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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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You guys don't seem to grasp the concept that if Bush was a deficient president, it is NOT OK for Obama to also be lacking in competence. If we took this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, once any given president exercises poor judgment, then no one following him need ever be competent. Irrational.
Lois, why do you persist with this line of reasoning? It isn't true. Not even a tiny bit.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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The whole premise of "Fast and Furious" is so f*#king stupid that no one that works for a living would entertain it for more than a second.
This came from Holder or higher up.
You also have an NSC staffer, IN THE WHIEHOUSE, following it closely.
Why?
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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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Lois, no one is excusing Obama. We just find it strange that you could never criticize anything bush did, but you look for anything Obama does. And most of the time you get it wrong.
1000s of lives verses a few lives, and you still get it wrong.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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TGT wrote: The whole premise of "Fast and Furious" is so f*#king stupid that no one that works for a living would entertain it for more than a second.
This came from Holder or higher up.
More concrete evidence that Obama did it. Good work.
But just for facts sake...could you provide a link TGT.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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TGT wrote: You also have an NSC staffer, IN THE WHIEHOUSE, following it closely.
Maybe, just maybe because...Newell has said he and O'Reilly are long time friends.
Proof solid...Obama did it!!
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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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What is even weirder Lois, is that Obama is ruling mostly right of center, yet he is getting trashed by you guys. He keeps caving in to all of the rights demands, and still he is hated.
the right doesn't like him because he is trying to change healthcare. A change you support, and still you don't like him. ( and please dont take this to mean that I think you support the changes Obama has made, I'm simply saying that you agree that healthcare needs to change )
Bush did way more heinous things then Obama has done. But because he tried to do something with healthcare, boom, you think he is worse.
He didn't even get a bravo for killing Bin Laden. Instead he was criticized. You guys would have cheered Bush to no end if he had gotten Bin Laden.
So excuse me if I dont think that you have walked in my shoes yet. Not even 10 feet.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Lois wrote: I will experience much of the same sentiments you guys did.
And I will relish it every day knowing that you are suffering...the strange part is that the country is going to be way better off under Obama than Bush.
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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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He is very polarizing
Do you remember how much the right went after Clinton? How despised he was? And yet it turns out he did a good job.
He did what republicans haven't been able to do, which is start paying off the national debt. Yet during his tenure, he was despised.
Obama isn't Polarizing. The Right is just being controlled by neocon ideology and they hate everything any liberal stands for.
They spent 40 million dollars on investigating him and the only thing they got him to do was screw up and lie under oath, and then admit he had sex outside his marriage, something every major leader in the republican party was doing. He would have never lied under oath if they hadn't spent 40 million dollars harassing him for having an affair. And these are the people you admire.
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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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So your hatred of Obama is justified?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"“It’s been almost three weeks since I sent the American Jobs Act to Congress – three weeks since I sent them a bill that would put people back to work and put money in people’s pockets. This jobs bill is fully paid for. This jobs bill contains the kinds of proposals that Democrats and Republicans have supported in the past. And now I want it back. It is time for Congress to get its act together and pass this jobs bill so I can sign it into law."
barry's right, congress hasn't moved to enact his bill...anyone know why? hedge, any guesses? the recalcitrant, obstructionist, do-nothing, just-say-no repubs? WRONG
congress hasn't acted on barry's bill because the prez can't introduce bills for congressional action...ONLY a member of congress (rep or senator) can do that...ONLY a member of congress can introduce a bill for debate or vote because ONLY congress can LEGISLATE
congress hasn't acted on barry's bill because NOBODY in congress will sponsor the bill (i.e. put their name on it) for introduction to the legislature...all barry needs is ONE member of congress to sponsor the bill...ONLY ONE
there are 250 DEMOCRATS in congress...tell me, hedge, why hasn't ONE democrat stepped forward to sponsor barry's bill?
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Bookworm wrote: barry's right, congress hasn't moved to enact his bill...anyone know why? hedge, any guesses? the recalcitrant, obstructionist, do-nothing, just-say-no repubs? WRONG
The biggest question is why hasn't the republican house pass a jobs bill of it's own???
Bookworm wrote: the recalcitrant, obstructionist, do-nothing, just-say-no repubs?
Yes...I agree.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"a battery that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon"??? and we'll have it within "five years"??? does ANYBODY believe this? read and weep:
How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia
Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered
By STEPHEN MOORE
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."
"President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.
You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.
How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."
If he's right, that'll double America's proven oil reserves. "Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its "proved reserves" of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.
"We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years." And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America "there are 10 million royalty owners across the country" who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. "The wealth is being widely shared."
One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC's erosion of market power. "For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil," he recalls. "They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust."
Today OPEC's market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. "Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse." When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That's why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.
The other reason for America's abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques. "Horizontal drilling" allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet. Mr. Hamm was one of the pioneers of this method in the 1990s, and it has done for the oil industry what hydraulic fracturing has done for natural gas drilling in places like the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast. Both innovations have unlocked decades worth of new sources of domestic fossil fuels that previously couldn't be extracted at affordable cost.
Mr. Hamm's rags to riches success is the quintessential "only in America" story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma "the son of sharecroppers who never owned land." He didn't have money to go to college, so as a teenager he went to work in the oil fields and developed a passion. "I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling."
He became a wildcat driller and his success rate became legendary in the industry. "People started to say I have ESP," he remarks. "I was fortunate, I guess. Next year it will be 45 years in the business."
Mr. Hamm ranks 33rd on the Forbes wealth list for America, but given the massive amount of oil that he owns, much still in the ground, and the dizzying growth of Continental's output and profits (up 34% last year alone), his wealth could rise above $20 billion and he could soon be rubbing elbows with the likes of Warren Buffett.
His only beef these days is with Washington. Mr. Hamm was invited to the White House for a "giving summit" with wealthy Americans who have pledged to donate at least half their wealth to charity. (He's given tens of millions of dollars already to schools like Oklahoma State and for diabetes research.) "Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they were all there," he recalls.
When it was Mr. Hamm's turn to talk briefly with President Obama, "I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this."
The president's reaction? "He turned to me and said, 'Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.'" Mr. Hamm holds his head in his hands and says, "Even if you believed that, why would you want to stop oil and gas development? It was pretty disappointing."
Washington keeps "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: 'Why aren't you creating more jobs,'" he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. "These delays kill projects," he says. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is now tightening the screws on the oil industry, requiring companies like Continental to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules. "I could go to jail because a local operator misreported the production in the field," he says.
The White House proposal to raise $40 billion of taxes on oil and gas—by excluding those industries from credits that go to all domestic manufacturers—is also a major hindrance to exploration and drilling. "That just stops the drilling," Mr. Hamm believes. "I've seen these things come about before, like [Jimmy] Carter's windfall profits tax." He says America's rig count on active wells went from 4,500 to less than 55 in a matter of months. "That was a dumb idea. Thank God, Reagan got rid of that."
A few months ago the Obama Justice Department brought charges against Continental and six other oil companies in North Dakota for causing the death of 28 migratory birds, in violation of the Migratory Bird Act. Continental's crime was killing one bird "the size of a sparrow" in its oil pits. The charges carry criminal penalties of up to six months in jail. "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them," he explains. He says that "people in North Dakota are really outraged by these legal actions," which he views as "completely discriminatory" because the feds have rarely if ever prosecuted the Obama administration's beloved wind industry, which kills hundreds of thousands of birds each year.
Continental pleaded not guilty to the charges last week in federal court. For Mr. Hamm the whole incident is tantamount to harassment. "This shouldn't happen in America," he says. To him the case is further proof that Washington "is out to get us."
Mr. Hamm believes that if Mr. Obama truly wants more job creation, he should study North Dakota, the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 3.5%. He swears that number is overstated: "We can't find any unemployed people up there. The state has 18,000 unfilled jobs," Mr. Hamm insists. "And these are jobs that pay $60,000 to $80,000 a year." The economy is expanding so fast that North Dakota has a housing shortage. Thanks to the oil boom—Continental pays more than $50 million in state taxes a year—the state has a budget surplus and is considering ending income and property taxes.
It's hard to disagree with Mr. Hamm's assessment that Barack Obama has the energy story in America wrong. The government floods green energy—a niche market that supplies 2.5% of our energy needs—with billions of dollars of subsidies a year. "Wind isn't commercially feasible with natural gas prices below $6" per thousand cubic feet, notes Mr. Hamm. Right now its price is below $4. This may explain the administration's hostility to the fossil-fuel renaissance.
Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, "I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties." That's more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.
This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he's wrong by half, it's a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn't just about jobs and economic revival. It's also about repairing America's battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Bookworm...how many bills has the republican led congress passed in the last 9 months that help promote job growth??
Simple question...answer it.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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The biggest question is why hasn't the republican house pass a jobs bill of it's own???
The House has passed several, starting with Cut, Cap and balance.
Dingy Harry has blocked them all in the Senate.
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John Moosie
climber
Beautiful California
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Rox, I don't know what you are talking about. I just logged on to my account.
Maybe your bank shut off the electricity when it closed its doors on Friday. It is Idaho after all.
Just kidding man..
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Bank fees, those bastards! Collective fees from my two banks: (keep too accounts in case one freezes my account when I'm traveling, which they have done even when Ive notified them) GOne from free last year to $360 per year or more by the end of this year, and that's with closing a savings account that was going to be charged.
Hey Lois, so just what argument or facts did Netanyahu say that you were impressed with or what it just a "Cell level" thing that makes you want to support him despite that most of the world considers him a huge obstacle to peace (even in Israel lots of people believe this)
The guy has ZERO interest in a solution. He would never offer any remotely acceptable to the most peaceful, accommodating Palestinian. His whole plan is to continue squeezing them out with settlements and bad conditions and making excuses to attack more.
Peace
karl
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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I switched to AT+T , you know , another Dick Cheney conglomerate , because Altell was pulling out of this area...The reception went to hell with AT+T and i was suddenly being hounded by the AT+T bill collectors even though my accounts were payed in full...I told the operator that since switching to AT+T , my cell service has sucked and asked her why AT+T can continue to charge me full pop when half of my calls are delivered days later..She had no answer and apologized......A rep at the AT+T store said the company was going to install a new cell tower which never happened...Liars...! Another phone call from an AT+T rep notified me that if i pay my bill at the AT+T store , which is a block away , i will be charged $5 ...I laughed into the phone incredulously and asked the rep how they can charge a customer for paying their bill...? Welcome to the new America corporatocracy where the government holds you down while the Cheney's of the world pick your pockets under the guise of the free market economy...
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