The White House got the headlines they wanted today. The Washington Post: U.S Lifts Ban on Deep-Water Drilling. The Los Angeles Times: U.S. Lifts Moratorium on Deep-Water Drilling in Gulf of Mexico. The New York Times: White House Lifts Ban on Deepwater Drilling. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters on a conference call yesterday: “We are open for business.” Don’t believe the White House or Salazar for a second. While yesterday’s announcement does remove one legal barrier to the resumption of energy investment in the Gulf, the Obama administration still …
President Obama wants to see the U.S. lead the world in the number of college graduates by 2020. But new regulations being proposed by the Department of Education would undermine that goal by presenting more obstacles to students seeking to attend the higher education institutions that work best for them. For-profit institutions, which would be most affected by the new regulations, serve a student population that has been underserved by traditional higher education. New regulations pertaining to how colleges are authorized could potentially further burden higher education institutions generally and …
Over the weekend, President Obama notified House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–CA) that he intended to allow the issuance of temporary munitions export licenses for C-130 cargo aircraft for use in response to oil spills at sea. On the surface, this measure appears non-controversial. It is not, at least from what is stated, a decision to allow the sale of C-130 aircraft to China. Rather, the Administration can claim, quite reasonably, that the waiver is only to allow C-130 aircraft, of any nationality, to land in China, as necessary, to provide …
The White House announced today that the Department of Interior will be lifting the ban on off-shore oil drilling. This is good news. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement Michael Bromwich had estimated that the ban cost the region more than 20,000 jobs. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is leaving costly new job killing regulations in its place. Greenwire reports: The Obama administration is acknowledging that its new offshore drilling safety regulations will raise costs for the oil and gas industry — and may also delay some offshore …
Good news out of the liberal (and frequently reversed) Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — an en banc panel just upheld Washington State’s felon-disenfranchisement law and backtracked from a badly decided earlier opinion (Farrakhan v. Gregoire). Liberals have been attacking state laws that take away the right to vote from persons convicted of felonies. They claim these laws violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) because they are “discriminatory.” Washington has had such a law in place since 1866, four years before the 15th Amendment even gave African …
After nearly a decade, the Cape Wind offshore project has a lease approval from the Department of Interior, but it is not quite up and running. Once the 130 turbines that stand 440 feet high (taller than the Statue of Liberty) start moving, consumers will pay a hefty premium for the electricity the nation’s first offshore wind farm generates. The Boston Globe reports: [T]he energy produced will cost up to 50 percent more than energy today from some land-based wind farms and twice as much as some hydroelectric dams. The …
I am the co-founder of a tea party group in North Florida and our main focus is education. Since we started our tea party, we have researched issues, met with our representatives, written letters, and attended rallies with our wonderful signs and flags. It’s been a great experience to help revive citizens to become active in their government both at the federal, state and local levels. We recently hosted a screening of the 33 Minutes movie produced by Heritage. The basic tenet of the movie is this…You only have 33 …
This week’s Time Magazine featured a 12-page article on the The Secret World of Extreme Militias. Page after page describes the threat of renegade anti-government groups, who are described as militant groups armed with rifles and assault weapons and who threaten war against “‘the jackbooted thugs’ of Washington.” Yet, Time didn’t spare a single sentence to describe the nation’s true militia forces. There is a not-so secret world of militias out there called State Defense Forces (SDFs). These SDFs are authorized by state law and are under the command of …
Yesterday, Time Magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin wrote: “With the exception of core Obama Administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.” As if to prove Halperin’s point, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of Democratic donors in Seattle Friday: “The Recovery Act didn’t do enough because we couldn’t spend enough.” At least …
What’s the best cure for a recessionary environment? Apparently, raising energy prices and killing jobs. The Obama Administration admitted to both because of the Department of Interior’s (DOI) newly announced offshore drilling safety regulations. Katie Howell of E&E reports: The Obama administration is acknowledging that its new offshore drilling safety regulations will raise costs for the oil and gas industry—and may also delay some offshore development, slightly increase gas prices and kill some jobs. The new rules unveiled last week would increase operating costs by an estimated $1.42 million for …
