“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Thomas Jefferson

He couldn’t help himself. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if all you have is a wrench, everything looks like a nut; if all you have is a politician, everything goes into the agenda.

He has ideas he wants carried out by appropriate legislation. Sometimes I think he forgets he is the head of the executive branch and it was his job to end corruption or failure to act according to law by his enforcers.

It takes a while to learn the job. Give him a couple more years and we will see how he matures and learns.

In the mean time, pray for him. If nothing else, it will help you.

I know Lincoln quoting it gives it greater weight, but he was quoting another source found in Matthew 12:25.

24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beel’zebub the prince of the devils.
25 And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:
26 and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?

It is interesting in the light of the concept that the founding fathers decided to divide up government into a two part legislature, which could accomplish nothing unless they agreed, and an executive which could override the legislature with a veto unless a supermajority overrode him and a judicial branch which couldn’t actually do anything but issue opinions as to the legality of the actions of the others or of accused persons in general.

Their idea was to divide government so it could not stand against the people. That’s why it functions so poorly. It was intended to function poorly so we sould not be enslaved by it.

“I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending,” Obama said in an interview with Politico.
WHO WILL HE BLAME NEXT.

Notice that is PUNITIVE damages. Compensatory damages weren’t disputed, just how much to punish Exxon for the actions of the sea captain.

“. . . if we still had the oil man and his Halliburton counterpart . . . ”

He wasn’t really an oil man although he did speak the lingo, and Halliburton is a good company doing quality work. I find it hard to imagine their cement failing so I wonder what actually did happen. Regardless, it’s hard to imagine either of them, Bush or Cheney, making the situation better or worse.

David just thinking

It took 20 years to sort through liability after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, and in the end, punitive damages were slashed by the courts to about $500 million from $2.5 billion. Many people who had lost their livelihoods in the spill died without ever seeing a check.
Get the rest of the facts on yahoo news

We needed to be prepared for a blowout like this and we weren’t. I’m not even sure who was supposed to be prepared for cleanup and containment in the first place. There’s a four cent per barrel tax on every barrel of petroleum used in this country to fund Coast Guard cleanup of oil spills. Was it supposed to be responsible for one like this? If so, why wasn’t it? If not, who was and did they know? Did this little detail fall between the cracks? “I thought YOU were supposed to be doing it!”

The idea that government will be the solution to all our problems is disproven by the example of how the government got so deeply in bed with the oil industry that they did not force them to be honest. Imagine passing an environmental impact statement which said an oil spill might harm walruses and sea otters. It must be true because there are none alive after the blowout. On the other hand, there weren’t any alive in the Gulf of Mexico before the blowout either. It doesn’t sound like anybody was reading what they were turning in or what was being turned in to them. Everybody dropped that particular ball.

Don’t let them buy the government off. Not the regulators, not the congressmen, not the senators, not the judges, not the President. But, of course, they will.

Everybody will find ways around all reforms–IF WE LET THEM.

The guardians can be corrupted because ultimately, WE ARE THE GUARDIANS. If we don’t insist on honesty and safety, we will not get it. If we say, “Sure he’s a crook, but he’s our crook,” we will have crooks running things and they will not be in our own best interests. If we say, “Sure, he’s not doing his job; but he’s been not doing it so long that he gets to retire in just five more years,” that means we will continue to use people who we know aren’t protecting us.

This reminds me of the financial meltdown recently. The government regulators often didn’t know as much as the ones they were supposed to regulate, we overwhelmed by the wealth of those people, hoped to get jobs with them after they got enough experience to know what they were doing.

That’s just two places where we know highly paid federal regulators were not doing what they were paid to do. Where all else aren’t they doing their jobs? Where all else aren’t they doing the jobs they are supposed to do to protect us? Will giving them more power give us better protection or simply more incompetents over us?

Nits:

“We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. ”

I’m not sure but I think part of what is considered consuming the world’s oil reserves lies in importing petroleum and refining it into things like kerosene, gasoline, asphalt, propane, butane, wax, other products which we then sell to other countries. Thus, it looks like we consumed the raw petroleum when we actually converted it into refined products.

Also, when folks talk about reserves, they generally say “proven reserves” which means known reserves of economically recoverable product. For example there are oil sands and oil shales which have enormous reserves but the only to get them would be to scrape off 3,000 feet of overburden, dig them up, run them through a kiln to cook out the reserves, catalytically convert them to lighter hydrocarbons. Those are actual reserves but not called proven reserves because they are basically useless.

And there’s the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know. There may be reserves we do not know about because nobody expected them to be there. This grows less and less likely as means of detecting oil and gas improve but still possible. Vast regions of the world have not been explored yet. I think I saw a few days ago where a survey of Afghanistan turned up over a trillion dollars in mineral wealth, things like copper for one but I think oil was another. Regardless, we actually don’t know what is there.

For years the only way Mexico knew where to drill for oil was to watch drilling rigs on the American side of the border. I ft hey struck oil, Pemex would drill on the Mexican side. They didn’t use any science or real exploration because that would cost money and the people who paid were not the ones who would benefit.

Russia is now a powerhouse because they are finally developing some of their petroleum reserves after decades of knowing they had them but having the same lackadaisical attitude as Mexico, or Mexico had the same lackadaisical attitude as the USSR. However you want to look at it.

“The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. ”

I don’t think we safely landed people on the moon, just that we successfully did so. I can’t imagine it ever being safe.

“and deserve a fear hearing in the months ahead.”
Should probably be written
“and deserve a FAIR hearing in the months ahead.”