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Posts Tagged ‘Spill’
July 15th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Phone Book and Faculty Agree: Obama’s Drilling Moratorium a Bad Idea
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William F. Buckley, Jr. famously said that he’d rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty.

Every so often, however, the phone book and the faculty actually agree.  According to a new Bloomberg poll, a remarkable 73% of respondents oppose our supposed philosopher-king Barack Obama’s drilling moratorium.  What makes this remarkable is that approximately three-quarters of the American public, which very rarely seems to find consensus on anything these days, just doesn’t buy Obama’s constant drumbeat of scapegoating the oil industry, “deregulation” or the previous administration.  What makes this even more remarkable, however, is that Obama’s own appointed “experts” agree with everyday citizens.  As noted in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the hyper-partisan investigatory panel selected by Obama himself expresses skepticism toward his moratorium.

Add the fact that two separate courts have rejected the Obama Administration’s ill-advised moratorium, which is jeopardizing even more jobs in that hard-hit region, and we’re approaching unanimity against the self-professed “bridge-builder” Obama.

July 6th, 2010 at 10:25 am
Headline: “Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies”
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Hypocrisy in a president is shameful enough.  But combining that hypocrisy with outright dishonesty is inexcusable.

Compare a front-page headline from today’s Wall Street Journal versus President Obama’s speech from the Oval Office regarding the Gulf oil spill.  In his June 15 speech, Obama descended into his usual habit of scapegoating the allegedly “deregulatory” Bush administration and falsely attempting to distinguish his own:

Over the last decade, [the federal Minerals Management Service] has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility — a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves…  When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency.  But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.  And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency…  So one of the lessons we’ve learned from this spill is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling.  But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk.”

But that’s not true.  According to a front-page report from today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Obama Decried, Then Used, Some Bush Drilling Policies,” the Obama White House urged a federal court of appeals to reverse its environmental risk analysis and allow Gulf oil drilling to proceed:

Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore drilling.  The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea…  Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision.”

The appellate court did reverse its previous ruling, allowing more Gulf drilling to proceed.  That includes BP’s well.

Obama’s halting leadership style sows economic uncertainty at home and international menace abroad.  His increasing dishonesty, however, creates an even more disturbing spectre haunting the nation.

July 1st, 2010 at 1:19 pm
BP and the Obama Agenda
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Today’s BigGovernment.com queue includes our commentary on the disturbingly cozy marriage of convenience between BP and the Obama Administration.

BP and the Obama Agenda

By Timothy H. Lee

For years, liberals in Washington have tirelessly thwarted America from tapping its domestic sources of energy, while hypocritically lamenting our “addiction to foreign oil.” They have forsworn abundant energy supplies just off our coasts and erected boundaries against drilling and energy development right here at home. The unfortunate effect of their effort is to unnecessarily drive exploration further and further offshore, to deeper and deeper depths.

Suddenly, those same forces are forging a marriage of convenience with BP to scapegoat the entire energy industry for BP’s individualized failures. In his Oval Office speech to the nation, for instance, President Obama resorted to sloppy slurs against “oil industry lobbyists” and “an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.” …

Read the entire piece here.