Finished goal of running the distance of 2,080 miles from Lafayette, LA to Washington D.C and back!!!...plus 339.1 miles


0.0 miles run this week.
Daily running average for the week is 0.00 miles per day.
Total amount run in the past 800 days is 2,419.1 miles.
Daily running average overall is 3.02 miles per day.

Day240 Tuesday 04/26/11

ran 5.2 miles
Here’s the skinny. If these rising gas prices miraculously implode and shrink back to something acceptable within the next few months, then Barack Obama is to blame for either withholding the proper actions that led to this inflation to begin with or he is to blame for mismanaging our resources or prefabricating a crisis, in which he, at the last minute, emerges as a hero. There is a lot of chatter about who is responsible and what is going on with gas by the gallon. Our president keeps deviating from soaring gas prices by instilling hope in the future with long-term alternatives and avoiding solutions in present matters. Obama likes to take case-by-case, humble scenarios of random Americans, so allow me to do the same.

“Suzie, in Ponca City, Oklahoma, she has two young children, a girl and a boy, and she…she is worried about whether…whether she will be able to afford everything she needs to give them a bright future of…of hope…and change. Suzie wants to know why gas is so expensive. Well, I would say to Suzie…you just hold on Suzie. You tell little Jeffrey and Anna that everything…everything is going to be okay. I say to you that America, by 2021, we can have solar this and wind turbine that and electric everything. Thank you. High-speed rails. God bless. Siphon the earned rewards of others' hard work until it runs out.”

…or some such rhetoric.

John Boehner, Speaker of the House, made a reasonable prediction Monday, in an interview on ABC News, that Barack Obama would not stand a chance of reelection “If gas prices are five or six dollars”.

"I think the fact that he won't allow exploration in the Gulf, doesn't allow exploration in the inter-mountain west, won't allow us to drill in Alaska, this is not helping the situation. And then when you look at what the EPA is doing in terms of the number of rules and regulations comin' down the pike, those were his responsibility."

John Boehner

As I stated above there is not a large enough window of time for Obama to go against everything he has withheld so far, the moratorium in particular, without looking like a fool for all of a sudden issuing drilling permits left and right and relaxing the absolutely irrational regulations of the EPA.

"If someone tries to dupe you into thinking we don't have enough refining capacity, that's (insert expletive)," says Tom Kloza, the co-founder and chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service. "It's a good sound bite, but if anything, companies have probably added too much capacity, and if they add more they have to focus on managing margins."

Many will argue that domestic oil production, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with these gas prices we are currently enduring, and there are indeed other catalysts, but it is happening under Obama’s presidency, regardless of the cause. And as our president we have every right to demand some solutions from him.

Life is never what you expect it is going to be and we all have unforeseeable circumstances that block the road we may think we are supposed to follow. But presidents of the United States of America are, above everyone else, obligated by the merits which got them into the oval office to adapt and present solutions regardless of how far their initial impressions of their presidency may have deviated due to the uncontrollable nature of current events. In this climate that America is currently weathering there is little room for the ideas that Obama seems to hold highest.

I’ve used this quote before and I will use it again, from ex-president Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.” We need a leader right now, not a man obsessed with a future that current circumstances have left little feasibility for.

1,385.4 miles to go.