Someone should ask her if checked Google Earth to verify.

This seems to be yet another effort to scare the electorate using two tried and true scare items: 1) Xenophobia, and 2) national economic ruin. This is apparent even from her tone, which is Cassandraesque.

what really gets me angry is the lack of integrity by the reporter. Why can't a reporter reply to statements that are incorrect????? But maddem, why do you insists on telling us this with no facts to support your answer and where did you get your knowledge from????? It's that simple. KISS

tpm is usually really good about linking to related earlier stories. why don't these stories ever link to the dick cheney retraction, or some other evidence that this is definitely not true?

for anyone else who is looking, this is the AP story of cheney's retraction: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwl7MBs14OAtZbu1YJe8l-X7O8vAD91906B80

(kudos to the AP for calling the false story "false" instead of "controversial" or something)

A couple of responses to dnegri:

--Issuing more leases will not bring down prices now. But decision-making on oil development, including shooting seismic, drilling exploratory wells, deciding whether an area can go into production, etc., takes years. There are new projects coming on this year and next year where the go/no-go decision was made during the Clinton administration. So while it is disingenuous for anyone to say that issuing leases now is going to help prices now, it is what you do to guarantee supply for tomorrow.

--Refinery capacity actually may be in surplus in 10 years. The whole issue of the "US hasn't built a new refinery in 30 years" is maybe the most overblown issue in this debate. There's plenty of new refinery capacity on the boards in the US at existing facilities, or new plants in places like India. It's not an issue.

--How will the oil get to shore? Probably by pipeline, like they do everywhere else. This is even more a non-issue.

--Why would you release oil from the SPR now, when we face a real possibility of a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, which is precisely what the reserve was developed for? You're leading the American people to believe that it's like a buffer stock, to be opened up anytime prices get high. What do you do if gasoline hits $6? Or $7? We going to just keep unsheathing this weapon for non-strategic reasons?

--It's wrong for a politician to not tell the truth about China's activity. But the fact is the Chinese do have an agreement with Cuba for exploration rights north of the island. And it is a legitimate issue that 60 miles off the coast of the US, Chinese companies are going to look for oil, but we're going to pretend that we're just too good for that sort of activity 10 miles out. It makes our stance look even more self-absorbed than it is already.

--One last question: if drilling ruins coast lines, why would a beach house in Huntington Beach, California, where a decent canoeist could paddle out to the very visible platforms, put me back a few million to buy?

As I said somewhere else on this site, the echo chamber of the internet is at work here as well: Bill Phillips (yes, Phillips Petroleum)made a speech that said China was drilling off Cuba, which then got sent around, and keeps getting sent around, regardless of retractions, and then gets bloated into "China is drilling off our Florida coastline" and so on. What we should focus on, I think, is not that this story is circulating but rather on the policy issues that it obscures. The real effect of this story that the Chinese are not only beating us to the punch but "stealing" "our" resources is to get us to take for granted that more coastal drilling is the only energy policy we need. It's certainly the only one the Bush administration is interested in trumpeting. The story TPM should emphasize is not that the China-Cuba thing is getting repeated: of course it is. The story is that by repeating it and then refuting it, even retracting it, and *doing nothing else*, the adminstration's way of framing how we "should" think about oil policy is not addressed or transformed. (Seems to be MichaelA's point...)

I think that jking, wickning1, MichaelA and markg8 get to the crucial policy issues: nationalization of oil revenues (this is why al-Maliki can walk around handing out money), the nonstrategic use of strategic oil reserves, and the rights of individual nations to do what they wish with their resources.

Thanks to TPM posters for keeping us focused on what's important. Every time TPM brings up this "myth" it should also say something about how the myth deflects attention from the US's anomalous policy vis-a-vis revenues from a strategic national resource.