Of course Obama will do it. He just blew a trillion dollars and is going to need another budget bailout from China because his Administration is "too big to fail".

We need their money for deficit spending. So Obama hands them our oil so they can sell it back to us at a profit. This is a sign of an utterly reckless and dysfunctional government.

I thought the world needed to get itself off oil…and we are going to lead the way?

Remember when you were 8 years old and your parents told you to get a switch from that tree so they could beat your ass with it?

Well with Dear leader at the wheel. Obama is more than happly to get the biggest switch he can find so that we can be blackened and blued permanently.

I don't think Obama will do it. It would be political suicide. Even the bailouts, as unpopular as they are, had a small but vocal group of Americans on television telling people it was the right thing to do. There is no advocacy group for this decision other than China.

Posted by President_Friedman

2009-11-05 10:32:37

Some would argue that the bailouts were political suicide and especially the 2nd stimulus which to date has done nothing to "stimulate" anything but the size of government.

I don't think Obama cares about a 2nd term. He is trying to change the course of this country and is willing to sacrifice himself politically to do it. He knows that once the Eagle of big government can get it's talons on enough of our freedoms…it will be too late to ever reverse course. He knows exactly what he is doing and since he is one of the "Elite", he will not have to worry about the boot on your neck crushing government that will make the rest of us miserable forever.

Posted by Scorched_Earth
2009-11-05 10:46:17

Yep. The Dems are going for broke because they know if they can get Obamacare and Cap and Tax through it’s game over for freedom in America.

Obama will sell anything and everything he can to China if they continue to bankroll his agenda until the centerpiece legislation can be passed. We ought to start calling him Viceroy Obama at the rate he’s selling out our sovereignty.

I agree with PF here – I don’t think this will turn out well for Mr. Obama should he grant the leases. He’s got way too much to lose from interests here at home. And he has to be painfully aware of what he has to lose.

There’s the employment angle. If American companies could lease and develop those resources, they’d likely employ mostly Americans, thus actually “saving or creating jobs”. Which we all agree is an important thing for our recovery.

There’s the national security angle. Demonstrably putting ourselves deeper into the well of dependency on foreign oil interests isn’t an action that he can spin as a net benefit. Also, providing the Chinese with an excuse to drag a few naval assets over into the Gulf to babysit their new holdings isn’t what I’d call a national security win.

There’s the commerce angle. If the resources are going to be developed, the oil and gas extracted and used, thus allegedly adding to the faux climate crisis, then why not at the very least keep the profits earned here in the US, instead of letting them go to another nation? Why not feed our economy, not China’s?

There the environmental angle. If Mr. Obama is so committed to green this that and the other thing, then why is he permitting the oil and gas to be extracted in the first place? Isn’t that counter to his claims that we have to take immediate action on climate of face impending doom? And who’s going to police the Chinese regarding spills, leakage and environmental damage? Their record on the environment is pretty poor, as evidenced by the smog and pollution in China.

Lastly, there’s the common sense political angle. Leasing these resources to the Chinese would be easily interpreted by lots of Americans as another example of his lack of national pride and his lack of respect for the American people. This isn’t what a president with falling ratings should be doing, and he knows that.

Posted by martinhale
2009-11-05 13:08:20

This could be Omdrama’s Dubai port’s deal.

Posted by martinhale
2009-11-05 13:08:20

What would make you think Obama’s actions are governed by American interests and common sense?

He needs the Chinese treasury and will let them drill our oil and flood the country with toxic products to get the cash. He also knows 50% of the country would slavishly applaud in wonder and awe if he beheaded a puppy live on TV everyday. Do you think he’s going to listen to “reasonable” and “pro-American” ideas like yours?

Mike – I don’t know if he’ll approve these leases or not. I think I understand all the good reasons to approve them and all the good reasons not to approve them. But what I’m saying is that if he does, he’s going to pay a big price for making that decision. The way things are shaping up, I’m beginning to think that it can’t be that long before the political class (Note to all you haters of conservatives out there – I specifically chose the phrase “political class” because in my mind, the Demicans are just as bad as the Republicrats) gins up some rationale for scuttling the electoral process altogether and finally achieves the pseudo-royalty many of them have erotic dreams about – true oligarchy.

Martin,

I don’t think that Mike has a problem with the leases except for the fact that Obama is willing to hand them to Chinese oil companies instead of American ones. I, for one, think that allowing drilling in the OCS is a wonderful thing that will create jobs while helping to stave the price of oil (Where gas prices are creeping back up to $3 dollars a gallon).

What I’m saying is that Obama is so hell bent on getting his agenda passed that he has already gone past the “Point of no Return” to get there. He may not believe so….but he is already well on course to being a one term President with no signs of that reversing in sight. I don’t think Obama is an idiot and must know that such a move will end in his political demise so I have to believe that he simply does not care for his own political future as long as he’s remembered as the man who set the foundation for a permanent liberally controlled government.

“Some would argue that the bailouts were political suicide and especially the 2nd stimulus which to date has done nothing to “stimulate” anything but the size of government. ”

Absolutely, but Obama and the Dems (and a good number of Republicans) continue to fall back on the argument that “the best economic minds we have were telling us this is what we had to do”. We know it is bullshit, but it remains a somewhat effective political cover, and many Dems still support it as being the right thing to do.

NOBODY is going to provide Obama with the political cover to pull something like this off. Even liberal economists like Krugman and Reich aren’t out there making the argument that we should do whatever China tells us to in order to secure our credit line.

If Obama does this, he insures a huge victory for the Republicans in 2010, possibly giving them back both houses. It would be a disaster for his agenda. Which is why it won’t happen.

I don’t think Obama will do it. It would be political suicide.

Yeah, well, it’s not like Obama has much of a reputation for wise political moves in the first place.

Frankly I don’t think there’s any way for Obama to come out of this undamaged. If he approves the deal he’ll be blasted for selling off valuable American resources to foreign governments while at the same time making himself look like a hypocrite for banning offshore drilling for American firms but allowing it for foreign ones. If he refuses then, as Mike_M points out, he’s going to have a Hell of a time getting more of his deficit spending approved after turning down a potential source of revenue.

Hell, the fact that this is even up for debate at all is probably going to hurt him. Just the impression that Obama might be seriously considering selling off American oil reserves is going to make a lot of people angry.

Obama has a simple out on this.

1. It is only carbon pollution is America does it. Since it is the Chinese doing the drilling, no carbon pollution will be produced.

If he can’t get the alphabet media to buy into this explanation. He will then use any money made from this and buy Al Gore Carbon Credits with it and claim it is Carbon neutral.

The Chinese are going to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. Only American companies are going to be prohibited from creating jobs and lessening our dependence on foreign oil. And if the above excuses don’t work, Obama will just blame it on Bush and Foxnews for reporting it.

Scorched_Earth – Yeah, I wasn’t in attack mode with Mike. I really was just thinking out loud about how I don’t think Mr. Obama has the huevos to do this because of the fallout here at home.

Mr. Obama, like most of the political class, is a consummate poll-follower. I think he has to understand that letting the jobs, profits and oil/natural gas from those resources go to the Chinese when our own nation is struggling mightily with economic problems, unemployment and energy insecurity is a move fraught with political dangers, both for him personally, and for other members of his party.

Just for the record, I have long been in full support mode for drilling anywhere and everywhere for the resources we have here in the US. Between the Green River oil shale formation, the Bakken reserve, Prudhoe Bay, ANWR, East and West Coast OCS and Gulf of Mexico OCS reserves, we likely have enough petroleum available to us here that we could survive without imports for the 30 – 50 years it will take to develop a new energy base for our economy, such as hydrogen.

The one thing about oil reserves is that as long as I can remember there have been those who have predicted our running out of oil, but by the time their “doomsday” date rolls around, we’ve gone and found more oil – lots more oil. The geological processes which create oil from organic materials continue to operate, and as we’ve learned, those processes occur in lots more places than we originally thought.

“Yeah, I wasn’t in attack mode with Mike.”

I know. I wasn’t even arguing the wisdom of the leases themselves. Just illustrating how deficit spending is killing this country in a myriad of ways. Now that we have a President who wants to be popular at all costs and loves spending other people’s money, there’s no way he can say no to this kind of deal.

This country is built on a mountain of coal and surrounded by an ocean of oil, and we’re buying it from terrorists (with money we borrow from them) out of sheer laziness and stupidity.

Why not just hand over the keys to the country to China now? The entitlement class wouldn’t care if the welfare checks are printed in Chinese as long as they still get cashed.

Why the hell not, we’re not using them. China runs the Panama Canal, basically cutting our navy in half. Cuba is drilling off shore of Florida. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if China was given permits to do so, for some reason American government treats China like it isn’t a brutal communist dictatorship.