Obama head fake on offshore drilling

According to the New York Times, President Obama is planning on opening up oil drilling off of Alalska and the Gulf Coast.  Except, as Drudge points out, that was what the NYT said about the Obama plan over a year ago. Why is it being recycled?  2012. It's an election ploy.  Don't fall for it.  President Obama would rather see big oil in America go the way of Standard Oil.

There are other layers of consideration in this too - deep water drilling versus near shore drilling. There have been issues with existing licenses that Obama has glossed over.  And what about onshore drilling? Is that still off the table?  If so, why?

This is a transparent effort to come up with the next bump for Obama - don't let it fool anyone.

Wait, who pays for laid off oil rig workers?

After meeting with President Obama, BP agreed to set aside a special $100 million to compensate oil workers laid off as a result of President Obama's six month moratorium on deep water drilling. Why does it feel more and more like the United States is operating at the whims of an emperor?

Those Darned 'Special Interests'

I'd love to put together a montage of liberals, Democrats and progressives complaining about or assailing the special interests that they are fighting. Okay, maybe not.  It would drive me batty.  It must be uttered in a sound bite a dozen times a day.  I'm actually getting sick of hearing those two words in sequence.  Most often they don't name the special interests because a fictionalized demon works better than a named one.  The mind makes an unknown more sinister than reality and they rely on our imaginations to do the dirty work and then come onside with them.

Oil Spill Implications For US Oil Production

According to a seemingly not well publicized Bloomberg report last week, President Obama's ban on deep water drilling has serious implications for future US oil output;

May 28 (Bloomberg) -- Energy companies are scrambling to cope with the extension of a deep-water drilling ban, a situation many never foresaw before BP Plc’s oil well began spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico last month.

President Barack Obama yesterday said the suspension is being lengthened by six months and work on 33 exploratory wells will be halted. The decision follows an April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers and sent oil from BP’s Macondo well gushing toward the U.S. coast.

Companies can’t plan for an event such as the extended moratorium, said Gene Shiels, a spokesman for oilfield-services provider Baker Hughes Inc., based in Houston. The industry may move personnel and equipment to other markets, such as Brazil and West Africa, and may see job losses, he said.

“The spill is like the 1,000-year flood: it’s the worst- case scenario,” said Brian Youngberg, an analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis. “It’s hard to prepare for those extreme situations like that.”

Obama also dropped plans to open waters off the coast of Virginia to drilling, canceled a lease sale in the Gulf, and suspended the permitting process for Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s planned wells off of Arctic Alaska. He said new safety rules will be imposed on offshore drilling.

U.S. oil output may be cut by 160,000 barrels a day next year as a result of the ban, according to Deutsche Bank AG. A one-year delay to deep-water projects would reduce global supplies by 500,000 barrels a day between 2013 and 2017, Sanford C. Bernstein said.

[Emphasis added.]

Needless to say, that's not a good thing.

Al Gore Was Big Oil Before Being Big Green

The BP oil spill in the Gulf is an unfortunate accident and it needs to be cleaned up. Granted.  President Obama is responding with all the swiftness of a one-winged albatross in a wind storm. So be it.  He will suffer a green voter backlash when the time comes. Nut the question that popped into my mind is what does Al Gore have to say about this oil spill?  No really.  Where is the bombastic tirade? You know if this had happened on President Bush's watch Al Gore's head would have exploded with seething rage.  Why hasn't he been on every network lambasting Democrat inaction?  Besides the politically inconvenient truth, maybe Al Gore is rich enough already.