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Another New Agency
Jerry McConnell
asks,
what is the matter with that man in our White House? Will he ever
stop trying to spend every nickel and dime that Americans have,
including our savings that we worked hard for to ease our retirement
years? He acts like a poor kid that suddenly comes into some money
and it is burning a hole in his pocket to get spent. It is an
infatuation and an obsession that the money has got to be disposed of
regardless of how infantile or worthless the object of the spending is.
Spend, spend, spend!
The problem is that he doesn’t spend just
nickels and dimes, no; this guy is more like the proverbial fool and his
money but in the billions and trillions neighborhood, and it’s OUR
money. No, no, none of that penny ante stuff like hundreds of
thousands or even millions; it has to be in the billions or trillions or
it doesn’t please his little spendthrift heart.
And now he is at
it once again. He has found another new scheme to fondle and
nurture into a budget busting, economy depressing, deficit and national
debt obesity to strangle our children and our children’s children for
decades to come. It’s his own personal Global Warming Agency;
right here in RiverCity (Potomac?). Move over Al Gore you will be
outguessed on the rise or fall of temperatures by none other than the
Messiah of the new millennium, Barry Soetoro, AKA, Barack Hussein Obama.
Just what we really DID NOT need; our very own collection of
liars, cheats and mis-directed pseudo-scientists conjuring up specters
of horror of rising seas and shrinking icebergs, not to mention wild and
crazy computers that send out false messages and then make the data
disappear. Who among you out there agree that we need yet one more
government bureau to tell us more lies and fairy tales while gobbling up
billions and trillions more of our tax dollars? Stand up for the
new Global Warming comedy show if you will. What, no takers?
Right on.
Over the past few weeks we have seen the black side of
some of the world’s most depraved and deranged seekers of government
largesse that keeps them in the comfort of their high living styles.
These cheats are educated people of the field of science where they can
maneuver figures to make it look like they are really on to something
that will help all the world’s people to react properly to any wayward
conduct that Mother Nature throws at them. They are jokingly
called scientists; but that’s just amongst themselves. To others,
they are called jesters and milkers.
Now of course, I am not
talking about all of them; in fact, in reality there are only a minor
few considering there are many thousands of fine people working at and
classified as scientists. These are the ones that appear in print
and videos debunking the tall tales of the jesters and milkers who make
grant applications by the gazillions. Oh, oh, I’d better get rid
of that word or Obama will be using it as the next step up the chain of
debt beyond trillions. I can hear him now saying he needs a few
more gazillions to bail out this or that pet project of his; (maybe his
new Global Warming Agency?) Perhaps they should call it the new and
expanded Global WARNING Agency.
After millennia and more
millennia of climate changes, from the days when our cold and barren
earth was created by God and turned into a venue for warm and loving
people, to the days of warmth needed to create a growing place for food
for those people, climate changes have taken place. They are
cyclical in nature, and nature is the key word here, as that is what
causes these climate changes. Infinitely long before man had any
input whatsoever in the process, if in fact he EVER has!
All of
the Global Warming Agencies put together are no match for Mother Nature
and her brilliant methods of making our climate react for different
reasons, some too exacting for the simple minds of pseudo scientists to
fathom. But in spite of this, here is what Obama’s Commerce
Secretary Gary Locke said at a recent news conference, "Whether we like
it or not, climate change represents a real threat." It was reported
that he didn’t even crack a smile when he said it. But I’d bet
that Mother Nature cringed just a bit.
Then, not to be outdone by
this brilliant observation, Locke’s boss, Janet Lubchenco, (no, not the
Russian scientist), but head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration added, "Climate change is real, it’s happening now."
Can you believe the profundity of that statement? Where does "O"
get these scintillating characters? I would have never guessed
that climate change was happening now!
But those bits of wisdom
do not enter into the wild and lavish money disappearing acts performed
by the famed money wizard, Barack Obama, the one person who can make a
trillion, or even a gazillion, disappear like a puff of smoke on a windy
day.
Somebody, please stop him. Obama is making America
look foolish to intelligent peoples of the world.
"We Can't Control Nature"
Feed Your ADHD blog
says you can take it to the bank. Obama admits
"global warming" is a hoax. What will he say next, that doctors know
more about health care than he does?
Barack Obama: "We Can't Control Nature" (00:17)
Barack Obama on the Chilean earthquake, "We can't control
nature." Except, of course, for non-existent global warming.
Obama’s Aggravated Buggery
Chris Horner
says the facts on the ground make it inescapable that, regardless of
one’s intentions, opposing coal means supporting poverty. This
applies to Obama, to be sure, who has not only escalated a
three-decade-plus war on U.S. coal communities (and the U.S. economy),
it has even extended the war to trying to block other countries’ use of
the most abundant, affordable, and reliable energy source for liberating
people from drudgery.
Just in the past few days we read of Team
Obama’s pending effort to block World Bank support for a South African
coal plant, and published notice of a devastating step in West Virginia,
clearly what is intended to be only the first of many, which is the
first-ever revocation of an already-granted mine permit under the Clean
Water Act to shut down a major coal source. As even the New York
Times has printed, "The regulatory push has had an impact on West
Virginia coal production, which fell more than 11 percent in the past
year, the federal Energy Information Agency said."
And, now,
they’ve gone and done it and come out swinging full-force against
Appalachia, a region of the country the administration has by
coincidence determined is politically hostile. Specifically, they
have unleashed the second half of their two-pronged strategy to crack
down on Appalachian surface mining for coal in general, and a subset of
surface mining -- mountaintop removal -- in particular. They did
this through just-issued new guidance and standards governing Clean
Water Act (CWA) section 402 and 404 surface-mining permits.
Remember the Obama administration’s refusal to release water to
California farmers, leaving them suffering in the name of a fish (only
to agree to a deal releasing some water after two members of Congress
agreed to support his health-care takeover)? Bear that
cold-blooded ideological putsch in mind when you consider his effort to
shut down what are the best-paying jobs in certain areas, devastate
communities dependent on mountaintop coal, and of course put us all at
risk by recklessly foreclosing 10 percent of the U.S. coal supply.
Because the war on Appalachia is in the name of a bug. No one
could possibly be that heartless, right? So I can only guess that
any excuse will do when seeking to impose a "fundamental
transformation." Life absurdly, even cruelly, imitating art.
With
this power grab, the EPA now has the power and the intent to kill the
entire coal industry, which supplies half of our electricity, a supply
which will not, contrary to the remarkably dangerous assertions of at
least two administration officials, be replaced just by plopping some
windmills offshore.
So, as you think about Obama’s head-fakes on
energy in the run-up to trying to cram through another anti-energy bill,
know this: Media slavishness/ignorance notwithstanding, Obama
"opened for drilling" not one offshore area; it was all already opened,
and he simply imposed an embargo on U.S. resources from the North
Atlantic, West Coast, and parts of Alaska.
And his "support for
nuclear power," which his aides touted as "meeting Republicans halfway,"
actually only met his own economic assumptions (phonied-up to keep the
cost of cap-and-trade rationing down) a mere 2 percent of the way.
With the Left hand he offers inchoate support for nuke plants that
represent maybe one-fifteenth of the energy his Far Left hand taketh
away.
Obama, like his movement, is anti-energy. Period.
Which leaves all of them pro-poverty. Read this book, watch this
movie, and you will be left with no doubt. There’s a "fundamental
transformation" at hand, in their minds, and they’re not letting
anything like you, your family, or your safety stand in their way.
I was holding off as protocol requires, but here’s a heads up:
I lay these particular steps and this entire, reprehensible agenda low
in a book coming out two weeks from today. There really is no room
for bystanders on this one. Get engaged or get used to the fact
that you’ve lost your freedoms.
The Alarmist Presidency
Rich Trzupek
says there’s a school of thought among conservatives and
libertarians that liberals knowingly seed and fertilize phony crises in
order to cultivate even more big government. While I don’t wholly
discount that point of view, I think the sky-is-falling mentality that
permeates the Obama administration’s approach to environmental issues is
more the result of living within the liberal echo chamber for so long.
Environmentalists and their Democrat allies spent eight years
screaming that the Bush administration and corporate America were
destroying the environment and putting our lives at risk. Having
been handed the keys of state, Obama naturally embraces those voices
that offer "solutions" to a problem that never actually existed.
Democrats being Democrats, those solutions naturally involve benevolent
government intervention.
It’s a chicken and egg argument in any
case. Does the liberal desire for socialism consciously create
phony problems, or does it merely exploit crackpot ideas that fit in
with the program? Either way, this administration hasn’t yet met
an environmental "crisis" it isn’t willing to address by rolling up its
sleeves and getting down to the dirty work of drawing up more rules that
will protect the ignorant masses who have been exploited by big
businesses for so long. The latest example of this phenomenon is a
report from the President’s Cancer Panel which attributes cancer to the
supposed poisoning of America. Entitled "Reducing Environmental
Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," the report was prepared by a couple of
academics: LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr., M.D. of the Howard University
College of Medicine and Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D. of the University of
Texas. A couple of paragraphs from the letter that accompanies the
report, signed by Leffall and Kripke, gives you the flavor:
"The Panel was particularly concerned to
find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been
grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the
market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of
Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and
largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens
is widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A
(BPA), is still found in many consumer products and remains
unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between
BPA and several diseases, including various cancers.
Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do
not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer.
However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not
been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program. The
American people -- even before they are born -- are bombarded
continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.
The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to
remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and
air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s
productivity, and devastate American lives."
When somebody trots out bisphenol A as their
showpiece problem, what follows isn’t going to be pretty. The
evidence linking BPA to adverse health effects of any kind is remarkably
weak, much less to cancer. But this is a chemophobic
administration and Leffall and Kripke dutifully deliver a report that
raises chemophobia to new heights. The report was so hysterical
and full of unsubstantiated conjecture that even the American Cancer
Society rolled their eyes. Consider this from a New York Times’
piece that was surprisingly critical of the Cancer Panel’s report:
"Dr. Michael Thun, an epidemiologist from
the cancer society, said in an online statement that the report was
"unbalanced by its implication that pollution is the major cause of
cancer," and had presented an unproven theory -- that
environmentally caused cases are grossly underestimated -- as if it
were a fact."
Leffall and Kripke’s underlying assumption -- that
the 80,000 chemicals in use in America are "unregulated or virtually
unregulated" -- is utter nonsense. Every chemical is evaluated by
the EPA as part of the Agency’s obligations under the Toxic Substances
Control Act (TSCA) in order to determine if the chemical presents a
possible threat to the environment or human health. If the Agency
determines that there is a potential problem, it is charged with
regulating said chemical appropriately. Further, the vast majority
of those 80,000 chemicals are used in small quantities and could not
therefore effect the environment on a macroscopic scale in any case.
The EPA goes beyond the requirements of TSCA when it comes to the 3,000
or so chemicals that are used in large quantities. The Agency has
gathered and continues to gather even more information on the health and
safety effects under its "High Production Volume" chemicals program.
Beyond that, we have EPA rules covering chemical discharges to the
air, to surface water, to ground water and in the soil. We’ve got
OSHA, NIOSH and the American Conference of Governmental and Industrial
Hygienists, all of whom spend a great deal of time looking at the
effects of chemicals on human health and environment. Rather than
proposing new studies, new restrictions and new regulations, Leffall and
Kripke would do better to propose a study that would study the huge pile
of studies we already have. That would serve the dual purposes of
keeping academics happily engaged in a pointless task, and allowing the
rest of us could to avoid further benevolence from Big Brother.
We haven’t even gotten to cap and trade yet and already Obama’s EPA is
working up the most restrictive air quality standards in history,
creating new ways to regulate vast swaths of oceans, pushing for
sweeping new stormwater regulations and now this. A rational
president would take one look at the President’s Cancer Report and
quietly deposit it in the circular file. But Barack Obama?
This kind of hysterical alarmism is just the kind of excuse this guy
needs to regulate, well -- everything.
Obama's Criminal Negligence
Quin Hillyer
says there is no excuse, none at all, for this administration to
have sat so long on Gov. Bobby Jindal's request for permission, or
waiver of permitting requirements, to build sand berms/sand islands to
block the oil from Louisiana's coast. The lack of response borders
on criminal negligence. The excellent Rep. Steve Scalise made a
great speech about the issue on the House floor -- watch it
here. And let yourself get angry at Mr. too-cool-to-care, who
wants the government to interfere in almost every area of our lives but
can't get off his rear end to get the federal government out of the way
of a state's efforts to save itself, and can't coordinate a federal
government response of its own that is worthy a blasted thing.
Rep. Scalise is right: "The people back in [his] state are very angry
right now about what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico,"
because they are "not getting the adequate response [they] need from the
federal government. All [they]'re getting now is excuses."
The Incredible Shrinking Obama
Andrea Tantaros says when a national calamity
strikes like the Deepwater oil disaster, it's natural to look to the
commander in chief for answers. But Obama has felt the heat even
more than past Presidents because, to his core, he's pushed the idea of
government as the go-to for help.
Now, the gaping hole in the
Gulf of Mexico has revealed that government doesn't know best. In
fact, it doesn't even know at all. And because of that fact, the
vaunted federal government has been missing in action. Like the
political equivalent of erectile dysfunction, Washington is useless, out
of ideas and creatively bankrupt, leaving Obama and his own pro-public
sector persona undermined -- because he's punting and praying that the
private sector can fix the problem.
In fact, of the dozens of
people with some responsibility over the leak, Interior Secretary Ken
Salazar has been the only one of Obama's team to intimate that the
federal government could actually step in to solve the leak -- an
off-message suggestion that was quickly corrected by Adm. Thad Allen of
the Coast Guard, who stressed that the feds didn't have the technology
or the machinery to stop it. To date, Allen has been
straightforward, knowledgeable and authoritative about that fact that
Uncle Sam is out of answers and devoid of the experience necessary to
fix this mess.
Obama should take notes.
As the crisis has
unfolded, Obama's stature as an executive has shrunk. Rather than
rush to the South, he's chosen to fund-raise in San Francisco, greet the
national women's basketball champions at the White House and host a
ritzy state dinner for the Mexican president. Yes, Obama chose to
wear Armani while turtles in the gulf wear crude -- a damning visual.
It's almost as if he's in denial, unwilling to deal with the mess
because he knows that neither he, nor the big bureaucracy behind him, is
able.
But whether or not he can stop the spill, he can give the
country constant updates and show that he's engaged and on top of the
catastrophe. He could have daily conferences with the media,
weekly trips to the site of the disaster and meetings with families.
Prime-time press briefings were good enough when he wanted to pass the
health care overhaul; what about now?
Obama has instead chosen to
duck the public and play ostrich, which could do irreparable harm.
It wasn't until yesterday, 33 days after the leak started, that Obama
vowed "we will not rest" until the well is shut, the environment is
repaired and the cleanup is completed. Those words should have
been said weeks earlier and from the shores of the gulf, not from the
shelter of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The most emotional he's been was
behind closed doors when, as reports indicate, he ordered to his team to
"plug the damn hole."
Charles Hurt
says it was yet another performance of the "full responsibility"
flimflam.
In a rare appearance before his adoring fans in the
press corps yesterday, Obama repeatedly took "full responsibility" for
the blundering efforts to clog up the geyser of crude oil spewing into
the Gulf of Mexico coating everything in sight.
At the same
time, Obama repeatedly denied that his administration was complicit in
allowing the catastrophe to happen in the first place, slow to realize
the devastating nature of it, or ham-handed in the five-week effort to
try to stem the toxic tide.
In other words, Obama -- as he often
does -- took "full responsibility" for being awesome.
He took
"full responsibility" for being, well, nearly perfect.
From the
first day, Obama said it has been his "highest priority" and that his
administration has been "singularly focused" on the leak, saying, "Those
who think that we were either slow on our response, or lacked urgency
don't know the facts," he sniffed.
Again and again, Obama
disputed charges made by people on the ground that his administration
has bollixed things up pretty badly.
Realizing that even his
biggest, hand-picked fan club couldn't swallow what he was peddling,
Obama came up with a question of his own that he was a little more
comfortable answering.
"If the question is, are we doing
everything perfectly out there, then the answer is 'No.' We could
always do better," he said, bearing his trademark modesty.
Sure,
the government has been "scandalously close" to the oil companies, but
that was his predecessor's fault.
Finally relenting, Obama found
one area where perhaps their efforts "fell short," but even that was
actually BP's fault for not being "fully forthcoming" about the extent
of the spill.
This is not taking "full responsibility."
It's called claiming to take responsibility, but without any of those
pesky consequences.
It is the Obama way.
What Now?
John Hinderaker
says
Obama was in the Gulf region yesterday, trying, somehow, to get ahead of
the environmental/political disaster that is the oil spill there.
The Associated Press
covered his visit, no longer treating Obama as untouchable.
As a practical matter, Obama has been reduced to railing against British
Petroleum and vowing that the oil company someday will pay. There
are several problems with this approach. First, "railing" is never
the image that a leader wants to project. Second, as the oil
begins to wash ashore in Alabama and Florida, and the spill goes on and
on -- what is this, day 46? Something like that -- the inadequacy
of money damages years down the road is painfully obvious. Obama
risks looking impotent, as he and his aides can't keep their story
straight: is BP just a puppet that has been taking orders from the feds
from the first day of the spill, or are the federal agencies so
constrained as to be virtually powerless to do anything about the
crisis?
Further, Obama demanded yesterday that BP not pay its
shareholders a dividend. This is beyond impotent, it's silly.
If there were some legitimate concern about BP's solvency and its
ultimate ability to pay cleanup costs and damages, such a demand might
make some kind of sense. But there isn't. Once again, Obama
just looks petulant.
Likewise with his ban on exploratory
drilling in the Gulf, a classic case of shutting the barn door long
after the cows are gone. A study by the Louisiana Mid-continent
Oil and Gas Association concludes that Obama's moratorium will cost Gulf
Coast workers $330 million per month in lost wages -- exactly what the
hard-hit Gulf economy doesn't need.
The AP story linked above
includes this vignette:
On Obama's trip to the Grand Isle on the
Louisiana coast, his motorcade passed a building adorned with his
portrait reminiscent of posters of him during his campaign.
Instead of "hope" or "change," the words "what now?" were on his
forehead.
Here is a photo of the building; the AP didn't mention
the Jindal for President sign:
"What now?" is unfortunately a question to which
the Obama administration has no apparent answer.
Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling
The Wall Street Journal
laments that it's too bad it's not in U.S. waters.
You read
that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration
is financing oil exploration off Brazil.
The U.S. is going to
lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras,
to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi
oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's
planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser
James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the
loan.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a
"preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion
and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount.
Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the
form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this
corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the
U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the
largest corporations in the Americas.
But look on the bright
side. If Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not
in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the
heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead
of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a
ban on offshore drilling expire.
The Bush Administration's
five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil
exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in
2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in
April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling
applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an
appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said
the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the
sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go
forward on August 19.
This is progress, however slow. But
it still doesn't allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East
and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields,
which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are
right to wonder why Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow
at home.
Obama Wanted A Get-Tough Headline
David Freddoso
says, "thousands of Louisianans are going to be out of work because
the president wanted a get-tough headline."
Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar lied in order to give political cover for Obama
administration’s arbitrary six-month moratorium on deep-water oil
drilling. The Wall Street Journal breaks the news on its editorial
page:
In the wake of the oil spill, President
Obama asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to produce a report on
new drilling safety recommendations. Then on May 27 Mr. Obama
announced a six-month deep water drilling ban, justifying it on the
basis of Mr. Salazar’s report, a top recommendation of which was the
moratorium. To lend an air of technical authority, the report
noted: "The recommendations contained in this report have been
peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of
Engineering."
That would be false, sir. In a scathing
statement this week, the seven experts explained that the report
draft they had reviewed did not include a six-month drilling
moratorium. That was added only after they signed off.
"The Secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is
correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his
political decisions," wrote the seven in a letter to Gulf Coast
politicians.
Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., speaks the truth when he
notes that "thousands of Louisianans are going to be out of work because
Obama wanted a get-tough headline." Just imagine living on the
Gulf Coast: Your environment is ruined by British Petroleum, and then
your job is taken away by a panicked, politically driven Obama
Administration far more interested in covering its own rear than in
kicking anyone else’s.
"I Can’t Suck it Up With a Straw"
ABC News' Sunlen Miller
reports: While visiting with Louisianan residents last week during
his trip to Grand Isle, Obama expressed a little frustration that he was
not able to plug to hole still spewing oil in the Gulf by himself.
"Even though I am President of the United States my powers are not
limitless," Obama said last Friday at Camardelle’s Live Bait and Boiled
Seafood, "So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t
suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put
honest, hardworking, smart people in place."
The president’s
quote -- previously unseen by the pool of reporters traveling with him
not allowed access to this specific exchange -- was posted today on the
White House website as part of their weekly video posting, "West Wing
Week." The weekly video summarizes Obama’s week by featuring
behind-the-scenes footage shot by White House videographers.
"I
will do everything in my power to do right by you guys. And
everybody along the coast," Obama promises the residents, seated around
a table, in the video.
Obama's 9/11 Envy
John Podhoretz says Obama doesn't like the fact
that the Gulf oil spill reminds people of Hurricane Katrina, since the
public response to that catastrophe hastened the decline of his
predecessor's standing. He'd prefer that the American people be
reminded of something else -- something that rallied people around their
president.
And so he told Politico over the weekend that the oil
spill has "echoes of 9/11."
Americans thought differently about
"our vulnerabilities" after the events of 9/11, Obama said, and the oil
spill is "going to shape how we think about the environment and energy
for many years to come."
This is, not to put too fine a point on
it, one of the most bizarre things ever said by any president.
It is worth considering the meaning of this profoundly wrongheaded
analogy tonight when Obama delivers his first Oval Office address -- his
latest attempt to minimize the political damage the oil spill is
wreaking on his reputation.
The first thing that needs to be
said is this: The only thing the oil spill and 9/11 have in common is
nothing.
Yes, 9/11 was very important and so is the spill.
But many terrible things happen, are important -- and are unalike.
The Haiti earthquake of 2009 and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in
1990 were both important, but they had nothing whatever to do with each
other. Nor did the tsunami of 2004 and the Japanese raid on Pearl
Harbor in 1941.
Just as in those cases, what's most notable
about 9/11 and the oil spill is how essentially different they are.
One was a brilliantly conceived and diabolical act of war; the other a
horrific accident that was the last thing anybody wanted to happen.
One was designed to decapitate the US government and deliver a mortal
blow to the world's financial system; the other wasn't designed at all.
One was purposeful destruction intended to harm. The other
is a purposeless catastrophe that was in no way intentional at all but
will do great harm. One was an attack on the United States.
The other was an accident.
So what on earth could Obama have
been thinking?
The first possibility is that there is some kind
of perverse wish being expressed in these words. They have a
wistful quality, as though Obama wished he had a different crisis, a
more popular crisis, on his hands.
Of course the fact that 9/11
would prove to be a net political benefit for George W. Bush was not the
result of happenstance. It was due to the way he responded.
After a few days of discomfiting uncertainty, Bush found his voice and
his purpose, delivering a series of powerful speeches that suggested a
seriousness of purpose in regard to his presidential responsibilities
that no one had actually expected of him. Whatever happened
afterward to shake that perspective on him in the minds of so many, the
fact was that Bush had to meet the moment to secure the political
advantage.
Obama has had no such moment in relation to the oil
spill, because he couldn't have. BP didn't mean to do it and has
been laboring desperately to fix what got broken. It is liable for
what it did, it does not deny its own culpability, and it may itself be
capsized as a result.
What the deployment of the 9/11 analogy
suggests is that Obama would like to treat BP as though it were al
Qaeda, at least rhetorically -- a villain for him to confront on behalf
of the wounded American people. That may seem politically shrewd
to Obama and his team, but it will have parlous consequences. The
analogy muddies and obfuscates.
By comparing an unwanted
disaster to a conscious act of war, Obama is adding an improper moral
dimension to the effort to clean up the Gulf -- a moral reckoning that
will make it harder rather than easier to focus on the task of actually
plugging the damn hole.
By likening the murder of 3,000 people
and the efforts to take out the US government to a series of mistakes
that added up to a catastrophe, Obama has defined evil down in a fashion
that does immense violence to good sense, good taste and good
leadership.
Oval Office Speech To Politicize Gulf Oil
Spill
Bill Weckesser
asks if the Obama administration has willfully been scuttling clean
up efforts in the Gulf so that the oil could make its way to shore and
onto the beaches and birds for maximum political leverage? Now
Politico is reporting that Obama will use his oval office address for a
full court, no hold-bars, assault on the oil and energy industries. Mike
Allen writes in Politico:
Barack Obama and his Democratic allies plan
a major new push for a broad global warming bill, fueled in part by
public outrage over the BP disaster, according to top aides.
Joel Benenson, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee
and Obama's presidential campaign, argues in a new briefing for top
Capitol Hill officials that a comprehensive energy bill "could give
Democrats a potent weapon to wield against Republicans in the fall."
"The oil spill is intensifying the public's desire for clean
energy investments and increased regulation on corporate polluters,"
Benenson writes in the briefing, which he prepared on behalf of the
League of Conservation Voters.
"In the aftermath of the
spill, people firmly believe Congress needs to do more than just
make BP pay. Even when pressed with opposition messaging that
now is not the time for some 'job killing energy tax,' people
coalesce around comprehensive clean energy reform.
Consequently, support for a comprehensive energy bill is very high.
With the right messaging, that support holds strong in the face of
harsh opposition attacks."
Obama plans to include a call for
an energy bill in his Oval Office address about the Gulf on Tuesday
night. And the Obama administration has told key senators that
"an energy deal must include some serious effort to price carbon as
a way to slow climate change," according to a Senate Democratic
leadership aide.
"No traditional 'energy only' bill [without
climate-change provisions] meets their sense of what's credible as a
response to BP, or the president's own 2008 rhetoric," the aide
said.
Benenson's briefing argues that "Making BP
Pay Isn't Enough." His recommended "messaging architecture":
First, "frame the opposition" as "Big Oil and corporate polluters
who have blocked energy reform for decades" and "politicians
protecting the special interests that fund their campaigns."
Second, "illustrate the costs of our dependence: ... $1 billion a
day on foreign oil ... Oil spill destroying jobs and livelihoods."
Third, "tap into deeply held values." "Put America back in control
of our energy situation. Cut foreign oil spending in half.
Invest in energy that's made in America and creates millions of jobs
for Americans."
It's amazing to see this unfold before our eyes. There's a terrible oil drilling accident. Lives are lost. Oil is gushing
from a well that's about a mile down. But, instead of protecting the
American people from the oil, the administration rebuffs all efforts to
contain and clean the contamination. Instead, it rushes to bring in the
attorneys and demonize the oil industry. Shell-shocked American's and an
impotent main stream media focus solely on the damage -- not the
administration's contribution to the pollution -- and march comatose to
the melody of government to the rescue.
The Obama Oil Spill Address And Cap-&-Tax
Push
Jim Hoft says two vacations, a half dozen
parties, and several rounds of golf later, Barack Obama finally
addresses the nation on the BP oil spill.
Lie #1: We’re drilling
in deepwater because we’re running out of places to drill.
Not
True.
For decades, Democrats have blocked efforts to responsibly
develop this nation’s energy resources, transforming vast areas of
opportunity into "The No Zone."
Over the past 30 years:
Democrats have blocked the development of new
sources of petroleum. Democrats have blocked drilling in ANWR.
Democrats have blocked drilling off the coast of Florida.
Democrats have blocked drilling off of the east coast. Democrats
have blocked drilling off of the west coast. Democrats have
blocked drilling off the Alaskan coast. Democrats have blocked
building oil refineries. Democrats have blocked clean nuclear
energy production. Democrats have blocked clean coal production.
But, they’re funding projects in Brazil. The
Wall Street Journal reported:
The U.S. is going to lend billions
of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance
exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in
the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister
confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met
this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.
This
radical president is shameless. He’s pushing for more regulations
and his cap-&-tax energy policy that will cause energy costs to
necessarily skyrocket.
Obama Running On Empty
The Washington Times
says Obama's energy speech was fueled by hot air.
In his Oval
Office address on Tuesday night, Obama issued a ringing challenge to
"embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize
control of our own destiny" through developing clean alternative energy.
Obama stated that the future of unlimited clean energy had been denied
to Americans through a cabal of "oil industry lobbyists" and politicians
lacking "courage and candor." But don't worry, the O Force is
determined to focus the efforts of government on the problem, defeat
these conspiratorial forces and save the country.
There are only
two things wrong with this idea: It isn't true, and it won't work.
Obama is hardly the first with the purported "courage and candor" to
tilt at the alternative-energy windmill. Many presidents
mistakenly have believed that the solution to the energy conundrum was
more government action and larger public programs. In 1970,
President Nixon sent a message to Congress that he was "inaugurating a
program to marshal both government and private research with the goal of
producing an unconventionally powered, virtually pollution-free
automobile within five years." Mr. Nixon set 1980 as the year when
America would be energy independent. President Ford moved the
target date back to 1985, and it was later dropped.
President
Carter introduced a detailed and comprehensive national energy program
in the spring of 1977 that reads very much like what the Obama
administration is saying. Mr. Carter promoted the development of
"nonconventional" energy sources, which today are called "alternative"
energy. He advocated "increased funding for photovoltaic systems,
solar space cooling and other solar buildings technologies, small
wind-energy conversion systems and demonstration projects on
wood-derived biomass," among other dreams. Despite Jimmy's best
efforts, the promised future of solar energy and wood-derived biomass
remains elusive.
President George H.W. Bush established the U.S.
Advanced Battery Consortium, a public-private partnership to develop
batteries for electric vehicles that, according to one 1998 study,
"confirmed that there are major technical difficulties and challenges in
developing batteries." President Clinton kicked off the
"Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles," a program to create an
80-mile-per-gallon supercar, which Mr. Clinton described as "a
technological venture as ambitious as any our nation has ever
attempted." The program was championed by then-Vice President Al
Gore, who hysterically had labeled the automobile "a mortal threat to
the security of every nation."
All these programs were rooted in
the misguided belief that government is a necessary and beneficial
partner in technological breakthroughs. More often than not,
government simply wastes money and creates barriers to private-sector
innovation. Despite Obama's dark vision of shadowy forces and
gutless politicians denying the world a utopia of green fuels,
alternative-energy sources are called "alternative" for a reason.
Current technology will not support their economical and affordable use.
Scientists have been working on these challenges for decades and hardly
need Obama's nattering advice.
For all the condemnations of the
internal-combustion engine, gasoline is an extremely efficient, safe and
affordable fuel. Gasoline has 80 times the energy by weight of
lithium batteries, which are energy-intensive to produce and toxic when
disposed. Other potentially viable alternatives are stymied by
government regulations. The most beneficial move government could
make to promote alternative energy would be to disband the Energy
Department and the Environmental Protection Agency and let scientists,
inventors and innovators create future energy sources powered by more
than the usual political hot air.
Obama & the Vision Thing
Charles Krauthammer
says
Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do
larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office
address on the Gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through
the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian
"I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation
accounting. It wasn't until the end of the speech -- the
let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast
devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda -- that
Obama warmed to his task.
Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr.
Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to
make the oceans recede and the planet heal.
How? By
creating a glorious, new, clean green economy. And how exactly to
do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of
billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and
professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated
into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.
But is this not what we've been trying to do for decades with
ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable
and environmentally damaging to boot? As with yesterday's panacea,
synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.
Notice that
Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly
cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy
industry. That's because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is
pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including
radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.
There's a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It's not,
as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil company lobbying but
because it is very portable, energy dense and easy to use.
But
this doesn't stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into being a
superior substitute. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on
the moon, why not this?
Dick Morris
says to the left, the oil spill is not an index of presidential
competence or an issue in the political sphere. It is a daily
gushing of poison into the Earth's waters as a direct result of Obama's
failure to stop it. They blame BP. But they already hate oil
companies. And they blame Obama, too. And they are coming to
dislike him.
When Obama attempts to recoup this damage to his
political base by pushing new legislation on the environment or by
resurrecting his cap-and-trade legislation or by bringing criminal
charges against BP or by setting up a liability fund for the spill's
victims, it does not solve his political problem.
With each day,
60,000 gallons gush into the Gulf, Obama's equivalent of the body count
in Iraq that caused the left to loathe George W. Bush. Rhetoric or
programs or visits to the Gulf or posturing won't assuage the negatives.
Only plugging the hole in the bottom of the ocean can do it.
The
right and center of American politics turned off Obama over healthcare.
And now the left is leaving him over the oil spill.
Why
can't Obama plug the hole?
Because he has no administrative
experience. I often saw Bill Clinton, as governor and as
president, call in experts and ask the tough questions when he faced a
new disaster. In Arkansas, it was tornadoes or floods or fires.
In Washington, it was Oklahoma City.
But, each time, Clinton
thoroughly familiarized himself with all the technical issues. He
took a bath in the science and substance of the hazard and became as
knowledgeable as those who had spent a lifetime studying it. So he
knew what questions to ask.
Any CEO or COO or manager has
similar experience. But a community organizer, law professor,
state senator, U.S. senator, and president doesn't have the requisite
experience. He doesn't know not to trust his own bureaucracy.
He hasn't been burned enough to realize that he needs to intervene to
waive restrictions, set aside regulations, and open up the process to
new solutions.
Jim Hoft
says What a complete shock. The members picked for Obama’s Oil
Spill Commission are radical environmentalists and have no technical
expertise or experience in the oil industry.
The AP reported that
the panel appointed by Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico
oil spill is short on technical expertise but long on talking publicly
about "America’s addiction to oil." One member has blogged about
it regularly.
Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of
Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent
engineering background -- but it’s in optics and physics. Another
is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the
after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.
The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.
The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s
"too cozy" relationship with the oil industry. A presidential
spokesman said panel members will "consult the best minds and subject
matter experts" as they do their work.
The commission has yet to
meet, yet some panel members had made their views known.
The
Boston Globe took
a closer look at these radicals on the commission today.
When Idiots Join Hands
Alan Caruba
says
After the June 23 Cabinet meeting, Obama said, "We talked about energy.
In the context of the oil spill, as I said last week during my Oval
Office address, this has to be a wakeup call to the country that we are
prepared and ready to move forward on a new energy strategy that the
American people desperately want but for which there has been
insufficient political will. It is time for us to move to a clean
energy future."
First, let it be said that the American people do
not desperately want "a new energy strategy." They did not want
ObamaCare. They do not want Cap-and-Trade. They do not want
amnesty for an estimated ten to twenty million illegal aliens.
Along with the totally discredited global warming hoax, this has got to
be the biggest lie Obama keeps repeating, along with promises of
thousands of "green jobs."
When Obama refers to "clean energy,"
he is referring to solar and wind energy. Neither of these
enterprises would last longer than an episode of "So You Think You Can
Dance" were it not for the billions of taxpayer’s dollars provided as
subsidies to producers who, once the subsidies end, will abandon these
most useless of all ways to generate electricity.
When the
government mandates that part of the electricity you purchase must be
supplied by wind or solar, they are forcing utilities to invest in means
of generation that must always be backed up by coal-fired, natural gas,
hydroelectric, or nuclear plants. Neither wind, nor solar can be
depended upon to produce sufficient electricity, particularly during
times of peak uses. When you see those windmills turning even when
there is no wind, there is a plant somewhere providing them with
electricity because, unless they constantly turn, their mechanisms
famously break down. Solar farms are even less efficient,
particularly since the sun does not shine all the time and cloud cover
often reduces their capacity.
This, however, will not deter the
hoped-for thousands of people who will turn out on Saturday, June 26, to
participate in some 700 events across the nation and, we’re told,
worldwide in a mega-event called "Hands Across the Sand." It is
intended to encourage more "clean energy."
"This simple, but
powerful human expression of unity will send a clear message to our
leaders that more offshore drilling is not the answer and now is the
time to create our clean energy future," said event founder, David
Rauschkolb, described as a restaurant owner in Seaside, Florida. --
that’s who we want making energy policy, a restaurant owner!
Among the sponsors of the event are Audubon, the Alaska Wilderness
League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Water Action,
Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Day Network, Endangered Species Coalition,
Energy Action Coalition, Environment America, Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, Ocean Conservancy, Rainforest Action Network,
and the Sierra Club.
In other words, the most mendacious
environmental groups, all devoted to impeding the development and access
to the huge quantities of energy needed to maintain industry,
agriculture, and an economy that, despite their constant interference
and obstruction, is still the world’s leader in value of goods produced.
To them, the Gulf oil spill is the best thing that ever happened.
One well out of hundreds in the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a horrible
failure, but these are the people who want to shut down all of them
despite a fifty-year history of safety.
No doubt the mainstream
media will have a field day showing us coverage of countless idiots
holding hands on beaches, near waterways, and wherever else they will
gather in the name of not having any gasoline to fill the tanks of the
cars that brought them there, not having the electricity to power the
air conditioners in their homes, not having anything made from plastic,
not even having asphalt on the highways and streets they will drive upon
after the event.
You can watch them join hands on Saturday and
demand a return to the Dark Ages.
Doubling Down On Disaster
Rich Trzupek
says U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman did his best to help out the
Obama administration, but Obama seems determined to go down in flames,
or at least to wander aimlessly on a tar ball. Feldman’s decision
to overturn Obama’s ill-considered six month ban on deepwater drilling
in the gulf offered Obama a convenient escape route from the corner he
backed himself into. He could have -- should have -- used the
court’s decision as a means to restore at least some measure of respect
for his administration among the people of the gulf states who viewed
the drilling moratorium as the second half of a one-two punch that
threatens their way of life. With each passing day, the perception
that Obama has been hesitant, ineffective and unwilling to cut through
bureaucratic red tape to fight the spill has grown. That
perception is not going to change anytime soon. What might have
changed is the view that Obama panicked and over-reacted by imposing a
drilling moratorium in the midst of a crippling recession. Alas,
the administration’s immediate and predictable reaction to Feldman’s
decision -- to have Interior Secretary Ken Salazar crank out a new
version of the moratorium -- demonstrated once again just how out of
touch this particular collection of the ruling elite occupying the White
House is.
"The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented,
sad, ugly and inhuman disaster," Feldman wrote in his opinion.
"What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by
what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping
confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a
universal threat of irreparable harm."
Feldman thus firmly
rejected Obama’s proposition that one accident, no matter how tragic,
should indict an entire industry. A moratorium punishes the
innocent for a disaster involving a single rig, a disaster that may have
been caused by neglect or stupidity, or that may have been a result of a
unique, unfortunate and unforeseeable chain of events. We can
speculate, but no one actually knows exactly what chain of events led to
the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and we won’t know for quite some time.
If you’re Barack Obama, your reaction to such an absence of certainty is
to shove an entire industry safely under a bushel basket until
government can make everything all better. If you live along the
gulf and if you understand that the petrochemical industry is pretty
darn important to maintaining prosperity in your section of the country,
you probably look at things a bit differently. To put a point on
it, most of the people who live in the gulf states understand that the
one thing that could possibly hurt them more than an massive oil spill
would be for the federal government to over-react to the disaster and
punish tens of thousands of innocents over the alleged negligence of a
potentially guilty few.
Not only was the moratorium
ill-considered, it was dishonest. Salazar claimed that the
six-month ban on deepwater drilling followed the recommendations of a
panel of experts recommended by the National Academy of Engineering.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the panel didn’t actually
recommend a moratorium and at least eight members of the panel rejected
such an over-reaction. When it comes to environmental issues, the
ruling green triumvirate of Obama, Energy Czarina Carol Browner and EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson have fallen into a predictable pattern: find
a tame group of academics who will dutifully parrot the administration’s
agenda and then present these "independent recommendations" as supposed
scientific consensus. Yet, when it came to deepwater drilling, the
administration couldn’t even do that right. Accomplished engineers
who had in fact presented recommendations regarding additional drilling
safety measures were understandably upset when their views were
distorted to suggest they supported a moratorium.
The price that
the gulf states in particular, and the nation in general, will pay for a
moratorium is unconscionable. A few facts about drilling in the
energy-rich Gulf of Mexico deserve review:
•
About 30 percent of the nation’s total domestic oil production and
13 percent of domestic natural gas production comes from the Gulf of
Mexico.
•
Approximately 80 percent of the oil and 45 percent of the natural
gas in the Gulf come from deepwater exploration.
• According to the
American Petroleum Institute (API), a moratorium on deepwater
drilling would result in the loss of up to 130,000 barrels of oil
per day by 2011 and as much as 500,000 barrels per day between 2013
and 2017, making the United States more dependent on oil from other
countries.
•
API’s calculations also show the moratorium could put 46,200 jobs at
risk in the short-term and as many as 120,000 jobs over the
long-term.
Every policy decision that a nation makes involves
balancing risk versus reward. The Deepwater Horizon disaster
brings the risks of deepwater drilling into the sharpest possible focus.
Through a stroke of his pen, Justice Martin Feldman restored a degree of
sanity to this never-ending evaluation. The Obama administration,
through its continuing penchant to embrace panicked, knee-jerk reactions
has shown, once again, that it is wholly incapable of considering risks
versus reward and will continue to instead pursue the politically
expedient, but entirely unattainable, utopian vision of a world in which
risk ceases to exist.
Dictator Obama Reaches Day 70 Of His Gulf
Destruction
Sher Zieve asks, is there any other
explanation?
Is Obama allowing the destruction of the Gulf States
purposely?
Although Barack Hussein Obama may not have pulled the
trigger on the BP Gulf oil rig explosion, his abrogation of sand berms
and virtually all other means to minimize the damage from the toxins and
protect this US coastal region places him in the position of
destroyer-in-chief. Through his actions involving apparent
criminal mischief leading to the destruction of entire ecosystems and
their attendant wildlife -- including but not limited to human life and
livelihoods -- Obama has placed himself firmly in the position of the
most destructive and vicious leader of the USA that America has ever
witnessed. And what has Obama done to warrant such a statement?
Dick Morris says it’s one thing to say that
Obama’s administration showed ineptitude and mismanagement in its
handling of the Gulf oil spill. It is quite another to grasp the
situation up close, as I did during a recent visit to Alabama.
According to state disaster relief officials, Alabama conceived a plan
-- early on -- to erect huge booms offshore to shield the approximately
200 miles of the state’s coastline from oil. Rather than install
the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with
assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough
huge, heavy booms -- some weighing tons and seven meters high -- to
guard their coast.
But … no sooner were the booms in place than
the Coast Guard, perhaps under pressure from the public comments of
James Carville, uprooted them and moved them to guard the Louisiana
coastline instead.
So Alabama decided on a backup plan. It
would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the
beaches.
But … the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the
plan, saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.
So Alabama -- ever resourceful -- decided to hire 400 workers to
patrol the beaches in person, scooping up oil that had washed ashore.
But … OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration)
refused to allow them to work more than 20 minutes out of every hour and
required an hour-long break after 40 minutes of work, so the cleanup
proceeded at a very slow pace.
The short answer is that every
agency -- each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda -- was able
to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill, with the unintended
consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of
miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries and recreational
facilities.
Where was Obama? Why did he not intervene in
these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a focus on
the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?
Related: US finally accepts
international assistance for Gulf spill.
Obama Administration Lied About Oil Spill
Cleanup Efforts
Jim Hoft
says it’s Day 73 of the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster, and there is now
clear evidence that the negligence by the Obama Administration caused
the destruction of the Gulf coastline.
• The feds only accepted assistance from 5
of 28 countries. • It took the Obama Administration 53 days
to accept help from the Dutch and British. • It took them
58 days to mobilize the US military to the Gulf. • The feds
shut down crude-sucking barges due to fire extinguisher concerns.
• The Obama Administration ignore oil boom manufacturers that
have miles of product stockpiled in their warehouses. •
They only have moved 31 of 2,000 oil skimmers to the disaster area
off of Florida. • Florida hired an additional 5 skimmer
boats to operate off its coast due to federal inaction. •
There are no skimmer boats off the coast of Mississippi. •
The massive A-Boat skimmer won’t be allowed to join the cleanup
effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets
their standards. • The feds shut down sand berm dredging
off the Louisiana coast. • Obama continues to hit the golf
course, ball games, hold BBQ’s and party while the crude oil washes
up on shore.
NASA Time-Lapse Video of Gulf Oil Spill (01:55) YouTube
link
Cloward-Piven And The Environmentalists
Darren Goode says liberal groups are growing
frustrated over Obama role in climate debate.
Major environmental
and liberal groups are pressing Barack Obama to play a stronger role in
crafting climate change legislation and shepherding it through the
Senate, claiming their members are "deeply frustrated" by inaction to
date.
Nine members of the Clean Energy Works coalition --
including the Al Gore-led Alliance for Climate Protection, the
environmental and labor BlueGreen Alliance and the Center for American
Progress -- sent a letter to Obama Friday asking his administration "to
take the next essential steps" in getting a bill through a very divided
Senate.
"A rapidly growing number of our millions of active
members are deeply frustrated at the inability of the Senate and your
Administration to act in the face of an overwhelming disaster in the
Gulf, and the danger to our nation and world," the groups wrote.
They want the Obama administration to write a bill with key senators to
cut greenhouse gas emissions and oil use, directly respond to the Gulf
spill and to push the Senate to act on a bill before the August recess.
"White House leadership is the only path we see to success, just as your
direct leadership was critical in the passage of the recovery plan,
health care reform, and other administration successes," they wrote.
Other groups signing the letter are the Environmental Defense Fund,
League of Conservation Voters, Environment America, Natural Resources
Defense Fund, National Wildlife Federation and the Union of Concerned
Scientists.
Obama "has to directly engage with his staff at a
detailed level in producing a bill inclusive of carbon limits that will
win 60 votes in the Senate," Environmental Defense Fund President Fred
Krupp told reporters Thursday. "If he doesn’t do that, then
everything he’s done so far will lead to nothing."
There it is
right there, "...directly respond to the Gulf spill and to push the
Senate to act on a bill..."
Why Obama Can’t Plug That Damn Hole
Fortune Dale says he’s in charge. Yup, our
fearless leader and his minions of public-sector organizers who have the
job of cleaning up the massive mess in the gulf. An administration built
on people that Ayn Rand would call second-handers.
Individuals
who have risen to power based on the ability to bring people together
for the sole reason of bringing people together. These are people
who feed off the success of others. They use any means necessary
to give you "Hope" but they can’t "Change" a thing.
Obama cannot
plug the hole or clean up the spill or administer reparations to those
who have lost work because he has never been in charge of anything that
required results.
A campaign doesn’t produce anything but
people’s opinions. A crisis on the other hand requires results.
It means someone has to make a hard decision. It means there must
be accountability and a plan. Speeches and snow cones don’t clean
oil-soiled pelicans. Pointing fingers at the evil corporation that
employed thousands in the same community affected by the spill does not
get fisherman back to work. Demonizing BP and blaming Bush just
makes the crisis worse and proves how ill equipped this administration
of community organizers is.
We learn a lot about people during a
time of crisis. We learned that Obama loves golfing. Since
the oil spill began, he found plenty of time to hit the links (eight
times in 70 days), sing-a-long with an American-hating Beatle, catch
21-yr-old pitching phenom Strasburg play his White Sox and oh yeah --
put a massive halt on drilling in the gulf that is costing nearly $300
million a month in lost profit for the citizens in the region. Now
that’s what I call a leader.
Obama criticizes BP, while not
realizing the more he taints the public opinion of BP like the oil
infects the sands of Louisiana, the less profit BP can make, therefore
creating an impossible situation for BP to pay those in need.
Without future profits, all those people whose livelihoods have been
destroyed have nowhere to go to get cash. Oh wait, not true, the
taxpayers will foot the bill.
The only reason companies are
forced to do offshore drilling so far out in the ocean is because the
environmentalists forced them out there. Now they’re so far out,
drilling so deep, that when a crisis happens it is nearly impossible to
fix. Great plan!
Speaking of environmentalists, don’t
forget energy reform. Obama cannot plug that hole, because if he
does, then all his support to overhaul our energy policy will have no
enemy. He needs the villain of big oil. How can he justify
raising taxes and expanding government control if the oil isn’t leaking?
He can’t claim urgency like he did with healthcare without the open
wound in the gulf. Please "Hope" the American people won’t be
duped again.
The biggest reason Obama is completely incapable of
stopping the largest environmental disaster in American history is
because then he would have to abandon all his ideologies. He would
have to embrace individual minds who actual know how to fix and create
things. He would have to lean on people who are not government
workers. He would have to find experts who don’t get elected and
aren’t part of advisory panels. He would have to rely on the
creators, not the second-handers. And since he feels all those
types of people are the enemy, he has no idea how to extend his arm from
this oily mess and get a life-line from the individuals he hates the
most.
If you’ve never run anything before, then maybe president
of the greatest country on earth isn’t where you get your feet wet.
And Mr. Obama, watch where you step, the oil isn’t going anywhere
anytime soon.
Dennis Miller Talks About Obama’s Katrina
In
this audio,
Dennis Miller examines the almost total lack of criticism of the Obama
presidency by the Mainstream Media and contrasts how things would be
entirely different if George Bush were still the president now.
Miller says, "Think about that...its the biggest environmental disaster
in the history of the country, with a president who advocates himself as
the most environmental president -- and he takes minimal heat."
