Istook’s Insights: Obama threatens to veto oil bonanza, stop eating, body image and gun propaganda

America can add tons of jobs by exporting oil.

For forty years, federal law has banned selling American oil overseas. Meantime, we’ve found enormous new reserves of recoverable oil, developed new ways to extract it, and almost doubled domestic oil production. That has lowered fuel prices and generated a multitude of jobs.

Instead of importing it, we now could export oil, creating at least 600-thousand jobs. Instead of our depending on other countries, they would depend on us — making American stronger worldwide.

The House of Representatives just passed a bill to lift the 40-year embargo and allow oil exports. The problem is: The White House threatens a veto. President Obama favors subsidies for expensive green energy, but wants to hold back fossil fuels that consumers can afford, and which pay taxes and create jobs.

If Obama vetoes oil exports, he’s vetoing the jobs that Americans need and deserve.

Then, there’s this: Federal dietary guidelines are being updated.

For millions of Americans, they are not guidelines, but dietary mandates. That includes the school lunch program, the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, military meals, and many more. The feds pay for the food, so they dictate the menu. One gap — nutrition standards do not apply to Food Stamps.

Cabinet secretaries just told a Congressional hearing that these dietary guidelines do not follow “settled science,” but instead reflect “well-informed opinion.” But why should a bureaucrat’s opinion about your health outweigh yours?

Beware how quickly these opinions can turn into orders. Because Washington now pays about half the health care bills in America, they argument goes that the only way to control federal healthcare spending is for government to control what you eat—and what you cannot.

In Texas, voters are finding out how weird transgender issues are.

Houston voters will decide whether to keep an ordinance labeled as a non-discrimination law, but which is far more. The city council created a mess by outlawing discrimination against “gender identity.”

As opponents warn in ads, this would allow “troubled men who claim to be women to enter women’s bathrooms, showers and locker rooms.”

Supporters deny that the law opens ladies’ private areas to men. But that statement is based on distorting our language. You see, they deny that having male biology, male DNA and male genitals makes you a man. If you call yourself female, then !Presto! you’re a woman now.

The word games of the gender identity/transgender movement try to deceive voters by re-defining everyday words. Whether someone is male or female is not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of fact.

Unfortunately, the Oregon college murders quickly became fodder for political propaganda.

President Obama was silent about Christians being singled-out by the killer. 

Obama angrily called for gun control even before we knew most details about the Oregon murders.

The father of the accused killer blamed guns but not his son. But he didn’t mention that he abandoned his son and the mother before the child was born 26 years ago. Several social scientists say it’s a common pattern in mass murders, that these killers usually had no significant father figure in their lives.

But the gun control crowd claims the answer is disarming law-abiding people, and they look for scapegoats. One left-leaning newspaper claims the National Rifle Association should be designated a terrorist organization and punished.

We won’t fix America’s problems until we quit chasing phony solutions, and start reversing the breakdown of families and morality.