Rob Bishop: “They once asked the famous spitball pitcher Gaylord Perry if he put a foreign substance on the ball, and he calmly…”

“They once asked the famous spitball pitcher Gaylord Perry if he put a foreign substance on the ball, and he calmly answered: No. Vaseline is 100 percent American product. We used to only have to import a handful of rare earth minerals in this country, like eight. Today, we are importing dozens of them because we have, with this administration, a policy of trying to stockpile these resources. Hopefully, when we get through them, we will be able to find some other country that can help us to resupply those resources, kind of like Blanche in ``A Streetcar Named Desire,'' where we are dependent on the kindness of strangers at all times. Would it not be wiser for us simply to have a consistent policy where we actually have a workforce that is developing, on a regular basis, these rare earth minerals that we can have for our use so that we can have the jobs from them, it can help our economy, and it could give us the security we desperately need? We don't need to keep importing stuff into this country. I mean, we imported the Expos from Montreal to here in Washington. That should be sufficient. That is enough. I read an article the other day about mining rare earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where rare minerals, necessary for iPhones and the Samsung Galaxy phones, were being produced. Miners used their bare hands to filter out the minerals in order to earn a whopping $5 a day.…”