RUSH: ‘A federal appeals court….’ Rare good news here, folks. ‘A federal appeals court has rejected the regime’s effort to keep a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium in place. A three-judge
panel of the fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled soon after a Thursday afternoon hearing in a lawsuit filed by companies that opposed the drilling ban. The interior department [of the regime] said the moratorium was necessary while it studied deepwater drilling risks in the wake of the BP oil spill,’ putting who knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of people out of work, and the regime is out there saying they’re pro-business. So the regime had its head handed to ’em twice now. A federal judge and an appellate court has rejected Obama’s bid to keep his drilling moratorium. Will this stop Obama? That’s the question, and I’m being quite serious.
This is a regime and an administration that has demonstrated countless times its cavalier attitude toward law and the Constitution, and we’ll just see what the regime tries to do in response to this. The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on this entitled, ‘The White House Gets Drilled — How ideologically stacked is President Obama’s offshore drilling commission? So much that even many of his fellow Democrats can’t support it. Five Democrats on the Senate Energy Committee last week delivered an embarrassing rebuke to the White House, voting with Republicans to have Congress set up an ‘independent’ commission to investigate the BP disaster, bypassing the President’s appointees. Offered by Wyoming Republican John Barrasso to broader oil-spill legislation, the amendment that passed the committee on an 15-8 vote charges the Democratic and Republican leaderships with naming a 10-person commission.
‘It emphasizes that appointees should have ‘technical expertise in offshore oil exploration, health and safety, and environmental protection.’ Mr. Obama gets to name only the chairman.’ Now listen to this: ‘By contrast, the President’s seven-member commission contains not a single expert on drilling or petroleum engineering and is instead loaded with such anti-oil and antidrilling activists as Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke and former Florida Senator Bob Graham.’ It’s like putting somebody from the Sierra Club with nothing more than a liberal activist group, same thing with the Natural Resources Defense Council! It’s no different than a left-wing version… They’re global warming hoaxers. I don’t know how to describe them. These are the people that wanted to ban your SUVs. They’re like the Sierra Club, and these are the people Obama put on his commission. They don’t have one thing good to say about oil or drilling, and they don’t know anything about it.
”I would suggest to my Democratic friends that if the shoe were on the other foot, and President Bush was the President and he had submitted a list of names like this to us and everyone was related to the defense of oil companies, we would say this is not fair,’ said Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. ‘And I’m saying to my colleagues this is not fair.’ She was joined by Democrats Tim Johnson (South Dakota), Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Mark Udall (Colorado),’ all who said there’s no way we’re going to have people like this from the Natural Resources Defense Council on a commission to investigate drilling in the Gulf. It would be like putting Colonel Sanders on a commission to save the lives of chickens!
The Democrats are even opposing Obama on this. Obama is out there right now talking about the economy. (summarizing) ‘The economy is growing. Oh, yeah! And we care about big business. We want big business. We want private sector business to work.’ If you have to go out and say this, there might be some question about it. Here’s a quote from the Wall Street Journal piece: ‘Having had his drilling moratorium declared illegal by a federal judge and now his drilling commission rebuked by Democrats, Mr. Obama might want to liberate himself from Carol Browner and other antidrilling White House advisers before they cause him greater political damage.’ Carol Browner is at the EPA, also in the Clinton-Gore administration — and she is a full-fledged total wacko leftist environmentalist nutcase. And here’s where this breaks down. I love the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot and the people over there on the editorial board.
But once again, here: ‘Obama might want to liberate himself from Carol Browner’? Carol Browner is Obama. Obama’s not sitting there minding his own business shooting hoops, trading spies and letting underlings decide who’s going to be in his commission. Barack Obama is as anti-oil company as Carol Browner is. Barack Obama is as anti-drilling as Carol Browner is. People are going to have to understand: Carol Browner and people like her did not sneak by anybody into this administration. They were sought out, they were summoned because they are rubber stamps for Obama. So once again, Obama is portrayed as an innocent bystander. He’s trying to do what’s right but, ah, got some bad advice out there. Some wacko leftists ended up on his commission. That may be the way they want to position it — poor old Bam getting sabotaged by his own team — but it’s Obama who’s sabotaging himself.
He is who he is. That’s the whole point of all this. Obama does not like private sector businesses. It’s obvious. Obama has a problem with helping people find work in the private sector. It’s obvious. I reject the notion he’s sitting around minding his own business and these wacko leftists are somehow sneaking by and getting positions of influence in his administration.