romney: that s the problem, ad thinthe last four years he cut licenses on federal waters in half. obama: not true. romney: how much did you cut them by? obama: have produced more oil. romney: how much did you cut on federal land in federal waters? obama: there were a whole bunch of water companies. romney: you have a question and the question was how much did you cut. obama: i m happy to answer the question. romney: and it is? obama: a bunch of oil companies who had these on public lands that they weren t using. so what we said was we can t just sit on this for 10, 20, 30 years, decide when you want to drill, when you want to produce, when it is most profitable for you. these are public land so if you want to drill on public land, you use it or you lose it. so took away those leases so it can actually make a profit. romney: production on government land is down 14%. obama: what usa is not true. romney: it is absolutely true. neil: all right, that was a heated exchange over w
and this is the national debt just hit $16 trillion. this brings no pride or cause to celebrate to the american people. nor should it to any member of this body, our friends in the senate or in the white house either. that is approximately $51,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. it doesn t have to be this way. i want to point you to a few of the president s own words we can t afford to mortgage our children s future on another mountain of debt. where are we today? today, we are at a place that is far worse than four years ago. not $15 trillion, but $16 trillion in debt later, we have not seen anything significant from this white house in an effort to reduce our debt. instead, all we hear is new programs that are going to require more taxpayer dollars and not an effort to ri rein this out-of-control spending. we want to focus on jobs. this is the number one issue facing the american people right now. we need to get america back to work. and this body right
political playbook. we have the two smartest mind in politics. we have a lot of excitement and uncertainty could that is right. is getting a little wet now. it has been blustery. even if it doesn t hit tampa, we are worried about the starting anywhere along the gulf coast. they cannot afford it. they will go with the full convention. if you had 100 percent 100 miles per hour wind hitting biloxi, we all know what happened in 2008. the republican players and the convention in st. paul were desperately worried about it so soon after katrina. the split screen is not something that they want to invite. they want to have the romney speech. that is really the guts of this convention. he has to be nominated. everything else, obviously, is not as important as that. in late august come in tampa, there are a lot of republicans saying, what the hell were we thinking? and some people are trickling in today. the barricades are all set up. they are setting up for the big s
tell you this is the top worry they have. it is the one thing that congress has not passed. he has been working at this four year and a half or so, bringing all these committee chairs and bringing all these issues worked out, trying to get a bill that could pass. they are at the end of the opportunity to do something this year in the senate, so this is why they are doing it. you wrote about rival factions working on the bill. who are they? the main group that sponsors the bill on the floor, they are senator joe lieberman, senator rockefeller from west virginia, senator collins from maine, and senator feinstein from california. they are committee chairs or in the case of senator collins the top republican on the homeland security and governmental affairs committee. they have got the white house endorsement, the backing of senator reid. they have an interest in seeing some standard put in place on the industry. the second group is an number of top senate gop members, john m
most importantly, helping them to gain greater cohesion, working with the political opposition to develop a common platform, to develop a syrian derived transition plan. this is crucial. how is change going to happen in syria? the way it will happen is if you can get parts of the inner circle a round of saw to begin to defect. to do that, they need the assurance parts of the inner circle around assad to begin to defect. they can be part of a new syrian government. it is important for them to hear that from the political opposition and to feel that minority rights will be protected and so forth. working the political dimensions of this is the most important piece and that is what the administration has been focused on from the get go. move on to israel for a secondary when the president went to cairo in june 2009 and delivered a very important speech to the arab world, is there any thought now that he made a mistake by not going on to jerusalem at that time, which is just