Ranger from the North

She seems to be the real deal. Check out Mayor Love's website, love4utah.com.

Hugh Hewitt:

Bakken. Marcellus. Utica. These three short words represent not just the country's enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, but also one of the biggest divide between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the likely opponents in November's presidential contest.

Obama and his team at the Environmental Protection Agency and his allies in the United States Senate have done all that could be done to slow down the exploration and development of the vast and mostly untapped ocean of energy beneath the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota and Montana.

Like the president's permitorium in the Gulf and his veto of the Keystone XL pipeline, this is the anti-energy administration, the Solyndra gang, the "sons of Gore" club.

Despite the widespread and growing repudiation of the alarmism of the global warming fanatics and the revelation of the anti-science agenda that drove the manipulation of the warming enthusiasts' pubic pronouncements and private manipulations, still the anti-carbon bias of Team Obama is deeply embedded throughout the federal government.

Despite the job growth that is waiting to explode upon full-fledged endorsement of and backing for vigorous production wherever oil and gas is found, still the president obstructs.

Want to get a glimpse of what the country's energy boom could bring? Google "Shell ethane cracker plant" and review the competition among Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia for the location of the $2 billion facility.

This will be just the first of such facilities and the jobs that will go into the construction and operation of such a plant are a desperately needed boost for a region that is just now beginning to feel the effects of the country's and the world's deep need for energy.

Need more evidence of the potential of the natural resources of the country to power the second American century? Try researching French oil and gas pipeline company Vallourec, which has made a huge investment in a steel pipe factory in Youngstown, Ohio, with another on the way. That's what happens when the world finds energy: It goes to where the energy is and develops it, employing the people in the region and those who want to move there.

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple gave the GOP weekly radio address Saturday, and in it he stated bluntly that the Obama administration is "killing energy development" in the country.

Dalrymple was talking specifically about the president's war against the Keystone XL pipeline but the point is true across the country, from the new deposits in the old Rust Belt, south to the Gulf Coast and north to the Canadian border.

The Keystone XL pipeline "would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast, which would not only benefit North Dakota but the rest of the country," Dalrymple argued, adding "it's the common sense thing to do."

Commons sense has never been the long suit of the anti-carbon environmentalist absolutists, many of whom now occupy key positions in the Obama administration, including in the Oval Office. It is a theology of sorts: that new carbon-based energy development simply delays the dawn of the Solyndra-led golden age of green energy.

That theology is holding back the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs directly connected to the production of energy, and millions more that will flow from the reinvigorated economies adjacent to the deposits.

Governor Romney would do well to employ those three words -- Bakken, Marcellus and Utica -- in every speech and not just in the key swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, but everywhere in the country as he explains how energy equals not just explosive job growth but energy independence.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Ethnic politics have always been a facet of American politics. But recently the frightened Obama reelection campaign seems to be going to unusual lengths to appeal overtly to voters by virtue of Obama’s race — a sort of retrograde tribalism that Obama in 2004 promised that we would transcend.

What are we to make of the coach of the Chicago Bears, Lovie Smith, announcing on a campaign video, “I have the president’s back and it’s left up to us, as African Americans, to show that we have his back. Also join African Americans for President Obama today.” Does Coach Smith mean that “as African Americans” one has a duty to support the president by virtue of his race rather than his politics alone, or his politics as they relate to the welfare of African Americans? Are those African Americans who oppose Obama, then, doing so “not as African Americans”? Are whites and Hispanics who support Obama doing so because he is also half-white or as “not African Americans”?

And is the coach of the Chicago Bears now starting a precedent that the coaches of all NFL teams shall endorse particular political candidates (e.g., “I have Senator X’s back and it’s left up to us, as (fill in the blanks: white, Latino, Asian) — Americans, to show that we have his back.”), in hopes that their own races and team loyalties will sway voters? If so, Lovie Smith should read Procopius on the Nika riots and the volatile intersection between sport, faction, and politics.

These sorts of Byzantine blue vs. green tribal loyalties become creepy when our president is encouraging well known Americans to state them so overtly. And, of course, it is only a matter of time now when some will, in counter fashion, publicly state that they are voting against Obama as a matter of racial politics in the way that others are voting for him on that very basis — or perhaps because they also don’t like the Chicago Bears.

Again, the Obama-Smith strategy is a suicidal path for any multiracial society that has hopes of transcending tribalism.

Permian Basin of West Texas seeing oil boom:

The Permian Basin of West Texas is experiencing an oil boom, leading some of the region’s top oilmen to predict that Texas oil production will double within five to seven years.

Oil drillers over the last eight years have found that the dense oil rock of the basin surrounding Midland and Odessa responds well to hydraulic fracturing, releasing lush yields. Total oil production last year in Texas averaged more than 1 million barrels per day for the first time since 2001.

“Right in the basin, we could get up to 2 million barrels a day,” Jim Henry of Midland-based Henry Resources told The Dallas Morning News for an article in its Sunday’s edition.

“I’ve been totally surprised by the amount of oil we’re finding out in the shale zones,” Scott Sheffield, chairman and chief executive of Irving-based Pioneer Natural Resources Co., told the newspaper.

“We have 30 billion barrels of new oil discoveries,” said Tim Leach, chairman and CEO of Midland-based Concho Resources. “It can be hard to get your mind around that.

Well, we can't have that! Get to work, Dems:

Drillers also worry about the prospect of tax increases and limits placed on land use by the presence of such endangered species as the dunes sagebrush lizard.

Er, maybe not.

I know this is several months old, but I just heard about it while listening to an equally old podcast.

Yesterday, a very liberal friend of mine who works as a climate scientist posted the following on Facebook:

Hey, Nebraska friends!! The Keystone XL Oil Pipeline isn't just very bad for mitigation of future climate change, it's also a huge threat to the Ogallala aquifer. Don't let Big Oil poop all over your beautiful state.

Putting aside the "huge threat" nonsense, I want to focus on the part about the Keystone XL Pipeline having a negative impact on climate change mitigation. Does she believe that if Keystone isn't built, the Canadians will leave the oil in the ground? Obviously that's not going to happen (though maybe it's not so obvious to many liberals). In fact, it has been widely reported that without Keystone, the Canadians may build a pipeline to their west coast, load the oil on supertankers, and ship it to China or other markets. I assume the Chinese, or any other importer, would actually use the oil. Does this not contribute to climate change? Or, is it that only oil that is consumed in the US, or the West, contributes to climate change?

I suspect for a significant number of radical environmentalists, none of this really matters. If something harms the American economy, they will be all for it.

Michael Walsh:

In an administration filled with them, Holder is an especially unlovely character, a second-rate intellect wrapped inside a third-rate temperament. Whiny, petulant, accusatory, obfuscatory, unhelpful, and deceitful, he never convincingly defends himself but instead reflexively accuses his critics of racism – truly, the last refuge of a liberal scoundrel – and never should have been brought back to the Justice Department after his disgraceful service in the Clinton administration regarding the Marc Rich pardon.

In 2012, let us rededicate ourselves to...math. Here's an example of what I'm talking about from a speech delivered by Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor back in July 2011:

Another myth I’d like to address is the idea that our current budget crisis is the result of two wars and a tax cut. Let’s consider that claim. The total cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, over the entire last decade, is $1.3 trillion. Again, that’s over the last decade. This year alone the deficit is expected to be $1.4 trillion dollars. War costs represent only 4 percent of total outlays over the last ten years. The total amount of money spent since the president took office is $8.5 trillion dollars. By the end of his first three years in office we will have added $5 trillion to our gross federal debt. We are borrowing almost half of what we’re spending every single day. In the last two years, non-defense discretionary spending has soared 24 percent. The stimulus package alone—enacted into law in a single day in 2009—cost more than the entire war in Iraq. Annual spending when President Bush took office was less than $2 trillion. Today, it’s almost $4 trillion. It will be almost $6 trillion by the end of the decade.

Via Power Line.

John Hinderaker:

The whole essence of their movement is that some people have money, and they would like to steal it.

Yuval Levin:

Just about every conservative critic of Obamacare pointed to the irrational design of the CLASS Act before the legislation’s enactment. In fact, the administration’s own CMS actuary said it would never work. He was ignored by his employers not because they disagreed with him, but because they needed to pretend their legislation would reduce the deficit. The CBO’s scoring methodology could be manipulated to accept a lot of implausible assumptions, but even with those the legislation needed help, and by designing the CLASS Act to start collecting premiums five years before it would start paying benefits (and counting those premiums as deficit reduction even though they would eventually need to be paid out in benefits) they were able to make the program seem to be in the black by $70 billion in its first ten years, which accounted for about half of the overall “deficit reduction” the Democrats claimed.

Of course, administration officials can’t acknowledge that they always knew the program’s finances could never work, so rather than admit to cynicism they are pleading incompetence. And who knows, maybe they really are that incompetent. Having assured Congress for over a year that the program could be made to work, HHS Secretary Sebelius said today that “Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.” In essence: We tried our best, but the statute makes no sense.

Get used to that excuse. This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult. These outcomes are nearly as predictable as the fiscal collapse of the CLASS Act (and have been predicted by the same people who saw that the CLASS Act would never work, including the CMS actuary). But in the case of the CLASS Act, the Secretary of HHS was required to certify in advance that her actuaries believed it could be sustained, and at the end of the day there was no way around the fact that it couldn’t. The rest of the law has no such requirements, so the “we tried our best” excuse will come only after disaster strikes.

But none of this has to happen. It seems we will avert the fiscal disaster of the CLASS Act. Now let’s find a way to avert the even greater disaster of the rest of Obamacare by repealing the law and enacting in its place a set of market-based reforms of Medicare, Medicaid, and a private insurance sector badly distorted by decades of ill-conceived federal policies. American voters will have one chance, next November, to correct the terrible mistake made by their leaders last year before it fully takes effect. Let’s hope we do.