Speaker Pelosi states the obvious.

"The price of oil is... is attributed to two oil men in the White House and their protectors in the United States Senate," Pelosi said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Pelosi said she would continue to oppose two policy changes that President Bush and congressional Republicans have been advocating: lifting the ban on offshore drilling and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration.

Pelosi said there are plenty of opportunities that oil companies should explore before environmentally sensitive areas such as ANWR are open to drilling, pointing to the 33 million acres that have already been approved for offshore drilling and the 68 million acres of federal land in the lower 48 states that is open to exploration.

"The impression that the White House has given you is that if you could drill in these protected areas, the price of gasoline will come down," Pelosi said. "Even the president in his press conference the other day acknowledged that that was not the case."

Al Gore gave a great speech yesterday saying that he thought our country could ween itself off of fossil fuels to meet our energy needs within ten years time.

Now see that is the kind of leadership that this country is crying out for. And most of our crying is done as we fill up at the gas pump.

I applaud the efforts of Al Gore and agree completely with Nancy Pelosi that we would never have found ourselves in this untenable position if we had not elected George Bush as President (I am sorry I forgot that I am a raging liberal for a minute. I meant "if we had not allowed George Bush to steal TWO elections from the voters in this country." There that is better!)