President Obama is obviously planning to nationalize the oil industry

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Since finding more oil here is going to make the United States more energy independent, as argued, then obviously the United States will be controlling the disposition of that oil.

Otherwise it doesn't make at that much much difference whether it is pumped here or pumped somewhere else.

So that's cool.

Go socialism! (We will have to hope the Brits don't replace Obama with the Shah.)

De facto nationalization is probably not without precedent. I would guess that the US government controlled the disposition of oil pumped in America during WWII. And WWII was a war about oil... except in that case we had the oil and Japan didn't. (Our oil embargo of Japan was what precipitated Pearl Harbor. That sounds odd today, but on the eve of WWII the US produced more than half the world's oil!)

(I am not very riled up on either side of this one but I dislike the adoption of arguments that were so easy to demolish when the other side was offering them.)