Channel 38’s broadcast of last nights Red Sox – Yankee tilt showed Bill O’Rielly in the Yankee Stadium crowd. Sox color man Jerry Remy wondered aloud how Bill was in the Bronx when his “Factor” is on from 8-9. Well, he had the very lame Josh Gibson as guest host. Mr. O’Rielly calls his little gig “the no spin zone,” but my observation is that he typically staggers like a kid stepping out of an amusement park “teacup” ride, and falls to the right.

Of course that doesn’t make him a a bad guy. I find Mr. O’Rielly informative and most pompously entertaining. He’s like Morton Downey Jr. on half a valium, and he covers far more substantive topics than the late pre-Springer did. Where the hell am I going with this? Oh. I remember. It’s the oil/gas thing again.

On the 9/8/05 “Factor,” Mr. O’Rielly stated his belief that “the five major American oil companies are taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina and the war on terror to compile record profits by raising gas prices through the roof.” He then implored “all Americans to fight back and buy no gas on Sundays for the rest of the year and to cut back energy consumption 10 percent.” I can just see Al Franken running out to buy a Hummer when he heard that request…
President Bush recently spoke of conservation as a means to relieve demand during the supply crunch caused by Katrina. Hey, even little bro Jeb Bush is stylin’ in a new Ford Escape Hybrid.

All this conservation talk is great, albeit 28 years late. On April 18, 1977, four years after our first “energy crisis,” then president Jimmy Carter gave a visionary speech (I encourage you to read it or listen to it) outlining ten fundamental principals of a proposed national energy policy he described as “the moral equivalent of war — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.” Mr. Carter went on to say, “With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes.”

Yeah, 28 years later, it still is.