administration has a hatred of fossil fuels and is determined to reduce their use despite the economic damage.   The President is deliberately making Americans poorer.

When he was a guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Feb.13, House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, wanted to talk about the federal budget deficit and creating jobs.  But host David Gregory wanted to talk about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Mr. Boehner said he thinks Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, and is a Christian.  But Mr. Gregory wanted the Speaker to denounce those who have doubts. “As the Speaker of the House, as a leader, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?” Mr. Gregory asked. It was not his job to tell Americans what to think, Mr. Boehner responded. “Why isn’t it your job to stand up and say: ‘No, the facts are these?’” Mr. Gregory persisted. You remember how Mr. Gregory urged then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Cal, to denounce the “truthers” who believed President George W. Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks? You don’t remember?  Could that be because it never happened? The resurgence of the “birther” controversy is primarily due to Hawaii’s new Democratic governor, Neil Abercrombie, who on Christmas Eve pledged to settle the controversy over Mr. Obama’s birth once and for all.

THERE’S A BAD MOON RISING. The Middle East is on fire, and the only thing the President of the United States is signaling is weakness. The bloodshed mounts in Libya, but Muammar Gadhafi is finished. Out of approximately 50,000 regular troops, only a hardcore of about 5,000 soldiers and special forces can be considered reliable, and it's simply impossible to retain dictatorial control over a population of almost 7,000,000 people with only a single brigade of soldiers. It is now out of the question as to whether the government can retake the entire country. It can only hold out for as long as possible.   In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “spiritual leader,” Yusuf al Qaradawi, an unrepentant Islamist, has returned from exile, and is drawing enormous crowds.   In Iraq, radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr has returned from exile in Iran.

The violent imagery and uncivil rhetoric journalists have searched for in vain at Tea Party rallies are in evidence in the protests in Madison, Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to trim the power of public employee unions. The New York Times likened the protests in Madison to those against Arab dictatorships. Wisconsin is a democracy, not a Middle Eastern autocracy.  Those who subvert democracy are those who would shut down the government to keep the will of the people, as expressed at the polls in November, from being enacted. The primary reason why public employee unions are a bad idea is because politicians pay them off with our money.  These unions receive billions from taxpayers, who in return contribute millions to the politicians who gave them those billions. President Barack Obama has called the Wisconsin plan "an assault on unions."  But Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have stood with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

If a person pulled a gun on you, demanded your wallet, and then said: "I am going to use 50 percent of your money for good purposes, and I am going to waste and mismanage 30 percent, and the final 20 percent I am going to use for my own pleasure and to pay off my cronies who protect me," would you think the robber should be sent to jail or praised as a public servant? Feel free to alter the percentages in the above example based on your own impressions of how well the government spends your money, remembering that much of the stimulus money went to unions and political allies of Mr. Obama. And note that Thomas Jefferson said, "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." Unless the advocates of ever-more government spending are exposed for the self dealers and/or socialists they are, the economy and our liberties are doomed.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer wondered if the much ballyhooed speech President Barack Obama gave in Cairo in June of 2009 had something to do with the massive protests that forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign. The short answer, Wolf, is no.  But you knew that. In his Cairo speech, Mr. Obama explicitly rejected President Bush’s “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. Mr. Obama reinforced that message when he gave the back of his hand to the masses of people who protested the dictatorship in Iran that summer, and when he cut in half the funds President Bush had budgeted for support of democracy movements . Mr. Obama did make a nice speech in support of democracy in Egypt...after Mr. Mubarak resigned.  He’s had less to say on behalf of those protesting dictatorial regimes in Libya, Iran and China, and who are being violently suppressed. Liberals have little interest in popular uprisings if those uprisings are against anti-American regimes.  This would be odd -- if liberals really cared much about human rights -- since anti-American dictatorships treat their people more harshly than do authoritarian regimes allied with the United States.