re: PS OPEC and the Embargo
You make a good point, but there's more to the foreign oil issue than OPEC. Many of these nations are not, to put it mildly, all that stable. Even if they're willing to sell, the oil prices leap every time some idiot blows up a pipeline in the desert, or Nigerian workers go on strike.
There are other issues, too. Our decades-long moratorium on U.S. refineries and heavy reliance on the Gulf region for our domestic oil supply are not good things either. Maybe terrorists aren't going to blow up our own facilities, but Mother Nature did a pretty good job on them not long ago, and the market results were similar.