President Obama has more important things to do than go to the oil spill site:
This morning, President Obama will meet with the NCAA men’s basketball champion Duke Blue Devils at the White House to honor their 2009-2010 championship season in the Rose Garden.
Keeping up the sports theme, the president and the vice president will take a photo with the U.S. World Cup soccer team and former President Bill Clinton, who is chairing the 2018 World Cup bid, on the North Portico. The White House has previously announced that Vice President Biden and Jill Biden will attend the World Cup in South Africa next month.
Afterward, the president will a private have lunch with President Clinton in the Private Dining Room.
The answer is obvious, if you’re a respected social theorist: Barack Obama hates bayou people.
In the afternoon, the President will deliver remarks on the BP oil spill and the conclusions of his ordered 30-day safety review and hold a press conference in the East Room.
“Thirty Day Safety review?”
I’m thinking it flunked.
Haha, I get it! You far right knuckleheads want to pretend that a spill by a foreign oil company, drilling with your enthusiastic, half-witted support in the Gulf (drill, baby!), without the restraint of guvmint-mandated “safety” and “environmental” controls, is the same thing as Bush’s complete mishandling of Katrina!
Good luck with that!
Obama has already been to the Gulf oil spill. Is your complaint that he is not commuting to it regularly? Brief photo-ops doesn’t preclude his getting other more serious business done. Bush was faulted not only for his non-crisis activities but for his failures to act. While I’m not ecstatic with the results by any stretch, Obama does seem to be doing what can be done, given that the US does not own any of its own equipment to work at those depths. Shame on Obama for not clearing out what appears to be the corruption and incompetence in incestuous relationships in the MMS left over from the Bush administration.
AC, DG, all Obama has done is to harangue BP. One would think that he’s be talking a little more about getting some of the equipment on hand that the federal government promised to buy.
In 1994. Never mind he’s not talking about the Corps of Engineers balking at making decisions on sand booms to prevent more of the coast from being covered in oil, or anything else like that.
No, Obama is NOT doing what can be done to help. Perhaps the best thing he can do, though, is to keep out of the way while the adults deal with the problem.
Meanwhile gulf states want emergency permits to build dikes to protect the barrier islands and marshes. They have been waiting weeks to get approval from the feds, heck of a job there Obama.
Dog Gone said:
“Obama does seem to be doing what can be done”
At least one Democrat operative disagrees with you. Vehemently and publicly.
angryclown said:
“I get it”
Obviously untrue.
“drilling with your enthusiastic, half-witted support in the Gulf (drill, baby!)”
The POTUS explained that they were drilling far off into to the gulf, a mile down into the water, and a mile down into the ground after that. Is that what “Drill baby, drill!” was all about? No. And why do they do that again?
“guvmint-mandated “safety” and “environmental” controls”
Ah, I see. The government requiring these conditions for drilling seems not to have penetrated your head. Give it time.
“Bush’s complete mishandling of Katrina”
And we never get an explanation of how it was mishandled. Chanting point.
Bush sent Coast Guard in on day one to rescue 10’s of thousands during Katrina. What did Obama due during the first…let’s say full week….of BP? He wasn’t in Poland attending a state funeral.
Y’all are being too hard on Obama. In order to take decisive action on this matter, he needed to get a more thorough understanding of oily behavior, so that’s why did the interview with Marv Albert this week. It’s all good.
Let’s face reality: politicians can’t solve the problem. Engineers are the only ones who can. Politicians could organize relief and cleanup, which some are doing. Others are using the disaster as a chance to look good for their constituents on TV by going off on BP. There will be a day of reckoning for BP, because the buck truly stops there, but enough of the endless chatter from the pols. I’m grateful that Obama is not doing much overt stuff, because as far as I’m concerned, he possesses not one skill that will help. All he knows how to do is talk.
Elect a Democrat president and congress, and the Gulf grows black with oil slicks.
Sucks to be Angry Clown.
When will Sean Penn row his boat out to plug the leak with his big, empty head?
I’d rather this oil leak was occurring in ANWR than in the gulf.
MON is right.
But what is bothering me is why aren’t they soaking up the oil with baby harp seal pelts? There is a consensus among scientists that BHS pelts are the most oil absorbant material known to man….
How are those adults working out there, bubbabutthead? They still gonna try shutting the well down by shooting golf balls at it?
I’ve tried using BHS pelts to protect the garage floor underneath the thirty-year-old Sportster, but sometimes there is just too much oil. Maybe I should stuff one in the crank.
They still gonna try shutting the well down by shooting golf balls at it?
Clowns second-guessing engineers.
The hope for change is now fulfilled.
Deegee keeps consistent with the chanting points: ‘Bush bad; The Obamassiah good.’
I’m aware that there are democrats critical of the efforts to date. The only specific suggestion I’ve seen here is for the federal government to buy some equipment that they haven’t yet bought. I have no idea what the turn around time is to do that – I rather doubt it is as simple as buying a car off a car lot. The criticism that the equipment is something we should have bought back in 1994 puts the problem over a period spanning the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, AND the Obama administration, so it doesn’t seem to be an Obama-specific criticism.
However, equipment purchase aside, I’m not clear what people believe that Obama could do on site that he isn’t doing from Washington.
I fault Obama for not having dealt with the problems in the Dept. of Interior before this and the Massey coal mining explosion occurred, allthough my understanding is that the greater resistance to effective regulation of these industries has come from Republicans.
Perhaps that will be the one positive outcome of these disasters – better safety on a go-forward basis for everyone.
I read about an extremely large spill off the coast of Saudi Arabia that relied on sucking up the contaminated salt water and oil into tanker ships, and then subsequently filtering the oil out of the salt water, resulting in a cleaner solution for the clean-up, and a high percentage of the oil being salvagable for use. I’m trying to find out more on this story, I’m trying to find out more about this particular spill and clean up, especially if the outcome was as successful as I read initially.
If this is an accurate report then there is no excuse for it not being used in this spill.
AC, DG, exactly what IS Obama doing, besides yell a few profanities and threaten BP with lawyers?
And in a regulatory group more concerned with smoking meth and viewing porn than in actually inspecting oil rigs and buying fire booms, exactly what expansion of the regulatory state can we depend on to protect us? Will it keep meth off the streets because it’s in bureaucrats’ offices, perhaps?
Reality is that if you want someone to care about their product, it helps if the person can profit from doing a good job. That’s simply not the case in DC, and this unfortunate fact should shoot down most attempts at increasing regulation.
Obama said in his exciting press conference that his admin has been in charge right from the start. All six weeks. Very concerned. Studying the problem. His only mistake was trusting the oil companies.
The smartest administration evah!
Sounds like Obama is going to do a fairly major overhaul of MMS, beginning with an important separation of duties. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole branch of the Dept. of Interior is scrapped eventually, and too late to do much good in this crisis. I would guess there is a 50 /50 chance Salazar will go. Will any of that help – it could, I’m not holding my breath though.
It will be interesting to see if the public outrage translates into something useful or not. it will also be interesting to see if Oberstar comes up with anything useful or not that is not already known.
Pay attention KR, I’m not giving either the Clinton admin or the Obama admin. a free pass either, while criticizing Bush.
The people to criticize are the levels of government that have been held hostage by the environmentalists.
Since they managed to stick the moratorium on drilling in shallow water off California and Alaska, and since the shallow reserves in the Gulf played out years ago, drillers have had to go into very deep water, with its phenomenally-difficult engineering, to find oil.
A spill like this in shallow water off California a) possibly wouldn’t have happened, since it’s entirely possible that the explosion was at least in part a function of the depth of the drilling operations, and b) would have been plugged quickly and relatively easily, since it’s the sort of thing the oil industry, including BP, have been doing for decades in shallower US water and in the North Sea.
Bozo goes to the well again to pull up Bush=Katrina. Still desperate, Boz? For the umptenth time, Katrina, in a few words- You live in a city that sits basically in a bowl, about 6 ft below sea level, right next to the ocean. A category 5 hurricane is coming, and you know it. What do you do? The rest is liberal excuses for less than intelligent choices by the people that live there and their LOCAL government.
DG, no law is going to change a culture at MMS where people ignore responsibilities for decades and smoke meth while watching porn at work, taking long lunches with those they’re supposed to regulate.
Dog Gone said:
“I’m not clear what people believe that Obama could do on site that he isn’t doing from Washington”
True. Even if the POTUS was as ‘lost in the tall grass’ as you are, he does probably know how to focus public attention on a “problem”. Has he done that here? Or can you list off a bunch of other things he has going on right now that seem just as (or more) important to him?
“Sounds like Obama is going to do a fairly major overhaul of MMS, beginning with an important separation of duties”
Wow, that will solve it. OK, you proved your point. You have no clue.
How about we pretend GWB is still President, and then _you_ try to think of what _he_ should have done (/should be doing) about this whole “oil spill mess”. Does that help? Would “we’re going to keep our boot on the neck of BP” and “Department of * Juggling Act” still cut it for you?