Cartoon Round Up

Obama's Egypt Policy

Drill Here, Drill Now, Despite Obama's Lies

By Alan Caruba

The Obama administration announcement that it intends to lift the ban on offshore exploration and drilling came as a big surprise, albeit a welcome one.

In an early March editorial The Washington Times noted that, “Within a month of taking office in 2009, Mr. Salazar (Secretary of the Interior) froze drilling leases already approved by the outgoing George W. Bush administration. Then he imposed a six-month public comment period to precede his decision on whether to allow new drilling. When the comment period ended in September, Interior suppressed the results.”

“The comments, totaling 530,000, favored drilling by a margin of 2 to 1. Even now,” said the editorial, “six months after the public comment period, Interior—apparently displeased with the results—still has not published the public reaction.”

And, of course, Obama campaigned on restricting access to our own oil. Why don’t we find it unusual any more than absolutely nothing the man ever said in the past is not subject to revision and, therefore, untrustworthy?

For an administration that is often disdainful of public opinion, this reversal on offshore drilling is quite stunning and, of course, raises the question why. I do not even pretend to know. One can speculate that the huge new reserves of oil being found around the world makes it difficult to explain a refusal to drill for any of our own oil.

Others explain it as a political decision designed to encourage those members of Congress who do not want to vote for the Cap-and-Trade Act that is festering in some dark corner of the Senate. It is suggested that either the act gets passed before the November midterm elections or it will never be enacted. There are also fears being expressed that the Environmental Protection Agency will assert regulatory powers to limit carbon dioxide emissions without waiting for Congress to act.

Suffice it to say that Cap-and-Trade would be one more nail in the nation’s fiscal coffin. It is so awful an entire commentary will be needed to reveal its hideous details.

Since the days of Jimmy Carter, successive administrations have failed to address the vital necessity of opening our own vast reserves of oil despite the nation’s increasing dependence on imports. Bush did not act until the very end of his second term.

The current administration is lying, as usual, about the estimated amount of oil domestically and offshore. However, a U.S. Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service set the figure to be 167 billion barrels of oil, not the 21 billion currently being cited. The estimated amount is the equivalent of replacing America’s current imports from OPEC countries for more than 75 years!

In December of 2009, Rasmussen Reports released a poll that found that nearly seventy percent of Americans supported responsible offshore energy exploration and production. That’s the kind of majority that is hard to ignore.

In September 2009, President Obama went on record in a speech at the United Nations saying, “I will work with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so we can better address our climate challenge.”

That “climate challenge” disappeared in November 2009 when a leak of emails between scientists for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed they had been cooking the data on “global warming” for years, deliberately misleading the public and fellow scientists. They also worked to suppress the publication in science journals of any research that threatened their scam.

So, maybe, as the nation hurtles like an asteroid toward higher unemployment, insolvency and default, somebody in the White House noticed that America’s oil and gas industry represents nearly seven percent of the U.S. economy and accounts for more than nine million permanent, good-paying jobs.

While we’re discussing the subject, it’s long past time to stop calling oil and natural gas “fossil fuels” as if they are the result of dead dinosaurs. Geologists are increasingly of the opinion that the Earth naturally and continually creates oil and gas.

The author, Dr. Jerome Corsi, has written that “Abiotic oil theory postulates that oil is formed on a constant basis deep within the mantle of the Earth, requiring no deterioration of biological materials to produce oil.”

In short, there is no such thing as “peak oil”, yet another Green lie intended to make people think we are running out of the stuff, Dr. Corsi points out that in 2008 The Wall Street Journal reported “sixteen discoveries of large oil reserves were found in the Gulf of Mexico, largely due to advances in deep-water drilling technology.”

These days reports of such discoveries around the world are routine. In 2007 Brazil announced one such offshore oil field estimated to contain eight billion barrels of oil, enough to expand its 14.4 billion barrels by nearly half.

Meanwhile, the United States has been doing little to tap its own. The number of rigs actively exploring for oil and gas in the U.S. rose by 34 to 1,282 in January 2010. Good news, but the rig count had peaked in 1981 when it was an impressive 4,530. By 1999, the industry posted a record low of 488!

It will be years before any of the newly permitted exploration and production in East and West Coast areas translates into gas in your auto, as heating oil, or any of the countless other uses of oil. But it’s a start.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Actual Police Mug Shots

Is this some kind of fashion trend? These are actual police mug shots of people apprehended in the course of allegedly committing crimes...all wearing Obama gear!

Living in a Funhouse Run by Morons

By Alan Caruba

It is hard not to believe that the United States is being run by people who have no idea regarding science, economics, or history.

Case in point, back in 2007 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that carbon dioxide was “a pollutant.” That is to say, CO2 is, according to SCOTUS, a gas that must be limited, sequestered, and subject to vast bureaucratic efforts to save the planet from its deleterious affects.

The only problem with this definition is that CO2 is responsible for every blade of grass, every field of wheat, every giant Sequoia tree. Not one bit of vegetation on earth grows without it. Moreover, human beings exhale about two pounds of it daily. No vegetation. And soon no animals that are herbivores. Take away the herbivores and the carnivores, meat-eaters, have nothing to dine upon. This makes life dodgy for humans who are both herbivores and carnivores.

One can only conclude that the judges have drunk as deeply of the Green Kool-Aid as apparently every other member of government. Environmentalism will not save the planet or a single life. Just the opposite. Its opposition to pesticides like DDT has already cost millions of lives lost to malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

But who could be against clean air and clean water? Well, certainly not Republicans because the Environmental Protection Agency was foisted upon us during the Nixon administration along with other agencies that expanded the size of the federal government.

Now we keep hearing that the present Recession will be solved with millions of “green collar” jobs. This is so absurd as to be laughed out of the room, but then, so is the notion that CO2 is a pollutant.

The one thing it surely is not, is a gas that has any effect whatever on climate change.

A policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, William Yeatman, pointed out that in my home state of New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine repeating the same green job nonsense, “is doomed to failure for the same reason communism failed in Russia: government is incapable of successfully planning any industry,” adding that “the only jobs government can create are those for bureaucrats and regulators.” States that do not have a constitutional mandate to balance their budgets are also doomed to failure.

Right now, the wind and solar power industry produces about one percent of all the electricity Americans need, but we keep hearing that countless new green jobs will result from growth in both these areas. The problem is that without government subsidies, neither wind, nor power would even be in business.

In some cases, states have passed laws requiring utilities to get some of their power from wind and solar even though it is the least efficient and reliable means. Some states have required utilities to buy million of dollars of bogus “carbon credits” and guess who ends up picking up the tab for this? YOU!

The Obamaloonies cannot wait to take office and start running America and, if you think life is getting difficult now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. One of the reasons Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers are in Washington begging for a loan are the mandates imposed on them by Congress in the form of CAFÉ standards and a dozen other ways to insure every car and truck will cost more for no good reason.

I am all for safety standards, but have you noticed that more than 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year no matter how many air bags and other gimmicks are added?

If you think the Congressional mandate that ethanol be blended with every gallon of gasoline was useful to anyone other than those making ethanol, think again. The ethanol debacle forced up the cost of corn and soy to the extent that food riots broke out around the world and now some of the same ethanol producers are going out of business because corn and soy’s prices have risen to a point where, even with major subsidies, they can’t make a profit.

If the word “subsidies” keeps popping up, it’s because Congress is under the impression that it can take public monies to prop up private enterprises whose sole purpose is to help save the Earth or make us “energy independent.”

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and no nation on Earth is energy independent. If that was the case, oil-rich Venezuela would not be tottering on the edge of insolvency. Of course, it helps that socialism is the economic system there.

And creeping socialism in the United States has not yet convinced anyone that it does not work. It has never worked. When you use “saving the environment” or “social justice” to justify one new socialist government program after another, eventually you end up with a DEPRESSION.

Is the Democrat Party Just for Girls?

By Alan Caruba

The Republican Party benefitted from the decision of a large number of white men to leave the Democrat Party. They didn't like policies that threatened gun ownership, that put an end to some men's sports teams at colleges, or a party that kept offering candidates like Dukakis or McGovern whose pacifism seemed to lack manly virtues of courage and grit.

Gore had to hire a consultant to tell him what colors and fashions would make him look manly and, in the end, that silly, endless kiss before his acceptance speech at the Democrat convention, embarrassed everyone watching.

Today, the total feminization of the Democrat Party finds its fulfillment in Hillary Clinton, the first woman to truly have a shot at the party's nomination. Her qualification? She is the wife of a former President.

Giving her a run for her money is Barack Hussein Obama, the Senator from Illinois. Why does it come as no surprise that one of the most famous women in America, Oprah Winfrey, would not only endorse him (a first such political action for her) but pull in a huge crowd at an Iowa caucus on a day when the temperature dipped to about 11 degrees above zero?

It's just my perception, but there is a very soft, somewhat feminine quality to B. Obama. It isn't anything you can point to and identify with clarity. Yes, he's married and yes he has two daughters. I am not suggesting he's gay. I am saying he doesn't come across as particularly strong.

It's more a matter of style or, to some extent, being too stylish, too fashion-conscious. Even his rhetoric, though polished, is a tad too restrained as if he would never really get mad at anyone because he is so emphathetic.

To put it another way, if you had to choose someone to share your foxhole in a battle, you'd want a McCain, a Guiliani, a Thompson. Even Romney gives off a very masculine vibe, despite his movie-star looks.

Which makes us wonder how many white men would pull the lever for B. Obama and my guess is not many. And Hillary will only get the "wuss" vote from that demographic.