RUSH: From the Wall Street Journal today, Dow Jones News Service: ‘Executives from oil and gas companies on Monday concluded an hour-long meeting with U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar without securing promises from the government to lift a deepwater-drilling moratorium imposed after a disastrous BP PLC oil spill. … ‘Numerous operators told Secretary Salazar that they were in the final stages of moving rigs, deepwater rigs out of the Gulf of Mexico and to West Africa and the Middle East,’ according to a person familiar with the matter.’ These are floating rigs. They can be transported. ”We were frankly disappointed at the lack of serious attention that was paid by the Department of the Interior on the horrible economic impact that the Department of Interior’s policies are having on the industry and on communities along the Gulf Coast.”
So offshore jobs, anybody? We’re sending them away, and this was predictable. We predicted this very thing. These oil companies are not gonna sit there and just take it in the shorts because Obama wants ’em to. It’s indeed a global economy, and they’re gonna go wherever they have to to work and get work — and that means Africa, perhaps Brazil, West Africa, the Middle East. So a judge overturns the moratorium, the interior secretary (with Obama’s blessing) says, ‘Screw it! We’re going to reword it so we can have the moratorium.’ They lied. They put signatures of eight experts to a phony document, a document saying that it’s wise to have a moratorium for six months ’til we figure out what happened here at the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Those experts never agreed to such a thing. They never agreed to it. The administration full-fledged lied and defrauded these experts, putting their names to that document. They signed something else. So, again, folks, we ask the question: Can this possibly be anything other than purposeful? Is this naivete, is this protection of the environment, is this really based on concern? Because they’re not stopping any shipping traffic, and you can look it up: More oil leaks in spills from tankers than it does from rigs and oil wells. Now, in truth — let me hit you right between the eyes here. In truth, Obama’s offshore drilling ban is simply a continuation of the ongoing use of bureaucracy and the permit process to stifle energy development. This administration is stifling, via the use of bureaucracy, the development of the energy we need to grow as a country and as an economy.
How many years has it been…? I’ll just ask you point-blank: How many years has it been since a refinery or nuclear plant has been built? It’s been at least 20 and maybe 30 for the refinery. It has been reported that no new coal mining permits have been issued since Obama took office. Now, coal, West Virginia. Robert Byrd, dead. What are they going to do in West Virginia? Because it’s a Democrat state, it’s a coal producing state. It’s their number one business, or economic activity. Obama said he wanted to ‘bankrupt’ the coal business. ‘Oh, if you want to start a new coal-fired plant you go right ahead, but it’s going to bankrupt you.’ So when the governor there either appoints himself to Byrd’s seat or appoints somebody else, are they going to have a Democrat that represents the people of West Virginia and the people that work in the coal business, or are they going to appoint a Democrat loyal to Obama?
Is West Virginia destined to become Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama? Are you folks standing in line for your whirlybird cars here today that are certain to be on the market soon with our new green job technology? No new coal mining permits granted since Obama took office. Why even bother passing cap and trade when the federal bureaucracy in the executive branch can achieve the same result without all the fuss and bother? You just shut it down. So, in addition to whatever damage the oil spill is causing, I’m going to tell you this: The energy policy of this regime is going to cost the people of the Gulf Coast far more than the spill is going to cost them. I know they’re red states. They’re Texas. They’re Mississippi. Louisiana is on the cusp. But who cares? They’re red states. It’s breathtaking, ladies and gentlemen. It’s breathtaking to watch this.
I know I’ve been right in predicting all this from the get-go, but it’s still sad, shocking, and disappointing to actually see it manifest itself. I never thought this would happen.
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RUSH: Alicia, Rio Rancho, New Mexico, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: I’m honored, Rush. As I told Mr. Snerdley, I’m a little nervous, so I’ll try and be very coherent. We were told this president was the smartest president since — ever.
RUSH: Ever, that’s what I was going to say, ever.
CALLER: Though we wouldn’t know because they never released his school transcripts. So he had to know the moratorium was gonna send the rigs away, and I’m a retired manager, I gotta tell you, from the phone company, I don’t know a first line manager who couldn’t have done a better job coordinating the cleanup and the containment of the oil on the Gulf.
RUSH: This is the question that keeps popping up, though.
CALLER: This guy’s gotta be really, really stupid —
RUSH: Well —
CALLER: — or he’s got an ulterior motive. And I don’t know what it is. That’s what I can’t figure out.
RUSH: That’s the dilemma, because is he that stupid, is he so stupid to realize that a moratorium would destroy the Gulf oil business because the rigs would simply go somewhere else or does he know exactly what he’s doing? Look, you have to side with the notion he knows exactly what he’s doing if you listen to what he has said. He has guaranteed to put the coal business out of business. He says we can’t rely on oil, we gotta go green. We have Rahm Emanuel saying it’s terrible to let a crisis go to waste. You’ve got a genuine ready-made crisis in this oil spill for a bunch of leftists who hate oil, who hate oil companies, who think oil is destroying the environment and the planet and everything else. Here’s a chance to shut it down. If gas prices go up a buck and a half you know what happens to Big Oil, they start getting tarred and feathered. I mean this is made to order and Obama’s been out there dutifully ripping into BP. ‘They’re gonna pay, and they’re gonna keep paying,’ and he shook ’em down for $20 billion. A slush fund —
CALLER: — ulterior motives to destroy the Gulf states, to destroy the country?
RUSH: I don’t think Obama looks at it as destroying it. I think he looks at it as fixing it. See, in Obama’s view the way he’s been educated, the way he was raised, the United States has been unfair, it’s been unfair because it’s been too big, it’s not fair that we’ve been such a superpower, it’s not fair that we have had such a robust standard of living. It’s not fair that we’ve had all of these technological and lifestyle enhancing improvements. It’s just not fair while the rest of the world is starving and still walking around in muck living in huts like his brother does over in Kenya. It just isn’t fair, and the reason the United States is all of these big things is because we’ve cheated and lied and stolen from the real owners of the world’s wealth, all over the world, and it’s his job to give it back, to redistribute, to cut this country down to size. So he and Geithner are out there saying, ‘Look, the days of the US being the economic engine of the world are over.’ What more do you need to know? We’ve never had a president who has presided over the decline of a country apparently happily so.
CALLER: And we can’t impeach him?
RUSH: Well, any president can be impeached if there’s an impeachable offense that’s taking place, is there a violation of the oath? I don’t even want to go there. We’re going to solve this at the ballot box, and we get started doing that in November. And the key to that being successful is just more and more people learning, figuring out hopefully on their own exactly the mistake that was made in November 2008.
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RUSH: Here’s Rick in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you today?
RUSH: Very good. Thanks much.
CALLER: Congratulations on your wedding.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: Yes, sir. I’m a manager of a company that works on the Marcellus Shale in southwestern Pennsylvania. It’s a natural gas shale. And for some reason one of our senators is working very hard and they’re trying to shut down the gas field. Nobody can understand why. There’s been —
RUSH: Wait. A United States Senator or state senator?
CALLER: State senator. Casey.
RUSH: Oh, it’s a US senator. Bob Casey is trying to shut down the oil and gas? Why? Why?
CALLER: The gas fields. We have no idea. This is potentially, from the studies have been done out here, there’s levels below the Marcellus. We may have more natural gas than the oil in the Middle East.
RUSH: Well, do you want to know why?
CALLER: Well, they’re trying to tax everything out here, and I don’t know if that’s a backdoor way of trying to bend the gas companies onto their will. I don’t know.
RUSH: Well, maybe. That could be part of it. You know, wait to bring it out ’til they can raise taxes on it, carbon tax, that sort of thing. Possible. But what political party is Bob Casey in? He may not know from day to day, but you might.
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: What political party is he in?
CALLER: I believe he’s in the Communist Party. (chuckles) The Democratic Party.
RUSH: Democrat Party, right. Okay. Democrat Party. You know as well as I do that the Democrat Party has painted a bull’s-eye on the conventional fossil fuel industry: Gas, oil, all the derivatives. They’ve painted a bull’s-eye on it. Their president wants to get rid of all that, put the coal business out of business. Their president wants to come up with ‘green technology.’ What their president wants to do is preside over the decline of the United States of America — and, you know, oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom. There’s no other way to look at it. That’s why the free flow of oil at market prices is crucial to the growth and expansion of not only our economy, but of our liberty, and we have elected a regime that looks at oil and gas and the whole fossil fuel industry as an enemy.
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RUSH: Okay, looked it up. I’ll have more details tomorrow, but it’s a Bob Casey and Chuck-U Schumer bill that was introduced back earlier this month, and it’s about ‘protecting groundwater from being contaminated by hydraulic fracturing.’ That’s the guise under which they are halting the gas and oil production in western Pennsylvania.