Map the spill to your area of choice here. You can see a live feed of the oil spill here.
Responsibility for this disaster lies in part squarely with the Obama administration, which granted an environmental waiver to B.P. to drill the Deepwater Horizon. Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:
The President does, in fact, share in the blame. Obama inherited an Interior Department that he knew to be plagued by corruption, but he allowed the department’s particularly disreputable Minerals Management Service to party on. Last spring, in keeping with its usual custom, the M.M.S. granted BP all sorts of exemptions from environmental regulations. Ironically, one of these exemptions allowed the company to drill the Deepwater Horizon well without adhering to the standards set by NEPA. For reasons that are hard to explain, the Administration still can’t, or won’t, say exactly how much oil is leaking.
Can’t, or won’t, say how much oil is leaking. Can’t, or won’t, stop B.P. from further polluting the Gulf by using a poisonous chemical dispersant — banned in Britain — that makes damage look less by forcing the oil under water, but adds to the overall pollution of the ocean. Can’t, or won’t, enforce a stated moratorium on new offshore permits (hilariously, the Interior Department claims the problem is that Obama and Salazar forgot to put the moratorium in writing).
The fact that B.P. employees gave more money to Obama than any other candidate in their history is no doubt coincidental.
and in the case of the MMS, of no change.
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p>Salazar was a poor choice to head the Dept of the Interior and we will all pay for this.
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Folks must be hiding under their desks at MMS. There is a reason that presidents appoint during recesses and it isn’t just because the other party is going to block. That’s part of the play. The hacks can’t stand the light of inquiry. Both sides play the game.
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p>Now that the watered-down “audit the Fed” law was passed, is it any surprise that the people that have the strangle hold on the people of the United States don’t want a real audit? Could the Fed take real heat? Not the administration nor the congress want an exposé of what is happening. I shudder to think what sins are hidden.
The border plans turned into Bush. That followed the Bush war plans, Bush economic plans, Bush foreign policy plans.
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p>Now, even the jokes are from the Bush Whitehouse.
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p>Where do I get a, “I voted Democratic and the joke was on me.” bumper sticker?
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p>“Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.” –Will Rogers
I don’t agree with everything you say, at least the conspiratorial point about money (note that environmentalists gave plenty of money to Obama as well). Still, I’d agree that (1) the Obama Administration screwed up the optics of this; (2) the regulation of off-shore drilling is and has been far too light; and (3) the moratorium on off-shore drilling must be air-tight, even if it means reneging on statutory review time-frames (let the oil companies have the gall to sue over it).
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p>Also see E.J. Dionne’s short column in the Washington Post today. As usual, he’s right on point.
… is how many other industries are under-regulated. It’s like a minefield. I want the President to be pro-active disarming all the mines that are out there, but I also know that the bureaucracy can’t possibly disarm them all at once at the beginning of his term, so I can’t get crazy up in arms about our stepping on one mine (offshore oil regulation) before it was disarmed. That said, everything after the start of the emergency is very much fair game.
Still doesn’t prevent the Feds from stopping BP’s use of it simply by saying “stop,” which they did, which BP ignored, and the EPA backed off.
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p>What’s that about? Irrespective of the use of the chemical, how does BP say no? Something else going on.