Paying at the Pump With Eric Bolling and Gov. Sarah Palin

If you missed the Eric Bolling – Sarah Palin Special: Paying at the Pump, aired on Fox News over the weekend, here it is.  Definitely worth the watch!

‘The Special’ offers input from experts, everyday people and some solutions including from Governor Sarah Palin and Eric Bolling…

Paying at the Pump with Eric Bolling and Sarah Palin

Video:  Paying at the Pump with Eric Bolling and Sarah Palin

The video clearly points out that energy production in America is directly related to the American economy… and in turn energy independence is directly related to American economic recovery.  This special touches on several common sense solutions.

And for the environmentalists out there, there are green solutions for clean-up.  Here’s one: check-out these products: DualZorb®, PondZorb® and AcidZorb® distributed domestically and globally by a growing company MC Endeavors, Inc. who just launched an Online Store.

Updated: 4.17.12 at 12:05 ET – National Review Online

(Curiously just on the heals of, but not a word for credit or even a mention of the Bolling- Palin special… so as stated below this seems to be the big ‘campaign’ initiative of the day, but nothing will come of it… and certainly no shared credit if something should!)

Obama Announces New ‘Oil Market Manipulator’ Hunt Four Years Straight by Jim Gerahty

President Obama’s big initiative for the day is yet another pledge to crack down on nefarious energy traders who are driving up prices of oil and gasoline.

Today: “Under pressure to take action on rising gasoline prices, President Barack Obama wants Congress to strengthen federal supervision of oil markets, increase penalties for market manipulation and empower regulators to increase the amount of money energy traders are required to put behind their transactions. The White House plan, which Obama was to unveil Tuesday, is more likely to draw sharp election-year distinctions with Republicans than have an immediate effect on prices at the pump. The measures seek to boost spending for Wall Street enforcement at a time when congressional Republicans are seeking to limit the reach of federal financial regulations.”

If this pledge sounds familiar… it’s because Obama and his administration announce some new initiative to do this every year, usually as spring turns to summer and the price of gas increases as Americans drive more. It’s almost like the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Last June: “The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether oil companies have engaged in anticompetitive practices or manipulated crude oil prices, the government’s latest salvo to rein in high energy prices. The commission said on Monday it was also looking into whether oil companies had provided false or misleading information to a federal agency related to the wholesale price of oil or petroleum products. “We remain committed to preventing and prosecuting any anticompetitive, fraudulent, or otherwise illegal activity which we identify through the foregoing investigation,” commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a letter to Senator John Rockefeller, who called on the FTC in March to launch an investigation.”

Just about one year ago today, April, 2011: “With U.S. gasoline pump prices soaring, the Obama administration on Thursday unveiled a working group of federal agencies to probe potential fraud in the energy markets. The White House is worried that if average gas prices rise above $4 a gallon, the economic and political fallout could dominate next year’s presidential campaign and drown out President Barack Obama’s message of economic recovery. Obama asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to assemble a team of agency officials to “root out” cases of oil market fraud that affect pump prices, including actions by speculators.”

March 2011: “Obama said he had ordered a review of why oil companies aren’t producing more petroleum on federal land, and said his administration would monitor “any possible manipulation in the oil markets” and work with state governments to monitor for potential price gouging at the gas pump.”

July 2010: “Traders will face new rules aimed at making it easier for regulators to prove manipulation in markets for commodities such as oil, wheat and natural gas under the financial overhaul awaiting President Barack Obama’s signature.”

And then in August 2009: “Energy traders and companies will face fines of up to $1 million a day if they manipulate oil markets, the Federal Trade Commission ruled on Thursday in a crackdown on fraud that they said causes widespread damage to the U.S. economy. The agency issued a rule, which takes effect November 4, to prohibit fraud or deceit both in the cash, or physical, energy markets and on the regulated futures exchanges.”

Now… with gas averaging $3.89 per gallon nationally and much higher in many parts of the country, we can conclude that either every previous initiative announced by the administration was spectacularly ineffective at containing the nefarious menace of oil price speculators… or that oil price speculators are not really the reason gas prices increase.

No Green Jobs and WH Lies…

Drillgate: Internal Emails Shows Obama Team Lying to Public

If you’re the President of the United States or one of his political appointees and you’re ideologically opposed to new oil and natural gas development offshore, what do you do when the public registers its overwhelming support for new drilling in public opinion polls?

You dance, delay, and deceive. You speak melodious words about seeking the wisdom of the public in making these decisions and then ignore evidence of the public will when you get it, or worse, you hide it.

First came the dance. In August 2008, after soaring gas prices and a dramatic shift in public opinion caused President Bush, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain to reverse their positions on offshore drilling, then-Senator Obama also changed. The Democratic presidential nominee reversed his own position and that of his party, saying he was open to offshore drilling as part of an overall energy plan. The Democratic Congress followed a month later by quietly dropping the 25-year Congressional ban on offshore drilling.

Then came the delay. In January 2009, President Obama inherited a draft five year offshore drilling plan prepared by the outgoing Bush administration. The plan was already receiving public comment as part of the elaborate rule making process followed by federal agencies. Ken Salazar, Obama’s new Secretary of Interior, determined the decision about new offshore drilling was so important that he ordered a six-month extension to the comment period.

Third comes the dishonesty.

In April of 2009, during a discussion about offshore exploration in San Francisco, Salazar said that President Obama directed him to “to make sure that we have an open and transparent government” and that “these are not decisions that are going to be made behind closed doors.” Salazar went on to say that President Obama wanted to make sure that DOI was “maximizing the opportunity for the public to give us guidance on what it is that they want to do.”

Yet, more than four months after the comment period ended, the Department of the Interior has failed to make any public announcement about the results, even though sources have told American Solutions for months the comments show a 2-1 advantage in support of offshore drilling.

It took American Solutions almost four months and the power of the Freedom of Information Act to finally uncover indirect confirmation that, out of over 530,000 comments submitted, pro-drilling comments outnumbered anti-drilling comments by a 2-1 margin.

In an email dated October 27, 2009, Liz Birnbaum, director of the Minerals Management Service, informs other Interior officials that a preliminary tabulation of the results of the comment period had not yet gone to Secretary Salazar, adding “[s]o the Secretary can honestly say in response to any questions that he’s [SIC] has not yet seen the analysis of the comments – staff is still working on it. I did, however, confirm to him the 2-1 split that these guys [at American Solutions] are emphasizing.”

When a public employee is on record condoning purposeful deception of the American people, the taxpayer should no longer have to fund his or her job. Secretary Salazar should immediately fire Liz Birnbaum for purposefully deceiving him, and in turn, the American people. It’s not possible for the Secretary to honor pledges of openness, honestly, and transparency in government if his staff is going to deliberately undermine such pledges.

Public opinion polls already measure near 70% support for offshore drilling, so the results from a public comment period that reflect the same public sentiment should not be surprising. But after all this talk of wanting the public’s input, Secretary Salazar and his team must find it a real stumbling block to have to explain all their anti-energy development actions in light of the comment period results to which they previously attached such great importance.

This newly gained insight into the anti-energy exploration mindset within the Department of the Interior allows a new perspective of President Obama’s mention of offshore development in his recent State of the Union address. Here is the one paragraph in which the President described offshore development:

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.

To the passive listener, it sounded like President Obama expressed at least rhetorical support for offshore drilling.

But the President only says we must make “tough decisions” on offshore drilling, deliberately refusing to apply that standard to other decisions on energy.

But tough for whom? Certainly not for the public that overwhelmingly supports more offshore drilling.

Indeed, the only person facing a tough decision is the President since an important part of his political base is opposed to new American energy development.

Bucking public opinion would indeed be a tough decision for this President, but he has shown himself quite comfortable with bucking public opinion to pursue stunningly unpopular policies on health care and cap and trade.

In short, it’s a fair conclusion that the tough decisions the President identified in his State of the Union was his intended decision not to pursue any new offshore oil and gas development. The actions by Salazar and his team are entirely consistent with that conclusion.

What makes all of this dispiriting, especially this month, is that with 15 million Americans out of work and with the President’s recently submitted budget projecting trillion dollar annual deficits for the next ten years and a near tripling of the national debt by 2020, the President is throwing away a golden opportunity over the next three decades to create millions of new jobs and generate more than $270 billion in annual economic growth from new oil and gas development, including $54 billion annually in federal tax receipts that could help lower the federal deficit and the national debt.

These extraordinary benefits of job creation and economic growth – all without requiring any federal spending – are, sadly, not on President Obama’s agenda, notwithstanding all the phony rhetoric to the contrary.

Indeed, we can look forward to the President’s continued strategy of dance, delay, and deceive.

by Vince Haley

New (Green) Wind Farms Bring No New Jobs

Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

Wind turbines are powered by strong prevailing winds in Palm Springs, Calif. The American Wind...

(David McNew/Getty Images)

Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year. But the study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

So Where Are the Jobs?

"Most of the jobs are going overseas," said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He analyzed which foreign firms had accepted the most stimulus money. "According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S."

Sarah Palin: YOUR TAX DOLLARS HARD AT WORK: FIRST CARS, NOW FOREIGN OIL

YOUR TAX DOLLARS HARD AT WORK: FIRST CARS, NOW FOREIGN OIL

Today's Wall Street Journal contains some puzzling news for all Americans who are impacted by high energy prices and who share the goal of moving us toward energy independence.

For years, states rich with an abundance of oil and natural gas have been begging Washington, DC politicians for the right to develop their own natural resources on federal lands and off shore. Such development would mean good paying jobs here in the United States (with health benefits) and the resulting royalties and taxes would provide money for federal coffers that would potentially off-set the need for higher income taxes, reduce the federal debt and deficits, or even help fund a trillion dollar health care plan if one were so inclined to support such a plan.

So why is it that during these tough times, when we have great needs at home, the Obama White House is prepared to send more than two billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to Brazil so that the nation's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, can drill off shore and create jobs developing its own resources? That's all Americans want; but such rational energy development has been continually thwarted by rabid environmentalists, faceless bureaucrats and a seemingly endless parade of lawsuits aimed at shutting down new energy projects.

I'll speak for the talent I have personally witnessed on the oil fields in Alaska when I say no other country in the world has a stronger workforce than America, no other country in the world has better safety standards than America, and no other country in the world has stricter environmental standards than America. Come to Alaska to witness how oil and gas can be developed simultaneously with the preservation of our eco-system. America has the resources. We deserve the opportunity to develop our resources no less than the Brazilians. Millions of Americans know it is true: "Drill, baby, drill." Alaska is proof you can drill and develop, and preserve nature, with its magnificent caribou herds passing by the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), completely unaffected. One has to wonder if Obama is playing politics and perhaps refusing a "win" for some states just to play to the left with our money.

The new Gulf of Mexico lease sales tomorrow sound promising and perhaps will move some states in the right direction, but we all know that the extreme environmentalists who serve to block progress elsewhere, including in Alaska, continue to block opportunities. These environmentalists are putting our nation in peril and forcing us to rely on unstable and hostile foreign countries. Mr. Obama can stop the extreme tactics and exert proper government authority to encourage resource development and create jobs and health benefits in the U.S.; instead, he chooses to use American dollars in Brazil that will help to pay the salaries and benefits for Brazilians to drill for resources when the need and desire is great in America.

Buy American is a wonderful slogan, but you can't say in one breath that you want to strengthen our economy and stimulate it, and then in another ship our much-needed dollars to a nation desperate to drill while depriving us of the same opportunity.

- Sarah Palin

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling

Too bad it's not in U.S. waters

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

The Bush Administration's five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go forward on August 19.

This is progress, however slow. But it still doesn't allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Posted: Daily Thought Pad

Thought For The Day 10.05.08

“Some days just make up for all the crummy!!”  …Edith Ann, Lily Tomlin’s famous  Laugh-in Character from the 60’s

 (Good day after a long week of bailout b.s.)

  Palin Rally in Cali

 A crowd of 23,000 gathered to hear Governor Sarah Palin, Republican vice presidential candidate speak in Carson, California yesterday afternoon, followed by a $1,000 a plate fundraiser in Costa Mesa.  And we were there to hear her first hand.  She was articulate, focused and showed she was up for the fight, ready to be V.P. and ready to be President if it were ever necessary.  Political convert and lifetime Democrat, the Los Angeles President of the National Organization for Women was there to introduce Governor Palin and show support. 

Vowing to "take the gloves off," GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin unleashed an aggressive new attack against Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday, charging at her first public rally in California that her Democratic opponent "sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." 

"This is not a guy who sees America as you and I see America," she said, before a cheering capacity crowd of 10,000 at the Home Depot Center in Carson with another 7,000 in bleachers across the street watching on a huge screen, in a pointed effort to link the Democrat to William Ayers, a former 1960s radical who co-founded the Weather Underground. "We see America as a force for good in the world." (The Weather Underground took credit for Vietnam War-era protests that included nonfatal explosions targeting the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.)

The crowd was full of fired-up supporters who waited for hours to get into the arena and to hear her address, waving homemade "God Bless Sarah" and "You go, girl!" signs.  People even brought ThunderStix, did the wave, and energetically chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" before her speech.  Ticket supporter Jon Voight helped to rally the crowd before Governor Palin arrived, but he did not speak at the actual rally.

She spoke for about 25 minutes and spent another 15 to 20 minutes afterward posing for photos and signing autographs at the Carson rally. From there, she was headed to a 90-minute fundraiser at the Costa Mesa Performing Arts Center to raise funds for the Republican National Committee, the state GOP and the McCain-Palin Victory fund. Today, she will appear in Burlingame at another invitation-only breakfast event for GOP donors.

"There is a time when it's necessary to take the gloves off, and that time is right now," Sarah said, adding that her campaign adviser encouraged the move saying, "the heels are on, the gloves are off."

"Evidently, there's been a lot of interest in what I like to read lately," Palin said in a laughing reference to a recent interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric where she was unable to name publications she regularly reads. "Well, I was reading today a copy of the New York Times," she said to loud boos, "and I was really interested to read about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago."

The story in question, published Saturday, explored the "crossed paths" of Obama and Ayers, and what it characterized as sporadic links the two shared as residents of Hyde Park and as members of a nonprofit organization concentrating on Chicago schools.

"One of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist ... part of a group which launched a campaign to bomb" the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, Palin told the Carson crowd. "These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes."

Supporters of the GOP ticket, including actor Jon Voight, echoed Palin's comments and even further in their attacks at the rally. The actor told a pre-rally press conference that "no one's vetting Obama at all ... this fellow has a lot of very strange associations ... such as his affiliation with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist, Reverend Wright and a long list of others."  Voight told reporters that Ayers and Obama "worked together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ... four years together, radicalizing the Chicago school system. That's what their agenda was."  McCain campaign spokesman Rick Gorka later said “Voight does not speak for the campaign".

Much to the crowd’s delight, in her address, Palin, repeatedly jabbed at the media. In a reference to her interview with Couric, Sarah admitted that she had been "flippant" in some answers, but didn't think the questions she was being asked were very relevant. "Oh, come on, let's start talking to the American people about the issues that you guys want to know about," she said, and the crowd cheered.

Sarah had the Carson crowd chanting and cheering her on as she told them "our opponents take this state and all of you for granted. ...But I've got some news for millions of Californians, this is still Reagan country."

There were some laughs, but the GOP vice presidential candidate also hit hard on issues, like taxes and offshore oil drilling; as the audience chanted "Drill, baby, drill!"

It was a great event… full of hope and the possible promise of real change.

“Republicans believe every day is the 4th of July. Democrats believe every day is April 15^th.” …Ronald Reagan”