When Bush was in office, the Democrats seemed very concerned about what our allies thought of us. 
Well, here's the view from Canada.....

While the press is still chewing over Obama’s Cairo speech, this cebrity style coverage ignores the fact that Obama’s endless world tour is not actually accomplishing anything. Instead his combination of ego driven photo op appearances and clueless treatment of foreign dignitaries have alienated many of America’s traditional allies. Those who aren’t being quietly angry at Obama, like Brown, Merkel or Netanyahu, instead think of him as as absurdly lightweight, as Sarkozy, King Abdullah or Putin do.
(thanks to John S. for the heads up on this)

North Dakota Oil
Last year I wrote about the HUGE oil discovery in North Dakota and Wyoming.  Known as the Bakken formation, the estimated reserves of oil vary wildly.  However, even the most conservative geologists have acknowledged that the area contains 2-3 BILLION barrels of recoverable oil.  As technology improves, it's believed this number could jump to 50-100 billion barrels.

With all the activity going on in the Bakken formation, there is increasing evidence that another formation, just below Bakken, known as the Three Forks-Spanish formation may hold as much, or more, than Bakken.

These are just the fields we keep discovering.  Of course, we also know of numerous oil fields across the US, that could exceed that of Saudi Arabia.   But the Democrats are doing everything in their power to keep it from being extracted........that's really helping "the little guy"!