President Obama admitted today that he does not have a "silver bullet" solution for skyrocketing gas prices, but he proposed alternative energy sources such as “a plant-like substance, algae” as a way of cutting dependence on oil by 17 percent.

"We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance, algae - you’ve got a bunch of algae out here," Obama said at the University of Miami today. "If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing alright. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America."

The good news is that he clearly spends time thinking, because this isn’t off the cuff, since there were unverifiable statistics attached to said outrageous proposition, meaning some researcher spent time doing calculations in preparation for this astounding moment.

And Wikipedia tells me it’s called "Oilgae" and has a "lot of potential." It also tells me that "oilgae" is currently deliberately excluded from federal fuel standards in favor of biofuels whose production directly affects Congress, but private industry has been investing in it for almost a decade and had already figured out how to make jet fuel out of it, when Barack decided today that it would be the "next big thing."

The bad news is, obviously, that millions of federal dollars will now go to a doomed program that studies the use of algae as an alternative fuel, and then possibly billions to a small group of politically connected corporations who have no clue how, exactly, to produce a market-friendly algae-powered engine, but who hire Nobel laureates. Eventually, those corporations will go bankrupt, but not before repeatedly informing the federal government of their own stupidity and, accordingly, receiving large sums of taxpayer money each time.