Maddow and Olbermann Are Wrong About Senator Rand Paul

Recently on MSNBC Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann each did segments on Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and the new gas pipeline "safety" bill that the Senator recently held up in congress. Both of these characters claim that Senator Rand Paul doesn't care about gas pipeline safety and held up the bill purely on philosophical grounds with the "notion" that government regulations are bad. In fact Olbermann went so far as to give Rand Paul a nomination for "Worst Person in the World".


Here are the video segments:

Maddow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XBBX_Twis


Olbermann (follows the segment on Dick Morris):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5Rb-yGE2w


Rachel Maddow claims that all the bill essentially does is require new safety devices to be installed, upgrades to be performed sooner and increase government inspections.

The biggest irony I found in these pieces were that both mentioned the following, although I will quote Keith Olbermann on this one:

"This legislation is supported by...the owners of the industry the new legislation would affect."

 In fact, the way both of these two put it, the industry was practically BEGGING for this legislation to get passed in order to get started on implementing all of these new regulatory safety measures.

I guess the questions everyone is failing to ask...

Why do the gas companies need to have regulations passed in order to install new safety devices and make needed upgrades?

Why might industry want the government to perform more safety inspections? Don't the gas companies do their own safety inspections?

Isn't the idea that the government regulators are supposed to be a back-up for when industry fails to adequately protect itself? Or are the gas companies trying to save money by having this type of legislation passed to shift the burden of costly safety inspections onto the government, aka the taxpayer?

Isn't this then also a direct subsidy for gas companies? Do Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann support government subsidies for gas companies?

Don't gas companies have a stake in this? In other words, are gas companies responsible for the damages that their equipment causes, or are their federal regulations that help shield them from full indemnity?

Apparently nobody is asking these questions. If the press did their job and asked these questions, I could draw tighter conclusions.

So what is the conclusion?

It seems to me that the gas industry supports the legislation for one or both of the following reasons:

1) Current regulations are not only inadequate, but are actively PREVENTING gas companies from enacting the safety measures in the new legislation. Often times regulations are so specific that they don't allow for newer safer technology to be implemented until a regulatory bill goes through Washington D.C. Of course this requires expensive lobbyists. This can severely hamper innovation within the industry being regulated and it is very common. This is one reason why I oppose federal regulations, they just aren't agile enough to allow industries to innovate and provide the greatest possible safety measures. They are, however, a great way for big corporations to increase their monopoly powers and ensure that their technology is entrenched into the system.

So if this is actually true, then what happens in 10 years when new safety devices exist which cannot be implemented due to the current legislation being passed? Does the government really need to keep up rules and regulations for every industry and constantly adapt to the new technology coming out? Is science and engineering really a strong suit of Washington D.C.? I certainly don't think so.


2) The gas industry wants the legislation passed because it is a subsidy from the taxpayers in the form of costly pipeline inspections.


Maybe Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann need to consider the reasons why Senator Rand Paul is against the "notion" of government regulations before they put together these type of hit pieces.

Obama Prefers Foreign Intervention to Keeping Grandma Alive

"This is not just a matter of Social Security checks," Obama also told CBS News. "These are veterans' checks; these are folks on disability and their checks. There are about 70 million checks that go out."

When CBS anchor Scott Pelley followed up by asking, "can you guarantee as president those checks will go out on August the 3rd?," Obama said: "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd, if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/07/Obama-Debt-dispute-threatens-Social-Security-176615/1

Who would have thought, back in 2007, that if elected Obama would have us involved in wars in 6 different countries while simultaneously threatening to take away benefits from seniors and the disabled? I was one of his harshest critiques back in 2007, going so far as to call Obama a "neocon", yet I don't think I imagined this sort of blatant disregard for the people of this country.

Ron Paul Crushes in New Hampshire Debate

Here is a video summary of Ron Paul's responses during the debate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LkRoHH-kg



In the very beginning Ron Paul came out strong against the Federal Reserve. This helped to really separate himself from the rest of the pack of conservatives who, unlike four years ago, are starting to sound a lot more like small government constitutional conservatives and less like pandering, seething war hawks. Not that there wasn't a bit too much anti-Muslim rhetoric for my tastes coming from some of the other candidates, but there were certainly less scaremongering references to 9/11, Al Qaeda and WMD capabilities of various Middle Eastern countries this time around.

He then gave the crowd a huge dose of reality with his facts and positions on Medicare while also calmly discussing workable transitions that include a curtailment of our over reaching foreign policy. His foreign policy rants were all-time and reminiscent of the speeches he first gave the Republican establishment on this subject during the '08 primaries.

Ron Paul then hit one out of the ballpark with his stance on eminent domain which no doubt brought up his relative standing with the local New Hampshire populace.

At the end of the debate they asked him about who on stage he might pick to be in his cabinet. Ron Paul looked around carefully and replied that he would have to do some more interviewing of the candidates as none of them have given him any indication how they feel about the Federal Reserve and he didn't know how they all felt about a non-interventionist foreign policy.