Oil Spill

The Washington Times recently announced that the National Debt has now surpassed the 13 trillion dollar mark. The problem is that Congress barely passed a Bill raising the debt ceiling to 12.394 TRILLION dollars. Mr. Obama, master of everyone else’s checkbook, signed it into law on December 28, 2009. Now, barely 5 months later, we’re some $600 billion beyond that! At $13 trillion, the debt has risen by $2.4 trillion in about 500 days since President Obama took office, or an average of $4.9 billion each and every day. That’s about three times the daily increase of $1.7 billion under the Bush administration. So, every time someone tells you that Obama needs us to cut him some slack, and that he’s doing the best he can with what President Bush left for him to deal with, remember that Mr. O has extended our debt almost 5 billion dollars a day as he continues to fail the Country. The present administration can’t manage the Auto Industry, Wall Street, Health Care industry, or the Insurance industry. It certainly can’t manage the economy! It can’t handle foreign affairs or military action, and it can’t stop petty dictators from getting nuclear weapons or sinking the neighbor’s ships! But failure doesn’t seem to slow Team Obama’s desire to spend more and more of our money in the hopes of finally getting things right. We’ve seen none of our problems “solved” since he’s been in office… and no return on our tax dollar investment either. This has got to be the most inept and incompetent Administration in recent history! And now, the latest attempt to manage a crisis in the Gulf of Mexico only reinforces that impression of incompetence.

Obama formed his commission on the oil spill and stated his reason; “…so that the American people will have answers on exactly what happened.” That’s all well and fine, and a goal I can agree with. But then he tipped his hand with: “We have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, and these are risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes. We also have to acknowledge that an America run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and our grandchildren.” Okay, here’s a minor technical point… The problem with the Deepwater Horizon well has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a 3-1/2 mile deep well. The problem is that it’s in water a mile deep! With that one sentence, Mr. Obama has combined deep-sea oil drilling with all oil and gas exploration. He’s also demonstrating his environmentalist leanings and that he probably wouldn’t know an oil well even if he fell into one! But, is it his intent to use this crisis to get Cap and Trade legislation back on the table?

In his latest appointments to the commission on the oil spill, Mr. Obama reveals that he’s going much further than finding out what went wrong aboard Deepwater Horizon and fixing it. The commission will include two more experts who have been global warming activists, and who will join former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly. The background of these panel members suggest the commission will be looking at much more than just what went wrong, and will probably include the country’s conflicting problems of environmental and energy needs. According to the AP, other new commission members will be Donald Boesch, president of the Center for Environmental Science at the University of Maryland, and former Alaska Lt. Gov. Fran Ulmer, presently a University of Alaska chancellor. So what, pray tell, has Global Warming and Wildlife got to do with the cause of a mechanical failure at the wellhead? Failing to appoint a couple of engineering specialists indicates the purpose of the panel is purely political, and has nothing to do with what actually happened or what to do about it. It’s somewhat akin to appointing a hairdresser to determine what went wrong in a brain surgery! At least Mr. Obama gets a chance to put his Alinsky teachings to work, beginning with: “Pick the target [big oil], freeze it [big oil always bad], personalize it [BP], and polarize it.[green energy=angels, oil=Satan].” This will allow him to slip into campaign mode (which he apparently confuses with leadership), and where he is much more comfortable.

Mr. Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar have done their best to shift the blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the Bush Administration, the Republicans, BP, and the supposed ‘cozy relationship’ between the Minerals Management Service who “turned a blind eye to the shenanigans of their oil and gas company buddies”. In reality offshore safety performance improved significantly throughout the Bush years, as did a greatly reduced blowout incident rate. Bush-era internal investigations led to a significant improvement in ethics throughout the organization. Bush also increased the offshore royalty rates for the first time in years. Still, there’s plenty of blame to spread around. BP is after all liable for the operational errors that led up to the explosion. MMS Director Liz Birnbaum, Mr. Obama’s choice of Minerals Management Service chief, has strong credentials… her qualifications include attending Brown/Harvard Law, a record as an environmental lawyer, and experience setting environmental policy. But experienced with oil and gas technology? Well… Her department heads were heavy on environmental activism as well, but rather light on oil and gas experience. Probably because ex-industry hands tend to develop ‘cozy relationships’ with the folks they’re regulating. Mr. Obama, who was quick to criticize President Bush for his appointment of lightly-qualified Michael Brown as FEMA director, has apparently learned little from his predecessor’s mistake.
Under Obama and Salazar, the Minerals Management Service has become little more than an instrument by which the government pushes its Green Energy/Green Jobs vision.

As to solving the problem, the Houston Chronicle reports that the Netherlands, a highly experienced oil producing nation, offered the United States help in dealing with the BP spill shortly after it started, but the Obama Administration turned them down flat. Additionally, the present “cap” on the well was the first thing BP wanted to attempt, but MMS officials refused permission. Now we have another bright idea from the White House, and I quote Mr. Obama; “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick.” He’s talking to experts not to find out how to solve the problem but to find out whose ass to kick? Those are somewhat crude words from the President of the United States, but they are his own words. There is one well owned by one company leaking, and that was caused by the collapse of one oil platform owned by one company. Not only has Barack Obama overreacted and shut down every company’s offshore drilling, putting tens of thousands of people on the unemployment line, and he’s not talking to experts to figure out how to solve the problem, but to figure out who to assign blame to!?

That is not leadership!