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About this episode

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney gave a presentation in Muscatine on Thursday that included a video display with graphs, statistics, and bullet points. His event was billed as a a talk on his "Strategy for a Stronger America: Strengthening America's Economy." He talked and explained slides that gave statistical projections on subjects including taxes, immigration, and U.S. oil dependence. During a question and answer period, one man from the audience asked about drilling for oil in domestic territories, particularly in Alaska. Romney said he thinks drilling in "Alaska is the easiest, the people of the state want us to drill there and the nation wants to drill there. Let's do it. But in this case the Democrats are listening to extreme environmentalists that say no." During his answer Romney said 60% of U.S. oil is imported. The Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy has predicted that imported oil will rise to 70% by 2025.All this talk of oil makes us nostalgic for 2004 when Bush and Kerry squared off over energy independence. Factcheck.org takes us back with some figures on what it would take to become energy independent, including this one:“Bush supports expanded drilling in Alaska to increase domestic oil supply, but the US has only about 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. At current rates of consumption that would only last 4.5 years.” Romney went on to talk about energy from nuclear power and how the U.S. is "beholden to people like Putin, Ahmadinejad and Chavez," referring to the current leaders of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.

• Release Date

  Dec 14, 2007

• Runtime

  04:11