People, here's the simple fact: Oilmageddon is BP's fuckup. Period.

[Stinky The Clown]

The lack of oversight and regulation goes back to Poppy's Idiot Son and his Evil Uncle Dick. Or earlier.

There may have been mistakes at the edges by the Obama administration, but no primary blame. I see the worst fault of the administration as not speaking to the country about it. Not Gibbs at some daily briefing that only wonks and political geeks know about. The man himself. Prime time. With reporter questions.

But that's all petty bullshit. Going back to the main event - blame - there is no way any reasonable person can blame Obama for this.

Interestingly, we're now starting to hear politicians calling for Obama to do something. You know damned well they're saying this in response to some outside pressure. Would that be pressure from us Base Cadets?

[texastoast]

1. This Base Cadet checking in

I emailed and called both of my oil buddy senators several times today and said WTF is going on. DO SOMETHING!

[lunatica]

2. The fact it isn't all nicely cleaned up by now isn't Obama's fault

But he does need to get really mean really soon about it. A lot of Congresspeople need to get hopping mad too. Soonest if possible.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. No argument from me

The situation is complex and nuanced. The calls for Obama's head are simplistic, opportunistic, and pointless.

I actually want them to find a way to seize BP's assets, do the cleanup, pay off any claims and expenses, and return the picked carcass to BP's stockholders.

[villager]

8. that's exactly it -- he needs to get pissed, and seize the moment..

...using it for systemic change.

The kind he's actually been reluctant to fight for, and make.

[polichick]

3. Problem is, when criminals fuck up something they're not ever the ones who fix it. nt

[FSogol]

4. K & R n/t

[texastoast]

5. The trolls are here

Who would have unrecced this?

[Stinky The Clown]

7. Trolls

And fan club members.

[villager]

9. +1

n/t

[lunatica]

12. You must have two fan clubs then

Cause I just rec'd just to piss off your other fan club.

[Stinky The Clown]

15. Heh .....

They usually come in, do an early low altitude harassment strafe and move on. They EnJoy themselves, though.

[Luminous Animal]

25. Me. I unrecced.

[Stinky The Clown]

28. Oh yeah?

Why?

[doc03]

10. According to all the armchair experts on DU Obama should have

put his diving suit on and fixed it a month ago.

[Barack_America]

13. Funny, I haven't seen that suggestion. nt

[Rosa Luxemburg]

17. Some here are expecting him to put on his wetsuit and go down there

[Barack_America]

18. Yeah, still can't say I've seen anyone actually suggest that...

...just people insisting that "some people" have.

[Ex Lurker]

29. a leader would light a fire under his subordinates

he would replace the ones who need replacing. If the replacements didn't get the job done, he would keep replacing them until he found someone who did. That's what Lincoln did until he found Ulysses Grant.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

30. Is it the government's job to send deep sea divers down to fix an oil rig?

FEMA can do disaster recovery earthquakes, floods, radioactive (hopefully - I don't know about that one), but is it equipped to do new things like oil rig blow outs. This is a new one.

[amborin]

37. for starters, gov't should halt Corexit; and allow ind scientific assessments, etc....

[truedelphi]

31. You are summing it up nicely. Unfortunately except for Bernie Sanders of VT

We don't have any leaders or states men and women - we just have rank and file politicians who' re more worried about the campaign contribution flow than any thing else... Some have more charisma than others, but in the end, they' re all pretty useless.

[amborin]

36. +1000

[Barack_America]

11. So glad to hear the spill only affects BP.

And here I was thinking it meant environmental and economic disaster for the gulf states.

Fuck blame, I know who is to blame, I want to know who is going to solve this mess. With 30 days and counting so far, BP has more than adequately demonstrated that they can't.

[Stinky The Clown]

16. I hope you're not expecting either .......

.... defense of BP or argument to wanting it fixed ..... are you?

[Barack_America]

19. Sorry, I don't follow.

My point was that, yes, it is clearly BP's fault, but that does not mean that they can or will fix their mistake. BP has, in fact, shown that they are either unwilling or unable to stop the geyser of oil. Does that mean we should allow the gulf to fill with oil or can we expect our government to step in?

[Johonny]

14. My fear is congress will change too much in November

for this to be a lesson learned case instead of practice as usual.

[mindwalker_i]

20. Now let's not play the blame game...

[PufPuf23]

21. BP is gross but Salazar was a poor appointment over the corrupt MMS

and didn't mention any fixes until politically expedient.

MMS was in customary contempt of federal environmental laws and sold resources that belonged to USA citiziens at less than market value as a culture. Salazar was not stupid. Obama is not an expert on the environment but made poor appointments.

The situation is FUBAR now. Hope for the best.

[Zoeisright]

22. Exactly. He's supposed to undo 30 years of repuke deregulation in a year??

That isn't possible. And anybody who thinks he can is a fool.

[wolfgirl]

27. Exactly....Being a career government employee

I've seen how the GOP have moved political appointees deep into the various departments. They become the hidden leftovers that continue to work behind the scenes to push the conservative agenda (or at least keep hidden & protect the most egregious crap). It's called "burrowing"

Obama came into offce with huge f***ups piled on the desk and has been continually blocked/delayed in putting in his people to take over the various departments. We all hear about the top positions, but there are 100s of the lower administrative positions that remain vacant due to GOP obstructionism.

Anyway, it takes manpower to review all the various regs/guidelines, internal policies, etc. that have been put in place over the years by the GOP. One man or one department head can't do it all (add in the obstructionists that actively protect the crap and it becomes even more complicated). I truly believe that the depth & breadth of idiocy that needs to be fixed is much deeper than anyone imagines. AND it can't be fixed overnite, in 30 days or in 12-18 months....

[amborin]

35. got to start somewhere; he's had 18+ mos; and should stop Corexit NOW

[Mojeoux]

23. Kay and Arf

[lostnfound]

24. Of course, and I agree that there's a need for him to speak to the country about it

This situation is pretty scary and traumatic to think about. Right now it feels and looks as if BP, the careless and evidently incompetent perpetrator of this catastrophe, is calling all the shots. I don't expect the government itself to stop the gusher, but the government should be able to assure us that it is tapping any and all resources including BP, Exxon, supertanker sucking equipment, inventors & scientists, etc. to stop the gusher. Who's in charge of this crisis? BP?

[Hekate]

26. KnR

[RainDog]

32. The Obama administration is responsible for allowing bp to operate as they did

We know that before the disaster, President Obama recklessly pushed to expand offshore drilling. We also know that his Interior Department gave British Petroleum's rig a "categorical exclusion" from environmental scrutiny and, according to The New York Times, "gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without first getting required (environmental) permits."

Worse, we know that after the spill, the same Interior Department kept issuing "categorical exclusions" for new Gulf oil operations, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar still refuses "to rule out continued use of categorical exclusions," as the Denver Post reported (heckuva job, Kenny!).

Undoubtedly, had this been the behavior of a Republican administration, "The Left's" big environmental organizations would be scheduling D.C. protests and calling for firings, if not criminal charges. Yet, somehow, there are no protests. Somehow, there have been almost no calls for the resignation of Salazar, who oversaw this disaster and who, before that, took $323,000 in campaign contributions from energy interests and backed more offshore drilling as a U.S. senator. Somehow, facing environmental apocalypse, there has been mostly silence from "The Left."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/laying-bare-the-myth-of-t_b_585347.html

[RainDog]

33. kickin' up some truth n/t

[Jamastiene]

42. +1000000

Thank you for speaking truth to distortions.

[noamnety]

44. That's the elephant in the room

We have "regulators" bought and paid for by BP. We have a president who told them they didn't need environmental oversight.

The drunks walked into the bar, bribed the bartenders, the bartenders gave them the best liquor they had, presented them with car keys, and told them to go out and enjoy their drive.

[G_j]

34. The Buck Stops on Obama’s Desk

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/22-6

Published on Saturday, May 22, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Buck Stops on Obama’s Desk

by Lewis Seiler & Dan Hamburg

One of the hopeful promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008 was that if elected, his administration would reinstitute science-based decision making. We had all heard the stories of how, under George W. Bush, science was regularly compromised in the interests of big business. The BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and events in the aftermath of this epic catastrophe, demonstrates how little has changed.


<snip>

In his State of the Union address this past January, President Obama made clear that drilling in the OCS would be a central part of his "energy program". And then, ironically just a few weeks before a BP rig turned into a fountain of flame and sank, Obama announced that new offshore oil leasing on the eastern seaboard would commence.

Obama has disappointed in many ways, but none more than in the way he has handled this issue. Because once the oil began to spill, so did the beans on how his administration's MMS is really no better than the one presided over by his predecessor. Maybe there's less cocaine and booze, fewer golf and ski junkets, but the overall functioning of this critical agency has not improved. According to Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), "MMS has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry. The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws."

In a recent article published on May 7 by the New York Times, Ian Urbina discusses the continued abandonment of science-based decision making at MMS. "Managers at the agency have routinely overruled staff scientists whose findings highlight the environmental risks of drilling, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists." One scientist, who has worked for the minerals agency for more than a decade, put it this way: "You simply are not allowed to conclude that the drilling will have an impact."

Certainly no change we can believe in here. And it gets worse.

On the same day the Times story broke, we learned in a press release from CBD, that the MMS had approved 27 gulf drilling operations after the BP disaster, exempting these operations from environmental review! The MMS has done so using a loophole in the National Environmental Act meant only to apply to projects with no, or minimal, negative effects, "such as outhouses and hiking trails."

Another highly disturbing aspect of this monumental clusterf**k is the way it illustrates (do we really need more evidence?) that corporations rule the United States of America. Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof illustrate the point in a piece published on Common Dreams this week in which they outline government complicity in the obfuscations around the exploded rig and subsequent gushing of oil into the sea. According to Taylor and Schoof, BP "hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf."

<snip>

Meanwhile, inexplicably, BP remains in charge of the situation. They decide who are the "legitimate interested parties" to information. (Obviously, this does not include the general public!) For example, air monitoring along the shore and over the sea is being done by an organization called The Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, hired and paid by BP. BP has also determined what kinds of chemical dispersants to use. They chose the eerily labeled Corexit, and sprayed at least 600,000 gallons of it on the sea. If by "corrects it" we mean hides it, as in "out of sight, out of mind", they chose wisely. However, it turns out that Corexit is also, according to the EPA, "carcinogenic, mutagenic, and highly toxic." EPA has ordered BP to change to a less toxic dispersant but significant damage has already been done.

..more..

[donco6]

38. I think our government bears some blame as well.

Not Obama's . . . yet. But the previous admins' horrendous decision to allow drilling without any sort of plan of attack for what to do when this sort of thing happens. That's bad on us.

If Obama continues to allow such drilling, then he takes over responsibility at that point. I hope he thinks long and hard about it.

[earth mom]

39. Stop the denial. Obama is CONTINUING * & Co policies and people are waking up to that fact

because now they can CLEARLY SEE that Obama is NOT trying to stop BP's bullshit half hearted attempts to fix the gusher!

Sorry, but, The buck stops at Obama's desk:

"We are risking the future of the planet and our species by allowing this deadly ruse to go on."

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/22-6

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8395135

[ShamelessHussy]

40. true dat, but folks are rightfully upset by his gov response to this epic ongoing disaster

he owns the response, and he better start lighting peoples hair on fire to get fucking started... i wanna see fucking war ships out there lowering the booms, subs helping underwater, i wanna see a beehive of activity out there, wtf!

i wanna see them ACCEPT international offers of ASSISTANCE as well to this fucking HUGE ongoing catastrophe!!!

argh

[KonaKane]

41. Judging from all this vitriol against Obama here, you'd think you

had accidentally landed in FreeperVille.

Thanks for the OP, good to see there some wiser perspectives going on.

[HughMoran]

43. It makes people angry

If you don't jump on the 'blame Obama first, and for everything' bandwagon.