Posted on 05/02/2010 12:16:54 PM PDT by Matchett-PI
20 April 2010: An oil rig rented and operated by BP in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, killing 11 workers.
21 April 2010: All 115 workers are evacuated from the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig.
22 April 2010: The Deepwater Horizon collapses into the sea and sinks.
22 April 2010: President Obama delivers a speech on Wall Street to advocate more government intervention in the country's financial sector, but offers no reforms for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which helped precipitate the 2008 meltdown. He also delivers a speech regarding the contributions of Earth Day to environmental awareness.
Meanwhile, 200,000 gallons of oil are spilling daily.
23 April 2010: President Obama blasts the Arizona governor, state legislators, police officers and residents for backing federal laws that prohibit illegal immigration.
23 April 2010: The oil continues to flow.
24 April 2010: The president delivers his weekly radio address, which focuses on further regulation of Wall Street. He also calls upon certain segments of his original supporters -- African-Americans, Latinos, Hispanics, and women -- and asks them to mobilize for political action.
24 April 2010: Efforts to contain the spill are hampered by lack of resources and difficult weather.
25 April 2010: President Obama interrupts a weekend getaway to meet with the Rev. Billy Graham in North Carolina.
25 April 2010: Oil spreads across the gulf and heads toward the Louisiana shoreline.
26 April 2010: President Obama appears in a "Vote 2010" video, distributed by his political action wing Organizing for America, which serves as a stark appeal to blacks and Latinos -- specifically -- for their votes in November.
26 April 2010: The Coast Guard warns that the spill could become one of the worst in United States history.
28 April 2010: The President holds a rare, impromptu press conference on Air Force One, addressing "questions on the Arizona immigration law, the financial regulation bill and other issues." Obama also prepared to make his second nomination to the Supreme Court and warns of a "'conservative' brand of judicial activism in which the courts are often not showing appropriate deference to the decisions of lawmakers."
28 April 2010: large pools of oil are spotted close to the Louisiana shore line.
29 April 2010: the White House Flickr Feed is updated with a photo of the President meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and senior administration officials, including National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones, which indicates that they are urgently working the issue of the oil spill.
29 April 2010: Meanwhile, local officials, the Coast Guard and private citizens continue their efforts to prevent damage to the Louisiana coastline.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Perhaps if the oil breached the Louisiana levees, then caught on fire, and then turned New Orleans into a Dresden-like inferno, the President would stop campaigning for a couple of days and actually pay attention to his own, personal Katrina. Even The New York Times has noticed, decrying the President's lackadaisical response. But I'm guessing that somehow, someway, it's all President Bush's fault.
bttt
NRO Planet Gore
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore
05/19/10 02:00 PM bttt UPDATE from 9:30 AM below.
Confirmed: Florida Tar Balls Not From BP Spill
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/55814/confirmed-florida-tar-balls-i-not-i-bp-spill/greg-pollowitz
May 19, 2010 2:00 PM By Greg Pollowitz
Washington Post has the details here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/19/AR2010051901429.html?hpid=topnews
<>
Where’s the Spill Headed Next?
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/55789/wheres-spill-headed-next/greg-pollowitz
May 19, 2010 9:30 AM By Greg Pollowitz
AP:
WASHINGTON – Scientists are anxiously awaiting signals about where a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico may be heading, while containment of the looming environmental catastrophe proves elusive.
With fears growing that the gushing well could spread damage from Louisiana to Florida, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate panel Tuesday that his agency had been lax in overseeing offshore activities and that may have contributed to the disastrous spill.
“There will be tremendous lessons to be learned here,” Salazar said in his first appearance before Congress since the April 20 blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 people.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told another committee that the growing size and scattershot nature of the spill were creating “severe challenges” in containing it and cleaning it up. He called it more complicated than any spill he’s ever seen.
“What we’re basically trying to do is protect the whole coast at one time,” Allen said.
Watching MSDNC yesterday, they seemed to lead off each hour with the story of tar balls that had washed up in the Florida Keys and were hyping this as evidence of the spill’s impact, although it’s unlikely that they’re actually from the BP disaster. I’m not trying to minimize the impact of what’s happening, but honest reporting is what’s needed. Not hype.
05/19/10 09:30 AM
I never thanked you for the kind comments. So thank you, mia. I do appreciate it.
BTTT
Where are the news stories?
About Those Oil Rig S.W.A.T. [S.W.O.T.] Teams…
http://www.redstate.com/vladimir/2010/05/23/about-those-oil-rig-swat-teams/
The ‘cozy relationship’ meme is a lie and a slur on the reputations of some good people - both in government and in the private sector.
Posted by Vladimir
Sunday, May 23rd at 10:29AM EDT
7 Comments
With great fanfare, President Obama dispatched Interior Department “S.W.A.T Teams” to all 29 active deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Their charge:
Perform a thorough, complete drilling inspection of each deepwater rig.
Key on the BOP [blowout preventer] test time frame, leaks and resolution, discrepancies, and repairs.
Make sure well control drills were performed as required by 30 CFR 250.462. What’s that? You missed the results?
Well, you came to the right place.
From a May 12 press release from the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command: http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/548791/
MMS has completed its inspection of deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and no major violations were found. … The inspections of deepwater drilling rigs found Incidents of Non-Compliance (INC) on two rigs. Those violations were corrected and no other violations were found. To view the inspection report, click here. http://www.doi.gov/deepwaterhorizon/upload/05-11-10-MMS-Deepwater-Horizon-Rig-Inspection-Report.pdf
[emphasis added]
I’ll recap to save you the trouble.
Twenty-nine rigs were inspected. Twenty-seven were INC-free. Evidence of the “cozy relationship”? No, I imagine that these inspectors went loaded for bear.
Two rigs received a total of four INCs; one of them received three.
The rig with one INC was the Development Driller II, one of the Transocean rigs drilling a relief well for BP at MC 252. Paperwork revealed that proper blowout preventer testing procedure was not followed. BOPs are tested every 14 days, and the tests should alternate between the main and the backup activation panel. DD II function tested the backup panel, but conducted the pressure test from the main twice in a row.
Not a trivial violation, but not one that should be ignored, especially under the circumstances. It’s what operators call a “good INC”.
The other rig:
The Transocean Nautilus working for Shell, received three Incidents of Non-Compliance:
A warning INC for having some flammable material [I heard it was a paper coffee cup. - ed.] in the scrap metal bin of the safe welding area. Corrective Action Taken: the material was removed at the time of the inspection.
A warning INC for having a 6-inch x 12-inch hole [in the deck grating, a step hazard] by the mud pump suction pipe. Corrective Action Taken: additional grating was place over the hole.
A warning INC for having expired eye wash bottles. Corrective Action Taken: the eye wash bottles were replaced.
Few large-scale industrial operations could withstand the level of highly-charged scrutiny involved in these inspections and come away with such a clean bill of health.
Where are the news stories?
Palin accuses Obama of being in bed with big oil
AFP on Yahoo ^ | 5/23/10 | Andrew Gully
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100523/ts_alt_afp/usoilpollutionenvironmentpalinobama
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Right-wing darling Sarah Palin accused US President Barack Obama on Sunday of leading a lax response to the Gulf of Mexico spill because he is too close to the big oil companies.
The former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, who champions off-shore drilling, criticized the media for not drawing the link between Obama and big oil and said if this spill had happened under former Republican president George W. Bush the scrutiny would have been far tougher.
“I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to president Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration,” she told Fox News Sunday.
More than 3.5 million dollars has been given to candidates by BP over the last 20 years, with the largest single donation, 77,051 dollars, going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Palin suggested this close relationship explained why Obama was, “taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, and sank two days later. Ever since, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil, perhaps millions, have been spewing each day into the sea.
The resulting slick, now the size of a small country, threatens to leave Louisiana’s fishing and coastal tourism industries in tatters, ruin pristine nature reserves, and cause decades of harm to the ecology of fragile marshes that are a haven for rare wildlife and migratory birds.
The Obama administration has been forced to defend its response to the disaster as some Republicans have sought to portray it as their Katrina, an allusion to president Bush’s mishandling of the response to the 2005 hurricane that devastated Louisiana.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs mocked Palin’s suggestions that Obama was somehow in bed with big oil because of 2008 presidential campaign contributions.
“Sarah Palin was involved in that election, but I don’t think, apparently, was paying a whole lot of attention,” Gibbs said.
“I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally. We proposed a windfall profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge for gasoline.
“My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country.”
However, Gibbs did make it clear that reforms must be carried out to make sure that the incestuous relationship between oil firms and government regulators highlighted by the current disaster ended once and for all.
“BP will pay for every bit of this,” he said. “We have to figure out and make sure that the relationship that is had with government and oil companies is not a cozy relationship as the president said.
Gibbs also said there was no comparison with Katrina.
“If you look back at what happened in Katrina, the government wasn’t there to respond to what was happening. That quite frankly was the problem.
“I think the difference in this case is we were there immediately. We have been there ever since.”
Palin, who quit the Alaska governorship after serving less than half of one term, famously promoted the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!” that rallied supporters while dismissing possible environmental impact of off-shore drilling.
Her detractors switched the line to “Spill, baby, spill!”
Excerpt of the above was posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 5:01:37 PM by NormsRevenge here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519595/posts
<>
Comment:
“I bet he has an army of political hacks now trying to figure out how to get these oil companies to pay for his new program so he can permanently change the shape of the US” ~ plain talk
bttt
BP was ALREADY doing it for Obama because they were told that “the future” was in “carbon trading” schemes and “green energy” alternatives.
Read on:
Blame BP [Chris Horner] 05/02/2010
I hope to elaborate later I’m wrapping up two weeks on the road promoting Power Grab but it seems to me the issue with the recent oil-platform explosion and subsequent leak issue is BP, not offshore drilling.
Offshore drilling has a very good track record in the past few decades and especially recently; BP has a terrible one. The Deepwater Horizon incident is consistent with only one of those track records.
Like Enron and indeed, in close cooperation with Enron on the “global warming” rent-seeking BP got distracted from its core businesses and spent its energies getting into solar ventures and carbon-trading schemes, and otherwise losing the plot of an energy company. The absurd re-branding to “Beyond Petroleum” (really? your balance sheet doesn’t quite agree) speaks volumes.
They thereby also lost focus on these operations and implicitly told their best people that the future did not lie there.
And for a decade we have seen BP facilities blowing up with human and environmental consequences all over the place.
The newsiness of this spill is testimony to its aberrant nature. The issue today isn’t offshore drilling so much as it is the company that, in violation of all laws of probability, continues to be involved in a preponderance of its various industries’ high-profile workplace tragedies.
More: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=106#106
41 posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 7:09:31 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2519595/posts?page=41#41
Documents show BP chose less-expensive, less-reliable method for completing well in Gulf oil spill
sun-sentinel ^ | 11:55 a.m. EDT, May 23, 2010 | By Kevin Spear
Posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 5:30:19 PM by dennisw
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519610/posts
Oil company BP used a cheaper, quicker but potentially less dependable method to complete the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon well, according to several experts and documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
But that engineer and several others said that, had BP used a liner and casing, it would have taken nearly a week longer for the company to finish the well with rig costs running at $533,000 a day and additional personnel and equipment costs that might have run the tab up to $1 million daily.
“There are clear alternatives to the methods BP used that most engineers in the drilling business would consider much more reliable and safer,” said F.E. Beck, a petroleum-engineering professor at Texas A&M University who testified recently before a U.S. Senate committee investigating BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico.
He and other petroleum and drilling engineers who reviewed a log of the Deepwater Horizon’s activities obtained by the Sentinel described BP’s choice of well design as one in which the final phase called for a 13,293-foot-long length of permanent pipe, called “casing,” to be locked in place with a single injection of cement that can often turn out to be problematic.
A different approach more commonly used in the hazardous geology of the Gulf involves installing a section of what the industry calls a “liner,” then locking both the liner and a length of casing in place with one or, often, two cement jobs that are less prone to failure.
The BP well “is not a design we would use,” said one veteran deep-water engineer, who would comment only if not identified
He estimated that the liner design, used nearly all the time by his company, is more reliable and safer than a casing design by a factor of “tenfold.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
Comment:
Accurate IMHO. Experts are dissing the well design at The Oil Drum: What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? Posted by aeberman on May 21, 2010 - 10:28am http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6493
3 posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 5:36:18 PM by Royal Wulff
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519610/posts?page=3#3
EDITORIAL: Biased reporting on Climategate — Associated Press coverage raises eyebrows
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/28/biased-reporting-on-climategate/
[.......snip........]
Comment:
Andrew30
I did not notice the Associated Press as being one of the funders of the CRU. Perhaps the CRU get enough from British Petroleum and Shell Oil and other companies interested in demonizing and then taxing CO2 to make the Nuclear, Liquefied Natural Gas and Food to Ethanol businesses more cost competitive. From the CRU web site, look at the bottom of the page. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
From the Climate Research Units own web site you will find a partial list of companies that fund the CRU. It includes: British Petroleum, “Oil, LNG” Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, “Food to Ethanol” The United States Department of Energy, “Nuclear” Irish Electricity Supply Board. “LNG, Nuclear” UK Nirex Ltd. “Nuclear” Sultanate of Oman, “LNG” Shell Oil, “Oil, LNG” Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, “Nuclear” Tate and Lyle. “Food to Ethanol” KFA Germany, “Nuclear” And the climate scientologists have the audacity to claim that the skeptics get funding from ‘Big Oil’!
bttt
WALLACE: “.... How do you think the Obama administration has handled the oil spill so far?”
PALIN: “...the oil companies who have so supported President Obama in his campaign and are supportive of him now I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration.”
“Big Oil”, BP, AP, et.al., fund the ‘RAT agenda big time: [snip]
Here:
Transcript: Sarah Palin on ‘FNS’
www.foxnews.com ^ | Sunday, May 23, 2010 | Sarah Palin & Chris Wallace
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2519737/posts?page=8#8
Lab Chosen To Test Oil Spill Water & Animal Samples Has Ties To BP
AllGov ^ | 5/22/2010 | Noel Brinkerhoff
Posted on Sunday, May 23, 2010 9:25:17 PM by Laissez-faire capitalist
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2519699/posts
To find out how much damage the Deepwater Horizon accident has caused the environment, experts are collecting water samples from the Gulf of Mexico for testing. But the federal government is requiring these samples to be tested at ONE laboratory (TDI Brooks International’s B&B Laboratories) which does work for the petroleum industry, including BP, owner of the offshore oil platform that blew up and sank.
In addition to this potential conflict of interest, federal officials have mandated that BP gets to hire the companies that collect data as part of efforts to rescue wildlife covered with oil.
“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” said Taylor Kirschenfeld, a Florida environmental official...
The New York Times also reported that a BP official, Sylvia V. Baca, currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management in the Department of the Interior, giving her oversight of offshore drilling.
Conflict of Interest Worries Raised In Spill Tests (By Ian Urbina, New York Times) [Link at URL].
...
(Excerpt) Read more at allgov.com ...
Sarah Palin, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile fault Obama administration’s response to oil spill
The Orlando Sentinel ^ | May 23, 2010
Posted on Monday, May 24, 2010 12:29:26 AM by 2ndDivisionVet
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/2519769/posts
Sunday morning guests from Sarah Palin to Donna Brazile found fault with the way the Obama administration has responded to British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
On “Fox News Sunday,” former Alaska Gov. Palin said she was still a “big supporter of offshore drilling” despite the spill. She wondered about President’s Obama’s “connection” to the oil companies.
“I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there is any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration,” Palin told Chris Wallace.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs shot back: “Sarah Palin was involved in that [2008] election, but I don’t think apparently was paying a whole lot of attention. I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally. We proposed a windfall-profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge more for gasoline. My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country.”
On ABC’s “This Week,” Cokie Roberts and Democrat strategist Brazile said Obama wasn’t doing enough about the spill.
“The oil is gushing and we’re being lied to by how much oil is gushing … and the administration has now named a commission,” Roberts said. “Now this is what you do when you really don’t have anything else to do: You name a commission,” she said. “That’s not going to stop the oil.”
Brazile said: “One of the problems I have with the [Obama] administration is that they’re not tough enough.(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.orlandosentinel.com ...
Jindal: We won’t wait for federal permission to start building sand berms
AP ^ | 5-23-10 | AP
Posted on Monday, May 24, 2010 12:15:40 AM by joinedafterattack
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519764/posts
With oil pushing at least 12 miles into Louisiana’s marshes and two major pelican rookeries now coated in crude, Gov. Bobby Jindal says the state is working on chain of sand berms that would skirt the state’s coastline.
Jindal visited one of the affected nesting grounds Sunday. Jindal and officials from several coastal parishes say the berms would close the door on the oil still pouring from a deepwater gusher about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.
The berms would be made with sandbags. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also is considering a broader plan that would use dredging to build sand berms across more of the barrier islands.
(Excerpt) Read more at wwl.com ...
The U.S. Coast Guard and BP were slow to make decisions and delayed supplying necessary clean-up equipment even as oil washes onto the state’s fragile marshland, Governor Bobby Jindal said.
Jindal said he was “frustrated” by the slow pace and said the delays were “unacceptable.” He called for the Coast Guard to delegate more authority to local leaders to protect their own parishes.
In one example of delay, parish presidents had put in an urgent request to the Coast Guard on May 3 for 5 million feet (1.5 million meters) of hard boom to stop oil before it hits the coast but so far only around 800,000 feet had been supplied, Jindal said.
He also raised the pressure on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to grant permission for the construction of a series of sand levees and said he was “passionate” about the issue.
“Silence on this plan is the equivalent of saying: ‘we will just clean it (oil) out of the wetlands,’” he said, arguing that the dangers of inaction were far greater than possible risks of associated with construction.
(SO CALLED) Experts on the coast including conservationists and academics have deep doubts about the plan, arguing it would take too long to implement and could alter the Mississippi River delta’s balance between fresh and salt water.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64M2L220100524?type=politicsNews
14 posted on Monday, May 24, 2010 1:09:48 AM by kcvl
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2519764/posts?page=14#14
Louisianans take oil cleanup in own hands as frustration mounts
May 23 06:00 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.936e144ccc4a23348cdcc0aec488b9ea.cb1&show_article=1
Frustrated Louisianans took the oil cleanup into their own hands Sunday, heading out in boats to lay protective booms around a bird sanctuary threatened by a black tide.
“We’re going out to Cat Island right now where a thousand pelicans are breeding,” Billy Nungesser, president of the coastal Plaquemines Parish told AFP.
Some of the birds at the island sanctuary have already been coated in oil and have carried it back to the nests, he said.
While they’re not trying to rescue the oiled birds for fear of doing more harm than good, Nungesser said local residents refused to stand idly by as more oil lapped up into the fragile wetland.
“Our crews are out there laying the absorbent boom,” he said, adding that he couldn’t understand why BP and the Coast Guard weren’t doing more to protect his coastal parish.
In neighboring Jefferson Parish an emergency manager commandeered all 40 boom-laying boats hired by BP which were sitting idly at Grand Isle as oil sloshed onto beaches.
Bloggers and callers to a radio talk show cheered the dramatic action late Saturday night, promising the official their votes if he sought elective office.
Earlier in the day, WWL-AM radio station repeatedly replayed a taped interview in which a Coast Guard official in Terrebonne Parish took the blame for not ordering BP to do more, then flippantly said: “I guess I’m just slow and dumb.”
Frustration has reached a boiling point as more delays stymie efforts to cap a pipe which has been gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico from the wreckage of a BP-leased rig some 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana since April 22.
Favorable winds and currents have kept the bulk of the massive slick offshore, but the heavy oil began to seep into coastal marshes on Wednesday and some 66 miles (106 km) of coastline and 30 acres (12 ha) of marshes are now affected.
The amount of oil being suctioned up to a waiting boat from a mile-long tube has slowed to 1,360 barrels a day from the previous average of about 2,100, BP said Sunday.
Meanwhile, a “top kill” attempt to plug the leak by injecting heavy drilling mud into the pipe which was originally set to begin Sunday has now been delayed to Wednesday.
The delays have fueled the outrage of locals, who are already wary of relying on government as a result of the chaos which followed after Hurricane Katrina tore through coastal Louisiana in 2005.
“Stop at any of the coffee shops here at Plaquemines Parish and people talk about the spill with disbelief,” Nungesser said.
“Number one, you hear — ‘there is no plan to stop it’. Second, we keep hearing this oil could come ashore for a year or longer even if they do seal the well.
“After Katrina, we knew what we were dealing with and went to work and things got a little better each day. With the spill, every day it gets a little worse and we don’t know what the worst-case scenario is going to be.”
Charter boat captain Brent Roy gloomily pondered BP’s failed efforts to seal the gushing well and government attempts to curb the damage.
“Until they kill that leak, I just don’t think the clean up is going to be very effective,” Roy said. “It just seems fruitless.”
Noting that June 1 — the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season — is only one week away, the boat captain worried how a major storm would impede BP’s contingency plan to stop the leak by drilling a relief well.
“Even after (hurricane) Katrina, we knew things would eventually get back to normal,” Roy said. “With the spill, we’re just unsure.”
AUDIO: WWL Radio Personality Garland Unloads On BP and Feds
Garland ^ | 5-23-10 | WWL Radio
Posted on Monday, May 24, 2010 12:37:45 AM by joinedafterattack
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2519774/posts
You need to add the timeline mentioned here in this video by Gov Jindal. http://www.necn.com/05/23/10/Jindal-tired-of-waiting-for-approval-to-/landing.html?blockID=240006&feedID=4215 He states that the administration sat on his request over 2 weeks without reply.
BTTT!
Thanks for that important link!
I’d be glad to, but not my thread...I’m just the jackass that had the first quick comment...
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) speaks at a press conference. Behind him are Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and David Vitter (R-La.), and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.
POLITICO
Strain shows as W.H. responds to spill
By: Glenn Thrush and Carol E. Lee
May 24, 2010 08:33 PM EDT
Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, has a blunt message for Barack Obama: Cut out the middleman, Mr. President.
“There’s been a failure of leadership on all levels. Who in the hell is in charge?” said Nungesser, who is prodding the administration to back a controversial plan to build sand barriers to block the oil.
“I’m a big Republican, but the president spent two hours with me and really impressed me. ... He really seems to care, but I don’t think he’s getting good advice,” he told POLITICO. “I don’t think they’re telling him the truth about what’s going on around here. He needs to get more personally involved.”
Until this week, the Obama administration had largely managed to deflect responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon disaster onto others vowing to keep a “boot on the throat” of BP, while slamming lax oversight on the part of federal regulators during the Bush administration.
But now, with crude lapping into the bayou, even Obama’s defenders have turned critical. A White House that prides itself on operational competence and message discipline has been frustrated by an environmental catastrophe it can’t predict, can’t control and can’t out-message and the strain is showing.
A majority of Americans, by 51 percent to 46 percent, now disapprove of Obama’s handling of the crisis, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll. An Associated Press-GfK survey taken less than two weeks ago showed that only one-third of those polled gave Obama low marks for his response.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs surprised reporters at the daily briefing Monday by announcing the president would answer questions about the spill in person Thursday the first presidential news conference Obama has given in months.
Earlier, Louisiana officials, as they watch helplessly while oil fouls fragile marshland, destroying plants and killing birds and fish, also stepped up their calls on the Obama administration to push aside BP and take charge of the cleanup.
“We have been frustrated with the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little, too late to stop the oil from hitting our coast,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said during a Monday news conference at Port Fourchon with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
“BP is the responsible party, but we need the federal government to make sure they are held accountable and that they are indeed responsible. Our way of life depends on it,” Jindal said.
Gen. Russel L. Honore, who helped oversee the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, didn’t criticize the administration’s actions but suggested the federal government could assert more control by declaring a national disaster in the Gulf.
“My assessment is, at this point this is a national disaster,” Honore said. “This could be a generational impact on the Gulf.”
But back at the White House, Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, the man in charge of the U.S. response, shot down the idea of a federal takeover of the crisis walking back Salazar’s threat over the weekend to “push out” BP if it doesn’t cap the well quickly.
“To push BP out of the way, it would raise the question, to replace them with what?” Allen asked. “They’re exhausting every technical means possible to deal with that leak. ... I am satisfied with the coordination that’s going on. ... There’s no reason to make a change.”
Even though Obama has criticized the government’s relationship with BP as too “cozy” over the years, Allen refused to blast embattled BP CEO Tony Hayward. “I judge personally my communications with anybody, including Tony Hayward, and I would characterize when I tell him something, he says he understands it; he follows up,” he said.
The real problem, Allen said, is that only big oil companies and not the federal government have the capacity to fight a broken pipe a mile under water.
Allen’s appearance came as the administration moved to counter negative perceptions of its response, even as BP’s effort to cap the gushing mile-deep pipe foundered and the company tangled with the Environmental Protection Agency over the use of chemical dispersants to break up the spill.
Obama held a briefing call Monday morning with the four Gulf Coast governors to offer a status update and underscore his personal commitment to the issue.
“I think what the president wanted to indicate today was that he is on it, which is reassuring, but we all need to stay on it, and I think that’s very important,” said Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for Senate this fall as an independent. “I think that part of being on the call was, in some sense, a response to what was happening in Louisiana.”
Gibbs told reporters there are currently no plans for Obama to return to the Gulf Coast but his itinerary could quickly change later this week, after the president flies to California in support of Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer on Tuesday, another White House official later said.
During the president’s visit three weeks ago, Nungesser huddled with Obama and eventually sold the president on a plan to position boats to monitor the first shore wave of crude from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Since then, Nungesser said that when he’s proposed other fixes, he’s been shunted to a procession of unresponsive bureaucrats.
Jindal on Monday also criticized the administration for not quickly supplying local responders with all the materials they need to erect booms around endangered wetlands and is pushing the Army Corps of Engineers to support the plan to position berms, made of backfilled sand, in the path of the oil.
The Corps is currently considering the scheme, but administration officials dismiss the notion that it’s a quick fix, estimating the berms could take between six and nine months to build.
Honore also said there is more that can be done. He urged the administration to start collecting money from BP immediately, set up a streamlined system for individuals filing claims and explore the possibility of assessing daily fines against BP for each day the well isn’t capped.
“That money can go into a trust fund, and we draw from that until we fix this problem,” he said. “Now I think we need to have them start paying upfront for the potential loss. And we need to start drawing that money down now and don’t wait for BP to decide when they’re going to start paying.”
Gibbs said BP is already paying for the cleanup, though he said he didn’t know how much. As for Honore’s idea about declaring a national emergency, Gibbs said none of the states adjacent to the spill have requested designation as disaster areas, adding, “There are different tools for different types of events, and [the Stafford Act governing disaster declarations] isn’t the right tool here.”
Elgie Holstein, an oil-spill expert with the Environmental Defense Fund who served as an adviser to Obama during the 2008 campaign, suggested that Obama add one more element to his response plan: a pledge to create a government-run fleet capable of dealing with the next blown well.
“We as a country have not put in place a system for regulating or responding to complex and costly frontier drilling,” Holstein said. “The Obama administration simply does not have at its disposal the kind of expertise and equipment” to cap the well.
“The frontline of response lies with oil company field generals and not the administration and that puts the president at a disadvantage,” he added.
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