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 :

Continue reading →

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?

More Stories

• 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

What would Saul Alinsky do? Defying court orders.

David Limbaugh: What would Saul Alinsky do?

By: David Limbaugh
Examiner Columnist
June 27, 2010

Remember the popular motto “What would Jesus do?” which was invoked by many Christians as a moral guidepost for daily living? President Barack Obama more likely adheres to “What would Saul Alinsky do?” as most recently evidenced by his apparent defiance of a federal court order on his moratorium on offshore drilling.

Politico reports that the drilling companies who secured the court order blocking the moratorium say the administration indeed is going to defy the court order. I’m quite sure that Alinsky would applaud this move: If at first you don’t succeed through proper legal channels, proceed anyway, because nothing is more important than the radical ends you seek, including the means that must be trampled in the process.

Of course, shrewd Alinskyites like Obama will always have a plausible excuse for their deceitful tactics. In this case, they are alleging newly discovered facts. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he intends to reimpose the drilling moratorium based on information that wasn’t “fully developed” in May, when the six-month moratorium was imposed. Quite convenient.

The administration is also sending mixed signals, probably to introduce sufficient confusion to cover its disobedience. The government’s brief filed with the court insisted, “Of course, until a further order of this Court or the Court of Appeals granting relief from this Court’s Preliminary Injunction Order, Defendants will comply with the Court’s Order.” But attorneys for the drilling companies warn that “Secretary Salazar’s comments have the obvious effect of chilling the resumption of (outer continental shelf) activities, which is precisely the wrong this Court sought to redress through its Preliminary Injunction Order.”

The companies’ point, notes Politico, is that Salazar’s public announcement that the administration will reinstitute the moratorium will have the same practical effect as actually doing it because companies are not about to prepare rigs for drilling when they might be shut down in a few days. The administration predictably pooh-poohs the companies’ concerns and says these new “facts” present an entirely different scenario. How convenient. Whenever you can’t advance the football, just move the goal posts your way.

Can’t you just hear an irate Alinsky-schooled Obama behind closed doors learning of the court order audaciously purporting to limit his plenary executive authority? “Just find the damn loophole — or say you did — and I don’t want to see you again in this office until it’s done.”

Defying court orders is just one of many ways Obama abuses his authority. When Congress failed with its initial efforts to impose cap-and-tax legislation designed to suppress traditional energy production and consumption in the United States for the ostensible purpose of reducing global temperature an imperceptible amount over the next century, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency just issued ultra vires regulations to accomplish similar results. It didn’t matter that every literate and intellectually honest person had to concede that the EPA had no statutory (or any other) authority to issue such sweeping regulations. What mattered were the administration’s radical environmental goals.

When Obama wanted to secure for his favored unions a stake in his new General Motors far exceeding their actual ownership interest and rob secured creditors of their preferred-creditor status and the value of their investment, he used the power of his office to strong-arm a restructuring of the company to accomplish his aims. When Democratic Party donor and super-lawyer Tom Lauria opposed this plan on behalf of his client, the White House, according to Lauria, threatened to destroy his client’s reputation. One unnamed source described the White House as the most shocking “end justifies the means” group he had ever encountered. Another attributed Obama’s negotiating tactics to a “madman theory of the presidency,” saying Obama wants to be feared as someone who is willing to do anything to get his way. In return for standing up for their legal rights as secured creditors and not bending to Obama’s horrendously unfair demand, er, offer, Obama maligned the recalcitrant creditors as “a small group of speculators.”

When inspector general Gerald Walpin blew the whistle on the corruption of an Obama friend and supporter, Obama fired Walpin and sought to discredit him as a senile misfit — a charge wholly unsupported by the facts.

And I won’t begin to recite the many ways (e.g., reconciliation) Obama sought to circumvent the legislative process en route to Obamacare.

Alinsky is surely beaming from the other side.

Examiner Columnist David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book “Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today’s Democratic Party” was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at http://www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page.

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