Government Thwarts Oil Cleanup - Incompetence or Calculated Political Decision?
It has been over two months since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, 2010. Estimates of the amount of crude oil gushing into the Gulf range from 60,000 to 100,000 barrels a day causing an ecological disaster along the entire gulf coast. As residents fume about the slow and nonchalant government cleanup efforts, logical minds are beginning to wonder why the government does not take some common sense efforts to facilitate the cleanup.
DEEPWATER HORIZON
A Government intent on facilitating the cleanup and mitigating the huge environmental damage of the oil spill would address the following:
- Rather than rejecting offers of foreign government help, this assistance should have been immediately accepted.
- Suspend EPA rules on the amount of oil allowed in discharge from skimmer boats which is preventing large amounts of oil from being recovered. Blindly following bureaucratic rules when they do not make sense creates a general sense of incompetence.
- Large amounts of skimmer boats are not being allowed to participate in the cleanup efforts since by law they must be stationed elsewhere. Exactly where else would you want the skimmer boats to be when they are urgently needed today in the Gulf?
- Federal authorities have hampered and restricted local efforts to contain and cleanup the oil spill based on mindless reams of regulations which make no sense under emergency conditions.
Speculation on why the government has reacted at a snail’s pace in addressing the Gulf oil disaster center on basic incompetence and at worst, a calculated political decision. Consider the following from the Wall Street Journal:
As the government fails to implement such simple and straightforward remedies, one must ask why.
One possibility is sheer incompetence. Many critics of the president are fond of pointing out that he had no administrative or executive experience before taking office. But the government is full of competent people, and the military and Coast Guard can accomplish an assigned mission. In any case, several remedies require nothing more than getting out of the way.
Another possibility is that the administration places a higher priority on interests other than the fate of the Gulf, such as placating organized labor, which vigorously defends the Jones Act.
Finally there is the most pessimistic explanation—that the oil spill may be viewed as an opportunity, the way White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said back in February 2009, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Many administration supporters are opposed to offshore oil drilling and are already employing the spill as a tool for achieving other goals. The websites of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, for example, all feature the oil spill as an argument for forbidding any further offshore drilling or for any use of fossil fuels at all. None mention the Jones Act.
To these organizations and perhaps to some in the administration, the oil spill may be a strategic justification in a larger battle. President Obama has already tried to severely limit drilling in the Gulf, using his Oval Office address on June 16 to demand that we “embrace a clean energy future.” In the meantime, how about a cleaner Gulf?
America At War - Again
Does being elected President of the United States somehow turn an otherwise normal man into an aggressor, eager to engage American armed forces into unnecessary wars? Consider the following:
Military buildup in Afghanistan warranted, Obama says
The White House last week announced substantial increases of troops bound for Afghanistan and plans to increase training and foreign aid both in that country and in neighboring Pakistan.
Obama said Al Qaeda and its allies would be pursued aggressively but that did not mean that ground troops would enter Pakistan.
Wars are a horrific waste of economic resources and human life, yet the powers to be seem eager to “project our power” by engaging in needless and useless conflicts. What exactly is our strategy and exit plan with Iraq and Afghanistan? The lack of a c0herent strategy for conducting two wars that we cannot afford and that seem to be without purpose seem certain to backfire on the Obama administration at some point.
Poll: Most Say Afghanistan War Not Worth Fighting
WASHINGTON — A majority of Americans say the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, according to a poll released on the eve of that nation’s elections.
An ABC News-Washington Post poll found 51 percent who said the war was not worth fighting, while 47 percent said it was worth it.
Three years ago the U.S. had about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. There are expected to be about 68,000 by year’s end.
The cost of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reached $900 billion, $675 billion for Iraq and $225 billion for Afghanistan. I bet you thought we had taken our troops out of Iraq based on press coverage. You would be wrong. We still have 135,000 troops there, only down 30,000 since the surge. In the meantime we have escalated our presence in Afghanistan to 55,000 troops and there are serious discussions to bring that up to 100,000. We will reach $1 trillion for these two wars and what have we accomplished? I’d love to hear from my pro-war friends on this site with concrete benefits that we have achieved for $1 trillion. No democracy in the Middle East bullshit, because that is a lie. Could this $1 trillion have been spent in a better way? Or better yet, not spent at all.Obama campaigned that he would end these wars. Another lie proving that the Military Industrial Complex is all powerful. His budget actually increased for the military.
General: Afghan Situation ‘Serious’
The top U.S. commander for Afghanistan called the situation there “serious” but salvageable, in a sobering assessment issued Monday that is expected to pave the way for a request for more American troops, funds for Afghan forces and other resources.
This year, tens of thousands of additional U.S. and allied troops have flowed into the volatile country, bringing the total to more than 100,000, of which 62,000 are American. Casualties among troops have risen to their highest levels since the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban government in the fall of 2001.
Time to Get Out of Afghanistan
U.S. strategy — protecting the population — is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about “deteriorating” (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.
The U.S. strategy is “clear, hold and build.” Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.
Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen’s, is squandered.
Our Government has provided no rationale explanation for being at war in Afghanistan. How exactly is the national interest being served by expending lives and resources in a war with questionable objectives that cannot be won?
The idealistic notion of “nation building” is absurd in a country that has never had a functioning government. Is the United States prepared to spend trillions of dollars over decades to help a country that can’t help itself? The United States still stations hundreds of thousands of troops in Korea, Germany and Japan, six decades after World War II ended. Why not do some “nation building” at home? It’s time to pull the plug on this ill conceived and useless war.
Clinton Needs A New Spin Master
Portraying Clinton’s African safari as a “success” will forever reign as the most unbelievable spin job in history. It would have been far better to say nothing than to bring more publicity to what was a disastrous trip. Besides being sent on a meaningless journey to countries that most Americans never heard of, Clinton had to put up with insulting questions from her hosts as well as being publicly upstaged by her own husband.
Here’s the official spin job - believe it or not!
Clinton’s Africa Trip Is Viewed as a Success
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently accomplished what she set out to do on her trip to Africa. She pressed governments from Kenya to Nigeria to Libera for reform.
She highlighted the plight of women in Congo, meeting with rape victims and hearing their stories.
But the trip did not go entirely as planned.
Media headlines instead focused on Clinton’s more controversial remarks on tangential issues, and America’s top diplomat found herself commenting more on someone who was not even there: her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
As Secretary Clinton embarked on the 11-day, seven-country swing through the continent, President Clinton departed for North Korea on what was described by officials as a “humanitarian” mission to retrieve two American journalists being held there.
President Clinton’s successful trip was a media coup, one that overshadowed his wife’s arrival in Africa. In interviews and press conferences soon after her arrival, reporters peppered her for information about her husband’s trip as the rescue dominated headlines around the world.
The comments, and video, ricocheted around the world, prompting commentators and analysts to wonder if the secretary was withering under her husband’s shadow. She had just spent the past month fighting rumors of her marginalization in the Obama administration while nursing a broken elbow.
At a town hall event in Abuja, Nigeria, she compared the 2000 U.S. election Florida recount to the allegedly rigged election in Nigeria.
The comparison drew sharp criticism from conservatives in Washington, who balked at the notion that Clinton would compare a United States election to one in Nigeria marred with missing ballot boxes, inflated voter counts, and shooting of voters at polling stations. Again, the headlines were concerned less with governance in Nigeria and more with whether Clinton made yet another misstep.
Perhaps if Hillary had simply brought Bill Clinton along with her, the trip might have been a real “success”.
Thought Provoking Links
Obama - A Jump to the Left, A Step to the Right
In a front-page analysis, the NYT notes that Obama is taking “a nuanced set of positions that fall somewhere between George W. Bush and the American Civil Liberties Union.” But the truth is that the combination of harshly criticizing Bush-era policies, while also taking some on as his own, has “has generated confusion and disappointment across the political spectrum,” notes the NYT.
Some good insights on the agile President’s complex policy moves.
The repudiation of the California establishment in the series of initiative defeats could hardly have been more decisive.
This vote is the second great signal that the American people are getting fed up with corrupt politicians, arrogant bureaucrats, greedy interests and incompetent, destructive government.
Voters in our largest state spoke unambiguously, but politicians and lobbyists in Sacramento are ignoring or rejecting the voters’ will, just as they are in Albany and Trenton. The states with huge government machines have basically moved beyond the control of the people. They have become castles of corruption, favoritism and wastefulness. These state governments are run by lobbyists for the various unions through bureaucracies seeking to impose the values of a militant left. Elections have become so rigged by big money and clever incumbents that the process of self-government is threatened.
Nothing new here but a good summary of the “mess” our democracy has become. One wonders what could have been done in the previous eight years to prevent the fiscal crises that are now engulfing all 50 of the Nation’s states. The Republicans were never shy about running up monstrous deficits either.
If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush.
Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.
Did Obama vote for Bush? Some policies will never change.
Obama Faces Pitfalls on Detainees
In the reductionist debate in Washington, either any sacrifice must be made to win a pitiless war against radicals, or terrorism does not justify any compromise with cherished American values.
“Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems.
Perhaps one side is more right than the other. In any event, neither side seems pleased with the middle ground approach.
And, a CNN poll showed that 39 percent approved of the job Pelosi was handling her speakership while 48 percent disapproved — well below the 46 percent approval rating that the Californian scored in a CNN survey in March 2007.
Republicans are looking for someone — anyone — on the Democratic side to whom some negatives will stick given their decided lack of success in doing so to Obama. Pelosi is in the crosshairs right now. How will she handle herself in the coming weeks and months?
Pelosi seems confused much of the time. Maybe they should take polls on what the public thinks her IQ is?
Obama Is Embraced at Annapolis
There was no such controversy to confront here in Annapolis, where cheering midshipmen, clad in their sparkling summer dress whites, greeted their new commander-in-chief with hoots, hollers and raucous applause. Mr. Obama returned the show of support by praising the graduates for the path they chose — a notable contrast, he said, to the pursuit of wealth that characterized those who helped create the current economic crisis.
A good start for the President on Memorial Day Weekend!
How Obama Is Like Spock
President Obama has seen the new Star Trek movie. “Everybody was saying I was Spock, so I figured I should check it out,” he told Newsweek.
Obama is often compared to Spock because he never gets too hot or too cool and speaks in the careful way of a logician. But the president and the fictional character seem to have the same kind of empathy, too.
For Obama, empathy has long been the key to delivering the change in the political structure that he talks so much about. Here’s how he explained this approach as it applies to his decision-making: “[Opponents] might not, at the end of it, agree with me, but having seen how I’m thinking about a problem, having a sense of how I’m making decisions, that I understand their point of view, that I can actually make their argument for them, and that that’s part of the decision-making process, it gives them a sense, at least, that they’ve been heard, and … it pushes us away from the dogmas and caricatures that I think get in the way of good policymaking and a more civil tone in our politics.”
Great article with insights into the Presidential thought process as it relates to decision making.
Newsweek - A Conversation With Barack Obama
Inside the mind of Barack Obama - an in depth interview worth the full read.
Obama: “One of the extraordinary privileges of not only being president but being president at a time of great difficulty is that your plate is full and the decisions we’re making and the policies we’re pursuing I absolutely know will make a difference.”
In Obama’s universe, strength and subtlety are not mutually exclusive. He may make the wrong call—things could go disastrously awry, at home or abroad, on his watch—but one of the most interesting and underappreciated things to emerge from these early days is how comfortable Obama is in making the call. He savors exercising the power of the presidency.
Obama, at least in my experience, is different. There may be some small talk, but very little; and there is none of the conventional journalistic flirtation-by-compliment. This is business, time is valuable, so let’s get on with it.
“But one of the things I’ve actually been encouraged by—and I learned during the campaign—was the American people, I think, not only have a toleration but also a hunger for explanation and complexity, and a willingness to acknowledge hard problems. I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb things down for the public. I’ve always been struck by the fact that, if you can get me in a room with a group of people, even who disagree with me violently on an issue, they’ll still take the time to listen.”
“What I’ve learned, I think, [is] that the Republican Party, like the Democratic Party after Ronald Reagan’s election, when it’s been in power for a long time, has trouble making an adjustment—not just to minority status but also to self-reflection. I think there’s a certain period of time where you insist on talking only to your base instead of to the American people more broadly. And I suspect that they’ll make an adjustment.”
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