Crimes in High Places

The Obama administration is treating the Gulf oil spill like a minor annoyance that requires bit of leftover attention while Obama attends to "more important" matters. Shades of Bush flying over New Orleans after Katrina and taking way too long to show up and declare any concern for the city.

Here is a bit from a NY Times article by Maureen Dowd on the criminal negligence by federal regulatory agencies:

In a report released on Tuesday, Mary Kendall, acting inspector general of the Department of the Interior, described an agency that followed Cheney’s lead in letting the oil industry write the rules.

Just like those S.E.C. employees who were watching porn and ignoring warning signs while Wall Street punks created financial Frankensteins, some M.M.S. employees were watching porn, using coke and crystal meth and accepting gifts like trips to the Peach Bowl game from oil and gas companies, the report said.

Regarding outrageous behavior prior to 2007, one confidential source told investigators that some M.M.S. inspectors let oil and gas company staffers fill out inspection forms using pencils “and MMS inspectors would write on top of the pencil in ink and turn in the completed form.”

...

The tragedy is that M.M.S. eerily presaged the disaster in the draft of a May 2000 environmental analysis of deep-water drilling in the gulf. The agency noted that “the oil industry’s experience base in deepwater well control is limited” and that given the prodigious production rates, “a deepwater blowout of this magnitude in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could easily turn out to be a potential showstopper” for the Outer Continental Shelf program.

But M.M.S. got rid of those caveats in the final report, just as they deemed a remote-controlled shut-off switch an unnecessary expense for drilling companies several years ago.

Obama has walled himself off from public opinion. He is impervious to comments about his failure to act and his ridiculous attempts to find "common ground" with political enemies that have no interest in compromise. He campaigned as the man with the answers with his slogan "Change we can believe in" but he has delivered indifference and incompetence (not nearly as incompetent as Bush, but there is an urgent need for leadership and competence in the US and Obama is not filling that need).