Obama And The Gulf Oil Spill

Now we know what happens when Obama takes a call at 3 a.m.

Comments

[Bubby Hussein, Hillbilly Sheikh]

"Sir, Governor Jindal is on the phone, he says he is rethinking his position regarding "big government".

[Brian W. Schoeneman]

"Tell him to call me again in three weeks. I'm going back to bed."

[TomPaine]

"Tell Bobby to get off his anti-federal and
-environmental ass and get to work protecting his own environment that he was so willing to trash until BP screwed up. And while he is at it, get Mary Landreu and Diapers Vitter to help him shovel the shit they have created!"

[HisRoc]

Interesting. Disaster relief is the primary responsibility of local and state governments with backup assistance from the Federal government. (That is one of the resasons that the National Guard is under the command of the state governor until Federalized.)

Regulation of off-shore energy exploration is the sole province of the Federal government.

And yet, when Katrina hit New Orleans, the Democratic mayor and Democratic governor were blameless while the delayed relief was all Bush's fault. Now that we have a major oil spill, it is not Obama's fault but the Republican governor and the Republican and Blue Dog Democrat senators who are responsible. Oh, that's right! MMS's failures can still be blamed on Bush after a year and a half of Obama appointees being in charge.

What a crock of hypocritical bullshit.

[NotJohnSMosby]

Bush unable to get water into a major American city for five days vs. an oil leak 5,000 feet down at the bottom of the ocean. Which problem is easier to tackle?

[strongerthandirt]

It's not like Obama has worked hard on this issue. He's gone golfing 4 to 5 times during the crisis. Yes, presidents need to be on vacation, but think -- has Obama been out front on any issue? He laid back on health care legislation, inserting himself into the debate at the very end (and causing chagrin among legislators when he would suddenly pronounce that the bill had to have a certain element). He did not make any moves on Afghanistan until many months had passed and he started getting bad press about it. The same is true of financial regulation -- the White House apparently wants to scuttle derivatives regulation but has it been a major part of the process? He has given a bunch of speeches and hosted fundraisers during the crisis. Could he have done more here? Who knows, but I am not impressed by his work ethic. He seems to be in perpetual campaign mode. Remember, during his tenure at Harvard Law Review he produced next to nothing. I'm beginning to view him as a lightweight, all talk and not much ability to work on a tough issue.

[HisRoc]

NJSM,

Where do you get that five days crap? Katrina made landfall at 6:10 AM on Monday, August 29th. According the reports at the time, 3,800 Louisiana National Guard troops were on duty 24 hours later, delivering food, water, and other supplies to the Superdome. They had provisioned the Superdome before the storm with 3 days of food and water for up to 15,000 people.

The problem was that Mayor Nagen ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city the day before the storm hit, but didn't provide the transportation resources to do it or request state or Federal assistance. (Remember all those pictures of New Orleans city buses sitting flooded in a city lot after the storm?) Further, although the Superdome had been designated as the emergency shelter for those who couldn't evacuate, thousands of people went instead to the Convention Center where there was no assistance or aid planned.

Meanwhile, BP Exploration received its permits to begin drilling the deepest off-shore well ever attempted from the Obama Administration and the Deepwater Horizon began drilling in September 2009.

Yeah, it was all Bush's fault.

[TomPaine]

"What a crock of hypocritical bullshit."

You have the gall to say this in spite of the fact that this project was approved and reviewed regulatory-wise under then Bush Administration.

Perhaps you might as well blame all the oil industry regulatory problems also on Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Harry Truman, FDR, Woodrow Wilson or even Grover Cleaveland and James Buchanan!

So much for your
proclaimed "independent voter" Staus!

[HisRoc]

Sorry Tommy Paine. The permit for the Deepwater Horizon was issued on April 6, 2009. Under existing MMS regulations, a permit request review must be completed within 30 days. So, the project was reviewed and approved under the Obama Administration.

Nice try there, Demo partisan bigot. The first time that you can actually admit that a Democrat was wrong will be when you can join the liberated ranks of us Independents. Until then, you are hostage to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and condemned to repeating their talking points. It must really suck to be you.

[NotJohnSMosby]

Hisroc, you're about as independent as the rest of the teabaggers. Just the worst of Republican fucktards, nothing more and nothing less.

I would love to meet some of the junior officers who served under you. I'm sure they would have some very enlightening stories to tell us about the "liberated independent" that you are.

[Sam]

As USCG Thaddeus Allen pointed out earlier this week, the extraordinary thing about this particular disaster which makes it so anomalous and unprecedented in comparison with the rest of our history in disaster management is that there is zero access for any human being to the disaster site due to its depth; furthermore, because the United States Government does not own a single technological resource capable of both deploying to that depth and operating with the degree of sophisticate mechanical articulation necessary to accomplish anything useful, technological access to the disaster site is entirely controlled by the people responsible for causing the disaster through their negligence.

Any blame for not having the foresight to develop such a resource would have to be shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as by the career bureaucrats who work for the executive branch; I've certainly never heard anyone suggest that we should build such a contraption.

But with respect specifically to President Obama: anyone who wants to criticize specifically his actions in response to the disaster must also be able to suggest as an alternative what you think he *should* have done, bearing in mind that the executive branch doesn't have a single technology at its disposal that is capable of translation an idea into an action as well as the fact that we couldn't have funded, developed and deployed such a platform even if President Obama had directed it immediately after inauguration.

Barring your ability to propose a viable alternative: you're just another ridiculous f*cking blowhard, aren't you? In which case, keep it to yourself. We already have one Ken Salazar. We've no need for another.

[HisRoc]

NJSM,

At least I served. Did you, "fucktard?"

[TomPaine]

HisRoc

Yes, the MMS under Obama did grant unwisely grant an
exclusion of the Deepwater Horizon project from a NEP environmental impact
statement on April 6, 2009.

What you conveniently neglect to mention was that in 2007, the Bush Adminstration revised the MMS regulations to note that a deepwater spill would not reach the shore 200 miles distance and would not involve over 4,600 gallons of crude oil.

Also, in April 2008, the MMS revised its regulations to allow an oil driller to avoid filing a plan for handling a major spill from an uncontrolled blowout.

The MMS also internally warned, but did not publish, a 2001 study demonstrating that there was no proof that blowout preventers would
work in deep water.

Clearly Obama made a major mistake in appointing Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary given Salazar's close ties to the oil industry. Also Obama made major mistakes in appointing Lisa Birnbaum to head MMS and Sylvia Baca (Deputy Asst. Secretary)
neither of whom had either broad management or technical skills to handle MMS problems.

Finally, Obama made a major mistake in not getting rid of incompetent and corrupt Bush political level employees in a number of agencies(Interior, including MMS, DOJ,
and elsewhere. The public-employee whistle-blowing group, PEER, has noted that "for the most part, the Obama team [at MMS] is still the Bush team" and "other than
a thin layer of [Obama] political employees ... MMS offices are still run by managers who were promoted during the Bush years, in many instances promoted for basically violating the law and . . . their conduct hasn't changed."

For example, the incompetent and corrupt Chris Oynes, who recently retired when the BP oil spill shit hit the fan.

By the way, which administration wrote the
statute/regulation you mentioned that required
the MMS to compete a permit request within 30 days?

It must really suck claiming to be a political independent when you spend most of your time on blogs defending
Republican Party incompetence and corruption.

Now, I count at least three
criticisms of Obama and Salazar as well as a
criticisms of two
Democratic political
patronage employees!

[Scout]

HIsRoc - do you think the problem here is that the petroleum engineers aren't Republicans?

The approval of this well has nothing to do with why we have a disaster on our hands. It was a well like a lot of other wells. The same people who approved this one probably approved wells in the Clinton and Bush administrations also.

George Washington could have been president and the response would not have been any different. The only political implications of this catastrophe relate to how we prepare for the next one and how we get ourselves off the oil habit. I haven't seen any real indication that either dominant party has a real grip on these issues.

[TomPaine]

Scout:

More likely than not the petroleum engineers were Republicans masquerading as HisRoc style "political Independents".

[HisRoc]

TP,

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. He's a Republican." Sorry, but Obama owns this mess for the reasons that both you and I have outlined, regardless of whether I am an Independent, Republican, or Tea Partier. So stop trying to change the subject.

Scout,

No, this is not "a well like a lot of other wells." This is the deepest well ever attempted. Despite TP's deception tactics, the application for this well was submitted and approved during the Obama Administration. If those approval time lines were unreasonable, then the Obama Administration had plenty of time to suspend or revise them. Just like Obama has had a year and a half now to close Gitmo, to veto all major legislation that was not posted on the Internet for five days before Congress voted on it, and to keep dozens of other campaign promises that he has either forgotten or is ignoring because they are in the "too hard" box.

[Etymologer]

Obama - old swahili word meaning "wimp".

[change]

HidRoc,
You still trying to teach pigs to sing??

I admire your persistence, but some uber libs are too far gone to teach; they will cover for this administration of children until November 2012. Now we have Pelosi singing the old warn out song “this is all Bush’s fault”… go figure…

[Not Bubby]

LMAO @ the "5 days to deliver water" bullshit. Typical of NJSM. Make shit up and hope nobody notices.

Douchenozzle.

[HisRoc]

change,

I've always enjoyed that analogy--"it is a waste of time and it annoys the pig."

One of the corollaries is "mud wrestling with a pig: everyone gets dirty, but the pig enjoys it."

I have this belief that there still is a moderate middle ground in American politics, one that rejects the extreme, asinine positions of both the conservatives and the progressives. After all, the largest group of American voters are those who self-identify as Independent.

The problem is that you encounter those whose dogmatic adherence to either the left or right makes them unable to conceive of a moderate Independent. They are trapped in the mindset that you are "either with us or against us."

Such people have limited reasoning skills and no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. And it must really suck to be them.

[HisRoc]

NJSM,

We are still waiting for your reply? Did you ever serve, "fucktard?"

I'm betting that the only uniform that you ever wore said, "Cub Scouts of America" on it.

[TomPaine]

"Despite TP's deception tactics. . . ."

Since when do facts that do not fit your own political biases become deception?

I stated that the Obama Administration failed to have BP complete the required environmental impact statement before BP started drilling; the fact is that a lot of other regulatory approval actions preceded the EIS requirement.

Unfortunately, for the cause of your own
political bias, those events occured during the Bush Administration!

[TomPaine]

HisRoc:

"If those approval time lines were unreasonable, then the Obama Administration had plenty of time to suspend or revise them."

I'm having trouble trying to figure out whether you are a pathological liar or simply stupid!

Have you ever heard of the (federal) Administrative Procedures Act?

If not, you might be interested in learning (provided that you are actually capable of learning) that federal regulatory revisions require many months fof publication and review before revisions can be made and implemented under this statute.

This is not like the Army where someone in charge can unilaterally "suspend" regulations; by the way, I doubt that someone of your rank would have been eligible to suspend any thing but disbelief.

[HisRoc]

Oh, Tommy. You are a sad case, not to mention the pathological liar that you accuse me of being.

Yes, I know all about the APA. Guess what? Under Section 558, the Administration can suspend any license or approval previously issued if it can demonstrate that there is a risk to the environment or general welfare. Do you suppose drilling the deepest off-shore well ever attempted in pressures where a blowout preventer had never been tested would meet that standard?

[change]

Young tommy,
Remember the oft loved refrain “elections have consequences” that the Obambi administration so fondly repeated time and again as they spent trillions of our grandchildren’s money and ruined our healthcare system???

Well consequences cut both ways, but this group of adolescents do not seem to understand that with power comes responsibility; and you (my senile friend) only exacerbate the ignorance as you attempt to validate their continued errors. Take note, even some of your liberal friends are finally seeing the light on this issue.

Your “Nero fiddles while Rome burns”.. or more on point; your “Obambi plays golf and vacations while our gulf is destroyed”.

Face it… you fell for the rhetoric like so many others, stop swallowing the Obambi’s blue pill (although you should keep taking your other little blue pill) and admit you were snuckerd.

[change]

I wish a blessed memorial day to all, especially to those who have served our country well (even you young tommy, enjoy your pureed hamburger).

[TomPaine]

TooFrom TPM to HisRoc and change:

"To quote cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, the radical-wrong's ideology is:

'empathy-free, self-interest maximizing, with disdain or even hatred for those seen as lesser beings.'

Lakoff notes that this wrong-wing ideology is self-reinforcing: a system that essentially promotes that values-free system itself. It mocks altruists, "do-gooders," and "bleeding hearts," as if those were actually bad things. If the trend with college students continues, eventually a majority could take such a jaded view of others. For sixty years the fringe has orchestrated a movement to change the way we view our responsibility to one another. From Nixon to today's GOP, they've nixed the common good. Now the fringe has grown from less than 10% to roughly 25%. And the 25% is holding our nation hostage to their Party of No "leadership." Now we see the result of values-free, self-adulating, self-aggrandizing destructiveness. The radical wrong is destroying everything in its sight. We are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Democrats cannot have it both ways."

[TomPaine]

HisRoc:

Not quite the way you proclaim:

The simple fact is that outside of the technical information provided by the Oil drillers (BP in this case), MMS has no specific expertise

TITLE 5 > PART I > CHAPTER 5 > SUBCHAPTER II > § 558

Imposition of sanctions; determination of applications for licenses; suspension, revocation, and expiration of licenses

(a) This section applies, according to the provisions thereof, to the exercise of a power or authority.
(b) A sanction may not be imposed or a substantive rule or order issued except within jurisdiction delegated to the agency and as authorized by law.
(c) When application is made for a license required by law, the agency, with due regard for the rights and privileges of all the interested parties or adversely affected persons and within a reasonable time, shall set and complete proceedings required to be conducted in accordance with sections 556 and 557 of this title or other proceedings required by law and shall make its decision. Except in cases of willfulness or those in which public health, interest, or safety requires otherwise, the withdrawal, suspension, revocation, or annulment of a license is lawful only if, before the institution of agency proceedings therefor, the licensee has been given—
(1) notice by the agency in writing of the facts or conduct which may warrant the action; and
(2) opportunity to demonstrate or achieve compliance with all lawful requirements.
When the licensee has made timely and sufficient application for a renewal or a new license in accordance with agency rules, a license with reference to an activity of a continuing nature does not expire until the application has been finally determined by the agency."

In spite of the Republican-led corruption of MMS, has no specific technical expertise, outside of the information provided by the oil driller, is available to the MMS bureaucrats; In this case the so-called BP experts certified that any oil spill would be no more than 4,600 gallons and could not travel the 200 miles to shore (a lie); they also certified as to the fail safeness (another lie) of their procedures.

Please continue defending BP: Your own life must really suck repeating this kind of BS! But as a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Army and a beltway bandit, you probably have been doing this BS all of your working life!

[Jack]

"To quote cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, the radical-wrong's ideology is:

'empathy-free, self-interest maximizing, with disdain or even hatred for those seen as lesser beings.'"

Sure. That must be why the conservatives donate more time, money, and blood to charity than liberals do.

" For sixty years the fringe has orchestrated a movement to change the way we view our responsibility to one another."

Damned right. It is OUR responsibility, not the government's.

[TomPaine]

What various studies on "self-proclaimed independent voters" show:

" . . . the vast majority of self-defined Independents are not neutral but partisan—a bit bashful about admitting it, but partisan nevertheless. Once this is recognized, the proportion of the electorate that is truly neutral between the two parties is scarcely different now than from what it was in the Eisenhower era. Moreover, because these "pure Independents" now are less inclined to vote, their share of the voting population is, if anything, a bit smaller now than in the 1950s and 1960s."

Source: Wolfinger, The Promising Adolesence of Campaign Surveys," Campaigns and Elections American Style, 1995, pp. 184-185.

Shorter conclusion: Most self-proclaimed
"independent voters" are partisan liars!

[TomPaine]

More BS on relative charitable giving (by Arthur Brooks) or "Three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics" from Jack:

Who's More Charitable - Liberals or Conservatives?
By Michael White December 21st 2008

To be honest, I don't really care about the answer to this question. But read this Kristof NY Times column, and see if you're convinced of the answer. It's time to practice your critical thinking skills - questions you should ask about the claims presented in this column are exactly the sorts of questions you should ask when you read a press report about any statistics-based study, especially medical research.

Here is the basic result Kristof is talking about:

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Rather than taking that at face value, several questions should immediately pop into your mind:

1. Is this because more conservatives go to church, and give moeny to their church? For example, Mormons (who tend to be conservative), give 10% of their income to one of the wealthiest churches on the face of the planet, and one which does considerably less humanitarian work around than many churches (liberal and conservative) with much less wealth. Most of us wouldn't count everything you give to your church as "giving to charity," so you should ask yourself if the studies Kristof talks about take church giving into account.

And in fact, Kristof notes that "According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do."

But maybe that's because conservatives are already giving a big chunk of change to their church (which may really go to substantial charitable work, and not just to the general operating expenses of the church), so there is less money left over to give to non-religious charities. Thus excluding "donations to all religious organizations" may not be a fair comparison either.

2. Are conservatives richer, and thus able to give more to charity? Kristof notes that "measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes," but we're given no information on how giving relates to wealth. When I'm spending 80% of my income on basics like food, housing, and transportation, I have less money to give as a percentage of my income. If I only spend 30% on the basics, I'm free to give a larger chunk to charity.

3. How much is related to say, issues of urban vs. rural environments, instead of liberal/conservative? One claim is "People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often." Is that because there are more volunteer opportunities in smaller towns than in big cities? I grew up outside of the fairly small city of Ithaca, NY. I volunteered for the local fire department there, something I could never do now in St. Louis because the fire department is all professional.

There are obviously more questions to ask, and it's not clear at all, at least from the newspaper story, what we should really believe. It may very well be that, once you control for all of the confounding factors, liberals really are stingier. At least as Americans we're giving 11 times more of our GNP to charity than the French, as Kristof notes.

But wait - the French pay a lot more in taxes to provide many services which are provided by charities in the US. So who really is more generous?

[change]

Young tommy,
To quote Chomsky who has forgotten more than Lackoff will ever know “Lackoff is a jackoff”.

[change]

Re: charitable giving

It amazes me that liberals are so ashamed of their “giving” that they must make up bogus statistics to try to show they “care”.

The last sentence in senile tommy’s post, pretty much says it all… liberals are very charitable with somebody else’s money.

[TomPaine]

chsang:

I will match my charitable giving against yours any day.

[Jack]

Here's a simple question, Tom. Just answer YES or NO. Did you contribute to the Haiti rescue efforts, or to Katrina relief?

If YES, through what organization did you contribute?

[TomPaine]

Both: Through my wife's church the American Red Cross (Katrina) ! In fact, her church has been involved in Haiti for years.

How about you!

[change]

Young tommy,
If you need validation by comparison, you “contributed” for the wrong reason.

Your really are a strange fellow, are you trying to prove yourself worthy in some degree?? For what purpose??

It all comes down to our own relationship with our creator, you need to sit with that a bit and find your way outside of degrading others in an attempt to enhance yourself.
Btw.. you are not very good at it anyway….

[TomPaine]

". . . our creator."

Not likely; my creator was my parents not some mythical supernatural creature that supposedly created the earth some 6,000 years ago in six days just about when a mythical Adam and Eve rode around on the dinosaurs that were extinct many millions of years before!

Still,entertaining fairy tales, I see!

[TomPaine]

"If you need validation by comparison, you “contributed” for the wrong reason."

Jack was the one who was seeking validation; take up your irrelevant complaints with him!

By the way, if you did have some creator outside of your parents, I suspect he would have regarded you as a highly imperfect and sadly disappointing outcome.

[Jack]

Thanks, Tom. Now, I must ask the follow-up question. If the government is better at that sort of thing, why did you not donate to the government?

[change]

Young tommy,
For once we agree, my creator knows my imperfections; however he also knows my abilities and he forgives my weaknesses.

It is becoming more clear why you are such a cantankerous old man with the mind of a child. You see your years coming to an end and you have nothing to look forward to. You see no salvation for your soul (which apparently you do not believe you have); but your true creator wishes you to find understanding and salvation.

I pity your empty existence, and pray you find truth.

[Jack]

Change, do not fear for Tom's soul. He said, "through my wife's church."

The Bible tells us that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified by the believing spouse.

[TomPaine]

Boys:

Just say your prayers as you are heading straight for the hell that religionists seem to fear.

[Jack]

As you are a virulent atheist, Tom, you must be breaking the heart of your "religionist" wife every day.

[TomPaine]

Interesting new information on the MMS approval of the Deep Horizon drilling:

"On October 22, 2007 Randall B. Luthi, Wyoming attorney, Cheney cohort and new director of MMS signed a "Finding of No New Significant Impact" (PDF) with regard to Lease Sale 206, also known as the Deepwater Horizon. This finding was the last barrier for BP to cross before plunging equipment 5000 feet under the ocean's surface, using Halliburton fracture techniques to open the well, and beginning the flow of oil which ends as an environmental and economic disaster to Gulf inhabitants. No significant impact, indeed."

By the way Jack, I am an agnostic not an atheist.