For off-shore drilling to happen, three things have to happen.
1) The Executive Moratorium has to be lifted.
2) The Congressional Moratorium has to be lifted.
3) States have to allow exploration.
Archive for the ‘US House’ Category
As a general rule, when an elected official introduces legislation, they almost never call it something bad. If they could get away with it, I’m sure every bill would be called the “Happiness, Puppies and Children Act.” Of course, the devil is always in the thousands of pages of actionable legislation behind the frou-frou title.
Now, Democrats have gotten really good at using bill nomenclature to set up Heisman Votes. Sometimes, they even trick themselves. And here are three examples from recent history.
Rack this one up to media bias. Yes, Rehberg voted for Real ID. It’s all over the papers and in every news story about Baucus and Tester. Usually the article also mentions that Renberg changed his position on the law after the state unanimously passed legislation refusing to comply.
So I find myself wondering why, in every article I’ve read about Baucus and Tester opposing Real ID, there is absolutely no mention of how Baucus voted. It seems like in an article about their opposition to a law, it would be relevant to know how they originally voted when that law was made. And I figure the reporters know it’s relevant because they mention Rehberg’s support for the law even when the story isn’t about Rehberg at all. But Baucus’ press release probably didn’t have that information in it, and as busy as it gets, it was probably too much work to determine if he ever supported Real ID. After all, its not like anyone would try to use this as a political issue.
Fear not dear readers; I did the 2 minutes of research on Google. Turns out, that like 99 of his colleagues in the Senate, including the other Senator from Montana, Max Baucus voted for Real ID. Doesn’t that seem newsworthy to you?
In the same way that Conservatives fear the unchecked power of government, Liberals tend to hate the perceived unchecked power of the evil Corporation. For a Conservative, this vitriol toward a key byproduct of capitalism can be hard to pinpoint, but generally I think it’s the pursuit of profit that is the source of this mistrust. Profit is the cause and means for the rape of the environment, the exploitation of the working class and the failure of mankind to achieve their altruistic communal utopia. It’s simplistic but then so is the reflexive distrust of all things government from the right.
Sometimes the anti-corporate reflex sort of misses the big picture though. Liberals are set on suing the pants off major telecommunication companies for perceived violations of Constitutional Rights. They are so determined to give their trial lawyers a shot at evil multi-million corporate devils that they have allowed important intelligence modernizations expire putting all Americans at risk. Never mind that the Constitution restricts government action, not private. Never mind that the act of suing preemptively renders a guilty verdict by cost of defense, regardless of a court verdict. Never mind that the evil corporation is also the source of the payrolls and benefits of the very people the Liberals purport to defend.
What is ultimately baffling though is that the action the telecommunications companies are being raked over the coals for is precisely the sort of action that Liberals would like to encourage. It is action driven by motives other than profit. It is action driven by a deeper sense of community - of social consciousness. The telecoms didn’t stand to profit from helping the federal government spy on terrorists, but by doing so they did stand to make America safer.
The irony then is that the liberals are helping to create the single-minded profit-driven companies that they fear the most. If you want a company to abdicate social responsibility, the best way to accomplish that is to attack them when they are socially responsible.
House Democrats, folding to one of their most important and powerful special interest groups, have allowed our intelligence gathering laws to revert back to the way they were before September 11, 2001 - you know, when the colossal failure of these laws cost nearly 3000 Americans their lives.
Why? Part pressure from their lawyer buddies, part political miscalculation, part inept leadership. Whatever the reason, the fact is that you are less safe today than you were two weeks ago.
