June 20, 2013

BOEMRE issues first deep-water drilling permit since BP spill

Houston’s Noble Energy got the green light today for the first deep-water drilling permit in the Gulf since the BP disaster.  The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement stated:

“This permit was issued for one simple reason: The operator successfully demonstrated that it can drill its deepwater well safely and that it is capable of containing a subsea blowout if it were to occur,” Bromwich told reporters during a teleconference. “We expect further deepwater permits to be approved in coming weeks and months based on the same process that led to the approval of this permit.”

Two weeks ago four large oil companies announced their new “spill containment system” which is a rapid response system which is superior to any current Gulf of Mexico response capabilities. Noble Energy’s CEO David Stover worked over months with service providers and others in the industry to make deep-water drilling safer. This is certainly welcome news and hopefully we will be on the way to having more of those 103 permits approved that have been sitting in limbo.

House Natural Resources Chair Doc Hastings (R-WA) issued this statement today:

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 28, 2011 – House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (WA-04) released the following statement after the Interior Department announced the approval of Noble Energy’s deepwater drilling permit:

“Over four months after the deepwater drilling moratorium was officially lifted in the Gulf of Mexico, the Administration is finally issuing the first permit. While this is good news, today’s action alone isn’t enough. The Administration must immediately move ahead with issuing other permits and comply with the recent judicial decision ordering the Administration to act. This one new permit will not ease the economic pain being inflicted on Gulf families. Thousands of people are still out of work in the Gulf and the threat of four dollar gasoline is looming over our struggling economy. A robust all-of-the-above energy plan that includes increased offshore energy production is needed to put Americans back to work and help insulate America from energy price spikes caused by unstable foreign countries.”

This is a good first step in making the US energy independent, however much more work needs to be done.

Crossposted at Unified Patriots

Share

With gas approaching $4/gallon, at least one Dem rethinking stance on oil

Gasoline hit almost $4/gallon at some Chicago stations this past weekend, and as one can well imagine, folks aren’t happy.

Last year at this time Chicagoans were paying an average of $2.84/gallon and with the 10 cent rise in the last few days this is the highest cost of gas since 2008. Mvd1472798According to the same article the average price of gas for the rest of the nation for regular unleaded is $3.37.

According to analyst Peter Beutel the crises and events in the Middle East, mainly Libya and Egypt are adding to nervousness in the industry which has crept the price of a barrel of oil up to $97.

Approaches to energy issues and the fate of oil and natural gas drilling and coal mining versus ramping up “renewable energies” has largely fallen down party lines. The majority of Republicans are in favor of using our domestic energy fossil fuels to help the US become energy independent while President Obama and the Democrats are mostly concerned about the “clean energies.”

Now at least one Democrat may be having a change of heart. According to the NewCanaan on-line in Connecticut, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT #4) has been listening to drivers’ woes and their complaints of $4/gallon gas. While opposing drilling in ANWR and some sensitive areas in the Gulf, Himes now states:

“I do think we need to move away from [drilling], but give me a choice between getting it here and importing it from Saudi Arabia and I’ll take getting it from here any day,” he said.

Now if we could just get the majority of other Democrats to change their tune.

Couple the Gulf drilling moratorium and Obama’s desire to eliminate what he calls “costly tax cuts for oil companies” could spell disaster for consumers at the pump and cost thousands of jobs.  According to the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce:

“Big Oil has long been a plump piñata for politicos and environmental groups, but a simple cost-benefit analysis shows that eliminating decades-old tax rules for oil and gas could be a lousy deal for consumers,” Bryce writes in The Wall Street Journal.

Although Obama wants to move away from biofuels, the realism is taxpayer expense for using ethanol, for example, to reduce the amount of gasoline runs about $1.78/gallon. This means the entire taxpayer cost for the ethanol boondoggle amounts to around $16.2 billion.

Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association called Obama’s proposal:

“a sweetheart deal for the state-owned oil companies in Russia, Iran, China and other competitor nations, and for the Chinese who produce almost all the rare earth minerals needed to make batteries for electric vehicles.”

One must understand that oil companies do not get subsidies. For the present, at least, they get tax breaks for creating jobs and producing their commodities.

We need more on the side of tapping our domestic fossil fuels or gas prices could make a huge hit to the pocketbook. And that means consumers will have less dollars to spend in other areas and the dominoes will begin to fall.

Crossposted at Unified Patriots.

Share

Another union goon caught on tape, in Sacramento

This time it’s 28 year old Teamster Richard Andazola of Stockton CA.

Keep going for it guys. We’re taking names…

Share

Dr. Gridlock or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Government Shutdowns

Boehner and Ryan may have best strategy on budget battle after all

John Boehner

Soon after the new GOP-majority House convened in January, this column endorsed endorsed a “selective government shutdown” strategy in which congressional Republicans would pre-emptively prepare the public for what seemed to us an inevitable confrontation over government spending with the new party of “no”, i.e. status quo Democrats. Like Byron York, we think the political and economic landscape has shifted so dramatically since President Bill Clinton bested Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1995 version of this play, that we fear no shutdown; and, like Hugh Hewitt, we think it best to confront the issue of deficit spending and debt in the context of our domestic affairs rather than debt ceiling vote bluffs.

A month later, we are more convinced that a shutdown is inevitable given President Barack Obama’s “Louis XV budget” head-in-the-sand proposal and especially after ObamaDems have been talking of nothing else but a shutdown. However, we have become convinced that it is not necessary to aggressively pursue such a strategy immediately for a number of reasons.

Just now, the public is transfixed on another epic party-defining battle in Madison, Wisconsin, the images of which create more 2012 tea partier voters everyday the public witnesses elected Democrats fleeing Badger State Troopers for the Illinois border like Bonnie & Clyde after a bank robbery and the public sector unionists that now occupy their space at the State Capitol.

By all means let us get out of the Democrats way and let them bury themselves. No need to distract from free advertising when Speaker of the House John Boehner can issue a two-week continuing resolution that includes all of spending cuts that the President proposed in a vehicle that requires no compromises on the part of conservatives.

But the day is coming when the Drive-by media will film the crocodile tears of youngsters unable to see Old faithful a Yellowstone and the GOP needs to prepare for it, because any compromise that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would agree to in conference in conference and that the president would sign, would be a betrayal of last November’s biggest Republican election  since 1948.

I now think that the Speaker’s strategy of being hard on spending cuts but soft on any desire for a shutdown can be effective and that it may well be better if the day of reckoning is later in the year. It could well work to our advantage to spread out the misery for Obama. Right now, he sees the possibility of a lifetime of union community organizing for funding Democratic party campaigns going down the tubes at the hands of WisconsinGovernor Scott Walker:

“I just finished eight years as county executive in Milwaukee last December,” he told me during a telephone interview. “I’ve dealt with unions and angry legislators. I know anytime you challenge the status quo you have to be bold—and take the heat.”…the proposal would require that public-employee unions be recertified annually by a majority vote of all their members, not merely by a majority of those who cast ballots. The bill would also end the government’s practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. “If workers have freedom of choice on their own dues money and a real voice in their union,” the governor says, “they may get better representation.”

Had House Republicans had the guts of Walker, they would have added de-fundings of total ObamaCare, NPR, CPB, and the Legal Services Corporation to the aborting of Planned Parenthood. But they can still redeem themselves if they will listen to We the People as the Speaker promised. So far, tea partiers have moved Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) even further  to the right on a number of spending cut issues and the way is clear for conservatives to own the economic issue going in to the 2012 election.

The GOP must resist compromises that would let the Democrats off the accountability hook. One reason for the massive 2010 victory was GOP unity in 2008-9 against most all of the ObamaDem agenda. That same kind of unity these next two years can give conservatives control of all of the levers of power to truly reverse the Big Government slouching towards Gomorrah.

Moreover, with the oil-rich Middle East in turmoil and gasoline prices on the rise even more rapidly than they already were before Mubarak fell in Cairo, the GOP should float a proposal naming the price for either avoiding a shutdown or for ending it once it starts: ObamaDems will stop their 30+ year incremental shutdown of the domestic oil and coal industries and consequent attack on the poor, middle class and national security, and we’ll let some of their meddling regulators collect their severance pay.

Mike DeVine

Legal Editor - The Minority Report

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist for Examiner.com

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Modern ConservativeHillbilly Politics, and Conservative Outlooks. All Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.

www.devinelawvista.com

Share

Obama’s Betrayal of America

The promise that the Bush-McCain weary heard was that there were no red states and no blue states, but just the United States. The stimulus would arrest the recession and keep unemployment under 8%. ObamaCare would lower the deficit and you could keep your own insurance if you wanted. Foreign nations would love the anti-cowboy, and oh yes, anyone that was saddled with white guilt would have it instantly purged.

Two years later down the yellow-brick road, the curtain has been rent and revealed, not a wizard, but rather a lawless, arrogant alien in the White House that is not just presiding over American decline but actually egging it on.

He is not alien because he wasn’t born in Hawaii, but, rather because he doesn’t love America and what it is and has stood for. Rather, he loves the Obama-nation he is in the process of building in which he issues waivers to those that tickle the King’s fancy and organize communities for his Democrat like the hordes of spoiled public sector union brats in Wisconsin.

obama-wright

But what to expect from a man raised by proud Marxists; educated by those that deem Bill Ayers a colleague; and preached to for 20 years in a church that honors a racist that our President Obama always calls “Minister” Farrakhan (and with whom his Most Reverend Wright traveled to Libya to honor a tyrant that survived Reagan’s bombs and surrendered his WMD to Dubya but who recently finally found a U.S. Chief Executive he could praise in B. Hussein).

On Day One of the Obama Era, the dreams from his UK-hating Kenyan father prompted him to remove the post-911solidarity gift of Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office. To make amends he gave the Queen of England a CD of his speeches, slapped her on the back and gave Russia Britain’s nuclear secrets. All before bowing until his ears hit the floor to every two-bit Muslim potentate during two Apologize for America tours.

In further efforts to secure the love of the “international community” it equates the death cult in Gaza with the building of apartment buildings in East Jerusalem and sides with Iran’s mullahs over those innocents mowed down in Teheran streets. The result? Saudi Arabia mocks him in public, Pakistan tries a diplomat for murder despite immunity, Mexican soldiers treat the Arizona as grounds for maneuvers and China plays anti-American ditties in the White House to polite applause as Attorney General Eric Holder exonerates billy club-wielding New Black Panthers and sues Mexico’s Arizona territory.

Have we discovered any High Crimes or Misdemeanors yet, because it’s about to get worse?

Reform instead of recovery

How is ObamaCare working out for the nearly 20% of Americans that are either out of work or so under-employed that they can’t pay for necessities at Fed-inflated prices, much less consume any wants greater than Le Seuer brand-peas. Things are so bad that stories of proposed municipal laws banning roosters in backyards fill newspapers.

John Maynard Keynes complained of FDR’s misplaced focus on NRA price-fixing reforms while the nation cried out for recovery, but at least he put some folks to work through the WPA.

Obama delayed public works until his second year and then claimed there never was any such thing as “shovel-ready” projects. Has he even seen Hoover’s Dam or FDR’s TVA?

As senator and president he supported and fostered a TARP for Paulson, Geithner & Company that hasn’t even protected banks when one out of every nine of those that haven’t already closed are at risk of failure. No troubled assets have been recovered and no small business loans are being made since there are no expected profits with which to pay back said loans from a stimulus that only saved state and local government jobs and created federal regulators that kill jobs.

While star-struck Americans gazed upon the underside of Obama’s skyward-pointing chin and exposed nostrils, and so missed his promises to bankrupt the coal industry and have us learn a lesson from skyrocketing oil prices, now, thanks to lawless violations of court orders denying oil-drilling moratoriums, followed by lawless EPA attacks against oil drilling on Texas fields and denials of permits for power plant construction after even a Democrat Congress refused his cap-and-trade attack on the poor and middle class; when it snows in New Mexico, we have to beg Old Mexico for heat.

The left-hand touts the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the “host of important non-secular actors” in Egypt while the right hand deems them not very religious. The MUSLIM brotherhood are not very religious? He must be referring to his own not very religious, and rare darkenings of churches or to the irreligious audacities issued from Wright’s pulpit about the CIA’s conspiracy to infect Blacks with AIDS.

Empty Promises

Restructured underwater mortgages never materialized while policies prevented the reaching of the necessary bottom to a housing market, when all the while 1000-page Dodd-Frank financial “reforms” paid off revolving door Democrat pals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that blew the bubble up to bursting size in the first place.

Meanwhile, middle class taxpayers subsidize vanity GM cars for the rich as its stock dips below the IPO price.

He promised to end the running up of debt like Bush. He delivered on that one, as he ran up the debt at a currency-threatening rate three times the Bush rate and nearing post-WWII levels.

Promises were forthcoming that you could keep your own health insurance while attacking the very foundations of risk assessment and pricing with demands to cover “children” as old as 26 and pre-existing conditions on the day after cancer is diagnosed.

When all else fails, just take the painkiller and go home. Your life is no more precious at age 95 years than those 95+ day-old born alive infants he refused to protect from the floor of the Illinois Senate.

A Stranger in our Midst that chooses American decline

He seems a stranger in our midst that seems to get every issue not just wrong, but exactly wrong. He is no Jimmy Carter. No, Obama seems to choose American decline as a choice with no paean to “human rights” unless it is the right of humans to do right by his decrees. He takes apologize-for-America tours abroad to accept Nobel prizes while his rib-eating wife lectures the obese in a nation growing in numbers of those who will soon be able to see their own ribs if the great recession doesn’t abate.

Many of us are not surprised. We didn’t put our hands over our ears to drown out Rev. Wright or Obama’s musings on the flawed Constitution and Founders. Many of us were not so anxious to purge misplaced white guilt and give this stranger in our midst the nukes.

Must we endure two more years of this near-dictator while he continues to systematically dismantle the economy at home and our alliances over seas? While he defies court orders and “evolves” away defenses of traditional marriage?

Can he be stopped before the deluge? What will be left of America on Inauguration Day, 2013 if he remains our Chief Magistrate and Commander in Chief for another 23 months?

Democrats, have you no shame at what you foisted on this great country?

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Share