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Obama's Katrina!

applecorped

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applecorped
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/us/29spill.html?hp

"BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow.



Will the BP disaster shape popular views of the president’s competency?






Oil cleanup crews worked Friday on the beach at Grand Isle East State Park in Louisiana, where a trout rodeo has been canceled.


Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort — called a “top kill” — continued for a third day, with engineers describing a painstaking process of trying to plug the hole, using different weights of mud and sizes of debris like golf balls and tires, and then watching and waiting. They cannot use brute force because they risk making the leak worse if they damage the pipes leading down to the well.
Despite an apparent lack of progress, officials said they would continue with the process for another 48 hours, into Sunday, before giving up and considering other options, including another containment dome to try to capture the oil.
President Obama, who visited the Gulf Coast on Friday, spoke broadly about the government’s response to the environmental disaster, saying that “not every judgment we make will be right the first time out.”
He also added, seemingly capturing the mood of engineers working to plug the well: “There are going to be a lot of judgment calls here. There are not going to be silver bullets or perfect answers.”













Nah!, its worse.
 
Of course hurricanes are tracked before they hit land making a lack of preparation for them inexcusable while no one knows an oil rig is going to explode and sink before it happens.

Get back to me when we have telephone recordings of Obama congratulating BP on what a great job they are doing.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html?hp

May 29, 2010

NEW ORLEANS — BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.

The announcement marked the latest setback in the attempt to plug the spill that is polluting gulf waters at an estimated rate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. It is already the largest spill in American history.
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Gee, seems to me just a day or two ago, Obama was taking credit for this. But where's he now? Vacationing in Chicago? :D
 
Yet again, Americans reveal we really want a monarch, or at least a benevolent dictator.
 
When Katrina hit and the public was dissatisfied with Bush's handling of it, it proved how stupid and incompetent Bush was.

Now the oil spill hit and the public is dissatisfied with Obama's handling of it, it proves how stupid and incompetent... the public is. "They just want a dictator!" "They are unrealistic in their expectations!" etc.

This is what the New York Times & co. calls "in depth analysis", "looking at the roots of the problem", "making fine distinctions" between the two crises (the only distinction they really care about is that Bush's a Republican and Obama's a Democrat), blah blah blah.
 
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html?hpid=topnews

The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.
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Obama appointed S. Elizabeth Birnbaum to be the head of MMS in 2009. She was fired on May 27th (and on May 27th Obama told the press that he wasn't sure whether she resigned or was fired, and claimed he didn't know the details of what happened). :rolleyes:

Oh, by the way, know what her educational background was for this job? A bachelor's degree in linguistics (that would be helpful) and a law degree from the same school that Obama got his law degree. And she was such a political hack that she worked for government during the Clinton years, quit the government during the Bush administration, then returned to government under Obama.
 
He Was Supposed to Be Competent
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I don't understand why anybody thought that Obama was going to be competent for the job of POTUS. His meager record and lack of any significant managerial or political experience, certainly not on the level needed for the job, was a big warning sign about this.

This was pointed out before the election, but there is no arguing with the "sophisticated" and "progressive" class once they got into one of their tizzies of genuflection and hailing of The One.

There is something rather religious, in the fundamentalist religious revival-tent style, in the whole Obama phenomenon.
 
I don't know if this disaster and Katrina are a fair comparison. Katrina was a huge natural disaster that revealed both the Louisiana local government and FEMA to be woefully unprepared for a disaster of that magnitude. This oil spill is a man-made and avoidable disaster. I place the responsibility for this squarely on BP's shoulders. It is possible that BP may have taken risky shortcuts and if they did, they should be fined or have assets frozen to pay for the damage.

The US government doesn't have any equipment or technology to deal with this disaster, unless you want to consider the nuclear option. Pres. Obama can scream "plug the hole" all he wants to and it won't make a difference in the outcome.

If you want to talk about why the US government didn't have the in-situ burn equipment that it was supposed to after the Exxon Valdez incident, that's another story involving several administrations. I don't think even the in-situ burn capability would have completely controlled this disaster, but it might have reduced some of the damage to shorelines.
 
I'm curious of what people think that Obama should have done that he hasn't done. I'm not saying he has done a good job or a bad job, I'm just curious of where you think he hasn't stepped up to the plate. I think both with the Katrina situation and this current crisis, people tend to have an unrealistic expectation of what the POTUS can actually accomplish. It is sometimes humbling to realize that our government isn't as capable as we would like to think.
 
portlandatheist said:
I'm curious of what people think that Obama should have done that he hasn't done.
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*shrugs* Most of the media coverage so far has focused on the attempts to plug the leak and how the leak came about, both of which are BP's headache rather then the US' government's, and less on the preparation and work put into managing and cleaning up the oil spill, which would be on the US government's head.

Unlike with Katrina, where it became a focus almost immediately, I don't think either the media or the public has yet made up their mind as to whether the government has done a good job or not, as they've been more concerned with BP's culpability. It might become an issue eventually, but it hasn't so far.
 
Honestly what does this have to do with the Governments/Obama's competence or lack thereof? What response would be more appropriate from Obama or the Government that hasn't been exercised as of yet? Honestly i'm curious with all the cries of incompetence.

EDIT: Didn't see Portlandatheist post. He took the words out of my mouth.
 
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Juniversal said:
Honestly what does this have to do with the Governments/Obama's competence or lack thereof? What response would be more appropriate from Obama or the Government that hasn't been exercised as of yet? Honestly i'm curious with all the cries of incompetence.
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Well, the emergency response outside of the immediate vicinity of the well would be the government's responsibility: what organisation and equipment for handling and cleaning up an oil spill was in place, how well maintained was it and how well and how quickly was it applied?

Also, the regulatory framework the accident happened under would be on the government's head. How strict were the safety regulations, how well were they being enforced, have there been calls for greater safety that the government has ignored, was this incident an abberation or indicative of generally poor regulation of the industry?

Personally, I haven't seen much in the media on either of those two subjects, so I don't have any data to make a decision on how well the Obama administration has handled the situation, and it might appear that the scale of the spill is such that it would've overwhelmed any reasonably sized emergency response system regardless.

(For what it matters, I think the Bush administration did get more pepper over Katrina than it deserved. While there was some federal responsibilities that hadn't been handled properly, my impression is that much of the blame assigned to Bush came from incompetence on the state level and from bad PR management rather than actual poor preparation and handling from the federal government.)
 
BeAChooser said:
From an Obama supporter ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704269204575270950789108846.html
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I'd like to know what Ms. Noonan would suggest the President do since she deems his response "incompetent". Seriously. :boggled: Here's a few zingers from the artical:

"The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him."

When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way.

Shame on Obama for not taking responsibility for BP's actions. :rolleyes:
 
Leif Roar said:
Well, the emergency response outside of the immediate vicinity of the well would be the government's responsibility: what organisation and equipment for handling and cleaning up an oil spill was in place, how well maintained was it and how well and how quickly was it applied?

Also, the regulatory framework the accident happened under would be on the government's head. How strict were the safety regulations, how well were they being enforced, have there been calls for greater safety that the government has ignored, was this incident an abberation or indicative of generally poor regulation of the industry?

Personally, I haven't seen much in the media on either of those two subjects, so I don't have any data to make a decision on how well the Obama administration has handled the situation, and it might appear that the scale of the spill is such that it would've overwhelmed any reasonably sized emergency response system regardless.

(For what it matters, I think the Bush administration did get more pepper over Katrina than it deserved. While there was some federal responsibilities that hadn't been handled properly, my impression is that much of the blame assigned to Bush came from incompetence on the state level and from bad PR management rather than actual poor preparation and handling from the federal government.)
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Good point. But as you say i've seen nothing to suggest the appropriate measures haven't been taken. Even in the articals critical of the Gov'ts/Obama's response I see nothing that would point to inadequate safety precautions or the like. It might be true that the Gov't can be held responsible in some facet but as of yet I see nothing to substantiate the criticism.
 
Looking at it from abroad (therefore not in depth :)) it seems that some of opprobium coming Obama's way is a little unjust.

The fundamental thing that people seem to be so angry about is that they're so damn impotent to do anything. And rather than admit that actually there's ◊◊◊◊ all the federal government can actually do, that BP can actually do to stop this, they need to blame that impotence on those actors - because doing otherwise would take them to that scary place of having to admit no one has control of the situation and no one can control the situation.

Sure as with any disaster response you're not going to get perfect policies. But when you look at what is being argued about - it's minutiae that in the greater scheme of things make very difference to the scale or scope of disaster.

1) Should chemical dispersants have been used in such quantities? Well, no one knows - they've probably replaced one ecological disaster for another. Had they not been used and millions of barrels of oil were washing up on the coast then the critics would have been apoplectic that they hadn't been deployed.

2) Should more boons have been employed earlier? Probably - but all the boons in the world aren't enough to actually prevent or mitigate the ecological catastrophy.

3) Could there have been better regulation? Sure - that's the biggie. But there was precisely zero political or public will for this. And that extends for decades backwards. People wanted cheap oil and big tax receipts.

Bottom line, the US government is not omnipotent, and nature is far more powerful than America. Maybe that's what shakes some people's worlds....
 
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Travis said:
Of course hurricanes are tracked before they hit land making a lack of preparation for them inexcusable while no one knows an oil rig is going to explode and sink before it happens.

Get back to me when we have telephone recordings of Obama congratulating BP on what a great job they are doing.
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Did the LA. local/state govt request assistance from the federal govt before Katrina hit? Did those branches prepare adequately?

If not I think your blame is misplaced.
 
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