Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration…. But with only two percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough.Obama has trotted out this canard before; we and many others have exploded it. In fact, the United States has more fossil fuel resources than any country in the world–more than Russia, more than Canada, more than Saudi Arabia. The problem is that terrible policies at the federal level prevent us from developing our own resources and employing many thousands of Americans in doing so.
House Democrats are using the billionaire Koch brothers to score political points in their fight against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.Waxman’s grandstanding is contemptible for at least two reasons. First, no doubt some companies–along with millions of Americans–would benefit from construction of the pipeline. So what? Other companies (like Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe) will benefit if the pipeline is not built. Since when does the issuance of a permit depend on which companies will benefit?
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) suggested at a hearing Wednesday that Koch Industries — the Kansas-based conglomerate helmed by David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch — could benefit financially from approval of the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline. By linking the Keystone XL pipeline to the Koch brothers, who have supported a slew of conservative causes, Democrats are hoping to raise questions about Republicans’ motives in supporting the project. …
Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called Wednesday for a minority hearing on Keystone, with testimony from Koch Industry officials.
In a letter requesting the hearing sent Wednesday to committee Republicans, Waxman pointed to documents filed with the Canadian government by Flint Hills Resources Canada, a Koch subsidiary, that say the company has a “direct and substantial interest” in developer TransCanda Corp.’s pipeline application.
Despite Newt Gingrich’s momentum within the Republican Party, he would be a weaker contender than Mitt Romney in a general election contest against President Barack Obama, according to a Suffolk University/7NEWS (WSVN-Miami) poll of likely voters in Florida.That’s a difference of 14 points between the two head-to-head matchups (Romney +5, Gingrich -9). This poll comes as Gingrich’s momentum has slowed with Republicans in the state, and it reflects the wide disparity in favorability between the two men in Florida. Mitt Romney has a positive but somewhat weak 44/37 favorability rating, but Gingrich’s is deeply negative at exactly a 2:1 ratio, 29/58 in a sample that is only a D+4, 41/37/23. Barack Obama’s job approval rating among likely Florida voters is only a 40/49, which means that Obama only outperforms his job approval by two against Romney but nine against Gingrich. Obama’s favorability numbers are also underwater at 47/48, which means voters aren’t inclined toward him anyway.
Romney led Obama by 47 percent to 42 percent in the Florida survey, while Obama topped Gingrich by 9 points, 49 percent to 40 percent. Among independents, Obama led Romney 44 percent to 38 percent and opened up a 56 percent to 29 percent advantage over Gingrich. Gingrich grabbed 12 percent of registered Democrats, while Romney secured 18 percent of registered Democrats.
“Newt Gingrich is weak among Florida independents and likely Democratic voters compared to Romney,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “If Florida is one of six key states that swings the national election, independents in Florida hold that key, and this poll suggests that Newt won’t be able to secure Florida for his party.”
The Democrats are targeting Mitt Romney as if he were already the Republican nominee running against President Barack Obama, with campaign ads, Internet videos, daily news conferences and dozens of news releases attacking the former Massachusetts governor.
Traditional Democratic partners are jumping in, too. Both the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees' and Service Employees International Union's political-action committees are running their own TV commercials in Florida this week — attacking Romney.
Gingrich and the other two Republican candidates, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas U.S.Rep. Ron Paul, are being all but ignored by the DNC and its allies.
| Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning. Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter. If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud. It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late. This is just a sampling of what’s hitting Newt: • The overnight Drudge Report banner: “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan.” The headline linked to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies. • Drudge also linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.” Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past. • Bob Dole issued a scathing statement Thursday that the Romney campaign provided to the National Review in which he said “it is now time” to rally to stop Gingrich, blamed the former Speaker for losing House Republican seats in 1996, and warned that it could happen again, at all levels of government. “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late,” Dole said. “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.” Dole added, “In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year.” • Conservatives are circulating a piece written by the editors of the National Review: “The Hour of Newt.” The editors, who have been extremely critical of Gingrich for weeks, waved conservatives off the Gingrich bandwagon. “Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.” • Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist writing on her self-titled website, warns: “Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!” She, too, gets Drudge promotion, with a column punctuated with this punch: “Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.” • Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: “He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.” “It could happen, and it would be a disaster,” said the conservative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect private conversations. “All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker — there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen. He thinks he embodies conservatism and if he wakes up one day and has a grandiose thought, he is going to expect all of us to fall in line behind him. “There’s just so much risk on so many levels,” the official continued. “Everyone’s thinking, ‘It could really happen.’ He could win the presidency if there’s a way to win with 45 percent — a second recession or a third-party candidate. The immediate worry is him winning the nomination and losing the election, tanking candidates down-ballot. In a worst-case scenario, you could see unified Democratic governance, and we’d be back where we were in ’09 and ’10. It’s insane.” The conservative media is voicing what dozens of Republican lawmakers, governors and top establishment have told POLITICO in recent weeks in private conversations. Because Gingrich looks like he could win, many of these elected officials are reluctant to go public with their concerns. As POLITICO reported on Monday, Romney allies are putting pressure on conservatives to break their silence, and do it quickly before the Florida primary, because a Gingrich win would virtually guarantee a very long, divisive race. A super PAC supporting Romney, Restore Our Future, is running ads in Florida that echo many of the charges mentioned above, especially Gingrich’s claim that he is the logical successor to the Reagan legacy. “Reagan rejected Newt’s ideas. On leadership and character, Gingrich is no Ronald Reagan,” the group’s ad says. Romney himself is hitting on the same themes in speeches, with an edge rarely seen by the cautious former governor. Gingrich, who has shown a sharper instinct than Romney and the establishment for playing the rawest frustrations of activists, will crank up his Newt vs. the establishment rhetoric to beat back the attacks. Remember 2010 (Gingrich certainly does): The establishment doesn’t have a great track record in picking candidates and warned primary voters against tapping Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware because they were too radioactive and couldn’t win in the November general elections. The voters didn’t listen, and it cost Republicans the Senate. Remember 2010 (Romney certainly does): Republicans lost two elections they should have won. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/72000.html |
As we mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.If that doesn’t provoke hollow laughter, you haven’t been paying attention. Do President Obama and his fellow Democrats seriously believe that “government should not intrude on private family matters?” Let us count the ways! First, compare Obama’s declaration today with what he said when Michelle Obama announced her anti-childhood obesity project. Did you think that how much your kids weigh is a “private family matter,” in which “government should not intrude?” Don’t be silly:
I have set a goal to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight. The first lady will lead a national public awareness effort to tackle the epidemic of childhood obesity. She will encourage involvement by actors from every sector — the public, nonprofits, and private sectors, as well as parents and youth — to help support and amplify the work of the federal government in improving the health of our children.So the future weight of your minor children is a “goal” of the federal government. Of course, that is just one example out of many. For example, do you think it is a “private family matter” whether you feed your children Cheerios and corn flakes for breakfast? Think again.
AP and others did not even mention the standing OI took a quick look around at various mainstream reports and discovered that my friend was correct. Even pieces identifying themselves as analysis of “winners and losers” or “views from the bleachers” made no mention of the standing ovation that accompanied Newt’s smackdown of King. From the bleachers, this is what it looked like to CNN:
He opened by offering Newt Gingrich a chance to respond to his allegations from his ex-wife in an interview on ABC. Gingrich delivers a flat “No” and the segmented crowd becomes uniform in its applause as Gingrich attacked the media.The writers, Soledad O’Brien and Rose Arce (two sets of eyes!) were in the bleachers and saw the crowd “become uniform,” but they can’t bring themselves to report what they actually saw.
“We are done responding like Pavlovian dogs to your bells; we no longer trust you; we understand that you are no longer a press that is free, but one that is enthralled to its own ideologies and agendas. From this point on, a candidate is going to rise or fall on the substance of their ideas and abilities, not on your prosy gushes about his brilliance, or stern warnings about her stupidity. You savaged George W. Bush you savaged Sarah Palin and you got away with it. You carried your own preferred, utterly inexperienced, passionate ideologue into the White House with over-effusive rhetoric and you have buffeted him from inquiry (tax returns? Hell, we’d just like to see Obama’s college transcripts!), or what you perceive to be damaging stories, but you elevated your favorite at the cost of your own credibility, and now it comes back to bite you. Because a press with no credibility has nothing to offer us. It has nowhere to go, now, except into the arms of the political machine it has loved. Just like Pravda, actually.”The mainstream press does not want to discuss last night’s standing ovation because it shakes their worldview. They were supposed to be able to control the narrative; they were supposed to be able to corral the sheep. And last night, the sheep indicated that they’re no longer willing to be herded, no longer going to allow their own moral judgments to be exploited in a time when the nation is facing serious issues. They’ve decided they’re going to make up their own minds, thank you, about who they think is up to dealing with those issues. They’re looking at the press and saying, “Scallywags, heal thyselves!”
To me they are the equivalent of the OJ jury:A bit of conscience-singe for Christians? Perhaps. As I said, it’s worth pondering, and asking, “is it me, Lord?” We are, after all, supposed to be better than all that.
Yeah, we know he’s guilty, but THIS is for all the innocents (we think) were “wrongly accused”/roughed up by cops, etc
That is not the dignified, intelligent position, no matter how deeply tempting it is and no matter whose side adopts it.
The response was one of a team scoring a touchdown. And the Blue/Red “team” mentality of electoral politics is part of what’s wrong with it, not something to be encouraged.
Yes, the media is hopelessly biased and corrupt. I’ve been blogging for 12 years and bow to no one in my championship of alternative media. Everything you’re saying about them is 100% true. I don’t even believe in “not stooping to their level” — I say stoop away. Anything else is a mug’s game.
And yet: that standing o was so “reptilian brain” it curdled my stomach.
