Free Republic

Obama's neglect of our nearest neighbors and biggest trade partners has created deteriorating relations, a sign of a president who's out of touch with reality. Problems are emerging that aren't being reported. Fortunately, the Canadian and Mexican press told the real story. Canada's National Post quoted former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson as saying the North American Free Trade Agreement and the three-nation alliance it has fostered since 1994 have been so neglected they're "on life support." Energy has become a searing rift between the U.S. and Canada and threatens to leave the U.S. without its top energy supplier. The Winnipeg...

President Obama supports job creation, economic growth and revenue generation – except when he doesn’t. Official announcements from his Labor Department reported that the nation’s February unemployment rate is still 8.3 percent. That’s a decent decline from previous months. But the reality is far worse. Most of that job growth was in business and professional services, and half was temporary. Millions of Americans are working part-time or multiple low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Overall, 23.5 million are out of work or underemployed. Factor all that in, and the real unemployment rate is 14.9%, according to University of Maryland...

Soaring gas prices pose a major electoral vulnerability to a President so damaged he refused to celebrate the two year anniversary of his marquee domestic accomplishment. That is why, for the past several weeks, President Obama and his administration have been in damage control mode. At stops around the country, he sought to deflect blame for the pain Americans are experiencing at the pump. President Obama’s basic defense goes something like this: presidents cannot control the price of gasoline, but I have increased domestic oil production and decreased our reliance on foreign oil, so really, when you think about...

President Obama came to the heart of Oklahoma oil country on Thursday to insist he's a fan of the industry and give his approval to the southern leg of the project.

As gasoline prices continue to rise, President Obama on Thursday pushed back on attacks from Republicans that he is blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline and is against drilling, arguing his administration has added enough new oil-and-gas pipelines to "encircle the Earth and then some." Obama highlighted his support for the southern leg of the controversial Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from Cushing, Okla., to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Appearing before a backdrop of oil pipelines in Cushing, Obama said he was making construction a priority through an executive order issued Thursday that instructs federal agencies to expedite...

President Barack Obama is in my home state of Oklahoma today, touting his tired talking points about energy in little Cushing, “the town that fossil fuel built.” For the record, most Oklahomans aren’t happy he’s here. The state administration will give him no official welcome and protesters have already gathered near the location of the president’s speech, which — predictably — was closed to the public. First, listen to this portion of the president’s energy address (h/t Greg Hengler).

TORONTO — Canadian proponents of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline applauded Barack Obama's directive on Thursday to expedite the approval process for the southern leg of the pipeline. They also urged the U.S. president to approve the northern leg. Approval of the southern part of the pipeline is not really the Obama administration's call because it does not cross borders. The northern portion of the pipeline needs administration approval because it would cross the Canadian border. The longer 1,700-mile (2,735-kilometer) pipeline became a political flashpoint late last year when congressional Republicans wrote a provision forcing Obama to make a decision, and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I've never seen anything like it, folks. I've never seen this kind of a mid-course correction. I don't even think I saw one like this from Bill Clinton. Suddenly the biggest believer in the Keystone pipeline (or half of it), the biggest believer in drilling for oil, the biggest believer in expanding domestic oil supplies happens to be Barack Obama! Who just two days ago (and every day prior to that) hated the very idea and was trying to dissuade anybody from believing that drilling for oil or pipelining oil would make any difference whatsoever in the...

AND NOW . . . amidst billowing clouds of fragrant, aromatic first- and second-hand premium cigar smoke. . . it is time for . . . that harmless, lovable little fuzz ball, the highly-trained broadcast specialist, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, from behind the golden EIB microphone, firmly ensconced in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, serving humanity simply by showing up, and he’s not retiring until every American agrees with him, do NOT doubt him, with shrieks of joy at the mere mention of his name...

“If you hear anybody on TV saying that somehow we are against drilling for oil, then you will know that they either don’t know what they are talking about or they are not telling you the truth,” Obama said, against the backdrop of oil production facilities outside Maljamar, N.M. “We are drilling all over the place,” Obama added, reading from a speech on his podium on a windy afternoon. “That’s the reason we have been able to reduce our dependence on foreign oil every year since I took office.” While Obama has repeated in recent days that there’s no “silver...

RIPLEY, Okla. — President Obama stood in a red-dirt field before acres of stacked pipeline pieces on Thursday to illustrate his support for expedited construction of the southern half of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. But his public declaration of support for the project has pleased neither the industry and its Republican supporters nor environmentalists. Environmentalists nationwide have rallied to oppose the entire Canada-to-Gulf Coast pipeline because its owner, TransCanada, wants to transport what environmental groups consider dirty oil from the tar sands of Alberta. The groups say such oil would hasten climate change, threaten spills and pollute air,...

As gasoline prices continue to rise, President Obama on Thursday pushed back on attacks from Republicans that he is blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline and is against drilling, arguing his administration has added enough new oil-and-gas pipelines to "encircle the Earth and then some." Obama highlighted his support for the southern leg of the controversial Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from Cushing, Okla., to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Appearing before a backdrop of oil pipelines in Cushing, Obama said he was making construction a priority through an executive order issued Thursday that instructs federal agencies to expedite...

A solid majority of Americans think the U.S. government should approve of building the Keystone XL pipeline, while 29% think it should not. Republicans are almost twice as likely as Democrats to want the government to approve the oil pipeline. About half of independents also approve. These data were collected as part of Gallup's annual Environment survey, conducted March 8-11, 2012. The Keystone XL oil pipeline is a politically divisive project, which President Obama and the Republicans in Congress have been battling over. The proposal from TransCanada Corporation for building a pipeline to carry crude oil from Canada down to...

Rush on Obama's new found love for building the Keystone XL pipeline. He rips into the mainstream media for repeating Obama's lies and blasts the president following his speech at the pipe plant in Cushing, OK today. (audio)

There are good reasons for Mr. Obama’s discomfort. First is the almost immediate hit to the president’s popularity when gasoline prices go up. Rightly or wrongly, Americans hold him accountable. In fact, the president is vulnerable on this topic. He has consistently portrayed fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas as energy products of the past while expressing an almost unimaginably naïve optimism about the potential of alternatives. His attachment to high-cost “green” energy has played well with environmentalists but for most of the country – the roughly 50% not concerned about global warming -- it is increasingly...

Guest post by Alec Rawls“President no longer worried about CO2!” That’s what the headlines should have read last week after Obama presented an elaborate argument that alternative energy is the only viable response to high energy prices without ever once mentioning CO2, global warming or climate change. Instead, he presented the need to lessen our reliance on oil purely as an economic imperative.Back when he thought that global warming was a winning concern Obama used to acknowledge that his anti-CO2 policies were going to cause high energy prices (forcing them to “necessarily skyrocket“). Now he is trying to use the...

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices....But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the...

TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from landlocked Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast, is a “no-brainer” that would create jobs and bolster the economy, former President George W. Bush said on Tuesday. The $7.6 billion Keystone XL line would generate private-sector employment and government revenue, he said at an American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers conference in San Diego. The U.S. government’s budget deficit is unsustainable and must be reduced by supporting industry, Bush said. “The clear goal ought to be how to get the private sector to grow,” said Bush, who spoke during a luncheon at...

A report released on Tuesday by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute concludes that the economic damage caused by potential spills from the Keystone XL pipeline could far outweigh the benefits of jobs created by the project. The institute, which advocates the creation of union jobs in renewable energy and analyzes sustainability issues, said that more than a million people work in agricultural or tourism jobs in the six states along Keystone XL’s route and that the economic costs could be considerable if a major spill occurred. The risks of an economically damaging accident are higher than those for conventional crude,...

The institute, which advocates the creation of union jobs in renewable energy and analyzes sustainability issues, said that more than a million people work in agricultural or tourism jobs in the six states along Keystone XL’s route and that the economic costs could be considerable if a major spill occurred. The risks of an economically damaging accident are higher than those for conventional crude, the report said, because pipelines carrying oil sands crude are more prone to spills, an argument long made by opponents of the Keystone XL project. The report cited a spill from an Enbridge Energy pipeline in...