Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
California’s 2012 average gas price was $4.028 a gallon The 2012 average for a gallon of regular gasoline in California shatters the previous record — set in 2011 — by 21 cents.
By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
January 1, 2013
Californians had a bad year at the pump in 2012, averaging a record $4.028 for a gallon of regular gasoline, according to AAA.
That shattered the previous record, set in 2011, by 21.3 cents a gallon. The jump was so big that it surprised even people who review fuel prices on a daily basis.
“I can remember when the California average for the year in 2008 was $3.525 and we thought we would never see it go that high again,” said Marie Montgomery, spokeswoman for the Automobile Club of Southern California.
She noted that $4.028 “over a full year is a lot of money out of our pockets that we can’t spend on other things.”
California’s gas prices in 2012 also helped kick the national average for a gallon of regular up to a record $3.603, which broke the previous record, set in 2011, of $3.510, AAA said.
The increase in California fuel prices in recent years is startling. In 2008, the year oil prices shot above $147 a barrel, the state averaged a then-record $3.525 for a gallon of regular gasoline, according to AAA.
The California average fell to $2.687 a gallon in 2009, then climbed back above the $3 threshold to $3.100 in 2010. In 2011, the state’s average for the year jumped to $3.815 a gallon.
Since 2009, the average price that Californians pay for a gallon of regular gasoline has jumped nearly 50%.
California has some fuel factors that are unique. It’s an isolated market that does not have access to cheap crude flowing from the oil boom in states such as North Dakota, Texas and Oklahoma.
Its only regular source of domestic crude from outside the state is Alaska’s dwindling North Slope oil fields. That means California has to import more and more foreign oil, which is substantially more expensive than U.S. crude.
California’s clean-air rules also mandate a special formula of gasoline that is more expensive to make and is produced by few refineries outside the state.
Analysts have cited many reasons for the 2012 prices, including one of the worst years ever for refinery outages in California. A fire in August, for example, knocked out part of Chevron’s Richmond facility, one of the state’s biggest refineries.
In October, a power failure at an Exxon Mobil refinery helped send California’s average price up to a record $4.671 for a gallon of regular.
But a lot of people aren’t buying those explanations. Consumer groups and California’s U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, have called on the state attorney general and the Justice Department to investigate California’s volatile fuel prices.
California refineries were also exporting fuel in 2012, and an analysis by Oregon-based McCullough Research indicated that some of them may have misled the public about the amount of fuel they were producing.
I italicized the bold-face type describing how liberalism is stupid and counter-productive and makes living impossible until everybody flees to states that actually AREN’T fascist. And it is pretty damned amazing that California would blame its sky-high prices on “foreign oil being more expensive” given the fact that California has PLENTY of oil if it were just legal to obtain it. Sadly, California is dominated by liberals, and liberals are truly stupid people, so they’ve largely banned offshore drilling.
I just wish that Californians would vote to personally bankrupt themselves and then commit hari kari and get it over with. But California liberals are a slow, stupid people who apparently want to linger, and prefer a slow, torturous death by liberal stupidity. So they voted for Obama even though he has utterly screwed them. You know, the way the North Korean people kept voting for Kim Jong-il and then his son Kim Jong-un. And hang the pictures of these murderous dictators in their homes. And worship them as “Dear Leader.” While their country and their children are ground into dust.
Under Obama, and due to his stupid and frankly evil gasoline policies by which he attacks the fuel the American people absolutely need to get by in the modern world, gasoline is now MORE than fifty cents a gallon more than it was in 2008 when Obama was slandering George Bush:
This is God damn America, pure and simple. And in God damn America, God allows stupid and greedy people to elect and then re-elect a lying demagogue who will bankrupt and implode America.
All the rest of us can do is try to prepare as best we can for the crash that is coming. And in the meantime try to keep documenting why America fell while we still have the freedom to do so.
The pictures of the 2012 Obama gas lines are simply amazing. Want a little gasoline for transportation and warmth? Well, you have to go through Obama’s “hope and change,” first.
Let me warm you up with a picture of the Carter gas lines in the 1970s:
Ah, those were the good days. Nothin’ to do but wait in line. Nothin’ to be afraid of but not having gas and being stranded somewhere because your president was a worthless turd.
It’s too bad none of these people realizes that their messiah told them all they need to do is inflate their tires and they don’t need gas.
Instead, they are waiting FOUR FREAKING HOURS to get gasoline in Obamanation. People are showing up at the pump late in the middle of the night or first thing early in the morning to get a jump on that four hour wait only to find cars already lined up as far as the horizon.
As we speak, the city of New York is erupting in outrage because the idiot Mayor Bloomberg (who endorsed Obama because Bloomberg still thinks Obama is the messiah who will lower the levels of the oceans and heal the planet) is determined to have a parade also called the New York Marathon. New Yorkers who just went through hell are outraged that their mayor wants to divert massive resources when many who live in the city still don’t have any power or warmth or transportation. Instead of bringing in generators and police to ward off looters, Mayor Bloomberg says New York should instead use those resources for a damn parade of scrawny jogging idiots. And the hotels that are stuffed full of New Yorkers who can’t return to their homes because their damn homes washed away in a hurricane are being asked by foreign tourists who want to watch those scrawny idiots jog to vacate their only shelter now because those rooms were booked for the marathon. It’s quite amazing in the rigid bureaucratic idiocy.
Well, one more picture to sum up the current state of the union:
Thank God we never had to learn what a SECOND Carter term would look like. And for God’s sake, let’s not find out NOW.
Congratulations, liberal California; under Obama, you’ve screwed your people more than they’ve ever been screwed before:
LOS ANGELES (AP) – California motorists faced another day of record-breaking gasoline prices Sunday, though relief appeared to be on the way.
In its latest update early Sunday, AAA reported that the statewide average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $4.655. Saturday’s average of $4.6140 was the highest since June 19, 2008, when it was $4.6096.
The four-penny-per-gallon jump Sunday was less than Saturday’s increase, which was 12 cents. […]
The average for a gallon of regular was $4.69 in Los Angeles, $4.71 in San Diego and San Francisco, $4.55 in Sacramento and $4.90 in Santa Barbara, according to GasBuddy.com.
Note that Obama just broke Bush’s record. It’s Obama’s name in the record books now, kids.
Actually, AAA just announced that gas in California is now at $4.65. That smashes the record for the highest price EVER.
And because it’s Obama and Democrats running California rather than the devil Bush, the mainstream media has constantly said to Californians, “Don’t worry; it’s only temporary! Messiah will slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet!” But we’re gradually learning that things won’t be quite so temporary for us:
But hey, we’re not alone here in California. Liberals on BOTH coasts get to enjoy the price of that evil juice they constantly demonize.
Drivers on either coast may be questioning the conventional wisdom that gas prices fall after Labor Day.
Motorists in California paid an average of $4.232 per gallon Wednesday. That’s 45 cents higher than the national average and exceeded only by Hawaii among the 50 states.
Prices in New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire are at or near highs for the year. They’re also about 40 cents higher than a year ago.
Refinery and pipeline problems have shrunk supplies of gasoline on the coasts and driven up prices in states that typically have some of the highest gas prices in the U.S. anyway. In other regions, gas prices have trickled lower after a late-summer surge.
California’s gasoline inventories have shrunk to the lowest levels in more than a decade. That has been exacerbated by the state’s strict anti-pollution laws which require motorists to use costlier blends of gasoline.
Drivers in the Pacific Northwest also are feeling the pinch. The average price in Oregon and Washington is above $4.
Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service, expects another dramatic surge in West Coast prices over the next five days before they eventually head lower.
Kloza says conditions are improving on the East Coast, where refinery issues created tight supplies in the past several weeks, mainly in the Northeast. The situation is gradually easing as more imported oil arrives, he said.
For the rest of the country, average gas prices have dropped in the past month, but at a slower pace than typically seen after Labor Day. At $3.78 per gallon, the national average is the highest ever for this time of year.
It was reported today on Fox News that things are actually considerably worse now, but of course the media don’t want to report on that lest they hurt their magic messiah and risk tarnishing the power of his magic unicorn fairy dust. Gas prices are shockingly high in Oregon and Washington, as well as New York and much of the Northeast.
“The one thing we fail to talk about is those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it’s global warming. It’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.”
“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
I’m sorry, Nancy, you raving lunatic, WHOSE failed policy is that?
Meanwhile, household incomes are now down 8.2% since Obama took office and started healing the planet and slowing the rise in the level of the oceans. So the folk who are making an average of $4,520 less (the median income that was $55,198 the day Obama took office is now down to $50,678 under the failure in chief) have the privilege of spending more on gasoline, too.
If you think gas is poison like Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, vote Democrat. If you want to save the planet from the evilness of gasoline like former Speaker of the House and current Democrat Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, then vote Democrat. If you want to put gas in your damn car so you can go to work and you’re not either mentally incompetent or criminally insane, vote Republican.
If you’re a liberal, well, I might as well be trying to explain nuclear physics to a cockroach, so never the hell mind.
Update, October 8, 2012: Pat Robertson on his 700 Club program commented on California’s gasoline shortage and the corresonding stratospheric price increases and basically said that Californians are getting what they’ve voted for. He said that he once bought an oil refinery in the San Diego area that would have easily picked up the slack in supply if liberals hand’t torpedoed it. At the time Robertson purchased the refinery, it had passed all EPA requirements and was ready to go; but what happened instead? Well, a liberal environmentalist group called “Citizens for a Better Environment” filed a lawsuit that was upheld by a liberal Clinton-appointed judge. And as a result the refinery had to start over from scratch and do all kinds of studies that would prove that the refinery wouldn’t pollute (because it’s better to live in a cave and freeze at night in the winter or swelter in the heat in the summer than to allow an oil refinery to pollute, dontchaknow). And the millions of extra dollars killled the project, just as liberals have killed EVERY refinery for decades. And what’s the result: if just one aging refinery has a problem, the people are SCREWED. And of course liberals then blame the oil companies for basically not allowing Democrats to bankrupt them.
I believe that if Obama is reelected, we will see gas prices go up to the $9 to $10 a gallon that Obama’s handpicked energy secretary is on the record desiring. Obama’s philosophy (with its expression borrowed from his former chief of staff) is “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Which is to say that in a second Obama term when he is not burdened by an election and “has more flexibility” and is free to follow his heart, his heart will lead him to “motivate” you to buy green energy vehicles no matter how much more they cost and no matter how much the government has to subsidize said green energy because he will make it too painful for you to keep pumping gas in your car.
We can’t know how much gas will cost during a second term, but we CAN look at how much it has cost his FIRST term. And it’s been a pretty penny.
Democrats want to demonize gas prices under Bush. Well, let’s look at gas prices under Bush and then compare them to gas prices under Obama. Let’s compare all eight years of Bush to Obama’s first four years.
Average price for gas over Obama’s four years to date = $2.99/gal
And there you have it. Barack Obama costs you at least 85 cents a gallon more than Bush did. If you only consider Bush’s first four years of gasoline prices the way we’re only calculating Obama’s first four years, Bush’s average gas price was$1.68 a gallon – which is a $1.31 more per gallon that the $2.99 Obama has averaged so far his first term compared to Bush’s first term. And you aint seen nothing yet until you are fool enough to reelect him so he can go wild on your gas (that was a deliberate pun, btw).
When liberals demonize Bush for high gas prices, they attack him for the prices that went nuts in July of 2008. George Bush finally had enough of the hard-core Democrat obstructionism which they had used since taking over both the House and the Senate in 2006 and finally issued an executive order. As I document, oil prices dropped by $9.26 cents AS BUSH WAS SPEAKING when he issued that order ending the federal moratorium on offshore drilling. From that day on, gas prices took a precipitous plunge for the rest of his presidency and did not go up again until Obama began undermining Bush’s policies.
If you want to blame somebody for why we’re not lowering our gas prices by expanding our massive oil resources or building new refineries to expand our capacity (we haven’t been able to build one for 35 years due to massively expensive EPA restrictions and regulatory hurdles!!!), find a Democrat and punch him in the nose.
Obama made the American people a promise. He said he would not increase taxes on the middle class. What Obama has done with gasoline is a huge tax on the American middle class. And ObamaCare will be a giant tax on the middle class, that is now a confirmed fact by the Supreme Court ruling which justified ObamaCare ONLY if it was a “TAX.” Unless we vote his ass out this November.
The key intelligence breakthrough occurred when US intelligence discovered two key facts: 1) that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan; and 2) that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could then be identified and tracked to bin Laden’s specific location in that city. Both of these key facts were discovered under the Bush presidency by means of waterboarding:
Liberals outrageously lie when they talk about how waterboarding was used. CIA professionals did NOT ask a terrorist a question and then waterboard him until he gave them whatever answer they wanted. Rather, they used this incredibly painful – but completely medically safe under supervision – procedure of simulated drowning to “alter the perception” of the terrorist. The terrorist was confronted with his new reality in a cold, painful way: “We own your ass; we can do whatever the hell we want to you; and we will ultimately break you down. Get used to the idea that you WILL tell us what we want to know.” The point of waterboarding was to break their will to resist, not to torture immediate answers out of them but rather to inexorably bring them to the point where they would ultimately crack. The fact of the matter was that the CIA experts didn’t even bother to ASK terrorists any questions while they waterboarded the three terrorists who ended up singing like canaries. But it is a simple FACT that waterboarding was the essential background component that led to the breaking of these hard, hateful men: because the terrorists we waterboarded were the very same terrorists who told us about Abbottabad and the courier.
Democrats talk about “torture.” I say if we catch a monster like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed we waterboard him until he grows gills and then we take the water away so he’ll flop around like a dying fish. And repeat it over and over again until the same man who tried to destroy us becomes the very man who tells us how to destroy his hateful organization.
I recently watched a 2 hour documentary about the 2006 terrorist attempt to use passenger jets as bombs titled “Stopping the Second 9/11” on the National Geographic Channel. The thing that most struck me was the fact that British intelligence recorded the terrorists talking to each other on phones. The terrorists planned to bring their own wives and their own BABIES on the flights that they planned to destroy in order to reduce the likelihood that they would tip off law enforcement by boarding the planes as “family men.” That ought to scream about the determination of these men to kill and destroy. You simply are not going to get men like this to open up with courtesy and niceness. Islamic terrorists by their culture, their religion, and their brutal nature as mass murdering killers respect only superior force, not peaceful overtures, which they see as a sign of weakness. Anyone who thinks you can “nice” a terrorist into betraying his worldview, his ideology, literally his religion, and his movement is simply a naive fool.
The question then becomes this: Why would anybody but a radical leftist ideologue give Obama credit for the intelligence breakthroughs that led to killing bin Laden when Obama was the very guy who most viciously demonized the very procedures that led to those breakthroughs?
There is a fascinating analogy that comes out of the talk about the moon landing that happened as a result of the discussion about the passing of Neil Armstrong (who by the way went on the record criticizing Obama before his death). The anology begins with this: We give John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon:
Nixon gets ZERO credit even though he was the president sitting in the White House when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. You will not read an article written by a liberal giving Nixon any credit for landing a man on the moon and bringing that man safely back to earth. Why? Kennedy had been DEAD for six years prior to that moon landing. Why isn’t Nixon “the president who put a man on the moon”? Because it was JFKs vision and the fulfillment of that vision just as getting bin Laden was the fulfillment of George W. Bush’s vision:
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
But again, that meme about the first man on the moon merely reinforces the pathology of the left to take full credit for every good thing and avoid any blame whatsoever for any bad thing. The media gives John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon because JFK was a Democrat; the media gives George W. Bush ZERO credit for getting Osama bin Laden because GWB was a Republican. It’s really that simple.
Was Obama’s decision to send the SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden really that amazing? Let me ask you this: what would have happened to Obama’s political fortunes if he had refused to kill bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off CIA and military professionals leaked Obama’s abject refusal to kill the world’s worst terrorist monster? How many people think Obama could have been reelected as “the man who refused to kill bin Laden”???
Bottom damn line: if Obama had tried to kill bin Laden and failed, he would have been criticized for that failure. And to insulate himself from that possibility, he set up Admiral McRaven as the fall guy by giving McRaven responsibility. It was ultimately McRaven who made the “courageous call,” not Obama. That said, if Obama had refused to even try to kill bin Laden, HE WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE POLITICALLY. Does anybody seriously think for one second that the men who had devoted YEARS to getting bin Laden would have just rolled over if Obama had refused to issue the order to get him? In fact, I will bet you that Republicans would have brought up and article of impeachment due to Obama’s refusal to protect the citizens of the United States, and Democrats would have voted for it. Because otherwise, this election would have been the worst disaster in the history of politics for the Democrat Party as the weakling coward treasonous bin Laden Party.
So spare me about Obama’s “incredibly courageous decision” to kill bin Laden as George W. Bush had promised the world that the United States would do. Spare me the idiotic rhetoric that if George W. Bush had still been president he never would have had the guts to kill bin Laden. Just spare me all your blathering idiocy, liberal.
IRAQ WAR
Let’s talk about the Iraq War. Let’s talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Do you know which president won that war? Do you know which president negotiated that withdrawal of American troops? I do. In answer to both questions, the name is George W. Bush.
“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”
Two words come to mind: they are “evil” and “hypocrite.” Obama demonized the Iraq War again and again while Bush was trying to fight and win there. Obama demonized the incredibly successful surge strategy that allowed us to break the back of the insurgency. But now that same Obama claims credit for what he opposed.
AFGHANISTAN WAR
That same Obama dragged America FAR deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan than anybody could ever dream blame on Bush. Because Obama and the Democrat Party didn’t want to appear weak on national security. So they created a contrast between Iraq (which Bush won) as the “bad war” and Afghanistan (which Obama massively expanded) as the “good war.”
You wait and see: when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’s going to frame it as his courageously getting us out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” When Obama massively expanded America’s involvement in Afghanistan and very obviously used Afghanistan as a political device to give Obama a cover from charges that he was a cut and run coward:
Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq. In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.
What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.
Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.
And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.
And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.
Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.” It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.
The thing is that Obama’s “good war” aint going so good. The thing is that if you examine the casualties of Obama’s “good war” since Obama took it over, Obama is responsible for more than 70 percent of the casualties for the entire war (i.e., compare Obama’s 1,477 casualties in less than four years to Bush’s 630 casualties over eight years of fighting.
Bush limited the Afghanistan War. Obama radically expanded it. And now the man who radically expanded the Afghanistan War is trying to A) walk away from the mess that HE created and 2) blame the mess that HE created on Bush just as he’s blamed ALL his failures on Bush.
We are NOT winning in Afghanistan. We are not GOING to win in Afghanistan – particularly after Obama declared a “timetable for withdrawal” that told the enemy all they have to do is hang on until we crawl out with our tails between our legs and the country will be theirs. There IS no winning in that hellhole. As I have pointed out in the past echoing other conservatives, Afghanistan was a terrible place for the U.S. military to fight and be able to exploit our overwhelming air and ground power whereas the flat plains of Iraq was a GREAT place for America to fight and win.
Bush was rightly resistant to putting too many troops into Afghanistan because he knew enough about history to understand that Afghanistan is a hell-hole. Bush understood that while Iraq – with its flat, mostly open terrain – was perfect for American equipment and tactics, and that mountainous and cave-ridden Afghanistan was most certainly NOT well-suited for American equipment and tactics. Bush knew that the fairly well-educated Iraqi people were capable of some semblance of democracy; and Bush knew that the ignorant, basically stone-age Afghani people were NOT capable of anything resembling self-governance.
Because Bush – however stupid the left wants to say he is – wasn’t 1/20th as massively moronic as Barack Obama is.
Afghanistan is also the place where Obama ignored and overruled his generals. He was the one who declared that we needed to have a huge surge there (after demonizing Bush’s successful surge in Iraq, fwiw); and then he was the one who refused to listen to his own generals’ recommendations when they said we’d need at least 40,000 troops to do it right – and then after endless indecision finally decided to basically give them too many not to lose but not nearly enough to ever win.
Afghanistan is as much Obama’s war as Iraq was “Bush’s war.” The difference was that Bush owned his war and accepted responsibility for how it went and how it was fought and Obama will NEVER own ANY of his massive failures. So as I said above, when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’ll deceitfully depict it as getting America out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” Because that’s the kind of slandering liar that weasel is.
I was wrong about one thing in my past predictions: I thought that Obama would crawl out of Afghanistan before the election in November and make the immediately above claim. But I submit at this point that Obama can’t do that: because Afghanistan is frankly going so badly with new cases of Afghan soldiers fragging their American partners practically every day that to cut and run NOW would only serve to draw attention to just how catastrophically Obama has truly failed over there.
IRAN
Obama is the president who was mocked by Hillary Clinton for his naive stupidity in assuming he could talk Iran out of its rogue regime intent on acquiring nuclear weapons status. He is the same naive fool today that he was when Hillarly Clinton mocked him.
“According to EIA’s short-term 2011 outlook, released last week, oil production was significantly higher in 2009 than in the years prior. Obama may have been in office for most of that year, but the oil production numbers are due to action taken before he became president. In 2010, most if not all of the production increase recorded is likely due to action that predates Obama, since Obama didn’t take any major action expanding offshore drilling his first year in office.”
But the Obama administration has taken action since then, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Wednesday. “Over the past two years, the Obama administration has delayed, revoked, suspended, or canceled an enormous range of development opportunities. One month after the President took office, his administration cancelled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah — once the review was complete the administration refused to reinstate a single one. . . . Last January, it announced new restrictions for onshore oil and gas exploration in the Mountain West. Last February, it denied a permit to build a bridge needed to access an oil producing field in Alaska, after the Environmental Protection Agency designated a nearby river an aquatic resource of national importance. Last April, the Administration suspended 61 oil and gas leases in Montana that were issued in 2008 — then announced that all oil and gas leases in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota would be delayed indefinitely. Last May, the President announced a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — a moratorium that’s been repeatedly struck down in the courts.”
Bush was the president who signed the leases that Obama is taking credit for. Obama is the president who has shut down oil production. And yet Obama is the president who is taking credit for Bush’s success even as he refuses to stand behind his failure. Something to consider as we face the highest gasoline prices in the history of the republic on this Memorial Day.
HEALTH CARE
ObamaCare was an unpopular fiasco the entire time Obama and Democrats were forcing it down the throats of the American people. Obama demagogued health care costs – which were actually going DOWN before his ObamaCare boondoggle placed another one-sixth of the economy under government bureaucratic control – to pass his socialist takeover of the health care system.
Obama also swore up one side and down the other that he would NEVER raise taxes on the middle class. And yet ObamaCare is a massive tax hike on ordinary people. Because 75% of the 21 new tax hikes will fall on the middle class.
And where’s Obama to accept responsibility for his failed program???
ECONOMY
Question: Which president left his successor with a bubble collapse that vaporized $7.1 trillion in American wealth and wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq portolio? Answer: William Jefferson Clinton. But we don’t tend to remember the terrible Dotcom bubble recession that Bill Clinton left for George Bush to inherit because of three reasons: 1) the sheer unmitigated bias of the mainstream media; 2) the disasterous 9/11 attack (that can likewise be laid almost entirely at Clinton’s feet as he gutted the military and intelligence community and left America both weak and blind such that Osama bin Laden declared America to be a “paper tiger” and began to plot his devastating attack); and 3) because unlike Barack Obama, George Bush wasn’t a pitiful whiner and accepted responsibility for the economy.
The fact of the matter is that George Bush began his presidency with a huge double whammy. Not that the media will ever assign responsibility for it to Clinton the way they were determined to assign responsibility to Bush. Because there is a longstanding propaganda meme according to which the mainstream media will NEVER blame a Democrat for a failure and will ALWAYS find a way to blame a Republican.
Barack Obama has demonized Bush for the “Great Recession,” literally refuses to cite statistics that consider the first year of his presidency to create the rhetorical statistical illusion that his presidency has been better than it actally was, demonized Republicans for “obstructionism“, and taken credit for his “recovery”. The truth is that none of these things is true.
Let’s take the “Great Recession” first. Obama has demonized Republicans over and over again for “lack of regulation” and “failed policies” causing that recession. Bullcrap. The single entity that resulted in this collapse was Government Sponsored Enterprise Fannie Mae and its twin Freddie Mac. I’ve documented that fact over and over again on this blog:
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
And in fact the private sector entities such as Lehman Brothers that collapsed did so because they suddenly found themselves holding BILLIONS of dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that had been issued by the GSEs that the Democrats created and ran into the ground and protected – and refused to allow Republicans to regulate (Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMESto regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prior to its collapse and was stopped by Democrats every single time). In fact Bush was trying to regulate Fannie and Freddie all the way back to 2003 when we still had time to prevent the coming collapse. Democrats used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the market to sell homes to people who couldn’t afford those homes; and when the bubble burst and Lehman Bros. and others found themselves holding “toxic assets” that they had purchased from Fannie and Freddie, they couldn’t cover their Democrat-caused losses and collapsed.
Nixon was president during the moon landing, but Democrats and liberals have never and will never give him credit because they wanted to give one of their own credit for the success. Bush was president during the 2008 collapse, and that was all liberals needed to say to blame him for the entire fiasco regardless of how many Democrat shennanigans had gone into that collapse.
Obama is a liar and his “success” is based on lies – as you will see for yourself if you just try to match his rhetoric to painful American reality under his presidency:
But it’s Bush’s fault that Obama did it. Because no president in history has ever abrogated his responsibilities or refused to claim responsibility for his failure to live up to his responsibilities than has Obama.
Obama has been the president for the last four years, people, not Bush.
I began talking about the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. The only “man on the moon” now – thanks to Obama’s policies – is none other than Barack Obama: because this disgraced leader will surely assume no responsibility for anything that happens on the earth that lies so far below his lofty but meaningless rhetoric.
It’s past time to hold him responsible and fire his ass.
Gasoline prices rise, setting California and U.S. records California’s average gasoline price of $4.129 is a new high for the third week of August, though the ascent has slowed. The U.S. average sets a similar record, and diesel prices raise concern.
By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times
August 21, 2012
California’s gasoline prices may have peaked after the refinery fire at Chevron Corp.’s Richmond facility, but they still rose enough over the last week to reach their highest level ever for the third week of August, the Energy Department said Monday.
The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in California was $4.129, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of gas stations. That was up 3.3 cents from a week earlier — and 26.1 cents higher than on Aug. 6, just before the refinery fire knocked out parts of the state’s third-biggest fuel-producing plant.
The price for the third week of August broke a state record set in 2008, when the California average was $4.037 a gallon.
A separate, daily survey sponsored by AAA found that California’s average had stabilized, slipping one-tenth of a cent from Sunday’s average to $4.118 a gallon.
The Energy Department survey showed the U.S. average for a gallon of regular gasoline rose 2.3 cents over the last week to $3.744, squeaking past the previous national record for the third week of August, set in 2008, of $3.740.
Meanwhile, Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, said diesel prices were the bigger economic worry because they were raising transportation, construction and agricultural costs.
The average price of a gallon of diesel rose 9.8 cents to $4.313 in California and 6.1 cents to $4.026 nationwide — the highest averages since May 14.
Oil futures fell 4 cents to $95.97 a barrel in New York. The London price fell a penny to $113.70 a barrel.
The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. is proud to announce that its partly owned veterans jobs board has secured an exclusive employment initiative with Alberta, Canada, that could see thousands of U.S. veterans heading north to work on their oil pipeline.
“This is a great opportunity for veterans, transitioning military, National Guard and reservists, and their family members,” said Ted Daywalt, founder and CEO of VetJobs (www.vetjobs.com), a recognized industry leader in helping veterans find work.
“Though America’s Keystone Pipeline is delayed, the Canadians are moving forward on their side of the border and have an immediate need for tens of thousands of workers,” said Daywalt, whose website averages more than 55,000 daily job postings by employers strictly interested in hiring veterans. He said the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation anticipates a shortage of 114,000 workers in the Alberta area, and they want to hire American veterans to fill that shortage.
According to the development corporation, the positions being offered are long term, with many paying as much as 30 percent more than similar industry positions in the United States. Some positions will require a move to Canada, but many others will allow veterans to commute — working several weeks in Canada, then one week back home.
The skilled positions they are currently hiring for include journeymen pressure pipe welders, heavy equipment technicians, steamfitter-pipefitters, structural ironworkers, millwright and carpenter/scaffolders. Professional staff vacancies include construction quality auditors, quality examiners/inspectors, cost estimators, high voltage construction managers, refinery shift supervisors, planners/schedulers, power engineers (operators), project control leads, project managers/coordinators, and health, safety and environment professionals.
“This is a fantastic opportunity and I’m proud of our affiliation with VetJobs,” said VFW National Commander Richard L. DeNoyer, of Middleton, Mass. “Helping thousands of veterans to get well-paying jobs in an important industry just further proves that no one does more for veterans than the VFW.”
To apply for the new positions, go to www.vetjobs.com, click on Search Jobs, then type “opportunity awaits” into the company search field. Additional job postings will be added in the coming months as the Canadian pipeline project progresses.
Barack Obama is a job-killing Marxist.
114,000 jobs on the Canadian side of the border. We could have had that many damn jobs on OUR side of the border if Obama wasn’t a Marxist posing as an environmentalist.
Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.
He (Patrick Moore) says the fall of communism brought an influx of anti-corporate extremism to the environmental movement because, “suddenly, the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.
“A lot of those in the peace movement were anti-American and, to an extent, pro-Soviet. By virtue of their anti-Americanism, they tended to sometimes favor the communist approach. A lot of those people, a lot of those social activists, moved into the environmental movement once the peace movement was no longer relevant.” Social activists, he suggests, “are now using the rhetoric of environmentalism to promote other collectivist agendas, such as class struggle — which I personally believe is a legitimate area, but I don’t believe it’s legitimate to mix it up with environmentalism.”
Canada is going ahead with the Keystone pipeline on its side of the border because they are not evil unlike our own demon-possessed administration. If Obama is re-elected, the jobs will go anywhere but America and the oil will go to China. Not that not having oil will matter to those who vote for Obama; they believe they’ll be riding around on winged unicorns.
I hope 114,000 veterans can escape Obamination and start a new life in Canada.
It’s pretty amazing. Up until Obama, people from ruined nations fled north TO America. Now under Obama, Americans from a ruined nation are fleeing north to Canada to get the hell away from what used to be the greatest nation in the history of the world.
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Parker was crowned the most accurate forecaster on Wall Street when the S&P 500 closed 2011 within a handful of points of his year-end target of 1,238.
His 2012 year-end target calls for stocks to fall to 1,167. He sees a global economic slowdown hitting corporate profits hard.
Parker called for the S&P 500 to close 2011 at 1,238, making him one of the most accurate, albeit bearish, strategists on the street. Will he be right this time?
Ah, whaddoes he know???
1,167, for the record, represents about a 20% drop from current market value.
Parker expresses some of his views on the coming months and why investors should bail here. But it’s too bad I couldn’t post video of Adam Parker’s April 2nd visit with Larry Kudrow on his CNBC financial program; because neither man was happy with Obama’s incredibly failed policies.
It’s hard to understand how on earth Obama can possibly get re-elected if these men are correct: Obama will say, “blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush and, finally, blame Bush some more,” and people will be thinking, “Wait a minute, dude; YOU’VE been the president for the last four years, haven’t you?”
P.S. Enjoy your next fill-up, and please think of Obama as you watch the dollar amount indicator on the pump skyrocketing upward. As of April 2, the national average price for regular gasoline was $3.94 – versus $1.79 when the man who appointed an energy secretary who wanted to make American gasoline prices rise to the levels of Europe took office.
I’ve posted this video a number of times to document what Democrats really want: socialism and the government takeover of free enterprise and personal freedom.
But the words of the oil industry executive that led to Maxine Waters’ outburst are now equally interesting.
Listen to what he predicts:
Here is the exchange in transcript form:
Oil Executive: I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress ever-increasing prices unless the demand comes down – and the $5 will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.
Maxine Waters: And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing … uh, um, [pause] … will be about [another long pause in which she tries not to document that Democrats are communists] … basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.
The executive explains simple reality: “If you don’t allow us to find and extract new oil resources the price is going to go up and up and up you lunatic idiot.”
And the lunatic idiot issues a threat that Democrat Marxist communist dictator thugs don’t need no stinking reality. They can “socialize” the oil companies by exercise of naked government dictatorship and that will somehow magically make all our problems go away.
Larry Kudlow: In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.
Liberals try to insinuate that the gas prices going down AS BUSH WAS SPEAKING WHEN THEY HAD BEEN GOING UP EVERY SINGLE DAY PRIOR TO BUSH’S SPEAKING was merely the result of the economy stagnating. But that is a lie: our economy didn’t blow up until September of 2008. By the time Lehman Brothers collapse officially triggered the financial collapse on September 14, oil prices were already at $100 a barrel.
It was the hint provided by George W. Bush that ended the speculatory bubble of oil.
After rumors send oil prices falling, Welch renews call on President to tap nation’s oil reserves
BURLINGTON, VT – A day after rumors that the U.S. would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) spooked Wall Street speculators and sent oil prices falling, Rep. Peter Welch is pointing to that episode as exhibit A of the effect such a move would have on gas prices and is renewing his call on President Obama to take action
Notice that Democrats are demanding that Obama open the strategic reserves, which amounts to a very temporary increase of oil on the market. Democrats are demanding that Saudi Arabia drill more. They are demanding that oil supplies be increased to bring down prices even as they deny that the US – which is idly sitting on reserves of 1.6 trillion barrels of oil – would have any impact on prices.
Democrats want America to be more reliant and more dependent on Arab oil. They absolutely refuse to allow America to become energy-independent. That’s the bottom freaking line.
Our strategic petroleum reserve was intended to be stockpiled for time of national emergency or war. Obama wants to use it as a political slush fund to benefit his presidential campaign. The fact is, the US government bought that oil at a lower price and will replace that oil at a shockingly higher price. And since we very obviously can’t keep doing that, it won’t have a measurable effect on gas prices because it clearly isn’t a long-term supply increase.
And all of the above is why during the last three years, gas prices have gone from well under $2 a gallon ($1.84 a gallon on January 20, 2009) to nearly $5 a gallon on Obama’s watch. Bush gave us low gas prices; Obama took them away.
“Since taking office, [Obama] has declared 85% of our offshore areas off limits, decreased oil and gas leases in the Rockies by 70%, rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, and has 10 federal agencies planning more regulation of hydraulic fracturing…. The president’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ approach to energy security is hurting consumers.”
[A] study, prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), examined oil production on federal and non-federal land between 2007-2011. Approximately 96 percent of the total increase in domestic oil production occurred on non-federal land, CRS found.
Earlier this month, the Energy Information Administration reported that oil and natural gas production on federal land declined 40 percent over the past decade and 14 percent in 2011 alone.
And so you actually wonder why gas prices have “necessarily skyrocketed” under Obama’s watch???
This is nothing more than a continuation of Maxine Waters’ communist war on the means of production of the American economy.
I’ve written about the so-called “tax breaks” for oil companies. Note that what little “tax breaks” there were came on the back of tax increases – and the tax increases outweighed the tax breaks. The bottom line is that if Obama gives the oil industry a middle finger, the oil industry will give the American people who put this fool into office a middle finger.
a March 2011 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service suggesting that the president’s proposals could actually result in higher gas prices and a greater reliance on imports.
The proposed repeal “would increase tax collections from the oil and natural gas industries and may have the effect of decreasing exploration, development and production, while increasing prices and increasing the nation’s foreign oil dependence. These same proposals, from an alternate point of view, might be considered to be the elimination of tax preferences that have favored the oil and natural gas industries over other energy sources and made oil and gas products artificially inexpensive, with consumer costs held below the true cost of consumption, when the external costs associated with environmental costs and energy dependence, among other effects, are included,” the CRS said.
“The Administration estimates that the tax changes outlined in the budget proposal would provide $22.8 billion in revenues over the period 2012 to 2016, and over $43.6 billion from 2012 to 2021. These changes, if enacted by Congress, also would reduce the tax advantage enjoyed by independent oil and natural gas companies over the major oil companies. On what would likely be a small scale, the proposals also would make oil and natural gas more expensive for U.S. consumers and likely increase foreign dependence,” according to the report
There was a funny line I remember from Big Bang Theory to put this into perspective:
Leonard: Well let me see if I can explain your situation using physics. What would you be if you were attached to another object by an incline plane, wrapped helicly around an axis?
Sheldon: Screwed.
Leonard: There you go.
We’re screwed as long as Obama is allowed to continue ruining America.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a House panel Tuesday that he’d give himself top marks when asked to grade his policies’ effects on energy prices. Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked President Obama’s top energy official if he’d grade himself with an “A minus” on “controlling the cost of gasoline at the pump.”
Chu responded by saying he’d give himself a better grade than that.
“The tools we have at our disposal are limited, but I would I say I would give myself a little higher in that since I became Secretary of Energy, I’ve been doing everything I can to get long-term solutions,” Chu said.
Chu would give himself the top grade on gas prices despite that fact that the average price for a gallon of gas just hit $3.87 – the highest ever recorded in the month of March, according to ABC News.
I actually agree with Chu. He SHOULDget an A – for making gasoline the most expensive over the longest period of time we’ve ever seen. Which is exactly what he set out to do.
It was a question from John Harwood at CNBC: “So could the high oil price help us?” and Obama said, “Well, I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment, a gradual increase.”
Obama’s full statement:
OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that, ehh, this is such a shock t’American pocketbooks is not a good thing. Uh, but if we take some steps right now t’, uh, help people make the adjustment — first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers.
Just try to imagine what would have ensued if Bush had asked the mainstream media to literally scrub an already published story from their little Ministry of Truth complex. The Marxists who write our news would have a) broadcast Bush’s request and framed it in terms of a Big Brother fascist narrative; and b) blared the news Bush had asked them to scrub all over the airwaves just out of pure spite.
Now, go back to what Obama said and then allow me to explain what Obama SHOULD have said and why his answer is not only deplorable, but depraved. Obama should have said:
“Could higher gas prices help us? Absolutely NOT! High gas prices hurt the American people, it hurts the American economy and it undermines the American way of life. High gas prices are the worst form of regressive tax – by which I mean it would be a tax that afflicts poor people and particularly poor working Americans – far more than it would harm wealthier people who afford expensive gasoline. And I will do absolutely everything in my power as president to ensure that the American people are able to purchase gasoline at prices that will enable them to get to work and live their lives.”
Do you see the difference in those two statements?
And which statement do YOU prefer as you consider voting for president this November? Obama’s or the conservative’s?
Why does Obama and his energy secretary Steven Chu want oil prices to be the same (about $10 a gallon now) as Europe? It’s very simple: they have a Marxist red version of a radical environmentalist green vision of energy: they want to force the American people to “choose” the energy they WANT them to choose. And if they can’t simply mandate that “choice” like the fascists they are – which would amount to political suicide – their only option is to price gasoline out of the ballpark and force Americans to buy the little green clown cars and the electric golf cart cars that they want.
People like Barack Obama and Steven Chu sit in their limousines and see an average American driving down the road in a halfway cool car and say, “That’s unacceptable. There should be a much bigger difference between the elites who run the world and the proletariat masses.”
It’s the same damn kind of clown car with the same damn kind of radical environmentalist green clown car marketing that Obama and Chu want us in today. It’s a little tiny gutless piece of crap. And you ought to be driving one instead of something better, because frankly you’re a faceless nobody AND YOU SUCK. That’s the statist view of “an automobile for the people.”
So please reflect on the man that Barack Obama appointed to “get an A” with his current energy prices. Consider that Obama knew Chu had said:
Start Thinking Right 