Posted on 05/27/2010 8:37:30 PM PDT by Clyde5445
Passing The Buck Doesnt Plug the D#*! Hole
Nearly 40 days in, our President finally addressed the American peoples growing concerns about the Gulf Coast oil spill. Listening to todays press conference, youd think the administration has been working with single-minded focus on the Gulf gusher since the start of the disaster. In reality, their focus has been anything but singular to help solve this monumental problem.
If the President really was fully focused on this issue from day one, why did it take nine whole days before the administration asked the Department of Defense for help in deploying equipment needed for the extreme depth spill site?
Why was the expert group assembled by Energy Commissioner Steven Chu only set up three weeks after the start of this disaster?
Why was Governor Jindal forced more than a month after the start of the disaster to go on national television to beg for materials needed to tackle the oil spill and for federal approval to build offshore sand barriers that are imperative to protect his states coastline?
Why was no mention of the spill made by our President for days on end while Americans waited to hear if he grasped the import of his leadership on this energy issue?
Why have several countries and competent organizations who offered help or expertise in dealing with the spill not even received a response back from the Unified Area Command to this day?
The President claimed that this notion that somehow the federal government is somehow sitting on the sidelines and for the last three or four or five weeks weve just been letting BP make a whole bunch of decisions is simply not true. But, in fact, that is how U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen described the Obama administrations approach to this crisis: We keep a close watch.
Listening to the President, you get the impression he is continually surprised by the inability of various centralized government agencies to get more involved and help solve problems. His lack of executive experience might explain this because he is apparently unaware that its his job as a chief executive to make sure they do their jobs and help solve problems.
The fundamental problem at the core of this crisis is a lack of responsibility. (I risk the President taking my comments personally, but theyre not intended to be personal; my comments reflect what many others feel, and we just want to help him tackle this enormous spill problem.) Theres a culture of buck-passing at the heart of this administration that has caused the tragedy of a sunken oil rig to turn into a potential disaster.
The 1990 Oil Pollution Act was drafted in response to the Exxon-Valdez spill in my home state. It created new procedures for offshore cleanups, specifically putting the federal government in charge of such operations. The President should have used the authority granted by the OPA immediately to take control of the situation. That is a big part of what the OPA is for to designate who is in charge so finger-pointing wont disrupt efforts to just plug the d#*! hole. But instead of immediately engaging with this crisis, our President chose to spend precious time on political pet causes like haranguing the state of Arizona for doing what he himself was supposed to do secure the nations border. He also spent much time fundraising and politicking for liberal candidates and causes while we waited for him to grasp the enormity of the Gulf spill.
Now that the American people are calling him out on his lack of engagement with this disaster, the buck-passing is in full swing and, unbelievably, his administration is still looking to blame his predecessor. Amazingly, even those of us who support energy independence for America are the brunt of some buck-passing.
He suggested today that a culture of corruption at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) was solely the previous administrations responsibility and that the failure of the inspection system was a failure of that administration. That is false. The MMS has been his responsibility since January 20, 2009.
The MMS director who resigned today, Elizabeth Birnbaum, was appointed by his administration. And the most recent inspection of the oil rig took place a mere 10 days before the explosion also very much on his watch, not President Bushs.
The President is also now attempting to somehow distance himself from his administrations recent decision to open a few areas of the continental shelf to oil and gas exploration. Thats unfortunate because America desperately needs our domestic oil and natural gas. We rely on it for our prosperity, security, and freedom. The Presidents decision to open a few areas to offshore exploration was the right decision then; and unlike his quickly evolving position on energy development now, I continue to believe its the right decision today because energy independence is in the long-term economic and security interests of the United States.
As I explained in an article in National Review last year, conventional sources like natural gas can act as a clean bridge fuel to a future when more renewable sources are available. I do not, as the President mistakenly believes, think we can drill, baby, drill our way out of all of our troubles. As I have consistently stated, we need an all of the above approach to energy independence that combines conventional drilling with energy conservation and renewable-energy development. My record in Alaska clearly shows my commitment to this all of the above approach. Over 20 percent of Alaskas electricity currently comes from renewable sources. As governor, I put forward a long-term plan to increase that figure to 50 percent by 2025, which is the most ambitious renewable energy target in the nation. I take great pride in helping to make Alaska, in the words of the New York Times, a Frontier for Green Power, even as we continue to embrace the need to drill, baby, drill at the same time.
Alaska can be that frontier for renewable energy only because our conventional oil and gas reserves provide us with a bridge to a greener energy future. In fact, Alaska has enough reserves of both oil and gas to help the United States cross that bridge if only we are allowed to drill!
Please, Mr. President, hear me on this, if nothing else: if its your Administrations decision to suspend the leases of new oil field developments off the coast of Alaska in response to the Gulfs deepwater spill, and you still remain committed to locking up ANWR and other oil-rich lands, please know you are making a mistake. Unless we continue to drill here and drill now, we risk digging ourselves deeper into the hole created by our continued dependence on foreign energy which often comes from regimes that care nothing for our prosperity or security, and even less for global environmental safety.
We need affordable, reliable, secure, environmentally-sound, and domestically-produced energy, but this administration continues to lock up federal land filled with huge energy reserves. If there is to be a moratorium on offshore development, then its time we stop ignoring our safest options for domestic development places like ANWR and NPR-A in my home state of Alaska.
And its time for the administration to stop passing the buck and get control of the disaster in the Gulf. Theres a reason why Harry Truman had that famous sign on his desk. The buck stops with the occupant of the Oval Office. When the American people elected President Obama they gave him responsibility to handle this disaster. He promised to heal the earth, and watch the waters recede... or something far-fetched like that. It was unbelievable then, its impossible now, but what I believe he meant was that he promised to be held accountable. With all due respect, Mr. President, you have a huge job in front of you. We hope youre learning. Please learn that we must have domestic energy development, you must stop looking backward and blaming Bush, and we must all work together to plug the d#*! hole.
- Sarah Palin
And Never forget Chu is the mastermind of this jewel http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/27/steven-chu-white-roofs-to-fight-global-warming/
He is on 6 - 10pm here.
I predict:
Obama will not do a formal press conference until December 2010 or later.
Remember it.
And please call me out if I am wrong.
Why wont our elected officials use this ammo?
Excellent!
I am not a Sarah Palin supporter, but I do have to say that she is exactly right about this. Obama’s problem is that he is up against a problem that cannot be solved by his SEIU thugs or higher taxes...his stock solutions.
Noted
I will find the article. Thanks for the heads up.
MP
so now we know what would happen when that call comes in at 3am...
0bama let’s it go to voice mail and doesn’t check it for over a month!!
11 to 12 PM here
Off to bed with me.
lol lol -— missed that one. Is anyone in this administration capable of a practical idea?
Clyde5445: your welcome; thanks for posting. Palin’s article should be carried by Drudge and every major paper in the country.
I’m watching LKL re-run and T.Boone Pickens is on eating Barry’s lunch!
I totally agree. He always blames Bush, some low level person, Palin and Bush again. He thinks he is such a god he can’t take responsibility for anything. His lack of administrative experience is totally reflected in how he is running his adminstration. It probably took him this long to learn his lines because he didn’t want to look bad again by having a teleprompter at his press conference.
I respect the fact that he is the president, but I don’t respect him. Absolutely can’t wait until 2012.
Michael Reagan
Welcome Back, Dad
by Michael Reagan
09/04/2008
Ive been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that wed never see his like again because he was one of a kind.
I was wrong!
Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he’s a she.
And what a she!
In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dads indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical medias assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we havent heard since my Dad left the scene.
This was Ronald Reagan at his best — the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as The Speech, which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a make-or-break effort — either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster that would dash McCains presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced — and oozing with confidence — she strode defiantly to the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us.
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them — and all her fellow Americans — on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nations real destination.
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are — a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement.
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because thats the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
As hard as you might try, you wont find that kind of plain-spoken, down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign.
Sarah Palin didnt go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nations most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.
Welcome back, Dad, even if youre wearing a dress and bearing children this time around
I sent the link and title to you in FR mail.
:)
Oh, you must mean our Republican US Senators and Congresspeople?
I can't imagine why they're not hammering the Marxist and his regime in this mid-term election year anbd I don't mean that sarcastically.
It's truly mystifying and disgusting.
They do NOT know how to fight and win.
They need to watch and then learn from Sarah. They're pitiful.
BUMP!
:)
It times like this I wish Sarah was Vice President of the United States. She would be living down there right now.
Right. She would have been there from day one getting her questions answered and working with BP for a timely solution.
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