"Here's my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we've had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...."

http://tinyurl.com/3afklpq

--Charles Krauthammer

Here's what we do know.

* Obamarx is an enemy of capitalism, and Americanism
* His policies are failures, as were FDR's

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot! --Henry Morgenthau, Treasury Secretary under FDR, after 2 terms of FDR's "New Deal".

* The environ-mental-cases hate oil
* Obamarx is conveniently off the hook for suggesting drilling
* His illegitimate regime now has an excuse--at least to themselves--to further regulate oil production, just like they've attempted to take over Wall Street, the auto industry and health care
* Whether the left admits it or not, we're at war with radical muslim vermin, iran and north korea
* Obamarx (wisely?) has sent stormtroopers to the oil rigs

The real sabotage is coming from the White House every day. Compared to the disasters foisted on the USA by taxocrats, a mere oil spill is a few drops from a leaking ballpoint pen.

I've never had a beverage as hot as the hot chocolate which used to come out of those machines at the hockey rink. Seriously there must have been some additive in the chocolate mix that raised the boiling point of water. The stuff is seriously tasty when it cools down though.

That white shit that comes out of a can is not whipped cream. I started to find it disgusting after the first time I ever had real whipped cream. Cool whip from a tub is a decent compromise to real whipped cream in a pinch, but it's still disgusting sugary oil product "whipped topping", not whipped cream.

Liberal Lies in National Health Care: Second in a Series
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, August 26, 2009

With the Democrats getting slaughtered -- or should I say, "receiving mandatory end-of-life counseling" -- in the debate over national health care, the Obama administration has decided to change the subject by indicting CIA interrogators for talking tough to three of the world's leading Muslim terrorists.

Had I been asked, I would have advised them against reinforcing the idea that Democrats are hysterical bed-wetters who can't be trusted with national defense while also reminding people of the one thing everyone still admires about President George W. Bush.

But I guess the Democrats really want to change the subject. Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.

(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

Anyone who says that is a liar. And all Democrats are saying it. (Hey, look -- I have two-thirds of a syllogism!)

Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, "The Death Panel") deny medical treatment wasn't a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs ... without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let's go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine -- and it uses no energy, so it's totally green!

For you newcomers to planet Earth, everything that does not exist in infinite supply is rationed. In a free society, people are allowed to make their own rationing choices.

Some people get new computers every year; some every five years. Some White House employees get new computers and then vandalize them on the way out the door when their candidate loses. (These are the same people who will be making decisions about your health care.)

Similarly, one person might say, "I want to live it up and spend freely now! No one lives forever." (That person is a Democrat.) And another might say, "I don't go to restaurants, I don't go to the theater, and I don't buy expensive designer clothes because I've decided to pour all my money into my health."

Under national health care, you'll have no choice about how to ration your own health care. If your neighbor isn't entitled to a hip replacement, then neither are you. At least that's how the plan was explained to me by our next surgeon general, Dr. Conrad Murray.

(7) National health care will reduce costs.

This claim comes from the same government that gave us the $500 hammer, the $1,200 toilet seat and postage stamps that increase in price every three weeks.

The last time liberals decided an industry was so important that the government needed to step in and contain costs was when they set their sights on the oil industry. Liberals in both the U.S. and Canada -- presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and Canadian P.M. Pierre Trudeau -- imposed price controls on oil.

As night leads to day, price controls led to reduced oil production, which led to oil shortages, skyrocketing prices for gasoline, rationing schemes and long angry lines at gas stations.

You may recall this era as "the Carter years."

Then, the white knight Ronald Reagan became president and immediately deregulated oil prices. The magic of the free market -- aka the "profit motive" -- produced surges in oil exploration and development, causing prices to plummet. Prices collapsed and remained low for the next 20 years, helping to fuel the greatest economic expansion in our nation's history.

You may recall this era as "the Reagan years."

Freedom not only allows you to make your own rationing choices, but also produces vastly more products and services at cheap prices, so less rationing is necessary.

(8) National health care won't cover abortions.

There are three certainties in life: (a) death, (b) taxes, and (C) no health care bill supported by Nita Lowey and Rosa DeLauro and signed by Barack Obama could possibly fail to cover abortions.

I don't think that requires elaboration, but here it is:

Despite being a thousand pages long, the health care bills passing through Congress are strikingly nonspecific. (Also, in a thousand pages, Democrats weren't able to squeeze in one paragraph on tort reform. Perhaps they were trying to save paper.)

These are Trojan Horse bills. Of course, they don't include the words "abortion," "death panels" or "three-year waits for hip-replacement surgery."

That proves nothing -- the bills set up unaccountable, unelected federal commissions to fill in the horrible details. Notably, the Democrats rejected an amendment to the bill that would specifically deny coverage for abortions.

After the bill is passed, the Federal Health Commission will find that abortion is covered, pro-lifers will sue, and a court will say it's within the regulatory authority of the health commission to require coverage for abortions.

Then we'll watch a parade of senators and congressmen indignantly announcing, "Well, I'm pro-life, and if I had had any idea this bill would cover abortions, I never would have voted for it!"

No wonder Democrats want to remind us that they can't be trusted with foreign policy. They want us to forget that they can't be trusted with domestic policy.

the white house keeping its distance is the best foreign policy move i have seen from the white house in?..god,feels like forever.Iran has many pro-american constituents,but not from the mullahs.right now islam is so incredibly fractured it is a powder keg.i know i am just stating the obvious,but something has to be done and it wont help if its from an outside source,it has to come from within.

thats why i was cheering the protesters when they bogus election blew up in the mullahs faces.they may have restored some order after many deaths (nede being the most prominent)and many imprisonments but the word is out.now its just a matter of time.my hope is that the west stays out of it.there is a time to offer the hand of assistance,now is NOT that time.it would be too easy for iranian leaders to pounce on that and propagandize it to their own machinations.

if i had to point to a group to blame it would be the neo-liberals,now known as neo-conservatives.mrFisk posted an amazing doc today concerning just that topic so its fresh in my mind.i started paying attention to these guys around 2002,did some research and found an almost hidden group of empirialists who were pretty upfront about their goals.PNAC is a document i have posted about ever since.these guys mean business.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-New-American-Century

one more point.
while much is addressed in this documentary.it's prudent to know why Iran has a problem with the US.it was not just ONE thing,it was many.
but the two biggest,i feel anyways.
was the CIA/SAS backed coup of democratically elected(yes,iran used to be a democracy,until we showed up)mossadeq so that a much more "west-friendly" dictator in the form of the shah could be installed.(mossadeq kicked BP out of iran to nationalize the oil fields).
the second of course was the espionage game played with both iran and iraq to keep the region unstable and therefore unlikely to consolidate and take over oil production,THEIR oil production.that war lasted NINE years and the US played both sides.
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book called the grand chessboard.its an eye-opener on foreign policy,and explains many of the reasons why the US what they did.they were not exactly altruistic reasons.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard
the consequences of such actions?
chalmers johnson has the amswer:blowback
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson
interviews here:
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=chalmers+johnson
brzinzski here:
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=Zbigniew+Brzezinski

There's no reason that country should have to outsource the oil production to anybody in the first place.


Nope, none at all. I'm sure the remaining employees of Iraq's national oil company could handle everything all by themselves. I'm equally sure that all ties between them and Baath party are long gone and wouldn't cause the Iraqi government any problems. Of course, I don't believe there was anything stopping them from bidding alongside other global companies, was there...



Bet money that option was imposed on them by the US.


Oh, right. Because part of America's evil plan to steal Iraq's oil included guaranteeing over 90% of the profits went to the Iraqi government. Oh, and that the first contracts would go to China, America's closest ally...


And the Kurds? As soon as the fat cats get what they want out of the Kurds, they'll be brushed aside and forgotten all over again.


I think the Kurds are smarter and tougher than you give them credit for. Despite what you might like to think, the world consists of more people than just oil execs and their victims.

The Kurds managed to survive everything Saddam did do them. They've come out with the most stable region in the country and the only productive oil fields. Given they they hold all the power over those oil fields, I think they are in the drivers seat for anybody wanting oil out of those fields, and there will always be somebody interested in buying from a stable oil supply.

Shouldn't you be kicking a Palestinian child and stealing his father's land?

Yes, because it's all the Jew's fault again, isn't it?

>> ^bcglorf:
Yeah, except that 'those oil companies' ended up turning down the option to buy all but a single Iraqi oil field in the recent auction.

"The main stumbling block was the wide gap in the expectation of profits from Iraqi oil. The government was offering foreign investors a fixed fee of around $2 a barrel for extracted crude, while some bidders, such as the U.S. ConocoPhillips, were seeking nearly $27 per barrel!
(source)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's no reason that country should have to outsource the oil production to anybody in the first place. Bet money that option was imposed on them by the US.

And the Kurds? As soon as the fat cats get what they want out of the Kurds, they'll be brushed aside and forgotten all over again.

Shouldn't you be kicking a Palestinian child and stealing his father's land?

FOX, we would like it if both our NEWS and text-books were an "accurate representation of what happened".

FOX does however make some great points. Like how we actually won the Vietnam war, increased rice production in Vietnam AND created ONLY 2,000,000 refugees. Just like in Iraq where we found WMDs, increased oil production and ended terrorism. FOX is right-on as always.

BTW. I can't believe that a text-book had a centerfold of Cindy Sheehan. Outrageous...

Baked with Olestra, a new type of non-fat oil product. Only results in minor anal leakage.

I kid you not.. I did see a potato chip product made with Olestra with the anal leakage notice. It wasn't pringles though.

Three things she failed to mention about drilling in ANWR:

1) While the footprint for drilling there may be as "small" as 2000 acres, you still need a pipeline to get it out of there. (BP, anyone?)

2) The "average" Alaskan is in support of this? Does that mean a majority? I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and am not surprised since every Alaskan citizen (resident for at least 1 year) receives yearly royalty checks out of the oil rent trust fund. It's also beneficial to the state as a whole since royalties from oil production generate the bulk of Alaska's state revenue (no sales or income taxes).

3) "The opening of the ANWR 1002 Area to oil and natural gas development is projected to increase domestic crude oil production starting in 2018. In the mean ANWR oil resource case, additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR reaches 780,000 barrels per day (124,000 m³/d) in 2027 and then declines to 710,000 barrels per day (113,000 m³/d) in 2030. ... In 2007, the United States consumed 20.68 m bbls of petroleum products per day." from a Wikipedia article.
Forgetting the fact that it will take at least 10 years to get production going, at its projected peak production in 2027, ANWR would be able to supply roughly 3.75% of current U.S. oil consumption. In other words, this is barely a drop in the bucket, and will have no significant impact on world oil prices.

Bzzzt, Brazil is free from OPEC due to heavy use of ethanol, and while they did need to increase oil production too, that wasn't the biggest factor.

Brazil has 2/3 the population of the U.S., but produces less than 1/4 the oil we do, and they're independent.

My guess is in addition to ethanol, they also do more conservation than we do. Wouldn't be hard, we hardly do any of that, even with $4/gal gas.

*lies

>> ^viewer_999:
It's already a big worry that we might, just might finally get a guy in office who might, just might be able to make a difference for the better, and that some half-cocked jackass will try to assassinate him, but now this is the second such public reference (that I know of) to exactly that? Makes me fucking sick. In this case, I'm for the law: throw her ass in jail (and any random Fox employee as well for good measure).


Well Obama is the better of three evil, but generally speaking, it's not gonna make a whole lot of difference. Still gonna hit a brick wall once oil production diminishes, still gonna have horrible health-care, still gonna have overcrowded prisons, still gonna fight an endless war against drugs, war against terror. The list goes on.

The Petrodollar conspiracy is a weak one, and is not backed by any serious economic argument. At roughly $6 trillion foreign exchange reserves are simply not that large a chunk of global assets (not to mention debts or transactions).

That said, control over oil production probably has a far larger economic and political value than the price of oil would suggest.

Twiddles is right, its not just the bunker busters (which are also built using depleted uranium- makes for a bigger bang apparently), but all sorts of other smaller arms use DU as well. Frankly, you should be educating yourself on this MGR, if only out of concern for your own safety, chances are you were exposed to some of it during your service... and who the fuck knows what else, if history and experience have taught us anything is that in the quest to kill and maim efficiently the US army has been very adept at exposing both the enemy and its own soldiers to a plethora of nasty things... I mean, crap, how many older veterans do I know that are just now exhibiting symptoms of agent orange exposure? Or those of that in between generation that have Gulf War syndrome due to exposure to an as yet undisclosed substance? Too freaking many is the answer... too freakin' many.

And Twiddles is also right in that the assumption that Iraq was shit before we rolled in is completely ridiculous... things may have been relatively crappy in 2003 (see stats below), but you have to realize that our campaign against the stability of that country has been ongoing since the first Gulf War, and it has had a direct effect on the population, and undoubtedly accounts for much of the resentment of the Iraqi population towards their American 'liberators'. If it helps you to understand this, I'll shoot some statistics your way, these are all, by the way, directly from Phebe Marr's The Modern History of Iraq, in which she details the impact of US sanctions on Iraq:

"Oil production dropped 85% between 1990 and 1991 and began to increase again only after sanctions relief in 1997... Iraq's per capita income, which had stood at just over $2,000 in 1989 before the Gulf War, had fallen to $609 by 1992... Before the war, good imports were estimated to be about 70% of Iraq's consumption. These were now drastically reduced. Famine was avoided by an effective rationing system, but calorie intake fell from an average of 3,000 calories a day to about 2,250, most of these provided through a ration 'basket' provided by the government.... By 1995 the UN secretary general noted that living conditions had become precarious for an estimated 4 million people. The Food and Agriculture Organization claimed that child mortality had risen fivefold.... The damage to the education system was also severe... one report claimed that of the 250 primary schools in the center and south of the country, over 80% were in poor or critical condition. Credible figures show that the literacy rate, which reached 67% in 1980, fell to about 57% in 2001..." And I could go on, there is lots more where that came from, and I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Iraq.

But my point is We did that. One can argue that it was punishment on an evil dictator for daring to invade poor helpless Kuwait, and our continued sanctions on that country were meant to cripple him militarily as well as economically, in the hope that his people would rise up and overthrow him. However, that obviously did not happen, for a number of reasons, the primary one being that he was insanely good at keeping the population repressed and too afraid to step out of line. In the end, we may have removed him from being a regional power but we encouraged him to turn on his own people and increase his stranglehold upon them.

I was against the sanctions back in the 90s and I still think that they were one of the worst crimes against humanity that our nation has ever managed to get away with. I think it is of ultimate importance that our generation, (MGR- I'm not that much older than you), recognize now what we did, that we, as a country, completely fucked up another country (and arguably an entire region), so that when we are in charge, we do not repeat these same mistakes again and again.

That's a simplistic argument to make, that Russians 'tried' democracy and it failed. The fact is that Russian's never got to experience democracy at all, with the coming of Yeltsin into power the centralized market system was thrown out overnight for a capitalist economy, workers were issued shares for the companies they worked in, the Russian currency collapsed, pensions were stopped, all due to western economists (who arrived in droves) believing that the spirit of entrepreneurship would suddenly infect the souls of people who lived under communist rule for over 60 years.

But what happened was that some individuals within that system started buying out the shares from the workers who needed to sustain themselves at that point, seizing massive control of various industries, thus creating the oligarchs. The same people who now own various football clubs in the UK.

The people as a whole felt robbed, they blamed democracy for that, failing to see how the economic reforms worked against them, instead of blaming the transition many more people assumed it was democracy that was at fault. What should have been a long term phased switch into a market economy like the one seen with China was rushed within the space of a few years, incomes and welfare of course fell. Look at how gradually China introduced free market zones, by cordoning them off to small regions, then allowed foreign direct investment there. The whole motto of their capital development was "import 1st product, assemble 2nd product, manufacture 3rd product".

The current Putin government is full of KGB cronies who have muscled their way into acquisition of the most important sectors of the economy, most significant of them being the oil sector, which is wholly responsible for the economic boom in Russia. The war in Iraq and possible war with Iran has seen the Oil price soar year on year since 2000 and Putin's coming into power and the economic boom in Russia, that's not coincidental. This is why Putin visited Iran, instability in the Middle East sustains the high oil price and Russia's development.

Putin did give something to the Russians, and that is pride in their nation, a seeming return to the heyday of the Soviet Union with it's planting of flags in the Arctic, stance against the American government and nuclear armed patrols that hark back to the Cold War era. But it also came with government control of oil resources, elimination of civil rights, elimination of freedom of press, state control of media, needless military expansionism, Byzantine rule of government, political oppression through assassination of those who oppose the government.

Just this past month he imposed a collective freeze on food prices until after the elections sometime in January, this was done so as to keep the appearance to Russia's poor that the economy was doing well when in reality food prices across the world are rising, once elections are over they can remove the freeze.

A good article on "Why Putin Wins" is Sergei Kovalev's article , who gives a realistic breakdown of Russia as it is now and what is its future. As Scott Horton says in "What Putin Wants":

The challenge will be for America more than for Russia. In America, there is still a hope that the democratic process can work to effect a rollback of creeping authoritarianism and a restoration of the beacon of hope that the land once held up to the world. In Russia, all sight of that beacon is lost.

Your argument that non-democratic states like Kingdom of Saudi Arabia offer a higher standard of living is ridiculous, most of the population lives in poverty as the wealth is concentrated in the Royal family and even then only through the continual oil production, almost everything it produces is sustain through government subsidization, much more of its products are simply imported. Jordan differs because they possesses a technocrat King who believes in development, that doesn't mean tomorrow a tyrant will take power.

And am sorry but slave like hours on minimal wage for 90% of the population making Nike shoes does not translate into a higher standard living for the Chinese as a whole, not to mention that development is confined to the coastal areas, while inland China lives in poverty due to lack of investment and encroaching desert taking away valuable agricultural land. China possess an incredible amount of income disparity, firms are still mainly controlled by the Chinese government. It is true that there is slowly an emergence of a middle class, that is being educated abroad and not going back to mainland China, because opportunities in the west are much better.

The argument that ANY government policy has a potential to achieve strong economy is simplistic, the market system works because various agents start to develop products and services to supply a demand of other agents. That requires freedom of enterprise, the ability to freely form business solutions. That means reform laws that actively invite business activities to take place. Communism or centralized market economy does not lead to a strong economy because the demand and supply signals do not exist, the government decides what is important to produce and does it. It leads to a mis balance and a concentration of power in the hands of the few, this is why the USSR failed, and why China started to put in place free market reforms in the 80s. States in the Middle East still sustain their perverse development through oil money, without which all of them would quite realistically fail, as they are overly reliant on foreign labor and are not actively developing their skilled labor force, not to mention the sheer amount of corruption that occurs between those in high office and citizens.

Your mention of a few democratic states that are in poor shapes is simplistic again, they are not failures of democracy but rather a lack of proper reforms and rule. Brazil is doing rather well now actually even though government corruption is still rife as is political instability. Nepal is constitutional monarchy, where the King has assumed emergency powers and holds all executive power so I have no idea why you lumped it in there. Albania on the other hand has had successive government instability with the neighboring war, socialist, democratic governments in succession, the economy however is steadily developing even though stability has been hard to attain since 1990.

The idea behind democracy is that citizens can have a say in where their nation is heading, being elected to government doesn't make saints out of people where they suddenly selflessly try to achieve economy development for the people as a whole. The African nations where strong armed authoritative ruler one after the other prove this, as does Hugo Chavez who after winning the trust of the poor is now concentrating all executive power under his own control, as does Iran where Mahmoud's promises to the poor for oil revenue sharing amounted to nothing but continuous tensions and sanctions from the west.

I think you need to further broaden your understanding of the complexities of government rule and policy with regards to economic development as they are rather basic right now.