What’s the White House position on increasing the price of fuel through additional taxes – or expensive alternative fuels?
Right now, there’s no response, as White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to allow those questions to be asked at today’s daily press briefing.
Les Kinsolving, WND’s correspondent at the White House, arrived at the event today prepared to ask two questions about the key issue facing the nation. Consumers now are paying more than $4 per gallon for gasoline in a number of states.
He wanted to ask: “Does the president support his fellow Democrat, Maryland’s Gov. O’Malley, in his call for higher taxes on gasoline?” and “What is the White House reaction to columnist Krauthammer’s report of the ‘promises’ of seaweed in their gas tanks?”
Carney, however, allowed NBC to ask eight questions, AP to ask five and Fox, Reuters and CNN to ask three each. He did not allow Kinsolving and dozens of other reporters to ask any questions.
While the price of gasoline for consumers has more than doubled since Obama took office, he is taking dozens of jet trips involving tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. In fact, he’s scheduled to travel this week from Washington to New Mexico and back to highlight the increasing costs of fuel.
Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland has suggested that the state sales tax in Maryland be applied to gasoline.
He got a response that was an “earful” from state lawmakers, according to reports on the controversy.
He also failed to respond when Maryland Republican delegate Ron George of Ann Arundel County suggested that the governor “share the pain” of the higher costs facing consumers by “cutting his staff, or at least their salaries.”
The column by Charles Krauthammer noted that while it’s true presidents have no “direct control” over the price of gasoline, Obama has treated the fuel by which commuters across the nation reach their jobs “contemptuously.”
“President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, in stating that his policy is ‘all of the above.’ Except, of course, for drilling: off the Mid-Atlanta coast (as Virginia, for example, wants), off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there), in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30 percent below pre-moratorium forecasts), in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles Airport), on federal lands in the Rockies (where leases are down 70 percent since Obama took office),” he wrote.
“But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline. It gave the game away because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.”
He continued, “Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking – and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels – which we possess in staggering abundance – that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live,” he wrote.
Ask President Obama your own question.
