America descends from tragedy to farce.
by John Hayward
03/19/2012
President Obama is very unhappy about his crashing poll numbers, and he wants Americans to know he’s the first president in history whose policies have absolutely nothing to do with the price of gas. Here’s a public service announcement Obama put together, explaining why high gas prices are completely disconnected from White House policies:
Click here to view.
Whoops, my mistake! That’s Barack Obama in 2008, blaming George Bush for high gas prices, which were causing unbearable suffering for working Americans. Behind him, you’ll see a sign with gas prices Obama can only dream about.
Hang on until the halfway point, and you’ll hear candidate Obama promise to reduce the price of gas once he gets into office… you know, the sort of promise he now claims is totally disingenuous and impossible, made only by ignorant Flat Earth types who keep asking impertinent questions about the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars Obama has wasted on useless “green energy” garbage.
At any rate, the President decided it would take his own special, personal political touch to sell his new message of hopeless despair to those hard-working middle-class Americans, so he decided to launch a “5,000-mile, four-state, two-day trip on Air Force One to contain the political damage caused by high gas prices,” as reported by the Daily Caller.
It’s off to Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado for our intrepid incumbent, who will “tout his administration’s efforts to reduce the nation’s use of gasoline.”
And he’ll use a gigantic amount of fuel doing it:
His 5,000-mile trip will consume roughly 25,000 gallons of jet fuel, according to Boeing.
That adds up to a fuel bill of $80,000, assuming the Air Force buys jet fuel at the cheapest cost, now estimated at $3.20 a gallon by the U.S. Energy Administration. The retail price for jet-fuel at local airports is just over $6 a gallon, including taxes.
Still, the cheapest jet-fuel costs about 43 cents less per gallon than the $3.63 cost of auto gasoline in Columbus, in swing-state Ohio, where the president will make his final speech on the trip.
The cost of gasoline is boosted by state taxes, which amount to roughly 40 cents per gallon, according to GasBuddy.com, which tracks the cost of gasoline in each state.
The president’s support aircraft, including the C-17 cargo jets that carry his armored limousines and additional vehicles to cities before his arrival, will each burn a comparable amount of additional jet-fuel during the campaign swing.
One of Obama’s blame-avoidance campaign stops will be at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 solar-panel facility, which uses a million solar panels to provide energy to 17,000 homes. Obama will doubtless promote this facility as a great example of our New Sustainable Future. The next time you hear Obama or his apologists sneer at the 20,000 jobs that would have been created by the Keystone XL pipeline, remember that the Solar 1 facility has… five permanent employees.
As Nick Sibilla at Reason noted in February, the solar plant was built by unilaterally bypassing the kind of hyper-regulation Obama favors for all other industries, combined with incentives including $12 million in sales tax abatements for equipment purchases, a 55 percent property tax reduction for 20 years, and a 30 percent federal investment tax credit. So “green energy” works great, as long as you subsidize the crap out of it, choke off all other industries with regulatory nooses, and don’t expect more than a handful of “green jobs” to materialize.
How will the public react to Obama burning zillions of gallons of jet fuel, plus gas for his immense motorcade and limousines, to give speeches where he lectures The Little Guy on the need to get by with less gasoline, until our post-industrial low-energy future can be fully implemented in a couple of decades? Much will depend on whether the Republicans have the good sense to milk some killer campaign commercials out of it. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the next round of “comedians” sighing and explaining how they just can’t find anything to mock about their dreamboat President.
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