GregNews

I have to admit, I never thought there’d come a day when I embed a Rachael Maddow video in this blog…

There’s a lot of good points in that MSNBC video, but there’s also a healthy heaping of MSNBC lamestream media slant, and a typical Left wing ignorance of economics.

Two quick points: (1) the oil companies aren’t drilling deeper out of choice but because federal and state governments and environmental groups (lawsuits) make it impossible to drill in either shallower water or on land (ANWR, for example, or in the Dakotas).

(2) It doesn’t surprise me that Rachel Maddow is lacking economics 101 education — while petroleum may be the highest in terms of total profit its tax bill and expenses are also sky high. Thus in terms of profit margin, petroleum is more in line or quite behind other industries. IT Networking, for example, and software both enjoy much higher profit margin (20%+ versus about 11-12% for petrol). US petro-giant Exxon-Mobile, for example, ranks 60th.

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds with some reminders:

* Obama hand picked McChrystal!
* During the 2008 election cycle the Far Left called Gen. Petraeus “General Betrayus.” But now MoveOn has, well, moved on. I guess Obama gets a pass from them on that. (Flashback of this great parody of MoveOn — General LiesandPower.)
* Hillary Clinton questioned Petraeus’ character.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

The Obama administration is feeling a lot of heat regarding their reaction to the continued oil leak in the Gulf. Rather than be the executives who, you know, execute action to solve a problem (hence, The Executive Branch) the Obama administration is instead focusing on “whose ass to kick” (i.e., lawsuits — and what else would one expect from lawyers) and shifting blame. This week the blame goes to the Tea Parties and fiscally responsible conservatives. Watch how deftly Obama misrepresents the arguments of those who advocate limited government (including thus by definition James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et. al.).

Here’s Obama to The Politico’s Roger Simon:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

The president makes two fundamental errors in his argument, and we’ll look at them in reverse order to which he made them.

First, it’s ridiculous to compare a Federal response to the worst petroleum accident in the history of the country to daily Federal intrusions into our lives. Indeed, the very argument of those who advocate limited government is that national disasters are precisely when one should expect an overwhelming Federal response. No fiscal conservative or tea party I know is saying that government has no role (that would be the anarchists, the people who riot at world trade meetings, and hardly conservatives).

Conversely, the tea parties legitimately question, for example, daily government intrusions on your wallet and liberty vis-a-vis the type of light bulb you may place in your home, or how many gallons per flush your toilet may use, or how much money you must pay your after-school high-school employee to check out your customers at a register, not to mention Michelle Obama’s toe-dipping into the pool of the government determining what foods are or are not good for your family.

This is why Thomas Paine (of Common Sense) wrote that government “in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one”; and why Thomas Jefferson similarly argued never to misread the “General Welfare” clause: “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

The second fundamental error President Obama makes is his implied assumption that a lack of regulation enabled the BP oil leak. I have a hard time believing that when we’ve got a Federal agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) — an agency that the vast majority of Americans had probably never heard of six months ago — we really don’t have a plethora of federal, state and local regulations guiding the energy company. On top of that we’ve got the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and slew of other bureaucracies — again, federal, state, local — that must on a daily basis wade through no doubt pages of regulations that when stacked are higher than an oil rig. And that’s just the complexity that our government must interpret — imagine how much it costs BP, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Shell, etc., and thus how much that costs you and me at the pump. Remember, it was this same MMS that gave the Deepwater Horizon oil rig a safety award last year. So how would have giving the MMS, or another agency, more power prevented this accident? There’s not one shred of proof it would have.

Now, this isn’t an argument against regulation carte blanche. Rather, it’s an argument that the facts show that that oil leak was not a systemic problem — such as Obama argues — or caused from a lack of regulation, but rather caused by a series of human errors — the humans at BP and in the government did not follow the regulations, and indeed not even follow BP’s internal regulations or oil and gas industry common practices!

This understanding — that the problem was human, not systemic — is best explained, by the way, by a small Colorado oil and gas company president this weekend in the WSJ. In short, summarizes Terry Barr, the employees at BP and at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig chose to press forward despite a minimum of three “red flags” which any other company in the energy industry, argues Barr, would have halted operations.

First, some great recollection of history by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for the world’s Helen Thomases. The recently retired friend of moral equivalence and relativism, Helen Thomas, left in shame last week after a candid moment in which she explained on video how she’d promote Middle East Peace: “Tell them [Jews in Israel] to get the hell out of Palestine. … Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.”

Well, I don’t know about “everywhere else,” but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to “go home” to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them — killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 — more than a year after the end of the war — rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not “go home.” When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

That’s great history by Cohen.

Just one retort, however, counters Jonah Goldberg — it seems Mr. Cohen hasn’t always been intellectually honest himself:

I really liked Richard Cohen’s column today on Helen Thomas, in which he makes it sound as if he thinks Thomas is 100 percent wrong. But it’s kind of hard to square with this Cohen column from a few years ago. In his July 16, 2006, Washington Post column, Cohen wrote:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.