The U. S. Geological Service issued a report in April 2008 that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big.  We have plenty of oil right here within the borders of the United States. The report was an updated one to the old 1995 version on how much oil was in the area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota, western South Dakota, and extreme eastern Montana known as the “Bakken”.    The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since  Alaska ’s  Prudhoe Bay and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable… at $107 a barrel, we’re looking at a resource base worth more than $5..3 trillion.. “When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea..” says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature’s financial analyst…

The problem is the environmentalists won’t let us drill for it and the foreign oil producers don’t want us to access it either.  Whose side are they on – the terrorists?  Hmmm….

Update: the US Geological Service report referenced above refers to 3.65 billion barrels of recoverable oil —not 503 billion…

In the president’s SOTU last night, he said regarding health care:

But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.

Here is a simple approach that will work:

• A. ELIMINATE ALL EMPLOYER PAID HEALTH INSURANCE and group rates
• B. ELIMINATE ALL INTERSTATE OBSTRUCTIONS TO SALE OF HEALTH INSURANCE
• C. CAP MALPRACTICE LAWSUITS
• D. INCREASE THE SUPPLY OF HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS.

Part A. will:

• because all workers will be required to pay for 100% of their insurance out of their own pocket, they will have shop and negotiate for the lowest insurance rates.
• remove the disparity between what the self employed pay for insurance and what regular, previously employer-subsidized workers pay.
• Just as self-employed workers presently do, to keep their insurance premiums low, all workers will negotiate larger deductibles, giving them a strong incentive to question and negotiate the charges of their healthcare providers…driving down costs.

Part B. will:

• remove in-state and regional  monoplies of insurance companies … increasing competition and driving down rates.

Part C. will:

• drive down the cost of insurance since legal fees that need to be paid by that insurance will be less.

Part D. will:

• make health care providers have to reduce the charges for their services because they have to compete for business with more providers.

This 4 point approach will accomplish the goals the president outlined, but it requires real change, the kind of change that Mr. Obama’s special interest backers (like unions and banksters) will not support.  McCain had a proposal in his campaign to tax the employer paid part of health insurance, but the special interests and Mr. Obama shouted it down.  McCain ran a poor campaign and deserved to lose, but this proposal was on the right track.  Too bad,  Obama’s offer for real change is a farce…

A female Democratic lawmaker in footage released Sunday said Congress could pass healthcare if female lawmakers “sent the men home.”

“We go to the ladies room and the Republican women and the Democratic women and we just roll our eyes,” she said. “And the Republican women said when we were fighting over the healthcare bill, if we sent the men home…” at which point she was interrupted by loud applause.

“You know why? I’m not trying to diss the men but I’m telling you it’s the truth that every single woman there has been responsible for taking care of a [relatives] and so we think we can find a common ground there,” she said.

Boy, they sure are getting desperate.

Dylan makes the case against Timid Tim.  The TBTF’s own the Treasury Secretary- it’s definitely where the evidence points. We are surprised the MSNBC network lets Radigan say stuff like this…

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you are underwater on your home loan and can’t afford to make the mortgage payment, give the TBTFs the keys rather than “cooperate” with them. You are better off AND the TBTFs are then forced to write down the value of your mortgage on their asset list.  This helps the country, in the long run.   As Denninger argues, while commenting on this NYT piece,  the current extend and pretend policy is designed to hide the TBTFs financial problems -NOT TO HELP YOU!

This is the reason for “HAMP” and all of the other silliness.  It is not to “protect” homeowners, it is to prevent banks from having to recognize punishing losses that, in point of fact, they should have to recognize due to their own idiotic lending practices.

Treasury knows this – that their entire “TARP” recapitalization and “stress test” game was nothing other than a sham intended to pump confidence so that these institutions could issue stock into the market and try to “rebuild” their balance sheets.

If this didn’t actually hurt the public I wouldn’t care.  But it does severely damage the public in multiple ways, specifically:

• These “modification” programs in the general sense do not and cannot lead to sustainable mortgages for the vast majority of homes at risk.  The reason for this is simply that the person who bought the house did so at a radical premium to what they could actually afford.  That “premium” was there as a consequence of intentional speculative activity and outright fraud in underwriting that pumped “home values” – premium that has now disappeared and cannot come back by anything short of more fraud!  Therefore these “homeowners” cannot be “saved” – any change that simply reduces payments but doesn’t get rid of the negative equity problem only extends and increases the damage ultimately done.
• A huge percentage of the people trapped in these loans are cajoled or outright threatened into doing things that are severely against their own interest.  I hear daily of people who have raided 401ks and IRAs to try to remain in their homes and make these “trial payments” or participate in other similar schemes.  Retirement accounts are privileged in a bankruptcy and cannot be taken; it is essentially NEVER the correct thing to do to raid such an account to try to prevent a foreclosure or bankruptcy filing! This sort of underhanded “suggestion” occurs all the time and in my opinion constitutes raw predatory conduct for which there should be felony legal sanction – but of course there isn’t.
• The artificial propping up of home prices severely damages those Americans who would like to buy a house but cannot afford one at the present price. If you do not own a car, you obviously want prices on cars to be low, not high.  The same applies if you don’t currently own a house – you want prices low, not high.  The only people who benefit from prices that are pumped up out of whack with fundamental values are those who lent money at bubble prices and will lose that money if prices contract, along with those who build more houses at bubble prices and thus skim off unreasonably large “profits.”

The power is still with the people, we just have to wake up and do the right thing as individuals for ourselves.  The right thing is to take full advantage of the law of the land and to ignore pressure and threats from the TBTFs that your credit will be damaged if you don’t work with them.  The truth is this: YOUR CREDIT IS ALREADY DAMAGED AND IT’S TIME TO BEGIN THE REPAIR PROCESS!  Get yourself back on track, forget about government sponsored loan modification farces.  Jacking around with the TBTFs only postpones the inevitable – for you and for them…

This list provides a brief but we know, incomplete description of the corrupt deals for special treatment of SOME states for their senator’s support of the Obamacare takeover of 17% of the US economy.  If these deals are not unconstitutional, we need to amend the constitution so that they are.

The Weekly Standard:

The Democrats are irresponsibly and disingenuously claiming that the bill would cost $871 billion over 10 years. But that’s not what the CBO says. Rather, the CBO says that $871 billion would be the costs from 2010 to 2019 for expansions in insurance coverage alone. But less than 2 percent of those “10-year costs” would kick in before the fifth year of that span. In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion — for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill’s full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion — according to the CBO.

In those real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), Americans would have to pay over $1 trillion in additional taxes, over $1 trillion would be siphoned out of Medicare (over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage alone) and spent on Obamacare, and deficits would rise by over $200 billion. They would rise, that is, unless Congress follows through on the bill’s pledge to cut doctors’ payments under Medicare by 21 percent next year and never raise them back up — which would reduce doctors’ enthusiasm for seeing Medicare patients dramatically.

And what would Americans get in return for this staggering sum? Well, the CBO says that health care premiums would rise, and the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says that the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product spent on health care would rise from 17 percent today to 21 percent by the end of 2019. Nationwide health care costs would be $234 billion higher than under current law. How’s that for “reform”?

Even MoveOn.org says that the bill is “a massive giveaway” to private insurance companies. The CBO estimates that, from 2015-25, private insurers would receive $1.0 trillion in subsidies from the American taxpayer — the insurers’ apparent price for giving up their freedom and being controlled by the government. Congress would mandate that Americans buy the insurers’ product and would redirect massive sums of taxpayer money to make that mandate more feasible. So, if insurance companies are your idea of a worthy object of philanthropy, then Obamacare is for you.

This Obamacare vote is a clear indicator that our country has really taken a turn for the worst.  Can we undo this? Can we get these bums out of office now?  Any incumbent, Republican or Democrat who voted for any two of these three measures: the .700 trillion TARP, the $.787 trillion Pork Stimulus or the $2.5 trillion Obamacare … should be removed from office.

Obama’s personal network, ABC, has an interview of Obama in which the president warns that unless we pass his health care reform bill, “the US will go bankrupt”.  Well, then we will go doubly bankrupt if we DO pass it – ’cause Federal spending – and the deficit will indeed mushroom if the communist’s Obamacare becomes law.  What a lowlife threat.  WHEN the US goes bankrupt —we surely do hope Mr. Obama has the lack of a health care bill to blame for it.

Tech Ticker is very cynical on the Obama Administration.  So too is the American public – as evidenced by the recent poll numbers.  The excuse to spend until the world ends was that we need to avoid the end of the world.  So now we have a choice: end of the world? or…end of the world?

ABC News is reporting that on page 432 of Senator Reid’s health care bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.” The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.” That language applies to exactly one state: Louisiana.

According to the CBO, those subsidies will cost about $100 million. The bill cannot pass without Senator Landrieu’s support, and Reid is bribing her with $100 million in Federal money to get her vote. This should be ILLEGAL!

Below is the complicated language in the bill. All of it could have been cut down to a few words: “Extra federal funds allocated to the State of Louisiana to BRIBE Senator Mary Landrieu to vote for this bill”.

SEC. 2006. SPECIAL ADJUSTMENT TO FMAP DETERMINATION FOR CERTAIN STATES RECOVERING FROM A MAJOR DISASTER.

Section 1905 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396d), as amended by sections 2001(a)(3) and
2001(b)(2), is amended— (1) in subsection (b), in the first sentence, by striking ‘‘subsection (y)’’ and inserting ‘‘subsections (y) and (aa)’’; and (2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:

‘‘(aa)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (b), beginning January 1, 2011, the Federal medical assistance percentage for a fiscal year for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State shall be equal to the following:
‘(A) In the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), increased by 50 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5.

‘‘(B) In the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection for the State, increased by 25 percent of the number of percentage points by which the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection.

‘‘(2) In this subsection, the term ‘disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State’ means a State that is one of
the 50 States or the District of Columbia, for which, at any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President has declared a major disaster under section 401 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and determined as a result of such disaster that every county or parish in the State warrant individual and public assistance or public assistance from the Federal Government under such Act and for which— ‘‘(A) in the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year after the application of only subsection (a) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5 (if applicable to the preceding fiscal year) and without regard to this subsection, subsection (y), and subsections (b) and (c) of section 5001 of Public Law 111–5, by at least 3 percentage points; and ‘‘(B) in the case of the second or any succeeding fiscal year for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the fiscal year without regard to this subsection and subsection (y), is less than the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the State for the preceding fiscal year under this subsection by at least 3 percentage points.

‘‘(3) The Federal medical assistance percentage determined for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State under paragraph (1) shall apply for purposes of this title (other than with respect to disproportionate share hospital payments described in section 1923 and payments under this title that are based on the enhanced FMAP described in 2105(b)) and shall not apply with respect to payments under title IV (other than under part E of title IV) or payments under title XXI.’’.