I recently read "Before the August recess some senators refused to name a price per gallon -- $5, $7, $10 -- that would induce them to lift the congressional ban on offshore drilling."

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (Texas) would have named a price. He said "the United States pays $170 million a day -- $62 billion a year -- for oil from Venezuela, whose leader, Hugo Chavez, has close ties to sponsors of terrorism. Then there's Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Kuwait, Libya.

"At these levels and these prices, we're exporting $2 billion a day -- nearly three-fourths of a trillion dollars a year -- from the American economy into these other economies. Just think if we were investing $2 billion a day in American energy resources. Just think of the jobs that would create for American families ... We can't just keep kicking this issue into the next Congress."

We need to start drilling in ANWR and offshore in the outer continental shelf now.

Rep. Roy Blunt said "the truth is we have a whole lot more fossil fuels and natural gas and oil than anybody believed we did 20 years ago. All the evidence has been building that, that oil shale in the Rockies is probably 4 or 5 times the oil that Saudi Arabia has."

June Stetson, Lampe