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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (372739)	7/16/2010 10:04:28 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793903

Investors.com Editorial: Beyond Politics? Posted 07:06 PM ET Energy: Oil firms have been lumped into one big, bad group by the U.S. drilling moratorium. But they're not all alike. BP's green politics played a big role in the Gulf spill. That's what should be repudiated, not drilling. Collectivism is alive and well in the White House, which seeks to spread the price of its deepwater drilling moratorium across the oil industry and the Gulf's economy. As if the April 20 BP oil spill weren't bad enough for the people of the Gulf, they now face a jobless future no matter what the environmental and safety record of their local companies. This insanity was directly caused by the company with the loudest claims to environmental sensitivity — BP, whose Beyond Petroleum slogan sounded as if it didn't even believe in its product, oil. And, apparently, it didn't. No. 1, BP's been a big-foot lobbyist on Capitol Hill, spending $15.9 million to influence legislation — and not in the interest of producing oil. According to the American Thinker, BP played a key role in writing the economy-killing Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill that President Obama wants to ram through Congress. "BP is a strong White House and Democratic ally on the cap-and-tax issue," wrote Brad O'Leary. It also went green in the campaign sense, doling out cash to leftist candidates who opposed oil drilling. Obama took more than any other candidate BP financed, $77,051, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. BP and its employees gave more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years. Few were champions of producing oil. The politics gets even seedier. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel took a rent-free apartment from a BP consultant who helped create BP's sanctimonious "Beyond Petroleum" campaign. Worse, news is out that the $20 billion BP fund to compensate residents of the Gulf ruined by the spill could mean tax savings for BP. BP's $5 billion yearly outlay over four years can be written off as a business expense, according to tax law cited by O'Leary. None of the other oil companies shut down by the moratorium will get that. So in the wake of its disaster, BP gains. Which is infuriating, given that BP's political activity against oil was accompanied by an astonishingly bad safety record compared with other oil companies. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, using Occupational Safety and Health Administration records dating at least to 2005, found that two BP refineries account for 97% of all "flagrant" violations, with 760 of them classified as "egregious willful," along with 102 others. By contrast, ExxonMobil got a mere ... one. Combine the green sanctimony (which activist groups like Greenpeace call green-washing) with the huge record of violations, and the common denominator is big politics. Were leftist politicians protecting this company because it advanced a green agenda? That's sure what it looks like. The most outrageous thing is that it adds up to a drilling moratorium for honest companies that believe in oil, respect its awesome power as it's extracted from Mother Earth, and handle it with the safety and respect it deserves. Oil, in fact, is the greenest fuel because it's the most energy efficient and transportable. And remember: Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller saved more whales than all the green groups combined by replacing whale oil, once our staple fuel, with crude. BP's teaming with anti-oil politicians whose regulators looked the other way on safety violations and then claiming to be green has been a disaster for the Gulf. It's time to rethink the importance of oil to our economy — and the damage Obama's outrageous moratorium has wrought on the honest oil companies that make our standard of living possible. investors.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (372739)	7/25/2010 3:03:25 PM
From: KLP	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793903

We've got to hand it to FOXNews…They had the guts to have this old reprobate Howard Dean on their channel, something that even the Alphabet soup channels are reluctant to do…Did Dean do his Whooping' and Yelling' thingee again?…. What a gaseous windbag! He, Kerry and Gore are like the Three Little Pigs, but the pigs were at least cute. Brumar, this goes right along with the story you posted earlier....The Myth of the Racist Republicans Dean is really trying to stir things up, isn't he. Perhaps he should read history and remember the Republicans were partly made up of Abolutionists and many were fined or died trying to help free the slaves. Dean: Fox News “racist” July 25, 2010 The Fox News Channel’s handling of the Shirley Sherrod controversy “was absolutely racist,” former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean charged on Sunday. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Dean, who's also a former Democratic national chairman and hero of liberals, asserted Fox News failed to vet video footage of a speech misleadingly excerpted to make it appear that Sherrod was boasting of using her post as an Agriculture Department official to discriminate against a white farmer. “I don’t think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and I don’t think you’re a racist,” Dean told Fox News host Chris Wallace, “but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a – they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff.” When Wallace interrupted Dean to point out that Fox did not air the excerpted Sherrod footage until after the Obama administration had fired her based on it , Dean shot back “It was about to go on Glenn Beck, which is what the administration was afraid of.” And Dean mildly rebuked the Obama administration, as well, saying, “We’ve got to stop being afraid of Glenn Beck (a Fox News host) and the racist fringe of the Republican Party. But Fox News was not blameless during this. You played it up.” Dean dismissed Wallace’s point about timing, asserting “you didn’t do your job,” and charging that Fox News has helped the Republican Party foster racism by focusing on allegations of reverse racism. “The tea party called out their racist fringe and I think the Republican Party’s got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that. You put that on,” Dean said. “Continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this – some of which are taken out of context – does not help the country knit itself together.” Posted by Kenneth P. Vogel 09:34 AM politico.com