Are we willing to drill yet?

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Environmental Terrorism and the Price of Oil

Here we have the humiliating spectacle of a president of the United States begging an Arab potentate to increase our supply of oil while Democrats, who bear the major responsibility for the problem, scoff at him as a mendicant groveling at the feet of a foreign monarch. (Snip) Make no mistake about it, you are paying exorbitant prices at the gas pump solely because the environmental terrorists and their Democrat allies in Congress have all but shut down our domestic oil production...

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Bill Delays Oil Exploration for Polar Bear Listing

Environmentalists welcomed a bill introduced by a House Democrat last week that would delay the sale of land in Alaska for oil exploration. Environmentalists believe the Interior Department wants to avoid classifying the polar bear as an endangered species until the land -- which is polar bear habitat -- is sold.
[snip][despite...>]
"Sale 193 was originally scheduled for June 2007, but we delayed the sale until February 2008 to provide sufficient time to complete the environmental analyses," he said in his testimony for the select committee on Thursday.
[snip]
According to Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, "the Chukchi Sea Planning Area could hold 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas ... thus providing potentially significant future production of oil and gas from Northern Alaska."
[snip]
"Rep. Markey and too many other members of Congress are willing to use any tools available to stop oil production in this country," he said. "Then they complain about high gasoline prices and importing oil from countries they don't like."

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Oil drilling will not harm polar bears

US officials defended plans for oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska, telling lawmakers that it would not harm polar bears, already threatened by global warming [?]. Randall Luthi, director of the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which sells oil drilling rights, told Congress Thursday that the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act provides adequate safeguards to polar bears from oil exploration accidents such as oil spills.

[?] = fact? : "Fact: Polar Bears are not going extinct because of the supposedly melting ice, according to a biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the arctic government of Nunavut. “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here: Source

[nonetheless]: Representative Edward Markey demanded polar bears be declared a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming prior to the sale of oil drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea.

[and so our ever-increasing oil dollars continue to flow to our middle-eastern 'friends', while driving up the costs of virtually everything in our economy...]

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HISTORY AND BEAR BIOLOGY SHOW WARMER TEMPERATURES AREN'T A THREAT

In early March, the polar bear could become the first species officially recognized by the U.S. government as threatened by global warming. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed to list the polar bear as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) -- even though U.S. polar bear populations aren't declining.

Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, comprehensive research demonstrates that since the 1970s -- while much of the world was warming -- polar bear numbers increased dramatically to approximately 25,000 today -higher than at any time in the 20th century.

Research conducted by the World Wildlife Fund shows that of the 20 distinct polar bear populations worldwide only two — accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total number of bears — are decreasing.

• Those populations are in areas where air temperatures have actually fallen, such as the Baffin Bay region.
• By contrast, another two populations — about 13.6 percent of the total — are growing, and they live in areas were air temperatures have risen.

Evolutionary biologist and paleozoologist Susan Crockford, of Canada's University of Victoria, points out that polar bears have historically thrived when temperatures were warmer than today's -- during the medieval warming 1,000 years ago and during the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000 to 9,000 years ago.

[I.e., they're not endangered now - but computer models say they will be 50 years in the future due to global warming. It never ends.]

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Sweden, Norway drop out of UN's Darfur mission

Sweden and Norway have dropped plans to send about 400 troops to the UN peacekeeping force in Darfur because of opposition from Sudan's government, a Swedish Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday. The two Scandinavian countries had planned to send a joint engineering unit to the peacekeeping force in the troubled region, but the Swedish and Norwegian foreign ministers said in a joint statement that ''Sudan's opposition makes it impossible to maintain the offer of a Norwegian-Swedish contribution."

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Liberty Versus Socialism

A fortnight ago, I wrote about Mississippi Legislature House Bill 282 that would have imposed fines or revoked licenses of food establishments that served obese people. Fortunately, the measure died in committee. State Rep. Ted Mayhall, one of the bill's sponsors, justified it by saying that he wanted to bring attention to the fact that "Obesity makes people more susceptible to diabetes, which puts a further strain on the state's financially-challenged Medicaid program."

Similar justification was used for laws requiring helmets for motorcyclists and bicyclists. The fact that an obese person becomes ill, or a cyclist has an accident, and becomes a burden on taxpayers who must bear the expense of taking care of him, is not a problem of liberty. It's a problem of socialism where one person is forced to take care of another.

Forcing one person to bear the burden of health care costs for another is not only morally wrong but a major threat to personal liberty.

There are many other behaviors that lead to a greater health care burden, but my question is how much control over your life you are willing to give government in the name of reducing these costs? Would you want government to regulate how much salt you use? What about government deciding how much fat and alcohol you consume? There are immense beneficial health effects of a daily 30-minute aerobic exercise. Would you support government-mandated exercise?

When I was 14 or 15 years old, I thought I could take over the house. My mother told me that as long as she was paying the bills, I was going to do what she said. That's great for a parent/child relationship, but do we want the same relationship between government and its citizens?

[this is the crux of my 'we're making the government our parents' mantra, and it's why socialism is to be avoided: you cannot empower government with 'giving' you things without also empowering it to dictate your conduct in direct proportion - and therein lies the clear and present danger: we're well along our way. Recommended > ]

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Curing the Health Care Crisis

Money magazine has dubbed Regina Herzlinger the “Godmother” of consumer-driven health care, and it’s not just because [she] has written books with titles like Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers and Policymakers. The first woman to be “tenured and chaired” at Harvard Business School, Professor Herzlinger is widely known for her innovative research into health care...

It outlines her plan for creating a consumer-driven system that would deliver affordable, high-quality care to everyone by putting insurance money in the hands of patients, removing the third-party middleman in the doctor-patient relationship and giving employers cost relief...

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Largest Tax Increase in American History - Again

[Your money]

Approaching nearly 10 million words and stretching an interminable 67,000 pages, the American tax code exists today as complicated mess of pitfalls, pratfalls, and potholes – even though its central philosophy couldn’t be more straightforward: “If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less, tax it.”

... this past week, the majority leadership unveiled a budget plan for 2009 that raises taxes on everything from starting a family, to starting a family business. All to finance a reckless spending agenda that comes in a full $276 - billion - in excess of what the president has requested [which was no cut to begin with].

... slash the child care tax credit in half (from $1,000 per child to $500) ... resurrect the marriage tax penalty ... punish low-income Americans by replacing the 10-percent tax bracket (the lowest percentage one can pay and still pay income taxes) with a new lowest rung of 15 percent [50% increase, nice] ... increase the current 15 percent tax rate on capital gains ... raise the tax burden on dividends ... pave the way for the Death Tax to rise from the grave in 2011 ... ensure that an estimated 116 million taxpayers pay an average $1,833 more to the federal government this year than they did the year before... [there's {much} more...]

More than anything else, a budget request is a statement of national priorities; a clear enumeration of what our country needs to grow its economy and remain in the future the first-rate power it is today. In the case of the Democrats’ 2009 budget request, the statement of need could not have been articulated any clearer: We need more spending, historic new tax hikes, and greater control over the way American families live their lives...

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HEY, BIG SPENDERS

California

Hand it to Democrats, particularly those in California. One of the great bits of political jujitsu in recent years was to portray Republicans, not themselves, as the party of tax-and-spend. Now, with control of both Congress and California's state house, they're showing their true colors, says Investor's Business Daily.

• Democrats have boosted general spending 32 percent in just four years to $103 billion, or 8 percent a year.
• This increase occurred despite going through the worst financial crisis in its history only 4 years ago.
• Revenues, though growing rapidly, haven't kept pace; if spending had grown just half as much -- at a still-healthy 4 percent -- the budget today would be in balance.

Democrats were warned about spending so much, especially with the state's finances so dependent on just a handful of affluent taxpayers, says IBD. They didn't listen. They gave lavish contracts to state employee unions and padded retiree benefits. They even tried to hand out benefits to millions of illegal aliens.

This has been a fiscal disaster. Over the next year and a half, California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst predicts the state will have an unprecedented $16 billion budget shortfall. Pretty nasty, considering just last summer the state predicted a surplus.

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AP Article on States' Budget Woes Ignores Spending Excesses

Old Media coverage of government budget difficulties usually focuses on the here and now, and all the "tough decisions" that have to be made. Seldom is there ever an examination of how a state or local government entity got into its current fix. Sunday's Associated Press report on the budget situations many states governments face was no exception. In it, AP reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins:

• Recited a litany of current woes.
• Failed to mention that most states have allowed spending to greatly exceed inflation during the past several years.
• Gave unchallenged quotes to advocates of further tax and fee increases.

What Welsh-Huggins totally ignores is that during the past four years, state and local government spending has exploded, and is now taking a greater share of income than ever, as shown here (Source: The Tax Foundation; more detailed looks at each state can be found here):

[big graphs, show lots of spending increases, etc. etc. - point is; shouldn't professional journalists know that such info. is required in any such story? They do - but ignore it anyway. Why?]

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You thought your job was bad
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