It must be the water

[irishbobcat]

Bush has catered to the oil companies for the last 8 years and have gas prices gone down or up?

Don't try to blame catering to environmentalists for high oil prices. How much solar power could have been stored today in batteries for you to use to offset some of your electrical needs?  If we had feed-in tariffs like they do in Europe you could have sold back the power you stored today in solar energy back to the electric comapny and received either money or credit.

Other than gas prices, Germany, Spain and the rest of Europe who began investing in renewable energy years ago are finding their only high bills are just gasoline.

We here in America are not only seeing gas go up. but electricity and natural gas to boot. I own a 1954 2 story GI built Cape Cod home....my new natural gas budget for the next 12 months is $250 per month......

You don't see those prices in Europe because the environmentalists got their governments started on renewable energies years ago.
They saw the future. All we saw was Dick Cheney shooting his hunting buddy........

Dennis Spisak

[Towntalk]

That was before gas prices went through the roof like an ICBM.

There comes a time when all of us must wake up and smell the coffee, and I guess I'm staring to smell the Maxwell French Blend.

On my web site as I document the recession and the price of oil coupled with our own government's unwillingness to take it seriously, I see no other real choice. It comes down to one fundamental question ... eat and pay the mortgage, or throw all our cash into the gas tank and start living in our gas guzzlers.

We're being told that gas will reach the $4.00 a gallon mark by years end.

Let me ask all of you seriously ... which is more important to you ... keep driving your car everywhere you go, or keep your families out of the poor house?

Congress is finally yapping like a hungry Pekingese puppy over the sorry state of affairs, but will they solve our economic woes? The House and Senate can't even agree on the time of day, so why should we believe that they will turn our country around any time soon?

And what of the candidates running for the White House? Ditto!

The bottom line is that this country has plenty of oil, yet even if Congress and the White House did agree to restart drilling with the proviso that all the oil had to stay right here for domestic consumption, it would take years before we could see the prices go down, but unfortunately there is not the will to do it.

All this green talk sounds good on the surface, but any right minded person with even the least degree of God given common sense knows that it would be years before we could end our dependence on oil ... no decades, and we simply do not have that much time, or money.

Just think of the costs both at the public and private level.

Every business using a truck would have to buy a whole new fleet. Our Farmers would have to convert to planting corn to the exclusion of all other crops just to keep up with the demand, forcing the creation of a dependence on imported food stuffs. The utility companies would have to shut down all their coal and natural gas power plants and build new environmentally friendly plants sending the costs of electricity and natural gas through the roof. The family car that runs on gas would have to be traded in to get them off the road. Trains and buses would have to stop running until they can find a way of running on bio fuels. Airlines would have to scrap their present fleets and start finding ways to use bio-jet fuels. Families would be forced to make major investments on new heating plants, air conditioning plants on top of new bio-friendly cars.

True, new jobs would be created, but before they can be put to work, engineers and scientists would have to come up with the technology that would make all these new things possible, and that could take decades, and we simply don't have the time.

Talk is cheap, and if we could find a way of harnessing all the hot air going around by the environmentalists we could use it to generate the fuel to power our power plants, but none of the schemes answers the question of where the trillions of dollars needed will come from.

[northside lurker]

Towntalk, weren't you against the WRTA sales tax?

[irishbobcat]

Towntalk:

you are correct when you say we are 50 years behing the rest of the country and state because we continue to re-elect the same old tired politicians to Columbus. Term-limits were to bring new blood into government....instead all we did what allow our old blood to play musicial chairs with legistlative jobs.

Mr. Gerberry got term-limited out....Mr. Carano took a government position, Mr. Gerberry went back to Columbus as state rep to replace Mr. Carano.
Now that Mr. Boccheri looks like he will be the next congressman of Stark County, Mr. Gerberry has already been mentioned as to appointed back to the Ohio Senate. As so it goes.

We don't want to support WRTA because people believe they don't use the bus and don't want the poor or possible gang members to use the system to get to our retail centers on 224 or Mahoning Ave.

Now as we see the city of Youngstown shrink and gas prices rise, this communtiy will return to what this area looked like during the great depression. Being 49 years old, my parents told me stories of how they couldn't afford cars because of low wages, and had to use mass trnsportation to get to retail centers in downtown Youngstown. History is beginning  to repeat itself in the valley.

We will need mass transit to get to retail centers on 224....we need living wage jobs in the valley. We need new renewable energy companies and manufacturing jobs brought back to this valley that will require blue collar skills to build the mechanical components for renewable energy equipment.

As far as our fear of gangs and increased violence, when we had manufacturing jobs people could go to work, make a living wage, and did not have to commit crime.

Let's bring back that concept to the valley. Let us have renewable manufacturing jobs available so we can tell our youth,
"put down the handgun, pick up a chaulk gun, earn a living wage, and help your family incoprporate renewable energy sources to's  your family and neighbor 's homes to help them save money on soaring energy costs."

That's what my Independent Green Party run for State Representative for the 60th district is all about. You can tell a lot about a country, a city, and a valley on how they help their poor,working, and middle class.

In Friday's Vindicator Editorial Cartoon we see the Myanmar Junta holding up his hand and in the other hand holding a sign reading " No Foreign Aid." That is actually what our current old-time politicians are saying to the rest of the federal, state, and business world.
We don't need or want your help or aid beacuse we fear will lose control of our power base.

The Local Democratic Party that supported the poor, working, and middle class and in return my father grew up and supported this party in the 1930's and 1940's is not that same party that we have today. Today's local Democrats like Bob Hagan support the over 100 lobbyists and Corportate PACS that place money in Hagan's political war chest each year. Since the local Democrats no longer support the poor working, and middle class of the valley, it is time we elect independents and show the local Democratic machine the door.

We wonder why less and less people become active and engaged in the civic duty of voting. It's because the local party bosses decide for us who to support.

Some people have asked if I were elected to the state house what my one vote could do to change things for the better. Well, my one vote in the house may not be able to change things, but my one voice would be outside the state house each week with a microphone or mega phone leading a march around the state house with the poor, working, and middle class demanding living wages jobs, better health care, better school funding, and making Ohio a better place to live and raise our families.

Dennis Spisak-Independent Green Party Candidate for State Representative-60th District
http://votespisak.tripod.com

[Towntalk]

What's in the water we're drinking that we in the Mahoning Valley are constantly some fifty steps behind the rest of the country and totally unwilling to come up to speed?

Should we rename Youngstown "Dogpatch" and just accept the fact that we'll always be the same and never change?

Just finished reading a New York Times article about how mass transit authorities around the country are experiencing a large upturn in ridership due to the costs of gas:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/business/10transit.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1210415871-xcRQM2oheKBCyRmxpQMvMA&pagewanted=print

yet here we are in "Dogpatch", Ohio still resisting the obvious.

Obviously none of us have large bankrolls to burn, yet here we are throwing what little we have into the bondfire of rising gas prices.

Experts are warning us to look for gas prices to reach $4.00 a gallon by years end, yet we blithely hop into our gas guzzlers and go our merry way.