President Obama recently suggested that the Middle East is a region to be avoided and that the stunning transformation of America's oil and gas sector – the shale revolution – providentially is making the Middle East less and less important to the U.S. economy.  The president's assessment of our weakening links to Middle Eastern suppliers has opened a window on his curious thinking about the shale revolution and energy policy in general. What makes the president's praise of the shale revolution so odd is that his administration has done nothing to support it.  In fact, at the president's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior have developed one new regulation after another to make it more difficult and costly to produce American oil and natural gas. This kind of doubletalk from President Obama has become very old.  He knows very well that the United States consumes 19.3 million barrels of oil per...(Read Full Post)