Summary: when McCain says that offshore drilling can lower gas prices in any major way, he's lying through his teeth. We simply don't have big enough oil reserves. And if Palin is joining him in this, she's lying too.

Nor (if we're going to talk about overconfident pronouncements) can I resist mentioning the fact that McCain yesterday confidently announced that the $13/barrel fluctuation-drop in oil prices this summer was definitely due to Bush's lifting of the ban on offshore drilling -- only to be contradicted by Dana Perino, who said that it might instead be due to "a drop in demand".

It's useful, though, to learn that you think more of the knowledge of a "hockey mom" than of "Ivy League PhDs" (including those in Bush's Energy Department, not noted for its sympathy toward socialism). It tells us a lot more about you.

Americans collectively are smart enough to know that the current high energy prices can only be addressed effectively through a combination of solutions. You write, Bruce, as though McCain or the GOP opposes conservation. We don't. We oppose government-mandated, government-specified conservation because government management of the economy distorts the markets and ends up making things worse. (See, e.g., Soviet Union and everything, 1918-1991; U.S. Congress and ethanol, mid-1990s-present.)

Strip government restrictions out of the way and let the markets work, both on the supply side and the demand side.

This is a classic conservative theme that dovetails with classic economics. You, Bruce, and your party are peddling a culture of victimization in which Americans can't manage to figure out whether it makes sense to switch to better lightbulbs or support alternative energy sources that make economic sense. Indeed they can. And they likewise understand that someone like you who pooh-poohs drilling, always with some statistical "proof" to back you up, are peddling patent nonsense. Current market prices respond to changes in current expectations regarding both supply and demand. Right now the price of oil worldwide is heavily invested in the notion that the do-nothing, drill-nowhere, poor us American Congress will continue government interference to block supply increases, and cram purported demand fixes down consumers' throats whether they make economic sense or not.

I'll put my hockey mom from Alaska up against your Ivy League PhDs any day.

Now, regarding Beldar's continuing rhapsodies about Gov. Palin, whose "transformative" energy policies consist of urging us to "drill, drill, drill" (hardly surprising -- after all, she's an Alaskan). First, let's quote the San Francisco Chronicle two days ago on just how effective this would be in reality:

"...[O]ffshore oil exploration is slow and costly.

"If the federal government opened California's coast to drilling tomorrow, the first exploratory wells probably wouldn't be drilled for at least six years, [Ken] Medlock ['an energy research fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy'] said. Bringing newly discovered oil fields into full production would take longer.

"That means any new oil wouldn't arrive on the market until midway through the next decade, at the earliest. The process is slow enough that the Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, estimated last year that opening the coasts to offshore drilling would have no significant impact on oil prices before 2030."

See Kevin Drum for more details on that study:

"A recent EIA study [he provides the link] took a look at the impact that drilling in ANWR would have, and they concluded that it would probably reduce oil prices by 75 cents a barrel in 2025. A change that small two decades in the future almost certainly wouldn't have any effect on commodity traders today...

"...[O]pening up new drilling both offshore and in ANWR would produce more oil and result in modestly lower oil prices once production ramped up a decade from now. You can decide for yourself whether you think the environmental costs are worth it, but the likelihood of this having any impact on oil prices today is tiny.

"CORRECTION: Offshore oil reserves affected by the federal ban are estimated at 18 billion barrels, which is indeed larger than ANWR. However, EIA projects that offshore production rates would be about half of ANWR production rates, which means that lifting the ban on offshore drilling would probably have an even smaller effect on future oil prices than ANWR's 75 cents a barrel in 2025. In other words, 'tiny' was probably the wrong word in my concluding sentence above. 'Minuscule' is more like it."

Might one suggest that a faster way of lowering energy (and particularly gasoline) costs to most Americans is to increase the efficiency with which we use it -- including buying smaller cars, building more rail transit, and maybe even renting out big trucks and SUVs as multiple-passenger and cargo vehicles?

Now, as to the POLITICAL effectiveness of the Beldar/Palin line, let's look at today's Quinnipiac poll of four swing states (which actually shows McCain making mild but significant gains in three of them) -- specifically, Questions #16 through 25, on the public's own energy-policy beliefs. They do indeed favor, by landslide margins, offshore and ANWR drilling -- but this doesn't help McCain a lick, because they favor developing renewable energy sources MUCH more (by margins about 50 points larger!), and therefore tend to regard Obama as being better on energy policy. (They also seriously underestimate the gains that could be made by energy conservation measures, high-mileage cars, and maybe nuclear power -- but this current error of theirs doesn't play to McCain's political advantage.)

I believe in public education. I'm proud of my family's many, many years working in our schools. I hope my claim to fame, believe it or not, is never that I'm Alaska's first female governor. I hope it continues to be, "You're Mr. Heath's daughter." My dad for years has been teaching in the schools and even today he's inspiring students across the state. So many students around this land came up to me not saying, "Oh, you're Sarah Palin ... you're running for office ... you're the governor." No, it's been, "Sarah Palin, wow! Mr. Heath's been my favorite teacher of all time."

My apologies to Mr. Heath! I ought to have said, "without being the wife or daughter of anyone who's politically powerful."

In a 2005 internal investigation done by the Alaska state troopers, the trooper in question was confirmed to have used his Taser on his own 10-year-old stepson and to have illegally killed a moose. He got a ten-day suspension without pay, which was cut in half by the supervisor who Palin later fired. Palin makes no bones about her and her family's dislike of the trooper, who she says has also made death threats against her and her father, driven drunk, and scammed the state with a phony worker's comp claim. If ever there's a state trooper who deserves to be fired, it's surely this guy.

But Palin denies that his non-firing was the reason behind her replacement of his boss, who's a political appointee that serves at the pleasure of the governor. The fired guy says he felt pressured in some unspecified way, but can't identify any specific threats or demands from Palin or anyone connected with her, and he's given conflicting statements even about having felt pressured. Given that Palin swept into office on an anti-corruption platform that caught up several high GOP officials -- including, at its margins, the incumbent governor she defeated -- it's awfully hard to fault her for wanting a new head of that state agency.

This whole hoo-hah was ginned up by Andrew Halcro, the distant third-place independent candidate in the 2006 gubernatorial race that Palin won, who runs a rental car agency by day and uses his blog by night to try to get back at Palin. He's cast his lot with a proven child abuser and misuser of deadly weapons, which frankly tells me all I need to know about him.

The fact that she lacks a Y-chromosome isn't one of my reasons for supporting Gov. Palin. Rather, she's made it to the top of her state's political heap on her own merits, without being anyone important's wife or daughter. In a political career roughly as long as Obama's, she's actually accomplished things in office. And in particular on energy policy -- which ought to be McCain's signature domestic issue this fall, and which merges with the national security issues on which Obama is naturally weak -- she would be a transformative candidate, the new face of the GOP for the 21st Century, and quite possibly the most effective vice presidential candidate in American history.

I readily grant that she's nowhere near as old and experienced as McCain, and that (like virtually all governors) she lacks any substantial foreign policy experience. But McCain has those bases already covered.

McCain/Palin 2008: New Energy for America.

So, after all the chatter and heat that McCain gets for being a "me too" kind of guy who's trying to out-Obama The Obama, Newt Gingrich advises the GOP to play the game according to Obama's rules. Young, inexperienced, and non-white?

Hmmm, sounds like McCain should pick Obama as his running mate. Now there's a winning ticket!

I have yet to clearly hear from McCain what he stands FOR. Speaking your mind and expecting the voters to come has worked before. I don't see why it won't work now.