Tag: moratorium

Assigning blame for higher food prices.

Via Instapundit comes this story warning that restaurant food prices are about to sharply rise.  The challenge for the government?  Why, finding who to blame, of course.

After all: can’t blame it on short-sighted conversion of corn crops into ethanol; the government’s pushing for even more use of ethanol, despite the objections of the auto industry.  Can’t blame it on higher gas prices; the government doesn’t really want to explain why it’s put a moratorium on offshore drilling in (disproportionate) response to last year’s Gulf oil spill.  And there’s absolutely, positively, and completely no possible way that this administration is going to let even the hint of a suggestion of an implication of a reference to The Dread Word “Stagflation” escape any lips of any person associated with the executive branch.  If that happens, the President might as well put on a sweater, muck up a hostage rescue, and go get beat up by a rabbit now – just to get it over with.

No, the government’s most comfortable option is, as always, to blame somebody on the Right for all of this.  My guess?  Rush Limbaugh.  He hasn’t been the subject of a Two-Minute Hate recently, and this administration likes to cycle through their favorite targets of those, lest overuse of any one of them makes the whole thing stale.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Obama administration renews drilling ban. Of course it did.

Contra the Washington Post, the seven-year moratorium on new Atlantic, Pacific, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico oil drilling that will be announced today does not particularly mean that we’re going to allow new drilling in any of the other areas available to us, either*.  It merely means that these were the bans that the administration had to get on with right now before an annoyed Republican-controlled House – and a deeply frightened Democrat-controlled Senate – started asking pointed questions.  Well, one question, really: Why are we making suboptimal domestic policy decisions based on the belief structure of a very strange, and frankly not very pleasant, fringe religion?

Well, all right, we know the reason: it’s because the Greenies are always two short steps away from painting themselves with hallucinogenic moss and going out to firebomb a bulldozer for Mother Gaia.  It’d still be nice to see a little more secularism in this administration, and a good deal less fuzzy thinking.  But I shouldn’t complain: having gas prices go through the roof in 2012 will likely have a different, and much more satisfying, political result in 2012 than it did in 2008…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*The rest of the Gulf and the Arctic region.

Interior Secretary Salazar lies about drilling peer review.

I’m not affiliated with this administration: I don’t have to use the weasel term ‘misrepresented.’

Basically, what happened was that Salazar added language to a report on the Gulf oil spill, and that said language called for a drilling moratorium. That’s not the lie: the Interior Secretary is allowed to make his own recommendations, even when they’re dunderheaded recommendations. No, this is the lie:

Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”

Continue reading Interior Secretary Salazar lies about drilling peer review.