They Are Drilling There Now

Or allowing China to do it 50 miles off our coast.

PERRY: America can't afford not to drill in Gulf
If we don't, hostiles like Cuba and Venezuela will

Those who disparage offshore drilling - and seem eager to ban it - ignore that the Gulf of Mexico accounts for one-third of U.S. oil production. Without domestic production, we would be spending even more on imported oil - which already is running $1.5 billion a day.

Any sensible response to the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig - and the huge oil spill that's fouling Gulf waters - needs to recognize two facts: First, the demand for oil is expected to increase. Second, America cannot suddenly stop offshore drilling.

The best place in the United States to find new oil is in the Gulf's untapped deep-water areas, in the Atlantic and off Alaska. These three new drilling areas combined hold as much as 22 billion barrels of oil, which is more than our current total estimated reserves. This oil would help meet U.S. energy needs for decades.

But if those areas are closed to oil production, we would need to import more oil from overseas, probably from countries that are nationalistic and, in some cases, hostile. Some of the countries are run by despots such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

But in the grand scheme of things, the extreme left-wing nutjob enviro nazi whackos would love to see El Jefe' and Ugo come out on top.

More Marxist Style Politics

BP paid workers $12-per-hour to show up for Obama visit, be props for the photo ops
By: Mark Tapscott

Has it really come to this? Yahoo News' Brett Michael Dykes reports that BP paid busloads of temporary cleanup workers to show up as stage props for President Obama's visit to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup operations on Grand Isle.

Dykes quoted Jefferson Parish councilman Chris Roberts who said "the overnight contingent of workers was there mainly to furnish a Potemkin-style backdrop for the event — while also making it appear that BP was firmly in command of spill cleanup efforts. New Orleans NBC affiliate WDSU reports that the workers were paid $12 an hour and came mostly from neighboring Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes."

For more, go here.

Obama was enjoying a bit of a recovery in the presidential approval numbers earlier in the week, after hitting the lowest point of his presidency. You think BP also paid those four percentage points to show up for the president in the latest Rasmussen polling?

HT: Examiner contributor Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner:

US Orders Blackout

I have to admit, I wondered what they meant when they said that SWAT teams were sent to OIL RIGS in the Gulf of Mexico last week, I thought it was a spoken error on the news reader's part, but according to this article, it is NOT:

This what Europeans are reading:

EU Times:
, Obama Ordered Media Blackout

A grim report circulating in the Kremlin today written by Russia’s Northern Fleet is reporting that the United States has ordered a complete media blackout over North Korea’s torpedoing of the giant Deepwater Horizon oil platform owned by the World’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean that was built and financed by South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. Ltd., that has caused great loss of life, untold billions in economic damage to the South Korean economy, and an environmental catastrophe to the United States.

To the attack itself, these reports continue, the North Korean “cargo vessel” Dai Hong Dan believed to be staffed by 17th Sniper Corps “suicide” troops left Cuba’s Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana (Port of Havana) on April 18th
whereupon it “severely deviated” from its intended course for Venezuela’s Puerto Cabello bringing it to within 209 kilometers (130 miles) of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform which was located 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the coast of the US State of Louisiana where it launched an SSC Sang-o Class Mini Submarine (Yugo class) estimated to have an operational range of 321 kilometers (200 miles).

On the night of April 20th the North Korean Mini Submarine manned by these “suicidal” 17th Sniper Corps soldiers attacked the Deepwater Horizon with what are believed to be 2 incendiary torpedoes causing a massive explosion and resulting in 11 workers on this giant oil rig being killed outright. Barely 48 hours later, on April 22nd , this North Korean Mini Submarine committed its final atrocity by exploding itself directly beneath the Deepwater Horizon causing this $1 Billion oil rig to sink beneath the seas and marking 2010’s celebration of Earth Day with one of the largest environmental catastrophes our World has ever seen.

Now We Know Whose Side They Are On

No Oil for Blood
Thanks to three American senators, China will be pumping Iraqi oil.
by Frederick W. Kagan 09/16/2008 3:15:00 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/574iglgp.asp

This morning, I had the honor of testifying before the House Budget Committee on the situation in Iraq. The discussion was polite and civilized, and was a reminder that even now it is possible for people who disagree about what to do in Iraq to argue without raised voices and disagreeable language (apart from the Code Pink women, yelling for those who think that shouting opponents down is preferable to arguing with them). Congressman Brian Baird once again demonstrated that it is possible even for those who bitterly opposed the war to recognize the importance of doing the right thing now--as well as the possibility of crossing the Republican-Democrat sectarian divide on this issue. One question came up repeatedly in the hearing that deserves more of an answer than it got, however: Why, after all the assistance we've given to Iraq over the past five years, was the first major Iraqi oil deal signed with China and not with an American or even a western company? The answer is, in part, because three Democratic senators intervened in Iraqi domestic politics earlier this year to prevent Iraq from signing short-term agreements with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Chevron, and BP.

The Iraqi government was poised to sign no-bid contracts with those firms this summer to help make immediate and needed improvements in Iraq's oil infrastructure. The result would have been significant foreign investment in Iraq, an expansion of Iraqi government revenues, and an increase in the global supply of oil. One would have thought that leading Democratic senators who claim to be interested in finding other sources of funding to replace American dollars in Iraq, in helping Iraq spend its own money on its own people, and in lowering the price of gasoline for American citizens, would have been all for it. Instead, Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rice asking her "to persuade the GOI [Government of Iraq] to refrain from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a hydrocarbon law is in effect in Iraq." The Bush administration wisely refused to do so, but the resulting media hooraw in Iraq led to the cancellation of the contracts, and helps to explain why Iraq is doing oil deals instead with China.

Senators Schumer, McCaskill, and Kerry claimed to be acting from the purest of motives: "It is our fear that this action by the Iraqi government could further deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even great danger." For that reason, presumably, Schumer went so far as to ask the senior vice president of Exxon "if his company would agree to wait until the GOI produced a fair, equitable, and transparent hydrocarbon revenue sharing law before it signed any long-term agreement with the GOI." Exxon naturally refused, but Schumer managed to get the deal killed anyway. But the ostensible premise of the senators' objections was false--Iraq may not have a hydrocarbons law, but the central government has been sharing oil revenues equitably and there is no reason at all to imagine that signing the deals would have generated increased violence (and this was certainly not the view of American civilian and military officials on the ground in Iraq at the time). It is certain that killing the deals has delayed the maturation of Iraq's oil industry without producing the desired hydrocarbons legislation.

Nor is it entirely clear what the senators' motivations were. Their release (available along with their letter to Secretary Rice at the New York Observer quoted Senator McCaskill as follows: "'It's bad enough that we have no-bid contracts being awarded for work in Iraq. It's bad enough that the big oil companies continue to receive government handouts while they post record breaking profits. But now the most profitable companies in the universe--America's biggest oil companies--stand to reap the rewards of this no-bid contract on top of it all,' McCaskill said. 'It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect these dots--big oil is running Washington and now they're running Baghdad. There is no reason under the sun not to halt these agreements until we get revenue sharing in place,' McCaskill said." So was this about what's best for Iraq and American interests there or about nailing "big oil" in an election year?

Either way, like Barack Obama's asking the Iraqi foreign minister to hold off on a strategic framework agreement until after the American election, it was nothing but harmful to American interests and our prospects in Iraq.

Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.