Tuesday, November 19, 2013

President Obama ratings drop to record low

The news just keeps getting worse and worse for President Barack Obama.  As his golden achievement Obamacare continues to crash and burn his approval ratings from the public have fallen to record lows.

The latest comes from a poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News.  The damage is an overall job approval rating of only 42%.  Down a whopping 13% points this year alone and 6% points in the last month alone.

Even more troubling is the result that 70% of Americans feel that the country is heading in the wrong direction.  Other Obama performance ratings have crashed as well.  He is at career lows for being honest and for being a strong leader.

The terrible rollout of the Affordable Care Act is at the center of all the problems.  It has been a gaggle of problems.  The website is a disaster.  The President obviously lied about the insurance cancellations and it is simply not financially viable at all. 

The American public is finally starting to realize these truths and a whopping 71% think Obamacare should not go into effect now.  The most telling segment are independents who are the key to most all elections.  Only 33% of Independents approve of President Obama.  Not looking good for the coming elections next year if Independents go conservative.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Oil Pipeline Spills a North Dakota Problem

A new report from the Associated Press has identified nearly 300 oil spills in North Dakota over the past two years.  Many of them are small, but there were nearly 750 oilfield incidents as well. 

The most recent spill was over 20,000 barrels worth of oil into a wheat field.  North Dakota is the #2 oil producing state in the country behind Texas.

Many of these incidents go unreleased to the public.  North Dakota regulators, like in many other oil-producing states, are not obliged to tell the public about oil spills under state law. But in a state that's producing a million barrels a day and saw nearly 2,500 miles of new pipelines last year, many believe the risk of spills will increase, posing a bigger threat to farmland and water.

"We're certainly looking at that now and what would be a threshold for reporting to the public," Dennis Fewless, director of water quality for the state Health Department said. Taking notice of the recent criticism, the state issued a statement October 17 on an estimated seven barrel oil spill in Divide County, which borders Canada in far northwestern North Dakota.

Read about my travels in South Dakota