Bipartisanship: Candidates Lied to State Residents about their Positions

How You Know McCain's Offshore Drilling Reversal Is a Pander

It might seem obvious that McCain's new-found support for offshore drilling is a pander: after all, the federal government itself says that if you were to drill all over the continental United States, you'd find enough oil to last America just two and a half years, meaning we're not talking about a long-term solution. Moreover, offshore drilling will cause only a marginal impact on prices, and even that tiny impact won't be felt for another seven to 10 years, according to the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group that points out that production cannot start right away.

But maybe McCain didn't check the numbers. Is there any other way you can tell that offshore drilling is actually pointless, and serves only as a base election-season pitch to voters angry about high gas prices? There is. There are no ships.

As President Bush calls for repealing a ban on drilling off most of the coast of the United States, a shortage of ships used for deep-water offshore drilling promises to impede any rapid turnaround in oil exploration and supply.

...the world's existing drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.
Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of whom are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million a vessel to about half a billion dollars.

“The crunch on rigs is everywhere,” said Alberto Guimaraes, a senior executive at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but has been unable to get at it.
Even if we did lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, we wouldn't have the equipment needed to actually take advantage. If McCain knows this and is supporting offshore drilling anyway, he's pandering. If he doesn't know this, he needs to go back to public policy school.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/06/8755_how_you_know_mc.html

(I hope I got the style correct. I will be editing my initial post several times just to make sure.)

 

Re: McCain Lied to Floridians about Opposition to Offshore Drilling

That's hilarious. I don't have a lot of faith in the public sometimes, but something tells me they're going to reject this BS.

An even bigger fraud than McCain, though, is Charlie Crist. He mentioned something about protecting the coast in his gubernatorial inaugural address. But, hey, never mind. He's on board now.

 

Re: McCain Lied to Floridians about Opposition to Offshore Drilling

June 19, 2008
Obama Lied to Ohioans About NAFTA
Rick Moran

This is pretty shameless - even for a politician who claims to practice a "new kind" of politics.

During the Ohio primary against Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama skewered her for her support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), calling her out on what many Ohio workers thought was the reason they lost their jobs.

Obama promised that if he were president he never would have signed it in the first place and that if he became president, he would try to renegotiate the terms with Canada and Mexico.

You may recall that his economic advisor told the Candadians that Obama really wasn't serious about this, that it was just campaign rhetoric.

Well, it turns out that the advisor - Austen Goolsbee - was absolutely right:

CNN Money:


The general campaign is on, independent voters up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric - at least when it comes to free trade.

In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee suggests he doesn't want to unilaterally blow up NAFTA after all.

"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

What Obama says now is that he believes in "opening up a dialogue" with trading partners Canada and Mexico "and figuring to how we can make this work for all people."

The rank cynicism of this move staggers the imagination. Basically, what Obama is saying is that he doesn't have a very level head and that sometimes he lets hyperbole take over when things get tough. The candidate is hinting at his dishonesty on the matter and brushing it off as "overheated" rhetoric.

This is change we can lie about http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/06/obama_lied_to_ohioans_about_na.html

 

Re: McCain Lied to Floridians about Opposition to Offshore Drilling

 

Well now we have a name to go with the photo, and vice versa. Well done.