U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate IN THE WORLD (But Emperor Obama Says Business Must Render More Unto Him Instead Of Creating Jobs)

America is NUMBER ONE!!!  But unfortunately, we’re just number one in anti-competitive taxes, pseudo-scientific obstructionism and costly regulations that all guarantee we’ll never be number one in much else ever again.

Let me take those in order:

No Fooling: U.S. Now Has Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World
Curtis Dubay
March 30, 2012 at 3:46 pm

This April Fool’s Day, the joke is on all of us. That’s because as of April 1, the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.

Our high corporate tax rate has long made the U.S. an uncompetitive place for new investment. This has driven new jobs to other, more competitive nations and meant fewer jobs and lower wages for all Americans.

Other developed nations have been cutting their rates for over 20 years. The U.S. did nothing.

The U.S. was at least able to stay out of the top spot until now, because Japan had also failed to get its corporate tax rate in line with other more competitive nations. But Japan has finally seen the light and reduced its rate as of April 1.

Japan’s rate was 39.5 percent. That was just barely ahead of the U.S. rate of 39.2 percent (this includes the 35 percent federal rate plus the average rate the states add on). Japan’s rate now stands at 36.8 percent after its recent cut.

The U.S. rate is well above the 25 percent average of other developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In fact, the U.S. rate is almost 15 percentage points higher than the OECD average.

This gaping disparity means every other country that we compete with for new investment is better situated to land that new investment and the jobs that come with it, because the after-tax return from that investment promises to be higher in those lower-taxed nations.

Our high rate also makes our businesses prime targets for takeovers by businesses headquartered in foreign countries, because their worldwide profits are no longer subject to the highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate. Until Congress cuts the rate, more and more iconic U.S. businesses such as Anheuser-Busch (which was bought by its Belgian competitor InBev in 2008) will be bought by their foreign competitors.

To get back in line with international norms, Congress needs to reduce the rate so the combined federal and state rate matches or falls below the OECD average. Some will contend that with deficits north of $1 trillion annually, we simply can’t afford such a large rate reduction. But the actions of the nations we compete with for new investment show that these nations understand that lowering the corporate tax rate is necessary because of the boost to economic growth it provides.

The United Kingdom, for instance, is in as perilous fiscal situation as the U.S. However, the U.K. reduced its rate in 2011 from 28 percent to 26 percent. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne recently announced that the U.K. would further cut its rate to 22 percent by 2014 to increase competitiveness.

Congress needs to cut the corporate tax rate to make the U.S. a more hospitable place for investment. The time for excuses is over. Until it does, every day will be a cruel joke.

An interesting exchange between ABC News anchor Charles Gibson and Barack Obama during a debate shows us where Obama is:

You have however said you would favor an increase in the capital gains tax. As a matter of fact, you said on CNBC, and I quote, “I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton, which was 28 percent.”
 
It’s now 15 percent. That’s almost a doubling if you went to 28 percent. But actually Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent.
 
SENATOR OBAMA: Right.

MR. GIBSON: And George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent.

SENATOR OBAMA: Right.

MR. GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?
 
SENATOR OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

You can reward wise practices or you can punish them.  You can reward individual initiative or you can punish it.  Obama is the latter even though the former is far and away the best for society.

Consider the words of Mark Levin as he shreds Obama’s “fairness” meme:

Utopianism also finds a receptive audience among the society’s disenchanted, disaffected, dissatisfied, and maladjusted who are unwilling or unable to assume responsibility for their own real or perceived conditions but instead blame their surroundings, “the system,” and others.  They are lured by the false hope and promises of utopian transformation and the criticisms of the existing society, to which their connection is tentative or nonexistent.  Improving the malcontent’s lot becomes linked to the utopian cause.  Moreover, disparaging and diminishing the successful and accomplished becomes an essential tactic.  No one should be better than anyone else, regardless of the merits or value of his contributions.  By exploiting human frailties, frustrations, jealousies, and inequities, a sense of meaning and self-worth is created in the malcontent’s otherwise unhappy and directionless life.  Simply put, equality in misery – that is, equality of result or conformity – is advanced as a just, fair and virtuous undertaking.  Liberty, therefore, is inherently immoral, expect where it avails equality.

Equality, in this sense, is a form of radical egalitarianism that has long been the subject of grave concern by advocates of liberty.  Tocqueville pointed out that in democracies, the dangers of misapplied equality are not perceived until it is too late.  “The evils that extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most violent, habit already causes them to be no longer felt.”  Among the leading classical liberal philosophers and free-market economists, Friedrich Hayek wrote, “Equality of the general rules of law and conduct … is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty.  Not only has liberty nothing to do with any sort of equality, but it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects.  This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.”  Thus, while radical egalitarianism encompasses economic equality, it more broadly involves prostrating the individual.

Equality, as understood by the American Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law.  Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect.  Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics.  Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty (Mark Levin, Ameritopia, pp. 7-9).

Levin proceeds in the following paragraphs to demonstrate why “equality” is inherently easier to demagogue than “liberty.”  He then points out – in words that obviously could be applied to ObamaCare:

Utopianism’s authority also knows no definable limits.  How could it?  If they exist, what are they?  Radical egalitarianism or the perfectibility of mankind is an ongoing process of individual and societal transformation that must cast off the limits of history, tradition, and experience for that which is said to be necessary, novel, progressive, and inevitable.  Ironically, inconvenient facts and evidence must be rejected or manipulated, as must the very nature of man, for utopianism is a fantasy that evolves into a dogmatic cause, which in turn manifests a holy truth for a false religion.  There is little or not tolerance for the individual’s deviation from orthodoxy lest it threaten the survival of the enterprise (Ibid., p. 10).

Obama isn’t just pushing for more and more taxes to punish more and more job creators to guarantee that there will be fewer and fewer jobs; he’s also targeting the oil that lubricates the entire American economy and way of life:

Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:

The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.

Obama has a documented history of performing endless “studies” and then perverting those studies in profoundly unscientific ways:

Academics, environmentalists and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.

[…]

The latest complaint from scientists comes in a report by the Interior Department’s inspector general, which concluded that the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the administration’s six-month ban on new deep-water drilling. The AP obtained the report early Wednesday.

And Obama has used frankly Stalinist tactics to then pressure the experts to fabricate their numbers in his political favor:

The Obama administration pressured analysts to change an environmental review to reflect fewer job losses from a proposed regulation, the contractors who worked on the review testified Friday.

The dispute revolves around proposed changes to a rule regulating coal mining near streams and other waterways. The experts contracted to analyze the impact of the rule initially found that it would cost 7,000 coal jobs.

But the contractors claim they were subsequently pressured to not only keep the findings under wraps but “revisit” the study in order to show less of an impact on jobs.

Steve Gardner, president of Kentucky consulting firm ECSI, claimed that after the project team refused to “soften” the numbers, the firms working on the study were told the contract would not be renewed. ECSI was a subcontractor on the project.

The government “‘suggested’ that the … members revisit the production impacts and associated job loss numbers, with different assumptions that obviously would then lead to a lesser impact,” Gardner testified before a House Natural Resources subcommittee. “The … team unanimously refused to use a ‘fabricated’ baseline scenario to soften the production loss numbers.”

So when Obama says he’s going to do a study, what he means is that he’s going to delay and stall and finally use manipulation and pressure-tactics and deception to fabricate a bogus “legitimacy” for his ideology and his cronyism.

To add to the injury Obama is doing to the economy there is the “hidden tax” of regulation:

A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) titled “Ten Thousand Commandments” reveals the vast amount of private-sector capital drowned in the sea of government regulations.

The report’s conclusion is mind-boggling.  The cost of complying with federal regulations has hit the $1.7 trillion dollar mark.

That’s trillion, with a T.

To put that number in perspective, it’s larger than the President’s own anticipated 2011 budget deficit of $1.6 trillion.  In fact, the current regulatory burden imposed on businesses across America now amounts to 50% of total government spending in one year alone.

That’s nuts!

But guess what?  We can top it.

As the CEI report underscores, the compliance cost of regulation is larger than all corporate pretax profits in 2008 and dwarfs the estimated 2010 individual income tax receipts by nearly 50%.

That last point is worth repeating:  The cost of abiding by all the government regulations tallies up to $1.7 trillion, which towers over the revenue brought in by all income taxes, in every bracket.

Putting it all together puts America out of business.

Government Report: New Obama EPA Rules To Cost More Than 800,000 Jobs

There’s all the crap about Obama being a Kenyan and a Muslim, etc. ad nauseum.  We’re way beyond that.  I for one don’t think that Barack Obama is conspiring to fly any planes into any skyscrapers.

That said, he is nevertheless a terrorist.  He is an economic terrorist who literally destroys jobs by the hundreds of thousands – something no Muslim jihadist could ever do to us.  And my labeling of Barack Obama has nothing to do with the color of his skin or even with his religion; it has everything to do with his Marxist ideology.

Exclusive: EPW report shows new EPA rules will cost more than 800,000 jobs
posted at 8:45 am on September 28, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Actually, it’s not just the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s minority contingent that fears the loss of nearly a million jobs from new EPA rules on greenhouse gases and other emissions issues.  It’s also groups like the United Steel Workers, Unions for Jobs and the Environment, and experts like King’s College Professor Ragnar Lofstedt.  Hot Air got an exclusive look at a report that the EPW minority staff will release later this morning detailing the economic damage that an activist EPA will do to the American economy, and which will come at perhaps the worst possible time, both economically and politically.

The executive summary spells out the stakes involved in the effort to rein in the EPA:

New standards for commercial and industrial boilers: up to 798,250 jobs at risk;

The revised National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone: severe restrictions on job creation and business expansion in hundreds of counties nationwide.

New standards for Portland Cement plants: up to 18 cement plants at risk of shutting down, threatening nearly 1,800 direct jobs and 9,000 indirect jobs;

The Endangerment Finding/Tailoring Rules for Greenhouse Gas Emissions: higher energy costs; jobs moving overseas; severe economic impacts on the poor, the elderly, minorities, and those on fixed incomes; 6.1 million sources subject to EPA control and regulation; and

In fact, the new regulations threaten to put entire industries out of business.  The new standard for boilers, titled “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters” and called the Boiler MACT, creates a standard that literally no producer in the US meets at the moment.  The industry group Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) represents end-user firms that employ 750,000 in various industries, and they concur:

IECA members have 6 units that were part of the best performing units and none can comply with the standards based on the best performing units. Based on the analysis of the data EPA used to develop these standards, it appears that none of the coal-fired boilers in the source category can meet the proposed standards.

What happens when the installed boilers don’t meet the new standard?  Factories and other facilities will have to close, putting jobs in danger and firms already hammered by the recession will lose production days — which will destroy jobs.  That’s why the United Steel Workers have sounded the alarm, insisting that the EPA’s proposal will mean disaster:

“Tens of thousands of these jobs will be imperiled.  In addition, many more tens of thousands of jobs in the supply chains and in the communities where these plants are located also will be at risk.”

Nor are steelworkers the only group at risk.  New industrial standards for Portland cement threaten to stop all American production in the name of environmental protection — and send the work overseas to China, where ironically the standards are more lax and more pollution will result:

“So rather than importing 20 million tons of cement per year, the proposed [rule] will lead to cement imports of more than 48 million tons per year. In other words, by tightening the regulations on U.S. cement kilns, there will be a risk transfer of some 28 million tons of cement offshore, mostly to China.” – Professor Ragnar Lofstedt, Kings College (London)

Again, no facility in the US meets the standards proposed by the EPA.  Imposition of these standards would at least temporarily close almost 20 percent of all American cement producers and reduce long-term cement production from 8-15%.  The cement that will be needed for construction demand will have to be imported, primarily from China, which is expanding their cement production using environmental standards significantly below current American standards.  In other words, we can expect more pollution, not less — just outsourced along with the jobs in the industry.

Watch for the full report later today at the EPW Minority Caucus website.

Obama isn’t backing down.  His jihad against fossil fuels and the US jobs those fuels create and sustain must succeed.  No matter how many Americans are harmed.  But in spite of the facts, our Liar-in-Chief keeps spinning and twisting:

“We may end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive omnibus legislation. But we’re going to stay on this because it is good for our economy, it’s good for our national security, and, ultimately, it’s good for our environment.”

Let’s give a listen to what Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu had to say about yet ANOTHER attempt to destroy the economy and destroy American jobs:

“The president’s policies right now are doing much more harm than the [BP] spill itself to the economy of the South coast. … It’s just gotten to a point where people in Louisiana ask, ‘Do they even understand what is going on down here?’ They have the entire offshore industry virtually shut down.”

Obama imposed a job-crushing drilling ban in the Gulf of Mexico, which has resulted in drilling rigs moving away from American jobs.  Even as Obama and his pal George Soros fund deep drilling operations in Mexico and Brazil.

When even labor unions and Democrat politicians start standing up and screaming that a Democrat president is destroying their jobs and their lives, it is way past time to take notice.

If we don’t vote these Democrats out and take away both the House and the Senate from them, we may not have a country by the next election.

Yet Another Liberal Points Out That Obama Is An Abject Failure

You have to appreciate the irony at the start of this article.  Democrats have mocked Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill.”  But is their increasingly loud wail to Obama – “Do something, baby, do something” – somehow supposed to be better?

Where was plan A?
By KIRSTEN POWERS
Last Updated: 9:58 AM, May 27, 2010

Do something, baby, do something: That’s the cry from Obama supporters and opponents alike as the oil keeps gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

The political firestorm kept growing yesterday, with supporter James Carville ranting that the administration has been “lackadaisical” and “naive” in its response to the disaster. He urged it to rapidly “move to Plan B.”

But that suggests there was ever a Plan A.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is so frustrated with the lack of response to his plan to stop the slick with sand barriers that yesterday he called on the White House and BP to either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.”

“Plug the damn hole,” President Obama reportedly barked at staffers in frustration after the explosion. That’s right up there with “Heckuva job, Brownie” in terms of clueless statements uttered by presidents in the midst of nationally televised disasters.

Meanwhile, White House regret over Obama’s politically expedient embrace of the “Drill, baby, drill” trope is growing faster than the vast oil slick.

Back on March 31, Obama announced — to the horror of many of his supporters — that he was expanding offshore drilling along the coastlines of the south and mid-Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico. Worse, he painted a (too) rosy scenario of offshore drilling being eminently safe.

True, it is rare that a full-blown environmental catastrophe results from an offshore oil well. But it can happen — and a Democratic president who’s embracing drilling ought to know the risks, and be prepared for the worst. But rather than planning for a spill, Obama parroted McCain-Palin talking points about how safe offshore drilling is.

Turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration back in 1994 drafted plans for responding to a major Gulf oil spill, a response called “In-Situ Burn.”

Ron Gourget, a former federal oil-spill-response coordinator and one author of the draft, told the Times of London: “The whole reason the plan was created was so that we could pull the trigger right away.” The idea was to use barriers called “fire booms” to collect and contain the spill at sea — then burn it off. He believes this could have captured 95 percent of the oil from this spill.

But at the time of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the federal government didn’t have a single fire boom on hand. Nor is there any evidence that the government required BP to have any clear plan to deal with a massive spill. How is this OK?

The administration’s chief response so far was to send out Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to do his best impersonation of a totalitarian thug, proclaiming that the government would “have its boot on the throat of BP.”

(Fun fact: While in the Senate, Salazar backed an increase in oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region by promoting and voting for the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.)

Since the “blame BP” strategy isn’t working, Obama will today announce tougher safety requirements and more rigorous inspections for offshore drilling operations. Sounds nice — except the problem isn’t a lack of safety requirements, it’s that the experts at the US Minerals Management Service ignored the existing requirements.

In fact, it was under Salazar’s reign that the MMS approved BP’s drilling without getting the permits required by law for drilling that might harm endangered species. The agency routinely overruled warnings regarding the safety and environmental impact of drilling proposals in the Gulf.

None of this was a secret.

It also shouldn’t be a secret that no matter how many inspections and safety requirements you have, you can’t ever completely prevent disasters like this one. If you’re going to permit offshore drilling, be prepared to respond to a spill.

If he promised us anything, Obama promised us competence. Instead, we’ve gotten the Keystone Cops.

Ah, competence.  One day after Obama is gone, we might actually have some of that in the White House.

Obama is bringing his incompetence everywhere he goes, rather like the travelling salesman with the unfortunate body odor that exudes out of every pour brings stink with him everywhere he goes.

What was it about being a community organizer that prepared him to actually lead anything constructive?

It’s not right to say that Obama has been doing everything the federal government could do; no, he ignored the very first thing that the federal government already had as policy to do in the event of a disaster like this – and has done absolutely nothing else in its place.  Oil that could have been contained and burned off is instead murdering all of the pelicans on the coast.  And, instead of helping Louisiana do everything it could to keep that oil off its coasts and marshes, Obama’s federal government has massively screwed up on that side of the coin, too.  Governor Jindal demanded 24 temporary sand berms to act as a barrier between the coast and the oil; first the federal government said it had to dot every i and cross every t with endless environmental studies before it would authorize any such construction; then the government said it would only permit six berms, and would only actually pay for just one berm.  And now the oil is all over the place and its too damn late for much of anything but to scrub oil from the few pelicans that might survive.

Instead, what Zero did was ZERO.  Instead of actually working to resolve he problem, Obama has handled this like a campaign issue.  He handed all the responsibility over to British Petroleum while simultaneously saying he was responsible.  It has all been about words rather than action.

Bobby Jindal has called upon Obama to “either “stop the oil spill or get out of the way.” And of course Obama won’t do either.  His government is worse than useless, because it is getting in the way of actual efforts by Louisiana to DO SOMETHING.

So here’s what we’re facing now under the failed regime of our Turd-in-Chief:

“In Revelations, it says the water will turn to blood. That’s what it looks like out here — like the Gulf is bleeding,” said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Plaquemines Parish as he kneeled down to take a picture of an oil-coated feather. “This is going to choke the life out of everything.” […]

Eugene, 54, who has worked for decades in a shipyard, said he was growing tired of the government’s response.

“He ain’t much of a leader,” he said of Obama. “The beach you can clean up. The marsh you can’t. Where’s the leadership. I want to hear what’s being done. We’re going to lose everything.” […]

Newly disclosed internal Coast Guard documents from the day after the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig indicated that U.S. officials were warning of a leak of 336,000 gallons per day of crude from the well in the event of a complete blowout.

The volume turned out to be much closer to that figure than the 42,000 gallons per day that BP first estimated. Weeks later it was revised to 210,000 gallons. Now, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million gallons of crude is believed to be leaking daily.

“He ain’t much of a leader.”  You got that right.  I was screaming that from the rooftops two years and change ago.

Do we have good information?  No, everything keeps turning out to be wrong – and always much for the worse.  Is anything getting done?  No.  Just one failed plan after another.  Having never bothered to implement the plan we’ve had since 1994 for a disaster like this.

Now we’re being told that the latest “fix” is capturing about 42,000 gallons of oil a day.  Which might sound impressive until you realize that it’s leaking a MILLION gallons a day.

And we’re looking at the very real possibility that we’re going to continue to see a massive disaster get more massive every single day until Christmas.

The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster is rather like the Obama administration itself: there’s just no end to this disaster, and all we have instead of solutions is a constant stream of misinformation and excuses.

If You Support Obama, Please Quit Driving, Traveling, Or Using Most Household Products

Barack Obama took more money from British Petroleum than any politician over a twenty year period.  In spite of the fact that he had only been in national politics for less than three years.  Barack Obama’s administration approved the project and granted the permit for the doomed BP drilling site.  Barack Obama’s administration helped quash environmental problems and issued an environmental waiver to BP at said doomed site only days before the disaster.  Barack Obama failed to take the disaster seriously and delayed serious action for weeks, fiddling with fundraisers, golf outings, and vacations while the Gulf went to hell.  The Obama administration has continued to delay and waste time pursuing the dotting of the i’s and the crossing of the t’s regarding mindless bureaucratic inanities.

Obama is rather like Oliver Hardy blaming British Petroleum like it was Stan Laurel: “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!”  But the fact is that Obama was up to his eyeballs in this mess from the inception.

One example of the time-wasting bureaucratic idiocy that is so characteristic of shockingly poor leadership was the sand berms that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal demanded.  Jindal spent weeks urging the federal government to construct sand berms that would protect the coastland and the vital marshes from oil seepage, but ran into one federal government delay after another.  He wanted some two dozen temporary berms, but the federal government dithered and then dithered some more.  Eventually the feds said they would allow six such berms.  And would only pay for one.  And that they wouldn’t allow any construction until after an environmental impact study.  While lethal oil began to contaminate the coastlands and marshes.

“It is clear the resources needed to protect our coast are still not here,” Gov. Jindal said.  “Oil sits and waits for cleanup, and every day that it waits for cleanup more of our marsh dies.”

44 days after the disaster, Obama graciously allowed Louisiana to construct six berms.  You know, the-build-a-barn-after-the-horses-left thing.

Jon Stewart absolutely skewered Obama’s incompetence by playing videos in which Obama vows “not to rest” until he solves the BP disaster, intermixed with video footage of all the useless garbage he’s been up to.

Jon Stewart link 1

Jon Stewart link 2

And then there’s the “never let a good crisis go to waste” thing.  Obama has handled this crisis more as a political problem than a national disaster from the outset.  And in Barack Obama’s brand of politics, you demagogue and you pander to leftist special interests.  And thus:

Obama: US must end its dependence on fossil fuels
3:16 PM on 06/02/2010
JULIE PACE, Associated Press

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Seizing on a disastrous oil spill to advance a cause, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil and pass a clean-energy bill that he says would help the nation end its dependence on fossil fuels.

Obama predicted that he would find the political support for legislation that would dramatically alter the way Americans fuel their homes and cars, including placing a price on carbon pollution, even though such legislation is politically divisive and remains bogged in the Senate.

“The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,” Obama told an audience at Carnegie Mellon University. “I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can, and I will work with anyone to get this done. And we will get it done.”

Obama said the country’s continuing dependence on fossil fuels “will jeopardize our national security, it will smother our planet and will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.” […]

“The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future,” the president said. […]

Obama also used the speech to lash out at Republicans with partisan rhetoric, saying they have mostly “sat on the sidelines and shouted from the bleachers” as he’s tried to restore the economy.

And thus Obama, who couldn’t be more responsible for this disaster without being the guy who blew up the platform, resorts to his constant stream of demagogic bullcrap.  It’s those Republicans who are responsible, you know: “The fact that I took all that BP campaign money, and then paid BP back by securing environmental waivers, and then paid BP back some more by letting BP broadcast the message that everything was under control and it was just a minor technical problem, nothing to worry about, is beside the point.  Republicans are evil, and they are to blame for everything.”

Mind you, Obama doesn’t have anything even close to a consistent energy position; to have that, he’d have to be an actual leader rather than a mere politically opportunistic demagogue.  Thus only a couple of months ago Obama was the one who ENDED the ban on offshore drilling (hint: not Bush):

From NPR, March 31, 2010:

President Obama announced the end of a decades-old ban on oil and gas drilling along much of the U.S. Atlantic coast and northern Alaska on Wednesday, as part of an effort to reduce foreign imports and win support for an energy and climate bill.

Then we had the Gulf of Mexico disaster, and suddenly “the end of a decades-old ban” suddenly became a brand new ban.  And the politician who accepted more BP-bribe money than anybody is suddenly shooting out demagoguery onto the airwaves the way that damn hole keeps shooting out oil into the ocean.

It’s not like Obama is an actual leader who needs a consistent policy; rather, he’s a pandering constantly-in-campaign-mode weasel who will say or do anything to gain a momentary political advantage.

And, of course, Obama also demonized oil companies.  Not just British Petroleum, the one actually responsible for paying Obama all those campaign contributions and creating the disaster, but ALL oil companies.  Because oil is as evil as Republicans.  And Democrats want to stop oil at all costs.

Forget the fact that this disaster was caused by Democrats who kept pushing oil companies further and further away from shore, into more and more and more dangerous conditions, until a disaster was inevitable.  Every single Democrat who has helped stopped oil drilling on the coastal shelf or – better yet, on our land – is partly to blame for this disaster.

Unless you don’t think we need oil.

But if you don’t think we need oil, the stop the hell using it.

Let me just put it this way: if you support Barack Obama, quit traveling.  Do not drive your car, do not take the bus, do not fly, do not get on a boat.  Because it’s finally time that you were consistent: ending oil means no oil.  So don’t use it.

Go to this site and make sure you don’t use any of the household products that contain oil, too.

My advice to you Democrats is just to move out of your house with all those evil oil products and live in a hole.  Don’t use a shovel to dig your hole – because it was made using oil – just scratch at the dirt with your fingernails.

Turn off your computer, too.  Because it’s got oil products, too.

And just climb in that damn hole and stay there.

Heck, maybe we could plug the hole in the Gulf with Democrats and have the best of all possible worlds.

Liberal Bill Maher First Points Out Obama A Hypocrite; Then Reveals That He Himself Is An Idiot

I don’t know.  The fact that (former Clinton spindoctor) George Stephanopoulos left ABC’s “This Week,” and now they are bringing vile turds like Bill Maher, can’t bode well for ABC’s flagship political program.

Still, it WAS nice watching Maher get owned by George Will:

Even Politifact, which is reliably to the left, had to point out that someone had scooped out whatever brains Bill Maher had begun his sorry life with and filled his hollow skull with doggy doo-doo:

In 2008, Brazil ranked No. 7 on the list of the world’s countries that consume the most oil, using about 2.5 million barrels per day. In first place was the United States at 19.5 million barrels per day, followed by China, Japan, India, Russia, and Germany, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Brazil also produces a lot of oil through drilling near its coasts. In recent years, Brazil’s state-controlled energy company Petrobras announced a major new find of oil in some of the deepest waters where exploration is conducted, some 7,000 feet below in the Atlantic Ocean. The find is expected to make Brazil even more important in the oil export business. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that Brazil will become a net exporter of oil this year, even before the new fields are tapped.

Getting back to our factcheck, Maher was likely remembering Brazil’s aggressive efforts to promote ethanol, and certainly Brazil has outpaced the United States in getting flexible fuel vehicles on the road. But Maher said, “Brazil got off oil in the last 30 years.” Actually, Brazil still consumes a great deal of oil. It’s also embarking on more offshore drilling in some of the deepest waters for exploration. Brazil is hardly “off oil.” So we rate Maher’s statement False.

Of course, I would submit that Politifact was in the difficult position of having to denounce Maher’s lies to protect Obama’s lies.

Now, what Maher said about Obama being a hypocrite, and making a bunch of bogus promises he didn’t even try to live up to, that part was true.

That BP platform that blew up and created the biggest ecological disaster in US history?  Obama signed off on that; it was his baby.

And why would Obama have signed off on that project?  And why would he have taken BP’s word that everything was okay until it was beyond obvious it wasn’t?  That one’s easy, too.  Because Barry Hussein was the BIGGEST recipient of campaign donations from British Petroleum, aka BP, that’s why.

That’s right.  Barry Hussein, the man who arrogantly promised to lower the oceans and heal the planet, is the guy who got bought off by BP, is the guy who signed off on the disastrous BP project, is the guy who waited WAY too long to deal with the building disaster, and is the man responsible for the biggest ecological disaster in American history.

Democrats Finally Blink On Oil Drilling After Decades Of Obstruction

“Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.”

It is a frankly stunning victory, coming on the heels of an incredibly cynical Democratic proposal that was literally intended to effectively kill offshore drilling even as it gave Democrats running for re-election the pretense of having “voted to allow offshore drilling.”  Republicans rightly held firm against the proposal, recognizing that by not allowing any revenue sharing with the states, it would have provided no incentive for the states to allow new drilling, and it would have continued to keep 90% of our oil off limits.

To understand the extent of the House Democratic collapse on offshore drilling, it is important to replay the words and actions of its leadership.  Not very long ago, Nancy Pelosi was single-mindedly committed to an ideological and frankly megalomaniacal effort to obstruct American energy development:

With fewer than 20 legislative days before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1, the entire appropriations process has largely ground to a halt because of the ham-handed fighting that followed Republican attempts to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. And after promising fairness and open debate, Pelosi has resorted to hard-nosed parliamentary devices that effectively bar any chance for Republicans to offer policy alternatives.

“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 wrote a story on this available here.

According to a Fox News story titled, “Democrats to Let Offshore Drilling Ban Expire, Conceding Defeat in Battle With GOP“:

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Democrats had clung to the hope of only a partial repeal of the drilling moratorium, but the White House had promised a veto, Obey said.

The House is expected to act on the spending bill Wednesday. The Senate is likely to go along with the House.

If the Senate Democrats allow the moratorium on offshore drilling to expire, we will see a similar miracle of reversal on the part of Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said things like:

“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.”

In other words, they either never believed the sheer bull poop they were spouting, or else they are the kind of people who would cynically dump out “saving the planet” or stopping oil which is “making us sick and ruining our country and our world” for the sake of their political skins.  Either way they are a bunch of cowards and liars.

Mind you, I’m glad that the Democrats are caving in.  I’m glad that the American people are finally beginning to realize that we need to harness our energy resources if we want to separate ourselves from foreign oil.  But I’m not willing to kiss and make up with the people who have demagogued oil for over two decades, and who have so screwed up our energy along with so much else that we’ll be years trying to recover even if we begin to act intelligently.

We’ll finally be able to quit hearing the summer-long mantra, “Even if we start drilling now we won’t have more oil for ten years.”  The biggest problem with that mantra is they were saying the exact same thing ten years ago during the Clinton years.

If you think that the Democrats will finally allow commonsense oil drilling to prevail so you can vote for them now, think again.  The Fox News story points out that:

While the House would lift the long-standing drilling moratoriums for both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a drilling ban in waters within 125 miles of Florida’s western coast would remain in force under a law passed by Congress in 2006 that opened some new areas of the east-central Gulf to drilling.

And:

The Interior Department estimates there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil beneath the Outer Continental Shelf, about half of it off California.

While the ban on energy development will be lifted if the Senate goes along with the House action, it doesn’t mean any federal sale of oil and gas leases in the offshore waters — much less actual drilling — would be imminent.

The Interior Department’s current five-year leasing plan includes potential leases off the Virginia coast but probably would not be pursued unless the state agrees to energy development. And the state is unlikely to do so without Congress agreeing to share federal royalties with the state.

The congressional battle over offshore drilling is far from over. Democrats are expected to press for broader energy legislation, probably next year, that would put limits on any drilling off most of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to fight any resumption of the drilling bans that have been in place since 1981.

If you want to put gas in your car’s gas tank, and if you don’t want to keep paying OPEC $700 billion every year for the privilege, you have to vote Republican.  Don’t think that Nancy Pelosi won’t still try to save the planet, or that Harry Reid has stopped thinking that oil is ruining our world.  After the election, you can rest assured that they will be right back to their old tricks.

Messiah Obama Really IS The Second Coming… Of Jimmy Carter

There are a lot of striking parallels between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama that people more astute than I have already contemplated:

– both were Democrats.

– both were young men.

– both had relatively little political experience prior to running for President.

– both had little in the sense of any meaningful accomplishment to point to.

– both began as outside of their Party’s inner circles.

– both built early excitement by winning early caucus primaries.

– both have run on a campaign featuring vague promises of change

– both had the eager embrace of the mainstream media.

– both were featured as having great intellects.

– both were/are foreign policy disasters just waiting to happen.

Israel Matzav noted:

The media discovered and promoted Carter. As Lawrence Shoup noted in his 1980 book The Carter Presidency and Beyond:

“What Carter had that his opponents did not was the acceptance and support of elite sectors of the mass communications media. It was their favorable coverage of Carter and his campaign that gave him an edge, propelling him rocket-like to the top of the opinion polls. This helped Carter win key primary election victories, enabling him to rise from an obscure public figure to President-elect in the short space of 9 months.”

Prior to his run, Jimmy Carter was such an unlikely presidential candidate that when he told his mother he was running for president, she asked, “Of what?”

Gerald Ford, rendered unpopular by being the president who dealt with the stench of Watergate, who pardoned Nixon, and who presided over an unfortunate period marked by our withdraw from Vietnam and the resulting damage to our prestige, found himself 30 points behind the new media darling – until his campaign hit on a strategy that nearly brought him all the way back: they focused on his His lack of experience, his lack of accomplishments and his lack of specificity on the issues. “The Ford forces pounded away at the experience question and painted Carter as a political illusion, an affable-seeming politician who was terrified of expressing his opinion on any controversial topic.” Had the campaign lasted just a week longer, many believe Ford could actually have pulled off the victory.

But that stuff – although interesting – is not what I wanted to focus on. Rather, I wanted to focus on their similarity on energy.

Namely:

1) both advocated a strategy of conservation.

2) both promised alternative energy over oil.

3) both called for a windfall profits tax on big oil companies.

Let us be frank: there is very little, if anything, that is signicantly different between Carter’s colossol failure of an energy policy and what Obama is pandering, I mean proposing.

Let me begin with 1) the strategy of conservation at the expense of increased production.

Jimmy Carter famously put on a cardigan and gave us high-minded exhortations to save on our heating bills by wearing sweaters. On a superficial level it was very true: by wearing sweators during the winter we could save oil.  It was good as public service announcement.

But as an energy policy it was laughable. And it was part of the reason he got clobbered when he ran for re-election.

When Barack Obama calls for every American to inflate their tires, it is absolutely 100% identical to Carter calling for every American to wear their sweaters.

We need more energy, not less. Our population is continuing to grow. Do you want to grow the economy as well? Do you want to create more jobs? Do you want more homes and businesses? Do you want more development, and a more modern, more mobile, and more powerful economy? Then you want more energy. And you need to vote for a president who will produce that energy.

Consider 2) the promise to develop alternative energy over oil. Barack Obama is promising to increase our “alternative energy” dependence from a little under 5% of our total energy consumption to 10% of our total energy consumption.

But he is literally concentrating on that 5% of energy by ignoring the nearly 90% that is based on oil, natural gas, and coal (by the way, natural gas is found in/near oil deposits; and harvesting the one naturally results in harvesting the other).

When we subsidize, we punish things that are doing well in order to reward something that is performing poorly. When government (during the Carter years, by the way) began to subsidize corn-based ethanol, it picked the wrong horse (as so often happens). We are now creating food shortages in order to force something that Agriculture Department studies show cost several times what it costs to produce a gallon of gasoline. And about 70% more energy is required to produce ethanol than the fuel itself actually produces, which means every time you produce a gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTU.

The decision to subsidize ethanol was based on naked political prostitution to special interest money. Do you really want these clowns – who couldn’t even run their own cafeteria without running massive deficits – making these decisions?

Meanwhile , the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. And yet the same liberals that forced ethanol upon us are refusing to allow us to use it again and again. There is a deliberate rejection of American energy in pursuit of biofuels that do nothing but disrupt our food markets and drive up the real costs of energy. Children are literally starving because of these policies.

I mean, fine. Let’s do better to develop alternative energy sources. But to literally do so at the expense of our actual primary sources of energy – which will remain our actual primary sources of energy for decades by ANY standard – is foolishness beyond belief.

When Jimmy Carter was president, foreign oil represented a little less than 1/3 of our consumption; today it is over 70%. You tell me, which way is the trend going? We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil for both our international competitiveness and for our security. And the ONLY way to do that right now is to drill for our own domestic oil. We are consuming more energy, not less. And at the same time we need that 70% figure to go DOWN, not UP. And we can only bring it down with a comprehensive energy policy that features drilling for our own oil in addition to conservation and alternative energy production.

Now let us look at the crowning policy of both the Carter and the Obama energy policy: 3) windfall profits taxes on big oil.

The current call for a windfall profits tax has been going on since before the 2006 elections, in which Democrats promised that they had the better solutions for energy (and the price of gas has essentially doubled since Nancy Pelosi promised her “commonsense plan.”) Democrats have ever since been lining up to support a new federal windfall profits tax, with the aim of redistributing profits from “greedy” oil companies.

But, as Jonathon Williams, writing in The Los Angeles Times, pointed out:

lawmakers could benefit from a history lesson. The last time this country experimented with such a tax was the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980. According to a 1990 Congressional Research Service study, the tax depressed the domestic oil industry, increased foreign imports and raised only a tiny fraction of the revenue forecasted. It stunted domestic production of oil by 3% to 6% and created a surge in foreign imports, from 8% to 16%.

As for that “tiny fraction of the revenue forecasted” figure, the windfall profit tax returned only $40 billion of the $175 billion that had been projected.

Surprise, surprise. When you tax something, you get less of it, and you drive up the cost. It boggles the mind that Democrats are pathologically incapable of understanding what is the most blatently obvious principle of economics. But they can’t.

Many have defined insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results. By that bar, Democrats should be sitting straightjacketed in rubber rooms.

Jimmy’s Carter’s failed energy policy was part of the reason for the 20% prime interest rate that consumed our economy like a cancer.

By taxing American oil companies, they produced less oil, reducing the supply and driving up the cost. At the same time, the reduction in domestic production created a corresponding increased dependence on foreign oil.

And, as Jonathon Williams also points out, the policy of windfall profits forced a major U.S. industry, and a major U.S. employer, into a depressed condition that it took years to overcome. You might hate big oil, but damaging the industry is tantamount to cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

The Jimmy Carter presidency was a catastrophic disaster in foreign policy, domestic policy, and energy policy. The last thing this country needs is the Second Coming of a failed presidency.

Democrats Stuck Between Crazy and Pandering on Domestic Oil

As George Stephanopoulos asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi virtually the same question over and over again – and as Pelosi provided one disingenuous non sequitur after another – Stephanopoulos increasingly began to look as if he had just stepped in something that really stank.

Here’s a partial transcript of the encounter from the August 3, 2008 This Week:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: You’ve been getting a lot of heat for not allowing a straight up or down vote expanding drilling off the coasts of the United States. Why won’t you permit a straight up or down vote?

NANCY PELOSI, SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: What we have presented are options that will really make a difference at the pump. Free our oil, Mr. President. We’re sitting on 700 million barrels of oil. That would have an immediate effect in ten days. What our colleagues are talking about is something that won’t have an effect for ten years and it will be 2 cents at the time. If they want to present something that’s part of an energy package, we’re talking about something. But to single shoot on something that won’t work and mislead the American people as to thinking it’s going to reduce the price at the pump, I’m just not going to be a part of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Except it’s not just Republicans that are calling for this. Members of your own caucus say we must have a vote. Congressman Jason Altmire, let me show our viewers right now, says, “There is going to be a vote. September 30 will not come and go without a vote on the opening the Outer Continental Shelf. The message has been delivered. The issue can’t be ignored any longer.” He says he speaks for a lot of Democrats. He’s talked to the leadership and a vote must happen.

PELOSI: Maybe it will, as part of a larger energy package. Let’s step back, call a halt and put this in perspective. What we have now is a failed energy policy by the Bush/Cheney, two oilmen in the White House. $4 a gallon gasoline at the pump. And what they’re saying is let’s have more of the same. Let’s have more of big oil making, record profits, historic profits. You see the quarterly reports that just came out, who want to be subsidized who don’t really want to compete. Let them use the subsidies to drill oil in protected areas. Instead we’re saying, free the oil. Use it, don’t lose it. There’s 68 million acres in lower 48 and 20 million more acres in Alaska where they’re permitted where they could drill anytime. This is a diversionary tactic from failed energy policies.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if you feel you have the better arguments, why not give a straight up or down vote for drilling?

PELOSI: Because the misrepresentation is being made that this is going to reduce the price at the pump. This is again a decoy, it’s not a solution.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, if you’re right, why not let it be debated out and have the vote?

PELOSI: We have a debate every single day on this subject. What you saw in the Congress this week was the war dance of the hand maidens of the oil companies. That’s what you saw on the Republican side of the aisle. Democrats and Republicans are not right there on party lines on this issue. There are regional concerns, as well as some people concerned about what this means back home for them. But we have a planet to save. We have an economy to grow. And we can do that if we keep our balance in all of this and not just say but for drilling in unprotected and these protected areas offshore, we would have lower gas prices.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what exactly are you trying to say? You say you might allow a vote as part of a comprehensive package, but you won’t allow a vote on —

PELOSI: We have put on the floor. Free our oil. Strong bipartisan support for that. Use it, don’t lose it. Strong bipartisan support for that. End undue speculation, strong bipartisan support for that. We’ve talked about these things. Invest in renewable energy resources so that we can increase the supply of energy for our country. Strong bipartisan support for that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yet you brought those measures to the floor in a way under the suspension of the rules so that it couldn’t be amended with a drilling proposal.

PELOSI: Well, we built consensus and have a strong bipartisan. This is what’s going to make a difference to reduce the dependence on foreign oil, to stop our dependence on fossil fuels in our own country. To increase the supply of energy immediately to reduce the price at the pump to protect the consumer. So this is a policy matter. This is very serious policy matter. It’s not to use a tactic of one — one tactic in order to undermine a comprehensive energy package to reduce our dependence on foreign oil which is a national security issue. To reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in our own country. Now, will we be talking about natural gas that’s cheaper, better for the environment —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But why not allow votes on all that? When you came in as Speaker you promised in your commitment book “A New Direction for America,” let me show our viewers, you said that “Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives.” If they want to offer a drilling proposal, why can’t they have a vote?

PELOSI: They’ll have to use their imagination as to how they can get a vote and then they may get a vote. What I am trying to, we have serious policy issues in our country. The President of the United States has presented this but for this our economy would be booming. But for this, gas would be cheaper at the pump. It’s simply not true. Even the President himself in his statement yesterday and before then has said, there is no quick fix for this by drilling.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And Senator Obama has agreed with you. He says, listen. This is not the answer. Drilling is not the answer. But he said over the weekend that he might be willing to sign onto drilling as part of a comprehensive proposal.

PELOSI: What Senator Obama said is what we want a President to say. Let’s look at all of the options. Let’s compare them. And let’s see what really does increase our supply. Protect our environment, save our economy, protect the consumer, instead of a single shot thing that does none of the above. Why we give subsidies to big oil to drill instead of letting them —

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to move on to other issues. Just to be clear, you are saying you will not allow a single up or down vote on drilling. But you will allow a vote on a package that includes drilling?

PELOSI: No, what I’m saying to you is, as far as I’m concerned, unless there is something that — you never say never to anything. You know, people have their parliamentary options available to them. But from my standpoint, my flagship issue as Speaker of the House and 110th Congress has been to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reverse global warming. I’m not giving the gavel — I’m not giving a gavel away to a tactic that will do neither of those things. That supports big oil at the cost and expense of the consumer.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not going to permit a vote, you may get beat, but you’re not going to permit a vote on your own?

PELOSI: Again, we take this one step at a time. But while we’re spending all of this time on a parliamentary tactic when nothing less is at stake than the planet, the air we breathe, our children breathe.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s what I don’t understand. If you could get votes on everything else that you care about which you say there is strong bipartisan support, why not allow a vote on the drilling as well?

PELOSI: Because the President will not allow any of these other things to go forth. Why are we not saying to the President, why don’t you release oil from the SPR in ten days to have the price at the pump go down? Why are you opposed to any undue speculation in the oil markets? Why do you not insist that people who have leases on our land with permits ready to go use those? The oil companies don’t want competition. And what we would do by saying, go ahead, give them the subsidies. Allow them to drill in areas that are protected now, instead of where they’re allowed to drill, is to diminish all of the opportunity that we have for an electricity standard for our country. Where we set out standards that makes the competition for renewable energy resources better. Which says to the private sector, invest here because there is a standard that they have to honor. If you just say it’s drill, drill, drill, drill and we’re going to subsidize it, what is the motivation for the private sector to come in and say we’re going to support these renewable energies, wind, solar, biofuels. Plug-in cars. Natural gas and other alternatives.

Speaker Pelosi has engaged in every form of partisan gamesmanship in order to block Republicans from even having a debate over drilling measures. Apparently, that qualifies as “open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives” in the Nancy Pelosi dictatorship.

According to a CNNMoney.com poll, 73% of Americans favored offshore drilling as of June 2008.

In PelosiLand, that kind of demand from the American people calls for only one thing: a five week vacation.

But Republicans aren’t having any of it:

House Republicans will be back on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives again Monday to continue the unprecedented protest that began last Friday, when dozens of Republicans joined hundreds of American citizens on the House floor to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) decision to send Congress home for the rest of the summer without a vote on legislation to lower gas prices and move America toward energy independence.

President Bush doesn’t mind letting Democrats twist in the wind for the next five weeks while Americans become angrier and angrier.

Barack Obama reversed his position (what else is new?) against opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to provide immediate price relief on gas prices. He had earlier said that the Strategic Reserves should only be tapped in the event of an emergency. Apparently a nine point drop in the polls over the course of a single week qualifies as an emergency where crippling $4 plus gasoline does not. Obama is hoping that taking 70 million barrels from the Reserve would reduce the price just long enough to keep the oil issue at bay until after the election.

Obama does not seem to want to take part in Nancy Pelosi’s (Captain KoolAid’s) suicide pact with the environmentalist groups. He is clearly beginning to hedge his position on offshore drilling. But we can’t depend upon this serial pandering flip flopper to follow through with whatever promises he makes any more than we can depend upon Nancy Pelosi’s mental health.

The Democrat Party finds itself stuck between a Crazy and a Panderer.

Democrats Demagogue and Lie About Oil – As Usual

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday as his Democrats failed to move their energy bill:

They’ve come up with the most unbelievable dodge that I can remember. They said, ‘We’re not going to do anything on speculation because it’s no longer important,’ even though it’s part of their bill.

But that’s a bald faced lie, and he knows it.

Republicans have repeatedly said they were willing to deal on speculation, and alternative energy, and other things the Democrats want. But they insist that drilling on federal lands – which is now off limits on and off shore because of Democrats – be part of any package they will support. As usual, Democrats prove themselves to be dishonest manipulators rather than straight dealers.

You want another example of Democrats’ bald faced lies – again from the top Democrat in the Senate? Speaking again about speculation (i.e. the oil futures market), Reid said:

Something that will lower prices by 20-50%. And I think that, uh, one of the reasons the price of oil has gone down… you’ll note that it has gone down since we started, introduced, since we introduced our legislation dealing with speculation.

No it isn’t, and he knows it. On July 14, President Bush ended the executive ban on offshore drilling. The very next day saw the price of oil take the biggest drop in 17 years.

Within two days of Bush’s signing the executive order, the price of oil dropped from nearly $145 a barrel to $130.73 a barrel. And within four days, it had dropped to $128.88. And Harry Reid wants to take credit for this drop in price with his incredibly airheaded speculation bill that never really had a chance of overcoming a filibuster to begin with?

In the House, Democrats are putting the energy bill on the “suspension calender” in a move that will require a 2/3 majority to pass any legislation, but which prevents the Republicans from adding ANY amendments to allow for drilling on federal lands or contribute in any way.

Democrats are so paranoid that a drilling amendment might be introduced that they would rather scuttle any meaningful vote whatsoever.

Why did President Bush lift the ban?:

The White House announced today that President Bush will lift an executive order banning offshore oil drilling, a move aimed at stepping up pressure on Congress to end the prohibition it imposed in 1981.

The futures market reduced the price of oil because they saw the very real possibility that the American political system might finally get itself in gear to increase the supply of oil. Increased supplies lower prices. It’s as simple as that.

It is just like the Democrat Party to do everything possible to cause the problem for restricting the oil supply, and then try to claim credit for lowering prices. They are the worst kind of backstabbing liars you could possibly ever deal with.

To add to the sheer insanity of the Democrat’s position on energy, Sen. Charles Schumer said the same day:

The bottom line is very simple. We Democrats believe in the future when it comes to energy policy. We believe in alternative energy, we believe we have to wean ourselves away from oil and dependency from people like Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Putin. And they want to throw themselves right into their owns because big oil wants it. So the equations is simple. The Republicans equal big oil and the past. They do what big oil wants. We democrats represent alternatives weaning ourselves away from oil and the future.

So Democrats state that they have no intention of doing anything to increase the supply of oil or doing anything meaningful to reduce the cost even as they blame the Republicans who ARE trying to increase the oil supply.

Or to put it another way, how on earth can Democrats be both for oil and against oil at the same time?

And pandering demagogue that Schumer is, he labels Republicans as stooges of the oil companies which he and other Democrats have repeatedly demonized.

Oil companies certainly have their flaws. But they have one essential virtue: they produce oil. And in demonizing oil companies, Democrats have long-since crossed the line into demonizing the oil that these companies produce.

Or, to put it in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s words:

“Those costs that you don’t see on the bottom line. That is, coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, its Global Warming, its ruining our Country, its ruining our World.”

Democrats are clearly opposed to oil. And that’s why the supplies are so low and the prices are so high.

You just remember something. Right now we are dependent upon oil. That is why Al Gore keeps flying his fuel-gobbling private jets and getting himself ferried around in gas-guzzling convoys of SUVs. Oil is what we have, and it is very difficult to go without it – even for the hypocrites who tell everyone else to do so.

Democrats like Schumer and Reid are not just part of the problem – they ARE THE PROBLEM. Because of Democrats, we are doing nothing to tap our own massive energy resources. Because of Democrats, we are therefore forced to go to the very dictators that Schumer named and give them $700 billion a year for something we could be producing ourselves.

We can either go on listening to one stupid self-serving lie and excuse after another, or we can vote these fools out and elect men and women who will allow this country to provide itself with the energy we need.

Democrats Block US Energy Independence, Send Gas Prices Soaring

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said:

“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.”

Watch it on Youtube if prefer seeing your idiots in living color.

Well, how about if YOU stop, Harry. And tell all your fellow liberals and Democrts to stop right along with you. The rest of us realize that we need the stuff, and that we will continue to need it for decades to come.

Let us not forget to point out that Barack Obama has the same stupid and self-defeating ideas about energy.

So it’s not coal and oil that we’re sick of, Harry. We’re sick of you and your irrational and self-defeating energy policies. Coal and oil is what made our country great; it’s what our economy has been – and continues to be – based upon. It’s what we will continue to need in order to continue to improve our way of life.

Stop and think about it: Route 66; the interstate system; distant communities interconnected by vast stretches of freeways and roads. Our entire way of life has been based upon the mobility that oil has provided. We can’t just get rid of oil and keep right on truckin’. The Democrat’s vision will create enormous adjustment and enormous pain for Americans.

At some point, we will clearly need to transition to another dominant source of energy. But there is simply no way that we will be ready to make that transition any time soon. To refuse to allow our vast domestic oil supplies to be utilized by citing theoretical alternatives is foolish beyond crazy.

While a few R.I.N.O. (Republican In Name Only) politicians (I like the term “Stockholm Syndrome Republicans”) have embraced global warming alarmism and environmentalist bans on drilling, the simple fact of the matter is that it was Bill Clinton who vetoed taking advantage of our oil reserves over a Republican effort to expand our supplies, and it has overwhelmingly been Democrats who have thwarted every effort both to increase oil drilling and oil refining every since.

The result is that we have been deliberately left completely vulnerable to just the kind of sky-high prices that we are seeing now.

Democrats argue that drilling is pointless because it won’t produce any results for 10 years. But that is insane. Number one, only a fool doesn’t plan for the future. Number two, had Bill Clinton allowed us to drill in the 90’s we wouldn’t be where we are now. And number three, oil drillers say that they could be getting substantial oil out of the ground within one year; and even the most technically difficult sites wouldn’t take longer than six years to harvest.

Democrats argue that they have provided oil companies with leases giving them access to millions of acres for exploration. But these leases weren’t granted on the basis of geologists’ studies (that these are the best locations for oil); but rather on the basis of “junk” land that doesn’t have any political (and likely not any energy) value. It’s the equivalent of the U.S. Government putting the Indians on the crappiest land in the country and then saying, “There: we’ve given you plenty of land.” The reality is that 92% of our offshore reserves and most of the state and federal lands are off limits to oil companies.The outer continental shelf – which contains the best known sources of oil – are completely off limits to the American oil companies, even as Chinese rigs are going up in those very same oil fields!!!

An Associated Press story titled, “Much of oil, gas off limits” says:

WASHINGTON — About half the oil and more than a quarter of the natural gas beneath 99 million acres of federal land is off-limits to drilling, the Bush administration says in a report that industry sought to highlight environmental and other hurdles to development.

Just 3 percent of the oil and 13 percent of the gas under federal land is accessible under standard lease terms that require only basic protections for the environment and cultural resources, according to the survey, which was ordered last year by Congress.

An additional 46 percent of the oil and 60 percent of the gas “may be developed subject to additional restrictions” such as bans to protect winter rangeland for foraging antelope, nesting areas for bald eagles and jagged slopes from erosion during parts of the year.

The revised inventory, released Tuesday by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, is starkly different from a study done three years ago. That version, which covered 59 million acres in the Rocky Mountains, estimated more than 80 percent of oil and gas was accessible, although in some cases subject to restrictions. Environmentalists often cited that figure in arguing that a wealth of energy resources is available for developing without going into pristine areas now off limits.

And, the actual fact of the matter is that the oil companies are routinely unable to drill even in those leased areas that the Democrats deceitfully claim that they have available to them. There are plenty of stories like this out there:

Billings, Mont. (AP) – Two conservation groups have asked the federal government to impose new restrictions on oil and gas development in the West to protect the greater sage grouse, a popular game bird on the decline.

Scientists contend sage grouse breeding areas are suffering in the face of accelerating oil and gas exploration in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah and other Western states.

West Nile virus, drought and residential development also have taken a toll on the bird, which is being considered for the endangered species list.

Federal rules now say oil and gas companies cannot drill within quarter of a mile of sage grouse breeding areas. Last week, Idaho-based North American Grouse Partnership and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership of Washington, D.C., filed a legal petition asking for the rule be extended to two miles.

I don’t apologize for caring more about my family and friends than I do about some rare species of bird. Frankly, Democrats should be apologizing to the American people for caring more about a few birds than they do about them.

Again and again, Democrats, Democrat-controlled government bureaucracies, and their left-wing allies in the “environmentalist” and “litigation” communities have blocked oil companies from doing anything. The result is years of lawsuits and court proceedings, red tape, delay, and other excessive costs that make such projects unfeasible.

There’s an old joke about a modern-day Noah trying to build an ark in today’s liberal political environment. It certainly has the pro-bureaucracy, anti-business policies that characterize the Democratic Party in mind.

Democrats routinely use environmental groups’ minimized estimates as to how much oil is actually in a given field. The oil companies believe there is much more available in those fields; that’s why they want to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to start getting that oil out of the ground. Think about it: Democrats routinely say that there isn’t very much oil in places like ANWR, and that oil companies don’t want to drill anyway. If that were even remotely true, then why are the Democrats repeatedly preventing oil companies from drilling by force of law? If the Democrats are anything other than lying demagogues, allow the oil companies to drill where they believe the oil is without the massive bureaucratic hassles; and if they don’t drill and increase our oil suppolies, the Democrats could say, “See, we were right.”

“Proven reserves” are resources that drilling has confirmed exist and can be produced with current technology and prices. By imposing bans on leasing, and encouraging environmentalists to challenge seismic and drilling permits on existing leases, politicians ensure that we will never increase our proven reserves. In fact, reserves will decrease, as we deplete existing deposits and don’t replace them. The rhetoric is clever – but disingenuous, fraudulent and harmful.

They have repeatedly argued that opening up ANWR would do virtually nothing to alleviate the price of gasoline. But Democratic Senators have called upon the Saudis to increase production by amounts that would be less – even according to ridiculously low liberal estimates – than the amount of daily oil flow that ANWR would generate.

The Geological Survey and Congressional Research Service say it’s 95% likely that there are 15.6 billion barrels of oil beneath ANWR. And we could add to that an estimated 169 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, Rockies, Great Lakes, Southwest and ANWR – as well as natural gas, coal, uranium and hydroelectric resources that are currently off limits because of Democratic activism.

One of our best prospects is Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which geologists say contains billions of barrels of recoverable oil. If President Clinton hadn’t bowed to Wilderness Society demands and vetoed 1995 legislation, we’d be producing a million barrels a day from ANWR right now. That’s equal to US imports from Saudi Arabia, at $50 billion annually.

Mexico has increased its oil production 64 percent since 1980. Canada’s production has increased 85 percent. If we’d increased production at the rate of our North American neighbors, we’d be producing 91 percent of our current consumption, noted National Review’s Noel Sheppard.

Democrats routinely demonize oil companies for their “excessive” and “windfall” profits. But – as usual – they merely prove what hypocrites and demogogues they truly are. Look at the revelations from The Hill:

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who calls for “windfall profit taxes on big oil,” has some $200,000 in oil holdings with Exxon and BP. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who publicly says that oil companies are guilty of “price fixing,” has some $350,000 in oil holdings with Exxon and BP. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tx) – who speaks of “unjustifiable tax breaks for big oil” has $350,000 in Exxon Mobil and Chevron holdings. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) who claims oil companies are “gouging” has $200,000 in holdings with Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Schlumberger. These Democrats are privately profiting from the very companies they publicly claim are so terrible. What hypocrites!

And they falsely demonize oil profits in the way of the classic demagogue. The reality is that the oil companies invest FAR more than they retain in profits; and the reality is that their profits are actually quite modest given the sheer massiveness of their operations.

Investor’s Business Daily says the following:

Yes, oil companies make money. But they spend more than they make on finding new sources of oil. A new Ernst & Young study shows the five major oil companies had $765 billion of new investment from 1992 to 2006 compared with net income of $662 billion.

Over the same stretch, the industry — which includes 57 of the largest U.S. oil and natural gas companies — had new investments of $1.25 trillion compared with a net income of $900 billion and a cash flow of $1.77 trillion.

This is an industry that has redefined innovation, reinvesting profits to find innovative ways to recover oil and gas wherever they find it. This includes fields once considered “dead,” vast tracts miles beneath the ocean surface, and sands or even shale in North Dakota.

Democrats talk about the need to conserve oil and use alternative energies instead. But do the American people truly want to drastically and dramatically change their way of life when the clear alternative of domestic oil production is readily available? Even the most radical environmentalist activists such as Al Gore clearly don’t want to make such a transition in their own personal lives: Gore has routinely been faulted for his own shockingly high rate of energy consumption. And as I see drivers routinely whiz by me on the freeway, I realize that few Americans are determined to make the kinds of painful sacrifices that Democratic strategies call upon them to make.

Furthermore, there is little evidence that such sacrifice will amount to anything. With China, India, and much of the rest of the developing world increasing its oil consumption, all the “global warming” hyperbole justifying the deliberate restriction of US energy consumption (and therefore economic production) will be “much ado, signifying nothing.” If China and India use the oil we would have used – which by all accounts is exactly what is happening and will continue to happen – then what is the net climate gain?

As a further point revealing the absurdity of Democrats’ claims that we must not drill for oil lest we contaminate the environment and increase global warming, just what do you think is going on in the Middle East? When they increase their production to meet our energy needs (at a massive profit), are they not contaminating the environment and increasing global warming even more than we would, given our higher level of technology and environmental regulations?

Democrats are currently hollering and screaming about speculators artificially driving up the price of gas. But let us consider this:

NEW YORK — Oil prices rose Monday on disappointment over Saudi Arabia’s modest production increase and concerns that output from Nigeria will decline. Retail gas prices, meanwhile, inched lower overnight, but appear unlikely to change much as long as oil prices stay in a trading range.

Saudi Arabia said Sunday at a meeting of oil producing and consuming nations that it would turn out more crude oil this year if the market needs it. The kingdom said it would add 200,000 barrels per day in July to a 300,000 barrel per day production increase it first announced in May, raising total daily output to 9.7 million barrels.

But that pledge at the meeting held in the Saudi city of Jeddah fell far short of U.S. hopes for a larger increase. The United States and other nations argue that oil production has not kept up with increasing demand, especially from China, India and the Middle East.

The fact that the price of oil goes UP when the supply goes DOWN ought to tell you something about what is truly driving the shocking price increases: supply and demand.

As we see the volatility of oil prices, and as we see that threats in the Middle East, or in unstable regimes such as Nigeria, send our prices through one roof after another, thinking, rational people must surely come to realize that there is an urgent, long-term strategic need for American to have it’s own stable domestic oil supply.

And one political party – the Democrats – are clearly standing in the way of that critical strategic goal. Our survival depends upon energy independence. But Democrats are literally STANDING on our ability to provide that independence.