BO, Can't Lower Prices By Drilling, He Lowered Prices by Drilling!

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/23/politics/obama-energy-speech/

A little stale BO from 2012 ... he was of course "deriding Republicans", he does at least do that well :

At the Republican debate in Arizona on Wednesday night, Gingrich introduced himself by saying he had "developed a program for American energy so no future president will ever bow to a Saudi king again and so every American can look forward to $2.50 a gallon gasoline." 

Without naming Gingrich, Obama appeared to target that remark Thursday, saying to cheers that "anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn't know what they're talking about -- or just isn't telling you the truth." 

"It's the easiest thing in the world to make phony election-year promises about lower gas prices," Obama said. "What's harder is to make a serious, sustained commitment to tackle a problem. And it won't be solved in one year, it won't be solved in one term, it may not be solved in one decade. But that's the kind of commitment we need right now."

The truth is never likely to get close enough to BO to bite him in the ass, but if it did, he sure wouldn't recognize it!  BO is the master at BOTH lying and "not knowing what he is talking about"!

But being loudly and arrogantly WRONG isn't enough for BO. No, he can BOTH call the other side names and then take CREDIT when what he called "not telling the truth" comes to pass!! Naturally the MSM is going to let him get away with it, and apparently the American electorate has a memory shorter than a late stage Alzheimer's patient! (from this link):

But virtually all of the increased oil and natural gas production has come from private and state lands, where Obama has no jurisdiction over approving drilling permits. Meanwhile, oil production on federal lands has floundered under Obama. From 2009 to 2013 oil production on federal lands fell by 11 percent and natural gas production fell by 28 percent.

He proudly held off the Keystone Pipeline and then cancelled it as well. BO has done all he could do to stop US and Canadian delivery of cheaper energy to Americans, but he shamelessly takes credit for it at the same time!

Our founders were right, we REALLY DO need an ADVERSARIAL MEDIA ... it is just too damned bad we don't have one when a D is in office! Just wait and see a completely insanely obnoxious completely adversarial media return if an R is ever elected president in BOistan!

Peeking Behind the Gas Price Curtain

Hometown gas stations struggle to compete against Costco; MN Dep - KTTC Rochester, Austin, Mason City News, Weather and Sports:

The simple story is that Costco dropped gas prices in Rochester to under $2 a week or so ago and now they are being investigated by the state of MN.

The simple explanation is like pretty much everything else in the modern area of N America that used to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" -- government. Nearly 40% of actual declared GDP, but with direct control and very substantial influence over much much more. 60%? 80%? Do you call it a "market" when you get investigated for dropping prices?

The article links off to the MN statutes on how low a price stations may charge -- the definition of "cost" is a little mini-study in government legaleze.  I'm not a government official, nor government lawyer -- nor do I get paid by various groups to make it sound like it is supposed to sound, but I'll give you my simple view of "what it REALLY says".

At this point, all the small service station owners, possibly oil companies, and perhaps even large service station conglomerates like Kwik Trip, Casey's, etc, want to keep the pump price relatively high -- most important,  the government does as well, primarily because it provides more "cover" for their fuel taxes ... now .47 in MN, and .513 in WI, the Feds are .184 of that. No doubt "environmental" groups are also happy to see fuel prices high -- to say nothing of Saudi Arabia, etc, so that is likely a secondary government interest here.

If you want to look at all this in more detail, here is a link -- it covers the strategic reserve, some history back to the '70s, how ethanol raises the price, how the US produces more oil than "most people think" (MUCH more now with fracking / ND on line).

Back in 2011, the oil companies were making record profits and they were getting about .07 a gallon of gas in profit. We heard a LOT about "big oil" and how "obscene" those profits were then ...  not so much now that they have the lowest profits in 10 years.

No doubt Bernie Sanders would find those profits to still be way too high -- he probably finds less than a percent interest to be just fine as well. He would like to put a few million more highly paid union government "workers" into even more massive bureaucracy insuring that everything was allocated "fairly" without any profit or loss motive at all. Allocate it all like the old USSR -- when everyone except Bernie and a million or so cronies and party apparatchiks has nothing, you are done!

As we continue to "progress" from freedom to tyranny, the biggest thing the "progressives" operate by is misdirection -- better known as lying. We see it in healthcare -- each new "improvement" drastically increases costs / bureaucracy as seen with gas prices. We see the same thing in college education.

Markets are messy. Without all the government involvement in gas sales, Walmart and Costco may well have cornered the market because cheap gas was a way to be CERTAIN that people were going to stop there. Possibly one or two of the convenience stores, cutting prices to the bone to bring in people for milk, eggs, pop, beer ... and making their money primarily on volume.

Or maybe one of the big gas companies would go nuts putting in fully automated small pay at the pump 24x7 stations -- who knows? Perhaps they could make a deal with an auto manufacturer or two in order to have some sort of an "automated bottom fill probe" -- drive in, park (or let something like the auto parallel park technology on some cars) position the vehicle, it reads an electronic code from your vehicle, fills it and charges you and you need never get out of the car. Possibly such a system could now be designed to check / air your tires, change your oil, wash the car, ???  In a market driven economy anything is possible because  innovation is a big winner, and complacency dies. In a command economy,  imagination and innovation is killed because nothing hates change like a massive government bureaucracy.

One by one, all the pieces of our economy are being "assimilated" by the "Borg" of "progressivism". There are a lot of "scare quotes" because we now live in a world where the echo chamber of the TP -- from cradle to grave, tells all what they are to think and hides ever more of reality behind scapegoats like "Big Oil", "Big Pharma", etc -- while behind it ALL, pulling the strings like that fake Wizard of Oz, we find the ever expanding government.

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North Dakota Arabia

The Weekend Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com:

Great article, just read it! If we can just get B0 and Democrat cronies out of DC, we are more than poised to have an economic burst bigger than the 80's + pay off the national debt.

Oh wait, that is an OPTIMISTIC assessment, and these days we are back into the Carter era gloom and woe.

Mr. Hamm's rags to riches success is the quintessential "only in America" story. He was the last of 13 kids, growing up in rural Oklahoma "the son of sharecroppers who never owned land." He didn't have money to go to college, so as a teenager he went to work in the oil fields and developed a passion. "I always wanted to find oil. It was always an irresistible calling."

He now is the 33rd richest guy in America.

Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, "I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties." That's more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

Oh wait, it might be only half that ... this guy is an optimist, and this is the age of fools -- we invest $500 million in bankrupt "green energy" companies, and stick it to guys like Hamm. 

Now why is it again that US corporations are sitting with trillions of dollars on the sideline talking about "uncertainty"??? 

Washington keeps "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks and then turns around and asks: 'Why aren't you creating more jobs,'" he says. He roils at the Interior Department delays of months and sometimes years to get permits for drilling. "These delays kill projects," he says. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission is now tightening the screws on the oil industry, requiring companies like Continental to report their production and federal royalties on thousands of individual leases under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules. "I could go to jail because a local operator misreported the production in the field," he says.

It is so reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged"

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