Morning Bell: 100 Days Later, Obama Still Failing the Gulf

Posted By Rory Cooper On July 28, 2010

Over the last four weeks, The Heritage Foundation sent multiple teams  of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf to study the federal response to the oil spill. These three delegations, with more to come, have traversed the areas hit hardest by the crisis, talking to response workers, affected oil crews, fishermen, elected leaders and BP representatives. What we found is simple : President Obama’s administration has turned a crisis into a disaster, and someone needs to be held accountable.

Accountability is in short supply in Washington these days. Fingers are pointed in every direction for our nation’s economic woes. President Obama’s favorite target of choice is the past administration for nearly every problem he faces. Yet, the oil spill has only two central characters: BP and the Obama administration. BP is (very) slowly taking accountability for its creation of this crisis. Tony Hayward was finally dismissed as CEO  and they have promised full financial restitution for direct and indirect victims. On Day 100 of the spill, it’s time the Obama administration followed suit.

And what exactly does the administration have to be held accountable for? An environmental disaster made worse by federal incompetence. An unnecessary drilling moratorium that has pulled the plug on a Gulf economy already on life support. A claims process  that was negotiated in secret, leaving few answers to why claims aren’t being processed and transparency is lost. A slow response that wasted clean weather days as hurricane season fast approaches, and a decision-making structure led by politics rather than duty.

Environmentally, the President and his eco-left echo chamber consciously chose to ignore the damage caused by the oil in favor of focusing on future tax increases that would expand government largesse. The President’s initial push for cap-and-trade taxes  as a response to an oil spill was so disconnected and oblivious that it was quickly brushed off by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Even so, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday cap-and-trade taxes were still possible this year  if any energy legislation passes the Senate and the bill goes to conference.

Details of the Reid-Boxer bill the Senate will market as a response to the oil spill released last night confirm that increased taxes are the Majority Leader’s first priority regardless, with a “drastic increase ” in the price of oil per barrel that will be paid at your local gas pump, breaking the President’s promise that taxpayers would not foot the bill for the oil spill. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) also said the bill would create a permanent “jobs moratorium ” in the Gulf.

And while focus in Washington has remained on legislative matters, the President’s administration failed to issue emergency permits  to protect Louisiana’s fragile coastline. Paid-for barriers were delivered, only to sit on the sidelines, as federal bureaucrats spent months debating three-year old emergency operations plans, only to decide not to implement protective measures.

Efforts were stopped  to divert oil into more easily skimmed areas. The problem of skimming the oil was made even more increasingly difficult by the questionable dispersants, authorized by the EPA, which either drove the oil under water or diluted it into impossible-to-clean droplets. And even if the oil could’ve been easily skimmed, the skimmers simply weren’t deployed, whether by ignorance of the Jones Act or an unbelievable rigidity to emergency placement. Skimmers sat in ports across America waiting for another disaster while this one went ignored.

The drilling moratorium takes what is a terrible situation for Gulf residents and turns it into a long-term economic catastrophe . President Obama is not listening [13] to any oil and gas experts  as he implements a moratorium that could affect our energy production for a decade. Two federal courts have blocked the moratorium, yet the President ignores the rule of law and proceeds with a de facto moratorium regardless. Ports are cutting rental rates, jobs are being lost, rigs are leaving the Gulf in droves and confidence in American energy contracts is being shattered. Meanwhile, this doesn’t affect rising demand , meaning an increasing dependence on foreign oil.

Jim Funk of the Louisiana Restaurant Association told New Orleans Fox 8 : “You’re looking at figures as high as 30,000 high paying jobs are gonna be lost as a result of this moratorium.” And that’s just the restaurant and catering business. Layoffs in the offshore transport business have already begun . John Henry, who runs a cement company that services offshore rigs, told Forbes  they’re already slowing down operations. And CNN reports , companies as far away as Ohio, Tennessee and elsewhere may also lose work as a result of Obama’s jobs moratorium. These reports are all in addition to the jobs already lost on the fleeing rigs .

The complicit media  chose the President’s negotiation of a secret liability deal  with BP as proof he was in charge. But while his strong-arming produced a supposed $20 billion payout, it was settled behind closed doors. Americans never saw any contract that was agreed to between our government and BP, yet that didn’t stop the media from celebrating it.

Now we learn that BP is claiming a $9.9 billion tax credit from the expenditure, meaning American taxpayers are now on the hook for half of the supposed settled amount, and the White House is once again proven inept. Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN) called the development “reprehensible .” David Desser, managing director of Juris Capital said : “You would have thought in advance of that meeting, [the White House] would’ve thought of all those issues…” Yes, you would think. Additionally, the claims process itself is operating in the dark, with state and local officials unable to track individual claims .

As Tropical Storm Bonnie approached last week, emergency and elected officials in Louisiana mobilized . The federal government did not. The clean-up operations halted, yes, and plans were in place for re-deployment. But Americans along the Gulf coast did not hear from the Secretary of Homeland Security what the government’s response would be to a potential storm that would be made only worse by their own delays in the clean-up. Leadership was obvious at the state and local level. It was absent in Washington.

President Obama has made it clear he couldn’t care less about the oil spill or Gulf residents. He has barely mentioned the crisis since he gave a forced Oval Office address  over a month ago. Amid complaints surrounding his three vacations this month, most recently to Maine, he reluctantly is taking his family to Florida  in two weeks for a photo-op.

Florida is hospitable to this visit, since Governor Charlie Crist–formerly a Republican, now an Independent due to the pressure of primary politics–has been proven a better ally  than Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal . Louisiana residents deserve better than to have politics come between them and a responsive White House. Their share of this disaster is overwhelming, and to be so ignored is unacceptable. Yet, even leading Florida Democrats, like gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, charge the administration with being “out of touch with reality ” when the White House does visit.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, FEMA Director Michael Brown resigned  due to public pressure over the federal response to the crisis. It has now been 100 days since the deadly Deepwater Horizon accident. The clean-up efforts have failed . The moratorium is simply kicking a dying man while he is down. Who is accountable in President Obama’s administration? Apparently, nobody.

Obama, Reagan, and the economy

By Frank Donatelli
Published in Politico
Tuesday, July 27, 2010

It’s easy to understand why President Barack Obama’s friends don’t want to acknowledge that July represents 17 months since Congress passed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill - the president’s signature measure to jump-start the economy and fight unemployment.

Obama says the economy is headed in the right direction; jobs are being created, not lost, and he is doing everything possible to revive the “worst economy since the Great Depression.” Most of the national press has been remarkably accepting of this narrative - even if the president has been vague, at best, about when we might finally see an uptick in economic growth and job creation.

But in another economic time, President Ronald Reagan’s economic recovery program took 17 months to take hold. It took from the time Congress passed his tax cuts, in August 1981, until the recession he inherited finally ended in January 1983.

Unemployment hit a high of 10.8 percent in December 1982. But then economic growth spiked, and the unemployment rate began a long, steady decline throughout the 1980s. It was obvious the program was working when people stopped calling it “Reaganomics.”

Tax cuts were a part of Reagan’s effort to cut the size and scope of government to fight economic stagnation. “Government is not the solution,” Reagan said in his remarkably clear inaugural address. “It is the problem.”

In addition to tax cuts, Reagan reduced domestic discretionary spending and streamlined regulations to make them less of a burden on businesses seeking to create jobs. He believed that government should give individuals and businesses the proper incentives to grow and expand and not inhibit the private sector with high taxes and cumbersome regulations.

Reagan faced obstacles that Obama did not. The House he had to work with was always controlled by Democrats. More ominously, inflation was running at double-digit rates, and it took nearly a year for the Federal Reserve to squeeze those pressures out of the system.

Regardless, in the end, Reagan’s program worked. The turnaround began 17 months later.

Fast-forward to today. The Obama administration says that government-directed investment, via huge spending increases, can revive the economy. It’s now stimulus plus 17. Is there a turnaround in sight?

Apparently not. Obama’s own budget estimates, released just last week, project trillion-dollar deficits, anemic economic growth coming out of a recession and unemployment near 9 percent for 2011 and 8 percent for 2012.

You have to go back to the 1930s to find a period in which unemployment has been so high for so long. This economic record would make former President Jimmy Carter blush.

Yet Obama continues to get a pass on his version of recent economic events. He has said that he inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression. He didn’t. The economies inherited by both President Gerald Ford in 1974 and Reagan in 1981 were far worse.

Obama has said the stimulus has saved 3 million jobs. It hasn’t. We have nearly that many fewer jobs than before the stimulus was passed in February 2009, and the unemployment rate is 2 percentage points higher than what he claimed would be the high point once his program was enacted.

Obama has said he is doing all he can to revive the economy. Actually, he’s doing too much. The economic uncertainty that his “historic” health care and budget bills have created is doing more to hold back economic growth than anything else. Companies are hoarding cash rather than invest in Obama’s uncertain economic climate.

As a result, the recovery is anemic by historic standards.

So we have two historic presidents. Both inherited bad economies. One cut spending and taxes, and then, 17 months later, the economy boomed. The other increased taxes and spending. It’s now 17 months later.

Mr. President, we’re waiting.

Morning Bell: Let’s Not Make a Deal

Posted By Conn Carroll On July 27, 2010

At the height of the debate over Obamacare, when the White House’s leftist allies were in full panic mode, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein accused  Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Lieberman’s crime? He opposed including an expansion of Medicare in the health regulation bill. Now that the President’s signature foreign policy achievement, the New START nuclear agreement with Russia, is on the ropes, the left is again back to their hyperbolic ways. Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione told The Associated Press  last week: “A delayed ratification with a close vote would be a blow to U.S. leadership around the world. People would doubt the President’s ability to negotiate other agreements.”

The histrionics are the result of a sudden surge of concerns over the treaty that started with a blast from Mitt Romney who declared  the treaty “Obama’s worst foreign policy mistake.” Sens. John Kerry (D-MA)  and Carl Levin (D-MI) attempted to shoot down Romney’s concerns, but their responses raised more questions than they answered. Romney has responded to his critics by identifying eight problems with New START  that must be resolved before the Senate can vote on the treaty. We’ll focus on three today:

New START Weakens Our Missile Defense Capabilities: The Washington Post  editorial board asserted yesterday that “attempts by Moscow to insert [limits on missile defense] into the treaty failed.” This is just plain false. First, even the Post admits that the preamble links missile defense and offensive nuclear weapons. The Post says that this was also true of previous STARTs. But not only is the language in this preamble stronger, and not only has the Russian leadership said that any increase in our missile defense system would be considered a breach of the treaty, but Article V of the treaty specifically limits our ability to convert ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers into defensive interceptors. The Post is completely silent about this fact.

New START Fails to Maintain Our Nuclear Forces: The Post does concede that our nuclear weapons our “in need of renewal, as are the laboratories and industrial complex that sustain it.” But then they claim, “the Obama administration accepts this priority,” which is odd since President Obama has promised not to develop any new nuclear weapons . The Obama administration is promising Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) $80 billion in spending on the “nuclear weapons complex” over the next decade, but no legislation has been produced. Any such promise would have to be passed by the House. Do you trust Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to spend $80 billion on nuclear weapons? Your answer to that question tells you all you need to know about the credibility of New START’s nuclear modernization claims.

New START’s Verification Procedures Are Inadequate: The Obama administration is telling  skeptical Senators that “rejecting the treaty would leave the two countries dangerously uncertain about each other’s arsenals.” But New START’s verification terms are so weak that they add little informational value. Paula A. DeSutter, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance and implementation, noted in a Heritage lecture last month: “The Russians can do so much under this treaty to advance and expand their strategic forces… [yet] our ability to determine whether or not they are doing that and whether it violates the treaty is very, very low. The degree of verifiability is very low.” Worse, the Obama administration admitted in Congressional testimony last week that they do not even care if the Russians cheat on the treaty .

All the pressure to blow past the critics, cut backroom deals and get the treaty ratified ought to raise huge red flags. New START has had less than half the number of hearings that treaties are normally subjected to, and the pace for approval certainly is trying to outpace any nuclear arms pact the Senate has ever considered .  Not only is the speed with which it is being pushed through unprecedented, the administration continues to withhold key documents, including the treaty negotiating record . This is no time for conservatives in the Senate to offer lemming-like support for President Obama’s arms control agenda.

Andrew Klavan
Empire of Silence
Journolist, Breitbart, and what the Left doesn’t say
26 July 2010
A personal incident has given me a particular perspective on recent news about the media. Last Tuesday, I received word that the French release of my thriller novel Empire of Lies had been canceled by publisher Seuil Policiers. The editor who originally bought the book had left the French company, and the new editor, my agent says, feels that “she can not publish . . . because of the political and religious aspects of the story.” This, even though it’s in breach of a contract for which I’ve been paid in full. Empire of Lies features a politically conservative Christian protagonist, Jason Harrow, who believes he has uncovered an Islamist terrorist plot being obscured by the leftist mainstream media. “Lies, lies, lies,” the emotionally troubled Harrow murmurs at his television set. “It’s all about what they don’t say.” It will come as no surprise that my friend Andrew Breitbart praised the book as the only thriller he’d ever read in which the mainstream media were the villains.

The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the Daily Caller website that left-wing journalists conspired to suppress scandals that might harm Barack Obama and to the brouhaha over Breitbart’s online release of a video that resulted in a government worker’s momentarily losing her job. In both stories, one thing leaps out at me: everywhere, the Left favors fewer voices and less information, and conservatives favor more. Everywhere, the Left seeks to disappear its opposition, whereas the Right is willing to meet them head-on.

Take the e-mails that the Daily Caller obtained from the now-defunct lefty Web service Journolist. Never mind the personal or psychological implications of a radio producer who lovingly imagines Rush Limbaugh’s death or a law professor who doesn’t know that the FCC has no power to deprive Fox News of a license or a reporter who wants to smear Fred Barnes and other right-wing commentators as racist in order to distract the public from the hateful radicalism of Jeremiah Wright, then Obama’s pastor. The point is not these people’s animus or ignorance or wickedness. The point is that what they desired was not victory in open debate but silence—the silence of censorship, intimidation, or the grave.

When has Rush Limbaugh ever wished a liberal’s mouth closed forever? Really, who can deny that Rush would happily argue a point with absolutely anyone anywhere? When has Fox News ever done anything to its rival cable stations but trounce them in a free competition for ratings? When has Fred Barnes ever tried to bully or intimidate someone into shutting up?

And what about Breitbart? Did he, like many a daily journalist before him, momentarily put speed over full context in releasing an NAACP video? Perhaps. But Breitbart is the grassroots nemesis of vast media conglomerates that continually and purposefully ignore, suppress, and distort information unfriendly to their ideology: release and disclosure are his reasons for being. Breitbart routinely breaks important stories that the mainstream media won’t touch. “I don’t even know about it,” chuckled ABC News’s Charlie Gibson well after Breitbart revealed corruption at the left-wing activist organization Acorn. “I just didn’t know about it,” said Bob Schieffer of CBS after Breitbart and others had been hammering at possible wrongdoing at the Justice Department in a botched case against New Black Panther thugs. And I guess the networks just didn’t know when Breitbart decisively disproved allegations that Tea Partiers hurled racist insults at lawmakers—because they continued to spread the discredited smear.

Old-media pooh-bahs like former ABC anchor Ted Koppel lament the “good old days,” when three government-licensed networks served as gatekeepers to what the public could and couldn’t know. Breitbart, meanwhile, exhorts crowds of citizens to shoot videos and gather information, telling them, “You are the media now!” Breitbart only wants more information, while the left-wing media too often operate through obscurantism and suppression. They bury the word “Islam” when describing terrorists who murder in the name of Allah. They depict police as racist while hiding the racial crime statistics that explain police actions. They actively ignore and spike both political and sex scandals involving prominent liberals, liberal causes, or media bias. They attempt to label speech offensive or racist if it undermines their positions.

My beleaguered creation Jason Harrow was right: it is all about what they don’t say. Now, in France, he himself has become part of that silence. Here in America, the Right keeps his voice alive.