Just recently, the kids and I were discussing Chuck Norris. They were watching the Wii Parade to see who could identify more famous faces turned into avatars. They found a bunch, including Jesus, Elvis, and Chuck Norris. I told them that if they ever found themselves racing MarioKart against those three, they would immediately explode from the colossal awesomeness. The next day, they in fact raced against Jesus and Norris at the same time, but Elvis appeared to be on vacation.
To bolster the Chuck Norris image, I looked up his "fact" site. Some are not appropriate for kids, but they found many of them quite funny.
Now it seems that not only can Chuck Norris run around the world so fast he can punch himself in the back of the head, he can take on Congress in
a smackdown of well-written words. Granted, he is supporting the Republican agenda, but he makes a few interesting claims: We have enough oil here in the US to supply our needs, if only we would just drill. While he does mention the Alaskan Reserve, he points out the oil in the lower 48, specifically Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, as having more oil than even the nations of the Middle East, combined.
I will be fact-checking this information later, and will edit this post when finished. My initial reaction is support, because I do not feel that we should be buying something that we already have at home. My secondary reaction is a deeper outrage, because there are still so very few hybrid options (where the hell is my hybrid minivan, dammit!) and no electric options with more than two seats available.
Mr. Norris does have one thing wrong: conservation
is key. We do not have to be a nation of users and abusers, as we are now. Cutting back on electricity demands reduces the need for fossil fuels, which reduces the amount of carbon blotting out the ozone, which reduces the overall temperature of the atmosphere in the summer and raises it in winter, which reduces our need for air conditioning and heating, and therefore our need for fossil fuels. Reducing the amount of gasoline and diesel we use also reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere as well as our reliance on fossil fuels.
Automakers must be strong-armed into providing true hybrid or family-friendly electrics. Toyota and Honda both offer hybrid mini-vans in Japan, but not here in the US. SUVs that are being touted as hybrids are not as gas-economical as the label implies.
Congress needs to forget who gave them the money to run the campaigns and remember who elected them: working slobs who watch their take-home pay get eaten at the pump. The economy is in a wretched slump, and Congress is mostly to blame.
Mr. Norris is right about this: Congress--get off your butts and do some
good for a change.
