Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Washington Post: We’re Going to Fire Garbage at Marco Rubio Until Something Sticks
Bless WaPo’s increasingly irrelevant heart, it’s at it again.
Marco Rubio on national ticket could be risky bet for Republican Party
Just a week after the paper misfired badly at the Florida Senator, it’s not only giving it another go; it’s using its own discredited and quietly scrubbed smear piece as evidence to support itself.
But Rubio’s role in recent controversies, including a dispute with the country’s biggest Spanish-language television network and new revelations that he had mischaracterized his family’s immigrant story, shows that any GOP bet on his national appeal could be risky.
One of the biggest hallmarks of the MSM dinosaur in its death throes is the tendency to reveal which Republicans scare it the most, and to provide clues to the GOP as to how it should react (whether the GOP has honed its clue-taking ability is a story for another post).
The previously indomitable message machine for the Democrats is so unused to vulnerability that it panics way ahead of time. Predictably, the panic tends to manifestitself in stories about what is or is not good for the Republican party. Because, you know, the MSM has a history of really, really caring about Republicans.
Concern duly noted and heartily laughed at.
A charismatic young Hispanic Republican Senator from the biggest swing state in American electoral politics is someone to be greatly feared as far as the left-leaning media is concerned, and Marco Rubio has had them sweating for a while.
Of course, WaPo doesn’t just use its own dubious reporting to bolster predictions of Rubio’s risk value for the GOP, there’s also the fact that Democrats have already decided how Hispanic voters should behave.
Democrats had already questioned whether a Cuban American who has voiced conservative views on immigration and opposed the historic Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, could appeal to a national Hispanic electorate of which Cubans are just a tiny fraction but have special immigration status.
Naturally, Democrats and the Washington Post should be the go-to sources for Republicans to figure out what works.
Sadly, the MSM is never lacking in GOP “experts” to chime in on these “concerned” pieces.
“If he does take that mantle, there’ll be a lot of clarification that he’ll have to make on a whole lot of issues,” said Lionel Sosa, a longtime GOP strategist.
Nothing frightens Democrats more than a minority voter who is a registered Republican. It severely disrupts the meme that the GOP is still secretly getting fitted for Klan hoods at party meetings. Democrats begin to sweat severely when said Republican begins to rise to prominence and they need to get the message out that this will not stand. That is why Rubio was immediately labeled a “risk” and Herman Cain was dismissed as “Pizza Man.”
The amount of fear that Marco Rubio strikes in their hearts is indicated by the fact that they’ve been going after him since he was in second place in primary polling. Thus far, all they’ve been able to come up with is the fact that he might be a liability for Republicans at some time in the future. In each election cycle, the nature of his alleged downside is different, which is really proof that this is more about making a meme stick than anything that is actually occurring.
The Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media are forever explaining to us why this or that Republican is irrelevant, using myopic leftist criteria. In days past, when they controlled all political narrative, many GOP officials and voters would believe a lot of it.
Those days, however, are very, very much in the past. It is time for the GOP to stop playing into their hands, take the gift they’re being given by the floundering left as it reveals its fears, and exploit it.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Drilling off Keys to begin by December
A giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore will probably be drilling in the Florida Straits between Key West and Cuba in mid-December. The rig could arrive earlier, but Repsol, the Spanish oil company, wants to wait until after hurricane season ends before it begins drilling.
This latest report on the progress of the Italian-made Scarabeo 9 oil rig comes from Lee Hunt, the chief executive of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, who just returned from a trip to Cuba last week as part of a joint delegation with the environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund.
Hunt also said that Repsol plans on having one well drilled by the end of the year.
Along with Hunt, the fact-finding delegation included William Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and co-chair of the White House task force investigating the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Richard Sears, former vice president of deepwater drilling for Royal Dutch Shell, and Dan Whittle, a senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Their goal was to learn how committed the Cuban government is to operating offshore oil and natural-gas rigs safely and responsibly, and to find out the best way for American companies with oil-spill expertise to work with Cuba, despite a 50-year-old economic embargo by the United States.
“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot by not working together,” Whittle said in an interview this week. “There was a lot of speculation in the past about if Cuba will in fact begin drilling. Well, now we know Cuba is moving forward as quickly as it can.”
Because of the embargo, Repsol would have to rely on companies from the United Kingdom, Norway and Brazil for help if the Scarabeo 9 caused a spill, Whittle said.
Whittle and the rest of the group met with senior officials in Cuba’s Ministry of Basic Industry, which regulates the country’s energy, geology and mining and basic chemistry sectors. They also met with officials from the Ministry of Environment, as well as senior members of CUPET, Cuba’s state-run petroleum company.
Whittle and Hunt said they were encouraged by what they heard from their hosts during the trip. Whittle said he was especially pleased to see how interested these officials were to hear Reilly talk about his task force’s recently-released report on the DeepWater Horizon oil spill.
“They’re taking the lessons of the BP spill very seriously. They were dog eared whenever the report came up,” Whittle said.
“They could have easily distanced themselves from what happened and said theirs is a different situation from BP, and said ‘thanks very much, but we don’t need your help.’ The very opposite happened. They were eager to hear from Bill Reilly,” he said.
Whittle also said that CUPET workers have been training on offshore oil rigs in Brazil, and they have been taking part in exchange programs with Canadian oil and natural gas companies.
