'Obama's Katrina': an Illustrated Timeline

21 April 2010: All 115 workers are evacuated from the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig.

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.

23 April 2010: President Obama blasts the Arizona governor, state legislators, police officers and residents for backing federal laws that prohibit illegal immigration.

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.

Here’s more to notice:

BP gets OK to burn off captured oil, gas at sea
AP ^ | 6/15/2010 | RAY HENRY and BRIAN SKOLOFF
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. – BP won permission to start burning oil and gas piped up from its broken seafloor well as part of a pledge to more than triple how much crude it stops from spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal authorities gave permission late Monday for BP PLC to use a new method that involves pumping oil from the busted wellhead to a special ship on the surface, were it would be burned off rather than collected.

<>snip<>

Whoooo KNEW????? Notice what I posted in my “Obama’s Katrina” thread here about a month and a 1/2 ago: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=8#8

Thursday, April 29, 2010
Could Federal Thumb-twiddling Have Led to Disaster?

Former oil spill response coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ron Gouget, says that federal officials should have started burning off oil much sooner, even immediately after the event:

Ron Gouget, who also managed Louisiana’s oil response team for a time, said federal officials missed a narrow window of opportunity to gain control of the spill by burning last week, before the spill spread hundreds of miles across the Gulf, and before winds began blowing toward shore. He also said the heavy use of dispersants instead of burning the oil has likely knocked so much oil into the water column that portions of the Gulf may be on the threshold of becoming toxic to marine life. Add in the oil spreading into the water as it rises from the seafloor, and Gouget said he expected officials would have to begin limiting the use of the dispersants.

There’s more at the link, but if Gouget is correct, then federal officials appear to have completely blown the response. What may have been a garden variety spill now has the potential to wreak havoc on one of the most productive and pristine shorelines in the country. Some experts are saying that the spill could grow into one of the worst in US history.

Why didn’t Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano use the in-situ burn procedure sooner?.....

Extra Point: Money Quote from Gouget: “This whole thing has been a daily strip tease. At first they thought it was just the diesel, then they said the well wasn’t leaking. It’s unfortunate they didn’t get the burning going right away. They could have gotten 90 percent of the oil before it spread.”

02/26/2010:

Obama’s coast guard cuts: a recipe for disaster By Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) - 02/26/10 04:11 PM ET

8 posted on Sunday, May 02, 2010 3:25:54 PM by Matchett-PI
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=8#8

Also see here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2535037/posts?page=7#7

Enamored with wind, Obama ignored drilling risks
By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent June 15, 2010
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Enamored-with-wind_-Obama-ignored-drilling-risks-96334959.html

The Minerals Management Service, which is charged with regulating offshore oil drilling, was a deeply troubled agency when Barack Obama inherited it from George W. Bush. Top MMS officials had been caught drinking, doing drugs and even having sex with oil-industry contacts. More prosaically, they accepted gifts from industry representatives and did favors for them.

The cleanup had already begun in the last months of the Bush administration, but President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar still had their work cut out for them. Not only did they have to enforce ethics rules, they had to ensure responsible management of the offshore oil platforms that are a key part of the MMS portfolio, a huge contributor to the national economy, and a continuing environmental risk.

The problem was, Obama and Salazar were more interested in pursuing their vision of a clean energy future. Under Obama, the Minerals Management Service, driven by a strongly ideological commitment to green energy sources such as wind and solar power, chose to stress “renewables” while de-emphasizing the tough and dirty work of managing the nation’s existing offshore oil wells.

“What they did essentially was divert the attention of the agency away from regulating offshore drilling and focus it on the expansion of offshore renewables,” says one well-informed Republican House aide.

It started early in the new administration. Salazar’s first departmentwide order, issued March 11, 2009, was to declare “facilitating the production, development, and delivery of renewable energy top priorities for the Department.”

Salazar chose Elizabeth Birnbaum to head the MMS in large part because of her record of environmental and green-energy advocacy. “We have changed the direction of MMS,” Salazar told the Senate last month, “by balancing its ocean energy portfolio to include offshore wind and renewable energy production.” Given the considerable size of the existing offshore oil industry, “balancing” the MMS portfolio meant putting a heavy emphasis on new offshore wind projects. “They were more into renewables offshore than they were into oil and gas,” says a GOP Senate aide who works in the area.

Birnbaum, who is so far the only Obama administration official to lose a job over the Gulf oil spill, spent an enormous amount of time working on the controversial Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. After years of regulatory wrangling, it was approved April 29 — nine days after the oil-rig explosion that set off the Gulf spill.

Birnbaum came in for heavy criticism of MMS’ handling of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Gulf oil project. The general tone of the critique was that MMS had not paid enough attention to regulating such environmentally sensitive undertakings. What received less attention was why that attention wasn’t paid, and that was because Interior and MMS were busy pushing offshore renewable energy projects.

Shortly after Birnbaum was fired, her defenders told the trade publication Environment and Energy Daily that “she had not been ordered to clean house at the scandal-stained agency, but to promote renewable energy.” When Salazar paid half-hearted tribute to Birnbaum the day she left, all he could come up with was that she had helped Interior deal with “the very difficult issues on standing up offshore wind in the Atlantic.”

Wind, not oil, was the MMS offshore energy priority. Even when MMS addressed oil industry problems, it seemed only half interested. For example, on June 17, 2009, MMS began a procedure for coming up with new rules that would “require operators to develop and implement a safety and environmental management system for their oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf.” Nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers were fighting the last war. After the sex, drugs and influence scandal that rocked MMS in September 2008, senators and representatives came up with plans to reform the agency. They proposed to turn the director of MMS — currently appointed by the secretary of the interior with no input from Congress — into a position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Other proposals involved cleaning up the way MMS handles the enormous amounts of revenue it collects from oil companies.

All were good ideas and would have improved MMS had they been enacted. But they would not have addressed the problems that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And they would not have awakened an administration that, dazzled by the dream of renewable energy, neglected the dull but crucial work of keeping watch over the nation’s offshore oil industry.

Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on www.ExaminerPolitics.com bttt

Katrina and BP, Two Sides of the Same Coin

American Thinker ^ | 16 June 2010 | W. R. Wansley
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 1:25:31 PM by K-oneTexas
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2535894/posts

Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, often blunted attempts of the media to goad him into criticizing the rescue efforts of President George W. Bush by stating, “Louisiana has the same president as Mississippi has.” That is to say Bush’s supposed inaction in the New Orleans’ “come rescue me” fiasco was in sharp contrast to the boot-strap spirit of the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Now the Gulf oil spill has shed more light on the consequences of reliance on the federal government to a national disaster. In Katrina, a group of people relied on government to take them out. In the Gulf, a group of people have been trying to get in — to apply American ingenuity to clean up the oil spill or prevent it from reaching the shore. Both groups have been held up — by government.

In Katrina, many New Orleans people, after generations of government dependence, stayed behind, drained of initiative by their government’s seeming ability to come to their aid. Those who depended on themselves rather than government did leave while those who had faith in government had no initiative to control their own destiny.

In the Gulf oil spill, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has begged for approval to put up temporary sand bars as a barrier to the oil. The EPA, worse than saying no, delayed and studied and pondered and then said no. We have seen countless stories in the news of innovation and ingenuity by Americans attempting to bring proven applications, equipment and tactics to bear on the oil. Each attempt is met with the same federal dithering, inaction and impedance.

In Katrina, energy and effort that should have been put into getting people out was instead diverted into protest, complaint and blame. Government conditioned these people to expect that government would deliver them. Regardless, the would-be rescuers were thwarted in their efforts by an ineffective Democratic governor who put politics over rescue, and an inept Democratic mayor who was just plain in over his head.

In the Gulf oil spill, there are presently dozens of individuals and small companies that have the ability to solve the oil clean up problem. After they show their process to the media, the inevitable question is asked, “Have you shown this to BP or the EPA?” Their all too familiar and depressingly consistent reply is, “yes, and they are considering it” or “yes, and they said they would get back to us”. They have been “considering it” for over 50 days now.

In Katrina, the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast were hit by the brunt of the storm surge. Total devastation. This wasn’t just some flooding caused by the breach of a Democrat Parish maintained levy. The people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast are for the most part a mixture of industrious workers and former industrious workers called retirees. Their ability to make do and to utilize the outpouring of basic supplies of ice and water from individuals and corporations from upstate and around the country was a resounding success.

In the Gulf, one company has a fiber mat (Fibertect) that absorbs oil. Another company has a machine (the Voraxial Separator) that seperates oil from water. Several folks have demonstrated the incredible effectivness of plain ol’ hay to absorb its weight in oil. Then there are Peat moss mats and hair mats that do the same. Again, people standing by waiting for the go ahead. BP says they have to get cleared from the Obama Administration and the Administration saying they are talking to BP - nothing happens.

Another company has a proprietary “molecule mat”; another has a “hydrophobic sand” and many have their on concoction of natural oil-eating microbes. One Florida Company has a soap made of plant extracts another has a type of dry ice that sticks to the oil and lifts it off the then clean sand. One man has tons of an airplane dispensed natural earth material that is extremely lipophilic (oil loving) which traps, holds and sinks the oil to be destroyed by oil eating bacteria. His reply from the EPA: “it is against regulations to intentionally sink oil”.

One thing all these solutions have in common: they are private enterprise endeavors showing ingenuity from inventors and innovators who, yes, want to do good but you see they, gasp, may also want to make a buck in the process. Never mind that all these things were invented and developed long before the current crisis. One poor fellow — the one with the hay solution — actually was shown on the You Tube video wearing overhauls. While the man who came up with a floating hair mat after the Prince William Sound spill is from north Alabama. Now we really can’t have that sort of thing going on, now can we?

Milton Friedman once asked why people assume that political self-interest is somehow nobler than economic self-interest. “Just tell me, he said, where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” Why, from a community organizer, of course. The private sector cleaning up the oil spill; private charities feeding people; Private gun owners protecting their family and property; now we really can’t have that sort of thing going on, now can we?

Government PC pressure causes misallocation of resources into bad investments. Over the past couple of years, BP has spent millions of dollars publicizing its green initiative. Who can forget those disingenuous commercials, like the one of a teenage boy holding up some pathetic plant saying something like, “we can grow our own renewable fuel.” BP also gave heavily to the Obama presidential campaign. It would seem they have not had a good return on these investments.

Bush didn’t cause the hurricane and Obama didn’t cause the oil spill but Obama did say that the federal government was best suited to deal with such disasters. Bush had a state and local government to deal with. But the oil spill is 100% federal — or at least it was — for now the oil has made its way to shore, protected all along its slow malevolent journey by Obama’s federal government. It is his seeming inability to deal with private enterprise by allowing them to rescue the shoreline that is at issue here.

Touting windmills and solar panels instead of developing our 400 year supply of domestic natural gas while also discouraging relatively benign on shore and shallow water drilling are designed to do one thing: maintain a made up problem that government claims itself to be indispensable in solving — but never does. It has no intention of solving problems but only “managing” them.

Katrina and the Gulf oil spill prove that, at best, government can only get in the way. But at worst — like so-called global warming, lack of border security and unfunded Social Security — they are all part of the same thing: government created problems that government prevents from being solved. The resultant discourse leads to weakening the resolve of the people to resist the “helping” heavy hand of government.

Put another way, government has an incentive to not solve problems, the Arizona immigration law being a perfect case in point where government has really shown its hand. Problems are its fuel — fuel needed to empower itself and enslave its subjects. In the now infamous words of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Only time will tell just how much of Obama’s ineptitude and impotence is by design — for it would seem no one — not even an unqualified community organizer — is this pathetically incompetent. As with the Afghanistan troop deployment, once again, Obama dithers and the situation festers. Photo ops on the Gulf are to paper over his supposed ineptitude. Brave words are to gloss over his supposed impotence. If he is looking for someone’s “buttocks” to boot, maybe he should look at the one whose rear end is up in the air in a notorious picture bowing to the Saudi King.

Revealed: White House Scheme to Exploit Oil Spill Crisis By Imposing Nat’l Energy Tax

Question: Will House Democrats Support a National Energy Tax in a Lame Duck Session of Congress?

Washington, Jun 16 - The Obama White House plans to exploit the oil spill crisis to force a job-killing national energy tax through Congress after the midterm elections – thereby circumventing the American people and letting a lame duck Congress jam taxpayers with one final, costly act of defiance on its way out the door. According to the new strategy, outlined this morning by Politico, Washington Democrats would pass a job-killing national energy tax “after the election” so lawmakers “don’t have to take another tough vote”: http://www.politico.com/playbook/

“Phil Schiliro, the White House congressional liaison, has told the Senate to aim to take up an energy bill the week of July 12, after the July 4 break… The plan is to conference the new Senate bill with the already-passed House bill IN A LAME-DUCK SESSION AFTER THE ELECTION, so House members don’t have to take another tough vote ahead of midterms.”

While the Beltway will immediately turn its attention to the Senate – which must pass a bill in order to move the White House’s plan forward – Americans will be asking whether House Democrats will support a job-killing national energy in a lame duck session of Congress. Last summer, lawmakers who voted for the national energy tax faced “public outrage” http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjMxNTA3NmM2YWY4YzAxZThlZjY3ZWMyMmZkYmJmNjA= and blistering attacks http://gopleader.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=136617 back home. By year’s end, Senate Democrats were telling the White House to “drop cap-and-trade.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30984.html The bill was “left for dead,” http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/13/nation/la-na-energy-congress-20100613 and rightly so. Are House Democrats going to punish their constituents again in order to fulfill the President’s political agenda?

The New York Times notes that President Obama is attempting to turn the national energy tax bill into a “political weapon”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16assess.html

“The purpose, though, was to go beyond the immediate and make the case that the spill justifies his plans for energy and climate change legislation, a way of turning a political burden into a political weapon. …

“And Republicans quickly accused Mr. Obama of capitalizing on the leaking oil to pass a bill that otherwise seemed stalled. ‘President Obama should not exploit this crisis to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small businesses,’ said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.”

Sure enough, liberal special interest allies are already sharpening their knives, casting last night’s speech as a “political boost” http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/103469-climate-advocates-claim-boost-from-obama-speech-despite-silence-on-carbon- for the national energy tax. But as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) put it, “The climate bill isn’t going to stop the oil leak.” http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-16/climate-bill-lacks-momentum-even-after-bp-spill-democrats-say.html Right now, as the Obama Administration plots to exploit a crisis made worse by their own failings, oil continues to leak from the well and extend its stranglehold on the lives and livelihoods of the people in the affected areas. Americans want their government to be focused on stopping this leak, cleaning up this mess, and finding out what went wrong.

http://republicanleader.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=190831

BP was founder of Cap & Trade Lobby and is linked to John Podesta, The Apollo alliance and Obama

Washington Examiner ^ | June 15, 2010 | Tim Carney
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Once-a-government-pet-BP-now-a-capitalist-tool-95942659.html
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 9:37:08 PM by GlockThe Vote bttt
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2536222/posts

As BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig was sinking on April 22, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was on the phone with allies in his push for climate legislation, telling them he would soon roll out the Senate climate bill with the support of the utility industry and three oil companies including BP, according to the Washington Post.

Kerry never got to have his photo op with BP chief executive Tony Hayward and other regulation-friendly corporate chieftains.

Within days, Republican co-sponsor Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., repudiated the bill following a spat about immigration, and Democrats went back to the drawing board.

But the Kerry-BP alliance for an energy bill that included a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases pokes a hole in a favorite claim of President Obama and his allies in the media that BP’s lobbyists have fought fiercely to be left alone.

Lobbying records show that BP is no free-market crusader, but instead a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG:

Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.

As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business.

Expect BP to be public enemy No. 1 in the climate debate.

There’s a problem: BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill.

As the nation’s largest producer of natural gas, BP saw many ways to profit from climate legislation, notably by persuading Congress to provide subsidies to coal-fired power plants that switched to gas.

In February, BP quit USCAP without giving much of a reason beyond saying the company could lobby more effectively on its own than in a coalition that is increasingly dominated by power companies.

They made out particularly well in the House’s climate bill, while natural gas producers suffered.

But two months later, BP signed off on Kerry’s Senate climate bill, which was hardly a capitalist concoction.

One provision BP explicitly backed, according to Congressional Quarterly and other media reports: a higher gas tax.

The money would be earmarked for building more highways, thus inducing more driving and more gasoline consumption.

Elsewhere in the green arena, BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels and solar energy, two products that cannot break even without government support.

Lobbying records show the company backing solar subsidies including federal funding for solar research.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, is currently financing a BP solar energy project in Argentina.

Ex-Im has also put up taxpayer cash to finance construction of the 1,094-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, Turkeyagain, profiting BP.

Lobbying records also show BP lobbying on Obama’s stimulus bill and Bush’s Wall Street bailout. You can guess the oil giant wasn’t in league with the Cato Institute or Ron Paul on those.

BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans.

It employs the Podesta Group, co-founded by John Podesta, Obama’s transition director and confidant.

Other BP troops on K Street include Michael Berman, a former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale; Steven Champlin, former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus; and Matthew LaRocco, who worked in Bill Clinton’s Interior Department and whose father was a Democratic congressman.

Former Republican staffers, such as Reagan alumnus Ken Duberstein, also lobby for BP, but there’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as an arm of the GOP.

Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand.

Once a government pet, BP now a capitalist tool.

Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner’s lobbying editor. His K Street column appears on Wednesdays.

RE: BP was founder of Cap & Trade Lobby and is linked to John Podesta, The Apollo alliance and Obama
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2505164/posts?page=251#251

“Now, find the link to Lindsey Graham.” ~ Mamzelle

My guess is a Scana Corp.’s Summer plant in South Carolina.

(no link)

Senators pushing for increase in gas tax - 15 cents a gallon under consideration
St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN) - Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Author: Jim Tankersley, Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON — Leading voices in the Senate are considering a new tax on gasoline as part of an effort to win Republican and oil industry support for the energy and climate bill now idling in Congress.

The tax, which early estimates put in the range of 15 cents a gallon, was conceived with the input of several oil companies, including Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips, and is being championed by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

It is shaping up as a critical but controversial piece in the efforts by Graham, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to write a climate bill that moderate Republicans could support. Along those lines, the bill will also include an expansion of offshore oil drilling and major new incentives for nuclear power plant construction.

(snip)

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00009975&cycle=2010

Top 5 Contributors, 2005-2010, Campaign Cmte
Contributor Total Indivs PACs
Nelson, Mullins et al $79,491 $70,491 $9,000
Scana Corp $57,630 $51,130 $6,500
EnergySolutions LLC $35,800 $35,800 $0
Edens & Avant $31,900 $31,900 $0
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $31,450 $24,950 $6,500

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/10/15/15climatewire-carper-suggests-bolstering-nrc-as-part-of-cl-83161.html

(snip)

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) is helping to negotiate a nuclear energy amendment that could help bring aboard swing votes who support the industry. Architects and backers of the nuclear effort include Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who are seeking more federal financial backing and other support.

(snip)

Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman John Keeley said the industry’s priorities include greater funding for loan guarantees. Congress has set aside $18.5 billion thus far for nuclear plant loan guarantees under a DOE financing program first authorized in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. But this would cover only a small number of new plants.

Four proposals remain in the running for DOE guarantees from this funding, according to several published reports. They are: UniStar Nuclear Energy/Constellation Energy Group’s proposed Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland; NRG Energy Inc.’s South Texas Project; Southern Co.’s Vogtle plant in Georgia; and Scana Corp.’s Summer plant in South Carolina.

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/40154/

Assembling the Team

During 2000 and 2001, the Joyce Foundation, a progressive trust with assets near $1 billion, known for funding groups like Center for American Progress and Tides Foundation, provided grants to CCX totaling $1.1 million. State Senator Obama served on the foundation’s board of directors during that time and was instrumental in awarding the grants.

Shortly after the first grant was approved, the president of The Joyce Foundation, Paula DiPerna, left to join the executive team of CCX. Other notables with familiar names soon followed.

• Former Vice-President Al Gore became part-owner of CCX when his company, Generation Investment Management, made a sizeable investment. Gore brought with him his senior partner at GIM, David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, along with a company chalk full of former Goldman Sachs’ executives

• Goldman Sachs itself soon joined the team buying a ten percent interest in CCX

• Maurice Strong, once linked to Tongsun Park, the central figure in the United Nation’s oil-for-food scandal in 2005 and one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol, joined the CCX board of directors

• Carlton Bartels was one of the first, and perhaps most important, additions to the CCX roster. As CEO of a company called CO2e, Bartels developed and delivered the actual guts of the exchange — a system for facilitating and managing the actual carbon trades

Strange Bedfellows

Just three weeks after filing for a patent for his carbon trade system, Bartels was killed during the attacks of 9/11. Bartels’ death opened the door for a new partner to join CCX, easily the oddest fit of them all: Fannie Mae. In a move still unexplained, the quasi-governmental mortgage agency, led by CEO Franklin Raines, purchased the rights to the system from Bartel’s widow. A patent on the invention was granted to Raines and Fannie Mae on November 7, 2006, ironically, the day after the Democrats regained control of Congress. According to Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, the patent covers both the “cap” and “trade” parts of Obama’s top domestic energy initiative and gives Fannie Mae proprietary control over the automated trading system used by Sandor’s CCX.

When asked about the patent recently Fannie Mae communications director Amy Bonitatibus told the Washington Examiner, “Fannie Mae earns no money on this patent. We can’t conjecture as to the cap-and-trade legislation.” A source close to Fannie Mae, however, says a plan is in place to funnel future earnings from the patent to a non-profit housing organization called Enterprise Community Partners. Ironically, Raines, who left Fannie Mae in 2004 amidst allegations that he inflated earnings reports in order to collect higher bonuses ($52 million in bonuses over 5-years; $90 million in total compensation), serves on the board of trustees at Enterprise. In a continuation of theme, Goldman Sachs also has a representative on the board in the person of Alicia Glen.

“Just three weeks after filing for a patent for his carbon trade system, Bartels was killed during the attacks of 9/11.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2046736/posts

“Guess who’s been involved intimately with Fannie Mae? Does the name Jamie Gorelick ring a bell?

This woman is everywhere, and

***
Jamie Gorelick got a 26 million payout when she left the place.
***

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2053986/posts

Jamie Gorelick’s Cloudy Memory (mega clintonista wall gag alert)
American Thinker ^ | 7-29-08 | Ed Lasky

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1460263/posts

Fitting the Pieces Together—Able Danger, Jamie Gorelick & 9/11
The Strata-Sphere ^ | August 9, 2005 | Bronc1

HT: taildragger

More on Mrs. Gorelick....

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2526486/posts?page=45#45

Her law firm buddy, his job, and her being on the board with a firm working on Carbon Sequestering is such a co-wink-a-dink..

HT: Diogenesis

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1119404/posts

Jamie Gorelick Authored Conflict of Interest Booklet

Posted on Saturday, April 17, 2004

In 1989, Jamie Gorelick authored a 21 page booklet for The American Bar Association titled: “Conflicts of Interest in a Changing Legal Environment : Traps for the Unwary.”

Also in 1989, she co-authored “Destruction of Evidence” with Stephen Marzen and Lawrence Solum. Published in New York: Wiley Law Publications, Description: xxvii, 516 p. ; 27 cm. Series: Trial practice library.

And again in 1989, she authored a 26 pages booklet for The American Bar Association titled: “Structuring the Internal Investigation When a Corporation is Faced With Parallel Civil, Criminal and Administrative Proceedings.”

In 1988, for The American Bar Association, she authored a 41 page booklet: “Effective Representation of the Corporation, Its Directors, Officers, and Employees in Grand Jury and Agency Investigations.

In 1987, she co-authored a two volume book with Roger C Spaeder & Cono R Namorato: “Federal Enforcement 1987 : Representing Corporations, Their Officers, Directors and Employees, April 2-3, 1987, Loew’s L’Enfant Plaza Hotel, Washington, D.C.: program materials. Published by The Center, Washington, D.C.

Then, in 2001, the Department of Justice published a volume of her addresses as Assistant Attorney General.

22 posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 10:54:33 PM by maggief
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2536222/posts?page=22#22

BP Oil Spill: Against Gov. Jindal’s Wishes, Crude-Sucking Barges Stopped by Coast Guard

ABC ^ | 17 June 2010 | DAVID MUIR and BRADLEY BLACKBURN
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bp-oil-spill-gov-bobby-jindals-wishes-crude/story?id=10946379

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Media/bp-oil-spill-thick-crude-hits-shore-workers/story?id=10869546

“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/citizens-charge-10924636

“These barges work. You’ve seen them work. You’ve seen them suck oil out of the water,” said Jindal.

So why stop now?

“The Coast Guard came and shut them down,” Jindal said. “You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, ‘Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.’”

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

“We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Louisiana Governor Couldn’t Overrule Coast Guard
The governor said he didn’t have the authority to overrule the Coast Guard’s decision, though he said he tried to reach the White House to raise his concerns.

“They promised us they were going to get it done as quickly as possible,” he said. But “every time you talk to someone different at the Coast Guard, you get a different answer.”

After Jindal strenuously made his case, the barges finally got the go-ahead today to return to the Gulf and get back to work, after more than 24 hours of sitting idle.

Fifty-nine days into the crisis, it still can be tough to figure out who is in charge in Louisiana, and the problem appears to be the same in other Gulf Coast states.

In Alabama today, Gov. Bob Riley said that he’s had problems with the Coast Guard, too.

Riley, R-Ala., asked the Coast Guard to find ocean boom tall enough to handle strong waves and protect his shoreline. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/lack-boom-oil-spill-worries-mississippi-delta/story?id=10631569

The Coast Guard went all the way to Bahrain to find it, but when it came time to deploy it?

“It was picked up and moved to Louisiana,” Riley said today.

The governor said the problem is there’s still no single person giving a “yes” or “no.” While the Gulf Coast governors have developed plans with the Coast Guard’s command center in the Gulf, things begin to shift when other agencies start weighing in, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“It’s like this huge committee down there,” Riley said, “and every decision that we try to implement, any one person on that committee has absolute veto power.”

<>
Also posted on Thursday, June 17, 2010 7:24:50 PM by Hoodat
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2536910/posts
<>

June 18, 2010 bttt
Mark Steyn: Can Obama plug leak in his support?
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-254066-new-gulf.html
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist

I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year’s boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president. For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony moment. Had they caught up with him in the White House parking lot, they’d have put him up against the wall and clubbed him to a pulp with Matthews’ no-longer-tingling leg.

For the first time I felt a wee bit sorry for the poor fellow. What had he done to so enrage his full supporting chorus? In The Washington Post, the reaction of longtime Obammysoxer Eugene Robinson was headlined “Obama Disappoints From The Beginning Of His Speech.”

So what? He always “disappoints.” What would have been startling would have been if he hadn’t “disappointed.” His eve-of-election rally for Martha Coakley “disappointed” the Massachusetts electorate so much they gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. His speech for Chicago’s Olympic bid “disappointed” the Oslo committee so much they gave the games to Pyongyang, or Ouagadougou, or any city offering to build a stadium with electrical outlets incompatible with Obama’s prompter. Be honest, guys, his inaugural address “disappointed,” too, didn’t it? Oh, in those days you still did your best to make the case for it. “He carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate,” wrote Stanley Fish in The New York Times. “There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating ... the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.’”

Gotcha. To a fool, His Majesty’s new clothes appear absolutely invisible. But, to a wise man, the placing of buttons and pockets without indicating the relation of co-ordination is a fascinating exercise in parataxical couture.

And so Obama bounded out to knock ‘em dead with another chorus of “I’ll be down to get you in a parataxis, honey,” only to find himself pelted with dead fish rather than Stanley Fish. The Times’ Maureen Dowd deplored his “bloodless quality” and “emotional detachment.” This is the same Maureen Dowd who in 2009 hailed the new presidency with a column titled “Spock At The Bridge” – and she meant it as a compliment. Back then, this administration was supposed to be the new technocracy – cool, calm and credentialed chaps who would sit down, use their mighty intellects to provide a rigorous, post-partisan, forensic analysis of the problem, and then break for their Vanity Fair photo shoot.

What was it all the smart set said about Bush? Lazy and uncurious? Had Obama or his speechwriters chanced upon last week’s fishwrap, they might have noticed that I described the president as “the very model of a modern major generalist,” and they might have considered whether it might not be time to try something new. For example, he could have demonstrated, as he and his Energy Secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it’s hard to stop. Instead, lazy and uncurious, this is what the Technocratic Mastermind offered: “Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

“As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.”

Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize-winning Head of Meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti oleaginato at Starbucks.

The boring technocrat stuff out of the way, he then did his usual shtick. In the race speech, invited to address specific points about his pastor’s two-decade pattern of ugly anti-American rhetoric and his opportunist peddling of paranoid conspiracies to his gullible congregants about AIDS being invented by the U.S. government to wipe them out, Obama preferred to talk about race in general – you know, blacks, whites, that sort of thing; lot of it about. The media loved it. This time round, invited to address specific points about an unstoppable spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama retreated to more generalities – the environment, land, air, that sort of thing; lot of it about. “President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress,” observed Jay Leno. “How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?”

When he did get specific, he sounded faintly surreal. “As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows...” Energy-efficient windows? That’s a great line – if Obama’s auditioning to play himself on “Saturday Night Live” parodies.

And hang on, isn’t this the same guy who was promising to start “kicking ass” just a few days ago? You may find yourself recalling the moment in the film “In And Out” when Kevin Kline is trying to master the “How To Be Manly” audiotape and accidentally says “What an interesting window treatment.”

But, as Rahm Emmanuel shrewdly noted, never let a crisis go to waste, not when you can get a new window treatment out of it.

My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill – Gulf War 3! – and in this epic conflict the Speechgiver-in-Chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago

I fired off a speech

But the British kept a-spillin’

Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico...”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes A Spillage.”

Most Foreign Offers to Help with Oil Spill Still Not Accepted

Alabama Live ^ | 6/19/2010 | Sean Reilly
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/06/many_foreign_offers_to_help_wi.html

WASHINGTON — Some 28 foreign countries and international organizations have offered help in responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the bulk of those overtures remain “under consideration,” according to a tally posted on the U.S. State Department’s website.

On May 10, for example, the United Arab Emirates offered to send oil skimmers, dispersant and containment boom, along with human and technical support, the website says. As of Friday, no decision had been made on any of those propositions, the site indicates.

Also pending for more than a month are offers of containment boom and skimmers from the European Maritime Safety Agency; containment and fire boom from Germany; and bird rehabilitation equipment from France.

Some of the offers - almost all of which require reimbursement - are much more recent.

And response officials have accepted a few, including boom from Canada and skimming systems from Norway. A French offer of dispersant was rejected on the grounds that the chemicals were not approved for use in the United States.

Reached early Friday evening, a State Department spokeswoman referred questions to the Coast Guard, which passed them to the Unified Command Center for the spill response in New Orleans. There, spokesman John Curry did not specifically know why some offers had been left hanging.

“The bottom line is that we have a lot of boom and we have a lot of dispersant that we are already using,” Curry said.

But with crucial equipment having run short at times, the Obama administration faces questions about whether it has done enough to mobilize all available supplies. Obtaining more resources “must be a top priority,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, wrote in a Thursday letter to Obama that asked the White House to make public the total domestic inventory of skimmers, boom and other resources available for use in the Gulf.

Sessions also joined other Republicans in seeking a speedy waiver of the Jones Act - which requires cargo transported by water between U.S. ports to be carried on U.S.-built, flagged and crewed ships - if that requirement is stopping the government from making use of “potentially useful foreign vessels.” Several countries have offered ships, according to the State Department roundup.

On Thursday, however, an administration official confirmed only one actual request for a Jones Act waiver, but said it was for foreign-built barges when American-flagged equivalents were available.

Earlier this week, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said that any waiver requests would get fast-track handling. On Friday, three GOP senators, including George LeMieux of Florida and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, introduced legislation to temporarily waive the act, according to a news release.

Also linked here bttt:
Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2010 2:20:27 PM by Qbert
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2538079/posts

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