Jun 27 2010
Incompetence Writ Large: Obama Puts Top Donor In Charge
I was reading an article about President Obama’s historic level of incompetence and I ran across this line:
He [Obama] is the quintessential wrong guy at the wrong time ..
And I am sitting here thinking – that just about sums it all up. The author goes through a series of examples from the gulf oils spill to the economy, but the one example from Obama’s first days on the job just stuck out:
If the Gulf doesn’t prove it for you, then consider the president’s first official act as president — the signing of an executive order to close the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay.
With the stroke of a pen, he looked the part of a leader, fulfilling a campaign promise. But now, some 17 months later, Gitmo remains open. Why? Because leadership is more than looking the part.
Absolutely. This president does nothing but ‘look the part’. I am stunned at the gross incompetence of President Obama in the face of the gulf oil spill. I just cannot fathom how anyone could still be in a position of authority with this mess growing into massive disaster day after day. Any other person would be fired and probably facing criminal negligence charges. Instead the man is hunting for golf courses.
For some bureaucratic reason we could not burn the oil off as we corralled it with boom when the spill first happened. This response would have generated a fraction of the pollutants into our vast atmosphere than your average volcano  does (let alone a Mt St Helens class eruption). The 2010 Iceland volcano eruption (pictured below) dwarfs anything a single burning oil well can produce. Yet burning the oil was deemed a ecological no-no.
A simple question can establish context and magnitude here for the brain dead bureaucrats and green idiots. Which contains more volume (and therefore is able to absorb more pollutants) – the oceans or the atmosphere? Â This is sort of a duh-question, the atmosphere is much larger in volume. And when you compare the Earth’s atmosphere to the Gulf of Mexico in terms of capacity to disperse and absorb pollutants it is not even close. We should have burned this oil off at the site. But no, it was better to let the oil spread and kill life on a horrific and massive scale. In the dictionary, the word ‘incompetence’ should always reference the gulf oil spill response.
We should have called in the International skimmers and used the chemicals that break down and disperse the oil. We should have done this day one because it is the responsibility of the US Government to respond – not BP’s job. BP gets the bill at the end of the mess. But that is not how Obama treated his top contributor and ally in taxing energy. No. President Obama left BP in charge while he vacationed and played golf.
The  evidence abounds now over 2 months in, showing how the Obama administration – legally responsible for attacking this disaster and its fallout – has abdicated that responsibility to top campaign donor BP. From Missouri we find the state’s beaches are going to be destroyed, due to flailing around and missed opportunities to save them:
A morning flight over the Mississippi Sound showed long, wide ribbons of orange-colored oil for as far as the eye could see and acres of both heavy and light sheen moving into the Sound between the barrier islands. What was missing was any sign of skimming operations from Horn Island to Pass Christian.
U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor got off the flight angry.
“It’s criminal what’s going on out there,” Taylor said minutes later. “This doesn’t have to happen.â€
…
“There’s oil in the Sound and there was no skimming,†Carron said. “No coordinated effort.â€
Taylor said it was a good thing he didn’t have a mic in the helicopter, because he might have said some things he didn’t want his children to hear.
“They’re paying all these boats to run around like headless chickens,†Taylor said, as reporters gathered to hear his assessment of the Sound.
Why is there no coordinated effort? Well it could be that BP is calling all the shots now and they are more concerned with money and planning their PR campaign than getting things done. Check out this video of a LA resident given insider access to the human disaster playing out behind the natural disaster:
Disclose.tv – louisiana resident speaks about BP Video
This oil spill should have been contained to a much greater degree than this by now. Ventilator training taking precedence over oil recovery? Why aren’t those massive Danish skimmers already here? Why aren’t the Saudi’s here providing assistance (they deal with these spills all the time)?Why is BP in charge – with its financial interest paramount – instead of the Feds directing activities and sending BP the bill?
President Obama is so far in over his head it is a disaster in and of itself. The man can’t even close a prison on the Island of Cuba! What makes anyone think he could deal with the gulf disaster? Maybe that’s why he keeps running away and to play golf while the real Gulf dies a slow painful death? Even he is running away from his searing incompetence.
Pull BP out of the lead role. Designate one person to coordinate and direct resources across the federal, state, private, international and BP resources. And just send BP the bill. This is not that complex – we need a leader.
I vote for George W Bush. He understands how to mobilize and coordinate. He knows what to do, he is tested. No more part timers. Get a leader in there now.
Update: NASA has produced a series of images from space which show how a quick response of booms, burning and skimmers could have contained the damage. Watch in horror as the first month, the most important month, slips by us and the oil slick grows in response to the Obama administration’s incompetence:
Check out this May 17th image and the extent at which the problem grew since April 20th.
NASA has been keeping a keen eye on the growing disaster with its fleet of Earth Observing Satellites and instruments. BP and the Obama administration cannot hide from these space borne witnesses. What was a small and containable emergency quickly turned into a massive ecological disaster. Delay killed the Gulf.
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Regarding the 20B escrow account, there should be a class action lawsuit filed against Obama, his Adm, Democrats, and the environmental organizations by LA, AL, Miss, and Florida.
So Obama says that BP is in charge, they will pay, and pay and pay. I say so what? It is our marsh, our wildlife being killed, our fish, our beaches being destroyed, our way of life and NOBODY IS DOING ANYTHING. A few locals are trying but the government gets in their way at every move. Just like Obama saying he will send 1200 troops to the borders, and he never did. He talks and talks and DOES NOTHING.
HE IS JUST HOPELESS. I AM SICK OF THIS GUY PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE HE IS NOT. HE DOES NOT LEAD HE TALKS.
Despite his best efforts to show otherwise, Obama absolutely owns this one.
I truly believe there will be a reckoning: “…and the sharks will come.”
–
I don’t think this is what Rush meant when he said;
” I hope he fails!”
The only thing this lying poseur has accomplished are those things that do great harm to our country and way of life, ie. healthcare and the federal deficit.
The things hes’ supposed to do, sign a budget, protect our borders and our waters he does not even attempt.
IT IS TIME TO IMPEACH.
While we still hae a country left!
At this rate, I could write Obama a Kenyan birth certificate on a paper napkin with a crayon…and Congress will accept it, so desperate the nation will be to end the nightmare.
Anyone have a crayon I can use? 🙂
Obama’s dereliction of duty in this gulf matter is high crimes. I would call blackmail a high crime. It certainly is in the private sector and the courts. He is holding the gulf and the country hostage in a bid to have his crap and tax bill passed. He blatantly said so. He is also doing nothing about the Mexican invasion so he can get his immigration and amnesty bill passed. Another instance of blackmail. In fact he has more or less ceded three Arizona counties to Mexico by banning American citizens from going there. Add to these items the bribery of Sestak and Romanoff and you have two out of three reasons for impeachment. I’m sure he has committed multiple misdemeanors. Also, who knows what will come out of the Blago trial. We all know he was in that up to his neck. BTW, aren’t those date nights (that we pay for) also a crime. This guy draws a salary and should pay for his on the town nights himself. Impeachment is due but not before next January 2011. The dims would never impeach this imposter. They are all communists doing their best to turn our country into a communist state with Obama as dictator-in-chief. One wonders at their mentality in wanting this incompetent idiot in charge of the country. The whole world is going crazy since the USA has become so weakened under this POS.
OT
Bingo
According to Gateway Pundit, Obama adminstration is meeting secretly with Hamas in Damascus. For what reason? They wanted to keep it a secret but one of the Hamas officials blabbed? He said the knowledge of the meetings would upset the Jewish society in America. These are not the only ones who would be upset. Try the whole country minus the left.How about adding treason to the mix? Then again, giving Gaza $400 million should have done the trick. Doesn’t the law say do not give aid and comfort of any kind to known terrorists? Hamas is certainly a known terror organization funded by Iran.
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Anyone hear Obama’s presser from Toronto and the end of the G8/G20 summit? At the end he was totally political on a national stage saying people don’t think I going to do what I said I would do and they will be surprised, he didn’t say Republicans but he might as well have. This man, MSM calls the American President, is a very small piece of works.
This is actually what he said at the presser.
President Obama on controlling the debt: “Somehow people say, why are you doing that, I’m not sure that’s good politics. I’m doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it’s the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step-up because I’m calling their bluff. We’ll see how much of that, how much of the political arguments that they’re making right now are real and how much of it was just politics.”
The guy doesn’t even have a budget yet. He will not put one out until after the Nov election. So far guess who is cutting their budget….yep you guessed it, Defense. We remember that the Dems always brag that they cut the budget during the Clinton years. You ask how they did it, the dot com bubble and cutting defense. Bush could have followed in Clinton shoes if only he hadn’t initiated 2 unnecessary wars. I heard a Dem say just that today. Do these idiots remember 911, and you go to war with the people and arms that you have, not necessarily with what you want. Thank you President Clinton.
Real Clear Politics has Obama at 46.9%, lowest I have seen his rating. Just saying!
Remember how Obama does business. Only states that voted for him get any notice from him. Did Florida vote for him? What about Louisiana? That state has been throwing Democrats out of office wholesale. What about Texas? I don’t think the Gulf states are going to get any attention from Obama unless they grovel and bring tribute to the table in the form of supporting his programs. Then maybe he might lift a finger.
If this spill were off the coast of Oregon or Maryland, you would see a much different response.
Florida? Hell, Obama’s “helping” KSC while ignoring Texas entirely.
I am amazed that so many people still are writing that they can’t believe Obama’s incompetence. There has never been any reason to think otherwise. The only job he ever had was community organizer and he clearly failed in that in a big way. We’re learning a bitter lesson….
To BarbaraS on 27 Jun 2010 at 5:00 pm
“Obama’s dereliction of duty in this gulf matter is high crimes. I would call blackmail a high crime. It certainly is in the private sector and the courts. He is holding the gulf and the country hostage in a bid to have his crap and tax bill passed.”
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Agreed.
Absolutely.
Can we impeach yet?
Ok, does anyone remember the last well blowout in the Gulf? It was in Mexico’s waters but it absolutely wrecked Texas beaches. This one isn’t even close in size. Yes, it is the largest in the US, but not the largest the Gulf of Mexico (or the world) has seen.
Also, a very significant portion of that oil IS being collected, skimmed, and burned at the source. Overall, the amount of oil leaking out into the Gulf is NOTHING like previous spills, it is actually quite a lot less.
On June 27 16,275 barrels of oil were directly collected and stored at the source. Another 8,175 barrels were flared on the auxiliary rig. 56.2 million cubic feet of gas were flared. Now there have been widely varying numbers of how much oil people estimate have been coming from that well but they are only estimates. How many bugs did NOT hit your windshield last night when you drove on the highway? That is a hard question to answer.
I am not saying this isn’t a major disaster but lets try to stick with what we know. This is not the largest spill ever to hit the region. A much greater portion of this is being collected at the source than has ever been collected before in such a blowout. The news media has a direct financial incentive to blow things out of proportion in order to attract eyeballs to coverage (advertising). For the size of the leak, I believe this spill, barring a storm that requires the collection facilities to leave the area, will have much less of an impact than if it had happened, say, 20 years ago.
Obama is doing the best he can and that ain’t much. He is a perfect example of the socially promoted attractive black with enhanced self esteem , a product of our modern public school system and affirmative action policies which mandate that less than most qualified minorities be promoted ahead of those with superior abilities if they happen to be white. These uneducated smart asses are told they are as intelligent as anyone else andif they fail it’s because some evil white person held him back. they believe the self esteem crap because smarter non minority students are ignored or held back so they won’t get ahead of those who either can’t or won’t excell. Obama reminds me of the ex slaves put in charge of the South after the Civil war. He is running up massive debt and nobody knows where all that money is going. Carpet baggers made off with it back then…Is Obama surrounded by the modern day equivelant of the Carpetbaggers?Blacks consistantly score 15 points below other races on IQ tests. Obama is a perfect example of a “smart” black man and anyone can see that he don’t know much. He is so dumb he thinks he can solve problems by passing laws requiring problems to be solved whether the technology to solve them exists or not. Future cars must get 45 MPG. We have to stop using fossil fuels immediately when other alternate ene rgy sources have not been perfected. He appears to have the intelligence of a child. But we can’t say he is mentally challenged because he is a charismatic slick talker that that would make us racists because those who support him think that he really is as smart as he thinks he is..
Cryptome uploads the Australia 60 Minutes episode that was taken down from Australia CBS website after only one day.
Here is the link to Part 1 and Part 2.
SBD
AJ,
Exhibit “A” for the non-energetic Executive Branch empty suit theory:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/06/30/obamas_big_oil_spill_bungle_106149.html
June 30, 2010
Obama’s Big Oil Spill Bungle
By Dick Morris
It’s one thing to say that Obama’s administration showed ineptitude and mismanagement in its handling of the Gulf oil spill. It is quite another to grasp the situation up close, as I did during a recent visit to Alabama.
According to state disaster relief officials, Alabama conceived a plan — early on — to erect huge booms offshore to shield the approximately 200 miles of the state’s coastline from oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough huge, heavy booms — some weighing tons and seven meters high — to guard their coast.
But … no sooner were the booms in place than the Coast Guard, perhaps under pressure from the public comments of James Carville, uprooted them and moved them to guard the Louisiana coastline instead.
So Alabama decided on a backup plan. It would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the beaches.
But … the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan, saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.
So Alabama — ever resourceful — decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches in person, scooping up oil that had washed ashore.
But … OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) refused to allow them to work more than 20 minutes out of every hour and required an hourlong break after 40 minutes of work, so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.
The short answer is that every agency — each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda — was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill, with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries and recreational facilities.
Where was the president? Why did he not intervene in these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a focus on the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?