Does Obama even read his own speeches?

[sirs]

Obama’s oil flimflam

Yes, of course, presidents have no direct control over gas prices. But the American people know something about this president and his disdain for oil. The “fuel of the past,” he contemptuously calls it. To the American worker who doesn’t commute by government motorcade and is getting fleeced every week at the pump, oil seems very much a fuel of the present — and of the foreseeable future.

President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling:

- off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants);

- off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there);

- in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30 percent below pre-moratorium forecasts);

- in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles International Airport);

- on federal lands in the Rockies (where leases are down 70 percent since Obama took office).

But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline, after the most extensive environmental vetting of any pipeline in U.S. history. It gave the game away because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.

Obama boasts that, on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive.
- These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies.
- They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting.
- This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.

“The American people aren’t stupid,” Obama said (Feb. 23), mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less — that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home .?.?. that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”

So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?

Obama says of drilling: “That’s not a plan.” Of course it’s a plan. We import nearly half of our oil, thereby exporting enormous amounts of U.S. wealth. Almost 60 percent of our trade deficit — $332 billion out of $560 billion — is shipped overseas to buy crude.

Drill here and you stanch the hemorrhage. You keep those dollars within the U.S. economy, repatriating not just wealth but jobs and denying them to foreign unfriendlies. Drilling is the single most important thing we can do to spur growth at home while strengthening our hand abroad.

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

High gasoline prices are a major political problem for Obama. They are not just a pain at the pump, however. They are a constant reminder of three years of a rigid, fatuous, fantasy-driven energy policy that has rendered us scandalously dependent and excessively vulnerable.

The GOP's race, to lose

[Xavier_Onassis]

Drill all you want, and it will have little or no effect on the price, because the oil does not belong to the people of this country.

It belongs to greedhead oil companies who will sell it at the world price, plus profits for speculators, to anyone they wish. Most Alaskan oil is sold to Japan.

Floridians do not want oil drifting on their beaches. Cuba has a right to drill within its territorial waters and the US has no jurisdiction there.

[sirs]

A) it WOULD have an effect, as more supply --> decreased price
B) it WOULD have an affect at providing thousands of shovel of ready jobs, for an economy begging for jobs
C) it WOULD have an effect at providing INCREASED tax revenues, by the increased amout of payroll taxes gathered by the jobs, not to mention the INCREASE in sales tax revenues as those folks have $$$ to buy more products.  More income also equates to more to an INCREASE in income taxes received by the Fed
D) it WOULD have an effect on decreasing our reliance on foreign oil sources
E) Ignorance of what WOULD happen, vs the speculative "could", in the way of "oil drifting onto beaches" is the only vestage the left appears to have, on this matter.

[Xavier_Onassis]

That is bullshit, all bullshit.

[sirs]

LOL....there's that stout consistent all encompasing articulate rebuttal we're so honored to witness, day in and day out, from the likes of the left, as personified by Xo.  Such reasoned logical commentary, specifically able to refute each and every point presented

Coolaide topped by a foam of ignorance

[sirs]

Our lesson for today comes from George and Ira Gershwin:

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.  When he said the world was round.  They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.  They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother.  When they said that man could fly.  They told Marconi wireless was a phony..."

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang it in the film "Shall We Dance?" (1937) Seventy-five years on, the president revived it to tap-dance around his rising gas prices and falling approval numbers. Delivering his big speech on energy at Prince George's Community College, he insisted the American economy will be going gangbusters again just as soon as we start running it on algae and windmills. He noted that, as with Wilbur and his brother, there were those inclined to titter:

"Let me tell you something. If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail – [Laughter] – they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society [Laughter]. They would not have believed that the world was round [Applause]. We've heard these folks in the past. They probably would have agreed with one of the pioneers of the radio who said, 'Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan' [Laughter]. One of Henry Ford's advisers was quoted as saying, 'The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad' [Laughter]."

The crowd loved it. But President Algy Solyndra wasn't done:

"There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don't believe in the future, and don't believe in trying to do things differently. One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?' [Laughter]. That's why he's not on Mount Rushmore – [laughter and applause] – because he's looking backwards. He's not looking forwards [Applause]. He's explaining why we can't do something, instead of why we can do something."

It fell to Nan Card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio to inform the website Talking Points Memo that the quotation was apocryphal. Hayes had the first telephone in the White House, and the first typewriter, and Edison visited him to demonstrate the phonograph.

But obviously Rutherford B. Hayes isn't as "forward-looking" as a 21st century president who believes in
- Jimmy Carter malaise,
- 1970s Eurostatist industrial policy,
- 1940s British health care reforms,
- 1930s New Deal-size entitlements premised on mid-20th century birth rates and life expectancy,
- and all paid for by a budget with more zeroes than anybody's seen since the Weimar Republic.

If that's not a shoo-in for Mount Rushmore, I don't know what is.

I was interested in the rest of Barack Obama's yukfest of history's biggest idiots. Considering that he is (in the words of historian Michael Beschloss) "the smartest guy ever to become president," the entire passage sounded as if it was plucked straight from one of those "Top Twenty Useful Quotes for Forward-Looking Inspirational Speakers" websites. And whaddayaknow? Rutherford B. Hayes, the TV flash in the pan, the horse is here to stay – they're all at the Wikiquote page on "Incorrect Predictions." Fancy that! You can also find his selected examples at the web page "Some Really Really Bad Predictions About the Future" and a bazillion others.

Given that the ol' Hayes telephone sidesplitter turned out to be a bust, I wondered about the others. The line about television being a "flash in the pan" is generally attributed to "Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948." She was a New Zealand-born lass who while at Oxford wrote to the newly founded BBC with some ideas on using radio in schools. By the Seventies, the educational programming she had invented and developed was used in 90 percent of UK schools, and across the British Commonwealth from the Caribbean to Africa to the Pacific. She apparently used the flash-in-the-pan line in a private conversation recounted some years after her death by her fellow BBC executive, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a lady I knew very slightly. It was in the context of why she was pessimistic about early attempts at educational television. Mary Somerville would not have been surprised by "American Idol" or "Desperate Housewives," but she thought TV's possibilities for scholarly study were limited. If you remember Leonard Bernstein giving live illustrated music lectures on Beethoven on CBS in the Fifties, and you've lived long enough to see "quality public television" on PBS dwindle down to dreary boomer nostalgia, lousy Brit sitcoms, Laurence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials, you might be inclined to agree that TV as an educational tool certainly proved "a flash in the pan."

And that's before your grandkid gets home from school and complains he's had to sit through Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" again.

What was Obama's other thigh-slapper? Oh, yes. "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad." The line is generally attributed to "the president of the Michigan Savings Bank" in 1903. That would be George Peck, born in 1834 on a hardscrabble farm in Connecticut. Due to a boyhood accident, he was unable to use one arm and so was no good for agricultural labor. So at the age of 16 he started as the lowest-paid clerk in a Utica dry goods store. From this unpromising start, Peck built one of the largest dry-goods businesses in Michigan. Was he, as the president said, one of those men "who don't believe in the future"? Not at all. He was president of the Edison Illuminating Co., named for the guy who invented that light bulb the United States Government has banned. Henry Ford was Peck's chief engineer. Peck set his son and Ford up in a shop on Park Place in Detroit to work on their prototype horseless carriages. After Ford departed, the first porcelain spark plug was baked in Peck's shop.

Christopher Columbus? Once upon a time, your average well-informed high-schooler, never mind the smartest president in history, understood that Columbus was laughed at not because everyone believed the world was round: Educated Europeans of his day accepted that the Earth was spherical and had done so since Aristotle's time. They laughed because they thought he was taking the long way round to the East Indies. Which he was.

So let's see. 
The president sneers at the ignorance of 15th century Spaniards when, in fact, he is the one entirely ignorant of them.
A man who has enjoyed a million dollars of elite education yet has never created a dime of wealth in his life sneers at a crippled farm boy with an eighth-grade schooling who establishes a successful business and introduces electrical distribution across Michigan all the way up to Sault Ste Marie.
A man sneers at one of the pioneering women in broadcasting, a lady who brought the voices of T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and others into the farthest-flung classrooms and would surely have rejected Obama's own dismal speech as being too obviously reliant on "Half-A-Dozen Surefire Cheap Cracks For Lazy Public Speakers."
A man whose own budget officials predict the collapse of the entire U.S. economy by 2027 sneers at a solvent predecessor for being insufficiently "forward-looking."

A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It's not clear why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies" as a keynote address.

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, they all laughed at Edison... How does that song continue? "They laughed at me..."

At Prince George's Community College they didn't. But history will, and they will laugh at us for ever taking him seriously.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It would be ever so delightful if sirs were a candidate.

He would give every comedian in America material for generations.

[sirs]

Priceless.....STILL unable to refute one point.  Left to twoddle in 3rd grade snarking & insulting.   Here's a hint Xo.  When you can't provide any substantive rebuttal to points being made in a debate forum, best simply not respond vs the ingnorant claptrap of snarking.  It makes you look....that much more ignorant of issues, than if you simply had let it go

But boy, thank God you're not a politician in charge of anything/everything that could effect millions of lives.  We see your buddy Obama and one can accurately deduce the misery your administration would wrought upon the country

[sirs]

Lemme try to educate the professor.  In this, a debate forum, we attempt to discuss, ideas, explain our positions, refute claims by others, with facts and/or logic.  If you want to use 3rd grade mudslinging, go take it elsewhere.  It doesn't go well with your claim of being a professional educator. 

So, take a stab at this.  Refute the following, as it relates to increasing drilling, pipeline construction, and oil production in this country:

A) How WOULD an increase in overall more global oil supply not decrease price?

B) How WOULD beginning a massive pipeline project across the country, not have an affect at providing thousands of shovel of ready jobs, for an economy begging for jobs?

C) How WOULD thousands of increased jobs not have an effect at providing INCREASED tax revenues, by the increased amout of payroll taxes gathered by those jobs?
- not to mention the INCREASE in sales tax revenues as those folks have $$$ to buy more products. 
- not to mention more income also equates to more to an INCREASE in income taxes received by the Fed

D) How WOULD an increase in domestic production not have an effect on decreasing our reliance on foreign oil sources?

Not perseverating on repeating the word BS, but actual reasoned response. 

And if you are unable to refute those points, just ....let it go.  Move on to something else

[sirs]

Most intelligent move Xo has made