Monday, May 03, 2010

Obama’s Katrina Just Bit Him in His Inattention

Listening to the car radio the day before yesterday, I became aware of the problems Venice, Louisiana was facing in the aftermath of the oil rig explosion on April 20th. I tuned in partway through the NPR interview with Venice Parish’s president on the dire situation facing the shore line all along the gulf. He talked of the community’s desperate efforts to get help. The interviewer prodded and prodded him, but he refused to put the blame on the oil company, BP. As he explained patiently to this news twister, their parish had both oil workers and fishermen. Everyone was affected by this disaster.

As she prodded once more and he continued to hold fast, I turned off the radio in disgust, remembering why I find National Public Radio so loathsome. Those people don’t deliver the news, they pick the nose of the news and give you their considered results. Yes, they really are that disgusting. And that's why they call their program “All Things Considered” (or as my older son used to say, “All The Things We Care to Consider”. I believe it was he who named NPR “National Palestinian Radio”). Well, that's a government-funded news program for you.

Then, as I started to close up my computer tonight, I happened to look at posts by Gateway Pundit and Director Blue. I’d left their pages open hours earlier, but now I gave them closer attention. They were talking about the federal government’s appalling lack of action in this situation. The White House’s “non-response”. That’s putting it mildly.

Jim entitles his post Obama Takes Break from Campaigning to Visit Oil Slick Disaster:

After 12 days of campaigning against the Arizona immigration law and Wall Street bankers while pushing his next big government takeovers in energy and banking, Barack Obama finally decided to visit the oil slick disaster zone today.

Anyone remember the Dems excoriating Bush, claiming he didn’t do enough and he didn’t work fast enough on Hurricane Katrina? The headlines were endless and mean-spirited. And many of them were wrong.

Well, karma can be an unpleasant thing. Now Our Obama has met his Katrina and it’s a oil well five thousand feet down in the Gulf of Mexico, still actively spilling oil. Obama and his administration did take the time earlier to say this would put the kibosh on any plans for drilling. However, no one from Washington actually went there and as usual, the intrepid “who me?” Janet Napolitano was clueless about the federal help that might have been offered if anyone had taken the time to look.

Director Blue had a different take:
- - - - - - - - -
He has an illustrated timeline dating from the oil rig explosion on April 20th until today, when our President finally moseyed on down to Louisiana to look things over.

This creation of this timeline took some doing and Doug is to be congratulated for his careful work here. The Prez was a bizzy boy. While 200,000 gallons of oil continued to pour out every day into the Gulf from five thousand feet under water, Obama was speaking on Wall Street, making a video to get out the minority vote in November (yeah, he’s worried), and — why not? — having a weekend getaway on the 25th… hunh? What oil spill?

On April 29th, there are photos of Obama and Napolitano in the White House looking at pictures of the Gulf while wearing concerned expressions. Check that one out!

Doug ends his pictorial review of the lapse of time between this disaster with this:

Perhaps if the oil breached the Louisiana levees, then caught on fire, and then turned New Orleans into a Dresden-like inferno, the President would stop campaigning for a couple of days and actually pay attention to his own, personal Katrina. Even The New York Times has noticed, decrying the President’s lackadaisical response. But I’m guessing that somehow, someway, it’s all President Bush’s fault.

An educated guess, I’d say. It’s always Bush’s fault. Obama doesn’t do Oval Office responsibility.

Back at Jim’s post, there is a picture of Obama actually getting on the bus, Gus, to get his gluteus maximus down to Louisiana — where it belonged while they were still searching for oil rig workers. In fact, why not on Earth Day, when he was instead preaching on Wall Street about the environment.

As Jim notes:

Yesterday, The New York Times reported that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was not aware the Defense Department had equipment for dealing with oil slicks. The White House defended their non-response today.
[my emphasis — D]

There are links there to the Times story. Great ending: they “defended their non-response”.

I’d love to hear the back story on this one. The press is not going to cooperate, so perhaps the locals can tell us what Governor Jindal had to say to Napolitano and the President.

Whether Napolitano manages to keep her job after this debacle remains to be seen. The President isn’t about to take the fall for his own inattention so he’s going to be looking around. Perhaps the two people in the room with him at the White House, looking at pictures of the Gulf with concerned expressions, are shining up their résumés even now.

It doesn’t matter. Whomever he boots for this horrible inattention, Obama has his Waterloo now. Or rather, his Katrina. If it weren’t so late, I’d do some research on what our fearless President had to say about Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina…

But I think we can guess the content of his pontifications.

17 comments:

heroyalwhyness said...

Obama has priorities, specifically related to 'diversity' in the US Coast Guard:

Coast Guard acts quickly on diversity, but not without implementation problems -Washington Post, April 28th,2010

Quote: "LoBiondo hit the Obama administration for what he said was a $3 million cut in the Coast Guard's recruiting budget for fiscal 2011."

*********

Coast Guard faces serious gaps in personnel and equipment under President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget request. via GovernmentExecutive.com April 14, 2010

heroyalwhyness said...

From Director Blues comment section:
Obama's coast guard cuts: a recipe for disaster (Rep. John Mica) -The Hill 02/26/10

&

Obama's Presidential Summit on Muslim Entrepeneurship kicked off April 26th, 2010 -rediffNews

Yorkshireminer said...

I suppose we will hear no more of the Drill Drill baby crowd. Hopefully they will be able to get the well plugged and most of the clean up done before the hurricane season gets into full swing.

. said...

Hopefully, Dymphna, you weren't one of those on the conservative end of the political spectrum that has been chanting "drill, baby drill!" for the past two years.

As for the specifics of this disaster, the lesson I've discerned from is that the private sector is just as incompetent as the government when it comes to stopping such catastrophic events.

Zenster said...

Nodrog: As for the specifics of this disaster, the lesson I've discerned from is that the private sector is just as incompetent as the government when it comes to stopping such catastrophic events.

Which clearly explains how the private sector continues to create wealth even as a majority of this world's governments destroy both the environment and industrial productivity at the same time.

Your ability to erroneously equate government fiscal mismanagement with valid free market creation of wealth is a perfect example of Liberalism's Magical Thinking™.

X said...

Not to mention, a large part of the problem in this instance is the government's implicit claim that it has mechanisms and assets to deal with a situation like this, which puts the private company on the sideline by definition - yet when pushed, the government appears incapable of actually dealing with the spill. By creating the impression that the private company doesn't need to look after this particular contingency the government has prevented a timely response by creating a false sense of security.

I don't see why this should lead to an end to the call for US domestic drilling either. If the oil is there, it should be extracted and used, not locked away.

Nameless Cynic said...

Yeah, that timeline's cute, isn't it? Not backed up by facts or anything. But still. Pretty pictures to keep people amused - that can't be a bad thing, can it?

By the way, isn't it socialist for the government to be doing this? Where in the Constitution does it say that the government should be cleaning up a private company's oil? I think you need to put together a free-market solution to a disaster like this.

Zenster said...

Archonix: I don't see why this should lead to an end to the call for US domestic drilling either. If the oil is there, it should be extracted and used, not locked away.

Perish the thought that just a few months of reverting back to using domestically supplied petroleum would see the Saudis drowning in their own oil. We'll not even mention how it could possibly drive down prices far enough to where the royals would be so busy paying for hand tooled racing camel saddles that they wouldn't have any money to support their pet terrorists.

Anonymous said...

Actually, yes, if the government stayed out of it, and it should, British Petroleum should pay for the cleanup until it goes bankrupt or their insurers.

Yorkshireminer said...

Zenster said

Your ability to erroneously equate government fiscal mismanagement with valid free market creation of wealth is a perfect example of Liberalism's


I am sorry but it was the Banks (private fiscal mismanagement) which caused the financial collapse a couple of years ago, aided and abetted by a Government that rescinded laws from the 30s that were put in place for the sole purpose of preventing such a collapse. Private greed is not fiscal prudence. Wealth is produced by the interaction of land labour and capital and has nothing what so ever to do whether the capital is privately owned or state owned. I would also like to point out too you that if no energy is present in the system then nothing is produced, and it wont matter a dam if it is privately owned or state owned. The trouble is that there are two FAITH based political/economical systems fighting for supremacy, shall we call them the socialist and the Capitalist systems, they both have there good points and there bad points. That's why the First Law of Economics states that for every economist there exists an equal and opposite economist.

Deep Regards

Yorkshire Miner

Zenster said...

Yorkshireminer: I am sorry but it was the Banks (private fiscal mismanagement) which caused the financial collapse a couple of years ago, aided and abetted by a Government that rescinded laws from the 30s that were put in place for the sole purpose of preventing such a collapse. Private greed is not fiscal prudence.

Who said it was? Private greed that transcends the rule of law or business ethics is corruption or some other variant of criminal conduct. Full stop.

My choice of words was a very careful one. Criminal behavior and government intercession to distort functionality of the capitalistic process do not qualify as the "valid free market creation of wealth".

Please note that word "valid" as it is there for a very important reason. One thing is becoming increasingly clear. Many, if not most, governments no longer play any role in the actual creation of wealth, save for their elected officials and a few select employees, that is.

Profitsbeard said...

Obama joked while the Gulf choked.

Condescender-In-Chief.

Anonymous said...

Yorkshireminer, I suggest you watch this.

I will make it brief for you, since I'm too tired now to explain financials, but banks wouldn't have done what they did provided that these things didn't happen:
1)The Fed wouldn't have rigged interest rates and keep them artificially low.
2)Legislation in the late 1990s who made it illegal for banks to discriminate
3)Guaranteed mortgages
4)Guaranteed deposits
5)Foreigners recycling the debt into the CDO market since they didn't have anything to do with worthless USD, but refinance the mortgage market and FedGov.
6)The precedent of Long Term Capital Management.
The list goes on. Basically, greed has a fear of loss counter party. The federal government removed the losses out of the equasion. Just look at guaranteed deposits. The riskier a loan is, the higher it's yield. Considering that deposits are insured by the government, people don't care how safe banks are so they deposit in the ones with the highest interests - which means the highest risks.
Watch this for a short explenation, if you don't feel like watching the first video.

Oh, another thing, people who lied on their mortgage applications, just like the CEOs of a lot of the banks should be tried for fraud and jailed. For example, if no bailout happened, the leadership of Goldman Sachs would be in jail now. There's a lot to explain here, but this is the typical government regulation causing problems and the government blaming the market so that they make more regulation.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and there's no such thing as faith. The way I see it, the model that governments followed after the dot com led to the housing bubble and any economist worth his salt would have predicted. I mean, the thing was clear as the sky on a sunny day. The Keynesian economic model predicted massive unemployment in the late 1940s due to soldiers being laid off and it predicted the USSR winning the cold war, it said that the housing bubble is actual wealth and that dividends don't matter in the stock market bubble in the 1990s. I don't get how anyone can believe it - they're the ones saying more regulation and government is needed and every single person who predicted the collapse says that it happened due to government. Keynesian economists are the witch doctors of economics. lol

Dymphna said...

rebelliousvanilla--

You're right about Goldman Sachs.

Here's the scoop on the ties between G.S. and Obama. Makes the Bush-Enron scandal pale by comparison, but the NYT isn't gonna touch it.

Goldman Sachs & Obama...

Also, little Timmy Geithner has his fingers in many Wall Street pies, even though he 'forgets' to pay his taxes.

I predict the man will face some kind of criminal charges before Obama's tenure is up. Napolitano is probably going down for the oil spill "inattention". Similarly, Geithner will be on the skids before 2012.

The Wall St.<->politicians<-> lobbyists<->'higher' education <->
media<->Wall St. turnstyle insures the corruption is endemic and wide-spread.

It's past time to build some watertight, time-delimited doors between and among those fields to prevent this in the future.

There may be an isolationist Ron Paul in our future whether we agree with his philosophies or not. The anti-Obama is certainly Doctor Paul.

Do I want to see that happen? Heck no! But I prefer it to having to look at Obama for a second term.

Anonymous said...

Oh, the AIG bailout was really hilarious, since AIG insured Goldman's fraud and all the money they got, actually went to GS as an insurance claim. These people in DC have no idea what they're doing and the higher ups in DC are so full of it that it's not even funny. But hey, my country isn't much better - the incompetents are in government here too. lol

Their solution to get us out of the crisis - wage increases for public workers and higher taxes. That's the way to go!

. said...

Hey Yorkshireminer - rebelliousvanilla has the REAL scoop on what caused the financial disaster.

Short version: IT WAS ALL ACORN'S FAULT!