Hell our companies cannot do this and we tolerate this BS. Sink em.

Where O where did the linkey go. Oh well, Cuba and China are drilling for oil 60 miles off the Florida Coast.

Had your coffee yet, Sard? What, pray tell, are you talking about?

What?? Visit Argentina?

Your dementia is acting up. Drink some more Kool Aid.

Just for you 'Rhoid.


Cuba drills for oil off Florida
July 24, 2006
Cuba is drilling for oil 60 miles off the coast of Florida with help from China, Canada and Spain even as Congress struggles to end years of deadlock over drilling for what could be a treasure trove of offshore oil and gas.
Republicans in Congress have tried repeatedly in the past decade to open up the outer continental shelf to exploration, and Florida's waters hold some of the most promising prospects for major energy finds. Their efforts have been frustrated by opposition from Florida, California and environmental-minded legislators from both parties.
Florida's powerful tourism and booming real estate industries fear that oil spills could cost them business. Lawmakers from the state are so adamantly opposed to drilling that they have bid to extend the national ban on drilling activity from 100 miles to as far as 250 miles offshore, encompassing the island of Cuba.
Cuba is exploring in its half of the 90-mile-wide Straits of Florida within the internationally recognized boundary as well as in deep-water areas of the Gulf of Mexico. The impoverished communist nation is eager to receive any economic boost that would come from a major oil find.
"They think there's a lot of oil out there. We'll see," said Fadi Kabboul, a Venezuelan energy minister. He noted that the oil fields Cuba is plumbing do not respect national borders. Any oil Cuba finds and extracts could siphon off fuel that otherwise would be available to drillers off the Florida coast and oil-thirsty Americans.
Canadian companies Sherritt International Co. and Pebercan Inc. already are pumping more than 19,000 barrels of crude each day from the Santa Cruz, Puerto Escondido, Canasi and other offshore fields in the straits about 90 miles from Key West, and Spain's Repsol oil company has announced the discovery of "quality oil" in deep-water areas of the same region, the National Ocean Industries Association said.
Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, also has inked a deal with China's Sinopec to explore for oil, and it is using Chinese-made drilling equipment to conduct the exploration.
That compounds the frustration for U.S. oil companies and other businesses that have lobbied to open up the estimated 45 billion barrels in oil reserves and 232 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in banned drilling areas of the Gulf -- enough to fuel millions of cars and heat millions of homes for decades.
U.S. companies, which have the best deep-water equipment, cannot participate in the Cuban drilling because of the 45-year economic embargo against Fidel Castro's communist regime.
If oil is found in commercially viable quantities, Cuba could be transformed from an oil importer into an exporter, ending chronic energy shortages on the island and generating government revenue.
That prospect and the involvement of China and Venezuela in exploration activities have attracted the attention of the CIA and other national security agencies, even if congressional opposition to offshore drilling has not budged.
Sterling Burnett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, said Cuba's activities show that the quarter-century ban on offshore drilling is putting the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage at a time of increasingly scarce energy resources and record high oil and gas prices that are hampering economic growth and stoking inflation.
"Canada and even economically backward Cuba are moving forward with plans to drill in offshore areas that abut U.S. coastal waters," he said. "Since pools of oil do not respect international boundaries, it is almost certainly true that Canada and Cuba will be accessing oil that could otherwise be developed by and for the benefit of Americans."
More than half of the nation's untapped offshore oil and gas reserves lie within the Gulf, much of it within Florida's protected waters. In the latest attempt to exploit the reserves, the House last month passed a bill that would allow coastal states to decide whether to open the first 100 miles of their waters for exploration.
The bill allows states such as Florida and California to vote for a permanent moratorium on drilling but also includes a powerful enticement to allow exploration: half of the hundreds of billions of dollars in royalties and fees from drilling that otherwise would go to the federal government.
The bill's authors are calculating that the public will support drilling more when people are able to share in the revenues. That is the case in Alaska, for example, where drilling faces little opposition because each resident receives a prorated check for thousands of dollars in oil royalties each year.
Although coastal states stand to benefit greatly from the revenue-sharing provision, the Office of Management and Budget said the drain on federal revenues would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.
The White House particularly objected to extending the revenue-sharing provision to Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, which already allow drilling offshore, and said revenue should be shared only in new drilling areas.
A bill that the Senate is scheduled to debate this week is far narrower in an attempt to attract Democratic votes. It focuses on allowing drilling in a key area in the eastern Gulf thought to contain large reserves, while ensuring that Florida still enjoys a 125-mile no-drilling buffer zone.
The Senate bill's more targeted revenue-sharing provision would authorize states that already allow drilling to start earning a one-third share of royalties in 2017. The provision was added to attract support from Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, Louisiana Democrat.

Maybe the Cubans will spill some oil, it will wash up in the Keys, and can be defined as a state sponsored terrorist act?

Marines can flood out of Gitmo, seize the island, and we can put the detainees to work blowing up things so that Halliburton and Bechtel can get no bid contracts to rebuild them...very slowly.

Operation Beachfront Property Freedom?

Fish on...

Todd

"Cuba is exploring in its half of the 90-mile-wide Straits of Florida within the internationally recognized boundary as well as in deep-water areas of the Gulf of Mexico."

wow sard...your right- we cant drill for oil in cuban waters just as other countries cannot drill for oil in our waters.......boy sharp as a marble arent you? your are an uneducated ignorant war monger!!!!! why oh why, are you not in the bush administration with the rest of your ilk?

LOL I wondered what took you so long Lupo. Good to see you so alert. Sharp as a tie spike too. You should stick to words that fit in your vocabulary easily tho. Words like ilk are much too ambiguous for you to comprehend. Words like at, to, so, be and my are a better fit.

Hey Sard, I have an Idea for you next paranoid xenophobic post:

"Russians advance to within 55 miles of America's border!"
Demand line of demarkation be drawn within 27.5 miles of U.S. soil!

A ways West of there is the Kolyma Peninsula and River. Absolutely fantastic fishing. You should go try it. Since the Russians were in Alaska long before the Americans I think that would be called a retreat. Or perhaps a sellout. LOL

here's a little local color for you 'Rhoid. I bet Lupo knows of the author.


Che the 'Guerrilla Fighter'
by Humberto Fontova


Did you catch Eric Burdon on the PBS special "The 60's Experience" last month? Eric was "100 pounds of hipness in a ten-pound bag," as Dave Barry used to say. His Che Guevara shirt shamed both Carlos Santana's and Johnny Depp's. This was no measly t-shirt, either. It was a collared shirt, very elegant, with a HUGE image of the gallant Che's face on both front and back.

My entire family came rushing into the den when I exploded – not in rage – but in mirth. "WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE!" Eric was singing.

"EXACTLY, Eric!" I roared "You NAILED IT, amigo!" That was the exact refrain from 6.3 million Cubans (Cuba's population in 1959) when Fidel and Che took over.

The fiendishly clever Cuban-American National Foundation itself might have produced the show, or slipped him the song list to expose Burdon as a jackass. Che provoked the biggest political exodus in the history of the western hemisphere. Yet the thundering irony was lost on Eric, not to mention the PBS producers.

When your professor calls Che a "guerrilla fighter" he's correct, but unwittingly. The term "Indian fighter" was used for cowboys who fought against Indians right?

Well, did your history prof tell you that one of the bloodiest and longest guerrilla wars on this continent was fought – not by – but against Fidel and Che, and by landless peasants?

Didn't think so. Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba's Kulaks had guns, a few at first anyway. Had these rebels gotten a fraction of the aid the Afghan Mujahedeen got, the Viet Cong got – indeed that George Washington's rebels got from the French – had these Cuban rebels gotten any help, my kids would speak Spanish and Miami's jukeboxes today would carry Tanya Tucker rather than Gloria Estefan.

Che had a very bloody (and typically cowardly) hand in one of the major anti-insurgency wars on this continent. Eighty percent of these anti-communist guerrillas were executed on the spot upon capture, a Che specialty. For my book I interviewed several of the lucky former rebels who managed to escape the slaughter. "We fought with the fury of cornered beasts," I titled the chapter, using the phrase one used to describe their desperate freedom fight against the Soviet occupation of Cuba through their proxies Fidel and Che.

In 1956 when Che linked up with Fidel, Raul, and their Cuban chums in Mexico city, one of them (now in exile) recalls Che railing against the Hungarian freedom-fighters as "Fascists!" and cheering their extermination by Soviet tanks.

In 1962 Che got a chance to do more than cheer from the sidelines. He had a hand in the following: "Cuban militia units commanded by Russian officers employed flame-throwers to burn the palm-thatched cottages in the Escambray countryside. The peasant occupants were accused of feeding the counterrevolutionaries and bandits." At one point in 1962, one of every 17 Cubans was a political prisoner. Fidel himself admits that they faced 179 bands of "counter-revolutionaries" and "bandits."

Mass murder was the order in Cuba's countryside. It was the only way to decimate so many rebels. These country folk went after the Reds with a ferocity that saw Fidel and Che running to their Soviet sugar daddies and tugging their pants in panic. That commie bit about how "a guerrilla swims in the sea which is the people, etc." fit Cuba's anti-Fidel and Che rebellion to a T. So in a relocation and concentration campaign that shamed anything the Brits did to the Boers, the gallant Communists ripped hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their ancestral homes and herded them into concentration camps on the opposite side of Cuba. I interview several of these "relocated" families too.

One of these Cuban redneck wives refused to be relocated. After her husband, sons, and a few nephews were murdered by the Gallant Che and his minions, she grabbed a tommy gun herself, rammed in a clip and took to the hills. She became a rebel herself. Cubans know her as La Niña Del Escambray.

For a year she ran rings around the Communist armies sweeping the hills in her pursuit. Finally she ran out of ammo and supplies and the reds rounded her up. Amazingly, she wasn't executed (Che must have taken that day off.) For years La Niña suffered horribly in Castro’s dungeons, but she lives in Miami today. Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of "Women’s Studies," for a Susan Sarandon role, for a little whooping up by Gloria Steinem, Dianne Feinstein and Hillary herself.

Think about it: here's that favored theme for Hollywood producers and New York publishers – "the feisty woman." Well, they don't come much feistier than Zoila Aguila, her real name. Had she been fighting, say, Somoza or Pinochet, you can bet your last penny Hollywood and New York would be ALL OVER her story. Instead she fought the Left's most picturesque poster boys. So, naturally, nobody's heard of her.

Your professor, the fool, probably thinks Fidel and Che were guerrillas. Few fables get as much currency. Next week we'll blow that fable sky high.

Isn't it interesting that "Che the guerilla fighter" has drawn so little response from the Icon's admirers. Talk about an oxymoron, che, guerilla fighter.