BP Oil Spill

800 000 gallons ar gushing into the Gulf. For shame.

When you have two liberals questioning Obama you know he's in trouble. I give them credit for doing so. For video clip go here.

Not only does Obama mirror Bush, except when he's bashing his country abroad, he officially now has his own Katrina too! And really, he goes to Getty of all places?

As was the case with Katrina, the BP oil spill has become way too politicized (what isn't these days?) and to even bother trying to assess blame is nuts. If you want to follow this I suggest you go to The Oil Drum - without a doubt the best site covering it.

Part of the transcript. Bold emphasis mine:

COOPER: Yes. It is stunning. You know, you would think there would be hazmat crews out there, you know, in those marshes, soaking it up.


And apparently, they only -- BP only put down booms out there to soak up oil after they had been informed that the oil was already in the marsh. And they basically put down booms once the oil was already in the marsh. And no one seems to have picked up some of these booms that are supposed to soak up oil. So basically, they'll just re- release that oil because you're supposed to pick those booms up. You can't just leave them out there.

This new CNN poll this week found that half the country isn't happy with the way the president has handled this situation. Half the country doesn't think the spill is going to end any time soon. I mean, are those Katrina-like numbers for the president?

Because I was thinking, I mean, if this was President Bush, and you had President Bush going to a fund-raiser for a Republican Party at the home of -- you know, of the Getty family for oil, you would -- there would be a lot of people saying, "Look, how can he do that at a time when we're seeing all this oil in the water?"


GERGEN: There's no question if it had been President Bush, he'd be hammered by now, hammered by the press and by others, especially for the fundraisers.


We don't yet see the polls in the Katrina-like sense. Katrina, as you remember, was a turning point for the Bush presidency. The sense of complacency, the sense of not caring, really, I think doomed that presidency well beyond what happened in Iraq. That hasn't yet happened here -- and with President Obama.

We do have the CNN poll and we have another poll today from CBS, both of which confirm that the country generally -- there's general disapproval. But it hasn't reached sharp levels yet. But it's going to, Anderson, if this "top kill" doesn't work, and if, in the next two days, the president doesn't take full control of this and bring in the top military people to coordinate it and the type minds and the top technologists and engineers to get it solved. It has to be done. This is what government is for.

The reason we come out of a state of nature, going back to original documents being in a natural state and coming together and forming a government, it's all about forming a government that can protect us from wars and natural -- and catastrophes like this.

COOPER: I'm getting a lot of e-mails from people saying -- defending the Obama administration, saying, "Well, look, what could the federal government have done?"

I'm no expert, but I can tell you two things just from being here on the ground that I know they could have done. NOAA could not have -- could have actually made an effort over the last month to figure out how much oil was actually leaking from -- from that leak. NOAA was going along with BP all along, saying 5,000 barrels, and in fact, no one was saying, it doesn't even matter how much because it's not going to affect the cleanup. That just doesn't make any sense to me.