[...] Cory Booker! Whatever would g...
Did White House threaten Cory Booker for criticizing Obama’s attack ad? « Full Metal Patriot on Obama threatens to withhold Social Security checks despite sufficient funds [UPDATED] Social Security Chief Actuary exposes Obama deception
Obama’s strategy for $6-per-gallon gasoline
Americans have been noticing the rapid escalation of gasoline prices recently. And right on schedule, President Obama has gone on the offensive to blame everyone but himself for his lack of an energy policy:
A feisty President Barack Obama ridiculed his Republican adversaries’ plans to ease soaring gasoline prices Thursday, saying Americans would not fall for strategies that can be written on a bumper sticker. [But they'll fall for Obama's non-existent energy policy that can be written on a bumper sticker? — FMP]
“Some politicians always see this as a political opportunity. Only in politics do people greet bad news so enthusiastically,” he said accusing his rivals of trying to profit from high prices and the pumps.
The American Automobile Association has predicted average prices across the country could reach $4.25 a gallon by May, up from $3.61 today.
“Since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for two dollar gas. I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling,” he said in prepared remarks.
“We heard the same thing in 2007, when I was running for president. We hear the same thing every year. We’ve heard the same thing for thirty years.”
He’s right about one thing; we have heard the same thing for thirty years. And for thirty years, Democrats have steadfastly blocked domestic drilling in Alaska, blocked domestic drilling in the Gulf (while allowing countries like Cuba to extract the oil), and blocked domestic drilling along our coasts. All while punishing oil and gas companies with higher taxes.
Investor’s Business Daily’s Andrew Malcolm describes why it doesn’t have to be this way.
The country is virtually awash in oil, with as much as 1.4 trillion “recoverable” barrels now available, thanks to new discoveries and advanced drilling technologies, according to the Institute for Energy Research.
That’s about twice the proved reserves in all of OPEC. But much of it is off-limits due to federal restrictions.
If Obama were to announce an aggressive effort to tap our vast domestic oil riches, it would have an immediate effect on prices. If you don’t think so, consider how prices immediately dropped when President Bush simply announced plans to lift a presidential moratorium on offshore drilling in 2008.
Obama says the recent modest increase in domestic production is proof he’s not anti-oil. But this happened despite his policies, not because of them — largely the result of drilling permits issued under Clinton and Bush, and the oil boom on private lands in North Dakota.
Whenever Obama has had the chance to encourage production, he’s done the opposite:
• He needlessly halted Gulf drilling permits after the BP oil spill, and continues to slow-walk them. Permit approvals are less than half their pre-Obama average, and approval times have nearly doubled.
• Obama scuttled the 700,000-barrels-a-day Keystone XL pipeline, despite approval by the State Department after an exhaustive three-year review.
• And he endlessly demonizes oil companies while pushing to sharply raise their taxes.
The truth is that for Obama, low gas prices are the problem, since they would hamper progress toward his “green” Nirvana, where we all hop on government trains and putter around in government-approved electric cars. It’s just that he’s smart enough not to say this out loud.
The Left must have missed the day that the Law of Supply and Demand was taught in school.
Had America not tolerated decades of the Democrat Party’s stifling of domestic oil drilling, we would currently have dozens (if not hundreds) more oil rigs in production and would be dramatically less reliant on foreign oil. As it stands now, 10 oil rigs left the Gulf after Obama signed his drilling moratorium.
The Wall Street Journal makes the case that a president can’t really affect oil prices:
‘The American people aren’t stupid,” thundered President Obama yesterday in Miami, ridiculing Republicans who are blaming him for rising gasoline prices. Let’s hope he’s right, because not even Forrest Gump could believe the logic of what Mr. Obama is trying to sell.
To wit, that a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy. Where to begin?
It’s true enough that oil prices can’t be commanded from the Oval Office, so in that sense Mr. Obama’s disavowal of blame is a rare show of humility in the face of market forces. Would that he showed similar modesty in trying to command the tides of home prices, car sales (“cash for clunkers”), or the production of electric batteries.
The oil price surge has several likely sources. One is the turmoil in the Middle East, especially new fears of a supply shock from a conflict with Iran. But it’s worth recalling that Mr. Obama also blamed the last oil-price surge, in spring 2011, on the Libyan uprising. Moammar Gadhafi is now gone and Libyan oil production is coming back on stream, yet oil prices dipped only briefly below $90 a barrel and have been rising since October. Something else must be going on.
Mr. Obama yesterday blamed rising demand from the likes of Brazil and China, and there is something to that as well. But this energy demand is also not new, and if anything Chinese and Brazilian economic growth has been slowing in recent months.
Another suspect—one Mr. Obama doesn’t like to mention—is U.S. monetary policy. Oil is traded in dollars, and its price therefore rises when the value of the dollar falls, all else being equal. The Federal Reserve throughout Mr. Obama’s term has pursued the easiest monetary policy in modern times, expressly to revive the housing market. It has done so with the private support and urging of the White House and through Mr. Obama’s appointees who are now a majority on the Fed’s Board of Governors.
Funny, this isn’t the tune we heard from Obama and the Democrat Party while President Bush was in office. Set your Wayback Machine for Obama’s 2008 ad about gas prices.
How’s that hope & change working for ya?
And here’s then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) criticizing rising gas prices in 2007.
“Drivers are paying a heavy price for the Bush administration’s failure to enact a comprehensive energy strategy,” Pelosi said. “Years of Bush administration policies that have favored big oil over the consumer have resulted in record dependence on foreign oil leaving American families and businesses to pay even higher prices.”
Don’t hold your breath expecting to hear Pelosi criticize Dear Leader for failing to enact a comprehensive energy strategy.
Question: If $3.05 a gallon is a total failure, what does $3.59 a gallon equal?
In a sad attempt to distract from three years of total failure, the Obama campaign is flailing about in their latest fundraising email, blaming private citizens for high gas prices under Obama’s watch.
In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers.
Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who have bankrolled Tea Party extremism and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.
So in the hours before Romney courts two men obsessed with making Barack Obama a one-term president, let’s see how many of us can chip in $2 or more to the Two-Term Fund.
This number will update every five minutes to show how many people give in the 24 hours until Romney greets the Kochs:
Here’s what Mitt Romney told his supporters just after his victory in the Florida GOP primary:
“We must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.”
Pitch in $2 or more over the next 24 hours to show that, while that message may fire up two oil-industry billionaires, it’s also one that plenty of us are tired of hearing:
Thanks,
Messina
Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
I’m so glad they cleared that up. They now say the President has no control over gas prices (unless it’s Bush, in which case it was all his fault), it’s those eeeeeevil Koch brothers!
Puh-leeze.
This is nothing short of a declaration of war on private industry as well as private citizens engaging in politics.
Make no mistake: President Obama thinks high gas prices are a good thing, he just wants a “gradual adjustment” toward higher prices so that you don’t notice it as much. Again, from 2008…
HARWOOD: As difficult as this is for consumers right now, is, in fact, high gas prices what we need to let the market work, a line incentive so that we do shift to alternative means of energy?
Obama’s “gradual adjustment” strategy
Sen. OBAMA: Well, I think that we have been slow to move in a better direction when it comes to energy usage. And the president, frankly, hasn’t had an energy policy. And as a consequence, we’ve been consuming energy as if it’s infinite. We now know that our demand is badly outstripping supply with China and India growing as rapidly as they are. So…
HARWOOD: So could these high prices help us?
Sen. OBAMA: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers, then I think ultimately, we can come out of this stronger and have a more efficient energy policy than we do right now.
Obama’s Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, even admitted that punishing consumers with high gas prices is part of their strategy:
President Barack Obama’s Energy secretary unwittingly created a durable GOP talking point in September 2008 when he talked to The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of having gasoline prices rise over 15 years to encourage energy efficiency.
“Somehow,” Chu said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
As despicable as that is, it fits in perfectly with Obama’s Cloward-Piven strategy to undermine America for the purpose of changing it. Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll calls it a “castor oil theory of growth.” [emphasis added below]
It’s been a while since Washington politicians and bureaucrats were extolling the alleged benefits of rising energy prices and championing policy that would drive them up quicker, all in the name of green jobs and climate virtue. Perhaps slow growth and stubborn unemployment, like the gallows, tend to concentrate the mind.
President Barack Obama would never admit today, as he did four years ago, that electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket” under his cap-and-trade plan. In fact, he’d probably prefer to hear nary a word about cap-and-trade during the next nine months.
And Energy Secretary Steven Chu will surely not be heard repeating today what he said back in his heady days as an academic, namely that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
But just because they’ve turned silent about boosting energy prices doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned the project or rethought their conviction that higher prices will drive economic well-being — a castor oil theory of growth.
However, as a lengthy report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal confirms — and from which I lifted this column’s opening quotation — Obama and Chu have it exactly backwards: It’s lower energy prices that drive economic renaissance.
After three years without a credible energy policy, Obama admitted yesterday that he doesn’t have any clear solutions to surging gas prices. But fear not; he did propose using pond scum as a substitute for oil. Yes, really.
“You’ve got a bunch of algae out here … If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing alright. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) currently spends about $85 million on 30 research projects “to develop algal biofuels,” according to the White House, which announced that Obama is committing another $14 million to the idea.
Obama did not say when he expected algae-based fuel to reach that level, but the federal government has a dodgy track record with respect to developing alternative vehicle fuels. Biodiesel, for example, accounted for less than 1 percent of the diesel fuel market as of 2008, according to the Energy Information Administration. And of course there’s ethanol — after four decades, tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, and draconian mandates that force it on unwilling consumers, ethanol was five percent of vehicle consumption (by volume) as of 2008. Although algae-to-gas is a very different idea, it is still in its early stages.
“If we can figure out how to make energy out of that.”
IF?
The man who blithely flushed $500 billion dollars down the Solyndra toilet is spending billions of our dollars on questionable alternative energy sources. Although exploring alternative energy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, he’s doing that while blocking proven sources of energy like the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have created 20,000 new jobs for Americans while reducing oil imports from the Middle East.
Obama might as well propose harnessing unicorn farts while he’s speculating about the next replacement for petroleum. It’s just too bad America can’t use blame as an energy source, because Obama could single-handedly power the entire country with his speeches.
—
RELATED: Don’tcha Wish There Was an Oil Man in the White House Now?
Remember how, just a few years back, when we had a real president, every time the price of gasoline would go up, you could count on some liberal to screech about how Bush and Cheney were “oil men” and they were just “helping their buddies in the oil bidness”? (Actually, they didn’t say “bidness”. They weren’t cool enough to pull it off!) Wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that!
And now we have in the White House, a man who’s never been in any kind of business and the prices have gone up even faster. How can that be? Does Obama have friends in the oil bidness, too? What’s his excuse?
Posted by FullMetalPatriot
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
[...] Gas prices keep increasing, resulting in people being less able to purchase gasoline. We simply can’t afford to drive more than absolutely necessary. This is also part of Obama’s Cloward-Piven strategy for higher fuel prices. [...]
[...] mind trying to bring down the cost of gasoline; let’s just shovel more money at overpriced products the American people don’t [...]