oil drilling

WASHINGTON - California's senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, took fellow Democrats in the House to the woodshed late Tuesday after they were seen to have caved to Republican pressure to begin oil exploration immediately off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.

Freedom's Watch has begun a second round of robocalls in New Hampshire.

The calls use the same script to target both U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-Rochester) and U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes (D-Concord) for opposing efforts to expand domestic oil drilling. In June the group conducted a similar round of robocalls against Hodes and Shea-Porter.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Kensington): Getty ImagesEighth district Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Kensington) delivered the Democratic response to President George W. Bush's weekly radio address on Saturday.

Bush used his airtime to admonish Democratically controlled Congress for not doing more to bring down high gas prices by opposing more oil drilling offshore and in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska.

But Van Hollen attempted to tie rising gas prices to the earliest days of the Bush administration, citing Vice President Dick Cheney's "secret Energy Task Force," where "[t]hey invited the top oil company executives into the White House and told them to bring along their wish lists."

A representative of Congressman Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, complained Friday that a piece of campaign literature being distributed this week by GOP challenger Dean Andal deliberately lies about the freshman congressman's position on domestic oil exploration.

On a conference call with reporters U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-Rochester) said oil companies should drill on 68 million acres of land the government has already approved for drilling.

"I am calling for domestic drilling; I want to make that perfectly clear. We have short-term and long-term solutions here," Shea-Porter said. "The issue is we've got 68 million acres of land that the oil companies are holding permits on and their not drilling."

If drilling talk is read as capitulation to Republican messaging, as those in the Democratic base angry with him over FISA will undoubtedly do, it could spell more trouble for Steny Hoyer's future in party leadership.

Better late than never. Well, some folks think so anyway.

The truth is, last weekend’s program featuring talk radio host Bob Ehrlich was pretty much a yawner. There was a half hour of the latest Republican talking point: “Drill Here, Drill Now. Pay Less – Drill off the Coast of Ocean City or right smack-dab in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay – We Don’t Care” (I made that last part up. But nobody said anything against it, either. Why is it always someone else’s backyard or beach off in the distance that needs to get drilled for oil?).

As best as anyone can figure opening up all this drilling might worth a few pennies off a gallon of gas – in five years. All this time BIG OIL already owns drilling leases over about 68 million acres of American land and they aren’t touching it, for some reason.