Idiot of the Week Awards: Winners, October 5 2008 Edition

Top Idiots Of The Week Awards
Week of October 5 2008
Right Bias.com

---

We have a clear winner in this week's awards. By far, the biggest idiot of the week has to be:

1. Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who was caught on video accusing the U.S. Department of Defense of executing 5,000 prisoners Chinese-style and dumping their bodies in a Louisiana swamp. Maybe she's just off her meds.

2. Second place has to go to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She gave a five minute speech tearing into Republicans right before a crucial vote on the government bailout bill, where, it turns out, she could have used their votes. She lost. Moral of the story: Don't gloat before you vote.

3. Third place goes to Harvard University. They held a ceremony Thursday awarding researchers for studying fertility of exotic dancers, plant dignity, enhanced potato chip crunch, flea jumping abilities and spermicidal uses for Coca-Cola. I wonder what jobs are available with those kind of qualifications.

HONORABLE MENTION:

* Rep. Barney Frank makes this week's list for going on the O'Reilly Factor to defend the indefensible. He got a very public spanking. We can't figure out if it was idiocy or just plain old hubris.

* A Colorado teen hired men to kill his mother so he could use her money to get breast implants for his girlfriend.

* This poor idiot shot himself after being denied sex by his girlfriend. He was charged with threatening violence and firing a weapon in an occupied dwelling. He is being held on $100,000 bail.

* An amateur chef died the day after eating a "superhot" chilli in a bet with his friend over who could make the hottest dish.

* Luke Schreder thought a police officer looked like he just "needed a hug" so he ran up to him and stuck out his arms. He was arrested for assault on a peace officer, public intoxication and interference with official acts. When he gets out, he should consider going into politics.

* Two armed robbers hijacked a security van with $1.3 million inside but were forced to abandon more than half the cash because their small getaway car could not carry it all.


ECO-IDIOTS:

1. First place goes to authors of a new report which states: 'People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid runaway climate change.'

2. Second place winner is a fellow who believes this junk. For the past nine months, Dave Chameides has been filling his basement with every single thing he would ordinarily recycle or toss into the trash. He's doing this in order to reduce his carbon footprint and save the world. I know I'll be sleeping easier tonight.

3. Polar bears will also be able to sleep easier thanks to the brave scientists in California who are actually testing the hearing of polar bears to try to find out whether the noises associated with melting Arctic ice could affect their ability to survive.

HONORABLE MENTION:

How could we have eco-idiots awards without mentioning Father Earth algore? Al Gore said in San Jose on Saturday that the climate crisis deserves the same type of attention and money from Washington that the financial meltdown is getting. The scary thing is, this man almost became president. Whoa baby!

From the Just Plain Nasty files:

Hustler founder, Larry Flynt has made an X-rated movie using an adult-film actress who is a dead ringer for Sarah Palin.

In an effort to leave you with a little hope for the future, we feel we should mention the following:

Alan Fishman, named CEO of Washington Mutual just 18 days before federal regulators seized it, will not accept a multimillion-dollar severance payment even if he is entitled to it, a spokesman representing him said Wednesday. Some would consider him an idiot. We don't.


by Nancy Morgan
Right Bias.com


RightBias.com publishes the Top Idiots Of The Week Awards every weekend. Feel free to forward any idiotic news you feel deserves consideration.

Pelosi: Politics of Offshore Drilling Trumps US Energy Needs

Pelosi: Let Them Walk










Nancy Pelosi is an unlikely choice for Speaker Of The House of the United States. She is stupid, greedy, ignorant, vengeful, and stubborn. All poor qualities for someone in leadership, particularly someone that is third in the line of succession to be President. While these apparent political attributes have served her well, they have made the country less secure.

Pelosi stands firm against offshore drilling

The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the steady push to tap the potential reserves off the state's rugged coast had galvanized Californians and made opposition to offshore drilling part of the political DNA of up-and-coming figures like Pelosi.

She repeatedly resisted oil drilling in marine sanctuaries off the state's coast near her San Francisco district and, after joining the Appropriations Committee, was an advocate of reinstating the coastal drilling ban through spending restrictions each year.

"We learned the hard way that oil and water do not mix on our coast," Pelosi told a key committee in 1996 as she made her case for keeping the ban in place before a Congress then controlled by Republicans.

Let us quickly examine Ms Pelosi's assertions that offshore drilling necessarily is detrimental to the environment. The last major off shore accident in America, and perhaps the world was in......1969. It was that very same Santa Barbara spill that so deeply disturbed the hippies of the day and admittedly caused the death of many birds, seals, etc.

So, was offshore drilling stopped?

Uhhh. No.

There are 20 active wells in Santa Barbara. And there have been no further spills of measurable consequence caused by man.

None. But there is pollution. Lots. That is because the Santa Barbaba coast bleeds oil.

Natural seepage alone over a four-year period amounts to roughly the same amount of oil that spilled from the Exxon Valdez incident in Alaska in 1989. He points out that a University of California, Santa Barbara study conducted in the mid-1990s shows that seepage around one of the nearby oil rigs known as Platform Holly dropped by more than 50% over 22 years as a result of production.

"If you expanded oil production, it's believed that you would have that same effect of reducing the seepage and reducing the pollution impact," Allen said. "That runs counter to a lot of people who do not want offshore oil production in other parts of the world as well as here, and they view it as a larger issue. But for central California residents, we view it as a local issue where we could see a reduction in the pollution and it's important to us.

If you walk the shoreline of Santa Barbara today, you will find tar balls in the water. The locals will confidently inform you that they are remnants of the 1969 spill. Pelosi likely thinks so also. But in fact, they are not. The seepage has been known since prehistoric times and is the reason Santa Barbara was first chosen for coastal wells, in the 1920's.

So where does offshore drilling stand, 40 years after the last large spill in America?



Well (pun intended).

Long Beach, California has 1,200 offshore oil wells, constructed on artificial islands. They seem less controversial, maybe because they are owned by Occidental Petroleum, famously associated with Al Gore.

Louisiana has about 130 rigs, many which are dozens of miles from shore. All of these rigs survived Katrina without damage. Some of these well are in 8,000 feet of water. Far beyond the few hundred feet of offshore Santa Barbara.

Canada has been placing wells off its East Coast since 1992. (Note to Pelosi: we share that coast.) and now has 4 or so major projects, including a recent one in the Grand Banks, an area that is one of the most important fisheries in the world.

Not a peep of protest from Pelosi.

In fact offshore drilling is everywhere. The North Sea fields, developed by American oilmen and riggers, using American technology, operates in the most difficult region to imagine, with deep wells in deep waters. No Problem.

Even Ireland has offshore drilling, for crying out loud. No problem. And with American proprietary horizontal drilling now reaching 8 miles, each well covers much more territory.

A catalog of the offshore fields around the world shows that the USA has been left behind.

Offshore Drilling Projects Worldwide

Nancy Pelosi, upon being named Speaker, infamously demanded that the Air Force provide her with a private jet larger and more luxurious than that of her predecessor. This woman of the people, who rides in a limousine at public expense--while she hoards her $20 Million--may actually have a motive other than her selfless desire to Save the Pelicans and the views of the rich celebrities that inhabit the Santa Barbara coastline.

In a private meeting last week, according to some in attendance, Pelosi told members of her leadership team that a decision to relent on the coastal ban would amount to capitulation to Republicans and the White House. She attributes today's energy problems to a failure of the Bush administration to develop a comprehensive approach, its ties to the industry and a mishandling of the economy.

There it is: the dolt would rather destroy the American economy, so as to shoulder President Bush with the blame, than do what is right.

PS. Note to Pelosi:

There is only one way out of an oil crisis: You drill your way out of it.

USA at Night


North Korea at night


Which will it be?


by pat
images:
*American progress.org
* ridgeway company
* naturescornermagazine
* offtopic
sources:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/17/america/pelosi.php
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/santa-barbara-learns-live-offshore/story.aspx?guid={605CE503-B0D9-4951-8C86-19B0FB38CF64}
http://www.oxy.com/oil_gas/world_ops/usa/thums.htm
http://www.lacoast.gov/WATERMARKS/1999c-summer/2offshore/
http://www.offshoreoilandgas.gov.bc.ca/world-offshore-oil-and-gas/