With pokes at Dick Cheney and Barack Obama, John McCain today is calling for an energy policy that combines heightened exploitation of American oil and nuclear power with a greater emphasis on conservation and development of alternative energy sources.

"It takes a very short leap in logic to wonder why we produce less and less crude oil while we use more and more of it, or why politicians talk so much about promoting alternative energy sources, but often do so little to promote these alternatives," McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, maintains in remarks prepared for delivery by him during his speech in Houston this afternoon.

"A reasonable observer . . . might draw the conclusion that America has accepted this fate because we have no choice in the matter, or because we have no resources of our own. But just the opposite is true: We do have resources and we do have a choice."

In support of Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the Democratic National Committee charged today that McCain's call for exploiting alternative energy clashes with his Senate voting record:

"McCain will talk about promoting renewable energy, despite a clear record of repeatedly voting against the renewable energy incentives he now claims to support," the DNC said in a prepared statement. "McCain will criticize 'reckless speculators' who are driving up gas prices by 'gaming the system,' even though that speculation was allowed to take place because the 'Enron loophole' his top economic adviser and campaign co-chair Phil Gramm (the former senator from Texas) forced through left energy trading markets virtually unregulated . . . All the double talk and empty rhetoric aside, McCain is offering more of the same failed Bush policies that have driven energy prices through the roof."

As McCain revealed Monday, his speech today includes a proposal to end a federal ban on offshore drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and much of the the oceanic coasts, giving states the option to approve oil production within their waters.

"As for offshore drilling, it's safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston," he says in the prepared text of the speech. "Yet, for reasons that become less convincing with every rise in the price of foreign oil, the federal government discourages offshore production."  Read rest...