Quote of the Day (March 13, 2011)

Obama's Long Nose On Energy
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John Hinderaker at Power Line:

"With respect to energy, Barack Obama is a fraud. In reality, he is a tool of the environmentalist, anti-growth, anti-wealth Left. But he cannot go before the American people and try to defend policies that are deliberately designed to make us all poorer, so he has to pose as a sort of Sarah Palin in drag. All the while, he is doing everything he can to prevent America from developing its own energy resources, employing many thousands of people in high-paying jobs, boosting our economy, and ending our reliance on the Saudis. If the Obama administration were not a disaster on so many fronts, its energy policies alone would dictate that it be replaced in November 2012."

- JP

Hinderaker: Think Progress? Think Ignorance

This was the Murkowski administration, so the reference to Sarah Palin is gratuitous
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In our post yesterday about the battle between the establishment and the grassroots for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, we linked to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by businessman Charles Koch. After his WSJ opinion piece was published, Mr. Koch and his brother were immediately attacked by hard left wing website Think Progress in an article fabricated by using little more than lies and distortions. The author of the TP hit piece used the opportunity to take a gratuitous shot at Gov. Palin. Though we don't always agree with John Hinderaker, his debunking of the TP smear job is very well done and deserves credit. Here's the excerpt:

-- Relying on an Alaskan blogger, Fang claims that "a Koch subsidiary in Fairbanks asked Gov. Sarah Palin's administration to use taxpayer money to bail out one of their failing refinery [sic]." This one is particularly revealing. One of the problems with a web site like Think Progress is that the kids who write for it are ignorant with respect to both business and law. They lack the experience (and likely also the intelligence) to understand the matters they try to write about. This is a case in point. The Alaskan blogger had no idea what he was talking about; Fang, apparently, even less.

What actually happened was that a Koch subsidiary, Flint Hills, entered into a contract with the State of Alaska whereby it bought crude oil from the state and refined it. The price of the crude oil depended in part on the pipeline tariff charged to ship it. If the tariff went up, the price of the crude went down, and vice versa. A tariff proceeding was commenced that, if successful, would have had the effect of significantly increasing the price that the Koch company would pay to the state per barrel of crude:

The pipeline tariff proceeding, brought by the state of Alaska and pipeline shipper Anadarko Petroleum Corp., was initiated after an agreement was reached on a royalty oil contract between the state and Flint Hills, Cook said. At the time the contract [was] accepted, neither the company nor the state considered a possible change in the tariff, Cook said. "It is a circumstance Flint Hills Resources could not have contemplated at the time the contract was signed," Flint Hills executive vice president Anthony Sementelli said in a Feb. 24 letter to the state Department of Natural Resources. ...

The tariff change could result in Flint Hills paying the state as much as $100 million in additional royalty oil costs, a state official said on background.

This was highly problematic for Flint Hills, in part because the company potentially could go for years without knowing the ultimate price of the crude oil it was buying. So Flint Hills approached the state with a proposal to lock in a fixed price, independent of the tariff proceeding.

There is more on what happened here:

The pipeline tariff used in the calculation is the current interstate tariff filed by TAPS owner companies with FERC.

That tariff is being challenged, however, and if the FERC orders the tariff lowered to a level the Regulatory Commission of Alaska has set for intrastate shipments on TAPS, Flint Hills would have to pay more for its royalty oil, Cook said.

The adjustment could potentially raise crude oil costs for the refinery by $50 million a year, but the real problem is the retroactivity of the potential charge to the start of 2005. FERC has scheduled hearings on the appeal in early 2007, and a decision is possible soon after, but there is no certainty to that, he said.

If the decision is made to order a lower tariff, the additional payments to the state would be retroactive to the beginning of 2005. The TAPS tariff is scheduled to be renegotiated in 2009, so the potential liability could cover four to five years, or $200 million to $250 million, Cook said. ...

Flint Hills has been seeking a revision of its royalty oil contract with the state to remove the potential retroactivity of the charge, but has been unsuccessful so far.

Ultimately, the State of Alaska--this was the Murkowski administration, so Think Progress's reference to Sarah Palin is gratuitous--declined to agree on a fixed price for its crude oil, and the eventual result was that Flint Hills lost a great deal of money. At no time was there any talk of a "bailout" or a "special deal." Lee Fang and his fellow goofballs at Think Progress don't understand any of this. They have no idea what TAPS and FERC are, or how they work. They know nothing about contracts, or the price of crude oil, or how refineries and pipelines operate. To be frank, what they write on such topics is childish, and is driven entirely by prejudice.

[More]

So which Alaska blogger did Think Progress get its bad information from? None other than obsessive Palin-hater Andrew Halcro, who still can't seem to manage to get over his crushing humiliation in the 2006 election for Governor of Alaska.

h/t: Steven Hayward

- JP

Quote of the Day (January 20, 2011)

"Why now? Hinderaker never addresses that question"
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William A. Jacobson at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion:

"Why now? Of all the moments to let loose on Palin, why on the cusp of the media assault over the Tucson shooting, which was not only a media attack on Palin but also on the entire conservative movement? Remember, while Palin was the focus of media attention because of the phony supposed connection of her electoral map to the shooting, there was a broader media attack on 'right-wing vitriol,' conservative talk show hosts, and other Republican politicians such as Michele Bachmann. Why at such a critical moment in time would one of the most widely read conservative blogs run a headline declaring the candidacy of Palin over? Hinderaker never addresses that question, which I believe is what upsets people the most. There is no need for uniformity of opinion, but there also is no need for gratuitous piling on in a manner which empowers those who willingly smear leading Republican figures."

- JP

John Hinderaker Pwns The Babbling Brooks

In the liberal mind, a "conservative" is a liberal who espouses liberal ideas 90 percent of the time and moderate ideas ten percent of the time (anything less than 90 percent, and that person is dubbed a "right-winger"). New York Times columnist David Brooks fits that definition nicely, which is why he is the NYT's token "conservative" columnist.

The liberal alphabet television networks like to feature Brooks on their Sunday morning talk shows because he can be counted on to slam most anything that real conservatives say and do. Yesterday on the National Barack Channel's "Meet The Press" program, host David Gregory used Brooks to paint Sarah Palin and opposition in general to the president's plan to establish socialized medicine in the United States as "unreasonable":

MR. GREGORY: David, Sarah, Sarah Palin on Facebook, to the point of the opposition, this is what she writes: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's `death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide...whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." There is the rhetoric; there's also the question of what's true and what's false in what people are arguing about this notion of a death panel.

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Again, that's crazy. If--the, the, the crazies are attacking the plan because it'll cut off granny, and that--that's simply not true. That simply is not going to happen. The real reason for public skepticism is that Obama very eloquently and very truthfully said, "We've got to bring down healthcare costs."

Power Line's John Hinderaker, an attorney who has been writing on public policy issues for fifteen years, knocks down Brook's argument and validates Palin's:

Brooks is a conventionally "smart" guy who often seems like an idiot.

How, exactly, does he think that any government insurance plan is going to "bring down healthcare costs?" By the natural efficiency that results every time the federal government takes responsibility for something? Um, no. By rationing health care. And rationing means, precisely, "cutting off granny" and not "wasting" money on babies with Down syndrome.

It's possible to disagree with conservatives' critiques of Obamacare, although those critiques are generally, I think, on target. What is not possible is to casually characterize those critiques as "insane" and "crazy" and still call yourself a conservative.

Meanwhile, the Obamunist media calls any gathering of citizens who represent the majority of Americans opposed to ObamaCare an "angry mob" as union thugs beat up anyone who dares to publicly dissent. Welcome to the Democrat Party's Stalinist Amerika.

Update: This video from Naked Emperor News shows how Obama repeatedly lied about how open and transparent his health care reform process would be:



h/t: HotAirPundit

- JP