Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, "the worst speaker in the history of Congress," explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: "We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect."

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier ... and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by "oilmen"? Wait -- it doesn't cost pennies to them? That's weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: "President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay's oil-company interests." The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I'm not even "an oilman."

But yes -- good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven't spent their entire lives in politics! That explains everything. A government official with relevant experience or knowledge about an issue is obviously a crisis of gargantuan proportions.

This must be why the Democrats are nominating B. Hussein Obama, who finished middle school three days ago and has less experience than a person one might choose at random from the audience of "American Idol."

Announcing the Democrats' bold new "plan" on energy last week, Pelosi said breaking into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve "is one alternative." That's not an energy plan. It's using what we already have -- much like "conservation," which is also part of the Democrats' plan.

Conservation, efficiency and using oil we hold in reserve for emergencies does not get us more energy. It's as if we were running out of food and the Democrats were telling us: "Just eat a little less every day." Great! We'll die a little more slowly. That's not what we call a "plan." We need more energy, not a plan for a slower death.

But there's more! Pelosi announced that the Democrats also plan to push for "an historic investment in biofuels, efficiency, conservation and the rest." The "rest" is apparently what she called our "important and essential" investment in alternative energy.

That certainly would be historic: We would make history by throwing our money away on unproven energy boondoggles that have eaten up untold billions since the 1960s without producing a single net kilowatt of power while we all starve to death.

The proposal to use energy sources that don't yet produce any energy is like the old New Yorker cartoon with Obama in Muslim garb -- no wait, that was a different cartoon. The cartoon is: A scientist has written out his extremely complicated theory on a blackboard and is showing it to another scientist. The theory consists of numbers and characters and takes up the entire blackboard. About two-thirds of the way across, reading left to right, appear the words, "then a miracle happens," followed by more numbers and characters.

That's the Democrats' plan to run cars on biofuels, solar and wind power: Then a miracle happens. The current Democratic mantra on energy is: "We can't drill our way out of this problem." Apparently their plan is to talk our way out of this problem.

Democrats are also alleging that the oil companies are sitting on millions of acres of oil but are refusing to drill -- presumably because oil company executives hate the American people and perversely don't want to make money. Manifestly, those acres are being explored for oil or have already come up dry.

If the Democrats really wanted oil companies to find more oil, they'd allow oil companies to drill offshore and to drill in ANWR, which we happen to know is bursting with oil.

But they don't. They don't want drilling. They don't want more oil. They want humans to ride bicycles and then to die. We deserve it: We were mean to the polar bears.

It's good to know that in the middle of a crisis, the Democrats are still liars. As long as we're fantasizing about "alternative" energy sources, what we really need is a car that runs on Democrats' lies.

Let me back Mis Ann up by saying this. Conservation is not even a part of the solution. Conservation, also called economizing, is a fine thing for people wishing to save money to do, but it does not produce one drop of new oil or one watt of new electric power. Conservation does not move a truck or car one foot down the highway and it does not provide one ounce of the petrochemicals which are so important to our modern economy.

Wind power is not even a part of the solution. Yes there are some places where the wind blows hard enough with enough consistency (that is 24/7/365) to make wind turbines not completely useless, but those areas are not common enough to provide more than a trickle of power to the national grid. And even where there is enough wind and wind farms have been built they are not able to produce power at a competitive price. Wherever you see windmills you see taxpayers being robbed in order to fund a boondoggle. The business reason for erecting windmills is not to generate power. It is to gain tax breaks and government subsidies, and that is not going to change.

Solar power may one day be part of the solution, but is it cannot be today. The best photovoltaic cells we have today only convert a tiny percentage of sunlight to electricity. If a much more efficient solar cell could be developed it could literally solve all of earth's energy needs in that the energy of the sunlight which strikes the earth is 6000 time the amount of energy which all human activity now consumes.

However the development of that new photovoltaic technology is something which we cannot predict and may in fact prove to be impossible. Betting our energy future on a technology which we have no idea how to develop is like planning your retirement around buying Power Ball tickets. Yeah it might pay off, but do you really want to take the chance?

We understand petroleum and we have large supplies of it right now. And we need energy right now. The oil extraction technology we have available right now is environmentally safe. The offshore oil rigs are located so far out to sea that they cannot even be seen from shore so they pose no threat to the coastal tourist or fishing economies of any state in the Union.

The fear of what an oil spill might do to the pristine beaches of Florida or California is based on a small number of incidents the most recent of which is decades old and involved technology which has long been superseded.

The oil operations in Alaska prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are no danger to any wildlife or plant life and in fact have proven beneficial to the local caribou population.

There is no sane reason not to develop America's domestic energy reserves right now.