Gang of 10 offer stupid plan

Senator Kent Conrad | North Dakota reported A bipartisan coalition of senators led by Senator Kent Conrad today unveiled a sweeping energy proposal to reduce gas prices, lessen our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, and strengthen America’s economy.

At least they see there is a problem, but this weak approach will not fix it.

... Senators working with Senator Conrad to develop the proposal include: Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).... The New Era bill contains three main components:

• An intensive effort to transition vehicles to non-petroleum based fuels;

  Convert vehicles to an unreliable fuel surce just to hope it is there by the time they need it or disable our transportation system. Brilliant. Why not let the market free to develop on its own. If the fuel is there people wil figure out how to use it.

• a robust federal commitment to conservation and energy efficiency;

  High prices are doing that right now.

  and
• targeted, responsible domestic production of energy resources.
  • Provides a CO2 sequestration credit for use in enhanced oil recovery to increase production from existing oil wells while reducing greenhouse gas emissions;
    
  • Opens additional acreage in the Gulf of Mexico for leasing (in consultation with the Defense Department to ensure that drilling is done in a manner consistent with national security) and allows Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia to opt in to leasing off their shores.

    Allow drilling off both coasts and in Anwar.

    Retains an environmental buffer zone extending 50 miles offshore where new oil production will not be allowed.

    Stupid.

    Requires all new production to be used domestically.

    Transportation costs will take care of that.

    Creates a commission to make recommendations to Congress on future areas that should be considered for leasing.

    Allow drilling off both coasts and in Anwar

    Provides for appropriate revenue sharing for states that allow leasing off their shores;

    Te federal government should not be deciding what is appropriate for states to earn.

  • Provides grants and loan guarantees for the development of coal-to-liquid fuel plants with carbon capture capability. Plants must have lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions below those of the petroleum fuels they are replacing;

    You are going to make the plants responsible for how the fuel they produce is used?????

  • Supports nuclear energy by increasing staff at the NRC, providing workforce training, accelerating depreciation for nuclear plants, and supporting R&D on spent fuel recycling to reduce nuclear waste.

    Supporting nuclear power is good, but how about:

    • making it easier to get a permit
    • encouraging construction of new plants
    • Getting the storage facility in Nevada open and ready to store waste.

Ed Morrissey blogged Harry Reid, on his way out of town, issued a mildly supportive statement, and Nancy Pelosi hasn’t yet commented. This compromise could save the Democrats from their own leadership, and it represents a major rebellion against the hard-line demagoguery provided by Reid and Pelosi. This expansion represents a good start to restoring some common sense to American energy policy and marginalizing the radical environmentalists who have taken it hostage for a generation.

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The One

There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about McCain's Celebrity video relating Paris Hilton, Britany, and Obama. Just think what the latest video is going to stir up among the Obamamessiah supporters.


As Betsy Newmark said:

This is a hoot and does a great job of playing off of Gerard Baker's great column from last week.

Watch for the Obama people to blow a gasket and Obama to say that there are much more important issues for them to be discussing. Well, if that is what he wants, let him agree to appear in a townhall style debate with McCain. Then they could discuss issues all they wanted. Until then the Obama campaign will just have to learn to live with being ridiculed.

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I'm Back

Sorry I was down for a couple of days. Blogger suddenly decided my blog might be a spam blog and I could not post anything until a human took a look at it and decided it was not a spam blog.

Here is what they said:

Your blog at: http://donsingleton.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at ......

Your blog will be deleted within 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and you'll be unable to publish posts during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577.

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Obiously I immediately triggered the review. And during it I was able to edit an existing post, and save it as a draft, but I was unable to even post a simple notice saying why I was down, and I could not even change my template to display such a notice. At least it did not take that long to get someone to review it and unblock it.

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Drill

Republicans finally begin to target Democrats on drilling




Dems will not even allow drilling if the price of gas reaches $10.00 a gallon.

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Paris Hilton’s family fuming at McCain Ad

Martin Eisenstadt blogged the new McCain ad criticizing Obama for being a celebrity has ruffled some unintended feathers. I, for one, quite liked the ad, but I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton’s grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

I don't think Obama likes it either, but what has Paris Hilton done to deserve celebrity status, other than staring in a porn video?

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Presumptuous nominee

Dana Milbank wrote in WaPo reported Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

I bet Dana is no longer welcome on the Obam plane.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection,

and bow to him

Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president's. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him.

Did it include a blessing from the Obamamessiah?

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China to Limit Web Access During Olympic Games

NYTimes.com reported Chinese officials, speaking about the Internet restrictions on Wednesday, said they would not allow foreign journalists to visit Web sites that violated Chinese laws.

So if they are going to write about restrictions on human rights, they need to specify what info they need, and have someone in their home country look it up.

In its negotiations with the Chinese over Internet controls, the Olympic committee official said, the panel insisted only that China provide unregulated access to sites containing information useful to sports reporters covering athletic competitions, not to a broader array of sites that the Chinese and the Olympic committee negotiators determined had little relevance to sports.

I wonder if Sports Illustrates would be willing to add an Anonymous Web Browser / Proxy Server to their site, and if they did, how long the Sports Illustrated site would be able to be accessed.

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A Canceled Obama Visit

NYTimes.com reported two days before the visit, Pentagon officials told the campaign that only Mr. Obama would be allowed inside the medical center in his capacity as a senator. The adviser who had intended to join Mr. Obama, Scott Gration, a retired major general in the Air Force, was told he could not go along because he was a volunteer campaign adviser.... If the story behind the story of the canceled troop visit has run its course, one question remains: Why didn’t Mr. Obama leave his aides behind, even the retired general, and make the visit by himself?

Because the idea of visiting the troops bored him. He wanted photo ops.

“Even him going alone would likely be characterized by some as a political event,”

And by not going he made it worse for himself.

Mr. Gibbs said in an interview on Monday, adding, “He decided not to put the troops in that position.”

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The Democrats' Energy Charade

WSJ.com reported The bad news is that Democrats will try again before the November elections. We can expect more legislation that claims to increase production, but in reality offers a framework of heavy regulation, litigation and union rules that could prevent new energy supplies from getting to market.

Because that is what Democrats want: heavy regulation, litigation and union rules. They don't care ambout how much people have to pay for gas.

And we can expect legislation that would likely hamper current oil and gas exploration.

Consider the details of Drill. It would not have opened new lands to energy exploration. Instead, it would have increased the number of lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's (ANWR's) sister territory on Alaska's North Slope -- from one lease sale every two years to one every year. The problem here came in the fine print. The bill would have mandated that leasing be done in an undefined, "environmentally responsible" way. We know from experience that such ambiguous language leads to lawsuits and delays.

Lawsuits they love, because that makes lawyers ore money, and they don't care how much people have to pay for gas.

Further, the bill authorized the construction of new pipelines, but would have mandated that they be built in an "environmentally responsible manner" using labor agreements that earmarked all the work for labor union members.

The Democrats' focus on the National Petroleum Reserve is also striking. While it contains comparable known reserves to ANWR -- 10.6 billion barrels compared to an estimated 10.4 billion barrels in the wildlife refuge -- its fields are spread over 23 million acres. The portion of ANWR territory that should be opened to exploration covers a mere 2,000 acres.

Which makes it much easier to drill in an environmentally safe way.

The National Petroleum Reserve's fields are a little over 250 miles from the current pipeline infrastructure, while ANWR is only 75 miles away. To top it off, currently there is no production in the National Petroleum Reserve because of ongoing litigation.

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Obamanomics Is a Recipe for Recession

WSJ.com reported What if I told you that a prominent global political figure in recent months has proposed: abrogating key features of his government's contracts with energy companies;

It sounds like someone that does not understand the Rule of Law, at least Contract Law.

unilaterally renegotiating his country's international economic treaties;

Certainly not something that would improve how other contries think of us.

dramatically raising marginal tax rates on the "rich" to levels not seen in his country in three decades (which would make them among the highest in the world);

Sounds like a stupid Democrat.

and changing his country's social insurance system into explicit welfare by severing the link between taxes and benefits?

And after it works so good (NOT!!!)

.... From the property rights and rule of (contract) law foundations of a successful market economy to the specifics of tax, spending, energy, regulatory and trade policy, if the proposals espoused by candidate Obama ever became law, the American economy would suffer a serious setback.

True, but would not trigger a recession. It would trigger a depression....

History teaches us that high taxes and protectionism are not conducive to a thriving economy, the extreme case being the higher taxes and tariffs that deepened the Great Depression. While such a policy mix would be a real change, as philosophers remind us, change is not always progress.

Precisely.

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