Jack Kingston

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What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

Former Majority Leader Dick Armey was the featured guest at this morning’s Theme Team breakfast.

UPDATE (12:10 PM, 4/27/06): We’ve activated our anti-spam plug-in. Comments are back up and running. Have at it.

Unfortunately we’ve been getting hammered by spam bots. I’m guessing this is standard.
Until we figure out the whole “plug-in spam zapper” situation, we’re kicking it over to “Commenters Must Have One Approved Comment Before Being Able To Comment.”

We’ll do our best to be quick with our approval and will work to open it back up to the world.

Thanks for your patience.

P.S. I imagine y’all have some good ideas on what we need to do. Leave your advice or ideas on the comments. (We use WordPress.)

Click on the image below to watch Congressman Kingston’s speech on the House floor this morning on the high price of gas.

Over this past district work period, there�s no doubt that Republicans and Democrats heard more than an earful from their constituents about the surging price of gas. In fact, at my town hall meetings I heard about 10 questions, four of which were on immigration, three were on gas prices, and the other were on district-specific issues.

Clearly I wasn�t alone. Evidence of the pain folks throughout America are feeling at the pump is the fact that when we all came back to Washington, both sides engaged in the �blame game� and started pointing fingers at each other.

Though both sides found some wiggle room for the week, the problem which has boiled to the surface is our over-reliance on oil in our transportation sector. Oil is a finite resource that we don�t have enough of, and the countries that do have oil are not always America�s best friend. (I wrote an op-ed today on this issue which you can read.)

However, though Washington is known for its partisanship, and I�m certainly no stranger to the game, today something very interesting is happening on Capitol Hill.

Today Republicans and Democrats will join hands to call on our colleagues to help develop a plan to help America realize its fuel independence. We�re unified with the notion that America needs a long-term plan which changes our fuel strategy from oil to renewable sources.

America�s addiction to oil is HR4409, the Fuel Choices for American Security Act, which I introduced with Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) last November. Our plan offers a viable blueprint to fuel independence by helping transform the nation�s transportation sector into a 21^st Century model. It presents a new energy strategy which strengthens current supply, increases conservation efforts, and embraces new fuel choices.

Getting America to achieve fuel independence is going to take a village which is why we�re working with a broad coalition, including 58 Republican and Democrat cosponsors to help get it done. It is kind of ironic that when gas prices start boiling in America, bipartisanship bubbles to the surface in Washington.

-Jack

NOTE: This post is cross-posted at The Hill’s new blog.

Last night, Congressman Kingston was on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes” show to discuss America’s surging gas prices and the need to break America’s addiction to foreign oil.

Thanks to Ian over at Expose The Left, you can download and watch the clip.

I wrote an opinion piece on why I believe America needs to follow a plan to achieve fuel independence before it’s too late.

Here are the first few paragraphs and the rest of the story is here.

Let me know what you think.

-Jack

After the war against global Islamic terrorism, there is no more important issue facing America today than our dependence on foreign oil.�This is not an academic debate. Every American family who spent 40-50-60 dollars to fill up their car for an Easter visit to grandma’s house already knows this.

Dependence on foreign oil threatens our national security and distorts global diplomacy. Whether it is bandit kidnappers in Nigeria, two-bit Communist dictators like Chavez in Venezuela, or the former student-hostage-taker turned President of Iran - it is not in our interest to remain dependent on those who don’t share our interests.

Each year we are sending tens of billions of dollars to regimes that are using that money to undermine us in our own hemisphere, to fund the forces of terrorism in radical mosques and suicide bomber schools across the Middle East, and now to build the “Islamic bomb” in Tehran’s nuclear plants.

Oil is also the Achilles heel of the American economic miracle. It supplies over 98 percent of our transportation fuel and yet we own a mere 3 percent of known global reserves.

Remaining this addicted to other folk’s oil puts our economy at risk to acts of man like terrorism and acts of God like the hurricanes that shut down the Gulf Coast’s oil infrastructure last year and still has large parts of it struggling to recover just in time for this year’s hurricane season.

Got something to say to Congressman Kingston, House Republicans or Democrats?

What issues do we need to address before the end of the year?

Say it here. Keep it clean.

We just got back from the RFA’s 2006 Renewable Fuels Summit held in Washington, DC.

We heard President George Bush affirm his commitment to ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and Congressman Kingston delivered a great speech on his bill that would help America realize its fuel independence.

We’ll be posting the text of Congressman Kingston’s speech soon.

Congressman Mike Conaway of Midland, Texas just returned from Iraq and has a great post on his blog about the progress he saw on the ground.

Websites like this are helping folks find the least expensive gas by zip code.

Know about more of these websites? Leave them on the comments.

Last week, we had a little fun with a document we found on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s website called “Blogging 101,” which highlighted five GOP blogs (out of seven total) as great examples.

The observant DC blog-insider, Danny Glover, has a hilarious summary of the event.

Of note:

Pelosi’s staff reacted to the unflattering yet largely insignificant partisan jabs in knee-jerk fashion and pulled the blog advice offline. But that decision just made the story newsworthy — especially because Kingston’s Web-wise staff had expected the move and had made a copy of the document, which is now on Kingston’s blog.

The bottomline is that we have been blogging for months about how the GOP can better engage the blogosphere and are glad to see more public officials taking to the web. We just hope that next time the Dems want to play in the blogosphere, they do their homework first.

In today’s Brewton Standard, U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner (R-AL) highlights the work he is doing now and in the future to help lower gas prices in an opinion piece.

Congressman Bonner is a cosponsor of Congressman Kingston’s legislation to Help America Realize Its Fuel Independence, and we passed his op-ed around to other offices as a great example of how to discuss gas prices.

Last week, I joined 58 of my House colleagues and became a cosponsor of H.R. 4409, the Fuel Choices for American Security Act sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA).

The Fuel Choices for American Security Act would set a national goal of cutting our dependence on oil imported from the Middle East by 2015. As you know, global instability has major ramifications on our gas prices, and by reducing our dependency on the Middle East, we ensure more stable prices at the pump.

This legislation would also accelerate our use and development of existing technologies and fuel alternatives by providing tax credits to people who buy hybrid vehicles and to gas stations and automobile manufacturers to increase their use of flex fuel technologies.