In the 2004 election cycle, Ken Salazar ran as a new kind of Democrat: a guy not beholden to liberal ideology -- a guy who would do what's right for the country. And that rhetoric proved effective in Colorado; Salazar won his Senate seat.

This week, the interior department will unveil new regulations to allow the sale of oil shale leases on federal land. In the western states, those leases could eventually unlock up to 800 billion barrels of oil. Last month President Bush spelled out what that would mean for America, saying that "one major deposit in the Rocky Mountain West alone would equal current annual oil imports for more than 100 years."

But guess who's standing in the way? Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat, Colorado. Last year he slipped language into a bill to bar the federal government from issuing final regulations for commercial oil-shale development.

Even with $4-a-gallon gasoline, Salazar and his fellow Democrats are still preventing America from using our own resources to lower gas prices and create new jobs. In fact, Democrats -- having killed off any chance of a gas-tax holiday -- reportedly now want to raise the federal tax that you pay on each gallon of gas by a dime!

The moral (in case you haven't figured this out) is that "new Democrats" don't exist -- except when running for office. In office, they're the same old liberals that they've always been, and they don't give a rat's rear end about you or what's right for the country... it's only about themselves.