Skip to main content

The Crisis Deepens

By


Obama plans a fourth trip to the Gulf Coast before making a speech from the Oval Office outlining the position of the White House on the BP oil spill.  News has gotten grimmer and grimmer these past weeks, as the volume of oil spewing out of the Deep Horizon well is now estimated at over a million gallons per day,  based on new spillcam observations, making it by far the worst oil spill in US history.

The President appears to be bearing the brunt of criticism, as Gulf Coast governors question his leadership and coordination efforts.  The same governors who wanted no part of the federal stimulus bill or national health care. 

Meanwhile, BP stocks continue to tumble with revelations of much more oil spilling out of the well head than previously thought, along with very high quantities of methane gas that threaten the invaluable food chain in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Comments

  1. avrdsJune 14, 2010 at 4:32 PM

    As big a supporter as I am of Obama, he does seem to have let this go too long without forcefully stepping in. Not that there's anything he can do about it -- and he does seem to have been dealt a stacked deck on just about all fronts, but ...

    I caught a segment of Bill Maher last night and a writer from Newsweek made the point that other presidents have turned tragedies into major changes of policy through exerting strong leadership. I hope this talk Obama plans to give provides some of that.

    Plus, I think he missed an opportunity to really step in and explain where all this free market stuff leads. Don't want government regulation? Don't want the federal government messing around in your state's business? Don't want to pay taxes to support environmental protection and other public good programs? Well, take a look at what happens when you have eight years of that.

    In some ways, the Bush Administration has been one giant oil spill that Obama has to clean up. Now there's a message I wish he would run with!

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonJune 15, 2010 at 10:46 AM

    Apparently much of the initial information on the size of this spill was misleading, and I think the White House erroneously thought BP had it under control.

    In the beginning they were talking about 40,000 gallons of oil seeping into the Gulf each day, now experts place that number at 800,000 to 1,6 million.

    It took weeks to really figure out the enormity of the crisis and that BP was apparently clueless as to how to deal with it other than drilling relief wells that won't be ready until August.

    Seems after much trial and error BP has finally capped the leak and is siphoning up a great part of the daily outflow, but the damage is done, as not only oil but huge quantities of methane gas have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Overall, I give Obama a C. He shouldn't have been so much trust in BP. These guys have a shoddy record when it comes to safety and environmental regulations and should have demanded a full review by leading experts from the start.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsJune 15, 2010 at 4:07 PM

    I just wrote that I'd be a little more generous and give him a B-, since hindsight is 20-20. But a C is probably fair. He does seem to have lost his footing on this one, even though there's nothing that he can do to "fix" it.

    This appears to be the great irony of Obama's presidency -- great orator and educator who hasn't been able to apply those tools consistently in the White House. (Of course I'm one of those uber liberals who think that education will solve all ills.)

    Did you see my note about Parsons below? He'd like an invite to join us which I think would be great!

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonJune 15, 2010 at 4:14 PM

    I sent Parsons an invite. Hopefully, it didn't end up in his spam box.

    ReplyDelete
  5. avrdsJune 15, 2010 at 4:16 PM

    Cool! Thanks. If he doesn't show up in a day or two I'll alert him that it's there.....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more