Free Republic

Leadership: President Obama told CEOs in Hawaii that the U.S. had been "lazy" in attracting foreign investment. Actually, the White House has been pretty busy demonizing it. The Obama administration has a record of making life miserable for foreign investors that put their capital on the line to create jobs in the U.S. Politically wedded to special interests such as Big Labor, White House officials have hurled scurrilous charges against foreign companies and muscled others in ways no domestic company would tolerate. Foreign investors also have been targets of punitive regulations disguised as "patriotism" and had contracts kicked out from...

Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling Inc.has filed a motion for summary judgment in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana requesting the court to compel BP to honor its contractual obligation to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Transocean for damages associated with BP's failure to contain flow from its Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The contract between BP and Transocean for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig contains industry-standard reciprocal indemnity provisions that apportion risk and quantify liabilities between the two companies. In the contract, which was signed in 1998 and extended several times...

Justice: Another border patrol agent faces prison after arresting an illegal alien smuggling drugs. When not being killed by guns funneled into Mexico by their own government, they are prosecuted for doing their job. In a case reminiscent of an earlier injustice against those protecting our borders, Border Patrol Agent Jesus E. "Chito" Diaz Jr. has been sentenced to two years in prison by U.S. District Judge Alia Moses Ludlum in San Antonio. The illegal alien he arrested for drug smuggling goes free. In November 2009, Diaz was named in a federal grand jury indictment after an October 2008 arrest...

BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the blowout of its Macondo well a year and a half ago touched off the country’s worst offshore environmental disaster. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said that BP met more stringent safety requirements devised by the federal government in the aftermath of the disaster. The company also planned to follow even tougher voluntary standards that exceeded the government’s rules. “This permit was approved only after thorough well design, blowout preventer, and containment capability reviews,” said bureau director Michael...

Are students that promote the black panther ideology and the Office of Diversity in league together at the University of Minnesota - Duluth (UMD)? It would would appear so in the video below. The events took place last week as one young man, Phil Cleary, handed out pocket Constitutions on campus in honor of Constitution Day. He had a table with literature promoting Youth for Western Civilization, a group dedicated to traditional values and western civilization, and engaged in students and faculty passing by. Then, the leftists showed up to heckle. The young man in the video, Blair Jordon Moses,...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

WASHINGTON - CBS News has obtained secretly recorded conversations that raise questions as to whether some evidence is being withheld in the murder of a Border Patrol agent. (Scroll down to listen to the audio) The tapes were recorded approximately mid-March 2011 by the primary gun dealer cooperating with ATF in its "Fast and Furious" operation: Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Arizona. He's talking with the lead case ATF case agent Hope MacAllister. The tapes have been turned over to Congressional investigators and the Inspector General. As CBS News first reported last February, the Bureau...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal magistrate refused Wednesday to order the White House to provide BP PLC with emails by a former top adviser to President Barack Obama about the administration's response to last summer's massive Gulf oil spill. A lawyer for the oil giant had argued that emails by Carol Browner, Obama's former adviser on energy and climate matters, and three other officials in the Executive Office of the President could shed light on the White House's role in estimating the rate of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the company's blown-out well. But U.S. Magistrate...

CHICAGO — BP wants to stop paying most people affected by the massive 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill for potential future damages because the region has recovered, a document released Friday said. The tourism industry is booming, all federal fishing grounds have reopened, and the shrimp catch has been plentiful, BP said. "The current economic data do not suggest that individual and business claimants face a material risk of future loss caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill," BP said in a 29-page document filed with the Gulf Coast Claim Facility, which is handling compensation claims. ... The compensation...

When workers dismantled the ARCO corporate logo at the former Arco Arena earlier this year, it served as a fitting symbol of the company's California retrenchment. Known for selling cheap gasoline and for its 24-hour ampm convenience stores, ARCO has been a dominant player in the state's petroleum industry for decades. It is California's largest gasoline distributor, with more than 20 percent of the market. But since last year's deadly Gulf of Mexico oil spill, parent BP PLC has either sold off or put up for sale most of its California assets. They include: [snip] The divestitures are notable because...

He maybe the president of the most powerful nation in the world, but his car still needs filling up with petrol. Workers at a garage in Pimlico today told of their astonishment after Barack Obama's car and the presidential entourage pulled up for refuelling. The armoured limousine, nicknamed "The Beast", arrived with six other vehicles and police escort at a BP petrol station on Vauxhall Bridge Road during the president's state visit to London. Onlookers said the cars took up the entire forecourt when they arrived yesterday at around 3pm.

CANNES, France (AFP) – Peter Fonda launched a four-letter attack on US President Barack Obama at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, calling him a traitor over the handling of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. The star of the 1969 road movie "Easy Rider" was in Cannes for the premiere of "The Big Fix" by Rebecca and Josh Tickell, the only feature documentary in the official selection at the Cannes film festival this year. Fonda -- a keen environmentalist and co-producer of the film which centres on the explosion of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the ensuing...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil giant BP could announce as early as Monday that it plans to buy out the Russian partners in its joint venture TNK-BP Ltd., according to a story posted Sunday night by the Wall Street Journal. The deal would transfer a 50 percent stake from a company called AAR, which is controlled by a group of Russian billionaires, to Russian state oil company OAO Rosneft, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. More importantly, it would clear the way for BP's plans to explore for oil in the Arctic Sea north of Russia, a...

Testing is set to resume next week on the blowout preventer that failed to stop gushing oil at BP's Macondo well, but an independent federal agency that has been probing the disaster will not be permitted to participate. Under a federal judge's ruling, the only witnesses allowed during the examination at a NASA facility in New Orleans will be representatives of the Justice Department, oil spill victims in a broad class-action lawsuit and three companies linked to the disaster. That shuts the door to the Chemical Safety Board… CSB has investigated more than 50 industrial accidents in its two-decade history...

In the next week, how many times will you hear that the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was the worst environmental catastrophe in American history? This assessment was plausible when first uttered by President Obama almost a year ago, but now it’s clear that the worst never happened. The Deepwater spill has largely disappeared — dispersed, evaporated, and eaten by bacteria. Its impact on sea life appears minimal. Yet politicians, activists, trial lawyers, and environmental journalists persist in perpetuating this myth. Why? Pinning disasters on the environmental lobby’s hobby horse du jour defines the battlespace, increases the power of...

WASHINGTON -- People familiar with the investigation of the Gulf oil spill say manslaughter and perjury are among the possible violations being explored by Justice Department investigators still in the early stages of their probe.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration failed to set up an "effective" communications system during last year's BP oil spill and threatened its own credibility by "severely restricting" the release of "timely, accurate information," according to a newly released report commissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard. Quietly posted on the Coast Guard's website two weeks ago, the report offers the first major assessment of the federal government's communications efforts during the worst oil spill in U.S. history. "Several layers of review and approval by the White House and (Department of Homeland Security)

PASCAGOULA, Miss. — Documents provided by the administrator of BP's claims fund for Gulf oil spill victims show the oil giant agreed to increase his law firm's monthly compensation from $850,000 to $1.25 million. The documents furnished Friday to The Associated Press include a letter from former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to claims czar Kenneth Feinberg. Mukasey stated his belief that the extra money was warranted because Feinberg's duties had grown. Mukasey was asked by Feinberg to weigh in on how reasonable his compensation was. The pay hike, detailed in a Tuesday letter from Mukasey to

Two weeks ago, we asked whether Interior Secretary Ken Salazar considered himself above the law by ignoring court orders to resume the permitting process for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Now we learn that Salazar may have misled Congress and the public on the number of drilling permit applications he is ignoring. Yesterday, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) accused Salazar, along with Michael Bromwich, the director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, of using bogus figures. During Congressional testimony on March 2, and on other occasions, Salazar and Bromwich used much lower figures...

The day that LSE sold its soul to Libya: BP chief makes oil deal with Gaddafi... and drags prestigious university into disrepute By Michael Seamark Last updated at 1:33 AM on 5th March 2011 . •BP boss who signed £545m oil pact was lobbying for university too In a desert tent outside Colonel Gaddafi's home town of Sirte four years ago, Tony Blair shook hands with the Libyan dictator in a controversial 'blood money' deal which laid the foundations for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Also inside the tent was Peter Sutherland, then chairman of BP, who subsequently announced...