Disappointed in deteriorating quality of Republican newspaper editorial page ..

As a native and frequent visitor of Garrett County, I often like to read the Republican newspaper to catch up on the latest local news. Over the past year or so, however, I have noticed that the editorials in this paper have often been very ill-informed or intellectually lazy. Take last week's editorial as a perfect example.

http://www.therepublicannews.com/article.asp?id=2665

The editor criticizes the fact that oil companies (in truth, only integrated oil companies) are making record profits and implies that something should be done to correct this. I assume if newspapers were making record profits his opinion would be different. But what really strikes me as poorly thought out is that the editor closes his editorial with a statement that the US government should in effect pay a bounty for "a vehicle that is efficiently powered by something other than gasoline". Let me just ask the editor one question, if these oil companies are making record profits isn't there already a great incentive to create an alternative (much as alternative media sources are profitably displacing newspapers). Wouldn't someone who created a vehicle as the editor describes sell millions of them and make a large fortune themselves? Why exactly is it necessary for the government to subsidize such a business? I suppose as soon as they became very profitable the editor would also be calling for a government sponsored bounty for another alternative.

I assume the editor also does not understand the true reason behind the integrated oil companies record profits either and yet he continues to write on the topic and potentially mislead his readers. Any editorial about the oil companies record profits that does not include a discussion of low interest rates, global demand, the weak dollar and our policies which keep it weak is missing the big picture and too narrowly focused in my opinion. In the future, I can only hope that the editor of the Republican recognizes this or at least admits that he is not telling us the whole story.

Don't forget to check back to Dan's Deep Creek Blog for future updates.