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