posted May 27, 2010 10:07 AM         

It has long been established in law that government can send out a deficiency notice to correct some problem or another within so many days...or else government will correct the problem and charge whomever is deficient with all the costs.

BP would have been happy to have some other experts working on this oil rig blowout in an advisory capacity or otherwise and there are plenty of other experts at other oil companies, at oil service companies, at oil tooling companies and at oil technology companies. For all I know, some of them were consulted by BP.

That has nothing to do with getting the oil burned off the surface and it has nothing to do with the EPA and Army Corp of Engineers citing pollution and other regs and refusing to permit common sense methods to be used in containing/confining the oil already released.

O'Bomber's clowns at the EPA actually attempted to get BP to stop using an oil dispersal agent to break the large globs of oil into fine particle size where it will expose more surface area to the air and evaporate.

There are insufficient skimmers and oil tankers brought to the area to skim the oil off the surface, run it through a separator and remove the oil.

In every phase of this mess, the O'Bomber administration has been lost in space and asleep at the switch.

Now, would I want these incompetent boobs in the O'Bomber administration, including O'Bomber to take over and actually run all phases of getting the oil shut off AND cleaning up the oil now washing ashore?

Hell no but the feds have the resources or have access to resources in the form of burn ships, skimmers, tankers, dredges and other equipment which they have either not deployed or under employed to the area and they should be held accountable for their failures.

Any decent mid level manager would have been on the phone lining up those resources..both government and private.. at the first sign of
oil in the water and they would have set sail for the Gulf.

posted May 27, 2010 10:17 AM         

apparently the russians have NUKED similar holes to collapse them. that would be a great solution, dontcha think? we could add nuclear waste to the whole morass.

another scientist theorizes that the hole is actually not very deep, that what is escaping is partly natural gas which lies near the SURFACE of a deposit like this, and that the darkening of the substance recently is because they have got through most of the pure oil and are now pumping a lot of MUD with it...ie the flow will cease before long and he also suggested that if they do proceed with this "top kill" it will be a gratuitous effort that makes it LOOK like they have fixed what was nearly finished anyway.

tell you what jwhop, you're a hop skip and jump away, why don't you toodle on down there and tell them how to fix it? could it be they have known for some time that they COULDN"T fix it and THAT is what is being covered up?

do you not think every expert - "real" or not - on the topic in the world has not already been on the blower to the president and other relevant parties?

posted May 27, 2010 10:34 AM         

Now we know.

Finally, Democrats blame George W. Bush for Gulf oil spill--Chris Dodd video as the blather spreads
May 25, 2010 | 2:52 pm

posted May 28, 2010 09:03 AM         

Community Organizing...which is really agitating for Marxist government down on the street corners is no accomplishment.

The reality is that O'Bomber's resume is so bare of any real world experience that no wide awake corporation would hire him for any executive position.

Now, Americans want to un-hire O'Bomber and only 42% approve of the job O'Bomber is doing. O'Bomber has managed to "accomplish" this in only 16 months in office.

May 28, 2010
When Professor Obama Meets Dirty Reality
By C. Edmund Wright

Just plug the damned hole!

That, more or less, is the leadership and direction we are getting from our President as we grapple with the oil spill in the Gulf. What else should we expect from a socialist theoretician who has never actually accomplished anything in his life?

I guess we could expect him to take credit with his daughters if it works.

This is what happens when an academic finds himself in the position of actually having to get something done. Nothing written on a blackboard or recited from a textbook or lectured from a podium will plug the leak miles deep off of Louisiana. Nothing in Barack Obama's background full of lectures and text books makes him fit for any job where getting things done is important.

Like many activities that impact our existence, drilling for oil is damned hard and damned risky and damned expensive and involves a lot of hard physical work and technical knowhow. The same can be said of making automobiles, building houses or manufacturing the heavy equipment that makes all of these activities possible. The problem is, academics unfamiliar with such work and knowhow believe their tenured cushiness and "think how" is enough.

I guess if you can Google something, you can convince yourself you can actually do it.

The only ingredient that academic theoreticians add to the equations of necessary hard jobs are ridiculous rules and regulations that make them even harder and more expensive and riskier. The oil spill in the gulf is not the result of failed enterprise. It is the result of government mandated difficulty.

In his press conference, Obama mentioned that this was a difficult project because the oil is spilling a mile under the ocean floor that is five miles beneath the water's surface. Well damn. Whose fault is that? Is this where BP wanted to drill?

Academic liberals and their friends in high places have placed such incredible difficulties in front of domestic oil producers via regulation and legislation that it is stretching the limits of what man is capable of doing just to get the stuff out of the ground. There is much easier to get oil in ANWR in Alaska, as well as the oil shale and tar sands in the west, not to mention the calmer and shallower waters all over the place off our coastlines -- yet the liberals have blocked production in all of those areas. So down, down, down BP and everyone else must go. As long as they are American or British that is.

It's enough to demand that Obama power Air Force One with solar energy or just shut up about BP and the oil industry.

The only oil we are now allowed to go for is doggoned near impossible to get to. Nothing -- and I mean nothing -- is easy to do 32 thousand feet under the surface of the water.

So now President Obama, who has clearly always aligned himself with the environmental movement that has pushed our drilling efforts into the extraordinarily dangerous deep waters, is becoming ironically victimized by that very difficulty. Try as much as he might to blame BP or the oil industry as a whole, or even the fact that we all need oil, the national finger of blame is slowly rotating right back to him and his administration's laissez faire response for the first month following the disaster.

The professor has not a clue what to do. This stuff is hard. Well doggone! You mean if drilling five miles deep and then another mile below the mud on the bottom of the ocean is hard -- then repairing a screw up in the same location is hard to do too?

Yes it's hard. Very hard. And as such, perhaps it would have been instructive for the liberal academic theoreticians and environmentalists to consider this when demanding that oil exploration and recovery be done only in places man is hardly equipped to go. Obama himself described the environment at the leak as one where "man is unable to go."

Fine. Then why are you liberals demanding that men go there in order to get oil?

Perhaps the world of the classroom is such a comfy and reality isolated environment that liberal theoreticians never stop and ask questions like that ahead of time. Ensconced in world-class campus buildings that liberal academics could not ever figure out how to build, their neat little worldview remains uninterrupted by reality.

No doubt, the reality of the energy and the pollution and the carbon footprint involved in building college and university buildings never crosses their minds as they cash their paychecks and preach against everything that makes their ivory towers -- not to mention their pay checks -- possible.

And almost everything that makes it possible is related to oil and energy production and consumption.

And it's one thing to see teens and 20-somethings who share the Appalachian campus with my daughter walk around in their liberal daze totally unaware of what built this campus in the Carolina mountains -- while they hold their car together with anti-capitalist and anti-business bumper stickers. It's quite another to have a president who ran a messiah complex presidential campaign to still be such an intellectual child -- and hell bent on running everything nonetheless.

And it's ironic that now the President is about to have his reputation further tarnished by the very difficulties he and other liberals have placed on the energy producing sector of our economy. Now the professor child is upset about a spill in his little utopian sandbox. The child is whining and pointing fingers and demanding that someone fix it. It is eating into his playtime for shooting hoops and playing golf, and is so much messier than theoretical issues.

The problem is that the child has no clue how the sandbox was built or how the pristine sand got there. He has no clue what built the house in front of it or how the lawn around it gets mowed. He really has no clue where the money comes from to make all of it possible. But sadly, the child has the keys to his little kingdom.

And liberal academic children have had way too much power for far too long. Academic children thought every American should own a home regardless of their ability to pay a loan, so they made difficult rules for the lending industry. They thought Americans should want and Detroit should build little green cars, so they made life difficult on the popular and profitable SUV models. They thought unionized government employees should be able to retire early and have unlimited healthcare benefits, so they wrote these into contracts that are now ruining state budgets.

And now this. The idea that we must go six miles deep to find our oil is more liberal theoretician environmental groupthink. The problem is, this very idea is now boomeranging back and devastating our environment and a good chunk of the gulf economy with it. And the liberal academic theoretician is finding out that solving these very real problems is very hard indeed. Everything is, 32 thousand feet down.

Or maybe not. Just plug the damned hole.

posted May 28, 2010 11:18 AM         

[1]

quote:

---

Barring an actual divine intervention-styled miracle [if you're a lightworker, or if you're in with some friendly space brothers, please get busy], it’s only a matter of time before the sludge gets into the Loop Current and then the Gulf Stream. We could be seeing this oil on the beaches of Key West, of Maine and the coasts of England and Western Europe and as far away as West Africa.

*

Oceans are not stagnant ponds; they are dynamic systems, and what happens in any ocean can affect what happens in any other.

• Yet another confrontation involves witnessing how the technology we trust so well can run out of control in a moment. The blanket assurances of safety we are given are almost always lies. This is difficult because we want to be told that it's safe. In my long reporting career as an environmental journalist, I've watched people practically beg to be lied to, then gamble their lives, and those of their children, on that lie. I have watched once-honest people, confronted with a difficult truth, morph into liars, and flee into becoming participants in the coverup.

  The psychology is complex. Once a student editor refused to print my articles about a toxic situation involving PCBs on his campus. He said he was afraid he would go to hell if he published my articles (he was Catholic). The next time I saw him, he was working as PR man for General Electric, specifically on the issue of the PCBs they had dumped in the Hudson River.

  If we want to know why this kind of stuff happens, we need look no further than moments when we have a choice to accept truth or deception, and then contribute our power one way or the other. Often there is the equation, "If I accept this truth, what else do I have to accept?

• 
  The chemical [dispersant] is made by a corporate ally of BP called Nalco Holdings, whose stock jumped on the news that BP would be buying all of its available Corexit supply.

  Nalco, in turn, used to own a company called Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT Labs, for short). And who were they? Well, they were one of the moral lessons of our times. When you wake up in the morning and take a shower using antibactierial soap or brush your teeth with flouride toothpaste or apply sunscreen, you are using chemical ingredients -- present in nearly every packaged product -- that have been safety-tested by supposedly independent testing labs, one of which was IBT.

  Through the Sixties and Seventies, IBT Labs was in the business of producing thousands of fraudulent studies 'proving' that the chemicals contained in every product in your home are safe to be used on your skin, and that of your children, and your dog; and safe for your liver and kidneys and hormones and immune system. Who was affected? In hearings called by Senator Ted Kennedy, one official wryly testified: "everyone who washes" (unless of course you use Dr. Bronner's soap).

• So now we have Nalco itself, the sponsor of this lab, creating the chemical that's now being dumped into the Gulf, to deal with another chemical flooding out of the Earth uncontrollably. The two are mixing and they will have what is called a synergistic effect: they make a brew of new chemicals with unknown effects. The EPA has ordered BP to use a different chemical. BP is still using Corexit. Welcome to Atlantis.

  ---

posted May 28, 2010 11:19 AM         

2]

quote:

---

It's glaringly apparent that BP has exhausted its best engineering ideas, created roadblocks to local solutions and become not just the source of this horror but its enabler. BP refuses to share information on the extent of the spill in order to limit its liability, even as Democrats struggle to crack Republican obstruction to raising the liability cap. Growing cries for the government to seize the operation, similar to those that demanded it take control of the big banks, may be naive as well. The government is too broken to attend to this emergency, due not only to lack of technological know-how, but also to generations of corporate control.
*
In recent decades, predatory capitalism built on politically protected exceptions to the law has ensnared the American economy. Year-by-year giant enterprises have grown more complex and smug, sidestepping regulations designed to control them. Exxon, BP and Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs, WellPoint, Monsanto and other giants are now too big to fail -- and too big to be held accountable, protected by legal loopholes and political cover.
*
After the BP explosion, the White House immediately suspended new drilling, ordering a federal review into offshore oil and gas safety issues, to be completed this week. Americans expected the curtailing of permits, but -- loophole -- that only applied to new projects. Old projects continue as planned, including proposed exploratory drilling in Alaska's fragile Chukchi Sea. Additionally, Obama established, by executive order, a bi-partisan committee to investigate the spill, warning that it must not impede "any ongoing or anticipated civil or criminal investigation." But it will take an outraged citizenry to demand such an outcome.

Bush and Cheney -- oilmen both -- replaced the Department of Justice policy of corporate criminal prosecution with a 'deferred prosecution agreement' that defaults to civil suits, imposing fines for transgressions rather than jail time. BP is one of the 'serial offenders' that took full advantage of Bush's DoJ policy to get out of serious legal jeopardy. In Corporate America, money controls and resolves everything.
.
.

Sunlight illuminated the lingering oil slick off the Mississippi Delta on May 24, 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image.
.
.
.
Factor that in, as you wonder where BP's arrogance comes from. Last week, after BP sprayed more than 700,000 gallons of a Nalco dispersal agent, producing a deep toxic cloud that decimated sea life, the EPA gave the company 72 hours to suspend use of the Nalco agent or describe in detail why other dispersants fail to meet environmental standards. BP refused to stop using the Nalco dispersant or to describe other products on grounds that "releasing its full evaluation of alternatives would violate its legal right to keep confidential business information private." Loophole to the rescue, leaving Obama's agencies in search of another to counter it.

---

quote:

---

Establishment politics has become the stronghold of corporatism. This didn't happen overnight. While both parties are complicit, Reagan began the push to restore unfettered capitalism, and Democrats have been playing defense ever since. With each succeeding administration, ideology has been served by converting presidential appointments into 'burrowers' -- civil service employees. Bush was particularly adept at this, beginning conversions early in his tenure. Some of his ideologues remain in the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, handing out drilling permits and waiving environmental impact reviews.

Obama's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, hired a former BP executive as his deputy, claiming he needed her expertise. Private industry and government quickly inbreed without independent regulatory agencies. Indeed, the Texas laboratory that the government hired to analyze the impact of the Gulf spill is also employed by BP. Is there such a thing as conflict of interest, anymore?

Over a year ago, the Inspector General's Office reported that the Department of Interior "has never had and currently operates without a scientific integrity policy.'' Salazar's fault? Obama's? Thanks to decades of conservative pressure, government regulations and disaster planning that might have prevented or mitigated the Gulf emergency were long since lost to privatization, leaving the crooks in charge of the crime scene.

When the Coast Guard removes reporters from beaches at BP's orders, it is because BP's authority over the clean-up process has been deemed necessary. Only big oil employees can fix what big oil breaks, much as only big bankers can remediate the rules they bent to shake the world market and empty our pockets. Meanwhile, the Congressional system puts its members on the block to be bought, and we have to wonder about the Judicial branch as well. With commerce as king and the Almighty Dollar as God, we got just what we paid for.

Obama's battles in the first eighteen months have revealed that conglomerates control us, privatization has left us vulnerable, and the rule of law has failed us. A perfect storm of corporate negligence has the entire nation's attention, and what comes next depends on the will of the people. The notion that what's good for the private sector is good for America is only valid until we decide it isn't. We're staring our dysfunction squarely in the eye now, a shift of public awareness we've been waiting for. "No, we can't" -- the mantra of the business class -- isn't an option we can live with anymore.

---

posted May 28, 2010 02:11 PM         

and those cars the author's kids are driving, which are obviously powered by oil, and less obviously get about half OR LESS the mileage your average european car gets, that must be the fault of regulation as well, right? i wonder what could be holding up american production of gas miser cars? the law or the need to justify more supply?

i love the way BP is excused criminal negligence and inability to fix its mess while obama is blamed for not fixing it...who exactly are supposed to be the experts in this field?

in a case which affects the whole world i think it is excusable to "breach" private industry's right to keep its business secret. in fact it should be mandatory at this point.

and anyone who thinks the price of gas is high because the oil companies are not making any profit should be relieved to hear that BP posted $5BILLION profit for the first quarter of this year. unfortunately i suspect this means their head honchos didn't get to walk with billion-dollar bonuses booHOO.

i feel so sorry for the private business enmeshed in this story of political ineptitude. POOOOORRR BP.

a radio host read off a letter authored by shell oil applying to drill in the arctic. promising how much safer it is to work in subzero temperatures in the case of accidents, and how they have a response team in place to come to the rescue within an hour of something like this happening THERE. soo reassuring. but i did NOT hear them lobbying for shallower drills or admitting that HUMANS might find it a little more difficult to work a rescue op in subzero...

wotcha reckon? give them the job? to me it sounds eerily like BP's confidence going into THIS rig.

posted May 28, 2010 02:51 PM         

These clowns have also managed to block drilling on land.

posted May 29, 2010 10:47 AM         

These are the dithering hand wringers whose only solution to any problem...no matter how pressing...is to do a study, impanel a commission or some other time wasting bureaucratic nonsense...instead of solving the problem.

There are thousands of people waiting to get started on the Gulf cleanup...washing the oil off beaches, out of marshes and off animals or laying out barriers to keep the oil off the beaches...but, they can't get started because they haven't had their mandatory "drug test".

If I had to guess which group are more likely to be drug users, I would choose the know nothing Socialist Bureaucrat class and not those who are waiting for "drug tests".

Nevertheless, something good is going to come out of all these problems...some of which were either caused by the Socialist Bureaucrat political class or whose solutions are being impeded by federal bureaucrats.

Increasingly, the states are telling the feds to F-off; to get the hell out and stay the hell out of states business.

It seems some in state government are actually reading the United States Constitution, especially the 9th and 10th Amendments and the Preamble thereto and are coming to the realization that the Federal Government did not create the States but rather, the States created the Federal government...and gave the Feds only enough power to carry out the specified, enumerated duties of the Federal Government. The rest of the power being reserved to the States or to the people.

Let the whining, moaning, screeching and shrieking of the feds begin. Oh wait, it already has began when Arizona passed a law to deal with illegal aliens which the feds have let invade the United States.

May 29, 2010
Enemy of the States
By Cicero

The federal government appears to be becoming more a parasite than a protector to the several states that organized its creation. The state of Louisiana has two enemies at present: One is an immense oil slick, and the other is a federal government doing its utmost to make matters worse. While the oil slick is lifeless (as well as life-choking) and is moved by wind and wave with no course of its own, the federal enemy is willfully obstructionist, uncaringly incompetent, and hopelessly uncoordinated.

The people and government of Louisiana have prepared an emergency plan to protect their marshes and bayous from the floating sludge: a chain of barrier islands made of sand dredged from the shallow bottom of the Gulf. The sand barrier would hold the oil offshore, preventing it from destroying the marshes and wetlands, and allow for a much easier cleanup of the oil by catching it on relatively straight, featureless sandy levies -- as opposed to attempting to clean oil from the labyrinthine bogs, swamps, and marshes of Southern Louisiana's Bayou Parishes.

Alas, bureaucracy and bureaucrats prevent the people from implementing their plan. A permit is required from the Army Corps of Engineers, but the permit must be reviewed and commented on by other government agencies, such as the EPA. Changes to the draft will be required, and approval sought, restarting the process. Meanwhile, after more than eleven days of byzantine bureaucratic fiddling since the plan was submitted by Louisiana, the oil continues to wash ashore, and the State is left to deal with destroyed fisheries, ruined wetlands, and lost jobs. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic square dance continues: Permits and federal training are required to clean up the oil already ashore, and volunteers dare not attempt to clean a bird or amphibian of oil for fear of draconian Federal repercussions. The people of the Sovereign State of Louisiana have a right, and a duty, to protect and defend their homes, their environment, and their livelihoods. Federal incompetence and obstruction are hampering their efforts to do any of those.

The State of Louisiana needs to disregard any and all federal interference at this point. The men and equipment are in place, and Governor Jindal needs to take control of the situation, begin dredging his barrier islands, and begin vacuuming the sludge already ashore. The federal government has no apparent interest in acting with speed to resolve this issue. At the end of the day, the bureaucrats will still have cushy government pensions and pleasant offices in suburban Maryland; they won't have to live with the consequences of their dallying and empire-building like the watermen of Louisiana will. The political opportunists will use a worsening disaster as capital to impede oil exploration efforts, when their very interference forced exploration so far offshore and so deep as to make drilling so difficult and risky. The governor has said he will start the dredging, even if it means going to jail himself. If he really offers leadership like that, there are probably a hundred thousand watermen, shrimpers, fishermen, and assorted bayou boys in Louisiana who would gladly take his place at the Bastille.

The State of Arizona also faces two enemies: The army intruders crossing an unsecured border is one, and the federal government that refuses to secure it is the other. One enemy has many faces, drug running, human trafficking, ruined desert habitats, crime, kidnapping, and national security concerns among them. When the crime and cost resulting from that unsecured border became too grave and the federal government steadfastly refused to do its duty to secure the border and protect the citizens of Arizona, the state rightfully took matters into its own hands. It is now beginning to feel the wrath of the second enemy.

The courts will play out decisions of constitutionality and supremacy of federal law, but the reality on the ground is that a dangerous situation existed, one that threatened the life, liberty, and property of Americans, and something had to be done. Again, the federal government is willfully obstructionist and incompetent when it comes to securing the border. Border patrol agents need to wait for the Parks Service before they can enter the parkland and preserve what makes up the vast majority of the Arizona border area, leaving huge gaps where drugs and people swarm north. Most recently, John Morton, the assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has stated that his agency may not even process illegal immigrants referred by the state of Arizona due to the controversial law, a position backed by Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Few of the political elite have any interest in securing the border; many of them are pandering for votes and voters, and their campaign donors want an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Just as in Louisiana, the people on the ground -- the ranchers, business owners, and citizens of Arizona -- will reap the consequences of Federal indifference and irresponsibility.

Louisiana and Arizona are suffering abuses and usurpations at the hand of a distant central government that cares not for the safety and happiness of their people, nor does it care to execute the few inconvenient responsibilities assigned to it in an inconvenient and forgotten Constitution. This is a distant central government indifferent to all matters beyond its own expansion and continued election, a government so engorged that it cannot move with alacrity or decisiveness.

posted May 30, 2010 06:51 PM         

This one looks like a fecking Monet.

Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who

The point is how is this going to be cleaned up??? Who's going to pay for it??? Will the area ever recover???

posted May 31, 2010 12:23 PM         

you are right of course. i really couldn't care at this point who has done what. we need to clean it up and if the taxpayer has to start the ball rolling so be it. blame and costs can be allocated afterwards though i would expect BP to shoulder the lion's share...5 BILLIOn in profit posted at the first quarter of this year, they can stump up and plead their case for remuneration later. for now, delay in containment and cleanup is criminal.

posted June 02, 2010 07:38 AM         

June 02, 2010
Team Obama's 'Real Time' Bureaucracy
By Brian Sussman

Yesterday, the White House director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, assured "Fox and Friends" host Gretchen Carlson that the Obama administration was "making decisions in real time" regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. Browner further appeased Carlson by insisting that Team Obama had been on the leak "since day one" and that any complaints of government beadledom were unfounded. "There is no bureaucracy here," said Browner.

The Energy Czarina went on to highlight two names from the "best minds in America" club that we keep hearing about in reference to stopping the British Petroleum (BP) gusher: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Contrary to Browner's insistence, the government players involved in the Gulf oil crisis have no track record of making real-time decisions, have been thoroughly taken to task for not being on the case since day one, and have been mired in mind-numbing bureaucracy. This is because the White House and its West Wing are packed to the rafters with lawyers, politicians, and academics. These are the type of people associated with paper-shuffling, assembling blue-ribbon committees, holding hearings, and filing lawsuits -- not getting things done in "real time."

Just for confirmation, let's check the Curriculum Vitae of some of the honchos running field ops for Team Obama.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar worked as a private attorney for a few years before going to work for Colorado Governor Roy Romer in 1986. Salazar has been in government work ever since, first as Colorado's Attorney General, then as a U.S. congressman, and now as head of Interior. Not the kind of resume that would imply the ability to commandeer the stoppage of a 5,000-barrel-a-day oil leak in real time.

Next we have Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Without question, Dr. Chu is a brilliant academic, and a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. However, academicians like Chu aren't beholden by real time, either. They crave mental environments laden with deep theory and void of the stresses involved in bringing products to market. Even though Secretary Chu has had some personal interaction with British Petroleum via a grant proposal he once submitted to the oil giant (while at the University of California-Berkeley, he received the winning bid for a $500-million grant funded by BP), folks in the know tell me grant-writing works on a Gregorian calendar -- not in "real time."

We can't forget Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security. She began her career as an attorney in private practice and first came on the national scene as a lawyer for Anita Hill, who claimed to have been sexually harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Napolitano went on to become a U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration, and then Governor of Arizona. We all pray that as Secretary of Homeland Security, she is capable of real-time decision-making, but given recent breaches of security, some might say she is getting by on more luck than executive real-time resolve.

And then there is Carol Browner. She too is a lawyer who has either been on a government or not-for-profit payroll most of her life, including managing Senator Al Gore's legislative staff in the eighties and administering the Environmental Protection Agency in the nineties. Her brush with real-time decision-making may be limited to her partnership in the Albright Group consulting firm, which was the central figure in the 2006 attempt by Dubai Ports (based in the United Arab Emirates) to purchase key businesses located at U.S. ports. In that case, a real-time decision was made by a House panel to block the highly controversial deal from going through.

Finally, there's the man at the top of the government food chain: President Obama. Other than a brief stint as a private attorney, he's never known anything but not-for-profits, academia, and government work. And in keeping with that bureaucratic mindset, Mr. O came out yesterday vowing a "full and vigorous accounting" of the causes of the oil spill and unveiling a new commission he created that will pursue the trail of blame without limits.

"They have my full support to follow the facts wherever they may lead, without fear or favor," Obama said in the Rose Garden after meeting with the co-chairmen of the commission, former Florida senator and governor Bob Graham and former EPA administrator William Reilly.

The President promised that the six-month review by the commission will focus on "a comprehensive look at how the oil and gas industry operates and how our government oversees those operations." He hinted that future support for new oil drilling in the deep waters off the coast would be contingent on what the commission finds.

Pardon me, Ms. Browner, but this sounds like a load of finger-pointing, politicking "bureaucracy" here.

posted June 02, 2010 12:32 PM         

it has nothing WHATSOEVER to do with regulations pushing oil-miners to unsafe depths and EVERYTHING to do with profiteering at the expense of the environment and human life.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

posted June 02, 2010 05:47 PM         

Rabid screw loose so called environmentalists are the reason oil companies are in the deep water drilling for oil. There's plenty of oil...both on land and under the continental shelf...close in.

In the meantime, Cuba is letting contracts to China to drill in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles from the US.

Do you really think China is more safety conscious, more environmentally astute and caring than US oil companies?

Just for your information, the O'Bomber administration gave the BP/Horizon oil platform a safety award about a month before the well blew out.

Further, the O'Bomber administration waived certain safety regulations for this platform about a year ago or so.

posted June 03, 2010 08:38 AM         

This is a message to extreme “environmentalists” who hypocritically protest domestic energy production offshore and onshore. There is nothing “clean and green” about your efforts. Look, here’s the deal: when you lock up our land, you outsource jobs and opportunity away from America and into foreign countries that are making us beholden to them. Some of these countries don’t like America. Some of these countries don’t care for planet earth like we do – as evidenced by our stricter environmental standards.

With your nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you’re doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You’re not preventing environmental hazards; you’re outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous.

Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country’s energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It’s catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.

We need permission to drill in safer areas, including the uninhabited arctic land of ANWR. It takes just a tiny footprint – equivalent to the size of LA’s airport – to tap America’s rich and plentiful oil and gas up north. ANWR’s drilling footprint is like a postage stamp on a football field.

But it’s not just ANWR; it’s our Petroleum Reserve, too. As Governor Sean Parnell noted today in the Wall Street Journal:

“Federal agencies are also now blocking oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve—Alaska.

Although familiar with ANWR, most Americans are less likely to know about NPR-A and how vital it is to our energy security. Given recent developments, it’s time to elevate the position this area holds in our national discourse.

NPR-A, a 23 million acre stretch of Alaska’s North Slope, was set aside by President Warren Harding in 1923 for the specific purpose of supplying our country and military with oil and gas. Since 1976 it has been administered by the Department of the Interior, and since 1980 it has been theoretically open for development. The most recent estimates indicate that it holds 12 billion barrels of oil and 73 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In addition to containing enormous hydrocarbons, NPR-A is very close to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which means that there would be relatively little additional infrastructure needed to bring this new oil to our domestic market.

But even here, progress has been stalled.”

Radical environmentalists: you are damaging the planet with your efforts to lock up safer drilling areas. There’s nothing clean and green about your misguided, nonsensical radicalism, and Americans are on to you as we question your true motives.

posted June 04, 2010 09:43 AM         

meanwhile, i know pensacola is still a long way off, jwhop, but here it comes...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37463005/ns/disaster_in_the_gulf

posted June 04, 2010 12:17 PM         

You need to ask O'Bomber why that length of oil barrier is laying on land instead of being anchored off shore to shield the island or mainland from the oil.

A fair question it would be too...since O'Bomber says he is "totally in charge" of efforts to cap the well, prevent oil from coming ashore and cleaning up any oil which manages to get through and...O'Bomber says he has been in charge from "Day One".

While you're asking O'Bomber that, you can also ask O'Bomber why it took more than 2 weeks to get permission to build a sand barrier in front of sensitive wetlands areas...why after more than 45 days there is still equipment which was requested but still isn't on site in the Gulf and why the pre-approved plan to use fire boom ships to burn off the oil on the surface wasn't implemented.

Get back to me when O'Bomber answers those questions.

So far, O'Bomber's stock answer to every question of responsibility is "BP did it". "Bush did it".

posted June 04, 2010 09:00 PM         

Transocean lawyers are earning their daily bread with the revival of a 159 year old precedent and

quote:

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3. Unless Congress fixes things, yet another obscure law on the books will help Transocean (and BP) largely escape responsibility to these 11 families. The Death on the High Seas Act severely limits what it owes to surviving family members of those killed more than three nautical miles from shore.

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The vid of Shelly Anderson is in the quoted link. http://www.thepoptort.com/2010/06/transocean-bah-humbug.html

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posted June 05, 2010 02:00 PM         

The Congress has had more than a hundred years to bring this law current in eras of higher prices for everything...and they didn't.

Some may talk about Congress acting now to increase damage awards under maritime law but any reasonable reading of the US Constitution would not permit any changes to affect current litigation.