Napolitano’s Safer Border Claim is bunk; Obama Admin/Napolitano policies Blasted As ‘Laughingstock’; and ATF’s Project Gunrunner/Obama Stimulus Scandal

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• Napolitano Blasted As ‘Laughingstock’ for Safe Border Claims
• US Lacks Comprehensive Border Strategy
• IG:Homeland Security Reviews Were Wasteful

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio poses in front of seized bales of marijuana. His assertion that the U.S.-Mexico border is not safer is backed by the nonprofit Center for Immigration Studies’ Mark Krikorian, who told Newsmax that Napolitano’s statements are “political spin,” and her defense of administration policies along the border is becoming “something of a laughing stock.” (AP Photo)

 

Arpaio Rejects Napolitano’s Safer Border Claim — Sends in New Armed Forces

Controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio isn’t buying Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s claims that the U.S.-Mexico border is safer. Arpaio is launching one of the largest crime suppression sweeps in Arizona’s history, which will include the use of 30 aircraft, armed posses, drug dogs, and SWAT teams equipped with M-16s.
FULL STORY

Analysis: US still lacks border strategy
WASHINGTON (AP) – The federal government hasn’t come up with a comprehensive strategy to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, even as an all-out war between Mexico and its violent drug gangs has claimed 35,000 lives and pushed hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the United States.

 

  Project Gunrunner: Obama’s Stimulus-Funded Border Nightmare

Buried in Barack Obama’s failed trillion-dollar stimulus program was a $10 million bloody border racket that has now cost American lives. This goes far beyond the usual waste, fraud and abuse underwritten by progressive profligacy. It’s bloodstained government malfeasance overseen by anti-gun ideologues — and now anti-gun ideologue Attorney General Eric Holder will “investigate.”

Gas Price Spike Propels Double-Dip Recession Fears, coming Stagflation, Obama-Salazar energy policy disaster, Drill here drill now, and the Mideast factor

Why We Need to Drill Here and Drill Now

by Steve EverleyThe president’s policy won’t create more energy — or more jobs. Read

As Gas Prices Rise, Is It Time to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’?

March 07, 2011 FoxNews.com by Bradley Blakeman 

Unless our government steps on the gas and exploits our own oil, gas, and coal production, America will suffer a double dip recession, or worse.

Drill We Must — and Right on Dry Land

by Roger L Simon. Middle East madness makes energy a winning issue for the Republicans.

• America’s Enemies Don’t Want U.S. Drilling – IBD editorial

• Most Back Oil Drilling Offshore, In ANWR – IBD

“President Obama is considering opening up the nation’s strategic oil reserve as the administration grapples with how to deal with rapidly rising gas prices.” – New York Times

Obama Nixes Safe Drilling – Jeffrey Folks
Gulf Oil Spill Could Have Been Stopped 48 days Earlier
March 03, 2011
The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, said no. More

House Republicans Propose Nuclear and Drilling Energy Plan: Can Obama Say No?

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Jane Jamison

 

The House GOP is going to keep President Obama on task with his  promise last year to “nuke” up :

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Interior appeals OIL DRILLING ruling – POLITICO.com

By DAN BERMAN & DARREN GOODE | 3/4/11

The Obama administration late Friday appealed a judge’s orders directing the Interior Department to act on several Gulf of Mexico deepwater drilling permits.

The appeal is the latest salvo in the ongoing fight over the speed with which Interior is – or isn’t – letting oil drillers get back to work after last year’s BP oil spill.

Gulf state lawmakers and the oil industry have accused the department of enacting a “de facto” moratorium against new drilling, while Interior says it needs to ensure safety and environmental protections are in place.

Friday’s appeal challenges rulings by Judge Martin Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, who on Feb. 17 gave Interior 30 days to make a verdict on five pending deepwater drilling permits applications. He later added two additional permits to that order.

via Interior appeals oil drilling ruling – Dan Berman and Darren Goode – POLITICO.com.

Gasoline now costs 26.7 cents a gallon more than it did a month ago, and 66.4 cents higher than its price on year ago.

Gas Price Spike Propels Double-Dip Recession Fears

Rapidly escalating gasoline prices may push the nation back into a recession as scared Americans cut back on spending, economists warn. Each 1-cent increase in gas prices is the equivalent of a $1.2 billion “tax” on Americans, one economist says — and that figure would compute to $31.2 billion during the past month alone.
FULL STORY

Obama’s Legacy: Stagflation
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

President Obama’s failure to support America’s allies in the Middle East and his dithering endorsement of chaos in the region will send oil and gasoline prices skyrocketing, triggering a massive bout of stagflation. … more

Rep. Dan Burton: We need to drill here, we need to drill now — It is unconscionable that America is not energy independent.

 Deroy Murdock – Can We Drill Now, Please?

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• High Pump Prices Rattle Drivers and Businesses
• EU: Gadhafi Has Lost Control Over Oil, Gas Fields
• Bryce: Obama Oil Policy Will Rob Consumers
• As The Saudi Tanks Roll To Bahrain

Obama Nixes Safe Drilling
Jeffrey Folks
By refusing to grant a single deep-water permit in the Gulf, Obama has shut down access to one third of America’s oil supply. More

The Oil Spill Crisis That Didn’t Go To Waste – Bruce Thompson

Salazar in deep water with both sides of drilling debate

How High Will Oil Prices Go?

March 2nd – Why Oil Prices Will Continue To Climb
Crude oil closed above $102 a barrel today, as news of an unexpected decline in last week’s U.S. oil inventories and the ongoing political turmoil in the Middle East fed concerns about global supplies, lifting prices to a fresh two-and-a-half year high. “The single biggest cause of skyrocketing oil prices is the refusal of this president to develop our own American energy sources,” Sean steamed kicking off Wednesday’s show. “Obama has banned drilling almost everywhere. He promised he’d build new nuclear plants but he hasn’t done that either. Yet, he’s wasted billions on these phony baloney green energy projects which are useless.” And, as Sean predicted months ago, the instability in the Middle East may push oil prices close to two hundred dollars a barrel as a result of Obama’s policies. “Conservatives have said for a long time that we’re ‘all of the above.’ We want drilling, refineries, nuclear facilities, coal mining – basically all the things we’re not doing,” said Sean Hannity.

Bernanke Warns Rising Oil Prices A Threat To U.S.
In a semiannual report to Congress, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told politicians that commodity-price inflation, and oil prices more specifically, could pose a threat to economic growth and price stability if sustained at high levels. Yet, at the same time, the fed chief reassured politicians that inflation remained low and expectations stable. Bernanke actually pointed out that “sustained rises in the prices of oil or other commodities would represent a threat both to economic growth and to overall price stability, particularly if they were to cause inflation expectations to become less well anchored.” “Here’s the problem,” Sean said responding to Bernanke’s statement. “America has all this oil sitting out there in the wilderness and we won’t touch it. But yet we import all this oil from all over the world. They have to drill for that oil in other parts of the world! It’s the same earth that we share with the people we import the oil from. It’s the same oil drilling process we’d use in our own country if we were allowed. If we could drill our own oil, all this instability in the Middle East wouldn’t matter as much. It would still matter; it just wouldn’t matter as much. We should look for other technologies so that we can be oil independent. But in the interim, let’s drill!” Sean said adamantly. 

How Obama Is Making Gas Prices Higher

Yesterday, for the first time since September 2008, the price of a barrel of crude oil topped $100 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. But while the recent unrest in the Middle East has had some marginal effect on rising prices, the most significant factor has been increased oil demand worldwide. That is why, long before the recent protests even began, analysts were predicting $4 a gallon by this summer and $5 a gallon by 2012. Anyone could have predicted that the recovering world economy, coupled with the continued growth of India and China, was going to push oil prices higher. So if an Administration wanted to keep gas prices down, they could have mitigated increased oil demand by increasing domestic oil production. But that is not what the Obama Administration has done. Instead of increasing domestic oil supplies, the Obama Administration has cut them at every opportunity, and Americans are now suffering because of those choices…

But not only has President Obama failed to diversify our energy supply in any meaningful way; he has actually proactively moved to cut our own domestic energy supplies: …

“The Obama Administration is repeating the mistakes of President Jimmy Carter’s failed energy policies, which marred his term and stigmatized the 1970s. They are leading us straight into another national energy disaster,” Steve Forbes warned …

Read the entire Heritage Foundation report.

Roadblock On Domestic Oil Production Even More Costly Now

By: National Center for Policy Analysis

DALLAS -The ongoing turmoil throughout the Middle East highlights the continuing and pervasive vulnerability of the U.S. economy to oil price instability, yet the Obama administration continues to thwart any efforts to increase domestic oil production, according to National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett.”We have billions of barrels of oil just waiting to be accessed, yet the Obama administration has thrown one roadblock after another to prevent new domestic production,” Dr. Burnett said. “These actions have made it nearly impossible to tap new domestic reserves.” more…..

Editorial Exegesis

“The turmoil in the Middle East has pushed oil above $100 per barrel again, and gasoline prices are following suit. … Unfortunately, at the same time foreign supplies are falling, domestic production is being curtailed by policies of President Barack Obama’s administration. The Interior Department continues to defy a federal court order that lifted a ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, put in place during last spring’s oil spill. Rather than complying with the judge’s order, federal regulators have stalled the issuing of permits so that almost no new drilling has occurred in the Gulf in more than six months. In addition, the administration is standing firm on a seven-year ban on new drilling in the eastern Gulf and off the East Coast, and has expanded by 100 miles the no-drill zone off the coast of Florida. Vast areas in the nation’s interior have been placed off-limits to drilling, as has the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (You may recall that President Obama rescinded President Bush’s lefting of the ban). Additional impact on consumers will come if Obama succeeds in his bid to raise taxes on oil companies. … Democrats in Congress are urging the president to ease prices with releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But that oil serves the purpose of protecting the country against a more serious contraction of imported oil. A better strategy would be to resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf, and consider exploring other domestic reserves. … The only sure way to offset the decrease in foreign production is to increase domestic production, which has fallen to 5 million barrels a day from a high of 10 million. … The risk that higher oil prices will send the economy back into recession is too great to ignore. Easing restrictions on domestic production is a necessary safeguard.” –The Detroit News

“It appears that the Obama administration is more interested in kowtowing to environmental donors in advance of the 2012 election than it is in controlling energy prices. Even with a federal court order to decide on new drilling in the Gulf by March 20, the Obama administration remains obdurate. By refusing to grant a single deep-water permit in the Gulf, Obama has shut down access to one third of America’s oil supply. With Libyan oil fields now closed indefinitely and with uncertainty about future production elsewhere in the Middle East, it is a dreadful time to be shutting down America’s oil fields as well. Turmoil in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, or Iraq would drive the price of oil up above $150 a barrel, at the very least. A prudent policy would be to increase domestic production in light of uncertainty abroad.” –columnist Jeffrey Folks