Tax the living daylights out of domestic oil companies while giving Hugo Chavez’s Citgo a free ride??? Brilliant!

Send gas prices skyrocketing beyond $3.29 per gallon and hurt the vast majority of driving Americans and the millions of people with an IRA or retirement plan??? Brilliant!

Giving the Democratic Congress a chance to cripple America’s already soft economy??? Brilliant!

If anyone believes they have a true grasp of oil pricing and know the REAL ramifications of political policy, they are delusional. This rant is cheap, rightist talking points. I find it absurd that a republican sympathizer points fingers at Dems over oil prices…pot…kettle….black. You have nerve young lady.

If you want less of something just tax it.

Want less oil? Tax it!

Want less income? Tax it!

OMG, a letter from the UWCR that bashes Democrats and Chavez without having any grasp of the issues? I’m in shock.

Free market… hello, anyone here seen the free market?

Giving oil companies tax breaks is COUNTER to free market forces. What would you rather subsidize: a farm struggling to compete in a global market, or an oil company making billions in profit monthly?

If you let the free market work with farms, starvation is the correcting vehicle.

The author also missed a big point. If we are ever going to be serious about developing alternative fuel sources to replace fossil fuels, thats going to require investment in research. The big oil companies contribute and invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in just that. The oil companies dont just burn their $18 billion in profits. They actually do something with it and it just so happens that what they do with it is a pretty good thing. Once we move away from gasoline these companies dont want to just die out they want to be involved in whatever form of new energy we use and therefore have an incentive to help develop that new energy. Taxing away all of their profits just prevents them from doing that.

republicans chastizing democrats about how to handle oil companies? really?

“Since then, he has thrown thousands of dissenters into prisons and ordered many others executed. When the Venezuelan newspapers began to criticize Mr. Chavez, he nationalized the media. Now, members of the Venezuelan media have three choices: praise him, keep their mouths shut or speak the truth and suffer the consequences.”

You clearly know nothing of topic you chose to write about it. Who has Chavez executed? Who has he imprisoned? The “nationalization” of the media you speak of is a misinformed reference to the contract of a single company not being renewed. Most of the media in Venezuela remains corporate-controlled and consequently anti-Chavez, even as his approval rating hovers above 60 percent. If Chavez was really who claim he is, why would he continue to allow the big business media to control the airwaves and attack him? In few other countries in the world is the mainstream press so critical of the existing government. So much for repression.

“…an anti-Semitic, anti-American, fascist dictator.”

What has he ever said that was anti-Semitic? Oh, that’s right, he’s a critic of the Israeli occupation and therefore hates all Jews. He’s anti-American in the sense that he opposes the policies of the current Bush regime, which includes funneling money to far right groups in Venezuela, almost leading to a coup (there is fascism for you) in 2002. By the way, fascist dictators generally don’t come to power through legal elections, as Chavez did twice, in 1998 and 2004. But then your understanding of democracy is likely a little skewed, since you continue to support a president that came to power through electoral fraud (twice), disenfranchising black voters and not even achieving a popular majority.

Responding to CRs pieces is generally a worthless endeavor, but the factual inaccuracy and inflammatory nature of this piece was just too much. Next time you decide to go off on an ideological rant at least try to provide some evidence for your claims. Admittedly, no such evidence exists, but you should at least give it a shot.

In the meantime, I would suggest a public retraction.

Regards, Kyle

“I think we can all agree that our Congress should not be giving tax breaks to a man who insults the leader of our country.” — Oh no!Somebody should tell Jon Stewart that he won’t be receiving his tax rebate this year.

Kristen’s opinions left out the details about supporting renewable energy sources. I want solar panels on my house, so I want this to pass.

12:07 — Word.

Here’s a solution for you Kristen. Let’s just tax the crap out of all oil companies so we’re finally forced to make concrete steps toward alternative energy. More hybrids, less oil.

“Why Ms. Pelosi is supporting the dictatorship of Hugo Chavez seems to be a mystery.”

As for that — the U.S. continues to support dictatorships in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and at one point supported them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why the hypocrisy yo?

Kristin,

Your article highlights the continuing sabotage of energy supplies and artificially skyrocketing energy costs within the USA. The rank stupidity of Congress on energy policy far exceeds the modest concerns you expressed above, however.

A little-noticed provision (section 526) of the ironically named “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007”, passed by Congress and signed into law last December, effectively bars the federal government from purchasing fuels whose ‘life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those from fuels produced from conventional petroleum sources’.

Note that the chimeric ‘green house gases’ are the justification for this assault on budding alternative fuel sources. What is the significance of this esoteric clause buried in Section 526? It effectively bars the US Government from procuring Canadian oil produced from the tar sands of Alberta. It bars the US government from buying corn and other biomass based ethanols used as additions to or replacements for gasoline. It bars the government from using synthetic diesel fuel catalyzed and distilled from coal, biomass, and petroleum byproducts. It guarantees an increasing dependence on conventional fuels derived from unsavory foreign suppliers, like Saudia Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, etc.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., already are pressing the Department of Defense to comply with the provision. In a recent letter to the secretary of defense, Waxman and Davis asked how the DOD will ensure that the fuel it buys doesn’t come from Canadian tar sands or from domestic coal-to-liquid processing.

We are prohibited from buying oil produced by our next door neighbor and ally, Canada! We are prohibited from buying exceedingly clean synthetic diesel fuel produced by the budding technology of coal-to-liquids (CTL)fuels generation! We are aborting many budding technologies aimed at manufacturing fuels by alternative methods!

We have sufficient reserves of coal within the US borders to meet 2007 level energy requirements for the next 250 years. The prototype catalytic Coal-To-Liquid (CTL) plants are being sited and built to provide full sequestration of carbon dioxide generated during the manufacturing of synthetic diesel fuel from coal. With this technology alone, we can dramatically reduce our national ddependence on foreign oil in the next 20 years.

Our politicians are limiting our energy sources and destroying promising technologies based on the increasingly discredited theory of ‘greenhouse gases and global warming’. I support that statement with the following sources. WARNING: An understanding of Statistics, Mathematics, and Logic is required! Proceed at your own risk! 1) http://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/robinson600.pdf Check out a recent re-analyses of the UN-IPCC data sets and other corroborating sources demonstrating that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels do not correlate with either global warming or cooling. For the scientifically illiterate, that means the theory of manmade global warming is bull$hit. The UN-IPCC ‘cooked the data’ to falsely support their politcally motivated conclusions. 2)http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm This current report shows that the global cooling this winter alone (2007-2008) has effectively reversed ALL of the global warming purported to have been caused by man over the last 150 years.

If we continue to rely on Algore ‘Incoherent Half Truths’ psuedo-science to determine US energy policy, we will continue to pay the price for our stupidity. That is an Inconvenient Truth being demonstrated yet again by a scientific and technically illiterate society and their equally clueless representatives in Congress.

Why doesn’t Kyle understand the atrocities that Chavez commits against his own people? Could it be that Kyle Szarzynski himself is “an anti-Semitic, anti-American, fascist”?

No… oh wait. YES.

Kyle, to call for a retraction of this is one of the most asinine things I’ve ever heard proposed! If you’re going to demand retractions for everything that gets printed that angers people, maybe the Herald should just fire you. It would save a lot on calls for retractions.

Wake up, Kyle. This is America. Love it or leave. Thanks.

5:05, Retractions aren’t necessary when a piece is controversial, but when they’re factually inaccurate.

Chavez has not executed political opponents. He has not jailed political opponents. The media has not been “nationalized;” the vast majority of it is corporate-controlled and anti-Chavez. Chavez has never said or done anything anti-Semitic. He is not anti-American; he is a critic of US foreign policy. He is not a fascist, allowing for general freedom of expression. He is not a dictator, having been democratically elected twice.

So, the author doesn’t like Chavez - we get it. This doesn’t mean she can simply make up facts, as she has done multiple times in the article. Is it acceptable for me to claim that Bush dropped a nuclear bomb in Iraq because I don’t like him? Of course not. My criticism of the policy would be based on the best evidence available.

I’m not a journalism major, but I do know that everyone makes mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. But when an article has at least eight factual inaccuracies that all fall in line with the same ideological agenda, there is a problem.

Regards, Kyle

Chin Up, Kristin!

Your assertions are validated by none other than the Human Rights Foundation (HRF)! The following are links detailing a few of the shootings, initmidations, false imprisonments, beatings, etc promulgated by Hugo ‘Vote for Me or Die!’ Chavez

http://www.humanrightsfoundation.org/media/FernandezShot.html

http://www.humanrightsfoundation.org/media/Ravell.html

http://www.humanrightsfoundation.org/media/UsonFreedom.html

http://www.humanrightsfoundation.org/media/mediaShutdown.html

Kyle owes you a retraction of his false statements and an apology for his personal attack. Savor the flavor, Kristin, as Kyle enjoys his richly deserved slice of humble pie! Perhaps he will have the good graces to resign for his literary philanderings alla Elliot Spitzer…. but I doubt it! It isn’t that Liberals don’t know anything, it’s just that soooooo much of what they ‘know’ isn’t true.

Chavez is as criminal as Stalin and some people like it when their neighbors disappear in the night going to the gulag. North Korea should be place for all to visit where the military is given the food aid supposed to be going to the poor people. Those in love with Chavez probably support early reforms of Mao and Stalin. Freedom of worship is not allowed and opinions of complaining about repression is a politcal prison punishment. Give the world back and Latin America the happy days of Joesph Stalin he is a great guy because Hugo wants to be like him. Just love to be a person forced to work on a collective farm for better socialist ideals. And you get to dig your own ditch to be buried in when you die of starvation or get shot. Those were the wonder years to dream about! Oh! I want Hugo’s picture on the tyrants pages of history before time runs short…

for those of you who think that taxing oil companies are the way to end our dependence on gasoline: which companies do you think are going to invest in these alternative energies? It only makes sense that the companies that produce the energy source that is being replaced would want to invest in the replacement so they dont lose all of the sources of their revenue. In fact oil companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in alternative energy research every year. The more you tax them the less money they will have to spend to develop those solar panels you want on your house.

Kyle, have you looked up any facts on Chavez? Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others all agree that Chavez has engaged in terrible human rights violations. Seriously, do some research.